PMA, pliers, and ghetto dancing the night away.

have you ever zipped your prom dress with a pair of pliers?

that depends on if you've ever had a prom dress.

i happen to have one prom dress at school, and one at home. luckily, my freshman year of high school when i got asked to go to prom three days before prom, i was still short enough to fit into my cousin rachel's dress.

and then suddenly i was six inches taller than any woman had ever been in my family and i had to go out and buy my own prom dresses.

but i get back to my original question: have you ever zipped up your prom dress with a pair of pliers?

i hope to goodness that your answer is no.

so my tale starts out with me lying in the middle of the quad with my friend lisa on a towel listening to awkward nineties music. i'm not sure why, but it does. i just feel like this story starts there. and it's just kind of fun to say that i spent yesterday afternoon laying out in shorts and a tank top.

the REAL story starts when jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) joined phi mu alpha, better known as PMA, the music fraternity on campus. here are some things about the fraternity that my brother is in, and PMA, so you can understand a little bit about how PMA works.

ZETA, THE FRATERNITY OF MY BROTHER.

1. yes. after a party, they did wake up to find a pine tree in their shower. and it was on texts from last night.
2. pledging is hazing. they say that it's not. but it is.
3. my car is in serious danger of being parked in their parking lot.
4. their lawn popped my tire. too much broken glass. refer to number three on this handy dandy list.
5. they have a balloon party. a balloon party. (and yes, i've been to one of them.)

PMA, THE FRATERNITY OF MY BOYFRIEND.

1. they don't have parties.
2. nearly every brother plays some sort of instrument and almost all of them grow up to be teachers. music teachers.
3. there is a piano in their kitchen. my friend brendan keeps it in tune.
4. they do not wake up to pine trees in their showers. they do not haze.
5. mr. rogers was in PMA. you know, like mr. roger's neighborhood. he's pretty cool.

PMA is not your average fraternity, stereotypical or otherwise.

last night was their formal.

so naturally, jacob put on his salvation army tuxedo pants, a black shirt and a red tie, and then we went back to my room, where i commenced to shower and put on my make up in a tank top and my cross country shorts from sixth grade that i can still squeeze into. i do not wear make up. it took me a decent amount of time to get dolled up for this event that was in mt. pleasant. we would realize later that we left the directions to the venue in jacob's room.

to make sure that i absolutely had to wear my floor length prom gown, i didn't shave my legs. this later might've turned out to have been a bad idea.

when my make up was on and my hurrs wuz did, it was now time for me to put on my plum colored mermaid style ball gown that i had worn to senior prom. it was a good deal; it was two seasons too late, had a jank zipper, and was only forty-five dollars. i also happened to look good in it, which was a plus.

so i wiggle into the dress, zip it up as far as i can, and call jacob over so he can finish zipping me.

damn zipper gets stuck.

scroll back to the front of this blog post and pertinent question: have YOU zipped your prom dress with a pair of pliers?

oh, i have. and so has jacob.

that damn zipper was stuck about two inches from maximum zipping capacity (i mean the top of my dress, ahem) and then it would not budge. jacob yanked and yanked and i stood in front of my mirror, self-consciously holding up my boobs even though the dress was sufficently holding them up anyway, and i looked at my reflection and thought about how maybe i should wear make up every day like normal girls. then i remembered that i'm not like normal girls, and i forgot the idea as jacob yanked and yanked and nearly made me fall over.

jacob: i need pliers.
me: i swear to god if you rip my dress--
jacob: you have a back up dress!
me: no. i didn't shave. i need a long dress.
jacob: of course you didn't shave.

ladies. shaving. you understand.

so jacob yanked on my dress with pliers. it did not budge.

(i would like to point out at this moment that the usage of pliers and fingers in trying to get my zipper unstuck has given jacob three blisters on his hands.)

so i kicked him out of my closet, turned my dress completely around, and struggled with the zippper while wearing it backwards. no luck. there was something going on with the fabric in this teeny tiny part of the zipper track. and i couldn't get it while wearing the dress.

and this, ladies and gentleman, is where i felt like a superhero. i got OUT of the dress, spent ten minutes wiggling the zipper, got it to FINALLY zip up all the way, and managed to squeeze into my prom dress with it zipped. it did not rip going over my hips. and i made a serious of high-pitched wheezing noises while jumping up and down to accomplish this earth-shattering feat.

time elapsed since first putting on the dress: thirty minutes.

now skipping to the part where we actually get to formal after taking awkward pictures...

the food was excellent. i was disappointed that the manicotti had chicken, but a vegetarian can't have everything in life. i was very excited to see my former roommate mariah invited by ryan. i realized i didn't know half of the brothers there, or their dates, but hey, i knew a few of them, and of course, i was with jacob.

after dinner, the dancing starting.

first song of choice: backstreet boys, backstreet's back (all right!).

no, PMA is not a normal fraternity.

let me remind you that i am a twenty year old white girl that is five foot nine and reasonably lanky. i cannot walk in high heels, and i break a bone almost every year.

let me assure you of this: i can ghetto dance.

and last night, i ghetto danced.

of coures, i also awkwardly slow danced in which jacob and i traded gender roles and he put his arms around my neck and i had a fun time with my hands on his hips, and i spent a decent amount of time jumping around excitedly and just generally being an awkward hispter dancer. upon rereading this paragraph, i have used awkward a decent amount, and i realize that that's the best word.

i. am. awkward.

to make this decently long story short, i had a blast dancing with my friends and just letting loose. jacob's brothers are absolutely amazing, and everybody was looking extra snazzy. it was like a small concentrated prom with only people that i liked. and because it's PMA, not a single person had anything hanging out that shouldn't have been hanging out. (i cannot say the same thing for zeta's formal, which i attended last year. it was basically the brothers and their girlfriends wearing pretty dresses and getting wasted in the basement of the house.)

we'll see how my sorority formal goes in two weeks.

and yes, i will be wearing the same dress, unless my mother can mail me the white monstrosity of a prom dress that i wore my junior year of high school. pretty sure that dress is ten pounds.

and now, some pictures for your general entertainment. and no, there are no pictures of the pliers that were used to help zip up my dress. i apologize.

feelin' snazzy. :)

it's not an event unless we take
a picture like this.

former roommates. :)

the day we went to see the head and the heart.

i am going to start this out by saying a few things.

