sweet cuppin' cakes, i love me some mmmmuffin

Life is never more perfect than when you're eating a freshly baked chocolate chip muffin, especially if you did not have to bake/pay for said muffin yourself. One of the things I love most about my mod is that the other people in it not only cook, but actually enjoy cooking, so often when I wander out of my room at 3 in the afternoon wondering if I'm going to have to have Cheetos and ketchup for breakfast again, there will be a plate of warm pastries for the taking. It's like magic.

You know, you would think that with a 4-day weekend, you would really have time to get things done. You would think. However, I have come to the conclusion that what everyone really needs is a 6-day weekend...which makes it not so much a week "end" as a "week," but whatever. There should only be one day of work, then 6 days of rest. Just like in the Bible! Er...I think.

Basically, I have somehow ended up with more work than I can throw a stick at, if I were inclined to throw sticks. I'd say that really has to qualify as one of humanity's top ten most useless expressions, because, let's face it, you can throw a stick at pretty much anything. It might not help, but you can do it, and probably feel a little better about things. You can even throw intangible sticks at your emotions for fun--except for that bastard ennui. You can't throw a stick at ennui. It won't care. I wonder if I could hand in a stick as one of my response papers, though. I could just be like, "This is how I responded to the text," and then throw the stick at my professor. That's one case where throwing a stick at things might actually be constructive...or restraining order-inducing...

The to-do list, as it stands today: A paper on The Cheese and the Worms *a book that is not nearly as gross as it sounds* and a paper on Nazi book burnings for Dangerous Books; an essay on Maus and an essay on Poison River for my comic book class midterm; an ending for my Lost in the Story story cycle; my Division I portfolio; my Division II applications. Now, it's not like any of this involves, like, high-level neurocalculus or anything, but it's a lot of words. A LOT. And I like words, most of the time, but at some point there are just so many your brain just starts going, "Merrrrrrrrrrrrrgh," and wanting to draw pictures of bunnies for the rest of your academic career. HOWEVER, as all of my pictures of bunnies end up looking more like pictures of fuzzy scissors, I think I'll continue to slog my way through the writing, even though Kim from America's Next Top Model is apparently wandering around Northampton today. I'm giving up lesbian model stalking for my studies, okay? I think that pretty much says how incredibly scholarly I am.

Where did I leave off in updating? Oh! Last last Wednesday...jeez. This is going to get sketchy, guys. Expect a lot of, "And then something else happened, but I don't remember what. THE END." So, on Wednesday, Kel and Kate dragged me out of bed (so many of my stories start out that way) and made me go to the ThirstyMind, where I ate chocolate cake and more or less studied. Then I went to Lost in the Story, which I've officially decided is my favorite class in the universe. I mean, my other classes rock, but Lost in the Story centers completely around making shit up, and if there's anything in this entire world I'm capable of doing, it's making shit up. We're currently in the middle of a story cycle, wherein six people write six separate beginnings to a story, then six people write the middle, then six people write the end...Ours is kind of weird, though, because it's not like you continue one of the stories--you just write a middle based on all six beginnings, but you don't necessarily have to include all of them. It's a little bizarre, and I'm not entirely sure what's going to come of it, but thus far it's been supremely entertaining. Our final project for the class is to write a 20-page short story, and for once I've actually started working on a final two months before it's due. Thus far my story involves giant squid sex, a legless poetess, and a guy named Edgar. I'm not really certain how it's all going to come together, but I assure you it will be fabulous. After class I went over to Kel's to cook pasta for the QCA's Sexy Spaghetti Soiree, and by "cook pasta" I mean "stand around while Kel cooked the pasta and occasionally asked me to hand her things." We made a ginormous pot of pasta, which we then lugged over to the QCA for our family-style coming out dinner--but a good family-style coming out dinner, not like the family-style coming out dinners that end up with someone getting kicked out of the house. We got about fifteen people, which was good considering the weather was still apolocalyptic, all of whom shared there coming out stories after I pointed to them and forced them to. I told mine first, and I would totally relate it here except that I feel it's completely one of those tales that has to be told in person in order to get the full effect, because it's amazingly ridiculous. So if you see me and we're not in a red state, ask me about my coming out story and I'll totally tell you--and even include sound effects and inappropriate hand motions!

Thursday has been deleted by this blog, since I can't remember anything significant happening that day. Friday, though, my parentals and sisters got into town for Friends and Family weekend and saw my amazingly clean room, which was amazingly clean for a grand total of about 2 seconds after they left. I even vacuumed--it was intense. We were hoping for that, like, picture-perfect tourist-heaven leaf-turning New England weather, but instead we got rain. SO. MUCH. RAIN. I stopped taking showers for about a week just because they reminded me entirely too much of rainfall. I HATE RAIN NOW. I used to really like it, because it only showed up occasionally, but it has overstayed its welcome. Also, can we just dwell on the general bizarre-ness of water falling from the sky every couple of days? I mean, I know it makes perfect natural sense, but it's really sort of odd. It's also odd that the days we think of as nice are created by a giant fireball. Weather is trippy, man.

