"the catholic church elects a new pope whenever the old one dies or folds completely in half."

Right now I am passive-aggressively taking my sweet time drinking a caramel mocha. But, quite honestly, I don't understand why poor communication should impede my ability to indulge in caffeine. Particularly when it is really tasty and includes wireless access.

I have been devoured by mosquitos to a phenomenal degree after last night's fire shindig at Alex's house in the boondocks of Angelica. Do you want an accurate depiction of how far into the middle of nowhere Alex lives? We drove to the Kwik Trip in Bonduel to buy supplies for Smores. And even after we were satiated and had our Little Buddies in our hands, Diana and I couldn't help being snobby "city" girls and saying, "I cannot believe we are in Bonduel."

Speaking of the city, Diana is in New York for the weekend. I am really jealous because I was invited along but airfare was obscenely expensive. Actually, no, I am jealous because Diana is seeing Cirque de Soleil. She and I saw it together in Madison last fall and we have a pretty deep obsession with it, so I'm maybe even more jealous of that than I am of all the shopping she will get to do. And I really like shopping.

Anyway, back to last night, which was much fun: Anna was a. not working at Titletown and b. present, and in rare form. She melted torn-up cheese curds on her mini pretzels in the microwave and described some new MTV show as "the one where they turn ghetto men into gentlemen." Which caused me to spit my Diet Pepsi back into the ginormous Badgers stein out of which I was drinking it.

The most classic moment, however, was that Tim, Alex's dad, was trapped alone with us. Tim thinks (knows) we are noisy lunatics. Normally this is fine because Alex's mom, Laurie, is present and loves us and can deal with us quite well. (This feeling is mutual. Diana and I especially adore Laurie. Everything she does is hilarious.) She was in Buffalo for work, but we got to talk to her on the phone! Kind of. We could really only hear Tim's half of the conversation, and then we yelled loudly enough that he just gave me the phone.

Tim: I was wondering when you would call. [Pause.] Oh, you're at grown-up Chuck E Cheese right now?
Diana and I: SHE'S AT DAVE AND BUSTER'S?!?! (Another thing Diana and I love: Jillian's, the coolest restaurant to ever be in Green Bay, Wisconsin, which unfortunately has deceased. Dave and Buster's is the closest thing the world has left.)
Tim hands the phone to me.
Me: Are you at Dave and Buster's?
Laurie: Yes! I am totally winning!
Me: That is awesome. Diana and I are really jealous.
Laurie: I got a pair of light-up maracas!
Me: Ugh, that is too cool. I'm going to give you back to your husband now.
I give the phone back to him.
Tim: Save me, Jesus.

i'm a modern girl but i fold in half so easily

Today was highly unproductive due to the addition of a new laptop into my life. I seem to be incapable of doing anything but looking at websites, futzing with iTunes, and playing Mahjong Titans (a benefit of Windows Vista.)

Actually, that is a lie. I painted my nails sparkly black for no apparent reason and watched last night's DVRed episode of House and went to the SNC Bookstore to stock up for next semester. And stock up I did. I figured being an English major involved an obscene/offensive/ridiculous number of books and thought my estimation would be dramatic, but it was actually an under-shot. It was a crazy number. Even worse, the girl working at the bookstore had to write my receipt out by hand. I felt horrible about that, and my mind is still a bit blown from this experience. And I'm fairly sure I walked around the bookstore spewing borderline offensive verbalizations of my surprise.

Diana and I are texting back and forth while she is at her Orientation. She finally has a real dorm room, not youth-hostel style overflow housing. I am happy for her but also sad at the loss of possible entertainment from Diana, who loves cleanliness, being stuck with a dozen or so sloppy kids.

"he looks like a muppet." "he totally does. he looks like the eagle muppet."

I don't even know if these things are funny to anyone else, but I need to have them for later:

-Alex, pointing at a mini-golf course at 2 AM: "What is that?! It looks like a magic show!"

-Another ridiculous Alex statement, when Karen (Diana's mom) used a door that Al hadn't noticed before: "Surprise door!"

