I’m about to redefine the word “dork” for you, so ya’ll better sit down for this one. Because I’m sure you were all standing up at your computer to begin with.
Here we go: I love the grocery store. And I don’t mean that I just have a generally positive attitude towards food providing establishments, I mean full out I’m-naming-my-kid-Harris-Teeter-or-maybe-Food-Lion LOVE the dang place. Is that a weird place to love? From what I can gather, when it comes to which side of the adoration spectrum one’s feelings of the grocery store fall on, I think most people go all Sweden on the place and stay pretty neutral. But that’s not the case for me. I have such a strong ardency for the grocery store, there’s a good chance I’m going to arrange the furniture in my future house into aisles and hang numbered signs in between to let you know what is down each aisle (e.g. “Aisle 1 – Couch, End tables, Coasters;” “Aisle 2 – Coffee table, Television, Decorative Shrubbery;” “Aisle 3 - Ice Cream” etc.) (Yes, there will be an entire grocery-sized aisle for ice cream.)
And while you may think this is just another random quirk of mine, there’s actually a very good story behind it. Well, there’s a story at least. The “very good” part, I’m sure, is just in my head.
When I was in school at Indiana, I went a little crazy. There were many reasons for this, but I’ll just list a couple. First of all, neither I, nor anyone else I was close to on campus had a car, so my world was suddenly reduced to about a 3 mile radius, and that pathetic distance was only made possible thanks to the campus bus system.
Let me stop right there for a minute. Now that I have had more than enough experience with public transportation, I can honestly say that if you were to tell me that I alone could single-handedly save the ENTIRE environment by riding the bus instead of driving my own private car, I’d send my condolences to the environment (probably with a hallmark card and a balloon or something), tell it to take it like a man, and drive off into the sunset with my hands glued to the steering wheel of my exhaust-spewing car and never look back. Then I’d spend hours at a time running over a bunch free-range chicken, just because I could.
Anyway.
Second, I lived in a windowless 5’x8’ practice room (a.k.a. solitary confinement) for about 4 hours a day, and almost every other hour of the day was spent in some other type of music class whether it was theory, lessons, master classes, or ensemble practice. Plus, with so little free time and no “regular” classes, my entire social circle consisted of other music majors who were in the same classes and groups as me. My world was very small, very narrow, and very intense. It wasn’t too bad at first – like when I was at Interlochen, and the clarinet was in my mouth for 9 hours a day, every day, for 8 weeks. But that was the catch – it was only 8 weeks. I can do anything when I know it’s only temporary. So after about the 3rd or 4th month at IU, I started to realize that I was on the road to making this my life. Now I love(d) music, so I never understood why that petrified me so much – I still don’t, really – but with so many other personal things going on, with the insane amount of pressure I was always putting on myself, and with the overwhelming feeling of failure that came along with the inability to meet my own insane expectations, it was just too much to handle. And when you being to fantasize about stabbing yourself with your own reed knife, it stops being fun.
Plus, you could always tell which practice rooms I had been in by the dents in the walls from where I had picked up the metal music stands and thrown them hammer-throw-style across the room.
So I needed an escape back then. And, weirdly enough, I found it in the grocery store.
I let myself go there every Friday after classes were over, and I only went once a week because 1) it was more than a 20 minute bus ride away, 2) I never had much money or room in my mini-fridge for groceries anyway, and 3) I needed food to survive, so I could justify taking the time for at least one trip a week. And, boy, I lived for those trips. The grocery store became my sole link to the real world – after all, everyone shops for food - and for just a little while, I was a regular person with a regular life like everyone else there. I would spend literally hours and hours at the grocery store, just strolling up and down every single aisle over and over and over again, diligently soaking in every last foodstuff on the shelves, and idly pushing my cart filled with the only 5 or 6 items I actually went there for. I’d stare at all the other shoppers there with me, and I’d secretly pretend that I was one of them, that I too was living a non-music filled life, that I was simply picking up the weekly groceries for my non-music family who was waiting for me at our non-music home. It was magical in a way that nothing else was, because it was the only normal thing I had, and I so desperately needed something normal then. It was the only thing in my life that wasn’t making my bottom lip bleed, yelling at me for being unable to perfect that one stupid run, or giving me some of the weirdest health problems I’ve ever had. Visiting the grocery store was the only free, non-self-destructive thing that relaxed me back then, and for that, it became my oasis.
