There and Back Again: A Short Girl's Tale, by Leonard.

Yesterday, in a fit of what I can only call madness, I decided to visit our creek. Not that it's actually our creek, not really; it winds its way through at least three different properties besides ours.  

Or, in actuality, I went because I am reading The Lord of the Rings.  But that has little to do with the rest of the post, mainly because the rest of the post is designed to make you jealous of my back yard. Through photographs.

Ties Are Made

"No, seriously, what's going on?" my guest asks again.  "How do you two know one another?"

"Stop being annoying!" I yell, louder than I mean to.  The hazy man across from me leans back in his chair. 

"Ma'am, let 'im aks 'is questions."  The billowing smoke shifts slightly toward my unwanted associate, leaning forward almost enough to expose the face behind the cloud. "This liddle gal n' I met one day when I wus called to the scene of a crime.  A toy dog, a liddle pup, had gone berserk an' attacked a boy. He wus only two, ye know.  One 'o the worst tings I had ever seen.  An this gal, the woman ye have beside ye, was standin' right outside o' the police tape, like nuttin was botherin' her inna world."

I blush, surprised that he remembered so well.  "I am your biggest fan, sir."

"I know, gal, I know."  He tossed the toy car casually onto the desk.  "Now, waddaya need from me?"

"Well, sir," my associate began, "I seem to have lost something very important..."

I roll my eyes.  "He lost a flock of robotic pigeons that are of national importance."

"Ah, I heard about 'em, from a friend o' mine."

"But," my associate spluttered, "this is top secret! Most of the people who invented the things don't know they're lost!"

"Mebbe, but the people I know're higher'n that..."  The voice behind the cloud petered off into nothing, waiting for a response.  I cover my face as much as I can, trying to hide my embarrassment for the man who unfortunately hired me.

My employer explained everything to the ball of smoke, and I let my eyes wander the room, bored.  On every wall there seemed to be a book case dedicated to the technological trophies he had won or dismantled. 

When the men were done talking, our host gathered a few odd looking things from around the room, giving them to me in a small bag.  He told me that they were going to be instrumental in returning the secrets and the pigeons to Washington.

For a few minutes he marked on a map that he had grabbed from one drawer or another.  The smoke once again obscured everything, and when he handed it to me it was folded into eighths.  

"Now, don't you open that up 'till ye get outta this office.  And keep the stuff in the bag hidden.  I never wanna see any of it again.  Not, both of you go an' don't come back here. Ever, whether you're successful or not.  Do ye unnerstand?"

"Never?" I as kin disbelief.  "But what if I want to talk to you? If I want to discuss methods of mechanical extermination?"

"Never!" the cloud said harshly.

I rose so abruptly that my chair screeched against the stone in the office.  My associate followed after me, back into the dark city.

References you may not understand or, Why Math Is So Interesting.

Thomas Jefferson is now in charge of my math homework.

Badly drawn Doctor Who

We talk about concavity in math, I sing Cats show tunes.

And finally...The Big Lebowski.

Why is IU so lacking in things to do?

I haven't posted in a while, and I apologize for that.  And now I'm going to be all hateful, and I'm sorry for that as well.


The only thing I've heard about 'round the IU campus is sorority related.  I am not in a sorority.  I never want to be in a sorority.  I don't see their point, except to make it a little easier to get wasted.  Which is pretty easy anyway, especially around here. 

My room mate is in a sorority, as is everyone else in my dorm it seems.  And I sit here, on the internet, forever alone like a 4chan meme.  I hear about the formal that my room mate's house is having,  I hear our neighbors gossiping about their awesome parties and their legion of sun-tanned sorority sisters.

I know I've made this point before, but I want to outline it again, in case it wasn't clear enough the first time: my room mate has conversations about drinking and parties; my friend and I walked around one of the Halls on campus looking at exhibits of taxidermied amphibians and birds. My idea of a cool night out involves going to the art museum or watching reruns of Doctor Who on Netflix.  Sororities do not concern me so much.

