Rewind

There are days, like today, when I wake up, and suddenly realize that I have been living here for four years.

This may not sound like a legendary announcement.

Allow me to explain.

Routine. Alarm, gym, coffee, shower, throwing lunch in a bag, out the door, traffic, parking, rushing, booting, reading, answering, calling, reading, answering, calling, reading, answering, calling, meeting, eating, re-booting, reading, reading, reading, answering, answering, calling, meeting, meeting, reading, reading, traffic, parking, snack, cleaning, errands, dinner, reading, bed, STOP. REPEAT. You get caught up in this cycle.

Of course there are breaks. There are dinners, luxurious mornings of sleeping in, long runs, delicious treats, family, friends, boyfriend, cats, breakfasts, lunches, happy hours, films, books, festivals, travel. These are the things you remember the most, however, and the other days just seemed to get sucked into the tornado of routine, if it can be described as such.

The things I remember most are high highs and low lows. The everyday mundane tends to get swept under the rug, and it is moments like these that I am eternally grateful that I keep journals diligently. If not for this compulsion, we would all be devoid of gems such as this:

July 23, 2003
Denmark, Maine
Summer Job - camp counselor
2011 comments in italics

7:56am- Wake up.
8:00am - Breakfast. (Remember the days when you could wake up and be somewhere in four minutes? Like college. Strong prerequisite: not giving a shit what you look like when you roll in somewhere.)
9:00am - Stables, watched K8 (my nickname for one of my British friends, who is still a good friend of mine, and whom I still refer to as K8) ride new horse.
9:30am - Bunk inspections. Hadn't done them in over a week, but higher powers finally caught on and confronted me at breakfast. Foiled.
10:00am- Cleaned our room. Discovered beds are slightly more bearable with only one mattress instead of two. (Ahhhh, camp beds. For an entire summer, we lived on squishy, tissue-thin mattresses on military cots. With no air conditioning.) Got clean sheets for once - am tired of sleeping in own filth. (I went through a Bridget Jones-phase of writing in my journals. This lasted approximately four and a half years, and immensely entertained me.)
10:30am - Nap. Hungover from drinking in the C______ House (a run-down shack further down in the woods where all of the counselors snuck off to after the kids were asleep to drink Natty Lite and listen to music on someone's shitty boombox. Totally the stuff of horror movies.) Must make 34 costumes. Am very stressed. Solution - nap. I miss the cat. (I was in charge of costumes and set design for the camp's theater program. Sushi, who was only about a year old at the time, lived with my parents that summer. I think they still miss him.)

Someday...I shall post more journal entries. There is a statute of limitations in what I feel is appropriate to post, but I will admit that the Bridget Jones years are points of hilarity in a long history of melodramatic journal entries that read like Danielle Steele novels. (My mother once pointed out that my writing - MY EARLIER WRITING, I WOULD LIKE TO CLARIFY - was reminiscent of Danielle Steele. I am still not over this comment. I may need therapy.)

Journalling has been my constant compulsion. I once made Snap promise that, in the event of my untimely death, she was to immediately round up any and all journals in my estate (as if I have anything that would constitute an "estate" beyond a car lacking working shocks and two fairly brain-damaged cats) and lock them away. She - and only she - had full permission to weed through, decide what would be too humiliating for public visage, and post the remaining entries online. If she could find any that aren't too humiliating, that is. I have a tendency to...well...have literary diarrhea in my journals. Probably about that caliber of writing, too.

Well Hello There, 2011!

"2010 was a...'Rebuilding Year'," Jaunt said to me last night. It came out with a mix of affection and exhaustion with a slight pause to emphasize that, for all of us it seems, 2010 was a bit of a tornado that picked us up and dropped us off in some entirely different location then where we started the year. Some of us a little more scathed then others, but mostly in one piece.

To call it a "Rebuilding Year" is entirely accurate and, because it's Jaunt, it's also a quite intelligible and poetic way of referring to said tornado. I've felt more change in the air- with friends, family, and the world at large. Change is riddled with difficulty, excitement, and a certain degree of learning when to dig your heels in and when to simply let go and allow the winds to whip you as they will.

