Dress for the job you miss, not the one you had

Lately the age range of how I dress has nose-dived. In college I wore heels to class sometimes. Leftovers from my summertime office job. Blouses. Last year I had a hard time figuring out what to wear in the two days a week we didn't have t wear t-shirts. I think I wore the same shirt to taco mac for weeks in a row. (But to be honest it doesn't get much more awesome than a shirt with whale sharks on it. In grad school I wear t-shirts. Jeans. At home I get snowbound and wear running tights and sweatshirts. I wear tights and long skirts and fall asleep in them and wake up warm and confused. I put on a pair of jeans today for the first time since Tuesday. I just can't bring myself to wear nice clothes when the weather is awful and I'm not working. Remember when no one wore skinny jeans? Now I think about how much it would suck to have to wear jeans that go outside my boots when it's super slushy. The water would start on the cuff and travel upwards like a science experiment. Although skinny jeans tucked into boots didn't really do me any good two weeks ago when I got off the bus for school and stepped into an ankle-deep puddle with both feet. Before six hours of class. Because it's Rutgers and a quadrillion people go there no one laughed at me. They just ignored it. Weird.

I was doing great, concentration-wise for the first weeks of school. Now that I am getting deep into cupcake-plannery I feel kind of like Kenny.

S. Dodson: What's cooking in the kitchen, what's cooking in the kitchen, what's cooking in the kitchenn that rhymes with sigh?

Kenny: CAKE!

But replace that with--

Professor: What's an example of instantiation, what's an example of instantiation, what's an example of instantiationnnn in a library or knowledge center?

Me: FROSTING!

Kenny did the catchier version.

This picture has nothing to do with anything, except for the fact that I wanted to let everyone know that I still make the sad lobster face. Even at happy occasions.

sometimes i wish i were a mad hot krumper

Well things have changed since my last post. I moved out of the cat lady's house like 2 days after I wrote all of that (woohoo!). I moved into a cool little apartment in Oakland - it's kind of small and old but in an ultra-bohemian way. I live in the living room on my air mattress behind the couch. Not ideal, but it's much cheaper that way. I have 2 roommates who are actually around my age - one guy and one girl. The girl and I are pretty good friends - we have a lot of similar tastes in music and tv shows and such. The guy we don't see much. He tends to keep to himself. I like it here.

I'm still flat-ass broke. I absolutely love my job - I still don't make enough to live on. They moved me to an autism specific room working with little kids (3-10). Much busier than I was before, but I love it there and that room reeeeeeeeealy likes me. So that's good.

My car is still slowly dying. One day I woke up to find a flat tire. I put the spare on and took it to a tire place to get it patched right after work (all the while being super proud of myself for my quick work to get it fixed). They told me that the tire was fine, but the rim was damaged. So I had to go to a junkyard to get a new rim. When I went to another tire place to have the tire put on the new rim - they told me the tire was damaged beyond repair. So then I had to take my car to a used tire place and get TWO of the tires replaced. Awesome. And now my brakes are grinding and the belt is still squealing and we'll see how long this lasts.

I finished the last play. People loved me - so that's good. I was told by various people that I was perfect, that I stole the show, and that I had perfect comedic timing. Plus I got to wear huge nerd glasses - so it was all good. The next show I'm auditioning for is a musical and I haven't been working on my audition piece and the audition is saturday. Ugh. I'd better get on that.

Oh yeah. I went out with this guy a couple of times. He was cool, but I didn't really see anything going long term. He, however, seems to feel differently. After our first date he told me that he wanted me to be his boyfriend - which - I thought was a little fast. At the end of the second date he told me that he was in love with me. And I said nothing back. He now wants to plan a weekend away together. He has also told me that he's willing to give up girls completely for me (he's bisexual). I've never thought of myself as commitment-phobic before, but this all kind of freaks me out. It may, however, have less to do with the commitment aspect of it and more to do with the fact that I don't really like him like that.

On Valentine's Day I told that boy that I already had plans with my roommate and some friends (all true) so I didn't have to see him. Instead, I went with my roommate and a couple of friends into San Francisco for a several-thousand-person pillow fight. People gathered in front of the Ferry building (pillows in tow), and when the clock struck 6 everyone went crazy. People were beating the shit out of each other and it was all in good fun. I feel like Alex really would have enjoyed this. There were feathers everywhere - about 3 inches high on the ground and in the streets, and constantly floating in the sky like snow. We stayed for the first 3 hours of the pillow fight and it was still going strong when we left.

