chasing after a stationary car counts as exercise too, right?

Good things never happen in parking garages. You know how in the movies the girl will be walking towards her car—her footsteps echo and the lights are flickering and sometimes there’s even an ominous puddle of water on the ground—foreshadowing? Something makes her nervous and she glances over her shoulder. Her pace quickens and we see a shadow! following her. She breaks into a run, reaches her car. In her panic of course she drops the keys and at that moment the Villain strikes!

Luckily, this will never be me. Because I won’t even get to the part where I find my car.

I did all the right things. I parked my rental on the level my manager told me to. I found a spot right next to an elevator and under a large “5e” sign. A cursory glance around me even allowed me to take note of neighboring vehicles. My plan was foolproof.

I walked into work as a Confident Working Woman. Five minutes later I was walking back out with my manager to return the car. He’d parked a level below me so I told him I would just meet him at the rental place instead of finding each other in the garage.

Five minutes later I couldn’t. find. My. Car. Isn’t it irritating when you’re standing right where you think it should be but—plot twist—that isn’t your car?

If anyone saw a crazy little asian girl running–nay, SPRINTING through the parking garage that morning—I have no shame. Whoever designed that garage decided it’d be a great idea to have two perfectly symmetrical parking garages right next to each other—and I had no idea which one I’d parked in. I found what seemed like every elevator except that one I’d parked by. I wondered if I’d gone crazy and parked at 3e instead of 5e. nope.

Y’all I spent 20 minutes in that parking garage running back and forth hoping my car would magically appear. I waited for the phone call from my manager who was probably already at the rental place wondering where the hell I was. And after being deemed capable enough to be sent to another account to help with recruiting, I’d have to be that intern and pick up the phone and be all “Hey—surprise! I haven’t even left the garage yet. I can’t find my car.” Luckily he has been blessed with an inordinate amount of patience.

After running up, down, sideways, and following strangers around I finally found my car…right around the corner from where I’d first started.

20 minutes later the car was returned and my manager was driving me back to work. Here’s a good tip for you guys. If you’re ever in the situation where you lose your rental car in a parking garage and are under mounting pressure,—always blame it on the GPS.

Don’t laugh. It happens more than you think.

better late than never…to come up with some good epitaphs

Sometimes people weirdly think I have good people skills but I’m here to say that you are wrong.

As a senior in high school applying to colleges, I was so confident of my potential. Anything! Is! Possible! The reality of it is I had no idea what I was doing, got lazy, and only applied to four schools. I russian rouletted the “good” schools and based my first choice school off of location. But wait– I loved this school. I deserved to go to this school. Nobody wanted it more than me. This school needed me. Right now, I don’t even remember the university’s motto.

…actually I just realized I don’t even know Penn State’s motto, so maybe that’s not the best example.

-edit- It’s “Making Life Better.” That actually doesn’t sound the least bit familiar to me. Are you supposed to know your school’s motto?

Anyway, I attribute much of the reason I am not at this school (besides, you know, not being good enough–also maybe because I’m about to reference Gossip Girl) due to an in hindsight, disastrous first interview. Never, ever, make your first college interview your first-choice college interview. If you’re applying ED and this is not possible, well, just try to be better.

I can pinpoint exactly the point at which this interview began to look like the last season of Gossip Girl (read: trainwreck). This is significant because I literally can’t tell you what I was doing five minutes ago.

Interviewer: “Hmm…I think that’s all the questions I’ve got for you….unless….”

Me: “heh..heh…what’s that?”

Him: “Well…usually I wouldn’t ask this but…”

Me:

Him: “I wanted to ask you what you’d want your epitaph to be to describe yourself but….I shouldn’t do that to you…”

Him: -expectant look-

Me: Oogity boogity boo.

Okay, I didn’t actually say that, but I might as well have. It was bad enough that every so often I’ll just be living my life as usual when suddenly I remember it and I have to do my spasm-of-awkwardness-recall dance–and in my 20 years of awkwardly existing, only two other instances make me do this.

Now a couple years later, I’ve come up with several epitaphs that I think would be fitting ways for me to describe the way I am. Come and ask me again, guy. I’m ready…for you to not laugh at any of my jokes. Here are my top four so far:

“If only she’d looked both ways.”

“Don’t pet stray cats.”

“Cookies don’t count as dinner.”

“You should push the revolving doors faster.”

Don’t you see the ingeniousity in this? Even from the grave, I’m imparting words of wisdom. Also, I made that word up. Artistic license, guys.

-note- I’m still alive. Also, I know, I am/was clearly a quality candidate for any college.

