Sickened
I love the Postsecret blog. See, look, it's even in my blogroll. This particular secret, however, not only makes me angry, it hurts my heart. All I could think when I read it was how angry I would be if I found out someone did something so heinous to one of my babies - and then how I would go about repaying them for their disgusting act.
Kris just had a scare over her cat (which, by the way, I'm relieved to see went well enough). She was clearly, from her posts, very upset about this. This is the kind of person who should own pets, the kind of person who genuinely cares about what happens to them.
I wonder if Puck and Marilyn know how much I love them.
On an only slightly related note, Puck fell into the bathtub with me this morning. He and Marilyn like to sit on the edge when I'm in there (reading, usually, because I can), and it was, apparently, wet. He moved and his back end fell into the tub, right on top of my pretty little leg. Fortunately his freaking was minimal and I escaped with a small scratch. I had to reach over and give him a boost. Then get out of the tub and follow him to attempt to take pictures.* He wasn't having it, so I don't have anything good to show you.
Current Tally Marilyn, once in the tub, three times in the toilet. Puck, once in the tub, once in the toilet. But really, who's winning?
*So this may sound mean, but let's compare. Laughing when my cat slips halfway into a tub of warm, clean water. Someone feeding their cat bleach because they are too chicken shit to ask someone out. I really see no comparison there.Labels: everyday musings, kitties
Scent-Sational*
My monitor fritzed out Wednesday night, leaving me computer deprived for three days. It sucked, but I’m back.
Studies say that scent is our strongest sense. Supposedly you can remember scents and their associations for years, and I was thinking about this the other day, wondering which scents would stick with me from college and my early twenties.
The smell of hickory smoke always makes me think of my parents’ restaurant and the oh-so-tasty hickory burgers we make there. Any time I’ve ordered something labeled hickory on a menu elsewhere, I have been disappointed. Nothing ever meets my high expectations.
Project always wore the same cologne, every day – maybe he still does. Bright, not too strong, and sometimes mingled with marijuana smoke,** it was good on him. I would spend the night at his apartment and my coat would still smell like him three days later, slightly comforting, slightly disconcerting, and potentially embarrassing. *** Occasionally I walk by someone at a party or in a store who wears the same thing, and I have to do a double take to make sure that he isn’t lurking nearby, waiting to call me Midget.
I wore a specific brand of lotion daily the summer before my junior year of high school, something with a really light, perfume-y scent and just a bit of shimmer to highlight the tan that I, admittedly, still thought made me look healthy. I didn’t do anything spectacular that summer, though I did go to the lake weekly. Even though the scent isn’t tropical or summery itself, I associate it with sand and sun every time I open the bottle.
There are seasonal associations for me too, things that go back years. Roast turkey smells like Thanksgiving, gingerbread and peppermint remind me of Christmas, burning leaves make me think of Halloween,**** and smoldering charcoal brings summer to the front of my mind. Certain scents bring up an emotional connection, though not specific memories. Coffee is energizing, clean laundry is comforting, vodka is sickening, and books are relaxing.
So what is my point? I can’t say that I have one. I just find it interesting that one sense can have such an impact on our day to day lives simply due to the memories we associate.
Nope, there is no point. I’ll find something interesting to write about soon and really get back into the swing of things. I promise.
*Oh yes, it is cheesy. Give me a break.
**No, I never smoked. Anything. And I wasn’t exactly thrilled that he did, but I was blinded by my own stupidity.
***Embarrassing if I smelled like weed, especially since I don’t smoke it.
****Most people would say school starting, but it’s August when school starts here and is nothing but hot and disgusting.Labels: everyday musings, my insanity
Expanding My Mind
Recently, it was brought to my attention that I know a lot about literature. I can rattle off titles and authors and give you plot summaries, and I’ve read a lot of things that the average person hasn’t read and never will. However, many of these great, classic books that everyone raves about – I haven’t actually read them.
There are some that I really have no desire to read.
Moby Dick? I honestly never want to read it and I hope I can manage not to. Melville drives me batty. Anything Ernest Hemingway wrote won’t be joining my favorites list, and it’s highly unlikely that Stephen Crane will suddenly become my new favorite novelist.
I went searching for a list of the essential classics, but none that I found really struck my fancy. So, after some consideration, I decided to modify one of the lists to suit what I want to read. As it stands, after my omissions and additions, I have a list of eighty-nine books that I have every intention of reading.
Don’t misunderstand, I don’t really have any intention of finishing this within the year. Still being in school, that would be nearly impossible. Once I’m finished with school or have a vacation or just catch a wild hair, I’ll start going after the list in earnest, but for right now it’s just not practical. I will, however, finish the list. I’m setting the goal, right now, at finishing the list before I’m thirty, though I’m really shooting for twenty-five.
Anything in bold I’ve already read, though most of it I’ve read long enough ago that I intend to reread it. Wish me luck!
Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Ulysses - James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
The Brothers Karamazov - Feodor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Emma - Jane Austen
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
The Ambassadors - Henry James
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoevsky
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Odyssey – Homer
The Iliad – Homer
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Things Fall Apart - Chinue Achebe
My Antonia - Willa Cather
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
The Hound of Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Little Prince -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
From Here to Eternity - James Jones
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Sophie’s Choice - William Styron
Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton
Dante’s Inferno – Dante Alighieri
The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spenser
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Dangerous Liasons - Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos
Harry Potter (series) – J.K. Rowling
The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Silence of the Lambs (and others) – Thomas Harris
Labels: lists, my insanity
Flashback: Twenty-One Candles
At 8:59 am, March 29th ’07, I finally turned twenty-one.
I was asleep at the time, because I didn’t have class till 12:30 and I don’t like getting up any earlier than I have to. I got up, dressed all cute (denim miniskirt, black fitted t-shirt, and pink flip flops), and made my way to class. After classes, I went to Boys and Girls Club (where I volunteered for a while during my blogging absence). My only real memory was watching the last half of
Happy Feet and then playing Four Square and getting the kids to let me cheat because it was my birthday.
Clearly, that part of my birthday was boring.
I went home, curled my hair, traded the flip flops for black peep-toe heels, and waited for Bradshaw to make her appearance. She had basically orchestrated the plans for my birthday, being the older, wiser drinker that she is. I went along with it, simply because I didn’t want to over plan the evening – every time I try to do that, it ends badly. Stretch had agreed to be our sober driver for the evening because she had a camp or a game or something volleyball-related to do that weekend (it was Thursday night) and couldn’t drink. Also, I refused to have a twenty-first birthday celebration and have my best friend be my sober driver.
Bradshaw and Stretch arrived, and Stretch had something fantastic: birthday cake. She made me a birthday cake! I was very excited, and this action simply reinforced my newfound love for her. We were sitting in my living room, all party-ready and eating cake when my phone rang. Not thinking, I answered without looking at the display – which I never do.
It was K.
This was surprising, because he was basically the last person I expected to hear from on my birthday.* In fact, I nearly choked on my drink of water. He had noticed on facebook (a college stalker’s dream) that it was my birthday, so he thought he would call and say hello. I invited him to come to the bar we were spending the evening at, ended the call, and proceeded to forget about him for the rest of the evening.
Bradshaw is very familiar with the bar that we went to, an establishment that serves an assortment of mixed frozen things along with beer and a huge list of mixed shots. The bartender on duty that night was one of her friends, Tim.** After hearing that it was my birthday and checking my ID (carefully, since I look far younger than I am), he told me that there were two rules: one, I could not throw up in his bar, and two, I should get all of my drinks from him and he would take care of me.
I agreed quite happily to his rules, got a mixed drink to carry around,*** sat at a table with Stretch and Bradshaw, and began perusing the shot list. Friends began arriving shortly: Racer Boy; a guy I met a year ago at a frat party, Frat Boy; a guy Bradshaw went to high school with, Smiles; and Nametag. Within the first hour at the bar, I had taken five shots.
One fun highlight: Shortly after taking my third shot,
Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” began playing. My mom
loves Steve Miller Band, so I felt compelled to call her and tell her that they were playing it at the bar. I managed to talk to both of my parents, told them that I was happily tipsy, and that I would, of course, be careful for the rest of the night.
I love that I tipsy-dialed my parents.
My timeline becomes very fuzzy around this point, so I remember only highlights. One of my dorm suitemates from my freshman year arrived. Some unfortunate things happened about a year prior to my birthday, and we hadn’t really spoken to one another since. That afternoon I had decided that it was stupid, especially since this particular suitemate was very fun to party with. When she arrived at the bar, I was more than a little bit excited. The Slutty One (who is no longer slutty since meeting her boyfriend) bought me a shot and we took pictures together.
Bradshaw found me standing on the outdoor patio, drunk-dialing all of my online friends, calling on, “that girl in Arizona,” telling another happy birthday, and leaving another a voicemail without knowing that she was in bad medical condition. When I found out later, I felt like a jerk.
At one point, Tim had several of us sit at the bar to play a game, Fuck You, Fuck Me. He handed out slips of paper and told us all to write an ingredient on it. Basically, you can all be very nice and end up taking a shot of something like grenadine, or you can all be bitches and end up taking a shot of something like Everclear. Tipsily, I decided to write one of my favorite ingredients on my slip of paper: lime juice. Tim collected all the paper and began reading them aloud. Bradshaw, the wonderful friend that she is, had chosen
151. I do not drink 151. I smiled, waved, and left the bar.
The next day, I found out that Tim had continued with the game, including my slip of paper. The ingredients for the shot were as follows: vodka, rum, 151, Goldschlagger, Bailey’s, tequila, gin, and my lime juice. If you know much about alcohol, you know that lime juice curdles Bailey’s, making the drink chunky and disgusting. Everyone still sitting at the bar took the shot and named it the “Fuck You, Midget,” because I’m short and I put in the ingredient that curdled the shot. I maintain that I was the only nice one for not choosing an alcoholic ingredient and it should have been named, “Fuck You, Person Who Picked Bailey’s.”
My opinion on the matter is inconsequential.
