The Time I Broke My Arm

            There are a couple of “staples” I tell in social settings (bars, parties, dates, random encounters because I’m awful at small talk), and the one I think I’ve been using the longest is the story of how I broke my arm when I was seventeen. Now, there’s nothing spectacular about how I broke my arm, but the story itself is somewhat entertaining when I tell it.

So this story actually starts with my grandfather. My grandpa, long before I was born, was the right combination of smart and lucky, and by virtue of those two things ended up retiring as one of many vice presidents at his company, whose primary business is government contracting for aerospace and defense projects. We like to say Papa was a rocket scientist, but he was always more of a businessman, which is good for us because businessmen have better stock options than engineers. So the best presents on our birthdays and Christmas have always come from my grandpa. It also happened to be that for most of my childhood, my grandpa split his time between Colorado and Florida, and he usually left for Florida around September, when my brother’s birthday is.

The year I was seventeen, we celebrated my brother’s birthday with my grandpa on a Monday, even though Paul’s birthday was on that Friday, so that he could give Paul his present in person. That year, RipSticks were the new big thing, and since you probably don’t remember what that is, let me explain it. Some moron somewhere said “You know skateboards and how the kids just eat that shit up? Well, I don’t think the skateboarding industry has hospitalized enough of our youth, so we better take two of the wheels off and put a joint in the middle so it’s extra unstable. They’ll love that!” I think they stopped just short of marketing the damn things as “death on wheels, because skateboarding wasn’t dangerous enough as it is.” And that’s what my grandpa got my brother for his birthday that year.

Now, Paul is one of those kids who, despite not being particularly active, can take one look at anything that might be considered a vehicle, even in the loosest sense of the word, and make it look easy and awesome on his first try. So when he got that RipStick, within five minutes he was swooping up and down our driveway like it was easier than walking, and significantly cooler looking.

So me being me (read: competitive and continually over estimating my own coordination), I had to try it. That Friday, so Paul’s birthday, I got home from school and was in such a good mood, I decided today was the day I was going to teach myself to ride that stupid RipStick. I parked the car, waved to my mother who was in the process of cleaning up a small garage sale, grabbed the RipStick, and went on my merry way. Of course, seeing me grab The World’s Worst “Toy” Ever, my mom insisted I wear a helmet, which might have made the difference between me writing this and me slurring that I want more applesauce because I spilled the first cup down my bib. If I’d actually belted the helmet, I probably also wouldn’t have spent my senior year being addressed as “Frankenstein-ella” by my dad (he’s not super creative).

So I got up on the RipStick, helmet jammed on my head and unbuckled because I’m stupid like that, and quickly became frustrated by my inability to get it going. I’m sure there’s a convoluted explanation about the physics that make this thing go, but basically, it works like this: there are two foot sized platforms with a wheel at each end, and a lubed up pole in the middle that allows the platforms to twist in opposite directions. By making a swiveling motion with your hips, the dumb thing moves in a generally forward direction. Or if you’re me, you make two swivels and fall off. After a couple tries, I managed to work my way out of the safety of our very flat cul-de-sac, and onto our very steep main street. I also figured out, almost simultaneously, that it is way easier to stay on top of a RipStick when you’re trucking down a hill.

There were about two seconds of “Hey, cool, I did it!” before I realized that at the end of our street, which was very quickly approaching, was a curb, and hitting it would launch me into hip-high grass that I knew concealed at least one large rock and probably a couple snakes. I know the snakes don’t sound like a big deal, but they are and I’ll explain that later. But I realized that really my only option was to “abort mission” as quickly as possible, and that meant jumping off. Now, I might have mentioned that I have next to no coordination, so somehow by jumping off to my left, I managed to pirouette mid air and land facing the opposite direction on the right side of my body.

I remember jumping, I don’t remember the twist, but the next – and very vivid – memory is of two distinct bounces. The first was the visor of my helmet hitting the pavement and then popping off my head, and then the next and less forceful bounce of my face meeting pavement with more enthusiasm than I had really anticipated. I think I blacked out for a moment, but I propped myself up and immediately checked my teeth and my lips. Last time I crashed that hard on a bike, the only damage had been a chipped baby tooth and a fat lips. This tells you exactly how physically inactive I am, that the last time I’d physically injured myself before this, I still had my baby teeth. Satisfied that my mouth was intact, I got back up and began collecting my scattered things – RipStick, helmet, and sunglasses. I knew almost immediately that my arm was a little messed up, because I couldn’t carry the RipStick with that arm, and instead had to cradle it against my body with my arms sticking out like I was a retarded T-Rex. I felt a little banged up, but at this point I figured I just needed to ice my elbow so that the feeling would come back, lay down, and pretend nothing ever happened.

The way I remember it, I scooped everything up, got to our driveway, and calmly called, “Hey Mom?”

The way my mom remembers it, I hobbled up to the middle of our cul-de-sac and shouted, “MOM!” in such a pathetic voice that all her maternal instincts were instantly thrown into high gear. She ran out to the driveway, worried to begin with, and what should she see but her seventeen year old daughter who can barely manage stairs without personal injury, limping forward with an arm that already looks “wrong” and blood pouring down her face “like Carrie, but worse” and sheet white to boot. I didn’t realize it, but that second bounce had scraped an abrasion all the way from my right eyebrow to almost my hairline, leaving a giant, raw, bleeding gash that you could actually see my skull through.

