OMG are you two twins?!

I can't tell you how many times I've heard that question in the past 5-ish years or so. Ever since my sister got to high school, basically (which was my first year of COLLEGE, mind you), people have been asking us this.

The only question I've heard with the same regularity is "Which one of you is older?"

Um. I am. By four and a half years. And I officially kind of hate you, person who just asked me that.

"You'll appreciate this 10 years from now!" Yeah, yeah, when I'm 35 I will be glad for someone to tell me I look 4 years younger. But I'm 22, and I can't even fathom 35 right now, and I don't appreciate it. But I digress.

If I actually thought my sister and I looked like twins, I'd be a lot more cool with it. Heck, I might even be totally on board with it. People think twins are cool. I think twins are cool. I think my sister is cool, I wouldn't mind being her twin. But in my professional opinion, we don't look alike. AT. ALL. So I don't get it; it baffles me. Either there is something that she and I are just really not seeing, or most of the general public is out of their mind.

But I don't think it can JUST be that people are crazy (although people are crazy). We have family members, close friends, classmates, etc. who think we are each other's spitting images too. There's even been said to be a "Townes-nose."


This is Stephanie (left), and me (right). We're at a Hallmark convention in this picture (that blog will be coming soon). Brown hair, blonde hair. Brown eyes, blue eyes. Different face shapes. What gives??



Here we are again at said Hallmark convention. If anything, I might argue that we complement, not mirror, each other in looks.



Okay, okay. I can kiiinda see it in this one.



This is from a cruise we went on during spring break 2 years ago.





Don't get me wrong. The chick is gorgeous. I could be doing a hell of a lot worse than looking like her. I just don't see it. What do you all think?

I guess until I am 35 or halfway to dead or something, I'll just have to suck it up and keep whipping out that I.D. when I inevitably get carded trying to purchase my gas station Merlot. Cheers to that.

The People You Meet in Grad School: Part 2

After attending a class or two this week (just kidding, Mom, I went to all of them!), the second installment of my TPYMIGS serial-post is basically begging to be written. Higher education, I have discovered, produces some rare, rare breeds of crazies, and also apparently eliminates a lot of people's filters for what is and isn't socially acceptable. Or even just socially tolerable. Having said that, without further ado, I give you....


2. The Flaming Liberal

First things first. I mean no harm or offense to any political views with this category. It's a free country. If you want to hug trees or burn bras, more power to you! At some point though, can't we all just put away our social agendas and get along? Well, no, the Flaming Liberal (FL) has lost the capacity to do that. It's amazing to me that, just like with the PS, there is a Flaming Liberal in every. single. class. you're taking somehow.

This person usually rolls into the classroom with just a few minutes to spare, or maybe even a few minutes late, you know, just to really stick it to society. If your particular FL classmate is male, they will typically be dressed in one of two ways. The first involves ripped up, ratty jeans of some sort, possibly even cuffed at the bottom in an attempt to express their free-spirit hippie lifestyle. And sandals. The male FL loves him some sandals. Even better if they are made out of hemp or some other natural, if not controversial, material. Their upper bodies are usually adorned with a thinning t-shirt with phrases like "Creativity, not Conflict," or "I Think, Therefore I am Not Glenn Beck." These would be more impressive, I suppose, if the FL had not bought it on liberaltees.org for 7 bucks.


Yup, we get it. You hate conservatives.


The second way they might be garbed is less of a hippie-FL and more of an intellectual coffee shop-FL. They usually wear slacks, argyle sweater vests, and possibly even a fedora. And facial hair. OH, the facial hair! The more and the scragglier, the better! I think somewhere there must exist an unwritten rule/bond amongst Flaming Liberals that they must...have...facial...hair. Even the girls. Just kidding. Soul patch, goatee, chinstrap, sideburns, full-on ZZ top beard....doesn't seem to matter to the FL, they just gotta have something.

As for the female FL, they are not as easy to immediately pick out of your new classmates. One good indicator is an ankle length skirt or leggings. Also, the apparent lack/need of any appropriate chest-area undergarments. They must have burned all of theirs.

