if you don’t like exclamation points, don’t read this.

Gah, there’s so much to be said!

I chopped all my hair off!

I have a pet hedgehog! His name is Huxley! He’s really cute but he poops and pees on me like it’s his job!

I effin’ graduated college! Oh, and then I promptly had an identity crisis and ended up calling Lindsay in the middle of the night to sob and to lament incoherently that I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL TO DO and WHY AREN’T WE FRIENDS ANYMORE?

I started eating healthy and exercising and I lost 7 lbs! But then I fell off the wagon for my graduation party and pretty much stayed off of it after that. I think I’m waiting around for another wagon to roll by.

I donated all of my clothing that I don’t wear anymore and now I am rebuilding my closet! My sister is helping me! I might have style soon!

I also cleaned out my bookshelf! I’m going to send all of my fave Young Adult books to the Philippines, where (I hope) a Young Adult might find and read them, and have her life changed and shaped by them as much as I did!

I think I might go back to school to get a Masters in Library Science! But I have to decide if that’s really what I want! Cause I don’t really KNOW what I want, as I mentioned before!

Matt downloaded The Sims 3 and it’s completely consumed my life!

And now I have to go because my dad needs me to pick him up from the car dealership! Gah! There’s so much more! There’s no time! I guess I’m gonna have to juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuump!

 

Ready

I meet and kill about 3 spiders daily. There have, inexplicably, been BEES in here lately.

The cell phone reception is dismal at best, even when I’m not in my basement room.

My stairs lead into the kitchen–and they basically funnel any noise directly into my room. When people are up there it sounds like they’re actually IN my room, moving furniture, cooking, walking around, clanging pots and pans,  and talking about how I flooded the bathroom when I took a shower and how inconsiderate that makes me.

 The dust in my room accumulates at an alarming pace. One day after I’ve swept, I have an entire army of dust bunnies gathering under my bed.

My housemates have decided that I’m not locking my door to the outside with enough consistency, so they’ve taken to OPENING MY DOOR FROM THE OUTSIDE to see if I’ve locked it, then calling out “Melissa? Can you please renember to lock this door?” 

A note about that complaint: This has been an issue since the beginning of the year. Any rented basement space needs a door to the outside to pass inspection. I never use this door except to let Matt in. He always forgets to lock the door behind him, and frankly I don’t care. My housemates believe, understandably, that keeping that door unlocked is basically inviting intruders to walk right into the house. A valid concern. However. I AM LEAVING TOMORROW. MY HOUSEMATE DID THIS  1 HOUR AGO. I have been constantly opening and closing this door to pack my car up. Give. Me. A. Freaking. BREAK. 

Also, excuse me, but this is my room and that’s my door. From my perspective, it’s not really their door to just open and close at will. I rent this space and I should be able to leave the door unlocked while I’m here. I always lock it when I leave, so I don’t see why I’m being chastised for this.

OKAY FROM ONE COMPLAINT TO THE NEXT.

Having your room directly connected to a noisy common area is total crap. If I need to go to the bathroom or check my laundry and someone’s up there, I basically feel trapped. I have to either go upstairs and be coralled into social hour, or stay down here until I hear everyone leave. Ever try to go to sleep early when two people are upstairs having a conversation about what happened last weekend at the disco club? It’s too late to invest in earplugs now.

My room is directly under housemate D’s room and she likes to have phone conversations with her mom and/or best friend that last well into the wee small hours of the morning. 

Personalities are finally starting to clash after months of playing nice. Lately I’ve entertained fantasies of giving housemate J the verbal lashing she deserves. I’m sure everyone’s starting to get annoyed with me, too.

Which is why it’s just as well that I’m moving back home tomorrow. I thought it would be bittersweet, but given the litany of grievances I just doled out, I think we all know that’s not the case.

Sigh. When did I become a crotchety old lady? 

Must be the diploma.

 

just saying what comes into the top of my head

Well! Sorry about abandoning the Chopped Live Blog last night, I’m sure you were all so disappointed to see that I wouldn’t be broadcasting an hour’s worth of inane comments. Seriously though, I think it would have been too long of an entry anyway.

I was wrong about Chef #3. She didn’t get chopped that round–she made it all the way to dessert and did a bang-up job, too. 

Chef #1, Johnny Depp Lookalike, turned out to be kind of a douche when he served raw turkey breast and then, when he got chopped, acted all “Huff huff judges are dumb huff afraid of the FUTURE OF CUISINE huff.” Dumb.

I just learned this yesterday, from an issue of Seventeen magazine: There is a school district in Georgia that has two separate proms every year, one for white students and one for black students.

SEGREGATED PROM. IN 2009. THERE IS NO PLACE FOR THIS CONCEPT TODAY.

And that’s my daily rant for the day.