So mommy scoops me up in a whirlwind of matronly concern, and plops me at the kitchen table. As luck would have it, my registered nurse of a grandma had passed away earlier that year, and my mom had been going through all the professional grade medical supplies left over, looking for what was worth saving. And it all happened to be on the kitchen table. Like even in death, my grandma saw me grabbing that RipStick and said, “This isn’t going to end well.” So mom stuck a giant wad of gauze to my forehead, slammed some ice on my elbow, and said “We’re going to the emergency room. Now.”

I weakly protested, even as the last bit of shock was wearing off. I also, reportedly, said I felt really dehydrated right before I passed out for a second time on the walk to the car.

My mom took one look at the gushing wound on my head and immediately knew she wanted a plastic surgeon stitching it up, and for that we needed to go to the hospital 30 minutes away instead of the urgent care center 15 minutes away. Longest 30 minutes of my life. We didn’t know it at the time, but I had managed to crack the end of my elbow, and bones bleed. So as time passed, a very short amount of time, mind you, the space around my elbow filled up with blood from the greenstick fracture, and that blood started pressing on the break, which made it hurt more. The pain quickly escalated, like in a matter of minutes, from “Ow, that’s starting to hurt,” to me sobbing hysterically and clutching my arm, convinced that it was going to fall off. Also, to make me extra beautiful in this time of hardship, I’d already soaked through the gauze on my head. So when we rolled up to the ER, my face was mostly just a puffy mess of blood and snot that my mom was occasionally wiping from my face so I wouldn’t swallow it in the middle of my open mouthed sobbing. I remember, very distinctly, sitting across from a Mexican couple holding a baby that couldn’t have been more than 9 months old and clearly on the edge of pneumonia-induced death, and glaring at the baby because I didn’t want it getting admitted before me. I think they actually admitted me first not because I was more serious, but I was by far being the bigger baby.

Anyway, they admit me, clean up my face enough that I didn’t look like a snotty crypt keeper, pumped me full of drugs, and then left me there for an hour and a half. Someone had just had a heart attack, and no one was free to take care of me, but in my vicodin induced slumber, I didn’t mind so much. An hour and a half later, they gave me another dose and then started running tests. Let me tell you, you will never sleep better than on a hospital gurney pumped full of opiates. It was great. It was so great, I fell asleep in the MRI machine. However, when they woke me up to go get me x-rayed, that’s when shit got real.

I think by now I’ve established that I have a very low threshold for pain. I don’t know if you’ve ever broken your elbow (not your arm, there’s a distinction here), but the elbow is responsible for two main motions. Bending your arm (obviously), and also turning your arm over. You might think that second one is the responsibility of your wrist, and it very well could be a cooperative venture between the two joints, but surprisingly, when you’ve cracked the end of your ulna like a cheap fortune cookie, to take xrays of it there is significantly more twisting than bending happening, and IT HURTS LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER. By this time, the drugs have worn off enough that I appear to be capable of being responsible for moving my arm. They told me to turn my arm, and I think my response was something along the lines of “Make me.” So they did.

It took two nurses and my mother holding me down to get those x-rays because I started throwing punches.

They also had to shut the door despite the intense heat an x-ray machine will generate in a short amount of time because I was screaming so loud that children in the lobby could hear me, and started screaming too.

That’s really the climax of the story, because after that they were able to determine there was a hairline fracture on the end of my arm bone and it was a simple matter to make a brace for me and stick me in a sling. Yes, you read that right, I only needed a brace, not a cast. In fact, the break was so small that all of the pain was coming from the swelling, and the best way to get my bone to reabsorb the blood was to continue using it. I milked the “broken arm thing” for about a week longer than the doctor told me to, though.

There was also a plastic surgeon who was kind enough to suture up my face with no less than 28 individual stitches in three layers of skin. I still sport a scar from the gash that makes my right eyebrow grow in wonky, and there’s a pattern of freckles across my forehead where the abrasion was. If you catch me without make-up one day, I’ll show you, since by now they really have faded so much that you can feel them better than you can see them.

Also, this is why I never EVER get near anything with fewer wheels than God intended.

There is absolutely no reason I should like this music video as much as I do

Ok, this is me NOT going to the gym like a said I would this morning and instead updating my blog again like I said I was trying to get better at. So I'm kinda 1 for 2 right now.

Anyway, this is the video I'm talking about:

Now, if you know me (and if you're reading this, you probably do), you know I'm what you might call "quirky" if you're being nice, a "hipster" if you're ignoring the distinction that I really genuinely like stupid and banal shit as a form of escapism instead of an ironic statement about some political crap, or an "elitist" if you're being honest. I mean, cause I totally am. I am arrogant as all fuck (God, I hope my mom doesn't read this - I swear too much). If you like something, and it doesn't sound like something I would like even if you have previously introduced me to stuff I'm now crazy about, my reaction will range from polite avoidance to blatant "NO. DO NOT WANT." My friends Oliver and Claire might have noticed this, cause whenever I'm over and they suggest we watch something I'm not sure I like, I always suggest something safer. They play along with my rigidity nicely, but I'm sure they notice.