Poetry speaks to me

When we might ask did we begin to share that existence

What have we overlooked

Nostalgia is another name for one's sense of loss at the thought
that one has sadly gone along happily overlooking some
thing, who knows what

Perhaps there were three things, no one of which made sense
of the other two

A sandwich, a wallet a giraffe

Logic tends to force similarities but that's not what we mean
by 'sharing existence'

-Lyn Hejinian

Oh . . . hi

Oh my goodness,

I'm glad I read all those posts even though I am supposed to be book critiquing. The critique can wait, not sure my online teacher really reads anything I write but . . . not gutsy enough to test that theory out.

Nick! Ah! Sadi would tell you to cover your whole body in Turmeric (which would get rid of the cat pee smell), all I can say is I know things will turn around. You're too cool.

Emily! Ah! Raise chickens and sell their eggs. Don't tell my vegan friends I said that.

p.s. - an anarchist told me I'm a beegan because I eat honey. Have I already blogged about that?

Georgia has been weird but good and sad but happy and horrible and beautiful all at the same time and that's been exhausting.

Farming still, which makes me more happy than I can explain and! and! Mama Judith from love is love farm might be starting an organic garden consulting/building business and she needs a lead shoveler.

Friday I take a bee keeping class. I'm torn between whom I love more, bees or worms.

or myself.

The band is still happening. We reminisced the other night about Nicks performance and How! Cool! That! Was!

Emily Kempf swore in this weeks paper. Check it out.

http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/the_back_pockets_put_juvenilia_on_blast/Content?oid=1372517

Sterling's Mom took that picture. Thanks Mrs. Morris.

Sterling and I acted very gross towards each other for awhile, now we're being polite and not gross. Much better this way, if not exactly following the plan we had in our heads August 7th.

Alex always calls me and I'm total poop about calling him back. Total poop. Sorry Alex.

Terri's new AmeriCorps children claim she is not a vegetarian. She claims she is. I'm way more scared of Terri, Terri wins.

Too long. Too long. For reals, I miss y'all too much sometimes. I started wearing a name tag everyday because I wasn't talking to anyone and it helped. I also have a new moustache that is driving no ladies or boys crazy. But it's a nice compliment to my rat tail.

My name is Billy and I feel oddly hopeful. My goal is to remember how amazing I felt working with everyone last year. I don't remember what else to say.

oh! I'm having a slumber party with Lauren Rench on Friday in Athens. We will stay busy as to not cause her soul a slow and painful death. I wish I could remember exactly what she said.

Academia

Emily...in case you make good on your thoughts of abdicating from vegetarianism, fear not. Terri has decided to go veg. I've been corresponding via facebook about it. She's really into it. It's a great contrast to remembering her consider ordering tofu on her Mellow Mushroom pizza last year and instead going with three kinds of meat.

Also in contrast to being underemployed (as I was for the past several months) I am now fully un. My schedule changes for school didn't work for them. Or the changes they proposed didn't work for me. One of us didn't dump the other. We just broke up. It's pretty insane how much of an impact it's had on me. Aside from the occasional money freakout, I suddenly find myself hungry again after months of feeling like I had no appetite when I came home from work. My school work has picked up a lot in the past week and instead of having breakdowns about when I would be able to do it all, I make myself schedules in my head. And I stick to them. Nothing's perfect, and eventually I'd like another job, but my old one was starting to be a bad scene for me, mood-wise. Although I do miss some of the kindergarteners.

The snow here is deep. Cooper has a look of pure misery world on her face when I take her outside to do her business. My town is bad at plowing. But people are pretty good at driving in it. There are big snowmen all over the place. I wish everyone was here so we could sled together. Now that we've had a proper storm I'm ready for it to be warm again. I'm sick of blow-drying my hair.

I have an Americorps alum in one of my classes. She has dyed-gray hair, huge glasses, and often wears accessories that have bones and skulls on them. I have another girl in one of my classes who never stops talking and it makes me want to die a little every time she opens her mouth. Naturally she is in my favorite class, Materials for Young Adults. We read Twilight in March. So far I've been able to read the books in public, but that one will be done solely in the privacy of my own home. On that note, I need to go to a different library to pick up one of the books for this week. It's about a boy in a juvenile detention center. My professor said to expect that it will take a while to read because it's pretty gritty/disturbing. I think about the things that Alex talked to Neeeedra about last year and I wonder if I'm more prepared for this book than others might be.

I like school. I like being in a busy college town/city twice a week. The people in the program are all pretty nice and open. No true blue A-Corps level friends though. I'm starting to feel like that will be impossible. I won't build a bridge for several months with my fellow student librarians. But on the upside I don't have to play drums with them either. I feel like there are probably some great trivia people in the mix, but who knows how to find them?

Please write things on this, friends.