today sucks.

I hate coming back from vacay.

Yesterday was fun though, even though I spent the majority of it at the airport. Drew and I just spent like 3 hours drinking coffee and playing cards. We also spent a lot of time demoralizing this toddler that was being really irritating near us. He kept yelling for no reason and throwing trash in our direction. Real mature.

austin. city. limits. tomorrow.

Sometimes I get embarrassed at my lack of knowledge in current musical trends. Because I'm in a band now I run across people almost daily who just assume that I will not only know about this and that obscure band/song, but I will also be able to maintain our conversation by suggesting an equally obscure band/song that they have perhaps not heard of and can now add to their arsenal of obscure bands/songs.

The actual truth is that I don't know any indie music beyond that to which I am forcefully introduced, and my preference is usually old-people country and/or whatever Rihanna song is heating up the Top 40. I can also usually name classical pieces that I hear, given that it is one of the 50 or so that I played while in GCYO.

My feelings about this are complex. Sometimes I want to expand my bank of knowledge so as not to appear so completely ignorant about a field in which I actively participate. Other times I want to scream at the person in question "I DON'T CARE ABOUT THIS TOTALLY AWESOME BAND "THE UNITARD COLLARS" THAT YOU HEARD AT SOME DIVE BAR WHILE YOU WERE IN CHICAGO, NOR DO I CARE THAT YOU MUCH PREFER THEIR EARLY STUFF AND THINK THAT THEY SOLD OUT WHEN THEY OVER-PRODUCED THEIR SECOND ALBUM." The latter reaction is normally saved for strangers. I like it when my actual friends give me music.

Anyway, the point of that tirade is that I'm going to Austin tomorrow, and don't even know who is playing, besides Patty Griffin. I'll probably just wander from tent to tent until I find someone whose sound I like. Maybe I'll buy a t-shirt if I like them a lot.

i just saw the most offensive thing

There was a yellow, full-sized military issue type Hummer driving down the street with a sticker on the back that was a smiley face with its tongue sticking out. Anyone who knows me understands why this offends me in at least three different ways.

wind tunnel

My hair was like a wild animal struggling to escape the suffocating confines of my head this morning. Normally it is fine and flat, but today it has a kind of life that I have never before witnessed. Maybe it is feeling the same way I am, that in its 24 years it hasn't achieved quite the things that it set out to, and is now taking great strides to make something of itself.

My condolences go out to Kelly on the passing of David Foster Wallace. I was sad for days when Madeline L'Engle died, and she was taken by old age, not tragic desperation.

obligatory birthday reflections

So I guess I'm in my mid-twenties now. It's not so bad. Kind of exactly like being in my early twenties. And my late teens. Which makes me wonder if I will ever actually feel like a grownup. When I asked my 83-year-old grandmother when she startd feeling like a grownup, she gave me the obligatory "Ha! I still don't know!" but then immediately followed it up with "Seriously though, it still hasn't happened for me."

Obviously I feel more adult. I officially pay all of my bills by myself (just got passed the car insurance baton last month), live in a place that my parents do not, and have a stable adult job. I even have a 401K, even though I'm still not really 100% sure what that means.

I'm not really afraid of becoming a grownup, but my worst fear is that I will someday have the paralyzingly boring adult life that I see people in all the time. Like what if I get married, and my husband is white and blond and a lawyer? What if I have a kid and have to get a minivan with a soccerball magnet over the gas tank? What if I have to join a country club because my husband likes to play golf with his colleagues and I have to sit around at the pool with a bunch of fully made up stay-at-home moms and their horrible children and talk about carpools and the hilarious perils of motherhood?

I'm not really sure how to wrap this up. It's just one of those things that I think about every time a birthday rolls around.

i love you, end of summer.

Today I walked outside and it was sunny and cool and there were people everywhere and someone was playing U2's Its A Beautiful Day over a loudspeaker and there were a million vendors selling kettle corn and hot dogs and ice cream. It was such a good day.

current mood: sick and tired

For some reason I have been in a kind of depression over the past few days. I think it has something to do with being "sick" and having a lot of down time to actually hear myself think. Normally I love thinking and just hanging out with myself, but at this point I am still kind of trying to get over my whole blow-up with Dan, so that tends to be where my mind always wanders. And it's ridiculous, because it's been over two months since it ended but sometimes the most random things trigger memories and its like it happened yesterday. It's the biggest cliche ever, but even things that have nothing to do with him make me think of him. So lame.

The strange part is that I know I'm better off without him, and I know for certain that he wasn't the person that I was supposed to be with forever. Maybe its that I was never REALLY with him in the first place. I remember being so hurt at the fact that as each week passed I would become more and more attached while he seemed content to just keep things as casual as possible. I would think "how could he NOT be falling in love with me right now??" and I think that's what kept me in the relationship for so long--the determination to make him feel something for me. Maybe that's all any type of broken-heart is--the shock and pain of realizing that not everyone is going to think you're as worthy of their love as you do. I guess I'm lucky to have made it all the way to 23 without feeling that way before, but it doesn't make it suck any less.

Its so embarassing, because I never pictured myself as the type of person who would find herself in this situation. I mean, I'm handling it the way I usually handle the end of an involvement with someone (that is, cutting them off entirely), but this time its much more difficult to let it go. Its like I'm not as immune to feeling as I used to be, which is surprising because you would think you would get tougher with age, not more vulnerable. My sister keeps wanting to "talk about it," but for me, after the initial dish, talking it out just doesn't help that much. As a matter of fact it tends to make it worse, kind of like picking a scab and reopening a cut.

I think I just need to tough it out for a few more months. He's going to be deployed in December, so there will be a physical separation--I won't have to live five minutes down the street from him, wondering what he's doing or who he's with. The weather will be cold, I'll get to see my three main ladies all at the same time, and then it will be a New Year.

P.S. Is it lame that Sex and the City has been really instrumental in helping me though a lot of this? Its just comforting to know that even though your problems feel very specific to you, they are actually common enough to provide the themes for entire episodes of a TV series.

apparently i have strep throat

Yeah, for the past 4 days my throat has gotten increasingly worse, and I finally decided to do something about it. Normally I would wait until I was knocking on death's door before I even took the step to call my dad and ask if I should do anything about an illness, but that hurricane is supposed to come on Friday, so I really didn't want to be stranded on my roof in a nightgown waiting for the National Guard to drag me up into a helicoptor AND have to put up with a debilitating disease at the same time.
Anyways, I actually went to the doctor. Literally for the first non-checkup visit of my life. That's sad, but true. I went in all like "um, I'm not here for a checkup, I'm just sick...am I in the right place?" and had to go into a sick waiting room with all of these disgusting wheezing children. The doctor gagged me with one of those strep-test q-tips, and it came back positive. The awkward thing is that I don't feel that bad, but I can't go into work because I'm extremely contagious. So when I called my boss to break the news to him, it sounded something like this:

Mike: Hello?

Me: Hey Mike!

Mike: ...are you calling me from down the hall?

Me: Noo, no...I was just calling because I went to the doctor and he told me that I had strep so I couldn't come in to work today on account of being really contagious. Anyhoo, just wanted to let you know!

Mike: Um, ok. Well, I'll see you...possibly not until next week?

Me:(suddenly realizing that I don't even sound remotely sick over the phone and wanting to make up for it) Um, probably not. But I may come in tonight just to get some work done! K Bye!

Aaaaaand here I am. I actually did come in at 8:30 pm. Just to say I did. I almost posted a picture of a throat with strep just so i would have a picture to go with my blog, but all the pictures I could find were completely repulsive.