24th Birthday

Corny yet sweet card from the parents.

Sunshine.

Yard + art = yart sale.

Chinese print.

Serious self-portrait.

Jenny Lewis.

Encore!

Amber Waves of Grain?!

Few things are more American than taking shitty-but-pretty pictures of fireworks with a non-professional camera.

HEY AMERICA, did you know that you’re 209 years AND ONE DAY older than me?! *hint hint hint*

I haven’t done an exact job with the 30 days of blogging, but I think I’ve done a pretty good job. Not quite consistent, but I tried to make the content interesting and amusing. It got me to blog again on a consistent basis, and for that, we are all thankful. However, this is not Thanksgiving, so give me a beer. PLEASE I’M GOING TO MY FAMILY REUNION.

As I sit here and type this, I’m wearing a white shirt, blue skirt and red shoes. The shirt because all the rest look weird with the skirt, skirt because its too hot for jeans and the shoes because they’re the ones that look best with the skirt. I feel like a patriotic douchebag, but if there’s one day to be a patriotic douchebag, it is today. So please, fashion bloggers, don’t snicker too loudly when you see me or try to take pictures when I’m not looking. I’m on to you.

My mom has called me twice already, so its off to reunite my family. Happy 4th to you, be you American or not (good days for everyone!).

High Wired

I didn’t even think they made this stuff anymore. I long dismissed it as grocery store folklore.

Part of me wants to try it and yet…. not.

Supermarket self-portrait. My hair has been doing that flippy thing lately and its rather annoying.

Its surprisingly cool for July. As someone without air conditioning, I don’t mind this too much.

I have a family reunion tomorrow at a local family amusement park. Its my mother’s mother’s side, the Italian part of me, which means there will be lots of food, card games and kids. I outgrew the amusement park when I was in middle school, so typically I spend my time eating, playing cards and walking my little cousins around the park… which gets old rather quickly. Still, its become apparent to me how lucky I am to have them, no matter how much they drive me crazy, because not everyone comes from big families like mine.

In other news, my friend Caitlin from high school will be in town for the 4th (she lives in NYC), and we will be going to see Miss Jenny Lewis on my birthday. This is on top of the tickets to the Decemberists that my dear friend Jennie got me.

I’m a very lucky girl.

Mid-Year Resolutions

1. Improve punctuality.

2. No caffeine after 4 p.m. 6 p.m.

3. Nix negative thoughts.

4. Stop going 0n Facebook when bored just to make fun of people (bad karma).

5. Not giving up on the things worth fighting for.

LOL graffiti

I walked out of the library yesterday and noticed this on the building across the street.

OH BUILDING UR SO FUNEE.

Ugh, just writing that made me shudder.

Sometimes there is so much I want to write about that I don’t write about anything at all. Makes no sense, I know.

Right now, I’m low on time.

Chop It Up

I was chopping up vegetables last week for chili when I was struck by the way I was slicing the peppers. Without even consciously thinking about, I was cutting them the same way I used to when I worked in my college cafeteria and needed to refill the salad bar. It was as if no time had gone by since I last sliced a pepper and my hands picked up where I left off.

I started working in the cafeteria halfway through my sophomore year and continued until graduation, so technically, it is the longest job I’ve ever held. At first I didn’t mind– liked it, even– but with time I grew to resent it. Mostly, I really hated the way I was treated by some of my fellow students. In the classroom, we were equals, peers, but in the cafeteria,  I was just a faceless food service employee who cleaned up their messes. I had worked at McDonalds in high school, so I knew how terrible people can be when it comes to their food. However, its one thing to be treated that way by total strangers and another by acquaintances and classmates. It was humbling and disheartening at the same time. If everyone worked at least one year in food service, this world would be a very different one.

When I was close to graduating and at the peak of my get-me-out-of-here-now-ness,  my manager, the head chef, told me I would miss working there next year. Of course, I thought he was crazy. In a year, I knew I would be working in an office, doing writing of some sort, and being a active, contributing member of society. After two and a half years of a job where I was constantly on my feet, always sweaty, smelling of grease, the thought of working at a desk in an air-conditioned office sounded fantastic. I was 21 and starry-eyed.