1. i have many, many things to do. blogging is not one of them.
2. this cannot wait. this blog post cannot wait.
3. i cannot believe i am writing this blog post. i truly cannot. because this makes it real.

that being said, yesterday, jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) and i went to see the band the head and the heart.

they are so beautiful.

i don't know if you've heard of them. you probably haven't. that's okay. they're not widely known. none of the bands i listen to are. they are indie folk rock. their only girl sings harmony and plays the violin. they have two male lead singers, and the blond one likes to wear ugly sweaters.

jacob and i went to go see them live last night in pontiac michigan.

i got the tickets for fifteen dollars each online way back in some random month like november, and they finally came mailed to my dorm room around christmas. i did not open the envelope. i tucked it away in a secret special place. while i waited anxiously for last night to arrive, i felt even more obnoxiously in love with the head and the heart, and by the time that last night rolled around, "rivers and roads" wound up in my top 25 most played songs on my ipod, which is saying something.

all through the morning i could not contain my excitement. i sat in the library yesterday afternoon practically peeing my pants. then jacob and i grabbed our to-go lunches to eat in the car on the two hour drive to pontiac, i grabbed the tickets, and we set off into the glorious sunshine to the sketchy city of pontiac.

tickets! excitement!

after being parked in by my brother's fraternity brothers, we set off on the two hour drive to pontiac. my CD player broke over spring break, so we hooked up my ipod to jacob's awkward portable speakers, and we listened to the head and the heart's only album while i tried to eat a sandwich on drive. the chocolate milk we had got warm a little bit too fast, and i was very happy with the vitamin water that i had brought, even if i almost impaled my throat on the straw. jacob took awkward pictures of scenery, and the music changed to bon iver. we anticipated a "sharp right turn" for nearly ten miles before it actually presented itself, and no, it wasn't that sharp of a turn.

outside the venue!

pontiac, my dear reader, is decently sketchy. the venue that we were at, the crofoot, was perfectly acceptable, but we were next to a rather large night club called "elektric" and there was an emery concert there at the same time. two lines awaited us. we picked the line of college aged hipsters and avoided the line of gothic punks with pink hair. we stood behind a couple that looked about our age that introduced themselves as dan and staci. they were a big part of the concert scene, from MSU, and had actually heard of alma. we spent a good hour talking to them about bands, concerts, food, and other interesting things. jacob then pointed out two hipster looking guys with matching shoes walking across the street to a cafe. one took a picture of the line with his ipad. they're important. remember them.

(it's also important to note that nearly everybody talked about after this point is a hipster. the concert was a congregation of three hundred hipster college students, except the couple in their fifties that shouted "yeah! we love these concerts like we're young!" i've decided i want to be them when i have children.)

our concert tickets said that the show started at seven. i had to pee. really badly. so i danced the pee dance up and down and took scenic pictures of downtown. at seven we were finally let into the crofoot, and i promptly went to the bathroom after buying a purple head and the heart shirt for twenty bucks. i almost broke a girl's nose opening the bathroom door, and as soon as i was done doing my business, the line of ladies with full bladders was curling out of the bathroom. i got there at a good time. we then made our way to the very front of the venue and stood directly at the edge of the stage and... waited until eight. but the background music was billy joel, and dan and i sang along. it was then that we met the old hipster couple with gray hair.

the opening band was a band from west virginia called the black girls. the lead guitarist looked like a cross between a kid i knew in middle school and daniel radcliffe. the lead singer had uncommonly tight pants, awkward glasses, and danced with his feet together. he screeched more than he sang, and halfway through their first song, jacob shouted, "THEY'RE THE MATCHING SHOE GUYS!" and so they were. the bassist stood about three feet away from me, was wearing awkward sweatpants, had long hair and a baseball cap, and simply stood there bumping up and down and pouting. he thought it was pretty cool. i thought he was rather grody. i decided that if he cut his hair, showered, and put on a sweater vest, he would look pretty fine.

a note before i continue. this was my first time at a real concert, and here i was, standing three feet away from the introduction band and two feet away from their speakers. i did not realize that a thumping bass and drum could be felt in your shins and in your throat. it was a good half hour before i could talk, and when i could, i couldn't hear my own voice.

the second intro band was from portland, oregon (surprise surprise to a crowd of three hundred hipster kids) and they had a chick bassist who played the upright like a fiend. the lead guitarist, who was once again right in front of me, was a sketchy looking dude with some weird earrings, tattooes, and played the slide guitar with really loud effects. the lead singer looked quaint enough, but when he started singing, he absolutely wailed. the sound balance wasn't that great, and i could mostly hear the awful guitar effects and the guy practically screaming into the microphone. during their last song, which was about ten minutes long, he became extremely distressed, threw down his acoustic guitar on the stage, ripped a cymbal of the drum set, threw that on his guitar, picked up another guitar, and then played that guitar so violently he broke three of the six strings.

awkward waiting photos at the crofoot!
photobombed by other hipster girl in the
background.

they then came to the front of the stage and stood literally five inches away from my face and sang an acoustic song with only an acoustic guitar. no mics, no anything, and they were beautiful now that i could actually hear them. the drummer danced, stepped on my hand, and then showered me in his sweat. the lead singer swung his guitar violently and almost whacked me in the face. when they left the stage, all we had to do was wait for the head and the heart and take awkwardly excited pictures while they did sound checks and set up their instruments. i was seriously about to have a seizure from sheer excitement.

