Belgian Waffels and Brussel Sprouts

To live within Europe is to vacation exotically.
 It is far too simple to jump a plane to Spain from Germany or a train to France and have a lovely little holiday. Being from Michigan, the best we've got is Indiana or Ohio on our borders. On my first trip to Ohio, people at a bus stop threw rocks at our passing car windows. Quaint little state, isn't it?

This might exist in the states, but I've never heard of it if it does; there's a way to buy a plane ticket in Germany very very cheaply. The catch is you don't know where you're going when you buy the ticket. Pick your days, pay something like forty dollars and you could be going to Vienna or London, or maybe Kiel or Helsinki.

I got Brussels.  Capital of the European Union, home of the waffle and praline, and monument to a statue of a little boy urinating in a fountain.

I would never lie to you, readers. 

It was an incredibly impromptu trip. Bought the tickets the night before with so little knowledge of Belgium, it's insane.
National languages? French and Flemish. ...Balls.
Currency? Euro. ..Good, good. But found out in disappointment that everything is incredibly expensive. Can't enjoy that Belgium beer when it costs the equivalent of ten dollars a glass.
Known for? Techno music. *face palm*

In Tuebingen there is currently a chocolate festival. Feels good to be back where I really belong.

The Round Thing Goes into The Square Thing

I've finally attended a football game! Sure, it wasn't America football, but tomato, tomato. (That phrase is much easier to get across verbally...Let's try again: To-may-to, to-mah-to.)

Weder Bremen, a northern Germany team, played Hoffenheim at home. This happens to be rather close to Tuebingen so we snagged some tickets and drove out there for the game. Took me a while to really understand what was going on, but the easiest metaphor was to think of it as basketball with your feet and then I started to get into the swing of things.

Right you are, Flula, right you are.

I was cheering for Bremen, the team wearing green and white (Because my allegiance to Michigan State runs deep.) but we were amongst the Hoffenheim fans.

In the end they tied, which was glorious because the opposing side was sort of harassing us and we made a quick comeback to even it out.

(For those of you wondering how a professional sports team can tie. I direct you to this blog post by the lovely Katie who attempts to contemplate Europe's lax views on competition).

So we were all pretty content. Bremen tied and they all seemed happy. ...Well not everyone seemed happy.

As we filed out, you could see the Hoffenheim team walking toward their fan-section to celebrate.

The Hoffenheim fans booed and hissed their own team for drawing. I saw some guy chuck a half-full beer at them. That was just sort of unfathomable. Why? They didn't even lose. Sure, they didn't win per se, but they surely didn't lose.

Then I learned that the Bremen fans still celebrate with the team afterward in this weird little victory dance. But what's more so, they, the fans, will bring the team gift baskets and bake them cookies after a great loss. The fans leave the goodies on the players' cars after practices.

Win or lose, soccer is taken to a hyperbole in either direction.

How do I feel about this? I'm not sure, still wrapping my head around it. Honestly, after Michigan's little show in the Ohio State game (yeah, we get internet here and Michigan football is staying classy as ever...) I think sports are taken a little too seriously here. And there. And everywhere.

You're Never Fully Dressed...

Day one of the impromptu Germany Christmas excursion is underway. But it's much more than underway. Day one is almost gone. And I'm still sitting on my bed.

A day of traveling, one plane FULL of babies whose first experiences of flying are uncontrollable anger at the changing air pressure, and a cancelled train connection. It is a small wonder I slept for 13 hours before being prodded out of bed to shower because the scent of my socks is obscenely wafting through the room. It's been a slow start.

We're heading out today to re-accquiant ourselves with Tuebingen, the college town that I studied abroad at. It's really only been a year since I last visited during my internship and nothing here has really changed at all. I have though, I can feel that. There was a great debate over the effects that being abroad had on us all before we left. Who matured, the insides of becoming independent, world-travelled, the nuances between cultured and snooty. (Which I may be well slipping toward...)

Before I flew out of Detroit I had this overwhelming anxiety attack about my appearance. I scurried to the nearest Old Navy and dropped $211.04 on a wardrobe. Having now written out by behavior of the last few weeks, it seems like I'm slipping into this weird quarter-life crisis.

Maybe a three-week stay in Germany during the holidays is exactly what I need. Maybe that's what every 45 year old male says about his new cherry-red Mustang convertible.


...

Howdy, Neighbor!

Going to work at 7:30am, my neighbor found me walking down the stairs in my dirtiest, heaviest work clothes and my trè chic polka-dot lunch box carrying my keys, a hardcover copy of the bestselling novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Pheonix, a Ramen noodle chicken-flavor pouch, and a cheese grater. 


How do you segway around that?

Coming home from work, he saw me get out of my car with a fern. 

