Leftover Pictures 2

Here's a few shots from our Halloween party last year.

Kate got some farmer to up and donate an Explorer full of pumpkins to our cause.
That smile? That's the "It's so early I'm not even sure what day it is" smile.


Awww, Boo House is all dolled up for the party. I wish you could see the inside; it's
completely covered in streamers and bats and candles. And pizza, mountains of it.


Most of the action took place on borrowed lawn furniture under the twinkle of borrowed lights. The lights are hung very unprofessionally from house to tree and back. Basically I strung them through the windows and tied them to door knobs and (mostly) heavy-enough furniture. Ken, on the other side, tangled them in the branches. Très romatic.


Zach (tourist) and Danielle (horse girl) play Twister while
I (my branch president biker) mope about losing.


Typical Court Street reveler.


Quit checking out my butt.

Leftover Pictures

Here are some pictures from the 2^nd annual Grover Family Game Night.

Mary blows out the candles on what I am required to say
was not a birthday cake because we were not celebrating her birthday.


The funky papers hanging on the bookshelf are our attempts to rip pieces
of paper into Christmas tree shapes behind our backs.


Props to Mom for funding the whole thing.


We like to keep winning in the family: my sister-in-law-in-law won
the jar of M&Ms by guessing closest to the right number.


Mary won the jar of Nerds. That's right—I counted every single one.


Oh, and here's us actually playing a game at Game Night. Fancy that.

Elder Dave

My roommate's name is Dave, as you may have gathered. He's taller than me. He's lived in Athens longer than me. He's several years ahead of me in our program. The utilities are in his name. He's engaged to a lovely woman.

Whenever I'm giddy and need someone to gloat to, I find him, as I did this morning when an essay I was working on went very well. Whenever I need to vent about the department's functioning or a particular assignment, I find him for sympathy. If there were any bullies about, I'd probably ask Dave to walk me to school.

There's only one problem: Dave's well over a year younger than me.

Not a problem, I guess, but interesting all the same.


(note: In composing this I went downstairs to confirm our mutual ages. Dave fed me something spicy he had just whipped up that included, as far as I can tell, black beans, onion, peppers, almonds, kidney beans, Granny Smith apples, corn, and tomato sauce. We ate it over Fritos. Vive le Bachelorhood!)

Lovesick, or

The Weapon of the Future is the Montage

I can't explain why, but I'm feeling lovesick right now. (Okay, that was a dumb thing to say, since the whole point of typing this is to try to explain it anyway.) You may remember the feeling: the mild anxiousness, the fluttery guts, odd swings between elation and despair. I've wanted to listen to the saddest songs I know all afternoon. My usually paralyzing nostalgia (for foreign lands and other days) has ebbed in favor of a new flavor of angst. I haven't felt this way in years, literally.

Alright, before I go any further, let me lay down some ground rules. Number one: no, Mom, I'm not actually in love, so don't get your hopes up just yet. Number two: yes, Internet Girlfriend(s), I still think you're sweet; let's flirt later.

If I was really in love, I wouldn't be talking about it—for one, it wouldn't be noteworthy enough for a blog post; for two, I'd be discreet (see post, 12.11.2008). The reason I'm talking about it, the reason it's worrying me, is that I can't explain it.

Here are the possible reasons I can come up with for why I might be feeling this way:

1. I watched several episodes of Freaks and Geeks this weekend at the behest of my roommate. I liked it. It made me feel like a high school again, which is where I spent a lot of time feeling lovesick. So maybe I'm just over-identifying with the characters.

2. I haven't had access to a (steel-string) guitar for two months. I didn't think this would bother me, being such a casual player, but it really has. I've found myself wandering around aimlessly at odd hours recently, and when I come to my senses I realize I'm looking for a guitar. Jeez, I sound like a hippie. Or a high-school cry baby theatre kid.

3. I've been on several dates in the past few months, all with charming women, and that's more than my average for a few years now. It could be an overdose of romance feeding back into my consciousness.

4. I could be in love. With who, though? The girl on Freaks and Geeks? She is a T-babe, but I don't usually go for imaginary girls. With you? Are we in love?

5. Perhaps I'm having a prescient emotion: perhaps love is on the way. How exciting!

My money's on the tv show. There's something about the mixture of film and music that is completely unfair to the senses. Throw on some dated t-shirts, intercut with shots of good times and slow-motion smiles, and choose a soundtrack of Journey-like proportions and you can't help but create something both completely false and inexorably compelling. I'm opposed to montage! (And yet, somehow, they're the best around. Nothing's ever gonna take them down.)

So what are your hypotheses? Why might I be feeling this way? (No PMS jokes, please.)

Waste

There's something about home that's entirely debilitating. Not my home, exactly, not the specific set of rooms and furnishings that my mom has put together over the years. I just mean home. Being home. Something about it sends me dashing towards the other side of the spectrum, towards—not depression, but languor.

When I'm home, I find myself full of ideas and intentions but barely able to lift a finger towards them. The small bursts of energy and ambition I get are indeed small, about enough to lift a body over towards the TV and flip a few switches before abandoning said body into the sweet entropic descent that is Dr. Mario. Which is what I inevitably do. (I think I beat the computer on hard mode about 70 times this week, no exaggeration.)

Despite repeated attempts to get up early and begin doing things, I find myself sliding towards the wee hours of the morning and the single digits of the afternoon. Despite long lists of to-do's and goals and projects and destinations, despite ample room and resources, despite a wide open schedule and the realization that this is the time people are always talking about—"when I'm finally not so busy"—despite all of this I find I can't move from my chair. I can't get out of bed. I can't dial the phone.