I honestly don’t know what purpose this story serves. I don’t have any point to make here or any moral of the story to wrap it up nice and neatly. But I did go to the grocery store today, as I often do, and I realized that even after all these years, those warm, fuzzy feelings and comforting memories I have for the place have stayed with me. And they probably always will.
Just wanted to share.
24 June 2009
[Imported] The Other Happiest Place on Earth
[Imported] This and that
So I haven’t really been following along with my post-pictures-of-my-continuously-clean-room plan, have I? I don’t have any excuses for it – no good excuses, anyway – but if it's any consolation, my room is clean. Not under the bed, as was the next part of my project, but my mom decided to put the house on the market, which meant I had to switch gears and tidy up all of the actually visible areas of the house and keep them tidy, so help me God. So while I didn’t stick to my cleaning schedule, I’ve pretty much done 90% of the other places that were on the agenda at some point anyway.
Yadda yadda yadda, that was all really boring.
Good news! I’m dating! And not just in my head! There is an actual, in-the-flesh MAN involved! Cue that heavenly choir. We actually met back in August on that awesome roller coaster trip, and we’ve been casually flirting and honesty-box-messaging online like nauseating high school crushes ever since. Isn’t that adorable?! Don’t bother answering, because the answer is Yes. Yes, it is. Say awwww. Also, he’s super involved in the church, and do you have ANY idea how hard to find guy who is obsessively into both roller coasters and Jesus? PRETTY. DURN. HARD.
The only somewhat less-than-perfect part is that he lives in Virginia and, you know...I don’t. But it’s only a 3-hour drive, which is totally doable. He’s made the trip here once already, and I’m going up there this weekend. (Pardon me while I do a little fancy skip real quick. (la tee daaaahhh!)) And while the distance isn’t the greatest thing in the world, I like to think there’s a bit of an upside in that with our fewer in-person rendezvous, it will take him SO much longer to become completely sick of me, and would you look at me all looking at the positive side of things? It’s like I’m growing or something.
Anyway, that might be all you hear about it on here, because 1) I learned long ago that - for me - it's best not to talk about people (good or bad) who actually read my blog and 2) I find that I can only publicly gush my girly giggles so much before I start wanting to throw kittens or don some brass knuckles or something – anything to offset the acknowledgment of my mushy, feminine, saccharin side. Which I don’t actually have. Nope. Not at all. I don’t do that girly stuff.
(Tee-hee)
(Giggle giggle)
(^_^)
(<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3<3)
-----
Oh, and also, I do have a job now. So, you know...money. That's really all I have to say about the subject for the time being.
[Imported] Task One - Accomplished
Yes, I did it.
Before:
After:
My closet does not have the most efficient floor space for things like shoes, which is why they're still a bit strewn about, but I did the best I could. Also, no, I did not just take the pile of stuff on the top shelf and place it in a basket on the top shelf. All items in said basket are neatly folded and stacked on top of each other in an orderly fashion. Kind of orderly, anyway.
And for this week's project:
I'm also gonna do the area beneath my dresser this week, too.
[Imported] Just trying to keep things clean
I learned a valuable lesson today, and I would now like to share with you my new found knowledge. Pay close attention, because it's incredibly important for one's pride and modesty:
If you decide to wear a skirt one day, please pay attention to the weather beforehand, specifically wind speed.
Oh man, I was so excited today. I don't remember the last time I wore a skirt. It's been MONTHS. But the forecast called for a high of 67o, and that was all I needed to hear to convince me to allow my inner thighs rest from the weary, suppressive world of those suffocating things called pants.