Witching Hour

As a person of the younger variety, stereotypically, I should have enjoyed Halloween in my most revealing version of a cat/witch/devil costume I could muster.

Milkshake bringin' all the boys to the yard and whatnot.

Seriously, because someone needs to explain this one to me, too.

Alas, Halloween found me, not haunting up a local bar flirting my way through all the free cocktails I could stand, but at someone's home, where people were gathering before heading to said bar.

I did not partake in the second portion of that plan.

In fact, one of the party-goers to be said that I looked like I wanted to murder everyone there for keeping me from my bed.              ...He wasn't entirely off. They did have a big bag full of candy, so I gorged myself out of pity and sleep loss. And my first draw was a starburst pack filled with ALL reds.

The night wasn't a complete bust.

I regret Everything.

I did something terribly stupid last night. Oh, why, oh, why did I think it would be a good idea? So much remorse. So much guilt.


Owing to the fact that it was 1:30am and I had finally gotten some cash money into my pocket, the decision to get fast food after a full day of work AND babysitting didn't appear so wretched. I hadn't had a full meal yesterday and there it was. Neon lights a'twinkling.

 So of course I curbed the temptation and just went home to sleep. HA. Nope, I had forty dollars in my pocket and had just listened to a baby scream for no less than four hours. I went through the drive-through and got two cheeseburgers and a milkshame.*

(*NOTE: I actually typed out 'milkshame' instead of 'milkshake' and I'm going to keep it. Some mistakes have great meaning.)

Owing now to the worst decision of the night, my stomach is trying to attack my intestines and while they are putting up a good fight, I think I might die. TMI. I know, I know, "tell more information." It's been so frighteningly horrid that my legs have begun to tingle from my shins down whenever I go to the bathroom.

...Someone call an ambulance while I do p90x and sob uncontrollably.

 I am calling off all junk food in the near future. I've got my sisters wedding (!) to get ready for and some other nice happenings that I would prefer not to wear a moo-moo to attend. Plus, I don't know how drunk-late-nighters do it, but--never again.

(Rita, don't you just love that your wedding gets announced on my blog in the same breath as my digestive problems? Love you, sister.)

So segwaying from the most American-esque story I know to the announcement I intended. I am still currently living in Kalamazoo. I was without internet for around a month, and when I did get it installed, it just so happens that I still have a full-time job that I work six-days a week. Not much time for blogging. Yet, time to save some money for...wait for it....a trip to Germany around Christmas!

I will again try to update more often. But no guarentees. This is a read-at-your-own-risk-type deal.


Here we go again. Welcome back, internet.

Dragging along

It's like I'm stringing this blog along. It's a good friend that wants to be more than friends, but honestly I don't have the time for it, and really I just like the attention that I get from the other blogs when I write on this blog and oh, my lord, my writing life has turned into that of a sorority girl...

This can accurately describe my feelings toward this blog right now.

Working full time will do that to you. It's an odd situation of mine because I haven't fully moved to my new home and residence and weekly I'm commuting to and fro--draining me of any time or excess money. This, thankfully is my last week.
Then I'll be full time on just ONE job.  For the first time in a long time.
 I'll be a construction worker, in the shortest sense of the meaning. The longer version is that I work on a crew retrofitting houses to be more energy efficient through BPI-approved techniques.

That sounds so much more...adult.

But then my boss will ask me "What are your goals" and, like a sad sad reminder slapped in my face, I realize this is not the end-goal for me and I still need to figure out my life.

I'm not eloquent. Fortunately this man is. And for that reason I leave you with his thoughts translating my babbling.

"One of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you’re never going to match up, and that everybody else’s life is going to be better and finer and fuller, and everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught, and you had a dental appointment that day or you were somehow not invited."
 

- Stephen Fry

50 days

I had my first day off in over a month.

It was nice.

I quit one job already in my resounding life choice to move to Kalamazoo and work full time at Better World Builders. Honestly, I just got woken up from a weird three hour nap that lasted until 10pm by my cat licking my forearm and I'm not convinced that I'm still not dreaming, so pardon me for not explaining BWB a bit more. You can look them up here.

On that glorious day, my first day off in an eternity, I looked around my apartment, packed a few boxes, and ultimately decided that I was a pretty boring person. Thankfully my evening was rescued and I spent the rest of it amongst friends watching youtube videos and petting cats named after candy. (Werthers and Andes Mints, respectively.) I suppose this is what all of the young, hip kids are up to these days.

Now I've got the whole weekend free and I've finally gone home again and I'm sort of floating. I'm not particularly looking forward to tomorrow, where I'll drive back to Kalamazoo and start work. I can't quite place it at this particular moment why that is. Something feels so definite, final, terminal, about having one full-time job.
No school, nothing else. Just working.

