pictures of spring break

i.

"Please just die so I can have the penguin power!"

"Stop trying to kill me!"

"But I want to get the penguin power!"

It's Wednesday night; I'm half way through my first college spring break and, suffice it to say, there is no six hour drive to Las Vegas in store for my Week of No School (no, really). I am at home, you know, the quaint but not that quaint blue farmhouse right on the outskirts of No-I'm-Not-Really-Nowhere-I'm-Just-Somewhere-You've-Never-Heard-Of-Before, Ohio, and currently listening to a fight of epic proportions between my five year old brother and my step-dad.

Who knew about the new Mario game for the Wii? The one which has turned our sweet little Robert into a boy begging his father to, "Please, just die! Please just die so I can get it!" I do not remember Super Mario being so violent, nor so two-player.

"Can't you just keep your damn firepower?"

Should my brother be cursing?

ii.

We're buying a house.

Yeah. A second one. My parents are ridiculous. Imagine, just imagine for a minute, that your life looks like this:

At the age of, oh, maybe eleven (I suck at remembering these kinds of things) you move into this dinky little farmhouse - and when I say dinky, I dinky. When I say dinky, I mean 900 square feet, two room, one bathroom and a gas-oven stove. Say you and your older sister marvelously don't have to share a room because your parents are crazy enough to set up a bedroom in one of the "living" rooms (probably because the last time you shared a room with your sister... well... let's just say you're both still wearing those scars). Say you move into this house after months and months of clearing out a house-sized space in the woods behind this house because your parents are all like, "Hey let's build a house!" and force you to fight off ticks, move giant rocks and carry buckets of water a tenth of a mile in order to put out the fire at the end of the day - then one day your parents say, "All that work we've put into this clearing? All the fights and promises that someday this will pay off? Who cares! We're buying the house RIGHT NEXT STORE that's already been built!"

You, eleven year old that you are, are relieved. A few years later you think back and wonder what the hell screwed with your parents' foresight enough to make all that hard labor in the sun absolutely, completely meaningless (not worthless, though, god knows your work ethic didn't suffer for it). So for a few years you live in this dinky little blue farmhouse and it's small, but whatever you've got your own room so it's like totally worth it. Then one day your parents say, "We're going to build an addition!" Your sister goes off to college and honestly come present day you can't remember what order this all happened in. So your parents dig a GIANT HOLE in the small patch of grass that's not quite a yard in front of the house and that gets filled up with concrete and becomes a basement before your eyes, and eventually there are walls and a second floor and more walls and a roof. You parents move back upstairs. They tell themselves and everybody, "When this house is finished, it'll be really nice. It'll be a three bedroom, two bathroom house with a basement, a dining room, office space and a living area." Well, awesome.

Sophomore year, say, you're about fifteen, sixteen, and going through all these boys who keep telling you they adore you and then turning around and doing stupid shit, like, say, dating their ex or getting over you. You think, well, at least by this time next year my house will be large enough that there is actually some semblance of privacy for the whole family. Sometime between fifteen and eighteen your parents buy a boat, fix up a trailer up north for vacationing, go on tour with their favorite band, travel the country to visit friends and family, contemplate owning chickens, and send two of their daughters off to college.

Imagine, that by the time you're midway through your freshman year in college, that addition that seemed like so much promise four years ago is still incomplete and, from the outside, looks the same way it's looked since the paneling was 90% finished last summer.

And then you come home for spring break, and your mom tells you, "We're buying another house." So what if she manages to explain how this IS actually a good idea? So what if the explanation is that it'll add to the family wealth, we'll be able to finish the dinky blue farmhouse so that it'll be a respectable, beautiful old-timey quality home before the end of next year? So what if moving means that your step-dad can work about the house without worrying about upsetting his son's asthma, killing the bird, or prodding your mom into a full time explosion of rage and stress? It's still really, really funny to think...

Buying a second house. Huh.

My family, I think, has taught me huge things in life. But the one thing I've never been able to figure out is... do they lack foresight? Sometimes I think that's the only possible explanation, because I often see them doing something that I think is dumb. I'll point it out, maybe, and they'll say, 'No, no,' and I'll think, Oh, OK, that must mean that they've considered what I think is dumb and have found a way to navigate around it and fix the problem. And then the consequence I foresaw... happens. Yet these are usually little things. Navigational errors in the everyday runnings of the family: chores, babysitting, shopping errands. What do I know about money, finances, house buying, interest, loans, mortgages, and the accumulation of familial wealth?

