Back in Black . . . er, Brownstone

Summer is over, and my stay in lovely Minnesota came to an end yesterday when I boarded a plane headed for Salt Lake City. I've worked hard in these past couple of months. I painted houses with College Pro for four months, which kinda sucked, but it's money now in my pocket. I finished up by helping out at Anoka marching band's spat camp. It was weird; there were still students in it who I was close to, but I was tossed into the position of instructor instead of peer. It was all rather disorienting. However, I learned plenty, got to know some people I'd been needing to get to know, and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

I am currently sitting at a round table in the middle of Brownstone condo #5, my new home for the next long while. I've met most of my new roommates, moved in....mm, two-thirds of my stuff (optimistically), and almost completely adjusted to the fact that school starts in 5 days. I've also installed the giant nose-shaped soap-dispenser given to me by my second-year roommate Erin, complete with frighteningly realistic green shower gel. I. Love. It.

Our apartment is slightly smaller than last year, but it's very pretty and I'm mostly pleased with it. Our lack of a balcony in comparison to some of the other Brownstone condos is disappointing, however. Ah, well. Maybe next year.

I hear our ward is on the older end of the scale...I'm a bit nervous about that, seeing as I'm only 18. Hopefully not too many desperate late-20s guys will fall in love with me. I do hate breaking hearts like that.

The Final Toilet Paper Famine (until next year, anyways)

All too soon, it was the end of the semester, and life was full of studying for finals and packing for home. Of course, this made us all much too distracted to worry about stocking up on toilet paper, and, once again, we were a bit undersupplied in the bathroom department. When someone finally bought toilet paper, the rescue was bittersweet: we would never have a toilet paper famine all together ever again.

We're all going separate ways now. One roommate is getting married; another will be teaching English in Russia. Erin and I will be living together in a condo next year, but the others have found new homes as well. Though the Riviera wasn't the most amazing place to live, we've made thousands of memories within its boundaries. We've dropped coconuts off our balcony. We've decorated a life-size policeman cutout with flowers. We've watched hours of Jane Austen movies. We've had picnics on the grass and parties on the roof. We've fell in love, had our hearts broken, and eaten a 3 pound bag of peanut butter M&M's in less than a day.

No one can doubt that it's been an interesting year, and I'll never forget it. However, now is the perfect time to look forward. I have a whole summer in front of me (longer than most kids', too...suckers :D). Hopefully I'll find a job soon, and that will probably keep me busy for the next few months, but there will also be plenty of time to make new friends and make new memories with old friends. I'm sure I'll have plenty of new inside jokes by the time August rolls around, as well as new scars, new heartaches, new insights, and a new, fabulous body (This will be due to Rachelle's and my weight loss challenge. If we fail to reach our weight loss goal we have to eat a bug. Crude . . . but effective).

All right, I've waxed eloquent for long enough. Time to go out and live life.

April Fool's Day

"The most wasted of all days is one without laughter."

- e. e. cummings

Love the poet, love the quote. What I don't love is that you can't indent on blog posts. Is that true, or am I just being a moron? Probably both. Anyways.

My family never did anything super big for April Fool's Day, but there'd always be some sort of surprise waiting for breakfast: green eggs and ham or whatnot. Since last Thursday was my first April first away from home, I decided to go all out. I don't have time to detail everything that went on, but I'll provide a brief list of the hilarity that occurred.

The night before:

~ Silly string-ed a couple people.

~ Filled hundreds of Dixie cups with water and placed in front of our friends' apartment in a way in which they had to move them all in order to get out withoput getting their feet wet.

~ Cut out the little mechanism in a musical birthday card and affixed it to the neighboring apartment's door hinge. Whenever they opened the door, the music would play, and when the shut it, it would stop! Brilliant, I know.

~ Window marker on several cars, but it rained that night, so that didn't work out so well.

~ Rearranging the Riviera's pool furniture into a giant pyramid.

~ Just for the heck of it, Rachelle and I went hot tubbing afterward in all our clothes. That was a party.

