Birthday Fun

MML #31: Going out with friends for birthday celebrating!

It's Wednesday, known as being a crappy day of the week, and I've been feeling slightly ill all day. But I don't care, because tonight I'm going out with the girls to belatedly celebrate my birthday! (Which was two days ago.) We're going out to Olive Garden and I'm SUPER excited about having some delicious food and some chocolate dessert.

Yay for birthdays and friends!

Silliness

MML #30: Receiving emails from my future self.

This is totally legit. Really. My future self is awesome. (Though coincidentally sounds a lot like my roommate.)

"Dear past Vicki,

This is future you, sending you a message from, you guessed it, the future! Things are very different here in the future. You survived sophomore year, and went on to have lots of fun in Scotland with your bfff (best friend forever in the future) Emily. It was there that you met your soulmate, got married and had four kids, all before returning for Christmas break! It was quite the whirlwind romance, and our parents were quite surprised (as was Emily. She would have felt left out except the same thing happened to her after she found Hogwarts). Anyways, the reason I'm writing this is to give you a dire warning!!!! Prepare yourself, because I'm risking everything to break the space time continuum and bring you this very important message:

Log out of your email when you print something off in the computer lab!!!! I'm warning you now, because in the future someone sends you a very silly email pretending to be you from the future. Yeah, it could be bad. So please be more careful in the future, for both our sakes!

Lots of love,

Future Vicki

P.S. Try and make sure you don't murder Emily, even if it looks like she might leave you. It was really messy cleaning up her body and I don't want you having to go through the same thing.

P.P.S. The stupid chapel printer is broken, just for future reference. so if, say, Emily were to be printing stuff off, she'd have to go somewhere else."

Emily Dickinson

MML #29: Rediscovering how much I love Emily Dickinson poems.

Seriously. She was the original emo, and I love her for it. One of my friends is a music composition major, and this semester is working on a chorus piece based on literature. I passively mentioned Emily Dickinson in a conversation a month or two ago, and then over spring break I found out that he unknowingly picked my favorite poem for inspiration. Read it - it's awesome.

I should not dare to leave my friend,

Because—because if he should die

While I was gone, and I—too late—

Should reach the heart that wanted me;

If I should disappoint the eyes

That hunted, hunted so, to see,

And could not bear to shut until

They “noticed” me—they noticed me;

If I should stab the patient faith

So sure I ’d come—so sure I ’d come,

It listening, listening, went to sleep

Telling my tardy name,—

My heart would wish it broke before,

Since breaking then, since breaking then,

Were useless as next morning’s sun,

Where midnight frosts had lain!

Junior Week

MML #28: When people dress up in silly costumes.

My school has a lot of awesome, occasionally silly traditions. One of my favorites is called "Junior Week," when each of the seniors picks a junior (secretly, without revealing their identity) and for one week assigns that junior a different costume to wear each day. At the end of the week, there's Junior Banquet, when the juniors put on their class rings for the first time and their secret senior is revealed. We have senior robes here, which are passed down to each class, and that's what the juniors work all week to receive. That's a whole other tradition that makes me smile.

Anyway, here are a few of today's favorite costumes:

Katelyn as the Queen of Hearts

Annie as Eeyore and Elizabeth as Jose Cuervo

Everyone from Up!

Old Fashioned

MML #27: Gender Roles

(Note: This has been running through my head since a discussion I had with Annie last week. You can see more of that at #25.)

Alright, before any feminists start throwing things at me, let me give a little disclaimer: I am not the type of girl to constantly have a boyfriend or always need a man in her life. I attend a women's college, and I completely support any woman's right to have her own career and make more money than her husband, if she wishes. I also support any gay person's right to marry the person of their choosing.

Have I covered it all? No one will hate me now? Yay!

Okay, so that said, I kind of adore gender roles when it comes to marriage. Not to say that I think that a wife exists to do her husband's bidding, or that I think something as complicated and difficult about the ultimate commitment that is marriage can be simplified down to gender roles.