For Flaming Liberals as a whole, I can pinpoint two of their most distinct characteristics. The first is their uncanny ability to uncover hidden political agendas behind every freaking piece of literature you read. The Flaming Liberal could probably tell you how Stephenie Meyer is somehow pushing her political beliefs on us all with the Twilight saga. And if you don't want to hear it, well, you're screwed. The FL is one of the loudest, most outspoken, hear-me-roar people in the class. They tend to contribute their own "hilarious" running commentary on essentially everything that gets said, and you will listen to them, damn it.


Better not read Twilight, might get "influenced." If you're gonna read it, at least make sure you have an FL around to steer you back to the right path afterwards.


The second distinction is that apparently the Flaming Liberal lacks any pressing necessity for personal hygiene (read: they no longer bathe.) Now, this is speculation on my part. I can't PROVE that these people no longer shower more often than once a year, I can only go off the evidence my poor little olfactory nerves are presented with when I get stuck sitting next to them in seminar. How many times can one individual wear the same "Make love not war" shirt to consecutive class meetings without washing it, you ask? Evidently, a whole shitload of times. Call me crazy, but I'm pretty sure you can still be a slightly abrasive agenda-pusher even after you've taken a shower.

But I guess the integrity of the awesome scragglyness that is their hippie beards might be compromised if they do something as radical as washing their hair. As a daily bather myself, I can, like I said, only speculate.

World peace 4 life.

Me vs. the Invertebrates

--Kudos to my Uncle Paul for inspiring the title of this post.--


From a very early age, I can remember being scared of bugs. And I don't mean scared as in giving-a-girly-squeak-and-swatting-it-away scared. I mean full-on-panic-inducing-I-should-probably-go-see-a-therapist-phobic scared. It doesn't even really matter the size or type of bug either, almost anything will send tremors down my little spine. Obviously, I could easily narrow in on a few types of insect that either A) scare the begeezus out of me slightly more than most, or B) are maybe not the nastiest of nast, but are more frequent invaders of my home/space than others.

I don't know if it's because I am incredibly hyper-aware of any potential bugs in my vicinity, or because the universe continuously plays evil tricks on me in sending creatures my way, but I seem to be more prone to close encounters of the insect- kind than most people. These events have spanned my entire life, and sadly, they have stayed with me in vivid detail as traumatic contributors to my fear as it has evolved to present day.

When I was 9, my little sister and I were swinging on a swingset in a friend's backyard. As we swung, we nonchalantly swept and kicked the ground with our feet as we passed over it. That's when I first found out that SOME bees (yellowjackets) make their nests in.....the....ground........What kind of sick joke is that?! Bees are speedy fliers, have poisonous stingers, OH AND they get to totally fake you out and build a nest IN THE GROUND too?? So that you walk through it. Or kick through it on a swingset. The next thing we knew, dozens of little black bees were swarming us, stinging at will and seemingly alerting all of their bee-friends to come join the fight. The little bastards got me a total of 11-ish times. My 5 year old sister had at least triple that amount, but you would have never known it by the way I reacted. In my opinion, I had basically become a martyr to neighborhood swing-goers everywhere that day. I was afraid to leave the house for a week. I would start crying every time a suspicious looking piece of fluff caught a draft and came near me. I forced my mom to doctor up my "wounds" with a baking soda paste and insisted that they still hurt days after the incident. And that's how bees landed on my personal insect shit-list for life.


*I can already tell that this topic is going to turn into a serial-post. I just have too much to say about this particular little avenue of retrospection.*

But for now, I will move on to the hideous little beasts known as ROACHES.


Gross.


Sick/nasty.


Scariest costume ever?



I feel like I have too many roach stories to even possibly touch on all of them. I suppose that goes with the territory of living in areas that could double as Hell's doorstep, especially Columbia, SC.

(But to those of you reading from Houston, you are a close second, if not a tie for first. Some of my roach memories come STRAIGHT from 4506 Hazelton.)

There was the time one flew across a lecture hall to land directly on the rim of the mug I was drinking out of. Instinctively, I threw the mug into the aisle, dousing at least 3 classmates with hot chocolate, jumped from my seat and frantically climbed over no less than 2 football players to escape the 2-inch perpetrator.

Or the time I found myself in the bathroom with one after a late night at Blockbuster. My roommates literally came out of their rooms equipped with makeshift weapons, as my screams implied that I was surely being axe-murdered, or, at the very least, that our house was being burglarized.