-The 120ish pictures of us making ridiculous faces taken in Jim and Pam's golf cart. (How awesome is this: Karen's best friend, Pam, is married to a guy named Jim! Snaps for unintentional references to The Office.)

-In the best picture, D is looking down at her general crotch area in complete surprise and I looked at it and said, "Diana, you look so surprised. You look like you just grew a penis." Just as Pam walked onto her porch. (What chapter is that in the saga of me saying inappropriate things when I don't realize real people are around?!)

-"If you eat my food, I'll cut your arm off!" -Frank, telling me not to eat "sell by January 2007" tuna and canned pineapple.

-Because of the flooding, gravel had to be carried down to the waterfront to expand the shoreline to be at least moderately reasonable for the next year. The gravel was carried in on a small digger-type thing called a skip-loader. Because the Crystal Lake RV Resort and Campground is a highly dramatic place (and not a white-trash trailer park like Diana has been describing it for the past year), the skip-loader fell in the water. Then, because Crystal Lake is even more dramatic than that would lead you to believe, the skip-loader's shovel thing crushed Frank's foot and totally pulverized his big toe and he bled through his shoe and had to be taken to the hospital. Ridiculous.

-Frank's x-rays came back in a folder that said "RUSH! DO NOT BEND!" But Al thought it said "CRUSH!" and goes, "Yeah, way to rub it in."

-The skip-loader is also the noisiest thing in the world. Before we renamed it The Bone Crusher, it drove by the porch where Al and I were sitting. It was beeping and groaning and being a general pain in the ass, and Al just grumbles, "Goddamn free-loader."

-Frank was ridiculously doped up on Oxycodone, even moreso than usual, and during the fireworks display last night, kept doing commentary and attempting to whistle. Usually he just tries to harvest my organs, so I'm not sure if this was an upgrade or a downgrade.

-"King of the mountain!" Again, Frank, creepin' on small children.

-The Al/D/Kellie Ridiculous Vocabulary. With "ridiculous" being the #1 most abused word in said vocabulary.

-This flood expert on CNN with the most amazing and perfect Boston accent ever. No R's where they belong, but all kinds of R's at the ends of words that technically end in A. My favorite part was "Californiar."

-Diana's obscene and borderline offensive snoring and marathon ability to sleep as long as possible until the blender goes on or Al punches her in the ass.

-The Bone Crusher was running at full volume outside on Saturday morning, so Alex and I were already awake and Diana was still sleeping until Karen turned the blender on to make Big Dutch Baby, at which point Diana wakes up and says, "Dear God. I am in hell."

-Big Dutch Baby is called German pancakes by normal people, but Diana's family prefers the weird name. It's really good, and basically just eggs and flour but still delicious, and the name is fun to joke about.
Diana: We should go to bed soon.
Me: Well, yeah. Karen is making us big Dutch fetus in the morning.
(Alex laughs incredibly hard, which makes me laugh really hard because Al has a contagious laugh.)
Diana: Shut up... baby is a delicacy.

-Taking ridiculous pictures in Lodi proper at 1:40 in the morning, and Diana's constant fear that we would be arrested.

-The psychotic musical offerings on XM Radio after 1:00 in the morning. The greatest offerings being "Inside Out" by Eve6 (the "heart in a blender" song from the 90s), "Say My Name" by Destiny's Child, and something called "Boom Boom Boom."

-Laying by the pool. Or, "When Diana's inner monologue exists, it's moderately disturbing."

-The questionable tribe of pseudo-Girl Scouts running around the whole weekend. I'm not entirely sure what they were, or how I can describe them in a politically correct manner, but Al and D know what they were.

-Alex can't crawl on her knees because they are jacked up, and, unfortunately, the loft we stayed in was only about 4'6" high, and the bed had maybe 3' of space before you hit ceiling, so she tried to do this strange ass-in-the-air crawl and ended up nearly falling flat on her face.

