nobody home

Small blessings: for once, my laptop was in the kitchen instead of on the corner of the coffee table. This is not the case 99% of the time. But it's a good thing, since my coffee table wound up the epicentre of my FUCKING LIVING ROOM FLOODING.

Thank you, upstairs neighbors and/or shady plumbing; after an afternoon of wrangling internet drama I really, really wanted to walk out into the living room and see water pouring out from around my fan and out of another part of my ceiling and onto my couch and carpet and coffee table.

Ugh.

headed down the coast to Dingle soon.

she died a year ago today.

i feel like i should feel weirder right now. i dunno.

I have not slept in 25 hours.

The hotel booked our room wrong and I will be sleeping on a cot.

My father and I keep fighting, mostly because his travel style is throwing off my travel groove and I have very limited patience, so basically I'm just an asshole. But so is he, and STUBBORN.

We are having unsolvable phone problems.

ASKDLASFDHSAJKDFSAFDSA


edit, next day, because not worth new post: things went better eventually. Thai food helps. And wine. And sleep. Oh, magical sleep.

So Chicago was quite delightful. Met some people from the message board I run, and had lots of funtimes with Lenya wherein we were continually brain-twins to the point of it being a little surreal.

( blah blah bullet points I am lazy )

And now I am home, where I spent an hour being pissy because my father decided not to come home and Ireland-plan like he said he would, instead opting to hang out with his stupid Republican girlfriend. My annoyance somehow felt vaguely parental (like "graarrarrr so irresponsible staying out late after I told him to come home"), which was odd and aggravating.

Anyway. Errands in the morning, then laundry, then back to Kzoo, where I have a few days to clean and do whatever else it is I do anymore, and then I get to do some entertaining, aaand then vacation.

And then I guess I have to get a move on that whole "figuring out/doing something useful with my life" thing. Guh.

So if you're going to be staying somewhere for a week and you have a kitchen, it is totally reasonable to just steal some spare little things of butter when you are at a restaurant, instead of buying a whole big thing of butter for a week when really you're only going to need a little for your toast. If you have a daughter with a purse in which to smuggle out said stolen butter, even better.

However, this plan really works best if the daughter in question is smart enough to remove the butter from her purse and give it to you once back at the hotel. Otherwise, it will ride around in her purse for a month, and one day she'll pull out her wallet and wonder why it's slightly greasy, and pull everything out of there and find, mixed in with the general purse detritus, several squashed, oozing little tubs of butter that have managed to get all over pretty much everything. She will be writing buttery checks for weeks, getting weird hints of rancid butter flavor when she puts on her lipstick.

In entirely unrelated news, I had to buy a new purse today.

Bleeaaaagh.


edit: ( Also, new purse is WAY bigger than necessary, and I have too much free time. )

I have lost 6 lbs in the last 2 weeks.

GO TEAM ME!

The mysterious stomach-weird last week where I couldn't eat more than a few bites at a sitting without feeling ill may have contributed to that, BUT STILL.

Also I found a great headboard on Craigslist for $20, so now my pillows stay where I put them instead of creeping into the gap between my bed and the windowseat during the night. Although now I have to figure out what to do with all the decorative ones I had stuffed into said gap in an attempt to prevent this...

And I seem to have a gym buddy now.

And in 3 weeks I will be in London.

And hopefully before that I can go visit Lenya, who is also hopefully calling me tonight. I miss her, and really need to go visit her in Chicago under GOOD circumstances, rather than "at the end of finals week when I still have a paper to finish and haven't slept in 5 days and am on the brink of a nervous breakdown" or "while I am with a friend and also super stressed".

But yeah. Whee. Good day. I was in a funk all weekend, so this is nice.

Note: when someone asks you to help them paint and mentions that it's oil paint, first ensure that they have the appropriate solvents to remove it from your skin when all is said and done. THEN you offer to help and paint the weird nooks and crannies that will inevitably result in covering yourself with the stuff.

... I am going to look very silly at the gym tomorrow.

mini-vacation #2 very good. Kelsey very tired. That is about all the energy and coherence I can muster up right now.

Except I will provide a short list of the top three vehicles most likely to contain assholes on 131:
1. Bright blue Dodge Ram pickup trucks
2. Black SUVS (especially ones from Ohio)
3. Any vehicle with a Hope College bumper sticker.*

Relatedly, the trick to having a vehicle-mounted rocket launcher would be, of course, to set it to point backwards, so that you would already be around the offending car before blowing it to bits. Because otherwise said car would just be rendered more inconvenient, really.

Also, either my father or my speedometer or his speedometer lies, because he was all "YOU DRIVE LIKE A MANIAC I WAS GOING 80 AND COULDN'T KEEP UP" and I had my cruise control at 75 most of the time... hrm.**


*Though this is #3 on the list, it was probably the variety of vehicle most likely to inspire lots of swearing, because they were all driven by those assholes who tailgate you and tailgate you and then pass you and then find somewhere impossible for you to get around and go 65, and then tailgate you once you manage to pass them, i.e. "those that should be shot".

**Also "hrm"-worthy: what the fuck is up with me and footnotes lately?

Sigh. Erranderranderrand. Need to get oil changed before I head up north. Shanty Creek this weekend. May or may not be weird/painful. Last year's trip up was the last big trip we made before she died; it even made it into one of those stupid poems I wrote for Creative Writing, this memory of flying up 131 with the sunroof open, listening to some band I liked and her pointing out where they'd stolen bits from music she grew up with, and smoking our last secret cigarettes before we met up with my father, and eating fat yellow plums and spitting pits out the window like they were cherries. Sunflower fields. Things like that. So.

Living alone is making me way more listless, and I should do the job-hunt thing, but it's sort of pointless right now. "Oh, hire me, except ohbythewayI'llbegonefortwoorthreeweeksinSeptember/Octoberokaybye." It might've worked to get the time off had any of the interviews I had back in May/June panned out (fuck you, Old Navy), because then I would've been established somewhere, but my father already booked the tickets et cetera for us to go abroad, and I wouldn't be able to take that time off as a new hire. Sort of makes me regret the trip, but we travel well together and it's unlikely I'll have the opportunity to go back over there myself anytime soon, so may as well go for it. So, blah blah unemployed bored bored running out of money, and I should at least volunteer or something to get myself out of my apartment, but it's hard to work up the motivation to do much of anything right now.

I'm not as down as any of this maybe sounds. I'm just existing too much. Need to be doing more instead.

Chad's going-away party was last night. Note to self: "red wine, vodka, tequila" is not THAT much better of a combination than last year's infamous "151, tequila, beer" incident. For some reason I remember Charna walking past and me very loudly and enthusiastically and terrifyingly hurtling across the porch to greet her, but I feel like my brain may be making that up.

Also, if you give a former roommate an apartment key, she will use that key to go pee in your bathroom instead of the one up lots of stairs during other people's parties at the same house. Ashten and I also stole some ice cream once we were in there, but evidently it was her ice cream so it's okay, although I'm surprised that it took me to the END of the night to start puking, given the non-wisdom of adding dairy and corn syrup to that alcohol mix.

In non-drunk news, somehow my ceiling fan died randomly in the night -- light, fan, and all -- and it's supposed to hit 93 today. I am really happy with my new apartment, but evidently it hates me, because the current tally is at broken shower handle, blinds that won't close so I had to hang a sheet up, and now broken ceiling fan. And my microwave died in the move here, as well.

Now for Hangover Eggs. Provided my stove doesn't explode or something.