But I'm a stereotypical wife in the making. I've pretty much been that way since I was born.

Examples:

I enjoy cooking and baking, and setting out a nice dining table with food. I like hosting parties. I don't like cleaning, but when it needs to be done I'm really good at it, as well as organizing. I know how to do basic knitting, crocheting, and sewing; and I've known how to tie a man's tie for him since I was about seven years old. I'm crafty, and I love tutoring kids and helping them with their homework. I'm good at keeping up with birthday cards and I can write an awesome thank you note. I also love decorating my house for the holidays. As far as stereotypical wifely duties go, I've kind of got it covered.

So is it completely terrible that I find myself having stereotypical expectations of men? Or at least ones that I'm interested in? For instance, I know my basic way around a car (checking oil, air conditioning fluid, changing a battery, etc.) but if something ever went wrong I could definitely get taken advantage of by a mechanic. I've never mowed a lawn in my entire life, unless you count the one or two times my grandfather let me use his ride-along mower, which I will admit was completely fun. I can change a lightbulb, but I don't know anything about plumbing and I can't (/won't) snake a drain. Cooking food on the grill terrifies me, and though I know I to start a fire, I shy away from that one two. And I cannot for the life of me kill a bug, let alone any other kind of house pest.

My point? I support women's rights. I'm glad I get to vote. And I'm slightly envious of any mechanically skilled, lawn-mowing, bug-killing woman. So I'm tired of feminist women telling me that I'm ridiculous just because I'm a little more traditional than they might be. I mean, traditions exist for a reason.

Shared Suffering

MML #26: "How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?" by Lorrie Moore

This is from a collection of Lorrie Moore's short stories entitled "Self Help" and rather than bog you down with precisely why I thought this short story was awesome, I'm just going to type up every single quote that made me happy. (Annie already heard most of these because I kept reading them aloud to her while we were at the White Hart Café yesterday.)

"First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age - say 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary so that at 15 you can write long haiku sequences about thwarted desire."

"Apply to college as a child psychology major."

"Decide that you like college life. In your dorm you meet many nice people. some are smarter than you. And some, you notice, are dumber than you. You will continue, unfortunately, to view the world in exactly these terms for the rest of your life."

"Decide that perhaps you should stick to comedies. Start dating someone who is funny, someone who has what in high school you called a 'really great sense of humor' and what your creative writing class calls 'self-contempt giving rise to comic form.'"

"You spend too much time slouched and demoralized. Your boyfriend suggests bicycling. Your roommate suggests a new boyfriend. You are said to be self-mutilating and losing weight, but you continue writing. The only happiness you have is writing something new, in the middle of the night, armpits damp, heart pounding, something no one has yet seen. You have only those brief, fragile, untested moments of exhilaration when you know: you are a genius."

"Insist that you are not very interested in any one subject at all, that you are interested in he music of language, that you are interested in - in - syllables, because they are the atoms of poetry, the cells of the mind, the breath of the soul. Begin to feel woozy. Stare into your plastic wine cup."

"Begin to wonder what you do write about. Or if you have anything to say. Or if there even is such a thing as a thing to say. Limit these thoughts to no more than 10 minutes a day, like sit-ups, they can make you thin."

"You will read somewhere that all writing has to do with one's genitals. Don't dwell on this. It will make you nervous."

Quotabiity

MML #25: Saying something that makes no sense or is totally random, and only noticing because a friend is around to point it out.

This happens to me a lot, unsurprisingly. It kind of makes me wonder how many weird things I say when I don't have a friend around to point out how little sense I'm making.

Obligatory question: "Vicki, does this mean you talk to yourself?"

Well, vague person I created for the sake of answering a question that in reality wasn't asked and therefore meaning I don't actually have to own up to this fact: Yes, that's exactly what this means. Some people are capable of thinking thoughts in their head. I don't understand how to do this, so I think my thoughts out loud or on paper. But enough about that.