Or the time one weaseled its way into my truck through the passenger side window. Luckily, my truck was in "park" at the time, or I would not have lived through the catastrophic wreck that would have inevitably ensued to tell you this tale.


The most traumatizing story I have to date, however, also happens to be the most recent. I don't know what it is about roaches and bathrooms, but that is the setting for this anecdote as well. I came home to my townhouse after a long day of class, and I needed to pee. I set my things down, went into our downstairs bathroom, and shut and locked the door. I should add that this bathroom is TINY. Like, the tiniest bathroom you've ever seen. When you sit on the toilet, the walls on either side of you are no less than 2 inches away. Oh, and this bathroom is also carpeted. These factors, combined with the locked door, came together in a malicious trifecta mere minutes later.

So there I am, emptying my tank, so to speak, when I hear a most curious noise. I stop to listen. What the hell is that? I wonder. It was a faint scuttling noise. It sounded like miniature, crazed, staccato tap-dancing or something. And I had never heard it before in my life. Whatever the hell it was, it was moving with. a. quickness.

And then I saw it.

Horrible and brown and oily-looking and disease-infested, it made its appearance on the wall to my left. The noise I had heard was its FEET! BARF. I'm not sure "panic" does the emotion I felt next justice. Perhaps "hysteria" would be more appropriate. I sprung from the toilet, but alas! I had apparently lost my ability to unlock a simple bathroom door lock! The rank creature was scuttling every which way at this point. From wall to wall, across the toilet bowl, and running figure 8s around my shoes.

Why didn't I just step on it, you ask? Oh, because the bathroom floor was CARPETED. And if you know anything about roaches, you know that a simple moosh into a carpet barely even slows them down. And also because I was too frantic to function coherently at that point.

By some miracle, the bathroom door finally came open, and I exploded out into my living room, pants around my ankles.

I shimmied in the direction of the bug spray as fast as I could, but by the time I returned to the bathroom doorway, the Tap-dancing Roach was nowhere to be seen. I backed away from the door slowly and scanned the room with my peripheral. At this point I had managed to re-pants myself, and I was also crying hysterically.

I called Suz. She couldn't understand my unintelligible gibberish through the sobbing and the shrieking.

Finally, the roach bared its ugly antennae again, and it was a full-out battle, Me vs. Arthropod, for a solid 10 minutes of Raid squirting vs. natural roach resilience. And my saint of a mother stayed on the phone with me the entire time, listening to the whole ordeal on the other end of the line. ( I should actually thank Suz for continuing to pick up the phone--ever--when I call.)

And so I had smited the roach.....this time.

These are but a few of my rationalizations for being as paralyzed by bugs as I am. At age 22, I'm just as terrified as I was when I was 9, kicking through a yellowjacket nest. One might even argue that I have only gotten more neurotic. So I will post more of my ongoing war with invertebrates as the battles occur.


Oh, and I haven't been back in that downstairs bathroom since.

The Saga of Stella

On May 22, 2009, just 14 days after I graduated from college, I drove out into podunk, SC, on a tip from one of my then-roommates, to check out a litter of puppies up for adoption in Lancaster, SC. I had been told they were goldendoodles, only the coolest type of dog I've ever known to exist. So I went. When I got there, it was to my dismay to find out that they were not, in fact, goldendoodle puppies. But I had driven over an hour, damn it, and they were close enough, and they kind of looked like Ewoks, so I decided to go home with a dog that night anyway. One phone call to Suz (my mom) and a $125 adoption fee later, I became the proud owner of this adorable creature:




On the way home from Lancaster, I stopped at Petsmart, where I picked up a kennel and some food, and a name came to me: Stella. Being 8 weeks old, little Stella slept most of the way home, and here I was thinking I had just nabbed the most perfectly-behaved puppy in the world. I was such a noob.


Stella, still innocent and "flawless" on the first day, snoozing on a sweet Return of the Jedi blanket.

Stella and my then-roommate's maltipoo, Winston, getting along famously.


My roommates fawned over her when I arrived back home, and I even thought about letting the little ball of fur sleep in my bed that night. But, like a diligent new owner, I made Stella sleep in her kennel, which I paid for in exchange for getting ANY sleep that first night, but which I would be very glad I made her do come the next morning.


(From here on out, it may be better to just bring you through the various phases Stella progressed through from that second day until the present...)






Phase 1: Stella is infested with fleas.

