pushing20

scarypillars

In the last seven days, this campus has been taken over by caterpillars.  Just to walk from class to class you have to pass through veritable clouds of gross black caterpillars hanging by little threads from trees.  Exhibit A:
Hard to capture on film, but every little black dot on the sidewalk and hanging from the tree is at least one (possibly more like five OR TWENTY) caterpillars, waiting to latch on to your bag,  exposed toes, and ponytail.  Which leads to terrible dreams that you are covered in caterpillars in your bed, much like every railing under every tree on campus is covered by caterpillars, as in Exhibit B:
Seriously horrifying, and totally stealing away my precious sleep as I swat away non-existant creeepy crawlies, trying to burrow deeper under my comforter but at the same time terrified that I am just sealing them in there with me. 

It's like a goddamn horror movie.  It's serious Wes Craven/Steven King shit.  They know what I did last summer. 

So we all walk around campus in this weird state of hyper-awareness, staring up at trees and trying to find alternate routes to class that don't actually go under any trees, which is impossible because this is the freaking country. 

Exhibit C:
SO. GROSS. And then they'll just go turn into gypsy moths, which...eew.  This is what it's come down to for me.  I spend my days terrorized by millions of caterpillars.

You win, country.  Time to head back to the city.

people

Starting when I was in seventh or eighth grade, my mom and I got a subscription to People Magazine.  I was nursing some intense crushes on Clooney and Pitt by then, and I shared with my mother (and her mother, in fact) intense schadenfreude when confronted with the sartorial missteps of the rich and famous.

So we shared the magazine every week until I graduated from high school, but over the last three years have had to share it long-distance.  Usually that means I find four issues on my dresser when I come home, but sometimes I'll get a fat envelope on my campus mailbox with a post-it note stuck on one of the magazines telling me to take a break from my work and read some trash.

Which brings us to today, when I was reading the People from two or three weeks ago.  Lying back on my bed (Side note: clean sheets! My mother would be proud (and also embarrassed that I'd waited so long to wash my sheets)),  I folded the back cover around to the front so I could hold it with one hand.  The way it creased back so easily, I could tell-- my mother had laid there on her bed, in New York City, reading it the exact same way.    The crinkled half-pages at the end of the magazine were where she rested her glass of water when she went to sleep. 

Living in different zipcodes, different states, might seem like a good reason to just give up and get two seperate subscriptions.  But then, what fun would that be?

things i came home without last night:

1.  My jacket.
2.  My college ID card...the one used to get in to meals and, um, my dorm. 
3.  My SHOES.

What. The. HELL.

Beer is baad.

around epcot in 80 days

Now, I know 2006 has not exactly been a banner year for New Orleans, what with the devastating hand-of-god-type events.  I feel for the entire region, I really do. 

That having been said:  If you are running for mayor of New Orleans, it's probably best to acknowledge the fact that your city was all but leveled.  I mean fully acknowledge it.

Kimberly Williamson Butler took another tack: her website features pictures of her posing in a remarkably French Quarter-esque location: Walt Disney World's New Orleans Square.  Seriously.  She is posing in the MAGIC KINGDOM.  What job exactly does she think she's running for?  And, um, she probably should have photoshopped the Disney World logo off of the garbage can over her shoulder.
 

Okay, it's hard to see in this picture.  Take my word for it.

Man alive, I love American politics.

(Second-best story of the day: Community College physics teacher in Bellevue, OR put a question on an exam that had "Condaleezza" throwing a watermelon off of the Federal Building.  When he got busted for being a racist he had the audacity to REQUEST cultural sensitivity training.  That's gotta be a first.)

learn something new every day

You know what I hate?  Heinous bitchery.

I hate heinous bitchery, and this weekend Emily has proved herself to be a heinous bitch; a lying, conniving sham of a friend whose main goal, apparantly, is to make me feel badly about myself. 

You know what? I may have been deluded into thinking you were a good person for a few years there, but now I get it.  You're the kind of backstabbing overgrown Mean Girl who gives women our age a bad name. 

Well, nice try Emily.  But it turns out that I ain't buying what you're selling, and instead of hating myself, I hate you.  I've never known anyone that has inspired such feelings of betrayal and anger in me.  I hate confrontation, but there is nothing I want more than to say all of this to your face.