and then they got on stage. the head and the heart.

i don't think i can adequately put their performance into words. their album is flawless, and it is the only album where i have enjoyed every single song. their harmonies are to die for. they are incredibly talented. and they were better live than they were recorded.

the next hour and a half was a blur of screaming, trying to take pictures without a flash, and singing along to every single song. they played new songs from their upcoming album. they sang and sang and played and played and danced around the stage. they joked about how after the show they were down for partying it up at elektric next door with anybody who wanted to join them. they were flawless. they were beautiful.

he fist bumped me. it was so awesome.

they were literally five feet away from me.

when they played rivers and roads, i was crying and singing so badly i couldn't almost do either of them effectively. when they left after rivers and roads, we cheered and screamed until they came back and played three more songs. during lost in my mind, the other two bands came on stage and danced around and it was a huge dance party. i just kept pressing myself closer and closer to the stage until i was practically on it.

at the very end of the concert, the blond lead singer bent down to give fist bumps. we fist bumped. i was so excited i got dizzy. and almost wet myself.

when the concert was over and i had regained a bit of my hearing, i sat up on stage and we attempted to get a set list that was taped to the stage. some other hipster snatched the one that jacob was trying to get, but dan and staci managed to get one. stacitook a good picture of it and then she kindly gave it to us. i folded it up, took it home, and taped it to my desk in my dorm. the girls next to us stole the lead singer's beer. so much creepier than stealing a set list.

it took a long time to get out of the pot-holed broken-beer-bottled parking lot, and it was a long, tiring drive home. it was blasphemy to listen to the head and the heart on the way back, so we shouted at each other in our deafness and listened to band of horses and yawned and talked about how it had been the most awesome experience ever. we had their set list. we had been fist bumped by the lead singer. we had seen the head and the heart live for only fifteen bucks. and we had shirts to take home. staci and dan from MSU were now our facebook friends.

campus arrival: approximately two am.

monday morning class wake-up call: approximately eight twenty-four am.

back to the real world.

but yesterday, sunday march eleventh, 2012, was the day that we saw the head and the heart live in pontiac, michigan, and it was truly an experience that changed my life.

now here are some pictures for your general entertainment.

driving to pontiac!

lovely downtown pontiac.

we were literally this close! ah!

i tried to post the videos that i took. i took one of their opening set, "cats and dogs" (which of course, was terrifically fabulous).

the other video is "lost in my mind", in which the other bands came on stage and started to dance around awkwardly. you can hear me singing obnoxiously, and i was so deaf by that point i'm not sure what key i'm singing it. the rest of the crowd couldn't sing either, but really, me screaming "HOW'S THAT BRICK LAYIN' COMIN', HOW YOUR ENGINE RUNNIN'" in a very scary toneless key is rather terrifying.

here is a video of rivers and roads. so you can listen to the head and the heart. :)

it was because of a doughut?

let me tell you about my life.

this blog is a life blog. i already do that.

let me tell you about my day.

if i want to get really fancy, it starts yesterday with a fun trip to walmart with four other RAs and me irrationally buying a large box of chocolate frosted glazed doughnuts with sprinkles from the bakery for two dollars and fifty cents. those doughnuts looked as lonely as i felt.

but to just put this out there: today i taught my first lesson as a future teacher.


in what i'm sure could be a whole entirely different post, to celebrate this monumental event that occurred this morning, i went to mt. pleasant with jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) to buy a new hipster teaching outfit (because i am a teacher and a hipster) with money that i didn't have. i bought a cute dress, a new cardigan (now i have one for every day of the week!) and a pair of silver tights.

and some starbucks.

so last night i was trying on my outfit to make sure that i looked okay, and the tights were about five inches too short, already had a snag, and a hole in the crotch. that was slightly unhappy, and i'm hoping i can take them back and sweetly demand a refund. while i was running around in my dress and cardigan, i realized that i hadn't printed off the copies of the handout i made for my students. my RA in-service (which involved pajamas, stuffed animals, and blankets) was in twenty minutes.

so i went to the library in my RA staff shirt (which is black and teal), my maroon plaid alma college sweats, a green cardigan, and of course, i took my fifteen year old stuffed simba and my sorority blanket. i got a lot of funny looks while i was stapling all of the copies of my handout together and i had simba mounting the counter like pride rock. it didn't help that i was humming the conquering of pride rock music while viciously stapling handouts. about the lion king.

the directions look something like this: Read each paragraph from an essay on the movie The Lion King. In your groups, on a separate sheet of paper, discuss and answer the questions at the end of each paragraph. Refer to the essay model on the board.

this morning i woke up late (loss of teacher points) and i ended up sitting around in a towel on twitter after i showered waiting for my hair to dry. i then put on my dress and tights but not the cardigan because i keep my room at eighty-five degrees constantly. i sat in my chair and i snarfed a bowl of cheerios and lord, did i go to town on that walmart chocolate doughnut. it wasn't even seven thirty in the morning yet and i was licking frosting off all ten of my fingers.

i slipped elegantly on the president's lawn on the way out to my car, which i will remind you, is parked next to my brother's frat house. i had everything that i needed. my lesson plan, my index cards, my handouts, my ball, and my tape. i had my name tag (ms. hollenberg, i'm so official). and of course, i had excitement! i always have excitement!

i pull out of the parking lot onto the road. and as my car is shuddering violently while i crank toward the traffic light, i remember very vividly the big BUMP that my car made while coming back from walmart with my prized doughuts.

upon arrival at my high school at approximately seven forty-eight am, i check. my rear passenger tire is blown.

i walk into school and go straight to my placement classroom, gather the skirt of my dress around me, and wait in my computer chair. nervously wait. this is my first time teaching a bunch of eleventh graders who don't know how to spell the word "torture". they don't talk. not even to each other. and my lesson is entirely discussion/lecture based. and i have a ball to throw at them.

after they finish their grammar, it's my turn in the sun. so i walk up to the board, pick up a green marker, and write my word bank on the board. then i turn around the classroom is mine. this is what comes out of my mouth.