This wouldn't be a problem if I was merely on vacation, home for a week or two here and there to just fritter about lazily, going out to eat nine times a week, attending parties and reunions and such in the short span between semesters. But I'm not really on vacation. I'm out of school for nearly five months a year: three in the summer and two in the winter. Technically I should be working—if not actually out there doing a nine-to-five, I should at least be writing, knocking chunks out of my soon-due thesis. I should be reading and writing and furthering my life's work, tuning up some serious hobbies. And if not any of that, I should be playing with my 12 nieces and nephews during the short time that they're young and I'm here. I should be assembling the basketball goal that no one's been able to assemble at my sister's; I should be painting family's living rooms and mowing their yards; I should be making myself, if not useful, at least helpful.

So why can't I? What is it about home that debilitates?

I once had three theories to try and explain this. One had to do with the idea of going home as putting on your old skin, of inhabiting old habits when in old places. I've felt this a lot in past years, but I think it's wearing off, or at least being updated as time goes on. See, the idea is that it's hard to be yourself when you go home because the self you used to be when you lived there encroaches on your present self. You sleep in old beds in old rooms and start acting like a teenager again.¹

Another theory has to do with the suburbs. I read a book by Žižek a year or so ago that made no sense to me at the time. It was about how modern society has replaced what's real with what is imagined to be real and how big things like 9/11 shock us into seeing beyond the suburban spectacle for an instant before the seeing beyond becomes the spectacle and the real is hidden behind the thought of the real again, etc. etc. (You see why I didn't understand it, yes?) Anyway, it didn't really make sense, and I really didn't read much of the book at the time, but when I went home a few weeks later for break, suddenly it hit me one day what he was talking about and why the suburban life might be dangerous at times. It really freaked me out.

The third theory actually has nothing to do with this.

Phew. It took me all day to write this. Every time the thoughts were there the energy wasn't, and every time the energy was there I just wanted to go drop pills on some viruses. Which is what I plan to do right now.



¹Which is why, if you want my advice, it's "Move out."

"Isn't that the payback for being indiscreet?"

I've been thinking about something a friend once said. In London one day, a bunch of us were sitting around the dining room chatting about—what else?—love. The question on the table was "What have you learned about love in the past year?" and each person who walked into the room was asked to answer. The group had gotten rather large, and lots of good advice had been offered, but what I'll always remember is what Paul said when he walked in and was asked. Paul was pretty much the coolest guy in the house, so we were all anxious to hear what he had to say.

"Be discreet," he said, and then he shut up. (So clever!)

Someone asked what he meant. He explained: "Whatever feelings you have about a person should be between you and that person."

This was quite different advice than we had heard thus far. That was quite a different position than most of us were apt to take; it seemed every other conversation one overheard among our group was about crushes and signals and possibilities. 40-some-odd girls and 7 boys on a bus together twice a week was a recipe for giggling. My own brother had captivated the crew when he grabbed the bus microphone one day and told an epic of love. But Paul, now that I thought about it, never shared his own love stories, past or present. He had been silent on the matter of his own love-life.

So here is my reasoning:

Paul = cool
Paul = doesn't talk about love

ergo

Cool=not talking about love

This makes a lot of sense to me, on the one hand. I mean, I have a lot of stories about love. About failed love (all past-tense love stories with living protagonists are failed-love stories, more or less). Some days I feel like I'm walking around with a lot to regret. But here's the thing: I'm not so sure my future lover will care. When I was younger, so much younger than today, it seemed like every third or fourth date was the "life story" date. The one where you tell each other all about the clubs you were in in high school and about the trouble you caused and about the epic birthday parties and, of course, about the long list of boy- or girlfriends you've had. It seemed necessary for two to understand each other, for two to have proper conversation. But when I think about it, I don't really see any couples I know talking about all that stuff that happened to them before they got together. I don't see them worried about the string of relationships leading up to the present. Rather, it seems like those failed relationships, those "mistakes," never happened at all, or, it you insist on bringing them up, the person just shrugs them off as part of the process—but who would dwell on that when I've got her now? It's like all the hurt and scars have been healed by finding "the one," yadda yadda.

Sorry, I'm grossing myself out a bit with all this lovey-dovey vocabulary. But you get the idea. No in-love person I know is worried about the past very much, and as I've gotten older, I think I see why. So rather than wait for the moment when I too will feel no more shame at my love-mistakes, I feel like maybe I should take a page from Paul's book and shut up about them. If they come up I should just smile and let the mystery stand.

On the other hand, I'm a storyteller, and I don't have many better stories than the ones in which I'm a fool for love. I mean, you should've seen me last week telling J and G about that one time—I was on fire, and they were cracking up. I had them feeling all the passion, pain, embarrassment, indecision, and every other emotion I felt went it all went down that fateful night. I'm not sure I'm ready to give that up. Perhaps this is why writers turn to fiction...


A Whole 'Nother Question: How come I can't seem to talk around my own family? I'm all smarm and charm around my peers, but as soon as I get home I can't seem to put two words together.

Contest Winner

JSK was the winner of our contest, so on Monday I presented her with a box of chocolates and a bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils. I've got the biggest crush on her.



Coming soon: Halloween party pictures, a tirade against plastic bottles, and the Election Breakfast.