Stella was a pretty furry little puppy, so it wasn't until my second day of owning her that her fur shifted in such a way to reveal to me the INFESTATION of fleas that were having a freaking PARTY all over her little bod. Darting every which way, mocking me with their crazy flea speed as they effortlessly escaped my desperate, futile fingers. Behind her Ewok, stuffed animal-esque exterior, the nasty little dog was packing some serious flea-heat. Naturally, I had a slight (major) panic attack. I called my mother no less than 15 times that day, begging for instructions on what to do and how to eradicate this end-of-the-world (in my eyes) parasite problem. Back at Petsmart again, I bought Advantix and some flea-spray for the home. I spent the remainder of that evening holding Stella hostage on the lightly-colored couch, so that when the dying flea carcasses fell off of her, I could pluck them up and run to the toilet to flush them (no way in HELL was I going to actually touch them to kill them). This went on for hours, and probably made our water bill go up at least several dollars that month.





Phase 2: Stella eats her own shit.

Okay. I know and accept that I freak out more than the average person, usually over irrational things. But about a month after I got her, Stella disappeared from my sight for no more than 5 minutes. When the little mongrel came trotting happily back into my room, carting with her, in her mouth, one of her OWN POOP-LOGS, I. LOST. MY. MARBLES. I was screaming at the dog. I was googling "Why does my puppy eat her own shit?" I was calling my mom (again). I was trying not to vomit. I was attempting to locate the rest of the shit-pile that was surely waiting for my bare foot to step in, warm and steaming, around some unsuspecting corner. The experience and the way Stella came running so proudly gave a whole new meaning to the term "shit-eating grin." This unfortunate little episode occurred at least two more times, possibly more that my mind has simply blocked from memory because they were so F-ing disgusting. It is my firm belief that creatures of any kind should not consume their own feces, and, thank the sweet lord above, this phase eventually came to an end.

(Sadly, I don't have a picture to share of the shit-eating phase.)






Phase 3: Stella gets a haircut.

In mid-July, I went to the beach for a weekend, and had to board Stella for the first time. While she was there, they asked if I wanted her to be groomed. Thinking that was the logical, efficient thing to do, I said "Yes! Cut her however you want!" NOOB MOVE. When I went to pick her up, she looked like this:


I tried to tell them, "No, no. That sorry excuse for a shih tzu isn't mine. I dropped off a cute dog."

I went from having the cutest dog in the world, whose outward appearance kinda sorta made up for her neurosis, to having a skeleton with fur whose external look finally matched the freakish interior.


I learned the hard way that telling an over-eager dog groomer to "do whatever they want" has the same detrimental, embarrassing outcome that telling your hairdresser that same thing does.

I went from owning the cutest dog in the world to owning a glorified rat. Luckily, fur grows back (and it did).






Phase 4: I try to re-home Stella.

About three months after I got her, I decided I was not the best equipped person to continue rearing Stella. Shocking, I know! What?! A 22 year old college student decides they no longer want the enormous responsibility that owning a dog entails?! Anyway, I put Stella up on Craigslist, and thought I found her a home with a nice family out in Lexington, SC. They kept her for ONE night, then emailed me saying I had to come back and get her immediately. She was too much of a neurotic freak....oh, I mean, "she wasn't a good fit" for them.

*I suppose I need to pause and explain this one. Stella is a Freak with a capital F. Anyone who has EVER encountered her knows this. She might as well be a cat or a rock for as interactive as she is with most humans. She is scared of everything, from her own shadow to a cockroach, and especially any male she has ever come in contact with. The fire alarm went off in my townhouse once, and I'm pretty sure Stella would have stayed balled up in her kennel, holding in her pee and shit for weeks if I hadn't dragged her out by the collar.*

So, the family in Lexington was a no-go, and it was decided that Stella should go and try living at my brother, Michael's, house in Greenville, with his wife Mandy, and 5 year old son Reeve. So, I schlepped Stella off to Greenville.


Stella met, and became friends with, Reeve. Here they are pre-fetching.



Stella enjoyed running and fetching. Pictures like this do nothing to add to her normalcy factor though.



Stella met Mellow, the beagle-mix Michael and Mandy already owned, and it was realized that for as much as Stella despised most humans, she loved other dogs.