But Ex Boyfriend got the worst of this. He was the one who showed me this two minute and fifty-six second video in the first place, and do you know how long it took him? MONTHS. Seriously, less than three minutes, and I dug my heels in so much, that in the end he had to come back to Colorado and physically restrain me in front of a computer before I would watch it. Now, in my defense, I've learned by now that when Ex Boyfriend prefaces something with "You have to see this, it's soooo funny," it's either gruesome, like the story about a bunny getting shoved through a chain link fence he told me over my screams of horror once, or it's stupid like a gif of a cat hitting a dog with a baseball bat. So by this past summer, at which point we've known each other for 6 years, dated for 4, since split so I have to deal with as much of his crazy as I want to (we remain friends, which is why I can say this and also not be afraid of posting it on my facebook), I know that Ex Boyfriend's ratio of things I'll like to things I won't like on his suggestion list is abysmal. I think the odds of him showing me something I'll like on the first time around are roughly the same as winning small change in the lotto. Like, it'll happen, but not with enough frequency for it really to be worth my time. Anyway, he and my brother ended up sitting on me on the couch so I couldn't get away while they showed me Lonely Island Music Videos. And this one almost made me pee my pants.

Really, I should not like this video. I don't find mainstream humor funny at all. You can name every "comedy" movie out there, and I can think of one that I like: Tropic Thunder (because of Tom Cruise). Every other funny movie I like is mixed with some other genre. So a couple of SNL comedians shouldn't tickle my fancy. Besides, I can't remember the last time I found SNL funny. And while I'll admit that I do have some pretty pedestrian likes in music (I claim to balance it out with my love of 1940s jazz), I'm not a big fan of whatever Akon does. There are a couple songs he's done with other artists that I have on my workout playlist (fuuuuuuuuuuu I'm supposed to be at the gym), but as a general rule, I avoid him and his genre. And most of all, I do not like rap. Or at least I didn't when I first heard this song. Now, because I've discovered my love of performance/slam poetry, if the lyrics are good and there's a catchy chorus, I can put up with it. But last summer - NOPE. So to recap: don't like the genre of humor, don't like the artists, don't like the genre of music. Shouldn't like the song.

But here's why I do: it's about sex. See, I've previously mentioned that I'm a prude to the nth degree, but I actually have a very liberal opinion of sex. I don't care who's having it, I don't care how much you're having, and as long as I'm even a little fond of you, I don't mind hearing about it from you. Subject for a different post, but I would much rather hear the nitty gritty of your sex life than your religion or politics. So prude only in my own practice, and that's a totally different issue. Sex is, in my opinion, the most powerful of all human social interactions and the most compelling bodily function after food, sleep, and sometimes shelter. And while I acknowledge that sex has the potential to transcend its own logistics (Insert part A into slot B, repeat until sweaty. Satisfaction not guaranteed with every transaction) and become something beautiful (I think the common colloquialism here is "making love"but that just sounds so foofy to me), most of the time it's just going to be sex. Not only is it just going to be sex, it'll probably be awkward, elbowy, "Is that ok?" sex. And despite the fact that most of the sex we have, especially non-committal sex because every lover is different, is going to be bad, or at least mediocre, we keep on pursuing it. That, to me, is funny. It's funny that somehow we have high expectations, that we keep on chasing it, and that we idolize it even in the face of a couple millennia of our own futility. Also, when you totally decontextualize sex, the sweating, groaning, and jerky movements are so awkward that how can you do anything but laugh? 

Also, just how into this song Akon and the Lonely Island boys are just makes me loose it. Facial expressions FTW.  

For being the antithesis of athletic, I sure am competitive

Short post this time around. I'm trying to get better at blogging, and I think one of the things that stands in my way a lot is that I want to have coherent narrative that is FUCKING HILARIOUS before I bother putting it on the internet. Thing is, funny/embarrassing shit happens to me all the time in like 30 second blurbs, so I should share that with all two of you who read this. Actually, I probably shouldn't, as a lot of these hilarious/humiliating things are a little too revealing for my buttoned-up self. Case in point: I got really drunk Monday and woke up in the basement. To put that in context, I sleep upstairs. That's funny, but also mortifying. And now the whole internet knows and I'm seriously considering not posting because of that ONE SENTENCE.

Guys, I think I have some issues that need dealing with.

Anyway, that post I was talking about. So tonight I went with my dad to the DU hockey game, and except for the last ten minutes of the second period, it wasn't an enthralling game. But nevertheless, my dad and I were standing in the middle of the opposing team's section and screaming our heads off at everything. Now, I'm not an athlete in any stretch of the imagination. Unless they've made video games and actual sport (pizza's a vegetable now, folks. It's only a matter of time.), I make the cast of the Big Bang Theory look like the Harlem Globetrotters. But despite lacking enough coordination to get the fork into my mouth 1/3 of the time, I realized tonight that I am hyper competitive about the weirdest things, hockey games I have no control over being the least of them. So I present to you a short list of things I'm unnecessarily competitive about.