"so. this is my first lesson, and i hope that you guys enjoy it, and i really hope that you don't eat me alive. we're going to do a lesson reviewing five paragraph essay structure and what goes into a five paragraph essay. and you had a long, wonderful three day weekend, and i want you guys to get moving. so i'm going to throw this ball at you and make you answer a question. your word bank is on the board. if you don't know the answer, you can phone a friend, but i'll expect you to listen to their answer. now, toss the ball gently back to me, please, because i can't catch to save my life, and i have a feeling that the most entertaining part of this lesson for you is going to be you watching me run around the room in this dress chasing a stress ball."

and then i was teaching.

it was so absolutely wonderful to have my own classroom and my own students. they were actually participatory. they enjoyed the ball activity, they didn't particularly like having to stick index cards up onto the board in the proper order to fill out the essay model, but boy did they like the handout on the lion king. it was the first time they'd ever worked in groups in that class, and they were actually talkative.

they did not expect me to ask "why" every time they gave me an answer. when i asked who could identify the thesis and mary read it to me, i asked her why it was the thesis. she looked at me like a scared bunny.  so we reviewed what was in a thesis again to make sure that they all had it down.

the lesson took half an hour, ten minutes over what i was supposed to teach. extra points gained back from the ones i lost oversleeping. and when it was all over, i felt so accomplished and just... ready. ready to be a teacher.

i cannot wait for my future.

fast forwarding through my senior class (in which i graded awful punctuation packets and dreamily thought about eating another doughnut when i got back to my room), i went back to my car with the flat tire. my placement teacher absolutely insisted that i could not drive back to campus with it without risking damage to the rim.

here was the dilemma.

1. it was eleven thirty.
2. i had class a one.
3. my paper that was due at one wasn't titled. or printed.
4. i had to print it. and title it. and eat lunch. and get back to campus.
5. AAA, however great, is slow.
6. my boyfriend does not have a car and could not be my knight in shining armor in his rusty station wagon.

so i holed myself up in the main office, called the tire place, and urged them that yes, this was an emergency, i was stranded with a paper on the line, and i had to get back to campus asap. the guy on the phone assured me he'd be there in ten minutes.

i then sat in the office for ten minutes, hungry, and watched kids eat mcdonalds.

the tire guy was a young looking guy. when i waved excitedly at him, he rolled his eyes, gave me a high-five, and said, "i bet you have no idea how your car works, do you."  he got that pretty much right.

he told me that my tire was pretty well blown, and the other rear tire had barely any tread, so he was just going to replace both of them. he was going to take my car away, fix it, and bring it back, all by twelve thirty.

that gave me half an hour to get back to campus, eat something, title and print my paper, and make it to class. i began to panic.

i hurriedly called jacob, told him that he needed to break into my room, title my paper something terrific, and then print it off and keep it. if i didn't make it to the cafeteria by quarter til, he told me that he would get me a to-go lunch to snarf in class. i was then once again sitting in the office, starving, watching seniors eat mcdonalds that they probably didn't have to pay for.

elation of teaching my lesson- gone.

after i spent nearly an hour waiting nervously in the main office while scrolling twitter on my phone and the superintendent asked me gruffly if i was being helped by someone, the tire guy came back. it was about time; the secretaries were bitching about some girl that was in the bathroom throwing up everywhere except the toilet, and lo and behold, the custodial staff wasn't there to take care of it. i repeatedly told mr. alma tire that he was my hero of the month and i was forever indebted to him, and then he handed me my bill.

$236.36.

i paid that with my credit card. you know, the one in my name but it's full of my dad's money.

the name on my invoice says "holly hollenberg." i'm not sure why you'd do that to your child. but i really think i have a relative named holly hollenberg. i don't think we've ever met.

to make this long story short, i careened back to campus, ran to my room, grabbed my stuff, ran to the cafeteria, snarfed a grilled cheese and some macaroni, and made it to class in time to discuss james wright's "a blessing" for an hour and a half while still having my nametag on.

today has been a successful day.

i have told you about today. and in a sense, told you about my life.

i hope you've enjoyed the ride. and now that i'm done with this, i think i will go eat that doughnut that i was  dreaming about eating.

mmm. doughnuts.

i tape things. a lot.

i've blogged about being an RA before.

i'm about to do it again.

i feel the need to do this because right now they're selecting new RAs for next year, and some of my friends are applying. naturally, that means that this happens.

friend: my interview is next week!
me: that's exciting! did you read the blog i wrote about the RA selection process?
friend: no. i figured i'd talk to you. there's a college blog?
me: oh. well i wore mismatching socks and had a kick-ass funny story. dress up nicely. and yeah, there's a college blog.
friend: oh that's cool. is being an RA hard?
me: um. i tape things a lot.

i speak nothing but the truth, my dear readers. i go through rolls of packing tape like toilet paper. and my suitemates and i tend to go through a lot of toilet paper.

everybody wants to know what it's like being an RA. is it fun? is it scary? do you get lonely living by yourself?

i don't get lonely. but i also pretend that my room is an apartment, and i spend entirely too much time watching the lion king with my stuffed simba. so maybe you'll get lonely, but i'm doin' just fine, thank you very much.

every time somebody asks me what it's like to be an RA, i never know exactly what to say, because it's such a strange experience. sure, it's a lot of work and i think eventually i will lose my finger prints from taping stuff everywhere and pulling out staples, but sometimes it just feels like this giant accumulation of interesting experiences.

it's kind of like this.