Yes. This is a picture of my spring break.

iii.

Anti-depressants. I can't tell what they're doing to me. All I know is that my throat feels funky; I'm pretty happy in the mornings and get increasingly sullen/moody throughout the afternoon and evening and then have a bitch of a time trying to fall asleep, but once I do, the dreams are benign and trippy and I wake up feeling like sleep and sunshine and morning are my very best friends in the world. How much of this is my normal self (you know, the reason I'm on these things to begin with)? How much of this is brain chemistry reacting to weird, invasive little buggers probing my neurons and resetting my neurotransmitters and telling my medula oblongata to just freaking RELAX? How much of it is my natural brain chemistry being all over-analytical-y (don't I sound like the born and bred intellect?) and trying to figure out what these proby chemical inducers are doing, and in its own reaction to the reaction is staging its own placebo-y goodness?

I DO NOT KNOW. (I am saying this with a British accent because...)

iv.

I'm re-reading THE SHOEBOX PROJECT. Look it up. NO SERIOUSLY. It is the love of my life right now, although I finished rereading it and am now reading Thread of Grace. I've yet to finish Outliers because, honestly, it just suddenly got boring. Whoops.

v.

My cousin's six-hour car trip brought her to Las Vegas. Lights! Shiny things! Cards! Different flavors of Coke! Gambling and booze! (Uh... wait... I actually doubt she's into that. But god knows that if Las Vegas were six hours from Athens, Ohio, well... yeah, we don't need that... *shakes head* OU used to be all about the Intellectual Hippies... the problem is, the Intellectual Hippies were too lax with the rules and all the Hooligan Drunks decided to take advantage of that... But you still do find Intellectual Hippies and I have decided to be one of them - take THAT number 5 party school in the nation label! HA!) MY six hour car-trip, with my very best lovely friend second to none but rivaled by one, will take me to...

*drum roll*

YPSILANTI, MICHIGAN.

Uh, you've never heard of it? Well, neither had I, honestly (I almost spelled 'EYE' - maybe anti-depressants really do make me trippy), until my very best lovely friend second to none but rivaled by one (this one being the rival of the first one I mentioned, but of course they're not really rivals cause they love each other) decided to go there for college.

Where she proceeded to become Jewish and date a dwarf. (OK, so she hasn't officially converted and most guys are shorter than her...)

But yes. Friday morning, my lovely Krista and I are going to visit our lovely Kaitlin. It is no Vegas but it will involves things like HILLEL and HOOKAH (uh, right, the only people who read this may disapprove... but hush, it's hookah, it's harmless in moderation, really... it's the HILLEL you ought to be worried about) and will probably result in the three of us spending altogether Too Much Time In A Coffee Shop.

SPRING BREAK. YEAH. It's all about CRAZINESS...

...if by craziness you mean a mocha latte and a three hour long debate about health care reform.

vi.

I had a six week long break between fall quarter and winter quarter. I have a WEEK break between winter quarter and spring quarter. A WEEK. Now, I'm not saying this is a bad thing. A week is a good, decent break... however... it's times like these when I'm jealous of the semester system. Winter quarter felt like a whole new world after fall quarter. I had time to reset, relax, and get excited for school again. This time, it's going to feel like one TWENTY WEEK BLOCK OF SCHOOL sdgkjhfgkjfdgfnbfgholyshit.

However, I'm only taking three classes (and possibly orchestra): Contemporary Social Problems, the Context of Art in Society, and African American Literature.

THAT'S TWO THREE HUNDRED LEVEL CLASSES WHAT THE HELL.

I must calm down. This journal entry is taking a decidedly different tone from previous ones. In fact, I don't know if I could keep a consistent tone to save my life.

Yes. These are the pictures of my spring break. There are no actual pictures because it is THAT BORING.

Me, though? I love boring. I thrive on it. The only thing better than boring is research and intellectual stimulation. The only thing better than that is three hour debates over coffee about dolphin-man creatures. (You thought I was going to say health care reform again. Come on, we may be smart but dolphin-man creatures are MUCH more interesting and, frankly, much less likely to reduce anyone to angry "Environmental Despair"* tears.)

*Simpson's reference... o_O

Goodnight y'all. I'll edit this in the morning.