Meta meta meta, but the first reason I haven't been blogging is because I managed to break my camera. Annoyed at my short-sighted past-self for passing on the warranty when I bought it last August, I've decided that I'm too goddamn old to be so needlessly hand-to-mouth. I'm gonna buy WARRANTIES, you guys. I'm gonna buy IN BULK. I'm gonna wash the cereal bowl immediately after I'm finished. Chrissakes.

The other reason I haven't been blogging is probably because I'm busier. The busyness of grad school was different; I was mentally tumored with stress and obligations but I still found myself very often with lots of time to reflect (and blog) in my big creaky house, trying to fill the hours before bed. Now I'm barrelling out of bed like a Roman candle each morning to pedal down Summit to my internship in the Short North, then changing into my server getup and making my way to Grandview. Beyond the internship and the job, there are friends here? And they want to buy me food and sing karaoke with me? Also, my boyfriend is cute and beardy and distracting. The weeks have been vanishing at an alarming pace, for example, it's JULY, which is weird because wasn't it just Christmas?

I liked the photo-blog format because I think a pictures and words are symbiotic, both em-better-ing the other. Also, a photograph helps me center my scattered writing (see: above sentences). But I miss committing stuff to electronic ink, drawing thoughts like invisible fibers from my skull. It keeps them from tangling as I'm trying to go to sleep at night, deafened by the sound of a twenty ideas talking to me at once.

So I'm going to be in a wedding in a week. While I know that I am going to be far more concerned with my appearance than anyone else in that gigantic Catholic church, I still find myself nervous about somehow screwing up my chance to look halfway decent. Every time I bang my shin on a chair at work or catch myself biting my nails, I straighten my spine and make a note to be a little more aware of myself.

Sure, I make an effort to wear makeup everyday and wear "hard pants" (pants with some sort of metal closure, i.e. not sweatpants) but I have never been terribly nervous about looking polished. I don't mind the occasional zit or bruised knee or chipped toenail polish. What I'm getting at is that being concerned with maintaining these sort of superficial things is making me terribly unhappy and it seems like no way to live. Bodies are for living in and they are made to be resilient. I look forward to being bruised and skinned and a little mussed again after July 11th.

Worst "daily" "blogger" ever. It'd be pretty inauthentic at this point to go and backdate two weeks' worth of entries, so I'll just try to summarize things best I can. As I write this I'm in a pretty comfortable state of transition: done with final/coursework, thesis looming over my head. Moved out of my big lovely house in Athens, moved into Nick and Jason's Washington Beach bungalow. Looking for the perfect house in Clintonville to share with my favorite L.A. malcontents.

Last year, for Nick's birthday, I made a pretty great-looking Flash cake. In keeping with the DC comics theme, this year I did Green Lantern cupcakes instead. The Green Lantern symbol didn't translate as well to candy as I had hoped; they ended up looking like cupcakes topped with some bizarre Martian rune. Still, they were tasty. So, Nick! It was good to celebrate another birthday with you. I am happy you were borneded.

It took Sjanneke and me until finals week of spring quarter, but we finally cycled out to the Athens farmer's market. We ate sour cherries and little peach tarts. Last fall when I moved, I thought it would be strange to see her all the time. We went to different colleges and really only spent time with one another every couple of months up to that point. Now, it's strange that I can't just call her to drink beer on my porch.

These are the faces of two people who made my life exponentially better while in Athens.

My parents helped me move last Sunday. How many adult moves do I have left where it's okay to draft my parents and their cars? They were a little late getting into town so Nick and I took the moped around. I love the whine of that two-stroke engine.

Columbus welcomed me back with a baptism of fire (oh, and a potluck. Thanks, Ana). Clearly I am up to my old tricks, evidenced here in my scaling of something huge, mechanical and likely dangerous on High St. I'm sorry, officer. You're right. Construction equipment is not a toy. I won't be able to keep up this behavior all summer but it was nice to have a "vacation week" after grueling final exams.