 

live food blogging (i don’t think this is how it works)

My new favorite show right now is Chopped on Food Network (Beware: video contains loud, chugging-guitar and surfer-dude voice-over). It’s an hour-long cooking competition show where 4 chefs (they’re a different 4 in each episode) compete to create a three-course meal. There’s an appetizer course, an entree, and a dessert. The best part is that for every course they get this basket full of surprise ingredients that they absolutely have to use in the dish. There’s always a satisfyingly absurd combination of ingredients in that basket:  catfish, strawberry jam, and tarragon. Watermelon, pork tenderloin, and animal crackers. 

Pure TV gold, my friends.

At the end of each course they’re judged and then the crappiest one gets–you guessed it–chopped. 

It starts in 5 minutes and I really want to see it but I also want to blog. So I thought, okay. I’ll live blog the show. I’m pretty sure live blogging involves some sort of up-to-the-minute feed (durrr), but I DO THINGZ MAH OWN WAY OK? 

So here we go.

—

10:01

This music sounds like a BBC broadcast.

Whoa! Chef #1 is a dead ringer for Johnny Depp!

“I love creating food that people love to eat” – Chef #3. Really, I love creating food that people hate to eat. That’s where the future of cooking really is.

—

10: 04

All of these chefs are from NJ. Dang.

I just found out like two days ago that the guy who hosts this show was on Queer Eye.

—

10:05 – Appetizer course begins!

THE SURPRISE INGREDIENTS HAVE BEEN UNVEILED.

Salmon, strawberries, radicchio, ginger. Um. I could never do this show. The end would come and the judging would be sampling a salmon, strawberry, radicchio and ginger sandwich.

Uh oh, Chef #3 started cooking her salmon too early. I call CHOPPED.

—

10:07

Mmmm, Chef #2 is frying the salmon in BACON FAT. You speak to my soul, brother.

They have 20 minutes to make this appetizer! 20 minutes! I can’t even make a grilled cheese sandwich in 20 minutes!!

—

10: 10

Commercial break. This is really hard. I don’t think I can do this for the next hour. Tell you what, I’ll let you know what happened tomorrow. 

So I guess the moral of the story is that I suck at live blogging. I don’t think you’re supposed to give up after 10 minutes. Oh well.

AHH IT’S BACK GOODBYE

 

Poetry Monday – me, mine.

I thought this month I might debut some of my original poetry for Poetry Monday. I’ll start with the normal ones and save the weird stuff for later in the month.

I think it’s so great that I get to tell you about this poem before you read it. In workshop classes, you have to remain totally silent while people labor over what the thing’s “about.” Sometimes it’s pleasantly surprising to see other peoples’ interpretations of your work. Most of the time it’s just kind of frustrating that others can’t figure out what you thought was sort of clear. 

Anyway. There’s this volcano in the Philippines that lied dormant for like, dozens or hundreds of years or something, then erupted terrifically in 1991. Ever since I learned about it when I was young, I’ve been totally captivated by the concept–it’s the kind of natural disaster people from New Jersey can rarely say they know the feeling of. I’ve been working on this poem for two years and it’s still not everything I want it to be. But here’s the most recent draft, from you to me. 

 

Pinatubo

Today, the news showed me 
what my window would not,

entire provinces dredged white and powdery,
homes and huts heavy under so much ash.

I imagine it all to be snow, or sugar—
fine, glittering stuff not spewed forth from 

a bull-snort of the earth, but dusted down by a 
benevolent flour-sifter, some baker in the sky.

Even corrugated Manila skies bow to the curves
of the billowing giant, the Marvelous Villain; 

He pulses towards us, a face, I could pencil in 
the clenched jaw and the snarling lip and lolling eyes,

he waits ominously to eat me up,
or flatten me beneath the heel of his hand,

or scoop me up in his fist,
suck me underground.

I fear for the morning that he disappears, for the
Easter-colored dawn when his wrinkled visage

no longer sternly observes our traffic accidents,
peers into our suitcases, walks with us to mass.

For then: The photographs will lie. They will never be able
to commemorate the sense of feeling like lice on a scalp.

We will soon forget all those weeks we felt dizzy
from the Earth’s constant whirling.

 

things that are never as good as the idea of it is

delivery-style frozen pizza

cosmopolitan magazine

that new mascara you bought on impulse at sephora

taking another shot

“i’ll go to bed now and wake up early to finish the paper”

febreze

snow days

spaghetti carbonara

 

let’s never again discuss the fact that i missed yesterday’s post.

Lots of exciting things are happening!

To other people in my life.

My mommy just got a new car! (I drove it today. I think he and I have a real connection. We may run off together.)

Melanie found a prom dress. (She got it in, uh, “Pool.” Which is a dumb name for a fabric color.)

Abbey made her grad school decision – Bowling Green State U, (AND she was on Good Morning America!!)

Matt’s birthday is on Saturday. And I can say with confidence that he’s going to get some pretty cool prezzies. 

(Cause I bought them. For him. )

Oh, me?