The other thing going around is religion.  My parents did not make us go to church.  The first time I remember attending one was around fourth grade, with a friend of mine.  So, when rumors fly around about Religious Anything I tend to ignore them.  However, when I heard that there was going to be a talk called "Jesus and the end of Religion" I decided to see what it was about, hoping for a legitimate talk about how religion could change.  I had hoped for a talk about what religious people thought was wrong with religion and how they thought it could be improved.  I will not deny it, I think there are some things wrong with religion, but I also believe that with some help things could get better.  They did none of these things, however.  Without going into detail, I will tell you that I was uncomfortable and angry the entire way through the seminar, and I now owe my friend my soul for making her attend the horrible thing in the first place.

So I say again, there is nothing going on around campus that is worth my time.  So instead I did this.

All I want for Christmas is to be mistaken for a family of Bigfoots.

I just noticed it the other day.

Father, creepin' round in the background.

Mother, REALLY creepin' round in the background.

 Brother, just Bigfooting it up.

 

 Now all I have to do is start randomly walking through people's back yards and maybe my dream will be fully realized.  It would give me no greater pleasure than to be mistaken for a large-footed mythical creature, even if that creature is not a unicorn. But, in my defense, it's hard to creep around like a unicorn without some pretty elaborate costuming.

They are revealed.

We found ourselves bundled comfortably on what I suspect is the world's oldest couch. Only one light shines on the scene.  An older man sits across from us, silent and judgmental at the same time.  His face is obscured by the smoke of his cigar.  In one cupped hand he holds a piece of metal twisted almost beyond recognition.  I can tell it is the remains of an RC car.  

My guest stares at the hand blatantly, and finally I slap him to get him to stop.

"You could have just asked," he said, rubbing his jaw.

"I don't believe in asking," I shoot back, not taking my eyes off the tiny car.

A half minute more of silence, and then:

"Whaddaya wan' wit me, huh?" A smoky voice comes from the billowing cloud.  "Not jus' anyone cin find dis address."


"I'm not just anyone, sir," I say under an arched eyebrow.


"I remember who y'are, girl," the elderly man says.


"I remember what you can do," I say, raising my chin.


"What is going on here?" my guest asks quizzically.


"Shut up," I hiss through the side of my mouth.

Faust or, Why Satan Would Make a Good Flasher.

There's a lot of things to do at Indiana University.  Granted, a lot of those things involve drinking, but what can you do.  Some of them, however, are geared to a classier sort of folk, myself included. 

My friend Claudia and I decided to go out last night, since the only alternative we had was sitting in our dorm rooms, lonely, surfing the internet.  I had  wanted to see Faust for a while, and since it was  coming round we decided to attend.

When we arrived, we realized we were severely under-dressed. Like penguins showing up to a peacock party, we walked into a dress-filled room in jeans. I, personally, felt like a winner.

We found our seats and sat down between an elderly couple and a middle-aged man, the youngest people in the theatre.  Neither of us knew quite what the opera was about, but we weren't too concerned.  All of the singing was to be in French, but there were, thankfully, super titles (which are not little floating Supermen holding cue cards).

The opera started with a lovely piece by the band, and the curtains rose to show Faust, an old man, contemplating suicide.  I was already feeling cheerful that day, and this just put a cherry on top.  Eventually, Faust calls on the Devil to make a deal with him, and Mephistopheles, AKA Beelzebub, obliges.  But, instead of just showing up like a normal demon-of-the-underworld, six of him show up simultaneously.

Six.  Six of these.

 To get Faust to sell him his soul, Mephistopheles tempts him with the love of a beautiful woman.  Faust, of course, agrees.

But I would like to make a point here: Faust is old.  Seventy or eighty, if not more.  Yet here he is, lusting after a nineteen-year-old girl.  I just want you to imagine the implications of that.