Side quests on video games. Playing through Mass Effect right now (shut up, Eric.), and my need to finish them and finish them quickly border on the neurotic. And I say that this is competitive, because I do this in other games, too. On my next play through, and god knows there will be another play through, I'll have to do all the side quests again even though I know how they end, and if I don't do them faster this time, I'll get mad at myself. I watch my play through times on games with multiple plays to beat myself. And bear in mind, this means hours. Hours, folks. Between all my play throughs of the first Dragon Age, I've logged at least enough time to get an extra college degree.

Grades This one at least isn't so weird. Or a least I know I'm not the only one who does it. My academic philosophy is "You don't have to be faster than the bear, just faster than your slowest friend." Which makes no sense since the professor isn't trying to eat the class (again, bears on the blog. GUYS I HAVE WEIRD ISSUES), but it more or less translates into "You don't have to be smarter than the professor, just smarter than most of the class. And since I've got a 4.0, it works. I gauge how much work I put into the class by exactly how smart everyone else seems.

Sex... or at least opportunities to have sex And we're back to the weird shit again. Ok, in case you haven't clued in on this one, I'm more or less insane. So when I've been involved with someone, or even emotionally invested enough to want to be involved with someone, and then it doesn't work out, my competitive psychosis kicks in, and I want to somehow prove I'm better than them by dating as much as possible. I would say sleeping around as much as possible, but I'm like the least physically warm person you've ever met, plus I'm what you'd call "prudish to the point of being a Puritan" so sex never actually enters the equation. But the person I'm pissed at doesn't need to know that, so as long as it looks like I might possibly be more... active? than they are, I'm "winning."

Basically all my hobbies Which are... shit, do I have time for hobbies these days? Let's go with cooking, baking, and being a clever, charming young lady (hey, who said you have to be good at your hobbies?). So whenEVER I see anyone doing any of these things better than me and they aren't older than me, I get a little pissed off. Like I have any control over it. Fortunately, this weird neurosis I'm at least a little better at hiding than the rest of them.

Next time someone asks why I don't want kids, I'm going to point them to this blog and then ask, "What here makes you think I should be responsible for the next generation?"

People Who are Important to Me: My Little Brother Who's a Super Freak

God, I suck at updating this thing. When I started it I was hoping for internet fame like some of the more popular blogs that I follow, but thing is, they update regularly and have a pretty solid following. Also, they have pictures, and mine has none. Oh woe is me, I will never scale the ladder of internet fame!

But anyway, a new post! Huzzah! So the latest installment of blog posts about the people I'm fond of (which started with a story about one of my best friends conning me as a small child) is going to kind of cover my little brother. The thing is, my little brother, who is 17 years old and not normal in any sense of the word, is like most beautiful and important things in this world. Just as you cannot define the truly important things in life like love, justice, and beauty in words without somehow cheapening the deeply personal connotation each individual human carries with them deep against their soul, you cannot define or really describe my little brother and do his person justice. I just reread that, and while it conveys the thought I want, it's really long winded, so let me rephrase. You cannot set a definition to a word without excluding all of the other possible definitions, and while that is perfectly fine for words like "banana" and "platypus," it'll hardly do for those abstract words that we use to describe the really important parts of our lives. And the same principle applies to Paul, my younger brother. So this blog will probably have a series of posts about him, and eventually I might paint a picture of him that comes close to the reality, but for now, just giggle and try not to judge too much.

So I'll tell you about the thighs. Yes, thighs. I really wish I had a picture I could show you of him doing this, but Paul's got some sort of strange sixth sense about when anything with recording capacities turns on. One minute he'll be stalking through the kitchen making velociraptor noises, and then someone will turn on a camera upstairs behind a closed door and he'll stop.

THIGHS! is kind of my brother's battle cry, and weird as it sounds, it evolved from SCKREEE! but before I get there, I have to explain something about Paul. He's brilliant, hands down the smartest person I know, but he is also lazy as all fuck. I don't know if "lazy" is really the right word, but Paul will do absolutely nothing without coercion or bribery unless he "sees the point." And that point almost always has to be entertainment value. If it's not fun, he will not do it unless someone is bribing him, threatening him, or physically moving his body for him. This applies to homework (he surprisingly doesn't have a problem with school) and chores mostly, and while he's figured out how to really dig his heels in about homework, he's developed an evolving defense mechanism to avoid taking out the trash, doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, and etc.

When I was his age, so he would have been in middle school, whenever we asked him to do anything, Paul would pretend to become a velociraptor. He'd get up on his toes and stalk around like the dinosaurs from Jurassic Park, which was pretty amusing, but didn't impede our ability to talk to him. He solved this problem by screaming SCKREEE! every time we opened our mouths, which was funny the first couple of times. Until, of course, we got fed up and just covered his mouth. It's hard to scream like a velociraptor with two hands over your mouth, but he'd try it anyway.