And that's where Stella stayed for almost two months, fetching for her new 5-year-old friend and living the good life in a big backyard with another dog. Alas, this home did not end up working out for Stellz either, and yet another new plan was concocted for the fate of Stella.






Phase 5: Stella temporarily lives with me again, and then Stella flies to Texas.

When it was decided that it would not work out for Stella to stay at my brother's, she temporarily came back to my townhouse to live. Stella and I were best buds again! After all, she wasn't eating her own shit anymore, or any other animal's shit for that matter, and it was only temporary, so how could I not enjoy her company? During this brief stint....


Stella discovers she loves closets!


She also sharpened her creeping skills (like owner, like dog) by not moving from this window-observation position for hours at a time.


Then, I packed her up in an airline-safe crate and brought her with me on the plane when I flew home for Fall Break. Well, sort of. She was in the cargo-bin of the plane, a traumatic event that took her at least a few days to recover from. Nevertheless, she had made it to Texas, where she would be re-homed for the 4th time to my Mom's house with my mom's 2 other goldendoodles, Dixie and Ginger.


Like I said, the freak-dog loves other dogs, so my Mom's house seemed to be a great fit for her.







Phase 6: Stella moves again. This time, with my Mom and dogs back to Greenville, SC.

Two months after I brought and left Stella in Texas, my parents moved to Greenville. Stella tried her best to be a good travel companion, and now resides in a house with the 2 other doodles in Greenville. She appears to be doing fine, and, under the authority of a much more able-bodied dog dictator (Suz), she has had no further bouts of flea infestation or shit-eating!

This is a very typical expression for Stella: sheer terror/disgust. She even managed to be afraid of the 6 month old baby.



Stella over winter break in her final re-homing spot, Greenville. Tail between the legs, look of panic on the face. Yep, typical Stella.




To my utter shock, instead of being terrified and suspicious of it, Stella loved the snow. Who knew. This is the most recent picture of her, taken just last week. Looks like a normal, happy canine right? Ohhh how deceiving pictures can be.



Which brings me to the present. Stella still lives with my mom and the other goldendoodles, and seems to be happy as a clam.

After spending my summer last year house training, crate training, trick training, and enduring a whole series of disgusting puppy-phases with her, I relinquished Stella to a new home, which wasn't the easiest thing to do. Luckily, that home is with my own mother, and now, much like I am with my niece and nephew, I get to be the "cool aunt" to Stella. I get to spoil her and not follow the rules when I see her, and leave at the end of the weekend, with all of the responsibility now falling to someone else :)

Maybe it was a mistake adopting a dog so soon out of college, when my future plans were still so up-in-the-air, but I don't regret it. Stella and I had a good run, and what summer isn't complete without a few encounters with blood sucking parasites and feces consumption??




And despite all the shit (figuratively AND LITERALLY) Stella put me through, I would be a heartless curmudgeon if I could stay mad at a face like that :)






Stanley Kowalski: Hey, Stella! Hey, STELLAAAAA! ---A Streetcar Named Desire

The People You Meet in Grad School: Part 1

Before I delve into the topic suggested by the title of this post, I would like to vent for a hot minute...

I'm in an English program. I attend classes with all English majors, where we study the English language, literature, and authors. That being said, the following things were said in one of my classes this morning.

"He don't need nothing"

"He ain't got none"

"She ain't going nowhere"


What the hell is going on here?? This is an upper level English course, and many of the students in this class are on teaching tracks (god help us all). And these utterances were not isolated events. It was only after I heard them repeatedly in the course of one hour-long class that I jotted them down in my notebook so I could remember to be disgusted by them again later.

Here's my suggestion: make every student who wants to enroll in English classes other than basic general education requirements take a grammar and conventions of English test. Oh, and there should be written AND oral components. If they pass, congrats! They can move on to be the future English teachers of our middle and high schools, and can sleep more easily at night knowing they're not completely ignorant. If they don't pass, I vote that they should pick another career path. Preferably one that doesn't involve making an entire generation of kids more stupid by speaking and teaching the mutilated English above.



Whew. Deep breath.



Now, I've decided to start a kind of running serial-post about the types of people I encounter in grad school.

I don't want to discriminate however, because I'm positive that these stereotypical classifications show up in undergraduate classes too. It does seem though, that when people get to Master or Doctorate programs, they evolve into a whole new echelon of weirdo.