Granted, it's not like I did a whole lot apart from working previously. With four jobs, I was/am pretty caught up in punching in a time card. But there's something about FullTime that feels just, different. Conclusive. Before work was a means to an end. Pay for your education, your meals, your down time. Now it's my life. It's what I do.

So there you have it. My apprehensions and insecurities about life transitions. Seems to be a reocurring theme...

Can't I just get paid to sit on a couch and sing along to videos of songs from the 80's and 90's? I've gotten really good at it.

Today I learned the difference between heat stroke and heat exhaustion

So, do all y'all realize how hot it is outside?
 It's hotter than two brown bears fighting over barbecue sauce in a forest fire.

(My brain is turned to putty in the heat. So much so that I have reverted to my southern roots.)

Apart from working a lot here in Ann Arbor, I've started straddling a grown-up job in Kalamazoo. This one requires putting on a full-faced mask respirator and body suit in a pseudo-Darth Vader fashion and squirming into attic crawl spaces to re insulate houses. Thinking about it, being in the lava like atmosphere of the attic is a lot like how Darth Vader came to be in the suit... My job brings it full circle.

But until such time that my rent is up here in Ann Arbor, I'll be running back and forth. And back and forth.

Last night I arrived back in Ann Arbor after three-day stint in Kalamazoo. I was pretty much bushed from three days of looming in the constant threat of dying from dehydration and manual labor and laid straight down to sleep. I woke to find my cat panting on the laminate floor of the bathroom. Technically, she's not my cat, so seeing her matted hair and watching her puff made me a little nervous. I immediately changed out her water for fresh iced water and let her out on the porch for some night air. Granted the air outside was only slightly less than the steaming humid soup air inside.
 No dice.
I was going to kill a rented cat unless I did something pretty quickly.

Funny thing about Ann Arbor, the stores that are open 24-hours are kind of a trek away. It keeps the small-town-island-with-a-big-city-feel going.

And that's the story of how I ended up driving for twenty minutes at 4:30am this morning to buy a fan that "my" cat is currently trying to hide from. I think the noise scares here. Closest thing I have to a vacuum, I suppose.

To the Blueberry!

Right after Christmas this year, I got into a pretty bad car accident. Travelling back from home to make it to Ann Arbor for work is a three hour drive that would have been greatly compounded by an intense sleet storm, but most bosses (mine included) wouldn't care that I had decided to spend an extra day with my family for the holiday, I was supposed to work.

And this was a place that didn't close on Christmas, if it helps to paint the picture in your imagination.

As most moms would have, mine forbid me to head out with the storm pelting half-frozen sludge on the windows, but I assured her, guiled her, got angry at her, and finally convinced her to let me out of the front door.

Yeah, I got about ten miles before I hit a patch of ice and swerved off the road, hitting the ditch after having spun 180 degrees to face the direction I had just been traveling in, like my trusty car knew where I was supposed to be headed: home. How ironic.

I rolled and crunched down the steep ditch bank (if you've never visited rural Michigan, here's a human for scale...).

Seriously, they're huge. I got this picture from the Nature Conservancy where they have a special project set up just to level them out. The one I drove into was a bit larger.

Before I hit the point of being upside down in my car, my only thought was, "S&*#, I should have listened to Mom...." Not exactly the last thought you want to have on earth as a conscious human being, but there it was.

Thankfully, I walked out of the wreck with a sore back and minor bruising across my shoulder--Always wear your seat belts, kids!--but the passenger side of the car was smashed in, almost every window had been shattered, and I would be shaking shards of glass out of my hair for the next couple of days. Without having to take a second look at it, my step-dad knew the car was totalled. Also, I lost my Blind Melon CD. By far the greatest tragedy of the night.

So for the next couple of months I was on the market for a new car, just like every other driver in Michigan who experiences the snowy roads of death. It was slim pickings and I had almost resigned to wait until later spring to purchase a new car, not ideal, but more practical. Then I stumbled across the new Fiat... Oh, what a beauty. I knew I had to have one. I had never been a VW Bug fan, but something about the Fiat 500 struck my fancy in a strong way. Maybe it was the excellent gas mileage, or perhaps the cute as hell design, or more likely, it was the most unique compact car I had ever seen.

The long of the short, after weeks of research, haggling, and convincing my family, particularly my step-dad how safe it was and how easy it would be to park in the city, and how the gas mileage was amazing and how by golly, I am an environmental major and just doing my part to save the planet, I purchased my new car.

The ultimate kick was when I took it home and my step-dad drove it and came out admitting it was a cute little car, and probably well-equipped for city living. Success!!