LAST WEEK


i planned my hall program according to my evaluation, which said that i needed more community builders. well that's fine with me, trying to do other programs is a giant pain in the butt. so i took a survey from my hall, made a facebook event, made posters, and emailed every single person in my hall about the date and time.

we were going to color, watch a movie, and eat popcorn in the lobby.

ten minutes to hall program. there is no DVD player at the lobby TV, and i have a sign hanging from it that says the lobby is reserved for a hall program tuesday january 31st from eight until nine thirty. i run and grab my DVD player from my room, take out chuck season one, and then my boyfriend spends five minutes hooking it up with his head squashed against the wall. while this is happening, i go upstairs and start to pound on doors shouting, "hall program, come color and eat popcorn!"

not a single resident was home. three residents from another hall came and colored and watched toy story two with me. i colored a really beautiful fish.

LAST NIGHT

last night a few things happened.

1. i went on rounds with my stuffed simba.
2. i made my bulletin board.
3. i popped awkwardly into rob's apartment.
4. i had an interesting conversation with a "friend" i hadn't talked to in nearly a year and a half.

here's how these went.

1. simba accompanied me on my rounds. it was very hard to open doors with the duty binder in one hand and a giant stuffed animal in the other. when some friends watching the superbowl asked what simba was doing, i replied, "he's helping me turn off lights. his dad taught him to be a part of the circle of life."

2. my bulletin board is a cliche bulletin board about love. i have three definitions of love; wikipedia (to cite your sources!), miriam webster (i used that picture from the blog about terrific being a terrific word) and of course, dr. spencer reid.

yes. this is on my bulletin board.

and i am so excited to look at it for the rest of february.

this already has five facebook likes and six tumblr notes.



3. while on rounds in wright hall at ten thirty, i was walking by adam and rob's apartment. they are fellow RAs and bloggers like myself. right when i walked past, i heard steph, another RA on my staff, say my name. i paused outside the door and she said, "look at emily hollenberg's facebook status, it's about how she effectively watched the end of the superbowl on twitter!" (which i did. who needs to watch the actual game when your friends tweet about it every five seconds?) so i knocked on the door, threw it open and yelled, "I HEARD MAHH NAME!" i do not remember if rob screamed or not. but he was right by the door and i'm pretty sure he almost dropped what he was holding. which was a soapy baking pan.

4. still on duty, i was on facebook chat with my stuffed simba after barging in on rob and steph (and probably adam in his bedroom) and i decided that i wanted to troll a quote unquote "friend" from high school. the friendship that i had with him cannot be accurately described, and i'm not too worried that he'll read this at all, so i feel like i can say what i want about him. but what went through my head was "omg i can totally troll kevin right now."

i don't know how to troll. so i just said hi.

after we got through the basics of "how are you" "oh i'm fine i'm not at purdue anymore i work at an oil refinery" "wow that's so neat i'm still in michigan becoming a teacher" it went something like this.

me: i think there's a drunk girl in my stairwell, i'll be back in a minute.
kevin: what? no! let them stay drunk!
me: what?!
kevin: let them be drunk!
me: do you want me to get fired?!
kevin: you gotta be good at not seeing stuff.
me: i think i did that when our frat burned down last week!
kevin: that's some deep shit.


LAST MONTH


last month i got an email asking if i would like to blog for the student life office about the RA selection process. i, of course, jumped up and down, screamed, and was so excited. this was like... professional blogging! it was going to be fantastic! i called my mother and the first thing she says is, "do you get paid?"

um. no. BUT I GOT TO BLOG.

so i blogged about the whole selection process the way that i normally blog. i got an email back saying that my lack of capitalization didn't look that good on an official college website. i had to put in some RA statistics that had to do with my paycheck. then i sent it to them and the hall directors said it was great! they put it on facebook! they put it up on the website!

i went to go read it and they cut out all the parts that i thought were decently funny. (i had to try to make the scary selection process sound fun, right?) but they left in the part about my interesting socks that you could clearly see through my tights when i went to the interview. i think the best line that they kept was "I debated and debated until the last minute, finally decided that having my own RA fill out my reference would be awkward, and hiked up three floors to an RA, who I really only knew through my brother, to ask him to fill it out. He did not judge the bowl of oatmeal in my hand or my fluffy green slippers when I asked him." they cut out the part about my failed drawing looking like a batman mask.

there are two other blogs on this website by "guest RA bloggers", and mine is by far the longest. by about five times.

THE PRESENT WHERE EMILY IS BLOGGING ABOUT BEING AN RA

see, none of this really has anything to do with being an RA. if it did, i would've told you about the times i've called the cops, knocked on people's doors at odd hours of the morning because they were being noisy, and the time that i took down my bulletin board without a staple remover. i still don't feel like my fingernail has sufficiently recovered, and i did that in october.

i will leave you with two videos. one is dr. reid explaining love (and peas) like i have on my bulletin board

the other is shit RAs say. i have said every single one of those things. including "i don't know, i don't know what it smells like."

"i can't, i have duty."

"it's also found in peas!"

this post is a lot like fight club.

it's an absolute crime that i haven't blogged in so long.

the only thing that i've wanted to blog about for the past two weeks has been recruitment.

recruitment is a lot like fight club.

the first rule about recruitment is that you don't talk about recruitment.

