We're Not Dirty Roommates, She's Just Crazy

My roommate is bleaching the walls.

Let me repeat myself: she is BLEACHING the WALLS.

I am sitting in my room, hoping she doesn't get extra-stringent in her cleaning and decide to mix the bleach with some ammonia to make an extra-powerful cleaning formula.

Heaven help her if she kills me three days before I go home.

I'm Taking This As A Sign

from McSweeney's:

Systems made to serve as heavily as a Big Ten school—especially one with budget problems, like Hinterland—can't afford to be quirky or fragile or even wonderful, in the old sense of the word; it's enough that they safely and efficiently move people through the system. Hinterland has the institutional atmosphere of a clean, well-used, and slightly dull municipal museum. I'm in one of the glass cases.

This is EXACTLY how I feel about BYU, and why I transferred.

Filling My Time Quite Nicely

AT some point before I blogged about how I was blogging instead of taking a nap, I lost my focus and took a 4+ hour nap. Clearly, my body is smarter than my brain, so it's my body that gets to wake up at 6:30 a.m. tomorrow to take an essay final on Shakespeare. While my brain stays in bed and "repossse"-es.


[Watch Everything Is Illuminated, and you'll get it.]

Hours Pass, And She Still Counts The Minutes That I Am Not There

Does everyone here have Gmail? I'm just going to assume so, because if you don't have Gmail...what is your problem? So I'm also going to assume you've at least noticed that Gmail Chat function, and how it tells you which of your friends are on their Gmail accounts and whatnot.

Well, this morning I went to check my e-mail and noticed that my good friend Elder Baker (who has not e-mailed me in months and months) was on. So I chatted him. Which I'm sure is against every mission rule in the book (the Elder in front of his last name signifies that he's serving a mission for his (our) church, etc. etc. and there are many rules for these missionaries). But I wanted to ask him to e-mail me, not seduce him from the path of righteousness.

We e-mailed and updated each other on our lives (I'm moving, he was almost killed by a Mexican gang), and then the conversation turned, inevitably to music. I spent the entire morning updating him on what's going on in the music world. I'm pretty sure that's frowned upon by those mission rules as well, but at least I have my Music Man back.

...Until he gets shot because Mexican/American relations are so volatile right now that bands of pistol-wielding Mexicans are going around shooting Americans up. Thanks, W.

To Alieviate My Boredom

I watched Arachnophobia last night. Fortunately, most movies (unlike The Butterfly Effect) don't stay with me, so I haven't been crying into my pillow for the last fifteen hours.

Or if I have, it wasn't because of the spiders.

I Know You Will All Hate Me, But...

...finals week is too easy. And too long. I want a challenge that will make my cry in frustration right before I come up with the answer that blows the professor's mind (that, or the answer that blasphemes so badly I pack my bags and wait for them to come in the night and toss me out in the desert to go live with jackrabbits and sand cats). Instead, I'm left crying in boredom because neither of my majors require too much studying, just general awesomeness, and I can do that while sleeping. (I can. Ask my roommate. I did last night, and she said that I manage to sleep in such strange, awkward positions that she fears for me. Or thinks I need to be exorcised.)

If anyone has any suggestions of things to do to keep myself entertained...well, I've probably already done it, but feel free to toss some ideas my way.

I Wish I Had More Important Things To Write About, But I Don't

I had ice cream for breakfast, so to continue the Hey-Classes-Are-Over-And-Who-Actually-STUDIES-On-A-Reading-Day theme of the past few days, I decided to go for some Smarties. You know, the little candies that come in those clear plastic wrappers?

I asked Jennifer to toss some to me, but I'm always afraid of stuff like that going horribly wrong and me being seriously injured, so I had her gently lob them to the other side of my bed, where I wasn't. I only made it about five Smarties into the pack, though, for three reasons:


1. The sour made my eyelid twitch.

2. And it twitched again. Dang sour.

3. I bit myself -- no joke.

I can't even handle small candied treats, which is why I'm not even bothering to study for my finals. I'll let Fate take care of that, and hope that there's no eyelid twitching involved.

Acapulcas

Today was the last day of classes, so you know right now I'm up late partying. And by "partying," I mean I'm actually just being slightly hyper, sitting on my bed watching movies, eating leftover chips from a class party, and reading about alpacas.

