It doesn’t matter that I am twenty-one, about to be twenty-two - every year before my birthday, I feel like I’m thirteen again, that dull, stomach twisting angst over what should be a fun occasion: my birthday party. Each year I’m continually plagued by the fear that no one will show up, except perhaps my roommates, who would already be in the house anyways. This actually happened when I was in middle school - when I was twelve, in fact, only -two- people showed up to my birthday party. Granted, I only invited five, but still, it’s tough to imagine more mortifying things at that stage of your life. I seem to not have moved very far past that stage, despite the fact that I -have- actually thrown parties since then, in which more than two people have shown up, and they’ve all been fun times. While I would like to play it cool and happy and be all “let’s have fun no matter what,” the fact of the matter is that I am a desperately anxious little creature, probably owing to genetics. One of these days I shall post my best of the Paranoid Mom stories as evidence.

I try to think of ways to get around it, like having dinner at a restaurant with a few close friends whom I’m pretty sure will show up because they like food. This year, I decided to have a joint birthday party with a friend (one of the future roomies, the boys) - thus placing half of the burden on him to be sufficiently cool and entertaining enough to draw people, and if nobody shows up, then it’s halfway not my fault. Right? Well, sure. We’d scheduled it for tonight, but because my roommate Beth decided to tell me yesterday (gee thanks Beth!) that she has a big inspection at work the following morning, that she needed to get sleep…so I ended up moving the party at the last minute, and now some people can’t come, including my other roommate…arrgh. I really do feel and sound as if I am in middle school again.

I even have dreams about it. They’re different dreams every year, different scenes, different people - yet always the dreams involve me throwing a party and people not showing up. Last week I had a dream featuring the people that went on my trip. I hosted a reunion party at my place, and my mother cooked for it. She made this huge Thanksgiving-style banquet, in which the food was a little off, because whenever my mom cooks American food it never tastes quite right. True to life, that part. Anyway, only about half of the people that I’d expected showed up, and all of those people took one look at the food and left - except for a girl that I never really got along with, who stuck it out like a true soldier and ate all that strange-tasting turkey. At the time, I thought it was a message that I needed to be nicer to this girl, but now I’m pretty sure it is part of my annual manifestation of party anxiety. Well, I probably should have been nicer to her but, eh, too late for that. I’ll say hi and pretend she’s not irritating next time I run into her on campus.

One of the books we read for the study abroad was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. I’ve read it twice now, and reading it makes me feel vaguely uncomfortable because I fret about these stupid parties all the time in my head, just like Clarissa does. “Oh, won’t you come to my party? Do come! Peter! Remember my party!” Fine, I’ll go to yours Clarissa, if you come to mine. Sheesh.

Updated post on July 7th with photos. It’s taking me forever to sort through all these; I’ve taken between 500 - 600 pictures. This number of course will be cut down once I throw out all the blurry ones (80% of the indoor shots), the ones with my thumb or hair in the way, and the ones that, well, must have looked splendid while I was on my acid trip. This is why I spent most of my time looking like a goofball photo-snapping, gaping tourist. Hey, at least I didn’t wear a fanny pack.

I’ve noticed a trend in my posting - I tend to post a lot when I’m bored and there is nothing in particular to talk about; when, on occasion, my life is as exciting as a pillowcase full of raccoons, I tend to slack off and not say much. I guess this makes for a boring blog, but then again, I’m able to spend more time noticing and expanding on little details when I’m not busy with other things.

Sheesh. I haven’t even blogged about spring break yet.

Oh well. Time to sift through more cathedral photos - we invented an acronym on our trip, btw - AFC. “Another Fucking Cathedral.” I mean, yeah, they’re amazingly beautiful and all, but you can only see so many before they start to fuse together in your memory like a giant, many flying-buttressed, stained glass monstrosity. Oh, and same goes for towers. My fat American ass is declaring a strike against winding staircases.

Things aren’t quite so hectic right now (which is why I’m blogging), but it will soon be. Right now I’m packing all my effects…though it’s a bit early, I’m going to be moving not only my things, but the belongings of my currently-overseas boyfriend also, and…we have a lot of things. Books, in particular. I’m not sure why we don’t just let the library store books for us, and go there whenever we need to read things. Although it’s probably for the best, as right now I have an outstanding library fee I need to see Watson about (I missed returning -one- small book before I left, one out of fifty for my spring research project, dagnabbit).

Here’s the tricky part about moving…as mentioned before, I am moving in with the boy and his boys, so I will be living with boys next year (oooh, scary). I am moving in early there, so that I have time to move the boy’s stuff, as well as my stuff, and be able to clean my place. Most importantly, I need time to paint my room back to white from its current state of lime green (what the hell was I smoking, anyway? It better have been good).

Also complicating things is that we might have two other people crashing with us for a month, when their lease is up - they’re both going to grad school on the east coast and their terms don’t start till September. So…six people in a four bedroom apt. Not too tricky really, since there are two couples in the mix…until you factor in their two cats. Now, I adore cats, as everyone that knows me will attest to (I have resigned myself to someday turning into one of those creepy old ladies with a sawed-off shotgun and fleet of felines at my beck and call), but I do remember hearing stories from the girl about one of the cats being a renowned bully. My cat has a bowtie. He loses in fights against leaves. I’m already envisioning the other two giving him swirlies in the litterbox, or beating him up for Pounce money. Poor Quarkie.

Another note - I’ve got a job. My old job, in fact. My psycho ex-boss, Jodie, got sacked (or left, under outside pressure), so Belle took over her old position, and emailed me while I was in the UK asking if I wanted it back. So yippee! I start on the 1st, and hopefully will be on the track to recouping some of the money that I blew on ice cream and scarves on my trip. No, really - while unpacking my suitcase, I counted about ten or so scarves, not counting the two that I am planning to gift. I think I’m going to take a break from the scarves as well as the winding staircases.

My only worry is that Jodie will show up at the office one day, and I’ll have to be in the same room with her again. And possibly talk to her, too. “Say, did you ever get that counseling?” Uh, yeah. Hopefully the atmosphere before her departure was sufficiently awkward enough to ensure her never ever coming back. The new department head apparently attempted to fire her after he realized just how looney tunes she was (which is damned near impossible to do to classified staff at KU - pretty much if one were to knock off the chancellor, inside the Douglas County Courtroom, the worker might get a stern warning). She then refused to leave for a few months, resulting in icy tension until she resigned “for the good of the program.” Of course, Jodie. Probably (sadly), it’s the best thing you ever did for it.

*Title has no relevance to my post really, except it’s a beautiful song by Jeff Buckley that I have been listening to while typing this up. I think I’ll continue this trend until I come up with more clever post titles.