Most recently I have started working with a construction company. This is the beginning of my big-girl life with a full-time job. The past few days, I've been shadowing the crew on-site as they retrofit houses for new insulation and other energy-saving renovations.

Let's keep this in mind; my first day, I show up, a skinny little young girl hoping to fit in with many of these middle-aged burly men....and I pull up driving this:

Doesn't it just scream, "Take me seriously!" Look it's even all dirty and muddy and rugged.

Steady, As She Goes

 I don't know what I've gotten myself into. 
It's my first day off since my brother's wedding. I wanted to be productive...

I'm sitting on my couch eating bisquits and gravy from a styrophom take-out container. How does this happen??

I wanted to be productive, truly did, but then I realize there's a marathon of House Hunters and House Hunters International on the telly. So now instead of being productive I decided I wanted to buy a house...in Germany...In my shorts and socks.

In my defense, it is raining outside that sort of calming rain that makes you want to nap.

So I leave you with that snapshot of my life.

You're welcome.

Like One of your French Girls

Backwards baseball caps are making a rise this season. Something I never thought I'd see after my fourteenth birthday...That has nothing to do with anything. Really, I don't follow much for fashion, but while modeling for an art class, you kind of run out of conversation topics with yourself and I found this to be one of them.
 Baking under show lights so a group of ne'rdo well painters can focus on that ever so slight crook in your nose that got busted up while playing basketball in fifth grade, I'll guarantee you'll get bored, and sore, and start to slightly hallucinate.

Trying to sit still for three hours straight is a lot like trying to hold your arms over your head for three hours straight. Sounds plausible, but go ahead and try.

"Oh, you big baby!" You'll say. "I commute to Chicago and back everyday and that's six hours in a car! I do just fine."
"Pansy"

Trust me, I considered this fact. But let's also consider all of the motions you go through in a minute while driving. Hands are constantly supporting the steering wheel, feet are moving slightly to accelerate or brake, your head and neck get to crane to check your mirror for blind spots or raging drivers, and if you're me, you are jamming out full-blast to whatever song may come on the radio.

All of those glorious movements that are stripped from a model. I plopped down in the seat--fully-clothed, mind you. All of my relatives may now exhale deeply in unison--and found a comfortable position. Or so I thought! *Ominous background music* The director continued to badger me, make sure you can hold that position. Focus on a spot on the floor to look at. The lights will blind you, you might want to look away from them. I was chuckling at her concern. Getting paid ten bucks an hour to literally sit on my butt. Please. I've got this.

As we began, my eyes began to well with tears because the five hundred watt bulb was still in my peripheral vision. The spot on the floor I started to focus on was suddenly moving and changing colors. Soon my back, which I hadn't noticed was slightly twisted to one side, began to ache with the pain of a thousand needle pricks. And for the love of all things holy, my NOSE ITCHED.

I chanced a quick flick of my eyes to the clock.

Ten minutes.

And I was scolded for moving my eyeballs.

I started to talk with myself. Realized that I am incredibly boring to the point where I started trying to remember lyrics to songs. I realized I was much more of a fan of Macklemore than I recalled being and could make it fairly far through Thrift Shop. Impressive.

At the end of the session, I was applauded for my cheek bones. They gave everyone a challenge, I was informed. Not quite sure how to take that one, but I'll file it under compliments.

I wish I could post the pictures that were done. Some were incredible and make the sit of death worth it, but alas, I do not own a magical device that can take a still image and transfer it to the mass of interwebs.

Perhaps my modelling career will explode and you'll get to see some in the near future. Or maybe I'll file down to a church basement again and this time, I'll bring my camera.

Sculpture Park

Driving to Minneapolis we had a GPS system in the car so there was no chance of getting lost on the way. Kind of took the adventure out of the road trip in the nostalgic sense, but we found ways to keep up the daring discovery without it.

The greatest thing about Minneapolis, in my opinion, is their bike rental. Every evening we'd snag a few bikes and trek out to explore and by far the most note worthy place we stumbled upon was this:

My spoon's too big...

Yep. That is a gigantic spoon. With a cherry on top. Which doubles as a water fountain in the middle of a park. ...

As giant art installations go, this had by far the most wonderment. We biked there in the night and my first thought was, "My goodness. What I would give to play kick the can here."

(For those of you who didn't grow up in rural Michigan, let Wikipeida be your guide to my childhood)

Though the grounds look fantastic in the daylight, I'm sure, at night it lent itself as a surreal playground.

 

We rode our bikes around the paths, through the instillation, weaving in and out, going off on our own and shouting to each other as we found more bizarre aspects of the lot. 

 Huge sculptures looked like some god's discarded plaything. 