This week, I started my internship and started back serving at the restaurant again. The internship is just wonderful. It's so refreshing to ride my bike to a creative, well-designed space where I can get waist-deep in stuff that actually interests me. Serving has been fine. I'm sure by next week I'll be recanting the hell out of this statement, but it feels good to do honest labor and get gratified almost instantly for it. And I work with six of my closest friends. Not exactly a coal mine.

I'm annoyed by blogging that seems self-deluding or rationalizes away every disappointment: "my life couldn't be more perfect!!" But honestly, things feel level, positive. Brenda is back, my roommates-to-be return soon, and Comfest is right around the corner.

This is what my hangover looked like back when it was just a good night.

You guys, I know I get caught up in metaphor. I see everything in terms of other things, often to a fault. These thoughts are typically pretty fleeting, but there's one I keep coming back to, over and over again. With every disappointing meeting with committee members, every PowerPoint presentation that vanishes from my jump drive just as I'm standing up to present, it occurs to me; more or less I'm just a cow with my horns stuck between the fence slats, thunking and thunking against the wood and hollering in a panic.

This comparison becomes a little more literal in the humbling instances where I do things like get my belt loops caught on the doorknob or close the car door on my skirt.

With few exceptions, I've been screwing things up the same way since I was in high school. Every time I ensconce myself in that same old bullshit, when I close my eyes at night I see that cow stuck in the fence, every muscle tense, ramming its horns back against the unyielding fence.

In the spring and fall, on days when the weather is a very specific lowlands mix of damp, cool, and bright, Sjanneke and I will text-message each other: "Dutch Weather!"

Dutch Weather is when the sky is a kind of matte shade of white, the temperature hovers in the low 60s and the dampness of yesterday's rain or today's impending showers saturates all the trees and grass a brilliant Technicolor green. It's my favorite kind of weather, and not just because I love Holland and I'm reminded of those days spent traversing those canals and nights spent trying my best not to fall in those canals. It's also perfect weather for my favorite things: sipping too-hot coffee on the porch, reading books next to huge windows in cafes, riding my bike to everywhere, donning a scarf and sweater, cooking with the windows open.

Oh, shit. Look what I did. Now I'm scouring the web for internships in the Netherlands.

I don't write much about my roommate, B, in the interest of maintaining domestic harmony. I have found out the hard way that the photos I post and the comments I make can alienate people, and that's not what I'm trying to accomplish here. Plus, I wouldn't want someone telling the Internet about how I leave a Family Circle-esque trail of Evie marking my path in the house until I finally pick up after myself. The lower level of our house is usually scattered with bookbag, jacket, coffee mug, other coffee mug, keys, bobby pins, camera, shoes, other shoes. But B and I are buddies, and strangely sympatico given we share a bathroom thanks to the uniting power of Craigslist.

Above is our sophisticated mail-sorting system. B's stuff goes in the orange crate, mine goes in the metal basket. He's been living here for several years, long enough for junk mail to find him. My mail is almost exclusively personal and therefore relatively sparse, letters from friends and cards from relatives and my quarterly ReadyMade (thanks Ana!). I usually do the sorting, and it always kills me that B, a Marxist who studies political theory and used to live in an anarchist collective, gets a subscription to Golf Digest and myriad golfing catalogs. I can't help but tease him about it.

Pesto, from the potted basil Ana gifted me for my birthday. My mom makes a ton of pesto every summer from her basil crop and freezes it in little batches to send home with us when we visit. I am pretty sure she uses a food processor, though, and doesn't spend an hour chopping, scraping, gathering, swearing, chopping, swearing, throwing things, chopping.

I give my first try a B. More meal-y than paste-like, but still tasty.

