bad metaphor

…oh, yikes. That’s two song lyrics in a row. Maybe my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

Anyhoo, it was my birthday yesterday. My 21st. That means I probably hit the bars last night, got smashed beyond endurance, and don’t remember much, right? Well, not exactly…I just had a low-key dinner at Free State with some of my friends. I’m no prude when it comes to alcohol, but that suited my mood better. I’m not really much of a bar person, I guess. I’ll have a proper party, with copious amounts of alcohol, after we move from the ghetto so that people won’t be so afraid to come to my apartment complex. Hell, I’m afraid to go to my place.

After dinner we went back to said ghetto apartment, had tons of popcorn, and watched “The Butterfly Effect.” I didn’t really have high expectations for this movie. Ashton Kutcher is definitely hot, but he lost standing in my eyes with Punk’d, which is a horribly unfunny show – all he does is run around and act like an ass. A pretty, frat-boy ass. That gets old after awhile. Yet surprisingly, the movie wasn’t bad. Sure, Hollywood’s grip on “Chaos Theory” was a little tenuous, and there were points in the movie that were supposed to be dramatic but instead made me giggle. I’m a harsh critic when it comes to sentimental scenes. But the movie did serve to remind me that Ashton Kutcher, beneath the stupid Punk’d veneer, is still very hot. Mmm. Oh, what was the movie about again?

Our lease specifies that we must move out on the 31st. We can’t move into the new place until noon on the 1st. That means we’re basically homeless for a night, and I’ll have to find somewhere to stow my cat, who is damned near impossible to get inside a carrier. I’ve surveyed the apartment and have deduced that I have a lot of crap to move, without even counting the stuff that I have in the living room and kitchen. My roommates aren’t as big of packrats as I am, but now Beth says that she might not even be there when we’re moving. Her family is bugging her to leave as soon as she can for their trip to Yellowstone. Kristen has already informed Beth that she is not moving someone else’s crap. It looks though moving is going to be a catastrophic event – nevertheless, I can’t wait. We can’t stay here any longer than we have to.

I described my neighbors earlier in White Trash Psycho Rampage. Luckily for me I’m pretty sure no one down there has the minimum intellectual capability to operate the Internet, so I’m safe. Besides – as scary as WT Lady is, I can’t really picture her threatening to beat us up for talking shit about her on the Intar-net. I think if that happened, she would definitely kill me, as I’d be too busy laughing so hard to be concerned about my safety. While I might be safe on the Internet, I’m not too sure about real life.

The night before last, I ran into Anne, one of Beth’s friends, on my way up the stairs of the building. Anne and her boyfriend live in the same section as WT Lady. For clarifying purposes, I’ve taken the liberty of rendering a layout of the apartments below (we never did get an “official” one of our own; thank you, Gage Mgmt), in MS Paint:

Needless to say, I’m very glad we didn’t get stuck where Anne lives. Anyways, Anne and her friends were sitting around, smoking and talking. They sounded pretty pissed off. Anne turned to me as I came up, and said, “You know those guys that live in apartment 1? Well earlier today, one of them shat on our building.” !!! “Yeah, he had his pants down around his ankles and just left a big dump outside my window. – Oh, and he wiped with newspaper. It’s still out there; you can see it if you go around the corner.” I did not go.

Maybe there was a good reason for it. Maybe their toilet is broken, and given that our management’s minimum response time to emergency calls is two weeks, he couldn’t wait that long…but holy poopin’ Peter. I mean, he could have just walked a block to the gas station to crap. Or, if he couldn’t hold it, he could have asked one of us neighbors if he could use our facilities. I guess I probably wouldn’t let him in, due to my policy of not allowing strangers to take a crap in my apartment, but – was there really nowhere else to go, dude? Seriously. At least he could have disposed of the newspaper afterwards, like a decent public-shitter.