  Literally thousands of wind chimes were strung up in grove a trees, tinkling so faintly that I didn't believe they were there until I stood under them myself. Trying to count them was like trying to count the stars, as soon as you focused on another part of the next tree more and more would come into focus.

Just a few feet away the chimes dissipated into the other noises of the night. I stood there, for a while, in the night air and taking in the peaceful moment. What I would do to practice some yoga under those trees.

One installation, though unsettling, spoke directly to me. I don't know what it was called or who made it, but it was a series of granite benches in a huge patio square, all with some observation about life carved into them. This one...

"Affluent college-bound students face the real prospect of downward mobility. Feelings of entitlement clash with the awareness of imminent scarcity. There is resentment at growing up at the end of an era of plenty coupled with reassessment of conventional measures of success."

I had two immense moments in the park. There was an ache to be a kid again, just wanting to play in the night outside with my siblings, setting up shop lights to play baseball after dark and a congruent twinge of guilt at having to grow up and being excited about it.

I ran around and played on a giant wrought-iron swing at the same time that I was puzzling over the aesthetic and intentional underpinnings of a statue of a woman in a fetal position. Is there any intention? Maybe the most I can do is sit under the shadow of some trees and enjoy that moment.

A Tale of Twin Cities

A week ago if you would have asked me to name three cities in Minnesota, I probably would have had to google if Minnesota were a state or a city. In fact, I had to double check if Minnesota had one or two 'n's. Never was much good with geography. Or spelling.


But now, oh now, things are different.

Check this out. Minneapolis, St. Paul, AND St. Cloud. Three! Count it, I can name THREE cities in Minnesota.

Sure, two of those are kind of gimme's and the third I may only know in reference to a particular sitcom that I watch...

Legend--Wait for it...

And I still went and double-checked those on the google machine.

But I digress, spent the week in Minneapolis for a psychology conference and while I could spend hours describing the various speakers I listened to, name drop a couple prominent figures, or wane to you on the multi-facets of avoidance contingencies (which I won't, because honestly I'm still not straight on that one either) I'm not going to. Mostly because it'd be kind of obnoxious.

Much to the shock of my fellow conference go-er's and road trip buddies, Minnesota was the farthest west in this great United States that I had ever visited and I doubted that I would ever get out that far. I mean, it is just Minnesota.

No offense to those from the area, I had heard it was such a beautiful city and everyone is so friendly and all the mid-west fixings you can eat--and those things stood to be true--but seriously. It had a snow storm like, a week ago, right? Half of the city of Minneapolis is built so that you can navigate it via a series of indoor walkways.
Super friendly people? High carb diets? Snow at obscene times of the year? It's practically Canada.

...dary! Legendary! Two How I Met Your Mother references in one post!

All jests aside, had a great time and am glad to be back. Thank you Minneapolis for your courtesy and kindness... and the two pounds of hot wings that I ate from Hell's Kitchen. Those were delicious.

Road Trippin'

Since I'm trying to make this a bit more of a daily habit, I'm requiring myself to write even when there's nothing to write about... Lucky you. But it'll get me in a rhythm, hopefully.

So then, good time to start is while I'm going to be taking a break because of an impromptu road trip. Instead of somewhere exotic or exciting, however, I am spending twelve hours of my life to drive out to Minnesota for a psychology conference.

More when I get back (about a week). I'm sure there will be daring tales of rolling wheat fields or roque Midwestern accents, or something. I dunno. What happens in Minnesota may very well stay in Minnesota.

But I will buy cheese curds in Wisconsin. That is a certainty.

Life's Simple How-Tos

Application Edition:
Or the how to NOT to's. Like, how to NOT get a job in an ice cream and chocolate shop.

With the upcoming push of students looking for summer work, I thought it nice to help out those who are looking to get into the culinary art of ice cream shop and chocolate sales. I've compiled a helpful to- (not) do list of all the things I find detrimental to your potential employment from real-life applications being submitted to the store right now. (Oh how I wish I had made some of these up.)

So, read on, dear applicant, and do the exact opposite of the poor saps below for a guaranteed 72.3% increase in your chocolate and ice cream marketability!

1. When asked for your hobbies, write: dieting, exercise and modelling.
     Seriously. Did you even happen to glance inside the store to glimpse its contents before grabbing this application?

2. Writing in the margin that you are lactose intolerant or allergic to dairy.
     See above response.

3. When handing in your application, ask: So when should I call you for an interview?
     Won't get you as far as you think it will. Because you sound like a jerk.

4. In the 'getting to know you' question of who your favorite character from a novel is, respond: Edward Cullen, Bella Swan, Ana Steele, or Christian Grey. (Combo breaker for answering two or more)
     I've already thrown your application in the trash. I might have even ripped it into pieces first.
Subsequently,

5. Answering the above question with "Ernest Hemingway"
     You're not fooling anyone. No one likes reading Hemingway. I don't even think Hemingway enjoyed writing his own work. 