From this dinosaur phase, though, he developed a kind of disturbing way of walking. He'll get up on his toes and skitter around with his legs bowed. If you've ever seen those mating dances that crabs do on their hind legs, it kind of looks like that, but giant. He's a buck ten after eating a Thanksgiving turkey by himself, but he's also pushing 6 feet now, so he looks like this but without a suit because he'd never change out of his pajama pants (that are too short, by the way) if he didn't have to. So picture the Slender Man doing a crab dance with bowed legs, and you've got a pretty good idea of how Paul likes to walk around the house.

I mentioned the pajama pants, right? Remember them, they're important to THIGHS! because jeans just don't cut it for this. Anyway, Paul typically doesn't wear anything beyond pajama pants that don't go past his ankles, which is how this whole thing started. He's damn skinny, almost to the point that we're afraid if he walks past an open window someone will call child services. Not to mention that he's Edward Cullen pale, and hunches like this guy (just showed that picture to Paul, telling him I found a really good picture of him on the internet. He didn't think I was funny), so he looks pretty freaking strange to begin with. The high-water pajama pants are really just icing on the weird ass cake, because he's funny looking all on his own. But he won't get pants that fit, since he hates clothes shopping and inherited my father's deep rooted fear of change. We used to tease him about it, asking if a pipe had burst in his room, and after Japan's tsunami we started asking if he was planning a vacation (my family is made entirely of assholes).

His response, god help us all, became to pull his pajama pants up as high as possible, like Urkel. When that became old hat, he started grabbing his pants at the ankles and pulling them up so high that it looks like he's wearing a flannel diaper.

Picture this: the Slender Man in a flannel diaper and nothing else hunched like Quasimoto and pale as death. Now make him skitter.

If I've done my job right, you just wet yourself with laughter, because that is almost always the reaction he gets when he does this. It is so effective at crippling the entire family with laughter, that he'll squint and whisper "THIGHS" and we break into hysterics just thinking about it. The word has become a threat, so conversations go like this:
"Paul, take out the trash"
"Thighs"
"Grurk (that's the sound of someone choking on their own laughter). Paul, I'm not asking again."
"THIGHS"
"Paul, don't!"
"THIGHS!" and then the pants are up and he's skittering away. I'm laughing just thinking about it.

How to "Ladies Night" at a College Bar

So I officially ended my sophomore year at college this Wednesday, drank myself into projectile vomiting, and then moved everything I own (while still projectile vomiting) out of my on campus apartment the following day. And I couldn't help but notice while I was packing all my knick-knacks between worshiping at the porcelain alter that this year has been super educational. I don't mean boring stuff like "I can now speak rudimentary Russian, including both telling someone I love them and then breaking up with them" or "I now understand how the Banking system works and can derive forward exchange rate quotes" or that kind of crap. No, I'm talking about learning how to be 20 years old. See, in my mind I have not had a particularly normal college experience, which is another way to say that until about April I more or less hated college. I still hate college, but at least now I know how to stave off the loathing for a night. See, in April I finally got close with my roommate, Alexa, who more or less is the driving educational force behind this post. Alexa, though being my age, has her older sister's ID, and can get into campus bars in the area. She managed to find one that I could drink at Wednesday nights through a combination of showing up really fucking early and being a white, skinny, attractive female who clearly does not know the first thing about avoiding being hit on at seedy college bars. So, for your entertainment at my own expense, here are the things I learned about bars at the Wednesday ladies night down the block from our apartment.

1) Even if you're not 21, if you're surrounded by friends who have legitimate IDs, the waitress tends to give you the benefit of the doubt and serve you anyway. Part of the reason we got to the bar so early was because there was a trivia thing Wednesday nights that Alexa loved going to, and we'd always get a pitcher of light beer and drink a little while we googled answered questions. And every single week, everyone would show the waitress their ID, and she'd get to me and I'd give her a line about losing my wallet or forgetting it at home, and she'd say "Nah, don't worry about it." Every single time! And the best part was that I know I was not the youngest person in that bar.

2) For the love of God, do not stick your ass out into the aisle while leaning against the table unless you want to get hit on. Or just have your ass grabbed. To be fair, this was totally the first night I'd ever drank at a bar, I was so excited to be drinking in a bar that I didn't think about it, and I learned my lesson pretty quick. Anyway, we were all sitting at one of the taller tables with bar stools, but my seat got jacked when I went to go get another drink. I didn't think it'd be a big deal, so I just put a leg up on Alexa's chair and leaned against the table. To give you a really solid image, I was like Captain Morgan in skinny jeans. It was seriously less than five minutes before the nastiest, oldest, sleaziest guy in the bar came sauntering up to me, declaring I was the "sexiest girl here." And not knowing any better, I thanked him and then tried to get rid of him for the next 20 minutes because he wouldn't stop repeating how sexy I was and I couldn't stop thanking him because I'm an idiot when I'm drunk. Once I got rid of him, I went back to standing like Captain Morgan's slutty cousin and got my ass grabbed at least twice in the span of 60 seconds. I went home shortly thereafter.