Protected: Sorry for being awkward…and sorry for misremembering your name…and sorry for not even realizing it til the next day…and sorry for having to realize it through Facebook…

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Happy Election Day, guys

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

David Foster Wallace

 

on the whole, I think I handled that rather well

You know how when you’re little and you see a spider and you scream for your dad to come kill it and you don’t shut up until he actually does? At some point in middle school I think my dad got tired of it and told me I had to deal with it myself, so the next time I saw a spider on the wall, I got a plastic cup and trapped it. And then I taped the cup really really well to the wall and it looked like a ghost was trying to eavesdrop through the wall. It looked creepy, so I just left it there for a long time. Also because yeah, I was definitely not killing that thing.

Every time my dad killed a spider for me, he’d always tell me they’re good, because blah blah blah. Spiders, I’m so glad you kill all the other mosquitoes and flies, but you’re still creepy crawly and I don’t want to eat you in my sleep. I’d ignore him and he’d kill the spider anyway, then solemnly look at the crumpled tissue and say “NO ONE is gonna mess with MY family. Freedom has been PRESERVED.”Okay dad. Thanks. That still doesn’t really make sense to me.

The thing is, I don’t mind spiders, except for when I see them. But I hate spiders especially when I don’t see them, like the gigantic spider I didn’t see on my shoulder today until this guy finally tapped my shoulder fifteen minutes into micro lab and tells me, “Uhh…there’s a huge spider on your shoulder. It’s been there at least since the start of class.”

I don’t know how y’all would have reacted to this, but this is how I reacted– crouched on the ground, head bent and my hands over my face: a perfect reenactment of the useless bomb drills we had in elementary school. Plus a scream–but maybe that was part of the drill too.

And you know what, that may have been weird but I AM NOT ASHAMED. IT WAS REALLY BIG, GUYS. What I am ashamed of though, is what happened next: a girl (in scrubs, no less) comes up, tell me to calm down, and  plucks the spider from my shoulder in her bare hands and leaves the building to set it free.

Leaving me standing by the doorway, still traumatized. And glaring back at the people staring. Come on, guys. What would you have done? I mean that as a completely rhetorical question to girl-in-scrubs because obviously she is a much better person than I am.  My only thought post-bomb drill pose was, FREEDOM MUST BE PRESERVED.

Which brings me to this: sometimes people ask me what’s wrong with me, but the real question is… shouldn’t you be used to this by now?

I bought benedryl because that’s what will smith used in hitch

There are days when you wake up on the wrong side of your bed. You stub your toe getting out, and you drop your toothbrush on the ground. You burn your toast and your coffee’s too weak.

There are days when you wake up wildly wondering what day it is and oh god, did I miss my 8 am again?

And then there are days when you wake up and your right ear is bigger than your left one. It’s itchy, swollen, and you squint at yourself in the mirror thinking it might break at any moment.

I was so busy yesterday there was no time to look in the mirror until around 5 last night. This means I woke up at 11, watched Doctor Who and baked chocolate chip cookies in my fuzzy bunny slippers, pajamas, and the the ponytail I fell asleep in. It wasn’t until we needed to go to the grocery store that a little voice inside of me reminded me I probably should try to look somewhat presentable. That’s when I finally noticed my swollen upper lip and the creeping spots that had been appearing on my face all day. My friends didn’t tell me because they thought I’d already noticed. I mean, it’s kind of hard to miss a red rash across your face and it was almost dinnertime at this point.

But for future reference guys, I will never have already noticed. Anything. I’m trying to change though, because if I ever witness a crime I’m not entirely sure the police will be too pleased with me as a witness.

After a couple hours of bemoaning my appearance, I finally went to get some allergy medicine and bought Benedryl on my friend’s advice, because “Will Smith used it in Hitch.” Product placement works, y’all.

But Benedryl doesn’t, at least as an antihistamine (yup; totally learned about this in AP Bio). I did spend all day drugged up on it so that I literally slept through the entire day, though. Except for the intervals in which I dragged myself into the bathroom to examine my hives, and oh look. I think it got worse! and wait–then the hives spread to my fourth finger on my right hand. Itchy bumps on my ears and face, and then on one finger. I don’t know what this means except for I couldn’t get my ring off.

There are too many things I ate yesterday that could be potential allergens and because I have zero frame of reference as to when the hives started coming, I’m pretty much scared to eat anything I have in my kitchen right now.

Lesson of the day: I ate something, and now I’m allergic to something.

freshman vs. sophomore vs. junior aka I am scatterbrained.

I was poking around on my computer because I’m nosy even to myself and I found this document that I wrote a year ago after coming home from freshman year at college, never finished, and promptly forgot about until today. I remember now vaguely writing it for some purpose–but exactly what, is lost. I thought it was interesting to see how past me thought versus present me, so I’ve posted what I originally wrote followed by an edit on how things have changed.  

——————————————————————————————

This is the cleanest my room ever was freshman year. It was taken the day I moved in.