And boy, did they get themselves quite a healthy breeze today. More than they had bargained for, I'm sure.
Now, luckily I was able to keep my skirt down for the most part, but I spent most of my walks to and from classes holding my skirt bunched up tight around my legs, which TOTALLY ruined the whole cuteness factor. Once in a while, I'd relax my grip as the wind seemed to calm down, but within seconds, another gust would come from wherever gusts come from, and I'd just barely wrangle the flying fabric in time to prevent any free peep shows for my 25,000 fellow peers. The thing that worried me most, though, was that I wasn't even wearing cute underwear. No, they were more like the Dang-when-was-the-last-time-I-did-laundry, Oh-well-these-will-have-to-do, Good-thing-no-one-will-see-them variety.
I mean, like I said, I successfully avoided any accidental exposures (not that there weren't a few terrifying close calls...), but oh how sad I am that my skirt could not be enjoyed to its fullest potential. Too busy keeping my lady parts covered.
Ahh well. Spring will be here soon, bringing along with it a myriad of days (wind-free days, even!) on which I will be able to wear skirts sans the Marilyn Monroe impressions.
And speaking of laundry (a couple of paragraphs ago, but stick with me) and other things that I've been meaning to do, please feel free to gasp in horror at the following picture:
This is my closet. My shamefully messy (though small, which is a decent excuse, I think) closet. The spaces beneath my bed and dresser look similarly terrifying, and I've been meaning to clean them out and organize them for mon- uh, well, let's just say a really long time. I always thought of myself as a generally rather self-disciplined person, in so far as I have great patience, I don't usually succumb to the allure of instant gratification, and I tend to work hard for things I genuinely I want and/or care about. But then I think of all the areas in my life I absolutely suck at getting myself together on - organization, studying, responding to e-mails, blogging on a regular basis - and then I scoff (yes, scoff I say!) at whatever pride I momentarily had in my ability to make myself do responsible things.
So! Why am I showing you a picture of my closet? Because I'm recruiting you, The Internet, to help me clean it. Not literally - I have every physical ability to get the job done - I just need the motivation. All you have to do is make sure that in one week's time, I post a picture of my clean closet on here for all to admire and applaud me for. And then I'll post a photo of the space under my bed that week, and the process will repeat. Only at the end of that week, I must show both a picture of a tidy under-the-bed area AND the closet. Otherwise, that thing will be right back to the mess it's in now. This will continue until I've got all the living spaces that I use neat, tidy, and under control; and I figure that maybe by the end of this little clean up experiment, I'll be SO used to keeping things clean (thanks to all ya'lls keeping me accountable and everything) that it will have formed into a habit by then, and I will rid myself of my slovenliness once and for all.
You all are welcome to join me and fight whatever area of your life you feel yourself to be a total loser in. After all, I didn't come up with this idea on my own. I stole it from Life in a Shoe who also recruited all her willing readers.
Just remember: one week. Gotta be done by next Wednesday.
Good luck. I know I'll need it.
P.S. Don't worry about me not living up to my end of the bargain. I've got a pretty sizable guilt complex, so as long as I've got at least one person expecting a clean closet of me in seven days, it'll get done. Otherwise, I'll feel so terrible over how deeply I'm sure I betrayed that person, how utterly disappointed they must be in me, oh-why-do-I-always-hurt-the-ones-I-love-boo-hoo-hoo that I won't be able to sleep until it is done. Yeah, it's pretty handy complex to have. I enjoy it. Good times.
[Imported] MMVIII
I've been trying to write a 2008 Year in Review entry for the last week, and have had a hard time getting beyond this first sentence. It was a…difficult year – yeah, that seems to be an apt word, 'difficult' – but it certainly wasn't the worst. No, that honor is still held by 2004, and short of a black hole swallowing the sun leaving all of us on Earth to die a slow, freezing death in any given future year, that is a title that I fully expect (and pray, pray, PRAY) 2004 to retain for a long, long, LOOOONG time.