3) When a nasty ass guy is hitting on you, declaring you're lesbian and have a girlfriend in Texas is the worst defense you could think of. I was trying to get rid of the nasty guy who kept toasting to me being some sort of underaged sexy bar goddess, when I decided that if he thought I batted for the other team, he might leave me alone. Nope. Instead, we stopped toasting how hot I apparently was, and started toasting to "pussy," at which point I figured I was so offended by this slimy man that I'd just ignore him. Twenty minutes after he started lauding my ass-ests, I figure out that ignoring creeps is the best way to get them to go away. I guess a secondary heading to this point could be Manners do not apply in a bar.

4) No matter how hung over you are, Thursday classes are too important to miss, so you'll go wishing a bus would hit you just to make the hangover feel less awful. Also, Gatorade is pretty much the best thing ever in that state of being. My hardest class was the International Economies class I had Tuesdays and Thursdays, aka the Day Before Drinking and the Day After Drinking, and no way could I afford to not go. So I'd go, and spend most of the class wishing for death. Thing is, I get SUPER hung over. At any given point of time, I'm probably dehydrated because of a couple different naturally occurring conditions in my body. Darwin would say "let her die," but instead I've spent the last twenty years of my life staving off death-by-dehydration by constantly drinking some sort of fluid. Now, if you've ever taken a freshman orientation class (or a "Please don't drink yourself to death because we'll be responsible" class), you know that alcohol is a diuretic like caffeine, and a hangover is really just the unpleasant combination of alcohol withdrawal and dehydration. So, if I replace constantly drinking water with even a little bit of liquor, the next morning my body basically tries to shut down. I've more or less dealt with this since I started drinking by just constantly having a water bottle with me while I party, and then also not drinking when I have plans the next morning. Neither of these safeguards work super well for the Wednesday night festivities, so I once spent an afternoon wishing for death until 4 because I had such a horrible headache. At one point, a classmate whose drunk debauchery would put Bradley Cooper to shame told me to drink Gatorade instead, and that usually halves the hangover. Which is super necessary when "Hangover" is synonymous with "Oh God, just let me die!"


5) People get really easy to talk to when you can't hear them. This one is probably more reflective of me, but I'm really bad at small talk, and it makes meeting people in random places kinda hard. Usually when you liquor someone up, the problem goes away, but even drunk I have a hard time with small talk. I found, though, if you're in a bar and can't hear half of what the other person is saying even while you yell, the conversation suddenly becomes awesome! I once had a conversation about Shakespeare at the bar with one of Alexa's friends, and the next morning I got a text message from him saying "I didn't know you were so interested in physics!"


I've still got a year before I turn 21, and Alexa is studying abroad next fall, so I really won't have a reason to be at that bar Wednesday nights. This might give my liver a chance to recuperate... but something tells me I'll miss it. Even if being "normal" means hangovers and getting hit on by creepers, it is weird how much I value that sensation every now and then.

How to Lobotomize Yourself with 14 Hours, a Car, and the State of New Mexico

Quick Note: Oliver, keep all your comments in one post, and if you continue to correct my grammar, there will be a reckoning akin to none this realm hath seen.

ANYWAY - So, like the four of you who read this know, I'm in a long distance relationship. My man-boy is in the Air Force, specifically in the Intel bit of the Air Force, and for whatever reason, he was assigned to work with the Special Operations macho-masochists. Maybe the small animal he sacrificed to the God of Interesting Military Assignments wasn't a virgin, or he didn't do it under the full moon or something. Now, I know working with the SpecOps sounds really cool, like he's skydiving out of a plane while doing calculous on his watch to triangulate the exact degree at which he needs to shoot a missile in order to prevent WWIII with minimal civilian casualties and save the love of his life (someone else, please - I just can't miss my test on Thursday to be dangled over crocodiles AGAIN), but that's not actually what happens. I know, right? I was really disappointed too. No, he spends his days in a small, concrete room for 12 hours watching a computer screen. He's not really allowed to tell me what he sees, and I'm probably less allowed to tell the internet, but he's equated it with watching grass grow, and since he's watching a desert, there's not even that thrilling escape from boredom.

Now, this wouldn't be quite so bad if after work or on the weekends he could go do something exciting, but that would require being stationed somewhere larger than our high school. No no no, that's not a bad metaphor - that's literal. The town he's stationed in is the size of our high school, or about 2,500 people, if you don't include the military. Including military stationed there, it's probably, maybe, the size of the four major high schools in our area. Fly poop is more densely populated that this place. And since none of the military members want to actually stay there more than the required three years (OH GOD WHY?!), there's not too much investment in entertainment around. There's two chain restaurants (one of which is the major corporation I work for, as if I didn't eat enough of their food already), a Walmart, a gas station, a Hastings (which is something akin to the love child of Blockbuster and Borders but sneakier), and a plethora of Thai restaurants. Why Thai, you ask, in this God forsaken speck of spittle on the map, this place where couples have matching tooth decay from tobacco use? I have no clue, but I counted three, and that's like one on every block. If there was a Hell on Earth, this place would be the waiting room.

He's only been there since December, though, so not long enough to go insane and start wearing the skins of his coworkers yet, and the weekend before Valentines Day was the first weekend I had the time to go see him. Now, I was hoping to have a certain other serviceman drive down with me, but the timing just didn't work out, and all told it's not a hard drive as long as the weather is nice, and it's not long.

Not long.

Only 7 hours one way if you drive like a bat out of hell.