At another point, Bradshaw and Tim coerced me into take the quintessential twenty-first birthday shot at this bar: the
cement mixer. In one shot glass, lime juice and 151. In another, Bailey’s. Shoot the Bailey’s, shoot the other, swish. As we learned from the fun little game, this shot curdles in your mouth before you swallow. Fortunately, I was drunk enough when I took it that I didn’t notice the chunks, but rather the fact that the shot is, indeed, rather tasty.
Later, I took a
Flaming Dr. Pepper shot, and the fact that I didn’t burn my hand off is a miracle, because I did not blow it out before I dropped it.
I was extremely camera happy on my birthday, and the next morning I discovered sixty-plus pictures on my camera. This one is the last, taken on the ride home.
Stretch had left early after securing Bradshaw and me escorts home in Nametag and Racer Boy. By last call, I was extremely drunk. The bar was only a mile and a half or so from my apartment, and rather than waste money on a cab, the four of us decided to walk back. This was before we saw the rickshaw.
Oh yes, a rickshaw. The rickshaw driver was my new best friend, and I gave him all the money in my pocket, $25, for driving the four of us less than a mile. I was either the most amusing part of his evening or the most annoying. I prefer the latter.
After vacating the rickshaw to walk the last few blocks to my apartment, I decided that my heels were unnecessary. I took them off and handed them to Bradshaw. She handed them to Racer Boy who put them in his pocket. This is further proof of how intoxicated I was: I have tender feet. I would never walk on the sidewalk barefoot in the middle of a city if I was sober.
I have never been drunk enough to lose parts of my evening, but this night I was. We had to cross a major street to get to my apartment: I do not remember this. I wanted to kick Dread’s window when we went by his apartment:**** I do not remember this. I unlocked my door: I do not remember this. I do remember taking out my earrings and dropping them on the floor, then going to the bathroom to rid my stomach of much of the alcohol I had ingested.
The next morning, I had my first real hangover ever. I only had one class, but I skipped it in favor of choking down Burger King and drinking glass after glass of water.
It was a fantastic birthday.
*This isn’t true. Project is the last person I expected to hear from on my birthday. I was correct.
**Yes, this is his real name. I’d wager there are hundreds of bartenders named Tim in the country, and at least a dozen in Missouri. If you haven’t already figured out where I am, this isn’t a helpful clue.
***All I remember about this is that it had gin in it and was blue. It colored my tongue. I took a picture of my own tongue because I wanted to see it. I was very drunk.
****I always want to kick Dread’s window when I walk by his apartment, drunk or sober, so this isn’t as funny as it sounds.Labels: alcohol, Bradshaw, my insanity
Back in Commission
Four months ago, I disappeared from the blogosphere. Where I went really isn’t important, nor is it terribly interesting. The point is, I would like, very much, to get back to my regular blogging habit. It’s cathartic to write on a daily basis, and it’s nice to know that someone, somewhere, is reading something that I wrote – no matter how insipid it might be. So, as long as the apathy that has been so insistent lately doesn’t take this over too, consider me back in the blogging business.
Since I’ve been gone for four months, I think I will give you the highlights of my life since you last heard from me.
K scared the hell out of me. One evening, we were chatting online, both avoiding homework. I mentioned that I was heading home for a
wedding. He said that he had just watched his brother get married and was ready to find someone and settle down. I nearly choked on my ice water, then made some smartass comment. He then told me that he was serious. I told him that I was far too young to be thinking about things like that and that I thought he was crazy for doing so himself. I then walked away from the computer and basically cut all ties. No, he certainly wasn’t saying that he wanted to marry
me. Just the idea of having a flirtation with someone who does want to get married soon freaked me out.
Nic turned twenty-one. If you hadn’t figured out that I was underage from all of my stories before, now you know. It is entirely possible that I will blog about my birthday in the very near future (because life is slow right now), so I’ll just give you quick highlights here. K called for the first time in six weeks. 100 lb. Nic took 9 shots. For the first time ever, I do not remember part of a drunken evening. I definitely threw up. I had my first hangover ever the next morning.
I got two kittens. I am absolutely in love with them. Puck (in the green collar) was named after a character in Shakespeare’s
A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Marilyn (in pink) was originally named Ariel after
The Tempest, but that simply wasn’t her name. After a week or so, I fully recognized her diva-like personality and named her after the lovely Ms. Monroe.
I have to take a summer class. After planning my schedules for four years, two of my required classes for my last semester ever overlap by half an hour, forcing me to take a survey of Western lit this summer. I am not happy about this.
Bradshaw graduated and moved away. I think this one may be the biggest, because now I don’t see her ever. She moved from College Town to St. Louis to start her grown-up job and I stayed behind here. I miss her. A lot.
I do believe that is the extent of the big news over the four months, and maybe the next four will be exciting enough to make up for the fact that I abandoned the blog with no notice. In any case, welcome back to the madness.
Labels: kitties, updates
I love the Postsecret blog. See, look, it's even in my blogroll. This particular secret, however, not only makes me angry, it hurts my heart. All I could think when I read it was how angry I would be if I found out someone did something so heinous to one of my babies - and then how I would go about repaying them for their disgusting act.
