"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.