Not long...

As you can imagine, though, it'd been two months since I last saw my man-boy, and I was ever so excited to go see him. I spent the week before meticulously preparing. I picked up a box of stuff his mom wanted me to take down to him, which was slightly akin to herding cats in an old fashioned diver's suit, I burnt myself all sorts of CDs, I had books on tape, snacks, energy drinks, and I was good to go! Boyfriend, here I come!

12:30 pm - Fill the tank of my CRV and get two greasy slices of pizza that are sure to save well, plus a bottle of water. Call my mom to tell her I'm leaving, and then hang up to begin my sing-a-long with the radio.

1:00 - Energetically sing-a-long to Toxic, Animal, Sexy Back, and then notice that the stations I want to listen to are getting fuzzy. Turn the radio to the oldies station, continue sing-a-long to Hotel California, Taking Care of Business, and American Pie, and try not to pretend I'm singing without my dentures.


1:15 - Radio is totally dead, leaving only ominous sound of static. I pop in my first book on tape, Lies my Teacher Told Me. Try to respond to the tape like I'm having a conversation, including fake laughs, arguments, and vigorous nods. Convince myself it's entertaining.

2:30 - Bolt into the truck stop to pee.

3:00 - Call my lazy ass boyfriend, who doesn't answer, leaving me alone to the open road and the impending madness. All around me is flat and barren, the kind of post apocalyptic scene Cormac McCarthy described in The Road, yellow and grey and decayed with the occasional buttress of forlorn rock standing stalwart against the horizon like a soldier's corpse still defending his post after the bomb had gone off.

4:00 - Beginning to question my own sanity, and frantic that my man-boy was not picking up the phone (therefore rabid wolverines ate him in his sleep and I was driving not to a weekend of love and relaxation, but a tragic funeral where I would have to dig the grave with my own hands because in this town "back hoe" means a prostitute specializing in anal), so I called my mom. After a debate over whether or not my sister joining the "Go Green" club at her elementary school would drive my father into a righteous rage over a consumer's right to all the plastic bags he wanted, I had her call the man-boy on his Skype. Praise jesus, he lives! He was sleeping while I was trekking to see him, but still, he lives!

4:30 - Stop in an even sketchier truck stop. Afraid manager will make me buy a can of chew and say "purdy" to use the bathroom.

5:30 - Turn off the book on tape, quite sure that the narrator's drone would be the soundtrack to my madness. Already I am contemplating getting out of the car and finding a cow to tip just for the sake of something to do. The only reason I don't is a fear that the cow will try to eat me instead.

6:00 - Find the last piece of civilization self-aware enough to have two whole gas stations and today's newspaper. I stop and get a Subway sandwich and try to make conversation with a clerk while buying Advil. At this point, I feel like my spinal cord is only duct taped into my spine, and turning my head has the distinct sensation of pulling the duct tape loose. The clerk is uninterested, and tells me that I have at least another hour and a half, two hours, to the Air Force base like it's the typical drive to the super market for her. The withering look she gives me when I choke makes me want to take her hand and say "There are places you could go, honey. Places better than this, if only you dare to dream!" But I take my Advil and get back in the car, making sure to empty my bladder again because I can "hold it" just about as well as my one year old cousin.

6:30 - Start to panic, because as empty as the drive has been thus far, I did see the occasional house or car going the opposite direction. But now it's dark, and I don't know where I'm going on a one lane highway, and I feel like I'm one busted tire away from Halloween 27. Speeding towards either my own demise or my boyfriend, I can't tell which, I catch up with a red Mustang going only slightly slower than me. Rather than pass them, I being following at what I think is a reasonable distance. Another human being, thank god! I'm not in the Twilight Zone! Apparently, though, what for me was a reasonable distance was to them aggressive tailgating, and after about twenty minutes, they try to shake me. They slow down, I slow down. They speed up, I speed up for fear of losing them. Finally, they pulled over to force me to pass, and I almost wanted to pull over too and explain "I'm not going to kill you, I'm just scared out of my mind and I don't want to be eaten by mutant tumbleweeds in the middle of nowhere." But that had a distinct possibility of not ending well, so I went past and drove alone.

7:30 - I finally pull up to the base gate, and see my boyfriend waiting for me in the cold, a big grin going ear to ear. After seven hours alone, when he pulled me out of the car for a hug and a kiss, the sensation of another's touch seemed so alien. But then I got used to it. Heh.

The drive back was almost the same, with two distinct differences. I did the really boring stretch I'd done at night in the morning, so I could see exactly how desolate the surrounding area was. At first I was counting tumbleweeds, but after fifteen or so minutes I hit triple digits and decided to stop. I was, however, convinced that someone was going to jump out of my back seat and shout "It's a twista! It's a twista!" The other change was that instead of listening to the book on tape and letting it lull me into a complacent state of insanity in which I might try to kill the president, I listened to my only Regina Spektor album three or four times in a row, picking apart the lyrics for religious meaning.

The moral: I hope New Mexico falls into a sink hole next time my boyfriend comes home. Also, Regina Spektor is probably a secret disciple of the new Moon Goddess.