~ After everyone else went to bed, I also dyed a couple roommates' milk; affixed my stuffed rat B'Crimefighter to the showerhead, changed Erin's phone to Spanish, and switched my number with her friend Nick's in her contacts list. This will come back later.

I woke up and opened my bedroom door the next morning to an avalanche of newspaper balls, courtesy of Rachelle and Erin. I left them laying around for a while, but when I couldn't shut my door to change, I decided to dispose of them by arranging them in Rachelle's bed to look like I was laying under the covers. She later retaliated by stealing and hiding my doorknob but made the mistake of telling a mutual friend about it on Facebook. I took care of that easily.

During the day:

~ Silly string-ed a couple more people, just to be obnoxious.

~ Texted Erin throughout the day under the guise of Nick. That was pretty fun, and she only became suspicious when I started talking about the excessive cat level in Provo.

~ While I was working I had enlisted some friends to trash a coworker's car (not really trash, but at least completely deface it with window marker), but it was snowing/raining again. I usually got a ride home with him, so they decided to prank me instead by putting dish soap under all the door handles except for his. Somehow, he ended up with crap on his hands I didn't, and I told him it was my roommates' fault. He got them back by calling Rachelle (with the number I provided) under the guise of a suave bassoonist named Leonard who had the hots for her. That was quite the party.

~ Also at work, I had some fun switching around silverware and juice dispensers and watching peoples' faces as they went to get apple juice and came back with orange.

Well, that's all the tomfoolery I can remember at this moment. Needless to say, it was a memorable April fool's Day for all, and I can't wait for next year . . .

Woops. I was going to write "The Dangers of Writing" but then I almost fell off the exercise ball we use as a chair and accidentally pressed enter.

I was going to write about a short story I'm working on, but I've decided to comment on my weekend instead.

The roommates and I hit up the Holi Festival of Colors on Saturday, like everyone else who's at BYU. Apparently the Hindu temple in Spanish Fork does this every year, and it's one of the biggest celebrations of its kind (Yes! One sentence, two correct uses of it with an s!). Basically, it's thousands of white kids who don't even know what Hare Krishna means chanting it at the top of their lungs and throwing colored powder in the air. It's rather enjoyable.

Well, I'm going to cut this short since I need to get working on some Arabic. Goodness knows I could use a little discipline when it comes to "homework time."

The Dangers of

Layover

An airport terminal is a fascinating place. So many worlds collide, and yet rarely do these worlds leave a mark on each other: people walk quickly past each other, oblivious to the lives brushing against them with their tensed shoulders. There is an unavoidable disconnectedness, a sort of mortal limbo. No one is where he wants to be yet—he is in transition, whether this is a layover on his way to Mexico City or the place where he’ll pick up his checked baggage and walk out into Denver, Colorado.

A woman in a pink tracksuit hurries her little boy along, not even glancing at the skinny young man standing alone in khakis and an argyle sweater-vest. He has the sort of hairstyle that might have been popular in my sophomore year of high school, and He looks too young to be carrying the official-looking briefcase in his left hand; then again, maybe I’m too young to be sitting in an airport terminal with a notebook, contemplating the lives of hundreds of people whom I will never meet.

Fair enough.

Airports don’t get the attention they deserve. Each terminal is a smorgasbord of humanity: toddlers and senior citizens, college students and college dropouts, businessmen and mid-thirties yoga instructors from Miami. They teem with life, with memories, with upset stomachs and walking sticks and lost luggage. Every pair of feet rushing by has walked in different places, and my hands itch to write their stories. But what right do I have to put myself in their path? I certainly never earned it. Then again, if I never put myself into others’ lives, how will I ever be able to form any relationships at all? One must be willing to risk a thousand forgettable encounters in order to experience the one that is meaningful.

Self-Evaluation

I have come to a sad realization.

There are three groups of people who I find most ridiculous:

Females, because they make everything much more complicated than it should be, and they're alarmingly shallow at times.

English majors, because they are insufferably pompous.

And freshmen. For obvious reasons.

And yes, you may have realized--I fall into all three of these categories. What a sad, sad day . . .