It’s weird to see that your life can be packed away. I stand in my room, surrounded by boxes, crates, baskets. But they don’t hold just things. My life is more than a couple of sundresses, a copy of Modern European History and my favorite, green dotted sheets. Some people say things are just things. But I say they hold memories.

And as I return home from my first year at college, unpacking my last year’s life, I unpack the time I couldn’t get the washer to work and made a new friend, the time I lost my head and completely forgot where my class was on the last week of classes and was almost late for the final exam, and all those times my friends and I sat in confusion as our comparative literature professor adapted every single story to relate to Edgar Allen Poe and the ghost of Jesus Christ.

Things change; people change. But after a year of name games, awkward get-togethers, and repetitive ice breakers, a year of realizing my actions were actually beginning to matter, and a year of perpetual identity crisis, on the surface, I still feel like a high school senior who came to college expecting everything! to change, who came as a biochemistry major and switched immediately to history, then dabbled in political science, international politics, and then nutrition.  I still don’t know what I want out of life, I still don’t know how to balance what I love and what is practical, and I really have no idea where I’ll be in three years.

But then I think about how my friendships have changed. How some have simply strengthened from a year’s distance, even from the other side of the country and how others, once just a walk around the corner, have inexplicably turned to dust.  How an older friend told me that while we may sneak in a Skype date here, a phone call there, so many of my friends will end up strangers in a few years—that even we will probably not speak once he’s graduated —but that’s okay, because you’ll make new friends in college. And I realize that some of that, at least, is true.

AJhdflisuhf

Jkadfnvkzjhdbfvlzjdbcnj

——————————————————————————————

Edited to maintain current relevancy

This is closer to what my room looked like both years.

It’s weird to see that your life can be packed away. I stand in my room, surrounded by boxes, crates, baskets. But they don’t hold just things. My life is more than a couple of sundresses, a copy of Modern European History Chemistry: The Central Science and my favorite, green dotted sheets. Some people say things are just things. But I say they hold memories.

And as I return home from my first second year at college, unpacking my last year’s life, I unpack the time I couldn’t get the washer to work and made a new friend my friends surprised me with a dancing cat on my birthday (don’t ask), the time I lost my head and completely forgot where my class was on the last week of classes and was almost late for the final exam, I still couldn’t find that dang building because I swear to god it moves around, and all those times my friends and I sat in confusion as our comparative literature professor adapted every single story to relate to Edgar Allen Poe and the ghost of Jesus Christ  sat in depression after news of the Penn State sex scandal broke; then again, and again, and again–each revelation more horrifying and disillusioning than the previous.

Things change; people change. But after a year of name games, awkward get-togethers, and repetitive ice breakers, a year of realizing my actions were actually beginning to matter, and a year of perpetual identity crisis (all still true), on the surface, I still feel like a graduated high school senior who came to college expecting everything! to change, who came as a biochemistry major and switched immediately to history, then dabbled in political science, international politics, and then nutrition and debating between nutrition pre-med and nutrition applied sciences, and then hospitality and dietetics, oh god.  I still don’t know what I want out of life, I still don’t know how to balance what I love and what is practical, and I really have no idea where I’ll be in three two years. (Okay, at least I have some idea now)

But then I think about how my friendships have changed. How some have simply strengthened from a year’s distance, even from the other side of the country and how others, once just a walk around the corner, have inexplicably turned to dust.  How an older friend told me that while we may sneak in a Skype date here, a phone call there, so many of my friends will end up strangers in a few years—that even we will probably not speak once he’s graduated (we don’t), but that’s okay, because you’ll make new friends in college. And I realize that some of that, at least, is true. (still true)

AJhdflisuhf

Jkadfnvkzjhdbfvlzjdbcnj (My thoughts exactly).

——————————————————————————————

I’m not exactly sure why I wrote this other than maybe I wanted to have some sort of reflection on my first year at college. All I remember is that something a friend said inspired the beginning. I realize that it’s quite incomplete, jumps from idea to idea, and lacks any sort of central message—but let’s be real–what else can you expect from a reflection on my life?

Maybe I’ll rewrite it after junior year, or hopefully at least by senior year it’ll have an ending…but knowing me I’ll probably be too lazy to write it.