Nick's shrapnel crash cymbal. Now that his and Jason's maybe-we're-a-band is playing a maybe-it's-a-gig next Friday, Nick finally had a reason to retire the ol' guy and replace it with a shinier, more, you know, circular new hire. I suggested that we hang it up as art, then realized it's maybe too dangerous to have on the wall where it could come loose and decapitate houseguests. (But not too dangerous to play on?)

Hey Lauren. You're a grown-ass woman. It looks good on you.

Happy birthday.

Today I drove to Newark, Ohio to conduct super secret business.

This craigslist purchase did not result in me getting locked in a sex dungeon and did result in me not being empty-handed for Nick's very imminent birthday. Batting 1000.

Ana's front stoop has these storybook vines that sneak up from the yard, vein the threshold with heart-shaped leaves and completely ensnare the doorjamb and mailbox. It's beautiful and a little bit creepy, like any good children's story should be.

Gulia is moving in with Ana soon and I will make a habit of being at their place as much as possible. Nick and Jason are kind enough to take in this weary traveler for the summer months, but I still can't figure out what to do in the fall. Living alone seems expensive and, well, alone-ly.

Today my journalistic duties took me to a diner in Pickerington where Nick met me and we ate apple pie and did the crossword. Not bad.

I've obviously been complaining about graduate school for several months now. Something that happens when you expresses dissatisfaction with a certain harrowing stage of life is that people are really excited to tell you how much you'll certainly miss it when it's over. For what it's worth, expressing that sentiment as a sort of pre-emptive "I told you so" has zero effect on making that person take stock of their situation and finding solemn appreciation for its hardships. ZERO EFFECT. I will miss Athens, and the nebulous sense of "this part of my life". Will I miss the vague sense of being challenged intellectually? Will I miss the unmerited feeling of superiority that accompanies doing something that people assume to be difficult? I really, really don't think so.

Sometimes watching the Cavs is great because King James wings the ball from half-court with less than a second left to win the game.

But a lot of the time, watching the Cavs feels like this.

The hot months bring babies in sunhats, dogs in bandanas, and friends on blankets calling the rain's bluff and I wonder how I will be able to handle a summer full of squinting babies and dapper dogs and sweaty, foul-mouthed paladins without my heart buckling like paper plate and too much casserole.

Q. What kind of person would I be if I turned down a spontaneous invitation to shotgun coffee and pound Indian food at the North Market on an unseasonably hot Saturday afternoon?

A. A WORTHLESS PERSON.

Mama got an internship!

DANCE BREAK.

Bated breath.

Let me go on the record: I know I'll miss it here.

I kept stumbling upon these little vignettes today that were downright cinematic. Turning a corner on my bike to see a canopy of trees lit up like a Polish church and perfectly framing the sun, fat as a grapefruit, setting behind an Appalachian foothill.

Or the ragtag six-piece marching band shuffling down the brick street, belching out big band standards and doffing their hats at girls in short dresses.

Hippie bullshit I hate:
Pseudospirituality
Jam bands
Stoner jargon: "dank nugs", "smoke me out", etc.

Hippie bullshit I love:
Baby slings
Food co-ops
Cheesy public art

How many senses, Nick?

Killin' it.

The same little kid who compulsively anagrammed and backwards-spelled every word on road signs and found faces and landscapes in the imperfections in the driveway concrete sees a chartreuse ironing board stand at the thrift store and thinks:
x + glass top + detachable basket = portable patio bar.

Nick, similarly afflicted, sees such a thing and thinks "keyboard stand", which is what this guy is gonna be for now.

P.S. You are cordially invited to enjoy a porch cocktail at my place, summer 2010.

Sjan and I stayed in town late tonight to attend International Dance night at a favorite bar and then carpooled together to Columbus. I squealed over her satellite radio as I always do. "This feels like objectively the best song ever, but what if a few clicks of the tuning dial would take me to five increasingly superior songs?" And Sjan is a good sport about hearing 30% of lots of sweet jams all the way down 33 at 2 am.