I guess I'll start with January, despite it being a terrible start to the year.
January: I moved to Florida on a whim. I allow myself to act upon one whim a year – obviously, I used this one pretty quickly – and given that the whim I acted upon the previous year led me to making out with a Moroccan looking for citizenship, and given that this particular whim of 2008 failed miserably, I think I might reduce my moments of spontaneity to once a decade. Maybe I'll choose my moments a bit more carefully then.
Anyway – Florida. I think it was a move made more out of desperation than reason, because even going into it, I had a feeling it wasn't going to go well. I was just that unwilling to return to school, and I would have taken any excuse not to go back at that time. Nevertheless, on the surface, it seemed like a decent idea: I was still listed as a seasonal employee at Disney, and I knew people personally who had returned to work for a week here, a week there; and while I knew Splash Mountain was down for refurbishment, I still had hope that I could either be stationed outside the attraction with the other Cast Members telling guests that the ride was indeed closed for the season, or that I could be crossed trained on Big Thunder Mountain. In my defense, I didn't officially decide to move down there until I talked to some ill-informed lady in Casting who said, "Oh, yeah, sure! One of those options will most definitely pan out for you. You'll be working within a week once you move down here." I'm just going to cut the story short and say that, duh, it didn't work out – the soonest I could have been stationed anywhere was April, and I did not like the people I was living with down there enough to wait that long. Their sex was too loud. Ew.
February-April: I don't remember much about these months, I was probably too consumed with my Floridian failure, boohoohoo. My father finished up his second government-sponsored vacation, as I like to call it. I had to break my silent treatment to him once he moved back in with his mother, because it was too hard to figure out how to visit her without seeing him. Eh, I got a couple hundred dollars out of the deal, and I really have no problem with that being my motivation. Probably not the most Christian attitude to have, but I'm working on it. Or rather, God is working on me. I'm just being stubborn.
Sorry God. :/
May: The official start of theme park season! And what a season it was. I started off by meeting up with one of my fellow "Splash Trash" friends from Disney. He lives in Maine, but he was visiting his family in Virginia, so we met up to do Six Flags America in Maryland and Kings Dominion in VA. A week or two later, I went to Pennsylvania with my mom and aunt to claim my hard-earn prize of being one of the first people to ride the brand new roller coaster at Hersheypark – Fahrenheit. As you may know, it didn't go exactly as planned, but it was still a fantastic trip.
June: Okay, wow, I really don't remember any single thing about June. I had to go digging through past blog entries to figure it out, which is a very dangerous thing because once I see how bad my writing is from my fresh perspective, I get very delete-happy. But to recap June: I nearly drowned in my living room and my laptop still looked like this. That's pretty much it.
Oh, and I just noticed that I took another trip to Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens with my former neighbor, her husband, and brother. I hadn't forgotten that trip; I just could have sworn that it was in July. The date on the pictures, however, tell me otherwise. It was a good trip, but I did learn something: while sharing the PB&J-making responsibility for our lunches, I learned that I have a very different opinion of what amount "a lot of peanut butter" actually is. (My opinion: if there is any peanut butter remaining in the jar after two sandwiches, you have not used enough. Everyone else's opinion: "Good God, woman." )
July: Man, what a great month to travel, right? What with those record-setting gas prices? My mom and I took a 10-day, 2,400 mile whirlwind trip filled with family and friends (and Six Flags Great America, w00t) and gas-guzzling - right when gas reached its peak. I swear, the day we returned, gas dropped 15 cents. Oh, the timing we have. This is the only post I have semi-documenting this trip, though prepared to be underwhelmed with the amount of recapping I do. But you can at least see our whole trip mapped out here.<
August: Theme Park Review trip. BEST. TRIP. EVER. 10 parks, 6 days, one terrifyingly exhausting drive home.
September: School. Eye roll.