So I was walking with Annie to her room today and we were talking about how the elevator in her building has been broken for a long time now. Since we both live on the third floor of our respective dorms, I can imagine how bothersome that would get, but then I decided it was important to add:

"Though, some days I'll start at the basement and go up the three flights of stairs just for a little bit of exercise because I feel like I've eaten like a whore."

I continued talking until I noticed Annie looking at me like I was insane. Then, after exchanging a glance that said, "Yes, I did just say 'eat like a whore' and no, I don't have a clue what that means" we both promptly burst into a fit a giggles. Good times.

My other quote of the day took place a few hours later when I was telling Annie about how I never expected to buy a car without a man present (like I did this past Fall), because I figured that I would always have my dad or a husband or a brother-in-law or a friend to offer me expert car opinions. Then, after realizing that many men from our generation actually know little more about cars than we do, we started discussing the injustice of it all. Warning: the conversation got extremely sexist from this point on. I honestly don't care.

So my/our rant went something like this:

"We know how to cook. We knit. We have sewing skills. We work as event coordinators, so that means we can throw a successful dinner party. We've tutored and babysat, so we have some experience with children. We're even business minors and can manage a budget. Is it so much to ask that they know how cars work?"

And I, getting very worked up in my standard Vicki-fashion, decided it was great idea to yell, right outside the library and in the middle of campus so plenty of people could hear me, "I mean, I SCRAPBOOK!"

*pause for more blushing and giggling*

That was my day.

Freud

MML #24: When my roommate follows my advice.

I realize this is my second post in a row about Emily, but this amused me way too much to ignore. Emily was struggling with writing an essay about Freud, and so I told her to take ten minutes and vent her frustration into a Microsoft Word document before going back to working. This was the result (inappropriate language warning):

"Dear Freud,
You are a ridiculous man who obviously does not know what he’s talking about. If sex is an instinct it should be simple, not complicated by a thousand different metaphors. Why can’t you be clear? Then I could form a cogent argument against you, but instead you keep slipping between my fingers you dirty bastard. I think I know what to say to you and then you come up with a sentence strong enough to counter my objections but ambiguous enough that I can’t base any of my arguments off of it. You oily sonofabitch. This rant isn’t working Vicki. I just keep thinking of insults in fact it’s very difficult to keep curse words out of these sentences. Ok not even gonna try. FUCK SHIT DAMNIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this paper is the only thing standing between me and fucking break and it refuses to budge. I’ve reread an entire book and taken 20 pages of notes and then written a cogent outline~!!!!hqwjekgfbskbgkldrah

Jfsdlakgbkjrqegbkh
Gbdsrbsagh;wqegbghgjbdsfklbagjbagkhlad FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!"

Emails

MML #23: When my roommate sends me an email. While I'm in the room.

Emily is working on two essays for a scholarship, so she sent this to me, her mom, and stepdad earlier:

"Hi everyone!

So these are the rough drafts of my essays for the honors scholarship. I must emphasize the word rough, especially in the case of essay b (I think it comes across as a little bitter at times, but let me know). Anyways, it'd be awesome if you could look them over for grammar and content, and get them back to me ASAP. I love all of you and I miss you (but not you Vicki, you're sitting like five feet away from me)

Thanks,

Shlembernia (Emily to you Vicki)"

This made me happy.

Mike Lombardo

MML #22: Listening to Mike Lombardo on my iPod.

He's awesome. The song I'm listening to is "Hey Molly" which you can listen to at the link I'll put below. I also just bought his album Fordham Sessions. Mike Lombardo is a recent grad of Berklee School of Music, and is awesome enough to put all of his music online so you can listen to it as often as you like for free. Only one of his albums (Fordham Sessions, which has my favorite song "Teach Me to Fly") has a set price - a reasonable ten dollars - and then rest are "name your price" with no minimum, so if you want you can even download most of his music for free, though my suggestion would be to give a little and support a young artist.

Here's the link, go listen!

http://mikelombardo.bandcamp.com