(if you're wondering, this is sorority recruitment. and it's hardcore enough that we have a manual. and something called "recruitment school". i will leave it at that.)

so then what was i to blog about? a serious question indeed.

i have decided to just blog about my life. it's what i do anyway. and i have suddenly become conscious about how many sentences i start with "so" when i blog.

so. (aha.) here we go with my life. again.

this is jacob and i getting ready to welcome new members into my sorority on friday.
i swear, my hair has never looked that good. and whaddyaknow, as soon as it was perfect, i ran outside screaming in my t-shirt, shorts and tights without a coat through the snow carrying a gatorade bottle full of glittering beads to shake at random cars. and with that, my hair was messed up.

and i think it was about the fourth coldest i've ever been in my life.

the first half hour in my walk-outs garb was okay. but once the excitement had worn off and i had to walk to stucchi's to get ice cream without a coat, nuh uh.


on wednesday i had a conversation with dr. aspinall, my reading writing and research professor, about what i should do my independent study on. i told him all about my lolita paper from last year and that i really wanted to delve into it, and he said that was perfectly acceptable, but probably only because lolita was such a dense book that to actually get into it you had to be a scholar.

he then told me that he was disappointed that i'm not going to grad school.

this has been an issue this year. everybody and their mother is going to grad school. i will graduate in april of 2014 from alma college with a degree in english and spanish, and i will have a teaching license to go teach in just about any state that takes a michigan license. grad school makes it harder for teachers to get jobs, it's more school (and nobody wants to be in school forever) and honestly, i just want to go teach and blog.

so no, i'm not going to grad school.

dr. aspinall then told me that he thought that jacob (the boyfriend, not the best friend) was walking jesus when it came to english. he then told me that anybody can slog through shakespeare. says the guy who has a degree. IN SHAKESPEARE. the man has a PhD. IN SHAKESPEARE.

on thursday i wrote a really interesting poem about the relationship that i have with my grandmother. it has a lot of violent imagery. i sent the poem to my father, since after all, it was about his mom. he called me yesterday to tell me that he didn't understand it at all, and that the beech tree i wrote about was actually a birch tree.

i told him that the next time he talked to me about chemistry, i was going to say "oh i don't do that, i'm an english major."

on friday, while i was running around outside in a t-shirt and sweater tights wearing too many red necklaces and clutching a homemade glittery noisemaker, chuck ended.

i will repeat this.

CHUCK ENDED.

sooo i haven't seen the season finale yet. like i said, i was out running around in the cold for my sorority and too excited to function. but when all the fun was over, i went back to jacob's room and i saw a picture of chuck on tumblr. this picture, to be exact.

when i realized that i wouldn't barricade my door at eight o'clock every monday to keep out unwanted visitors while watching a new episode, and that all i would have would be memories of bumbling chuck and cuddling with my mother on the couch while she knitted, i cried like a baby for half an hour.

i then promptly returned to my dorm, popped the best bag of popcorn i'd ever eaten, and watched the pilot episode like a person attending a funeral.

my mother recorded the series finale of chuck, and when i return home for the weekend in two weeks, i will watch it on my television. with commercials. my favorite television show will not end with me watching it on the internet on some sketchy website that has interesting pop up ads. you know what i mean by interesting.

now onto the RA things about my life. let's make a short list.

1. recruitment and RA things worked out just fine. which was good. because i was in tears.
2. i called the wrong AOD again. whoops.
3. nobody unthawed the doughnuts. that is a blog post in and of itself.
4. kait and i ran to the RA office in t-shirts (to avoid drunk people) to deliberate about the state of our hall director's 13x9 inch pans. at twelve thirty this morning.

so about the doughnuts. they had been frozen in the heavy duty RA freezer for god knows how long. we were giving them away in the library to promote the career and internship fair put on the ACP office, and nobody unthawed them. so when sarah and steph and i went into the RA office to grab them, they were nice and frozen.

we took them upstairs, put them in a pan (which i washed out in the public bathroom) and tried to put them in the oven. there was serious discussion of putting them in the dryer. sarah and i laughed. steph was pissed. other sarah helped. i ended up running to the library to guard the free hot chocolate machine.

this is what the hot chocolate looked like: you know in monsters inc. when mr. waternoose is gloomping coffee into his mug and you're instantly revolted? yeah, it looked like that. that hot chocolate was thick as all get out.

people came and ate our lukewarm doughnuts. i thought they tasted like pizza.

oh, I GOT A SMARTPHONE.


the first thing i did with it was download the free IMDB app and set my ringtone as the circle of life. so far i pretty much just use IMDB, facebook, and twitter. eventually i'll use my phone like a real person. getting a real-person phone that's probably smarter than me should warrant its own blog post, but honestly, i just haven't done enough with the damn thing to write that much about it. i'll let you know when i name it.

aaaaand i have officially gotten my teacher placement for this semester! and lo and behold, i'll be even more like a real teacher, because i have to be at the high school before eight. and the night before, my staff meetings go until midnight. real world, here i come! not barging through the door like a hero, but tripping on my dress pants in my high heels.

and i will end this blog with what i was supposed to be doing while i was writing this blog. i just read a terrific poem about a fish (that i read last year) and i am supposed to be analyzing it and writing a one page paper on the major theme that i discovered in said poem.

instead of writing the paper, i put on my header with my name, the class, the date, blah blah blah, and then i wrote myself a note that looks like this.

Hey Emily!

When you actually write this, you probably won’t be able to find your poetry notebook.

Here is what you’re writing this paper about!

PERCEPTION OF BEAUTY!

• Bright colors and flowers (comparisons)
• Rainbow! Rainbow! Rainbow!
• Colors in general. Get specific.
• Comparisons to birds. And stuff.
• Ugliness = wisdom and worldliness.