October: I was not done with my theme parking for the year, hohhhh no. I had a perfectly good 6-day weekend (thank you, Tuesday-and-Thursday-only classes) for fall break and I was not about to waste it. Plus, I had a perfectly good Six Flags season pass ticket, due to the three other SF parks I had done earlier in the year; so I figured it was the perfect time to go to Six Flags over Georgia, especially since there were four credits I'd yet to conquer. And since my dad (ugh) only lived 2.5 hours away from that park and only 1.5 hours away from Dollywood, I stayed with him on the condition that he actually take me to Dollywood. Which he did, like the good daddy he buys himself to be. The parks? Awesome. I did SFoG alone, but that's never stopped me from having fun before. And we took two of my cousins to Dollywood with us, so that definitely helped make my dad more bearable. But, I unfortunately learn that not even theme parks are worth spending the night with my dad, not anymore. It was awkward, annoying, and truly just a gut-wrenching, soul-selling experience. I think I'll keep any future visits with my dad under 24 hours, thank you very much.
November: Thanksgiving at Disney World and Universal Orlando Resort. You can read the not-yet-finished trip report here. This trip ties with the TPR trip for being Best Moment of 2008. On one hand, I made a ton of friends on the TPR trip, got lots of exclusive ride time, shared a room with an Oscar winner, and nearly died when we rode a roller coaster non-stop in a lightning storm for an hour. On the other hand, Disney is the Happiest Place on Earth, I finally got to see all the beautiful Christmas lights in person, and the trip was almost entirely free, save for gas. I don't know how I could possibly choose between the two.
December: The year ended about as well as it began. I failed my history class, I watched my grandpa fall into the Christmas tree after drinking all morning, and then I was present for the poorly-planned intervention with him that failed miserably that night. There was a lot of yelling, a lot of crying, and a lot of my grandpa being an absolute jackass. There's 20+ years worth of guilt behind my grandpa's drinking and there's 20+ years of repressed anger in my family toward my grandpa over the thing that causes his guilt. It ended in a mess, our Christmas, and I can only hope that 2009 is the year in which the pieces will be picked up.
All in all, 2008 was as difficult as it was fun. I should have graduated this year, and I never regretted leaving my music major behind once until this year when I saw all my clarinet friends from Indiana graduate and get jobs with orchestras, bands, ensembles, etc. I don't think I was cut out for that world, looking back at it, but there's still a part of me that wishes I had been. I gave up a piece of myself when I left that practice room building for the last time, and I think I will mourn that loss for the rest of my life.
I've been flaky this year – these past few years, really – and that's not me at all. It's not that I can't commit to anything, it's just that I can't make up my mind on what to commit to. I was certain before with music, I knew what I wanted to do with my life, and that path landed me in the hospital. My health - physical and mental - was at stake, but that didn't make the decision to leave any easier. So I've been second guessing myself ever since, terrified of finally choosing something for fear that I'll choose wrong again. And now that I have finally chosen something, all these decisions have to be made surrounding it – do I stay in the free school for four and a half more years despite the fact that I'm utterly burned out with all these gen-ed classes they want me to take? Or do I take out $30,000 more in loans for another school just so I can save two and a half years of my time and sanity by not needing those extra, non-related classes? It's so much to consider, and I'm just so tired of it all. I almost didn't go to my first day of classes today, because no matter which previously mentioned option I choose, this semester won't be a benefit for me in either case. I decided to go at the last minute, because the extra money in my bank account is a nice cushion until I get a job. Plus, I had nothing better to do. Not exactly the ideal motivation, I suppose, but something had to make the decision for me.
But I digress. That last part didn't have much to do with 2008. But it at least leads me to now, to 2009. And I do have hope for this year – hope that is entirely unrelated to Barack Obama, fyi. Because at some point, progress toward my degree will resume, one way or another, at one school or another; and perhaps that light at the end of the tunnel will start to emerge once I stop spinning my wheels as I have been doing for some time now.
By the way – light at the end of the tunnel? Spinning my wheels? How clichéd am I? Gag.
P.S. I think I'm falling.