I'm excited to move back to Columbus but until I get my thesis good and wrote, I think I'll be craving denouement. This is confusingly recursive but I keep trying to make myself feel better by imagining my future-self (maybe five months from now?) lifting boxes with my brother and dad into a new apartment. And that self, sweaty from moving, sneezing from all the dust, will have defended my thesis and secured a job. And sitting on the floor between a desk gutted of its drawers and a naked mattress, I will sip my to-go coffee and tell the self that is writing this that everything ends up okay.

Until then, I guess I follow the bread crumbs.

This note has flapped over the button that starts the dryer all year. I hate that it presumes I've already failed to clean out the lint trap.

It took me nearly nine months of being passive-aggressively chided for a laundry sin I haven't committeed to realize that I could just remove the landlady-placed note and pitch it.

AGENCY.

Hazards of spring mid-morning porch-sitting: Tree sex gets in your coffee.

Nick bought me a new beautiful cruiser bike for my birthday because apparently being a developmental lemon who moved away to go to graduate school to get a degree I'm still lukewarm about makes me worthy of stuff and praise. Ah, Nick. You're true blue. One thousand kisses upon your beardy mug.

Initial attempts to name the bike Suri Cruiser have been vetoed.

It's become basically impossible to drive back to Athens.

Belated suggestion: if you are in graduate school and thus, have zero dollars, make your mom a mix CD. She can play it in the car on the way to yoga or dropping her donations off at the food pantry, or you could finally teach her how to use the iPod she got for Christmas and put it on her iTunes. Maybe remember how to do the four things you know how to do in Photoshop and design an "album cover". Maybe slip the CD in a 45 sleeve and tape the "cover art" on the front. Really anything to save her from the Josh Groban and Michael Buble CDs she's gotten her hands on.

My mom is awesome. Her muscle memory from 13 years of Catholic school is still intact: she tells me that sometimes when she sees a parked police cruiser with a speed gun, instead of slowing down, she instinctually swallows her gum. Sometimes when my dad teaches late, she has a huge bowl of ice cream for dinner. She and my dad own the dance floor. She has a raging herb garden. She never wanted me to shave my legs or wear makeup or dye my hair. (I did them anyway) At the time, I thought she was trying to squash my individuality, but now I can see that she wanted me to think for myself.

The weather on May 9th is always perfect for fire, beer, and friends. Excellent planning on my parents' part.

Thanks, everyone. I couldn't ask for better dudes.

The men of my family wait for our table at the bar.

My favorite restaurant in Dayton is a Thai/pan-Asian place downtown, housed in a factory that used to process and package peanuts - now it's polished wood and exposed brick and high ceilings. My family took me there for my birthday, or Mother's Day, or both, or neither.

My birthday and Mother's Day always fall in the same week. My mom and I, both given to social martyrdom, demand that no one make a fuss and then are quietly disappointed if no one makes a fuss. "I'm sorry" "It's fine, I'm sorry" "Well, don't be!"

My senior year of high school, when other family elements were things-fall-apart-the-center-cannot-hold-ing all over the place, my birthday passed without much fanfare. I'd celebrated Saturday night at someone else's birthday party where I knew no one, tagging along with my then-boyfriend to the event at a grubby punk house in Columbus. The five of us celebrated/uncelebrated Mother's Day and my birthday at a forgettable Indian restaurant in Columbus the next day where I stared into my cup of chai, taking inventory of my first ever hangover. There were no gifts exchanged, to or from me or my mother, but I remember my parents giving me a birthday card that said something along the lines of "you're a wildflower, go change the world" and feeling very touched. Given my condition at the time (adolescence), I was unable to express my gratitude.