Anyway, Faust spends the next Act and a half trying to woo this woman.  The beginning of the Second Act finds Faust and Mephistopheles in the woman's garden. Mephistopheles is disguised, so the mortals who happen to walk by won't notice that he's the Prince of Darkness. He is wearing a trench coat.


Faust and his jail bait spend the next half hour singing lovingly to one another, which is beautiful and all, but the only thing I could pay attention to was Mephistopheles.  He spends that half hour appearing and disappearing behind a large bush that's downstage.  Wearing his trench coat. And totally looking like a flasher. If you couple this with the half-crazed smile he constantly had plastered across his face, he looked kind of like this:

Screw you guys, I'm SATAN.

And so I begin to silently break down.  I'm trying to hold back my laughter, and it is almost successful. I make it to the intermission, and then I mention it to Claudia. In between wild bouts of laughter and the disapproving glare of the multitudinous elderly around us, we decide that Satan would make the world's best flasher.  Perhaps even the world's classiest flasher.


About ten minutes into the final act I remember that there were a half-dozen Mephistopheleses running around in trench coats. Now I can't stop worrying for humanity.

How I Experience Music or, McDonald's and Peanuts.

This is Georg Friedrich Handel's Chaconne (Theme and six variations).  I played it last semester for my piano class.  It's a lovely song, really, but I also believe is might be a hallucinogen that spreads through the eardrums.

The first thing I learned about this piece, before even the notes, was that it was supposed to be a classy song.  Downright royalty-worthy, you might say.  My teacher explained it like I was supposed to be playing Versailles, like the idea of that city was supposed to flow from my fingertips.  That is not quite what happened.

At the beginning, the Original Theme, everything was okay.  I could feel the kings and queens walking down the stairs to the ballroom.  I embodied class.  From there, it got kind of weird.

At 0:22, Variation One, it begins to diverge.  Instead of posh France I suddenly found myself in a physics lab.  I was the size of an atom, a nucleus, and for the entire first variation I was trying valiantly and against time to split the nucleus with a large, high-powered laser.

At 0:40, the Second Variation, I find myself at a rally.  The only people at this rally are...cats.  They are hosting a campaign against breast cancer.  I am obliged to offer money.  Some felines wave signs, others pass out pamphlets.  I wander between tables full of information.

The Third Variation begins at 0:53, and I also begin to taste peanuts.  The nutty flavor pervades my senses and the taste will not leave me.  It is a ridiculously awkward flavor to have unsuspectingly hoisted upon your tastebuds.

The Fourth begins at 1:10, and once again I am in a hall full of mirrors and princes.  The peanuts still grate against my senses, but the pure opulence kills it a little.

1:30 begins the Fifth Variation, and I walk straight from the classy palace into McDonald's. I work behind the counter, serving petulant customers to the hiss and pop of cooking oil. The taste of fries joins with the still-lingering taste of peanuts and it is not a very pleasant combination.  I find myself refilling ketchup dispensers and I have visions of pickles.

At 1:45 the Sixth and Final Variation begins.  The uncalled-for nastiness of McDonald's is replaced by a chilly mountain top, not unlike the commercials for almost every mint-and-chocolate based confection you can think of.  I am climbing up the side of the mountain, ankle-deep in snow. In the middle of the variation I find myself on the same mountain, but in a wooden cabin.  I rush out the door and into a snowstorm, and the last thing I see is myself, sliding slowly to the bottom of the snow bank.

Somehow, all of that happens in only two minutes.  Don't ask me how.

Because I'm Better Than You.

After nearly a week of disturbingly nice weather, it rained yesterday.  I woke at seven in the morning, expecting a nice, 60 degree day, but was instead forced to bring an umbrella with me everywhere.  An umbrella that, at some point, said it itself, "Oh, screw this," and never fully dried. I made the HORRIFYING mistake of wearing Chucks instead of rain boots, causing my feet to wrinkle more than your grandfather's face, and yes, that is an image I want you to remember.