-"I can't skip rocks, okay?!" -Diana, in a fit of jealousy that Al and I have mad skills.

-Alex's incredible and bizarre vocabulary during mini-golf. Which was really ghetto. And which I won... More things to put on my resume there.

-We all layed on the three-foot mini dock installed after the flooding and looked at the stars, which was really cool. Everyone laughed at my weird laying-down laugh. Without prior consult, Alex and I decided to mess with D by randomly and stealthily throwing pebbles into the water and making her think they were fish. She assumed that the fish were freaking out due to the obscene amount of noise from the earlier fireworks, so Alex and I kept doing it intermittently until we were laughing so hard that she realized what we were doing and got pissed and told us to cut it out because, in her words, "I hate the noise of plopping!"

I think I've done significant enough coverage of this. Al just made fun of me on Facebook Chat because I am very tired but completed this task anyway, because I hate having uncompleted objectives right before bed. Then she threatened to throw her computer onto the pavement, so she obviously has bigger issues here.

this is your last line of defense

To make yesterday even better, my beautiful lime green laptop shipped!

And Elly and I had two shifts of serious bonding time, one with Amers and Sheebs and the other with D and Milo and So you Think you Can Dance?. Milo, the fattest, dog-est, noisiest cat in the world, adores Elly even more than he adores me. And he likes me a lot and is constantly rubbing his scent glands on me and playing with my hair. He fell asleep on top of her last night while we were watching collegiate track on some random channel.

And I was also helping D with her class scheduling so she doesn't feel dumb at orientation next week. These things stress her out and I really enjoy them, so I do them in exchange for nothing more than her hilarious comments.

Me: I hate my speaking voice. It's unpleasant.
Diana: I like your speaking voice. You sound like a Valley Girl.
(Often true, but what kind of a compliment is that? Seriously?)

"Um... why does our head psychologist's Bachelor's come from the State U of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry?"

Me: "Associate vice chancellor"... So if the vice chancellor dies, you get their job? You do all the busy work that the chancellor's job entails that the vice chancellor can't get to?
D: I just think that sounds like something out of Star Trek.

I think today and this weekend are going to be kind of fabulous also. If my laptop had shipped just a few days earlier, I would be able to update this weekend, but I can't, so it might be a few days before you hear from me.

And now I'm going to make Sheebs some playlists on her iTunes because I'm a good daughter.

if you left it up to me, every day would be a holiday from real

So. At Orientation this week, I learned that I am actually way smarter/more academic than I thought. And since I already knew I was somewhat of a nerd and not a total moron, this is kind of a development. For example, this: Oh, hey, did you know that I am kind of way better than mediocre at math? Did you know that I am allegedly best suited to psychotic theoretical calc? Did you know that I'm going to take easier business-major calc instead because the idea of any type of theoretical math is horrific to me?

And my schedule is awesome and could take yours behind the middle school and beat the shit out of it, so, yes. I don't have a class before 11. That alone makes your schedule look miserly and decrepit, and you should probably be depressed about that. Seriously. Act depressed. Now.

"Are you afraid of pickles?"
"Kind of. And I kind of just hate them. And I also think they're just a waste of space."

"My advisor is Karen."
"My advisor is John."
"My advisor is... um. Wolfgang."
"Wolfgang! I love that guy! He's this huge Austrian man with a combover and he sweats profusely and shouts all the time! [Pause.] He used to work in Jamaica. That can't have been good for the sweating."

I just 100% felt like I was not wearing pants. Way to go, nerve endings. Way to be cool about stuff.

reading rainbow

"Look, it's the token black guy!" -Diana on LeVar Burton

(Montage of ethnically diverse children.)
"The one white kid would be an Aryan."
"The one white kid would be talking about fuckin' monkeys."
"Future AIDS spreader."
"He wasn't literally talking about sex with monkeys."

"He can bust a move, but he can't clog."

"Why are her pants so short? And why is her ass so long? Where's the flood, lady?"
"In the entire southern portion of the state. Way to be timely."

"He's not a boy!"