At some point during the next week at school, my mom, wrecked by guilt over what she perceived as a weak birthday observance, made two dozen chocolate cupcakes and brought them to my English class. She was the school nurse at the time. My class erupted into hoots and applause at the sight of the cupcakes and my mom, who is shy, did this thing she does where she shields her eyes from the attention and then follows up by sort of sticking out her tongue and crossing her eyes a little bit. My eyes welled up and she quickly disappeared back to the clinic before I could go thank her.

I have a committee chair for my thesis! Asking someone to be your committee chair is the academic version of asking someone to prom. During our meeting, he kept referring nonspecifically to my committee, saying things like "well, whoever is on your committee will need to do x thing". My heart pounded. Whoever? Why is he acting like I'm not going to ask him? Does he not want to be on my committee? Maybe he's trying to save me the embarrassment of asking him, because he knows he'll say no. Finally, I summoned the courage to ask him to be on my committee, and when he said yes, I swung for the bleachers and asked him to be my chair. I left his office feeling that way you do when you first fall in love and you're late to everything all the time. I stepped outside the journalism building and stood in one spot squeezing my eyelids shut, certain that the energy pulsing inside me would begin to press me down into the earth's crust.

My Thursday evening eventually found me on a broken couch, cuddling an affectionate dachshund mix named Li'l Bit, having been unexpectedly befriended by a Manic-pixie-dreamgirl type, a petite blonde force of nature who creates in strangers a desire to give things to her for free. It wasn't so bad really - listening to a CCR record on the wrong speed at some alien apartment while my new friend continued to conduct herself cinematically and seemingly without a shred of affectation. It's been a while since I had an evening left completely to its own devices; different faces, different houses, different bars, different streets. Things have been kind of Groundhog Day around here.

Cool, rainy days are good opportunities to accomplish mundane household tasks. I like the tiny victories over The Chaos brought by folding clean towels straight from the dryer or purging the refrigerator of mold colonies secreted away in plastic tubs.

I know that I was battling praying mantises last fall, but I sort of forgot that warmer weather would bring back herds of bugs, fluttering and creeping and dying in my shared living space. These aren't creatures of squalor, just part of living in the woods - the sort of thing I should expect of a house built smack dab in the middle of Outside. It still surprises me, though, when I pull back the shower curtain to reveal a grasshopper or when a june bug has gone gently into that good night on the kitchen counter next to my crate of oranges.

It's the week preceding my birthday. This invites the kind of self-absorbed reflection on Time and its Passage that requires creaking on the porch swing late at night, staring at the love-drunk moths bobbing and diving at the incandescent bulbs. And for once, I'm not drawing sadsack parallels about flinging myself at the same light over and over and wondering why nothing ever changes. No, instead I'm hoping my bedroom window are shut upstairs so that I don't find any (more) insect carcasses in my sheets.

Nick grows a beard for my birthday every year; here he is in my room in beardy times past.

For a while, the "long distance thing" was pretty manageable. I get to indulge in all my embarrassing secret behaviors (consuming spoonfuls of condiments for snacks, watching Jon and Kate Plus 8, white cotton briefs) without having to hear about it, and then when Nick and I see each other, vacation! We go out for brunch and watch documentaries and go record shopping! It's an okay arrangement.

A couple of weeks ago, the whole living 80 miles apart thing became fundamentally very stupid. It's unnatural, it's exhausting, it's..stupid.

So sometimes, in the face of such stupidity, one must spontaneously drive to Columbus to hang out with one's boyfriend and his beard.

I returned from Cincinnati today, completely exhausted from an exciting but emotionally and physically demanding weekend. I came home to an empty house in need of some cleaning, piles of laundry, and looming school work sending my anxiety spinning into overdrive.

Seeing a postcard from Brenda from Rome sitting in the mail slot lifted my heart like a helium balloon so I made this dinner (black beans, feta, corn, lime juice) in honor of her and the janky hobo meals we used to invent for ourselves last summer.

Luck be a parking spot...

Stephanie and I found a parking spot directly in front of the hotel, and when she opened her car door, there was a twenty dollar bill laying on the ground. (It was not a "poo dollar".)