NOW GO WRITE YOUR PAPER, YOU BEAUTIFUL GIRL!

this is my life in the past week. i hope that you've enjoyed it as much as i have.

we, with our labeled lives, like literature?

this has the potential to get really weird really fast.

it also has a lot of ideas that i have in my head that are interconnected, but possibly only interconnected in my head.

please, bear with me while i jumble all of this together in a mad rush.

so yesterday was the first day of the semester, and my classes are looking something like this.

modern american literature. (thank goodness modern means after 1945.)
educational pyschology. (to understand students?)
reading, writing, and research. (that's exactly what it sounds like. reading. writing. and research.)
poetry workshop. (haven't been there yet. that's on thursday.)

so i'm going to start off by saying that ed psych is going to be interesting. at a school as small as mine, if you're in the education department, you all know each other. so my class is basically "alma's class of 2014 future teachers in the same room twice a week."

halfway through class i realized that room was my philosophy classroom from last semester. i just didn't recognize it because i hardly went to that class, and when i did, i sat in the very front and wrote down every funny thing dr. stratton said, including, "i think that granny smith apples are just about the most orgasmic things on the planet. have any of you ever had an orgasm? you don't have to raise your hands, just think about it and smile."

so american lit was the first class that i went to. i have it with dr. vivian, that fabulous creative writing professor that i've blogged about before. he opened the class with the same interesting poem, and once again, told us that we had to recite a poem in front of the class.

i am not allowed to use the same poem. i was highly distraught because i don't think another poem can fit into my life so neatly.

from there, he talked about all eleven text books (i currently have five of them) and how we were going to start reading "grasses of a thousand colors" by wallace shawn. now, don't tell me that you don't know who wallace shawn is.

he's the guy in the princess bride who yells INCONCEIVABLE! he's also the voice of rex in toy story.

if you still don't know who wallace shawn is, i am incredibly sorry that have you not seen either of those two movies.

so today, this play, "grasses of a thousand colors", comes in the mail, and i pick it up all happy because i have to have fifty pages read by wednesday, and whattyaknow, it's tuesday. so i start reading this play.

it's this guy. and he's standing on stage in his pajamas and he's just talking to his audience about whatever. i'm thinking that he's a very interesting person with some interesting insights. for instance, he talks about the audience as becoming a box of chocolates. i thought that was very strange and slightly illuminating.

and then suddenly he's a sex addict and there's five whole pages where he's talking about his relationship with his penis and he's having sex with a cat, and apparently, cat sex is so awesome that he orgasmed so much that he blacked out.

PLEASE. BEAR WITH ME. I AM AS CONFUSED AND DISTURBED AS YOU ARE.


so moving onto reading, writing, and research and forgetting that i ever typed any of that.

so dr. aspinall is one of my favorite professors even though i've never had him. i'm going to have the pleasure of traveling to europe with him when i'm twenty-one. he's well-loved throughout the campus. he's a shakespeare nut. he wears pink pants. it was my first class with him, and when jacob (the boyfriend not the best friend) and i walked into his class, we didn't know what to expect.

this class is going to take a lot out of me. i'm going to be writing concise, argumentative, and grammatically perfect one page papers twice a week. i'm going to be reading lots of strange (but not as strange as american lit) books. there will be much writing. there will be much reading. there will be much researching.

so on thursday he's going to give us the guidelines for our independent study project. we get to choose a book or a selection of poems to write a ten page paper on. we have nearly the entire semester to get this done.

my instant thought was lolita. i wrote a bombdiggity paper on lolita last winter semester about how quilty was a figment of humbert's imagination, a strange imaginary piece of himself that he created to be real so he could deal with the fact that he was a monster. by god, i loved that paper, and i loved writing it. and i love lolita.

but dr. aspinall encouraged us to branch out and do something that maybe we haven't done before. i'm still toying with the idea of going very in depth with the quilty not being real idea, so we'll see how that goes.

i've made a list of books i might be interested in doing. the third book on that list is "grasses of a thousand colors." pretty sure if i do that play, i'm going to vomit. everywhere.

before the class ended, our first one page assignment was to write about what makes an english major excel. everybody in that class is an english major or minor. what do we need to have to excel at english?

i sat with my shoes off, rocking my chair back and forth, while everybody was spouting articulate stuff like, "we must think critically, which means seeing literature this way." "we must have a nice canon!" (no. not like, boom canon. canon like, look at all these fancy classics i have on my shelf and that i've read.) "we must be original!" "we should have our own thoughts, be open to the thoughts of others, but not recklessly abandon our thoughts for the thoughts of others."

this went on for literally half an hour before i raised my hand and said, "i think we should like english."

it got really quiet when i said that.

i applaud every single one of my classmates for the nice and true articulate things that they said we needed to be good english students. but hello.

we gotta like literature.

what is the point of being an english major if you hate reading books? if you don't like to write? if you don't enjoy diving into a book and taking out its messy innards and writing complicated papers with eight million cited sources from scholars in obscure books? sure, we can think critically and be original and have great ideas and articulate well, but we have to actually like doing it.

i just wrote my one page paper about what makes us excellent english majors, and it was about how we, with our lives labeled as "english majors", must enjoy our subject, and once we have achieved love, we can find our own excellence. i know how pretentious that sounds. but as an english major in three english classes with three different professors to impress with three different styles of writing, i think i can be pretentious.

i highly doubt i'm going to do this big sha-bang paper on a sex addict who screws with cats. i'm probably going to do it on a french professor who's in love with his twelve year old step daughter and living in his own fantasy.

that doesn't sound much better, does it?

welcome to college. welcome to english.

welcome to life.

punch, kick, here's your new chair!

so today is one of those days where i blog about my day.

my life is interesting. at least i'd like to think it is. which is why it's okay to blog about.

my life could be something like this:

1. today i woke up.
2. i ate breakfast.
3. i then had a criminal minds marathon until lunch, and then a chuck marathon until dinner.
4. then i spent hours and hours online on my various social networking sites.
5. i want to watch matthew gray gubler on the craig ferguson show. but i am too afraid to go into the basement alone in the dark at one in the morning.

i have had days like these. (ahem. yesterday.)

but today i had a very interesting day, and i deem it blog post worthy!

so today i woke up. late. like, almost going on noon late. but that was fine with me, because i had plans to go chair hunting, and i didn't feel like waiting around for that to happen.