Big Scary College Bear

Umm, so hi, I didn't die. I just got lazy. Turns out that school motivates me to blog, so being out of school saps all my desire to vent angrily to the interwebs. But anyway, that's not what you're here for. You're here for a story! (Yay story time!) Well, this month I don't have a story. (Ohhh, no story time?) I have an extended metaphor because my boyfriend is an idiot. And I mean that in the most loving way possible. You see, it all started this afternoon when I cut a painfully large check for my parents. Writing it in blood could not have made the sum hurt more. Writing it in blood while being mauled by a lion might have made it hurt more; however, I'm not really willing to test that one. But those parameters can probably sum up the amount of money for you, depending on what you consider lion-maulingly painful. When I was trying to explain to my boyfriend why I was paying my parents a check written in my own life blood (which my mom would claim is technically hers to lay a claim on), it turned into me trying to explain how the whole college loans thing works. The man-boy can understand ancient politics, debug a 5 year old computer without a manual, and reads Voltaire for shits and giggles but for some reason he can't grasp the concept of staggeringly large amounts of debt three years from now, so after a half hour of banging my head against his proverbial wall, he asked me to explain it in really simple terms he can understand, like bears and cookies.

I don't understand why this blog keeps coming back to bears.

So picture this. Me, dressed for some reason in a black version of the Little Red Riding Hood costume because I'm an emo kid, skipping merrily through the Woods of Life. These woods are boring, and I've been walking for what seems like an eternity, but is in reality a small blip of time. I decide what I need to spice up my walk is a friend, preferably a very large scary predator because I'm a moron and all the other morons walking through the forrest tell me that large predator friends are a must. Something about protecting me from other walkers and their scary predators or a steady income or some other hooha that doesn't really fit cleanly in this metaphor. But these predators aren't going to just hang out with you. They'd much rather eat you, so you must bribe them for 4-8 years with cookies to keep them appeased. Well, running through the gambit of wolves, tigers, lions, bears, and Gary Busey, I realized I just don't and won't ever have enough cookies to get a really cool meat-eater, like a white bengal tiger with wings and a samurai sword.

So I settled with a pit bull. He was pretty boring, honestly, but he had a pretty moderate appetite, and he at least sounded scary in a "fuck, don't go over there to that meth lab, that pit bull has a taste for human flesh" kind of way. So I raided my cookie jar, that was significantly diminished by the Recession Ants that made off with a good chunk of my cookies, and my dad did some figuring. The Muffin Man of the Forrest (ok, this one is kind of random. He's the federal government) said, "Hey, you're young and that pit bill is probably going to eat you, so I'll bake you 8,000 cookies a year, and you can pay me back at an interest rate of 6.8% after he's sated and you've become friends in four years." My dad told me that was a good idea so that we could milk what was in my cookie jar, and he'd add a little out of his own cookie jar, and we'd all be happy. But a couple things happened with that pit bull. First, when you get a scary predator friend, you have to go where he wants until his appetite for either your blood or cookies is appeased. And this pit bull lived in a neighborhood far away from my home and full of crack houses. Second, and stemming from the first problem, the other people hanging out with that pit bull were negligent at best and maliciously sadistic at worst. The whole year I spent hanging out with that pit bull was the equivalent of having a squirrel chew through my neck - slow, painful, and scarring.

So I ditched the pit bull as fast as I could and decided to upgrade to a bigger predator that lived closer to home. I could have gone up to Boulder and hung out with a stoned buffalo, but he's neither scary nor particularly coherent 90% of the time and we didn't have any common interests, so I declined.  I could have hung out in Fort Collins with a... goat? I don't know, it's got horns and is most interested in the sciences. No thanks to that too. And then I met this bear. Oh my god, this bear. He's beautiful, and he's smart and we had so much to talk about! But... he's really fricken hungry and the Recession Ants were really mean to me. I thought there was no way I could possibly hang out with this bear without being eaten alive in the first month. But my dad, who is in reality a mystical voodoo money man and in this metaphor is a magician who can pull cookies out of trees at the expense of sacrificing a small animal, sat down and did his spooky math thing.

While I was convinced that the only way to make this work was to in-debit myself to the Muffin Man to the tune of 50,000 cookies in 4 years, my dad managed to lower to amount of money cookies I'll have to borrow down to 33,000 plus the 6.8%  interest. Now, this interest on the cookies is weird. Half the sum of cookies I borrow in a year, the interest starts ticking immediately although it doesn't have to be paid off immediately. The other half for that year doesn't begin accruing interest until after bear has decided it's no longer hungry for my flesh. And this happens every year. I could probably sit down and calculate each individual sum, but despite being an Econ major and the daughter of a Mystical Voodoo Money Man, the idea quite frankly makes my head spin. The other part of cutting down how much I'll have to borrow is that I have to bake (?) 5,000 cookies a year by myself to appease the bear, and my parents will wave a magic stick and hope to be able to cover the rest. And rather than have a million checks for paltry sums flying at the bear and confusing everyone involved, we pool it all in my dad's cookie jar and pay the bear out of one pot. Every. Single. Year.

So now that this probably makes sense, go back and replace "cookies" with "money" and I can start loving you again because you're smart.