 6. Dotting your i's with hearts. Writing your periods as smiling faces. Starting sentences with lower-case letters. Writing 'LOL' or 'IDK' or any other shorthand text answer for anything.
     You're speaking to potential employers, not your BFF from across the aisle in geometry class.

So there you have it. Six simple mistakes that are easy to avoid. I'm sure there will be more to come.

Oh the Places we will go

It's been eight days since I last attended to anything academic at all.
Graduation doesn't count. Being herded into a mass of 20,000 squirming pointy black cardboard hats to sit on bleachers for two hours didn't really result in any firing of neurons, so apart from my thesis defense I've been working on accustoming myself to...things?

I'm not really sure. I walked into work yesterday and as we humans are prone to do, I was asked how it was going. Before I could reply with the obligatory "Fine." (Because no one actually wants to hear about your deepest fears and desires) my boss chimed in with a "She's getting used to how to not be a student."

If that's what you'd call the crippling sense of overwhelming self doubt a formative stage of accustoming to real life... then yeah. I'm working on that.

Although, this summer should be pretty sweet. I'm working full time at an alright job, I've got enough money to keep my fridge semi-stocked, I can take a Wednesday morning off to blog and drink sangria on the porch with my cat curled up in my lap. Today is Wednesday, right? I lose track...
 So yep, without all of those aspirations and goals to strive for, the mental stimulation of overcoming challenges, the arduous journey to self discovery, this is looking like it might shape up to be an alright summer.

 And this is usually the moment where someone decides to tell me that mine being melodramatic is cliche. 20,000 other graduates in Ann Arbor alone are going through the same feelings I am. And they're right.

Our commencement speaker was the CEO of Twitter. Though not a Tweeter (Twitter-er? Getwotter?) it was nice to find out that he had a checkered past. Before hauling off and inventing some social media site filled with tiny #birds, he adventured out to try his hand at stand-up comedy. (Oh, so Obama spoke during your commencement speech? Big deal! Our speaker sort of kind of knows Steve Carell. Yeah, how do you like them apples!?) He told us to go out and do two things: be courageous and live in the moment.

My mom had similar advice. She gave me a hug before leaving and said, "Now go make something of yourself"

Without a doubt, I could think of nothing but this:

Leave it to Sunny to perfectly iterate what every single one of those 20,000 previous pointy black cardboard hats is thinking at this moment as we listen to the birds chirp on this gloriously sunny day and slip deeper into pool of our own anxiety.

I am currently shimmying down a job canon to fire off a few applications into job land. I hope they land in fertile fields to produce many a jobbie tree...

Is this real life?

Or is it fantasy?
Caught in a landslide.
No escape from reality...

...I could probably make a much more intriguing post reciting Queen lyrics the entire time, but quite honestly, I just completed my undergraduate course work and I'm not feeling much of anything for creativity. I gave every last bit and I am feeling a bit light-headed from the swoon of weightlessness that accompanies the completion of major life goals.

Once I crawled out from under the rock I'd been living under for about a year and shuffled out of a layer of thesis papers (I'm not kidding in the slightest. I wrote a Tolkien-sized equivalent for my thesis work and it's been laying about my apartment for the better part of a year.)

Proof. With a freshly-showered Rebecca for scale.

I'm feeling kind of ...good. Sure, I'm still unaccustomed to the sunlight and it still irritates my eyes which prefer the dank fluorescent light of the library, but I've heard good things about this 'outside' land of which the others speak. I may go exploring today.

Or I may nap. Yeah, that nap is sounding good.

Regards to my fellow colleagues finishing up their school sentence. The beginning is nigh!

I'd Rage Quit, but I don't have the time.

I am currently writing an honor's thesis on concepts that I'm practially making up.
I am studying for the GRE, the biggest test of my college career, which essentially decides the rest of my life.
Working not one or two, but three jobs.
Graduation is in little over a month. The necessary sixteen years of education is coming to a close.

And all I want to do is sleep.

Sorry for the lack of updates, but .... Take this as a sign of my apologies.

Yeah...Let that make up for it.

The Darndest Things

When I was little and I would wake up in the middle of the night, if I had kicked my blankets off I would do this weird thing. I would try and fall asleep without putting the blanket back on. I had woken up because I was cold and couldn't find it, but would try and hold out for as long as possible.

I would imagine that I was homeless and didn't have a blanket.

But it never became a game of how long could I hold out. It was my way of attempting to really understand and comprehend what it would be like to be without a home. I had trouble grasping how difficult it would be, and whenever I caved and pulled my blankets back up under my chin I would solemnly put out good thoughts to all of those sleeping in the night without Little Mermaid sheets. Because it was hard.