"I wouldn't want her to kick up her skirt much higher... wouldn't want to see her poonani there."

Inbred lady explaining clogging: It's not tapdancing.
Diana: It looks a hell of a lot like tapdancing to me.

"Why are all these people inbred?!"

a feminist debate between diana and kellie

So, for the longest time, Diana thought that the little ditty went "there's a hole in my pocket, dear Liza, dear Liza" instead of the hole being in the bucket, as normal people know is true. Now she is trying to argue that the "pocket" version is the appropriately feminist version, because then the song implies that men and women should partake equally in sewing work. Which is true, they should partake equally.

However, she argued that the original version implies that Liza feels incapable of fixing the bucket due to her womanhood. But I always thought the general idea of the song was, "Damn it, Henry, quit bitching to me and fix your own damn bucket and go to hell," which is a pretty strong message. I'm not really sure where in the song she says, "Oh, Henry, I would love to fix your bucket. If only I had testicles."

Anyway, you wish you had crazy friends like Diana and I, who fight about potential feminism in songs which are clearly nonsense and have no real subject manner. Actually, you not only wish your friends were this cool, you wish your SELF was this cool. Oh yes.

I'm going to go moisturize and read Breakfast of Champions now. Enjoy your early Monday morning.

she says you're a masochist for falling for me

I gained three pounds last night. This is because Diana and I went to the grocery store and engaged in a cooking spree. Gnocchi in pesto for dinner, followed by whole wheat pita chips with goat cheese and artichoke spinach dip and asiago cheese bread, followed by two batches of cookies and light Ben and Jerry's Phish Food. Then we got up and made peanut butter chocolate chip brownies. Luckily, the pounds have gone away somehow thanks to the lovely exercise that is sitting on my ass and reading.

Actually, that was kind of a lie. Today was pretty productive. D and I went to Megan's grad party and had a good time with Megan, Vicky, and Elly. We talked about where the weirdest places in America are and determined that they are: Appalachia, the deep South, the least populous areas of Arkansas, most of Minnesota, and Los Angeles. Then Vicky talked about "Kelen Heller" and how one might use "shady" as a noun after her dad felt the need to point out its status as an adjective.

Then I went to Bayfest against my will. I usually am a laid-back person, except: a. when other people can't be chill about things that aren't actually important. and b. fairs/carnivals/whatever have you. I'm a fan of Irishfest, but Irishfest has weird big nice dogs and Hawaiian shave ice and weird dancing, and I love shit like that. The fairs I am talking about consist of things like: eleven year olds in hooker clothing, people unable to understand that if you go up a pant size your muffin top disappears, pregnant women drinking, people screaming profanities, carnies trying to hit on me, missing teeth, unsupervised children, rides of questionable safety, and a lot of alcohol in the hands of people who probably have poor manners and social skills while sober. And I realize that a lot of that sounds horribly bitchy and judgmental, but it's actually just my way of expressing concern. And the fact that people behaving this way makes me feel bad about people in general.

"Would you be horribly offended if I stayed until the next day?"
"YES. I would be horribly offended, and I would cry in my beer!"
Oh, Sheebs. You are a character at 8 AM Arizona time.

my aim is true

My iPod basically shit itself about an hour ago. That was awesome. Finally I figured out how to put it in disk mode so it would stop seizing and I could return it to factory settings, and now it's taking forever to load all my music back on. That's so comforting. Just another chapter in my love/hate relationship with technology.

Anyway. Last night I went to see Sex and the City, which was much like the show itself: kind of cute and funny and kind of dumb. I can never figure out if I like that show or not (mostly because I find Samantha incredibly annoying and she has a shiteous wardrobe that only amplifies this opinion), and I generally thought my feelings on the movie were more positive than my feelings on the show. I'm definitely Miranda, though. We even have the same laptop. Well, we will as of mid-July. That said, Diana and I thought this movie had a stupid and unsatisfying ending.