Naturally, as these stories go, I was wrong. I was working in an office in a year, but not doing what I wanted. To my surprise, I found myself exhausted after sitting down all day. It was air-conditioned, true, but what’s the point of that when you’re unhappy? And indeed, I did miss the cafeteria and served myself another slice of humble pie.

I have a different job now and I don’t have such high expectations. I’m almost 24 and the stars have dimmed a little. Still, I wouldn’t change a thing, except maybe chop the onions a little finer.

Up To Your Cankles

When I was in grade school, two girls used to make fun of me for having skinny ankles. These weak, skinny ankles I inherited from my father were the culprit behind dozens of sprained ankles and, by middle school, ridicule.

Ace bandages and ice packs aside, their disgust for my ankles came down to the fact that they just weren’t aesthetically pleasing with the rest of my body.

“It’s so gross,” I remember the one girl saying. “Your leg should be the same size the whole way down. Like her’s.”

The ‘her’ she was referring to was the other girl criticizing me, a skinny, bony girl.

“I can’t help it!” I’d cry back to them, falling on deaf ears.

It took me until now to realize that they were making fun of me for not having cankles.

Thank you, body, for not developing cankles as a way of ‘fitting in.’

Its Hereeee

I’m currently typing this on my beautiful, brand new Macbook Pro. Its sooo shiny and sooo flawless and sooo wonderful.

And its sooo empty. I’m currently filling it with some of my music and the other things. I want to get an external hard drive for most of it though, to reduce the clutter.

In case you don’t know, I’m rather sentimental. I wish I wasn’t, but it’s the truth. This is going to sound extremely lame, but when my horoscope several weeks ago said to clean through my past memories and mementos, it definitely caught my eye, since I have such a difficult time doing that with my material possessions. So I’m using this time to comb through what I really need to electronically keep vs. what I don’t really need to keep but WANT to keep, i.e. the papers I wrote in my 19th Century British Poetry class, every single newspaper article I ever wrote and the billions upon billions of cover letters. And as I contemplate to drag it into the garbage bin in the corner of the screen and clicking ‘delete’, the packrat’s four word motto rings in my ears: You just never know…..

So what say you, Internet friends? Are you able to throw things away without a second thought (if so, give tips), or are you stuck in sentimentality too?

I hear the bells

I have a wedding today. One of my college roommates is getting married.

It is the beautiful sign of their love for each other….

A pledge of commitment and devotion for the rest of their lives….

Yes, yes. All true.

Weddings are also places for their single friends to not be single anymore.

Weddings are the #2 place people meet their future spouses, after school.

Or actually they’re #3, after work.

Or maybe #4, after bars and clubs.

Okay, okay, I don’t have the statistics on this, but its still entirely possible. Its not an urban legend, though I know the odds are not that high. I may have a much greater chance of the waking up tomorrow in a bathtub of ice with a kidney missing than meeting my soulmate, I’m still an optimist. Just make sure to keep the Pop Rocks and Coke away from me, especially when I’m down to one kidney.

Regardless of what happens or doesn’t happens, its just nice to be there for my friend. Congrats, Becky and Tim.

3 a.m. Memories

A couple weeks ago, I was running through the grocery store, trying to remember what I was there for, when I noticed this bin of cheap, plastic balls. I’ve gone by it a billion times (hello, its right next to the ice cream aisle), but I never really noticed it before.

In college, my friends and I would go on middle of the night trips to Wal-Mart for toothpaste, printer paper and just for something to do when the alcohol ran out– practically a required activity at small, quiet campuses like ours. The early morning hours are (were?) when I would come to life with a surge of caffeinated energy. Somehow, every time, I would end up in the toy section, bouncing and dribbling those big plastic balls up and down the aisles. My friends would laugh and yell after me as I tossed them around and acted much younger than I was. Our shrieks echoed through the store, so even if we got separated, it was easy to find each other.The poor employees gave us deadly looks which we completely deserved. It was dumb, immature and delightful.

Overall, I’m satisfied with my life right now, but sometimes I really miss that.