After sharing that pleasant tidbit with me, she and her friends proceeded to tell me more stuff about the crazy apartment goings on that I, thankfully, have missed in my more comfortable position on the second floor. Apparently not too long after the child-abuse call, WT-lady was spotted beating the living shit out of another woman in the parking lot. Anne said that the victim was looking for her ex-boyfriend, and possibly drugs, too. “I don’t got no coke,” quoth WT-lady. “I got kids now; leave me the fuck alone.” This upstanding mother was about to retreat into her realm of domestic tranquillity, until a comment from the departing woman made WT-lady go batshit insane faster than you can say “cops.” WT-lady ran into the parking lot and proceeded to pummel the remaining wits out of the coke-addict, and slam her into (our) cars. All of this took place in broad daylight.

I then shared the bit that I heard from Beth – she and her boyfriend were heading up the stairs to the apartment, as was one of our neighbors (a sane one, from -our- floor). WT-lady was in her car, pulling out of the parking lot. She was arguing with one of her boyfriends (possibly the shit dude, though I was not present at either occasion to be able to identify him). Then, as she was driving off, the guy pulled something out of his pants. Beth heard it – the unmistakeable sound of someone cocking a gun. All three of them – Beth, her boyfriend, and the neighbor – ran the rest of the way up the stairs.

God. After writing all of this, I feel like I’m living in some wacky urban ghetto, not Lawrence, the town of hippies and frat-boys. Anyways, I’ll be glad to move out. The increased rent is worth it. Between violent, insane neighbors and incompetent management, I’m surprised we haven’t broken our lease yet. I just wish the kids could get out of there just as easily. Anne says that the cops and SRS have probably known about them for awhile now – but there’s not enough funding to do anything about it. The whole thing is awful; they’re pretty good kids in spite of everything. We will be glad to leave, but I wonder what will happen to them when we’ve gone.

Since my computer is still in “busted” status, I’ve taken the liberty of hijacking my roommate’s computer while she’s away visiting her aunt in Abilene. Hey, what can a girl do.

Last night the boyfriend and I went to our friend Shelly’s for her housewarming party. “Friend” is a strong word, I suppose; she’s really more of an acquaintance. Anyways, as soon as we stepped inside the house, I felt really uncomfortable – that sort of feeling you get when you’re at a place where everyone knows everyone else, except for you. I suppose this is really racist and un-progressive, but I’ll admit it – I was also hyper-conscious of the fact that everyone there was white. I’m not sure why. I’m a banana girl. I have mostly white friends and I live in Lawrence, a town that’s not exactly a beacon of racial diversity. Shelly herself was there, and she’s also Vietnamese. Maybe it’s because we (the boyfriend and I) were clearly different somehow, and I didn’t know how, so I had to attribute it to the most obvious thing – race.

For whatever reason, though, I felt awkward and tense the whole time (the boyfriend admitted afterwards that he felt the same way, though he at least recognized some people). The good thing is, though, that we ran into another couple who also looked kind of awkward and uncomfortable. We talked to them for most of the time, so it wasn’t all bad. Still – it just struck me how hard it is to start relationships with people. It didn’t seem like it was always this way.

There were twenty-six people that went on the alternative spring break to New Mexico. The last night, all of us gathered around the fireplace of the main cabin, just as we did every night. We drank hot chocolate and said our benedictions – recapping all the funny shit that had happened that day. Then the laughter died down, and we got serious. We swore until we were blue that we would keep New Mexico, Ghost Ranch, the connection between all of us alive and strong. Well…out of all of these people, I’ve kept into contact with two of them – one being my boyfriend, and the other one just by virtue of the fact that he lives in the same building as my boyfriend. I guess it was really easy to think at the time that a bond existed, when twenty-five other people were telling you, each other, and themselves that it did.

The only thing that’s really survived from the trip, for me, was the feeling of silence – the way the air held so still out in the desert – no sound, nothing for miles. Even the redness of the sand, which struck me at the time as the most vivid natural thing I’d seen – even that is fading. What about the stars that night we slept on top of the mesa? They were dying, already dead when I saw them. If I can’t even remember nature, which changes over long periods of time, how am I expected to remember people, who are constantly on the move?