So, last summer, there were these two gophers who lived on Riverside and my mom would see them every morning on her way to work. And then it got cold and they were gone for a while but, in great excitement, they are back now! This is so good. Also, why do all my exotic animal experiences take place in/near downtown Green Bay? They do not live far from the place where I nearly hit a peacock.

I just filled out my medical history form for school. I have been watching a lot of House this week and so my medical history makes me feel pretty good about my general health. Mild asthma, chicken pox at age 4, a set of allergies I probably share with 60% of the other people who have allergies? Now I'm going to go assure them I've never come in contact with good old TB.

"for every minute we don't spend loving one another, a puppy sheds another tear."

Last night was an excessive night. For someone else, that statement would probably imply recreational drugs or tequila shots, but really I just went to serve as good company for Typhoid Diana and to serve as a buffer between her and her dysfunctional family.

This was especially good because Frank, Diana's stepdad/real life Dwight Schrute, was in rare form. He offered me a box of expired food and tried to make me offer him a kidney, so pretty much par for the course. Then he told me about how he belongs to the NAACP, and told me I should assert my independence from Diana and tell her to go to hell. "Yeah, or she could tell the creepy old man who's trying to harvest her organs to go to hell."

Anyway, the most excessive part of the night was the box of fortune cookies we bought. We had to eat the whole thing once we realized how ridiculous the fortunes were. For example:
-"You smile has great charm"
-"I have faith in you"
-"Your emotional nature is strong and sensitive"

Largely, they were not even fortunes. They were just sayings/advice, such as:
-"A painting is a poem with out words"
-"Children are life's reward"
-"Read a good book"
-"The family that prays together stays together"
-"A penny saved, is a penny earned"

And all that grammar is accurate. It was awesome, and made even more awesome by the fact that fortune cookies, being made largely of sugared cardboard, have only like 25 calories each, so this wasn't even disgustingly unhealthy like the food we usually eat.

carry on, my wayward son

Well, this is truthfully just a short pause from my intense reading of the new David Sedaris book, but I feel I just need to take a moment to be a hundred and fifty years old and discuss the weather.

It is incredibly humid out, and, as someone with a massive amount of curly hair, I completely resent this. My hair is massive and frizzy and no amount of smoothing milk can rescue it. Not only does my hair stick out and frizz, my dog's fur is sticking out at all angles as a result of this intense humidity.

Oh, and why is it so humid, you may wonder? Because it is raining, intensely raining, and looks as though it is going to rain for days on end. One of my favorite things about summer is nighttime thunderstorms, but not in this intensity and frequency. And the tornadoes that were touching down all over the surrounding regions of Madison, where I was, yesterday were not really fun or pleasant at all.

Anyway, the good news is, I still really enjoy the rain even though it makes me feel highly un-summery. And my clicky funny formerly broken elbow has not burned at all throughout all this, since the low air pressure has remained pretty consistent. And I have the new David Sedaris book, so really, I would just be reading it outside anyway.

so for the rest of my life, i'm gonna search for someone just like you

So, last night, Diana and I discovered a new modeling/makeover/fashion television program of ridiculous entitled She's Got the Look, and it was fantastically weird.

First of all, I must address that "celebrity stylist" Robert Verdi is one of the judges. Robert Verdi cannot style himself, and, secondarily, I'm pretty sure that title is just a straight-up lie. He wore a blazer that made me very sad last night, which is a statement to its true hideousness because the very idea of a blazer makes me happy.

Anyway, the concept of this show is that it is a modeling competition for women over 35. Since all but, like, two of them appear to be under 35 anyway, I'm not really sure how well the concept is satisfied.

There are many colorful characters on this show. First, there was the woman who Diana and I totally pegged as being a Stepford Wife, but then it turned out she was actually kind of wild and could belly-dance. There is one who has brown hair and reminds us of, essentially, every 38-to-45-year-old woman we know. One is from France and has a ridiculously symmetrical face that Diana and I, with our lop-sidedness, envy greatly. There was one who Diana referred to as "a kleptomanic pedophile" who did not make it through to the final ten. The most mind-blowing, however, is a woman who is exactly like Marvita from the last season of America's Next Top Model. We spent the entire hour of the episode waiting for her to say she was "hella juiced", but were let down.