We were thrilled about it, then spent the next hour wondering how we'd be punished for such fortune. (Running across the street to the hotel: "Twenty dollar jaywalking ticket, right?")

At the gas station on the way back to her place, a guy approached us, explaining that his car had broken down and he didn't want to walk several miles home from work with a server apron full of cash through a dodgy neighborhood. She and I, veteran servers, had a silent conversation where we calculated our getting-raped-and-killed odds to be moderate to low and gave the guy a lift. Once we dropped him off and it was clear he had no friends hiding in the bushes to jump us, we breathed a fat, dramatic sigh.

Consider "it" to be paid forward.

I know that every day can't start with my boyfriend surprising me by showing up in Athens at 8 a.m. and end with dancing on tables in a bier hall to an oom-pah version of "Sweet Caroline", but I will take those days when they come. If Sjanneke's wedding is half as wild as her bachelorette party, it will be quite a success.

I did enough apologizing to security guard/bouncer types to last me for a few years though. I'm very sorry, sir. You're right, fountains are not for sitting in.

I was pretty diligent for six months there, so I'm going to do a quick and dirty rundown of the past couple of weeks so I get back into this again. As I fished my camera out of my purse to upload photos, I accidentally palmed the lens into my pillow and it made the dull crunch of a stepped-on exoskeleton. Now it's reading "lens error" and the lens is hyperventilating half-open then half-shut. Tragically, I'm not sure I'll be able to take any more photos on it. Strange, after six months of dropping it on pavement so it snaps open and pukes out its batteries, wedging it beneath heavy textbooks in a tossed-around backpack, and general roughhousing, I killed the ol' girl with a pillow? Really? Gah. It's like the soldier who serves two tours in Iraq and slips on a banana peel at home and dies. That's not a thing, is it? Damn.

Sjanneke is planning a wedding, and teaching middle schoolers, and going to graduate school and writing a thesis. Industrious, disciplined, or fucking insane? Yes, those. A past Evie might have made herself feel bad in comparison to such an impressive person, and made halfhearted attempts to change my fundamental slacker hardwiring. The Evie that writes this now is wise enough to say, "Hey! Congratulations on being an excellent human! Drink a beer on my porch! I will continue to wake up at 10, though."

Something that must be nice about being my boyfriend is that occasionally I will make you veggie meatball subs. Just a guess.

So Lauren has to drive a lot for work and for self and so a dashboard GPS is pretty much a must. What I find amazing is that Lauren's dad, an actor, does many of the navigational voices for GPS devices. So, instead of "Niles" guiding you to your destination in dulcet cadences of the Queen's English, Lauren can be guided around by her dad. She seemed pretty blase about this but I think it's amazing and novel. Having your dad's voice navigate you safely through traffic: comforting or frustrating? At first I thought comforting, but eventually I think I'd revert to an angry adolescent subjected to one of my dad's driving lessons again. My first lesson my dad "let me" coast on the brakes in the church parking lot. What, you thought I'd be allowed to touch the accelerator on my first lesson? False.

This girl has a new place in Olde Towne East that I believe she would describe as both "bitchin'" and "juicy". It is a place where spontaneous painting happens, which I think is the whole idea, right?

Athens is sort of objectively lovely right now. Branches are spitting popcorn balls and shiny green leaf buds are uncurling depth and space into what was once gray and dimensionless. Spring is a tremendous relief, but I have to be honest, my spirits have been completely rotten lately. I think it's been weeks since I went a day without bursting into tears for some abstract, impossible-to-explain reason.

The thing about this house is that sometimes I'll catch a brilliant shaft of lemonade-white sunlight through one of the windows and I know it won't last long, so I'll grab an object (and think, "If only I had a dog or a child to put in this light and photograph!") and I'll take fifty shots of a pocketwatch on my macro setting before it vanishes. And sometimes I take pictures of myself in this light, which is now something you know that I do. So, here's me, resolving (at least for now) not to try my hardest, not to make the most of a goddamn thing, just to get by until it gets better.