I hardly ever feel like leaving the house anymore, in case I happen to meet someone and have to go through the whole rigmarole of introductions again. How do people get to the point at which they forget about appearances, and start to talk for real? I must have known at some point, since I’ve done it, but I don’t know how to do it anymore. It’s so difficult. Better to stay at home and take care of my own problems, before I deal with other people’s baggage, anyways.

I’ll admit it; I brought a lot of this on myself, and have no one else to blame for my woes. I also know that I have a lot to be thankful for – that I’m alive, the day is bright and sunny, I’m not living in Western Sudan, etc. But I’ve been having a bad streak of luck today, and dammit, I want to whine about it. What else should a blog be used for?

As a student, procrastination is my way of life, so I stayed up until 1:30 last night to finish the paper that was due in class today. Not terribly bad – I’ve pulled many all-nighters before – but I was tired enough that an all-nighter would not have been possible. I finished it, slapping a badly-worded regurtitation of the introduction at the end, and went to sleep. I woke up early this morning, thought of a brilliant (well, okay, adequate) conclusion, meticulously spell-checked and edited all nine pages, hit save, and clicked the print button. On cue, the blue screen of death materialized, its cold, indifferent DOS letters blinking at me in stale blues and grays. “Great,” I thought, grumbling. “I’ll have to re-type my conclusion.” I restarted the computer, only to find another error message:

“SMART failure detected…blah blah blah…please replace your hard drive and back up any important data. Press F1 to continue.”

Sweet; even my computer thinks I’m dumb. I hit F1, to find that all hell has broken loose – GoBack uninstalled itself, the operating system vanished, and the tower clucked at me in an admonishing tone, as if to say “you should have saved your data, punk.” At this point I went crazy from sheer helplessness and Beth had to calm me down enough to call and get it fixed. Turns out they may be able to recover the data, but definitely not by tomorrow, unless I have an extra $120 (which I don’t). This means I will have to type my paper over again, as the prof. takes off a letter grade each day it’s late. Sympathetic people have suggested I talk to the professor and explain my situation, but it’s no good – he’s told us, numerous times, that he won’t accept computer-related excuses for late papers. He tells us to back up our data and keep printing draft copies. I did continually save my essay – on my hard drive that is. I should have saved it on a disk, but really, nobody expects their hard drive to implode. And nobody prints draft copies, either – at least no one I know who is either environmentally-conscious or a cheap bastard (that encompasses just about everyone). My faith in computers and my reluctance to waste paper has come back to bite me in the ass. Much like a pissed-off West Nile mosquito.

After some time, I stopped being crazy, and I borrowed my roommate’s computer to check my email and my account balance. I’m not great about balancing my checkbook (are you kidding me? I can barely balance myself, while walking). I did expect that I was getting low in funds – I did not, however, expect that I had less than fifty dollars in the bank. Which is okay, a little low, but would be fine – except I wrote a check this morning for my roommate for forty dollars, and she cashed it at the bank; plus I went to the grocery store yesterday, and spent $15 dollars there. I’m no good at math, but that means if the checks both clear today, that equals two bounced checks and yet another headache for karenology. asdfhskdlfjkl;sf!!@$

Now I’m at work, alone because Jodie’s on funeral leave – her father-in-law passed away last night, sadly. He was going in for bypass surgery; I’m not sure if he died on the operating table or before. Anyways, the IT people at our school were scheduled to deliver 40 computers today to put in the computer lab. Guess who doesn’t have access to the lab. Yep, that’s right – the only one here at work today. Luckily I was able to call Facilities and Operations to have them come and open the lab. You can’t just leave 40 computers sitting in the hallway, and the IT people didn’t look too happy at the prospect of hauling them back across campus.

And all this because I got up today. Really. If I had just shut the alarm off and kept snoozing, I would be in much the same situation – paper not turned in, checks not clearing, computers sitting in the hallway – but I would be so much happier. How wonderful it would be.