Right. So, Friday night we went to dinner at the Teapot in Northampton, which is pretty much exactly like Taipei and Tokyo, where I usually eat Chinese and Japanese food, except that they get angrier at you if you and your friends just order tea and one plate of dumplings. After dropping by the Hampshire Mall to discover that every movie we wanted to see had started exactly, like, 15 minutes before, we went to Haymarket for smoothies. Look, if you ever go to Northampton, there is really only one thing that you are, like, required by law to do, and that is go to Haymarket and have a smoothie. Not only is it in a really cool space, but they have the best smoothies in the universe, bar none--and yes, and that includes the Smoothie Planet of Smoothiedromeda. I had the Swamp Thing, which looks sort of like tar and tastes kind of like perfection. The other thing you should probably do if you're ever in Northampton is go to Faces, the store of many wonders, where I brought the Family immediately afterward and bought the coolest tiki-man mirror you will ever see. Then the Family came over to Kate's mod to meet Kate and Amy, which was pretty much hilarious just because any meeting of people I know is generally hilarious, since everyone I know has very little sense of the concept of "tact" but is ridiculously familiar with the concept of "awkwardness." After the Family went back to their hotel, I hung out with Kate, Harry, Ben, and Amy in Kate's room, a gathering which basically consisted of fighting over Fruit Roll-ups *with tongue tattoos!* and freaking out because the tiki man-mirror is kind of terrifying. The mirror part is where the mouth would be, so when you look into it there are these giant teeth above and below your face, which is disconcerting even when you haven't eaten 15 Fruit Roll-ups. Then Kate and I went over to my mod to watch Saved! Ellen came over at some point to talk about how she and Kel have pretty much the exact same fashion sense *read: emo boi/mountain woman fashion sense* and some time after that I fell asleep. Saturday the Family came to fetch me at some ridiculously early hour like 10 for breakfast at the Route 9 diner, where I have spent many a late and insane night. After brunch we went for ice cream at Flayvors, which has incredible ice cream. Look, if you can smell the cow manure, you know the place has good ice cream. It's that fresh. On Friends and Family weekend, Hampshire always has all kinds of crazy activities at the Farm Center, so we went there to pet the donkey and goats and run away from the roosters, which are terrifying. We drank apple cider that was cidered right before our eyes, saw Jacob Wolf Lefton *BEST. NAME. EVER.* blacksmith it up, and took a wild adventure through the wilderness in search of cows but only found mud, a weird girl we think might be one of those mythical Hampshire students who went off to live in the forest, and a hay ride we had to avoid at short notice several times. We also saw Ellen D., the only other person from my high school to apply to and/or come to Hampshire. She was a year behind me at school, and told me she picked Hampshire based solely on the fact that I liked it so much and she didn't want to deal with applying anywhere else, which I found really amusing. After our wholesome family farm fun, we got in the car and prepared to drive 4 hours to the middle of nowhere, a journey that was made significantly more awesome by the fact that we listened to Mitch Hedberg for most of the trip. If you've never heard Mitch Hedberg, you are not only a loser, but you probably can't understand 23% of what I say. So go listen and enlighten yourself, because he's the best guy...ever. My entire family completely loved him, which should pretty much tell you how un-Tennessean they really are. Oh, as to why we decided to drive 4 hours in the pouring rain to destinations unknown--it was my grandmother's 80th birthday, so my uncle had booked us all rooms at this really cool inn called the Governor's House, so named because it was apparently once a Governor's House. Creative. The inn was in New Hampshire, though, and as far as I'm concerned the whole of New Hampshire can pretty much be categorized under "middle of nowhere." It's full of moose and pretty much nothing else. After driving down roads that had no landmarks except "that big tree" and "that slightly less big tree," we found the place and got prepped for our fancy dinner. And boy, was it fancy. My immediate and extended family, though, has some problems with the concept of fancy, so it pretty much ended up being "loud and inappropriate" and therefore really, really fun. They sat us in our own separate room, which was probably very good thinking on their part. I had some kind of amazing pork tenderloin and mashed potatoes and then, of course, huge amounts of the person-sized chocolate cake they brought out at the end. I had been instructed to talk as little as possible in order to avoid scandalizing my young New Hampshire cousins, but somehow we all ended up making inappropriate comments about St. Francis of Assisi and the wedding next door regardless of my direct influence. The next morning we had brunch, which means bacon and cheese crepes, which means *drooooooool*. I LOVE CREPES. Were it legal, I would completely marry a crepe and have half-crepe babies and fight for the rights of crepes everywhere and then open a crepe restaurant called "Holy Crepe" and then realize how if you type the word "crepe" enough times, it starts to not mean anything anymore. Crepe. Crepe. Crepe. Oh my god I need to stop. ANYWAY, after the eating we went to Atkins Farms, which is full of fresh, wholesome food goodness. We got chicken and cider donuts, then I went back to Hampshire and bid farewell to the family. I then had the QCA meeting, to which only one person showed up because the weather had gone from apocalyptic to suicide-inducing. Again--I HATE RAIN.