Twisted logic and I'm not sure where it came from. I had never seen a homeless person in my rural town. No where in my memory can I recall some movie or show that I remember decidedly acknowledging, "There is a hobo."
The closest I got to the poverty line would be those starving children in China who really needed me to eat my green beans and peas. But starving didn't mean your Grandma couldn't quilt you a blanket.

Funny how now I can't think back and figure out why I did it. I have no idea, honestly beyond considering that my empathetic streak ran exponentially with my baby teeth. I learned in high school biology class that there is a hormonal difference between adult and children's brains. Maybe I've switched to adult brain now and will be forever lost to my inner child.
Though...I still giggle when I hear the word duty, I think it's safe to assume that's not the reason entirely. Hehe. Doody.

But kid brain logic is a warped one. I like it though. It's simple and deep and not yet jaded.
I tutor now. Did I mention that?

I've got three kids and they're...great. They have all got their issues, but I'd fight anyone who says that they're not worth it.

One boy, his story is a laundry list of wrong. When your teacher picks on a student, you know something isn't going right in his life. But we get along well enough. He's only gone catatonic once and we could deal.

He hates reading though, but every hateful thought against reading is made up for in a love of Math and Wrestling. This kid knows more about times tables and Randy Orten than I'll ever have the pleasure, or desire, to experience.

He has an attendance problem though. Mentally and physically. This a boy who can leave his body quicker than you can say boo. When things are going wrong, he shuts down. So I feel accomplished when we read something together and he tries to start a dialogue. Before though, we just had trouble getting him into the classroom until I set up a sticker system. Stickers are like crack to kids. They'll do anything for it. Even attend tutoring.

For every tutoring session he attends, he gets a sticker. For five stickers, he gets a prize. We had settled on a bouncy ball.

In the third session I brought in a book on fish. Sharks, moray eels, puffer fish, we learned about them all. Then we decided which were the deadliest and which we'd like as pets. (I chose the shark, and he suggested I make a moat outside my house so he could guard it.) We spent the remaining time making play-doh fish and chatting...a first for us both.

On our walk back to the classroom, discussing our favorite pizza toppings, he started to lag behind me. "Do you think...I could keep this book", he motioned to my fish book. Unfortunately it's a library book so I had to say no.
"Do you think if I get all my stickers that instead of a ball, I could maybe have a book?" Now that he started it was a floodgate opening.
"It could be about fish," he went on, "or wrestling...or stuff. I could tell you where to find a good book. Especially ones about wrestling."

Kid logic. I would buy you a library little man.

Still give you the bouncy ball, too.

My Strange Addiction and Other Stories I keep to myself

I don't have a smart phone. No Android or iPhone7 or whatever. (Really no iAnythings, actually.) What can I say? I'm a minimalist.

The phone I do have though, I've had for a while now. From time to time I flip through my contacts and reorganize them. Normally this is done during a period of time where I am waiting in some exotic place like the DMV but since everyone else has their heads in their laps, I feel outed if I were to just looked around. The lone prairie dog with its head up, vulnerable to predators. Or to direct eye contact with the weird guy sitting across from you on the bus.

  The contacts within my contact list are kept pretty tight. If I don't call you within a few months, I'll delete your number. Excluded from this rule are family and all-night delivery places, for obvious reasons of obligation and deliciousness, respectfully. There is one other number that I've held onto for a few years now. Even after I got my phone wet and had to switch out the contacts to a new one, I chose to hang onto one Ann Arbor area code number that I have listed.

The number belongs to a girl I met a long while back here on campus. I saw fliers for some student group, I didn't really pay attention to which one, that was having a free yoga night and immediately I had my namaste on and was out the door. The tricky thing about free yoga is it can be a gamble. Free can mean you get what you pay for, or that it consists of the best things in life. I've gone to yoga nights that I'm not proud of, including the Gamma Alpha Delta Zeta Beta-whatever free yoga night that consisted of two hundred (I kid you not.) sorority girls squashed into one of the universities largest ballrooms.

Thankfully, this was not put on by a sorority, but a smaller student group. It was not in a ballroom, but a classroom of the School of Social Work where the desks had be slid to one end of the room to make space for the fifteen or so of us who sat patiently on our mats for the instructor to arrive.

This would turn out to be the first and only yoga class I've attended where the instructor encouraged us to laugh, to sing along with the blaring music, to vocalize our breathing. It was incredibly different from what I knew, the room was humming with our life. The instructor actually came along with us, pushing and pulling and pressing us into the postures. She didn't know us, yet she cared enough to notice what we hadn't about our own bodies. I could hear the girl next to me audibly sigh as the instructor helped contort her into a posture I had never even seen before.
I was shaking when we finished, too exhausted to get up from my mat and too content to want to. I finally began to notice the girl next to me, the one who had earlier been the human pretzel on the floor.