I'd like to kick off this posting trend with a species of grad student I've observed at least once in every graduate class I've enrolled in thus far. And it is...


1. The Perpetual Student

This is an interesting individual. You arrive at your classroom 15 minutes early, because it's the very first day of the semester, and the Perpetual Student (PS) is somehow already seated at a desk with an impressive spread of notebooks, texts, and papers in front of them.

The PS is usually confident and somewhat outspoken. Should you strike up a conversation with the PS and ask what program they are in, you'll probably get a reply along the lines of "Oh well I'm here working on my PhD. Yeah I have a Master's from so-and-so school in Victorian lit and another from [insert-small-liberal-arts-school-here] with a concentration in 20th century American, but I just really had an interest in...blablabla..." Ten minutes later, you're sorry you asked.

The PS seems to have done nothing but attend graduate school for the past 17 years, with no end in sight. If you happen to let on that you are a first-year Master's student aspiring to teach high school, you can also expect a somewhat smug or condescending look, and a whole semester's worth of feeling like an idiot every time you gather up the courage to speak and participate amongst these gods of Academia.

*That last bit was "sarcasm", which is a phenomena the PS has lost all familiarity with, so you can feel free to use it liberally around them. The PS has been a student for so long that they have essentially crawled up grad school's you-know-what and died.

BUT, There is an upside to the Perpetual Student. If you can stand to be around them, they do come in handy when exam time rolls around if you've been too busy having a life to pinpoint exactly what the central theme is in Plato's Republic.

The PS will obviously know, and will probably JUMP at the opportunity to interact with a real, live human being outside of class.





I'll be posting more chapters in this vein of thought from time to time. Trust me, the freaks I go to class with provide me with entertainment every day, so I'll be sure to introduce them to you too.

Be sure to look out for a new post, "The Saga of Stella," coming soon.


I'll leave you with this......I thought it was appropriate given my slight rant from up there. i can haz shakezpeer kitteh?


:)

TV Crack.

It's official. Until the season finales of both Lost and The Bachelor air, I am never going to accomplish anything on Monday and Tuesday evenings.

This week, the 2 shows together devoured 5, yes FIVE, hours of my time. The Bachelor, with all of its romantic sap and positively DRIPPING with cheese (cue the subtle playing of "On the wings of love" in the background please), continues to hold my attention hostage and glued to my tube, with stars in my eyes and a shit-eating grin on my face for a solid two hours each Monday. And I can't even tell you why. Maybe it's because the show is the television series version of a romantic comedy. Maybe it's because all girls, at their most primal core, are delusional enough to think that The Bachelor resembles real life dating in any way, shape, or form. Maybe it's because in some small way, even if we won't admit to it, we humor ourselves into thinking that the situations on The Bachelor or in rom-coms could somehow happen in our lives. In reality, we know that there's no chance of this. But maybe, juuust maybe, we will walk out our front doors and find that the quirky, socially awkward guy who just moved in 2 doors down is actually (gasp) our soulmate! (Substitute any other generic rom-com plot here.)

Or maybe The Bachelor is just TV crack.

As for Lost....Anyone who has been watching this show since episode 1 is just so damn, for lack of a better term, LOST at this point that we have to keep watching for those few little nuggs of information they feed us each week so that our heads don't explode. Every Lost fanatic I know has their own little theory of what the HELL is going on on the island, who Jacob is, what Ben or Locke's divine purpose will end up being....Lost theories abound. Personally, I have no f***ing clue what is happening. So, I watch. I've invested too many hours in the previous 5 seasons NOT to waste 2 more of them every Tuesday night to find out. Plus, I'm obsessed with Sayid (and Desmond). Plus, it's TV crack. The island wants me to watch...


So what does this mean for me? Well, last night it meant that I started all of my schoolwork at approximately 11:30 pm. When 3 am rolled around, I called it a night. So Dickens and Zora Neale Hurston got the shaft? BIG WHOOP. At least I know that Jake once again kept skanky, raccoon-eyed Vienna around for another week, and that Desmond is back in action on Oceanic 815.

Hurston and Dickens will still be around when the seasons conclude, and they will still be boring. Good, quality trashy TV shows only come around every so often. Here's to hoping Jake cuts the tramps next week, because lord knows I'll be watching.