I’ve been trolling hedgehog owner/breeder/hobbyist message board forums. And reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman series whole volumes at a time. And spending several consecutive hours blowing through the archives of webcomics. Oh and also there’s class and papers and general collegestudentry.

Dang, my hobbies are iffy. I’m turning into a Real Weirdo. I blame Matt.

Sometimes I watch YouTube videos and make “that’s what she said” jokes with my housemates. I sure will miss those girls when I leave. 

There was this one time I left the house to go visit Lindsay at Rowan, and let me tell you, I was so overwhelmed by the activity I had to take a day off to recover. 

So when I say I’m living vicariously through others and I’m patiently waiting for something to begin, you can rest totally assured that I tell no lies. 

Hey, real life! Hurry up and get here!

 

What I’m All About

These days, at least:

The Joss Whedon Trifecta Of Amazing – Firefly (ohhh, Firefly), Buffy, Dr. Horrible.

Greek-style yogurt with strawberries. Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. The Roches (it gets really good around the 1:10 mark).

Questionable Content, xkcd, Basic Instructions, Cyanide and Happiness.

Sleeping late. Honey Nut Cheerios. Dreaming about a vacation in the Philippines. ”Norwegian Wood” by the Beatles. Rye toast.

Signing into my boyfriend’s Facebook account and stalking random people he went to high school with (I realize this makes me a huge creeper.)

Career crisis. Papers, papers, papers. 

Papers, papers, papers.

You?

 

NaBloPoMo: Take 2

Alright, so last time, NaBloPoMo didn’t work out so well for me. To sum up, I totally failed within the first week and then completely stopped blogging for umm… 4 months? Maybe? So my track record with regular blogging isn’t what I’d call “exemplary.”

But when I found out  theme of NaBloPoMo in April is “Growing (Up),” it intrigued me. And piqued my interest. And caused me to take notice. And, uh. Synonyms. Cause that’s a pretty resonant theme in my life right now–growing up and The Real World and such. And seeing as how my 22nd birthday actually takes  place during this month, I thought maybe this was A SIGN that I’d have better luck this time. Maybe. Possibly. 

I think you should be excited. I mean, look at all the things I’ve thought of already that fit the theme of  ”Growing (Up)”:

• Growing…my hair …longer…
• My ever-growing waistline, due in no small part to the uncanny omnipresence of Entenmann’s Cheese Streusel Danish in my house (courtesy of my housemate)
• My growing fear and terror towards the prospect of trying to find a job as a newly minted college graduate with no experience in this crapbag of a job market 
• The Last Time I Grew, a.k.a. Now We Are Six

Oh boy, you are all saying. When do we start? 

Tomorrow, dummies. See you all here, Oh-Eight-Hundred SHARP. Or heads’ll roll!

 

sometimes only an emoticon can suffice.

His project, we will see, was to uphold the dichotomy between elite language and common language, and I believe all English scholars, even cultural critics, have inherited this project.

That’s the fifth sentence of the most recent A-graded paper I wrote. This is what I spent the last four years learning to do. I know a lot of big words now.

Where sap crusts into
sugar, there a shoot snapped off,
where? Where? Who took? Where?

This is a haiku from a poetry portfolio I composed last year that was comprised of all poems based on fairy tales. I got an A on it. Here’s another one:

 

She who bore me—gone, 
gone. Mama gone. She who bore 
me—gone, gone. Mama!

 

I was playing with the juxtaposition of Japanese form with Western fairy tales.  I was also testing my workshop classmates to see how many people had seen or heard of Spring Awakening.

 

Pornography might teach someone who’s never actually had a physical relationship that sex is all about getting off, about anonymity and performance. Sex, at its best, can be meaningful and powerful in the context of a relationship. But before teenagers even have a chance to have that awkward first makeout session, they’re being exposed to ideas about how to please the opposite sex that are entirely fabricated and sometimes simply wrong.

 

A paragraph from a short essay about the ethics of pornography, for my Gender and Pop Culture class–I absolutely loved that class. I got an A on that one, too.

I must have written at least a thousand pages in the past four years, a million words, maybe a billion, an uncountable number of characters. I’m so proud of how far I’ve come as a writer and a student, but sometimes I read this stuff and I think: Is this all I have to show for my education?

I can’t write software or administer an injection. I can’t balance a company’s budget. I can’t translate historical documents. I can’t even do division in my head anymore.  In short, I don’t have any skills.

College has made me a more socially aware person and a more thoughtful writer. But I’m trying to find a job right now, and I’m not sure how to market myself. “Fall 2007: Learned to trust my instincts, and that sometimes life takes you by the nose and brings you somewhere completely different”? 

“Spring 2006: Took an African-American Literature class with an amazing professor who opened my eyes to issues of race and class that I thought were long put to rest in this country”?

How can I possibly convey to future employers how much has changed and how far I’ve come these past four years? Does it even matter to them?