It’s so damn hot…milk was a bad choice

I finally saw Anchorman for the first time last night, and suddenly all these quotes I’ve literally been hearing for years that I thought were mildly funny but didn’t get, are so much FUNNIER. I guess it’s another one of those movies that everyone had already seen that I just…didn’t.

so was this beard

This is how I  imagine all Texans complaining about the heat

My sister always gets mad at me for talking about stuff that I never got to do growing up because every so often I shift into martyred soul mode and regale her with all the times I haven’t been to Uno’s, or Chili’s; didn’t do this, didn’t do that, or whatever. A tiny, miniscule part of that may be my horrible memory, but I tell myself it’s probably just because it’s usually her fault–let it be known that growing up we also NEVER got pizza goldfish because she thought that was “gross.” A couple months ago I bought it when I was with her at the grocery store because now I’m Grown Up and totally in control of my own decisions. They were on sale and I only bought them to stick it to her (I know–don’t mess with me). I wish I could say revenge was tasty, but you were right, ma soeur. Pizza really isn’t the best flavor. Pretty sure I finished them anyway, though.

Such are the tales of a poor, misunderstood baby of the family. Still, there seem to be quite a few, gaping holes in my childhood that normal people I grew up with seem to have filled up. I was the one standing awkwardly to the side during school dances when the Cotton Eyed Joe came on (and I’d still be, today). I don’t know any of the N’sync songs except for “bye, bye, bye,” and by that I mean that one line, not the whole song. And now that I think about it, I probably wouldn’t understand any other major pop culture reference of the time–but now I overcompensate by religiously reading celebrity gossip–Kristen Stewart, how could you??  And while all my elementary school friends got ballroom dressed up for cotillion, I was so in the dark I thought they were talking about Gentile’s, the produce market nearby. Don’t worry though–I ended up learning the box dance steps from a Berenstain Bears book, so yeah, I think I’ve pretty much covered my ballroom dance education.

So instead of slipping on white gloves or singing with my hairbrush, I was more interested in reading Nancy Drew under the covers.  I was busy learning trying to fly with my best friend and one of our many imaginary friends, Tiny the tiny (shocker) fairy or building dinosaur nests out of leftover grass hay. I feel a sort of need to put a disclaimer here and say that yes, my best friend, at least was a real, living person whom everyone could see.

Just so you know, this Titanic victim's grave is in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They are in no way related to our family but judging by the flowers I presume it is Jack Dawson, but not the fictional Jack Dawson in the movie Titanic, which the girls who brought the flowers clearly did not know--but my father made sure to point it out to us. Yup.

Here I am with my sister at a Titanic victim’s grave. I have my hands clasped behind my back like an old tenured professor and I doubt I have never not been a dork in my entire life.

But in the end I turned out okay, right?

You stay classy, San Diego Thanks for stopping by, y’all.

But seriously, I’ll pay you to pull the fire alarm

It is a horrible feeling to greatly anticipate something while simultaneously dread something else that needs to come before said event. Do you wish for it to come sooner and get everything over with? Or delay delay delay at all costs? After using some heavy duty bug spray in my room (you know it’s heavy duty because of the scary looking nozzle and obligatory exclamation mark on the can) I had dinner last night and halfway through began to worry I didn’t wash my hands well enough. The thought lingered long enough that I began to wonder how sick I had to get to be able to fly home straightaway while not so sick that I would hate myself being confined in a metal cylinder hurtling tens of thousands of feet through the air.

I didn’t get sick.

But in six hours this is all going to be over and even if the whole project that I have to present today bombs (I just checked—conclusion slides are still there!) it’s not going to matter that much. You see this is what everyone says, even me, to myself, but the fact of the matter is THAT DOES NOT HELP IN THE MOMENT when you are there, standing in front of everyone completely tongue-tied and wondering where that guy you paid to pull the fire alarm is.

This is the room I’ll be presenting in tomorrow. Looking at this in no way makes me want to freak out. I feel completely calm and am not worrying at all.

Just kidding y’all. It’s gonna be fine. No, really.

But seriously it will be.

YEAH.

Time to go pretend I’m not shy around these people and totally in control of my nerves and the Best Intern this account has ever seen.

I better get a trophy, or something.

tell me something good: 5 things that make me happy

I had a longer post to go along with this, but all my words felt a couple steps behind how I felt. It was important to me that I post this today so maybe I’ll put up the full post another time. Here is the main gist of it:

Today was a bad day. These little things made me happy, and I hope they make you smile too.

1. this picture of my cat

2. this clip from Friends. or pretty much the whole series.

3. thought provoking conversations with my sister

you have to read very carefully between the lines

4. this PostSecret

Dear Stranger, I found the crumpled envelope containing the love letter you wrote for “Rachel” and didn’t send. I read it (sorry!) so I know just how much you love her. The envelope was already addressed, so…I mailed it to her. If I were her, I’d love you back.

5. this Kafka quote:

The birds flew up like corks out of a bottle, I followed them with my eyes, saw them climb in a single breath until I no longer thought they were rising, but that I was falling, and, clinging onto the ropes in my dizziness, I began involuntarily to swing a little. Before long, I was swinging harder, the breeze had grown chillier, and quivering stars had replaced the birds.