But Monday! Sweet, sweet Monday! On Monday the clouds parted and the sunshine reigned! I called my mom just to be like, "See, I swear it's pretty here most of the time! You guys just have awful timing!" Monday morning I was so inspired by the sunlight I cooked a turkey. Yes--a turkey. An entire...turkey. This mystified my modmates and pretty much everyone I know, all of whom were like, "Honey...you don't even have the patience for Eggo waffles. Why are you cooking a turkey?" The answer is simple and stupid. Upon my last grocery trip, I realized you could get way more lunch meat from a whole turkey than those, like, deli meat things. Somehow, I failed to realize that to get that meat, though, I would at some point actually have to cook said turkey. When my mom came up, she gave me instructions, and so I just decided, "Well, it's either cook it or use it for arts and crafts, and the latter just seems wrong somehow, so let's cook it!" So I did, and it worked, which is the really remarkable thing. Now, though, I have like 8 pounds of turkey sitting in a plastic pitcher in the fridge since we didn't have a Tupperware container big enough to hold it. I'm kind of like Martha Stewart. Tuesday I went to work, had class, and probably did something amazing I don't remember. Wednesday I had class and then America's Next Top Model, which a bunch of first-years always get all glammed up and come over to my mod for. It's kind of bizarre, as is Shawn in drag, which he always dresses up in for the duration of the show. Wednesday is my total TV night--there's ANTM, LOST, and Drawn Together, which is the most TV I ever watch in one night ever anymore. Thursday I worked, hung out with Kate and Kel, and went to the Yurt meeting--the Yurt is our on-campus media center, built in the style of a Mongolian yurt because hey, you can do that here. I went to the meeting to get a radio show, and lo and behold! I have one. They're actually allowing me airtime, which is hilarious. My friends were so excited and also like, "How do you even find out about this stuff? You lead like seven different mysterious lives." It's on Internet radio, meaning no FCC standards *YES* and right now it's on-campus only, so if you want to hear it you'll have to come to Hampshire. Wouldn't that be awesome if I got some prospective student to come to Hampshire purely because they wanted to hear my radio show? I think I would get a trophy from Admissions or something. After watching Alias and bugging Kate at Pub Safety, I went with Amy to K2, where most of the people who lived with us on E2 last year live. They were all having some insane hall drama that was threatening to escalate into a gang war, but for all the tension it was a pretty fun night. There's just something about living on a hall that makes people extra-angsty. In the mods, I guess, you have more space, so you want to kill each other less, but on living on a hall is like being trapped in tube where you can only run from one end to the other. Not that I know what that's like or need years of therapy from when my parents made me play "The Tube Game" or anything. After hanging with them we went back to my mod to watch Jerry Maguire and eat sourdough bread with olive oil and pepper, which is an excellent snack that makes you feel like you're being healthy even though you're probably completely not.

Friday I...oh right! Was dragged out of bed by Kate and Kel. Right, of course. We went errand-running all day and ate at Cafe Fireside, where someone had decided the special of the day needed to be "combine three of Katharine's favorite foods into a pasta dish" so they had chicken, shrimp, and broccoli alfredo. OMG SO GOOD. That+dark chocolate mousse=the perfect meal. Then we came back to my mod to watch Space Cases, which I loved as a child and just found for download *Firefly fans--it has Jewel Staite as the ship's engineering genius--she's been playing the same character for, like, 10 years.* We also watched Amy's home movies, where she mostly yells about food and falls down a lot, so it's pretty much the same as her life today. Kate and Kel then went off to study, while Amy and I watched Inspiration Today for like 2 hours. It was terrifying yet addictive. We watched some guy named Alvin Slaughter *just pause to take in that name* lead praise worship and then some creepy bishop guy tell us to give him all our money because Jesus said we should. It totally reminded me of my Genesis Weekend experience, which I told Amy about, where one of my friends from school invited me to a "sleepover with her friends" that turned out to be a "Genesis Weekend sleepover" which means "the sleepover in which we try to save your soul." We weren't allowed to listen to anything but Christian music or talk about anything un-Christian, which meant it was not only really boring, but I had nothing to listen to/talk about. There was also this creepy group leader woman who wanted me to fill out a survey with my name, address, and a list of people I hung out with who I thought were going to hell, to which I responded, "OH GOD OH GOD," and locked myself in another room. I stayed in there listening to my Gorillaz CD until this girl came in and told me she didn't think that was Christian music, but I told her "Clint Eastwood" was actually one of Jesus' nicknames, so it counted. The next morning they took me to their mega-church, where me and all the other heathen kids tricked into coming basically tried to act invisible while the preacher guy denounced everything from women to Democrats to people who drive Volkswagens. It was really, really funny/frightening. If you're ever wondering why I'm not so much a fan of Tennessee, a lot of it can probably be traced back to that story. That and NASCAR.

This morning I cooked scrambled eggs and have since spent the rest of the day listening to Miles Davis, Cowboy Bebop, and the Triplets of Belleville soundtrack, because they are somehow the most conducive to studying. And, speaking of studying, mayhaps I should wrap up this entry and do a little of that. After all, contrary to popular belief, I am actually a student here and not just some wandering homeless person who hangs out in people's mods and eats their muffins. I swear...