In 2010, I went to New Orleans and helped rebuild a little corner of it. I started running and completed 4 5ks and the marathon relay. I started a new job with a nonprofit whose work makes me proud and is fulfilling to me in a way I didn't know a career could be. I got simultaneously angry at the state of affairs in this city that's become my home and elated that there is change happening on so many levels to address things. I went back to one of my favorite past times- kayaking, and explored waterways in Annapolis, the Eastern Shore, and Gun Powder. I reconnected with some old friends, made some new ones, and had more fun with my big band of merry girlfriends then really should be legal.

And I watched change in my friends too. I watched broken hearts and new beginnings, big moves, engagements, break-ups, marriages, pregnancies, new jobs, sicknesses and healths. I've started paying more attention to these things, realizing that our problems are shifting as we are all getting older. The things that are most important to you begin to change over time, and the things that bothered us in the past begin to fall away a little easier with these shifts in priorities.

And 2011? Well, if 2010 was the "Rebuilding Year," then perhaps 2011 is the year to experiment with our new selves. Test the steadiness of the foundation, feel the strength of new roots. Shift the focus away from the skeletons we've been building and start to flesh out the aesthetics a little more. Begin to move around and enjoy the fruits of our labors. Face new issues, build stronger safety measures, and perhaps use some of our newfound architecture as a launch pad.

I don't really have any grandiose resolutions- aside from the fact that I intend to train for and run the half-marathon in October- but I do promise to go a little easier on myself. After so many years of breaking and bending and testing, I want to live 2011 a little more comfortably in my own skin. Don't we all?

Cheers, 2011.

Embarrassing Groceries

Yep.

Nothing like catching the eye of the guy behind you in line at the grocery store, realizing it's that guy from high school who wasn't hot at the time but suddenly became some sort of hot emo rocker that you know is most likely bad news but you feel might just possibly be at least somewhat solid because, technically, you've known him for over ten years so he can't be totally bad news so maybe you should say hi and.....

...then you realize you're buying a stack of Lean Cuisines and ten thousand cans of cat food. And toilet paper. Oh, let's not forget that.

Yep.

Nothing like being embarrassed about your groceries.

Not That You Should Compare Your Life To Mine....

....but Glitterati has been having wayyyyyyyyyyy too much fun as of late.

There are times when I wish I could still be all gossssssssssipy boooooozehound on this site and dish on all the delicious details, but.....those days are gone.

Rest assured, however, that fun is being had. Ohhhhh is it ever.

I think in Glitterati Land, the rate of funness is directly proportional to the usage of excess letters in normal words.

Fuunnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn.

Der Austausch: Part I, "I Think We're Drunk!"

The summer before my senior year of high school, I studied abroad in a small village in central Germany. It was my first time being truly away from home (unless you count the devastating week my cruel parents sent me to music camp when I was eleven) and it was my first time in a foreign country. The German I'd learned the previous three years in high school seemed woefully inadequate to prepare me for spending a month living with a German family, and for the first two days I don't think I spoke at all.

FRAU: (In German) What do you think of our country so far?
ME: (silently, frantically, in my mind) Ummm..ummm..konnen Sie...ummm....bitte....mochten Sie etwas wie Hackfleisch? (Translation: Could you...please....would you like something like ground beef?)

After a short while, however, it became clear that my German Vater and Schwester both spoke fluent English and were eager for practice. Our days became a game of them asking me questions in English and pushing me to answer in German. They were endlessly kind and patient, incorporating me into their family life and feeding me as though I were a starving child. Mutter was convinced that I was far too skinny, and she made it her mission to fatten me up. I think I ate about six hearty meals a day while I was there.

There were multiple incidents that occurred on that trip that I will be describing over the course of the next couple of posts. The first: "I Think We're Drunk!"



There were a handful of other American students from my high school scattered about the neighboring villages also residing with other German families. One afternoon, all of our German host siblings had some sort of colloquiem to attend after school, and so all of us Americans sequestered ourselves one host family's house.

The girl staying there was a good friend of mine, and she was fortunate enough to have landed not only a spacious room with its own bathroom and balcony, but (gasp) a small refrigerator stocked to the brim with German beer.

"They said it's for me!" she said, proudly. At this point in my life, my experiences with alcohol were limited to the small sips my parents allowed me from their own beverages from time to time, and I don't think anyone else was all that steeped in knowledge about it either. All we knew is that we were in a country where our tender ages still made us legal to imbibe, we had a refrigerator full of beer and no adult supervision. It was time.