Three of my classes are early-ish in the day, no big deal.  I dealt with the rain LIKE A BOSS and came back to my dorm only mildly soaking wet and shivering. But my last class, band, isn't until 7:00 on Monday nights.  I was, by this time, shaking my fists at the sky and screaming unintelligibly at the unfairness of it all.  It was cold; it was wet;I was warm and cozy in my room.  But I HAD to go.  I try not to skip class unless I really have to, and laziness and an unwillingness to leave comfortable surroundings are not viable reasons for not going to class. So, once again, LIKE A BOSS, I went outside.  By this time the sheer relentlessness of the rain had caused my umbrella to leak right in the center of my head, making it the world's worst rain deterrent.

I get to band, we play a little bit, (by a little I mean for an hour and a half), and I flute away on my...uh...flute...

But we ended the session with this little ditty:

Not the best version of the song, but not bad either. 

Ah, Gershwin, you speak right to my soul...

'Our Fun' and 'Their Fun'

Today, for what I believe is the first time, I realized the major difference between my roommate's idea of hanging out and my idea of hanging out.

It's Friday. A good day, Friday. The end of the week, the first time I can actually stay up past midnight.  The bad part about Friday is that my first class is at eight in the morning. I wake up at seven so I can make my leisurely way to class, my roommate is still asleep, and I tiptoe around as best I can.  Her first class is at eleven, so she can stay up till way past my bed time at one frat house or another.

One other good part about Friday: I'm meeting a friend for lunch.  And she has promised to show me something cool.  A TARDIS graffitied on the side of Ballantine Hall, one of the biggest buildings on campus.  We meet finally and she shows me this beautiful thing.

BELIEVE

We go to Subway, where we talk about how time is nonlinear, how the whole concept is merely human invention, how you can remember things that haven't even happened to you yet.  High-class information, here.

When we leave, we continue to talk, and our conversation soon turns towards vampires. Not like Twilight, don't worry.  Instead we speak about the many creation theories of Dracula.  She believes it was the influence of an other-dimensiony particle, and I say it is a genetic mutation.  Eventually I have to go back to class, where two more of my friends and I talk for twenty minutes about the advantages of knowing a second language (one of them knows three and is working on her fourth)and the discrepancy of hand gestures around the world. 

Eventually class is over and my friend and I go back to my dorm- to do something cool, I know that's what you're thinking.  What did we do, you ask?  We played sheet music, her on violin and me on piano.  Her song is this lovely piece, Czardas:

And mine, the beautiful Raindrop Prelude:

(It gets really good in the middle) 

This is what my friends and I do.  For fun. BAM! Done before six P.M. 

My roommate does this:
On Thursday, goes out to party, coming back at one or two in the morning.
Turns disapprovingly towards the wall when I rise at seven.
Leaves as soon as I come in at 6:30 to START partying.  
Will not return till two, three maybe (it IS Friday night, after all).


I feel like a WINNER.

Rhapsody in Blue

Yesterday, I took a detour around campus just to finish listening to Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. It's one of my favorite songs, and I love to take a stroll with it in the background. It makes your day a little more epic.

Living in a houseboat off the coast of Ireland, owning a castle/restaurant.

I like to travel.  Or, rather, I would like to travel.

I have been on three major trips in my time, along with some smaller explore-the-area deals.  I've been to Tennessee, Chicago, Louisville of course, and some other places, but the Top Three Major Trips are so far out of their league it's not even funny.  They're bad-metaphor big, these things.  We don't have all the money in the world, but my parents somehow pulled it off.  They're made of magic and awesome, mostly.

The first was to Washington, D.C. in either seventh or eighth grade, I can't remember.  We took a bus, maybe thirty junior high kids and a smattering of adults.  We slowly wound our way up to D.C., through some other historical sites.  I only really remember Monticello and a massive statue of George Washington in the American History Museum.