Judging from the previews, next week seems to be makeovers, which everyone knows is always the best episode of any sort of televised modeling competition. To add an extra element of bizarre, this show is on TV Land, and I'm telling you that so you can watch it. Sometimes, commercials for Dyson vacuums come on and Diana gets all up in my personal space telling me about how awesome and beautiful the new Dysons are and how badly she wants them, but that's just our personal problem.

nobody knows the wreck of the soul the way you do

Why is figuring out a damn laptop so stupid and stressful? Why is it going to cost me extra to get an older model that isn't blessed with the leprosy that is Vista? Why do I have to pay almost $200 more to have this thing equipped with Microsoft Word? That's garbage on several levels. How am I expected to me an even remotely effective English major/college student/human being without Word? What the hell am I supposed to do, type things out on Wordpad? Also, why can't I get this with XP and a lime green color and no webcam?!?! Bunk. I hate technology. I'm going to stick to my fucking abacus and papyrus over here, THANKS.

Ugh, sorry. It's been a long day, full of small children and cramps and hour-lateness and not caffeine and not socializing with people whose verbal skills are developed as mine, ergo, this owly mood.

I need to think about nice things. Like the fact that I get to go to H&M and Urban Outfitters this weekend. (And not the fact that it involves me disappearing out of my own social life for almost four days.) Or the fact that I bought a really cute black coat last night, and that it was totally justified because: 1. It was $17. 2. I did not actually own a black dressy coat before this, just my ugly black puffy winter jacket. 3. It is totally the short version of the light blue coat I wanted so badly from Target last fall that reminded me of Madeline's coat, which they never stocked in my size, with the buttons and the peter pan collar and everything.

Okay. Clearly I've expended myself here, because I'm beat.

you know where i'll be found when i come around

I am in such a traveling mood. First, D-Money and I had the brilliant idea to use my voucher to go to New York City this month but then Midwest had its head up its ass, so that's not going to work out. But we may have formulated an even better Spring Break idea for myself. And now I am looking at all the study abroad options for SNC, basically because I need new bookstores to shop at since Barnes and Noble is getting old, and I need a new selection of white sweaters at my disposal. However, I just realized that I don't want to do this if the dollar is still slowly disentegrating. Which also led me to realize my desire to study abroad has absolutely nothing to do with academics.

Sports Center, why are you always playing heartbreaking stories about deceased coaches/teammates that are always making me tear up a little bit? Also, I'm not even really an athletic person, so why are these stories making me tear up?

D-Money is reading Freakonomics, which reminded me of how much I adore that book. Seriously, it is out-of-control good and I am in complete and total love with it. You should read it if you haven't, because you also will want to steal that man's brain.

i'm a halfhearted fool

So, I guess I graduated or something. I don't know. It is all kind of a blur, really. It's all very surreal because you've waited for it for so long, and because, if you are anything like me, you are focusing really hard on not tripping or otherwise making an ass of yourself onstage. Those gowns smell like body odor and those hats are itchy as all hell, but beyond that, it was decent.

Senior Send-Off was far better, largely because there was Guitar Hero and ping-pong and because Anna is the most ridiculous hypnotized person I have ever seen. Seriously, hypnotism is crazy. Completely ridiculous! I don't even know how to explain it because I'm not even sure what my feelings on it are. Such a weird event.

Damn, would I not want to be hypnotized. First of all, that seems to be something that would involve my brain shutting up and we all know that is never going to happen. Secondly, I would totally be stubborn and just not play along for the sake of being devil's advocate, so two strikes there. Also, that lady allegedly had a recurring role as a reporter on The West Wing but that was obviously false because Diana and I would have recognized her as such and we did not.

Every time I look at my Facebook default picture of Diana, Alex, and myself being tracksuit wearing tools, I laugh so hard.