We cracked open the cans and invented our own games with a deck of cards (this being long before any of us would learn the classic drinking games; Asshole, Kings, Circle of Death, etc.) We opened a second round. And a third. I felt nothing. I was embarrassed to admit it.

Everyone seemed a little giddier, a little louder, a little more red-in-the-face. I was mortified. Maybe alcohol had no effect on me! This could either be very good or very bad. Perhaps I would go through life drinking whatever I pleased and never getting drunk. Maybe I was immune. Or maybe, worse, it was all about to creep up on me and I would be humiliatingly flat on my back in seconds and everyone would know that I'd never drank before. Because nearly everything at this age was humiliating, this experience was quickly filling me with dread.

A fourth round was opened. And then one of the Americans opened her mouth: "I am wasted!" she said. A quick vote of concurrence. Doomed, I was doomed. I felt nothing.

Or did I? As soon as she said it, I felt the giddiness of so much giggling rush to my head. It was exceedingly warm in the room. Maybe these were the signs. I did feel a bit of a sway coming on.

At that moment, my friend's host sister poked her head into the room.

"Hallo! We are home now! Are you having a good time?" she said. There was no frantic move to conceal the cans, we all just simply watched as she swung the door open wider to reveal that she was standing in the hallway with some of our other host siblings. And they looked at us. And they started laughing.

"You are drinking the beer?" she said, covering her mouth to attempt to hide her laughter. "How do you like it?"

"'S-awesome!" one of my friends slurred. This provoked another round of giggles from the Germans. (Yes- Germans giggle.)

"Wasso funny?" another beer-drinker demanded, nearly knocking over a pyramid of spent beer cans.

"The beer is piss-water," the Germans crowed.

"'S not so bad!" we insisted.

"No, no!" my friend's host sister said. "They mean that it is, ....here, look!" She pointed to a tiny line of script on the side of one of the cans.

Alkoholfrei.

Awkwardly, we gathered up our decks of cards and quietly disposed of the cans of Alkoholfrei beer. We would not speak of this incident again.

NOLA Presentation

On top of gearing up this week to write a syllabus with Lee for a class we're teaching next month (NEXT MONTH. AS IN- "MAY." WTH.) and scrambling to do my taxes (how did I fall so behind on that this year?) I'm also writing two articles about New Orleans for submission and putting together a presentation to give in Annapolis on the 25th about the work we did.

One of the group members sent around this video which quite informatively explains a day-by-day time line of Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent levee break. Although it might skirt some controversial issues, it's done by National Geographic and gives a pretty unbiased account.

Busy, busy, busy. Also got a job lead. Things are feeling good.

Also, I asked Josh for another funny Tumblr to rival Michael Buble Being Stalked By A Velociraptor (bee-tee-dubs, I was at the gym this morning and almost fell off the treadmill whilst sprinting as his song "Just Haven't Met You Yet" came on VH1 and I kept mentally inserting the snout of aforementioned velociraptor into each frame), and he sent me this. Ever so often, Josh and I have a distinct disconnect between what we find funny.

**ADDENDUM**
Josh's reply:
Fine, fine oh Trivia Lady - I will do my best to not disappoint you further with links not as funny as Michael Buble being stalked by Raptors...if I should come across a blog about Harry Connick Jr being pursued by rabid kittens or collages of David Hasselhof+ Buddist Temples+Ramen noodles I will forward them tout suite.

**ADDENDUM NUMBER 2**
I believe Josh wins this round.

Michael Buble Stalked by Velociraptor

Was in need of a good laugh today, and then Josh sent me this. I couldn't even begin to tell you why it's hilarious; it. just. is.

That is some excellent PhotoShop.

In other news: I will soon be acquiring "1 Dead in Attic" which was recommended to me by several New Orleanders (is that the correct word? Who cares? It's Friday.) to supplement my understanding of post-Katrina NOLA.

In other news: went to see Ben Folds on Wednesday night (4th time I've seen him live), and he was just as phenomenal a performer in 2010 as he was in 2001, the first time I saw him. He played some ancient Ben Folds Five ("Army," "Brick," and "Kate," to name a few) as well as some more current songs reflective of pop culture. I love the collaboration of Nick Hornby and Ben Folds. Dreamy. AND, he did Chat Roulette live on-stage during his performance. I didn't know anything about Chat Roulette, and now most of what I know is that it's questionable at best and downright disgusting at worst. Still, hilarious.

Happy Friday.