This sexy (awkward?) piece of president.

 What I do remember well is coming home.  Sleeping on a bus is hard to do, so I understandably wanted to get a good nap in the car on the way home.  Instead, I was greeted by my mother and brother and the news that we had acquired a new dog.  His name was Ted. Oh! And they hadn't told the Padre first.  Classic.

He's sly like a fox.  A fox that has Voldemort on speed dial.

So, understandably, I wanted my own dog.  I named him Goren, and he's now afraid of balloons and squeak toys, the knowledge of which Ted uses mercilessly against him.

Closet hypochondriac.

Which led us to a grand total of four dogs. NO END TO THE HILARITY, I TELL YOU. Or the mess. Or the fluffiness.

Totally worth the dog hair.

 But then nothing interesting happened for a while.  No more dogs, no more Sexy Presidents.  Until the summer after Tenth grade.  I received a letter in the mail saying I could go to Japan for two weeks.  I convinced my parents it was legit and TOTALLY WORTH IT. 'Cause I'm a nerd like that, mostly, but what can you do?

And then. For two weeks.  JAPAN.

And do you know what Japan is? Awesome, that's what.

The next summer I got another offer, this time for three weeks in Europe.  I was perhaps more excited this time.  Mostly because people would actually be able to understand me most of the time.  We went to England, Holland, Ireland, France, Wales, and Belgium.  Now, when I watch Harry Potter, I totally KNOW WHAT'S UP.

I am trapped in a phone booth. Second only to a Police Box.

 

And then, the summer after that, I got a job.  I was slowly going insane restocking CDs and DVDs.  I still haven't really gotten over the fact that I'm stuck in the states.  Small things can remind me of that, a scent from Tokyo or a meal from Paris.  Mostly it's the food.  We were asked why we were excited to go to Japan, or England, and my answer was always to taste the food.  Escargot in Paris, waffles in Belgium, Dutch cheese, actual Japanese sushi.

And basically the title of this rambling entry sums up what I want to retire to.  I'll never travel enough, and I'll never cook enough.  Whether it's thirty, or sixty, or eighty, this is the dream I have for myself.

Today is the first day in many weeks that it has been above freezing.  I went out to get lunch in my coat, because I normally get my weather forecast from the janitor and she had said it was going to be in the fifties.

"Hmm..." I said to myself. "Fifties.  Seventies is warm. Eighties is warm.  But what is fifties?" I had actually forgotten what it feels like to be warm.  "Fifties must still be cold then," I say, and so I put on my winter coat and venture outside.

It turns out that 'in the fifties' is actually quite balmy.  I was about a degree away from actually sweating in my coat.

And then I think to myself, "Today would be a great day to go to the creek behind my house! Too cold for snakes to be up and bitey, but warm enough so that my feet won't freeze off in the water! Perhaps my brother will accompany me..."

And then I remember that I am at school, two hours away from home or any creek lonely enough that I could get completely disgusting and no one would see or care.  Sure, there are little stream things on campus, but all right next to pathways, the 'scenic route' if you will.

And then I was sad.

Those black smudges are my dogs, Fuzz and Rosie

 

Also, my brother is Sasquatch.

 

I COULD BE HERE RIGHT NOW. Instead, I am doing HOMEWORK.

Anachronistic Presidents that kind of look like the Powerpuff Girls.

Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln

Hamilton, Adams, John Jay, Madison

Franklin and Washington, presumably after a rave.

The taller you are, the more you can drink. Lincoln passed that threshold a long time ago.

THAT'S SHOWING THE BRITISH!

Lincoln with a historically inaccurate goatee.  But he's also hanging out with the Founding Fathers, so whatevs.

"You wig-wearing BASTARDS!"

Jefferson's so derpy

 Compare to the painting and you will see that mine is better.  So there.




The beginnings of a little Jefferson/Hamilton bromance perhaps? Or something more?

Jefferson works ALL THE DAMN TIME.