I'm angry at you, and I'm even angrier that I've gotten this worked up over you.  Frankly, you're just not worth it.  I see that now.

an open letter to noah, who lives two doors down from me:

Noah,

Please put a towel on before you leave the shower.

In case you never noticed, there is a little, oh, what shall I call it... antechamber beyond the shower curtain but before the actual shower.  I don't know, maybe you never looked up, but about two feet above where your shampoo sits on the bench are two handy hooks!  For towels, or shorts, or loincloths.  Anything to cover the "unmentionables", as Zach Braff might say, on your way back to your room. 

The by-the-sink hooks are for by-the-sink towels.  I guess you got confused.

In any case, now I know your man-scaping regimen.

Your Neighbor,
bex

i'm a stranger here, myself

I'm something like sixteen hours short of one week in to rugby season, and the traditional (for my team, anyway) refrain "rugby ruined my life" has already become a mantra.

I like to think that when I'm in season I'm more organized.  With 4:00 to 7:00 or so blocked out for practice and team dinner every weeknight, and the whole day Saturday spent on the pitch playing, good planning should become a necessity.  Instead, sleep is slowly being phased out of my routine in favor of cramming for bio exams or reading most of the New York Times and Washington Post every day or trying to write med school essays.

And then there was Thursday night, which I deemed My Night Off, had a grand old time out with friends and then spent the end of the night curled up around the base of the toilet (which held, of course, the entire contents of my stomach anything else that is physically retch-able) in the bathroom I share with five other people.  Classy, I know.

It is extra helpful that my iCal disappeared when my hard drive died.  Fancy new hard drive doesn't come equipped with my schedule.  But then, fancy new hard drive boots up, so I don't exactly miss the busted old one that is now basically a very expensive paperweight.

My team's epic loss on Saturday  (27-2, but who's counting, at a certain point) has left me so achy and bruised that even lying down hurts.  Did you know you had muscles in the front of your neck that could get sore?  You do.  More specifically, I do.  Ow.

 

To summarize:  the Mets are 4-1, and nothing else matters.

.1000

The top two days each year that I miss being in New York City are 9/11 and opening day at Shea Stadium.  One of those is today (you'll just have to figure out which one), and even though I was at home just yesterday, the amount that I wish I were there today...it practically burns.

Maybe it's just nostalgia for Opening Days gone by.  Freezing cold, wind practically whipping my Mets hat off my head, laughing with friends that we should be in Social Studies as we hear the first crack of the bat. 

Maybe its the french fries and icees, or the crappy five-dollar beers bought with crumpled bills and crappy fake IDs.  Next time I'm at Shea I'll buy a beer legally--what's the fun in that?

Mostly it's the stats.  Every guy starts out with a big fat .000 when he steps up to the plate.  Second go-round, everyone's either .000 or .1000.  Nothing looks like a "real" statistic, but last year's stats are useless because it's a new season and anything can happen. 

Xavier Nady's batting a thousand,  David Wright's got slugger tattooed on his forehead, and Billy Wagner is looking like the closer we all hoped he was going to be.  And Jose Reyes is just getting started.

Who can help but be optimistic on Opening Day? It's gonna be a big year.

frankenstein

The hard drive died, which means this computer is on its third hard drive in as many years.  Shoulda gotten that warranty, I guess. 

So now I've got Frankenstein--a new brain in an old body.  Like my old computer died, and willed its fancy titanium coat to the next generation of hard drives.  [Insert your own metaphor here.]

On the up side, I lied to TekServe and told them I had OS X Tiger, when I really hadn't updated since 2003. 

excuses, excuses

I was going to post five days ago, when we landed in San Juanbu, but I opened my trusty PowerBook and...heard a clicking noise.  And....saw a grey screen with an angry little folder with a question mark blinking at me.  And...more clicking noise.

So no post.

I was going to leave the hotel to find an internet cafe, but were were staying at the Ritz Carlton, and WHY WOULD I EVER VOLUNTARILY LEAVE?  Seriously.

So no post.

I was going to write something the minute I got home tonight, but the flight was so bumpy that it basically gave me Shaken Baby Syndrome at the tender age of twenty.

So...you get the idea.

Something tomorrow, when there is definitive news on my computer.  It will either be gleeful or so, so teary.