Why alpacas? Because there was a link in a sidebar, and it's 3 a.m., and right now alpacas seem like the funniest thing ever. And when I learned that my roommate had never heard of the things and refused to believe in them, it only made it funnier. She calls them Acapulcas and is agreeing to let us breed them right here in our bedroom. One problem, though: I leave in ten days.

So I typed "alpaca gestation period" into Google to see if we could feasibly make our alpaca breeding last hurrah into a reality.

We have ten days. Alpacas take about 335. I don't think we're gonna make it.

For All Of You Who Want To Know What I Actually Look Like

I know, I know, some of you have never met me, and I've been wonderfully delinquent in actually posting pictures of myself on here. So I thought today I'd share one with you, a screen capture from a home movie:





In two weeks, that's where I'll actually be. For now, I'm just trying to imagine how it'll look.

Cleaning Is Fun

Jennifer and I spent our Easter Sunday cleaning. It was all worth it for two reasons:

1. Who doesn't like a clean apartment? Mmm, taste the clean.

and

2. I got to pick up all my roommate's junk strewn about everywhere, pile it up, and make her clean it all up.

I guess she was wrong about who the messy roommates are. Ah, being right: it tastes like clean.

Summer, You'd Better Be Ready For Me

I got up early this morning so I could get to Kinko's and ship six boxes full of my possessions back home. I spent a lot of last night going through my stuff and throwing it out, because I just didn't have the room. I had to toss out books; I was a little devastated and definitely wanting to curl up and not try to get my entire life stuffed into a few worthless pieces of cardboard (that they charged me $15 for, I might add).

Then this afternoon, my roommate and I went to the mall to buy some stuff. (Duh. I'm not one of those people who just go to the mall for fun.) I remembered why shopping usually stresses me out: they have nothing I want in my size. I see something I really like and go to try to find it in my size, and whoops, maybe if I gained forty pounds. Maybe.

I also realized that I have the worst tan line ever invented, and that I seriously need to reshape my legs -- but my running shoes were in one of those six boxes I sent back to Maryland, so I won't be doing any reshaping any time soon.

Summetime, summertime.

A Little-Known Fact About Me

I can type with my lips.

[Those who know me well are in no way surprised by this revelation.]

It Feels Like Tired In Here

I've recently fallen into the Arrested Development crowd. I've seen episodes here and there with different people (Jared and Adam being the ones who started me out on the path). I thought the show was really funny, and of course, I've heard fabulous things about it from people I admire already.

So I decided to check it out from the beginning. That was a fairly huge mistake, but only because finals are coming up, and it's hard to think about doing homework when Arrested Development is calling to me. I thought it was funny BEFORE I got all the jokes and gags they'd started from the very beginning.

I'm just even more sad now that I know Fox has cancelled the show, the dirty whores.

I Can't Really Transcribe A Classical Melody For The Post Title

I was writing this really great post about tonight's orchestra concert, but then something happened, and all of a sudden, the entire browser window just disappeared. I have no idea what I could possibly have pressed, and I'm still wondering if the original window is around here somewhere, lurking and biding its time. Which freaks me out a little, because what sorts of unpublished blog posts does that little window have access to?? I hope that I will remain the only one who has access to the answer to that question. But for now, I'm just going to tell you that the orchestra did well, and the conductor failed to shake my hand. And if crazy, half-written posts start showing up, please someone come and exorcise the demons from my computer.

Throw The Doors Open To Catch The Light

This week has been crazy. Monday and Tuesday were absolutely gorgeous days, and I took advantage of the appropriate April-like warmth and sunned myself on the lawn in between classes.

On Wednesday, a friend stopped in on his way up to Oregon and brought a terrible cold front with him. I don't mind snow so much in January, but in April? In April, snow is unacceptable. Especially after the weather has made such a brilliant peace offering to me. I feel like Utah and I are in the death throwes of a very bad relationship.

Here is the view of the sidewalk in front of my apartment on Thursday afternoon:



I refused to go out in that mess, so I spent the day touring the aquarium in the basement of the Widtsoe building.

Today I woke up, and it was gorgeous again. There is still snow on the mountains





but I'm walking around in a t-shirt with the windows thrown open to catch the birdchirps and the sunlight.

Son, One Day You'll Be A Man, And Men Can Do Terrible Things

One in three women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. One in three. And those are just the women who report it.

It happens. Even here in Happy Valley, even if the girl isn't reckless enough to go out jogging alone at three in the morning, even if she's a good girl and goes to church and calls her parents every Thursday.

It happens, yet some people refuse to confront that fact. One in three; shouldn't that tell us something?