I had never been approached by anyone before in my college career. Especially anyone like her. Now she was far from resembling a pretzel and much closer to resembling a Vogue fashion spread. Blond, incredibly tall, and proportionately model-thin, she smiled and I was thoroughly dazzled by the way her face seemed to glow. She scooted over to me and introduced herself. It turns out she was the president of the student group and I was a new face.  

She remarked that it seemed like I really needed this session, and I might have snorted a little. My first few months of college had been rough. Cancer, culture shock, and vast feelings of isolation where the first three things I could tick off of my head. Of course, I didn't say that. Those are things to which we normally keep to ourselves. 

Funny how one's definition of normal is subjective.

After our conversation trailed off, I began to roll up my mat and make my way to the water cooler and the buffet table in the back. I didn't see her step to the front of the classroom and thank everyone for coming and inviting them to grab some food.

I turned around just in time as she began to formally introduce herself as a recovering heroin addict, five years clean. She started the group four years ago to reach out to other college students dealing with the same problems she had after she was kicked out of her home and fired from her modeling job. She still got into U of M when she applied, a feat for anyone, but a huge leap when you have to reveal you have had priors concerning drug possession and dealing to one of the schools in the country that prides itself on its rejection rate. The Leaders and the Best and whatnot.
She finally set up a support group, and started to break down some monster barriers and preconceptions about addiction.  A true force. Now, five years later, she was telling her story to us, to me, the newbie, and I was floored.

She invited anyone to share their story, some did. Most didn't, myself included. And we ate and finished up the night with her telling us all to judge a little less tomorrow. Smile to the person sitting next to you on the bus and never assume any one's story for your own.

I hadn't exactly expected it. I mean, the flier was just about free yoga; I hadn't actually thought of looking up the student group. Oddly enough, I wasn't wigged out at all. These people were present, laughing and approachable. God, they were more normal than most of the other kids in my classes. The first group of people I'd met and thought, "Yeah, I'd be friends with them."

As I was walking out, she came up to me again, thanked me again, and gave me her number on a sheet of paper. "For anything," she said.

I never actually called her. I programmed her into my phone, more for a comfort measure than anything. On and off I went to the other meetings they had. I never said anything, but I enjoyed the feeling of connectedness more than I would have liked to admit. She eventually graduated, moved off to Colorado, and the meetings stopped.

Now I'm finishing up here too. It's been over two years since I've gone to a Student's Anonymous meeting, I'm feeling better about being here, but now I've got to leave again and I'm sick of people telling me I should go teach, into the Peace Corps, or something else that fits a nice mold that I am the wrong shape for.

I kind of wish I could dial up that number in my phone and get an answer.

My Five Minutes

Still sitting in campus common areas to get my Internet, so yes I'm alive, but no, I'm not updating like I should be.

So I'm going to cheat on this one because I didn't actually write it. A university online publication got wind of my German adventures and decided to write up a short piece.


Find it here. Annnnd here and here. Because I'm basking in the limelight of my success.

And because I want you to click on it now because it's only up for a limited time so my fame and notoriety are truly constrained.

Also, I didn't cry during the interview. I guess that was added for dramatic effect.

The Pirates, Who don't do Anything

I rely on the Internet too much.

Not admitting I have a problem, just observing the natural order of things while I'm sitting in a deserted computing site on campus. It's break, most people aren't back from their most raucous holiday shenanigans, but I am and the Internet has been disabled at my apartment. And thar be the answer ye be seeking to the question, "Where has she been for the last forever?" Still no leads as to why I wrote that thinking and writing in pirate voice.

Yarrrgh, mateys. I be bored.

Quick recap of my last few weeks include Christmas emotional outbreaks, tear-jerking charcoal drawings, major car accidents, a dry New Year's Eve, saving a dude's life, job interviews, cat vomit, cross country skiing, vampire love stories that are actually worth reading, and a significant lack of Internet so as to not be able to relay these wonderful tales to you all. I am writing this purely to send out the beacon signalling my survival, as many of you have heard of my adventures and are beginning to worry for my health.

Many of these stories will not hit the blogosphere, partially due to my record high laziness, because I am still not sure as to when my Internet will be turned back on. And I am incredibly lazy right now. Sitting in this chair on campus is even getting to tedious for the likes of me. (It is slightly tilted so that I have to use my core to stay parallel to the floor. Not worth it. I'm going to go home and sit on my, now that I think on it, very comfortable and parallel couch.)