here's how the chair hunting came about. i've had this pod chair for like, eight years. to make it comfy, i have a special array of pillows on blankets on it. so many blogs have some from this chair. novels. poetry. anything computer related comes from this chair.

sunday night, in the middle of watching a very potter musical, i was suddenly sitting on the ground.

emily, our intrepid life blogger, needed a new computer chair.

so my friend vince from high school (this is vince of the vomit incidents from last post. we never get dairy together anymore.) tells me that we can go chair shopping today. it'll be an adventure. i agreed. i've spent the last three days sitting on the floor with my laptop. it hasn't been the greatest thing for my ass.

so he came and picked me up at one. we got into my dad's almost fourteen year old minivan, put iron and wine in the CD player, and we ventured to goodwill.

and once there, there was this GLORIOUS pair of puke green armchairs. forty bucks each. i had christmas money. these chairs were fabulous. but i was looking for a pod chair, not a seventies armchair. so we decided that we would check target and if there was nothing there, we'd come back and get the puke green chair.

we drove to target. almost got in a car accident. upon entering the target parking lot, there was a cart sitting in the middle of the entrance. i dramatically screamed and veered around it. when i parked, i was about to go be a good civilian and put it back, but somebody in a creeper van got to it first. i really shouldn't hate on the creeper van. after all, i was driving my dad's minivan, which my brother's boyscout troup named "the crimson avenger" back in middle school. my high school marching band adopted that name my junior year of high school.

we wandered aimlessly around target. looked at an expensive leather chair. discussed the toothbrush holder that jacob and i have picked out in case we get married. found nothing that resembled my old computer chair.

alas, i had gotten my old chair at kohls. we drove to kohls. did not almost get in a car accident. but i didn't trip a green arrow and i shouted spanish obscenities and random nothings at the light. it was exciting. i like to yell.

once in kohls, an old man told us that vince's watch couldn't be fixed right away, and once we were upstairs, i found a beautiful monkey sheet set.

no chairs.

office depot was next. that went something like this.

office depot employee: can i help you?
me: yes, i'd like a computer chair.
office depot store as a whole: LOOK AT ALL OF THESE BEAUTIFUL EXPENSIVE COMPUTER CHAIRS THAT ONLY BUSINESSMEN CAN AFFORD.
me: back to goodwill.

once back at goodwill, we stared at the pair of chairs. one had a scary stain that looked a bit like vomit. i sat in the other one. bounced in it, because when i get excited by anything, i bounce and jump up and down. we turned it over and checked its innards. it was a solid chair.

i bought it for forty-two dollars and eighty cents. a nice employee struggled it to the back of the store and i picked it up at the donation loading dock. once vince had managed to pick it up, i couldn't get the trunk to the crimson avenger opened. i later found out this was because my father had already unlocked it and i had relocked it. go me.

we got the chair to fit in the van. we drove home. we managed to get it into my kitchen. then my mother looked at it and said, "euw, what is that?"

me: mother, this is my new chair!"

she sat in it. she loved it. and then told me i could reupholster it before i get my own apartment.

my dad and vince got it upstairs. i then showed vince the beauty that is dr. spencer reid saying, "this is calm, and it's doctor". then i took some febreeze and sprayed the crap out of it.

oh yes. my new chair.

but this blog post doesn't end here! oh no, there is more to my day than just chair adventures.

so my mom has decided that she wants to turn her life around. i'm not sure what she needs to turn around, because she's absolutely wonderful in every way shape and form, but she has decided to dabble in three fitness classes. one of them is at her sister's dance studio. my cousin, my mother, and i ventured there for zumba last night. now, i am a zumba veteran with a fourteen week zumba class under my belt, and it did not meet up to my standards.

today we went to this thing at the YMCA called turbo kick. my father endearingly calls it turbotax. we figured it would be like kick boxing. it would be fun.

so my mother and i show up and the instructor is all like, "who's new?" and we raise our hands. she then laughs and says, "wow, not many people admit that." then she turns on this techno music. and the hell starts.

i am not afraid of hard work. i am (was) a collegiate athlete in the longest sports season of the year with the hardest sport. i am in shape. i understand how hard work goes. but i was not expecting this at all. i was drenched in sweat in five minutes.

these women are kicking and punching like the end of "i'll make a man out of you" in mulan. they know the routines. kick punch spin jump kick punch punch punch lunge go go go! faster faster faster FASTEST!

and that's when i realize how uncoordinated i am. my mother is more uncoordinated. i'm trying to punch the right way, and by the time i get it, these women are jumping the other direction kicking at everything. the lady next to me is practically kicking me in the face. i look at my mom for a fraction of a second while doing some form of upper cut and her eyes say this: what the hell did we just do.

it was a fantastic work out. i will give it that. i sweated a lot. i was out of breath. i drained my water bottle. the instructor kept smiling at me while i fumbled around trying to kick and punch at things, and her smile was a little too telling: you have no idea what you just got into. to make matters a bit worse, this girl in the front must have been some super-hybrid dancer/gymnast, because she was leaping and punching and generally defying the rules of gravity. during my fourteen week zumba class, i felt like how that girl looked while doing zumba.

but i probably looked like the idiot that i am. that's okay. zumba was amazing fun.

we were so tired and sweaty and embarrassed after that workout that we walked around the track. my mother kept saying, "we'll just walk until i stop sweating!" while we tried to stop perspiring, my mother enthusiastically talked about how she was so excited about this class and eventually she'd become coordinated and get all of it down.

me: i ain't goin' back. nuh uh.

my mother: you should transfer to IPFW and go to all these fitness classes with me!

me: fuggetaboutit.

i will stick with zumba. at least i know i can semi-reasonably dance. or pretend to. when i go back to school on saturday, i will have to ask my mother how turbo kick (turbotax!) is going. tomorrow we're going to another zumba class.

i hope it's better than the last one.

yep. i am not this coordinated.