To the four people who read this, bear with me.

Leslie, my dearest friend since 7th grade, and Caleb came into town for the Wilco show. I made them marginal whiskey-lemonades and exceptional guacamole and we all got pink-shouldered sitting on the back porch, the dull roar of Athens, Ohio on the first near-hot day of the year like the lapping of the tide. But with more woo!s.

I found out that Leslie is scurrying off to Asia for a year, most likely because she does not value my company and wants to be fourteen time zones away from me.

Seriously though, there's absolutely no way I will be able to afford a plane ticket to Korea in the next year to visit her. Secret benefactors of the world? Now is the time to contact me in an old-timey, mysterious way. I'm thinking something sealed with red wax or maybe a map (on parchment paper, obviously) affixed to my front door with a letter opener. Preferably the map leads to a wad of cash in an old patina-ed music box. But those are just suggestions. You're the secret benefactor here, I'm not gonna tell you how to do your job.

I've been creeping along at a slug's pace these past few weeks, a million things to do and not a drop of motivation.

I was always able to dubiously justify past cases of "senioritis". When I was a senior in high school, I was already accepted to college. When I was a senior in college, I was already accepted to grad school. I skipped classes and wasted weekends sans-guilt. But now? I'm so tired of school and isolation that I can hardly bring myself to do the things to get me out of school and isolation.

Coffee used to fix this problem. I keep imagining my brain as a crappy apartment building where the roof is leaking and the hot water is out in the bathroom but the landlord (me) won't return any phone calls.

Sorry, brain, you're gonna have to keep showering at your sister's place until I get all this sorted out.

From my forthcoming etiquette guide, "Cycling in Heels And Other Inadvisable Activities":

On occasion, it becomes prudent in the course of an evening on the town for a young lady of distinction to eat all the pizza in the world.

My journalistic duties took me to this lovely place today. It made me feel a pang of guilt that I will likely depart Athens having left tons of cool, vibrant, cultural stones unturned.

And then I remembered the glory that is riding my bike to Goodale Park on a cloudless summer day and reading on a blanket until I'm sun-dizzy. And then sitting sitting on Ana's porch with a glass of iced tea the size of an oil drum.

And then I felt okay about it.

I made a resolution a couple years ago to avoid talking on my cell phone while holding a cup of to-go coffee, because it's important to me that I not look like an asshole. That's not to say this doesn't still occasionally happen. After all, I am a person who would carry around an IV tree with an espresso drip if I could, and also a person who occasionally receives phone calls.

But this is exactly the reason that I made that silly resolution, cause there I am on the front page of the Messenger, in all my asshole glory.

Also, to anyone who came upon this site by googling "asshole glory", sorry to disappoint.

So I am "in charge" of "planning" a "high school reunion" this year and I have no idea where to even start. In a momentary lapse of judgement, I sent out a corny e-mail en masse via Facebook (I know, I know) to get a feel for people's expectations. Did I secretly want people to say, "naw, let's wait til 2014, I need five more years to become impressive"? Well, yeah. But honestly, after a lot of great responses and a few unexpected ones ("I was in a terrible accident this winter but maybe by this fall I'll be able to walk with the help of a walker!" "Sure, just gotta make sure I can find a sitter!" "Five years? Seriously? I guess I better get a job or kill myself"), I am actually sort of looking forward to it.

Mostly I just felt uncomfortable sending an e-mail to people saying HEY HIGH SCHOOL REMEMBER REMEMBER AWESOME when they are just trying to live their regular lives. That being said, don't people get on Facebook when they are trying not to live their lives, and so they can idly wander through a vacation photo album from that girl who sat next to them in AP Chem?

Also if you are my best friend and your names rhymes with Schmleslie, you are required to go to this thing.