Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Irrefutable Proof

Theory of Life number three, also known as the Object Personality Theory, states:

Inanimate Objects will serve best the human who forms a bond with them. Positive bonds will create long lasting, affectionate relationships. However, some bonds are negative and will accordingly produce negative results. Read: Love your stuff and it will love you back. Don't and it won't.

It is valuable to note that Physical treatment of objects is not necessarily correlated with the loving of the stuff. In this case, "love" need not represent both a noun and a verb.

The theory has been proven! Skeptics may rest when I tell the tale...

I have this straightener. It was a good one for a long time, but I was never particularly impressed. You can tell because it doesn't have a name. If I had named it, I would have picked a cat lady name like Willadean or Ruth.  And then it cracked and started snapping pieces of my hair off. And we weren't very good friends. And I didn't use it that much, except that this weekend I was at my parent's house without four other straighteners to kife. 

So there I was at HQ, curling away, when my straightener started to steam a bit. I thought, "Hmm. I thought I got my hair all the way dry. Guess not.", and went on my merry way. A minute later and one clump over, it steamed a bit again. And then I smelled it, and look at the huge clump of hair hanging from my straightener, no longer attached to my head. And I showed my mom, and we said things from Little Women and lamented, and I brushed it out and got over it for a bit. It was underneath another layer, right? no big deal.

And then the next time I showered, twelve times the normal hair came off my head. And then some more in little burned bits. And then some more in long strands. And I almost cried. Real mature, right?

And then I was drying my hair. And the burned part I thought I could hide turned out not to be so easily hidden. In truth, it is rather poofy and frizzy at this point. "I'm so fustrated!"
In one last attempt at reconciliation, I plugged in the straightener and came back awhile later to cautiously take a stab at the waves left over. And it tried to heat up one last time and then, finally and totally, gave up the ghost.


Moral of the Story: Name the things that have the power to destroy your hair. Name them nice names, not cat lady names. If you don't, you will end up with a poofy yucky broken left side of your hair and your sunglasses will get stuck in the charred, shortened bits when you go inside and stick them on your head.

Just in time for aviator season, too. Shame.

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

I've got emotions dripping out my pores!

That is the only part of the song I know. We used to sing it at each other back in apartment 27. Not to each other. At each other. At.

Emotion: Frustration
("I'm so fustrated! This is just so fustrating!")
I went and talked to a hair lady while Stephanie was getting her hair done wedding style. The red won't come out. I have to bleach it out and then dye it again. The process is smelly, long, and damaging. And I have to pay them fifty dollars for it. Humph.

Emotion: Exhaustion
Its twelve hour tuesday. Nuff said.

Emotion: Ripped in freaking half
As opposed to simply torn. You know. Torn is when you can't choose a flavor of cream cheese. This is not cream cheese. This is realizing every single day that there is one more person you may not ever see again after the next three weeks. This is realizing that ninety percent of the people I know will graduate before I come back here. This is loving my job and quitting anyway. This is missing my family and wanting Logan. This is not cream cheese. This is ripped in freaking half.

Emotion: Amused
Amused is how I feel when Collin bugs me all day about setting him up on dates, and tries to facebook stalk people with me, and goes to his office to calculate how much money he spends on dates in a year.

Emotion: Nauseous
This is how I feel when he comes back out of the office and tells me it comes out somewhere around Four Thousand dollars.  That's right. He is not a tightwad, but still single.

Emotion: Incandescently Happy.
That is how I felt all day. I dreamed in poetry and prose and woke up smiling. And it continued all day until Osanna told me this afternoon at work that I looked like I was "having a very good happy!.... wait."

Soo,... have a very good happy and thank yer, ladies and gentlemen.

Saturday, April 14, 2012

Thankfully, no cure in sight.

 Along with high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes, literacy runs in the family. (Thank goodness we'll have stuff to read in the hospital, right?)*

A lot of my bookwormness is because of my siblings. I had a lot of sisters influencing my impressionable mind, especially regarding the Emily books. There was Erin, with whom I can now speak a sort of fairyland code, who gives me Jimmy books. There was Bekah, who told me once that I remind her so much of Emily she doesn't need to read the books. There was Rose, fighting over the copies with me, sharing our mutual love of literature. The Emily books are a sacred tradition amongst the Robinson women. Of course, there is my brother too. I am fairly certain he never read the Emily  books, but we do have an ongoing book thieving tradition. I have often wanted to read one of my books only to realize that Alex has it in Phoenix. Which was fine, cause I have half a shelf of  his books with me. 

My dad also has a habit of stealing whatever book I am reading at the time. I thought when I was little he was making sure it was appropriate, probably because I was reading things that aren't meant for preschool toys. As I have grown, though, the practice continued. This last thanksgiving break I was home and also trying desperately to catch up in Dracula. Every time I wanted to read it I had to go steal it back from daddy. And when we were talking about our road trip this summer and I was all excited about the two way music indoctrination that will soon occur, all Dad wanted to talk about was the books we were gonna read. Last of the Mohicans. Bam.

 Most of the family literacy comes from momma, though. My mom is a bookworm. She succesfully spawned a whole new generation of new bookworms, and that is one of my favorite things about her. I can't even remember all the books my mom read to me as a kid. We would always have a book to read together while we waited for my bus to come in elementary. We spent countless hours in the car, mom driving and me reading, mom correcting my pronunciation, me scowling and then doing the same thing to all my friends. Mom told me it was okay that I read my books to pieces because I have "love affairs with my literature."Especially when we didn't get along, I can say from experience that our reading tradition was better therapy than therapy. My momma taught me the power of words, as well as the importance of saying them correctly.

There's this thing hanging in the kitchen at HQ. And it goes something like this.

You may have treasures and wealth untold
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold
Richer than I you can never be
I had a mother who read to me

It is a framed and precious thing that my sister Erin gave to my mom last Christmas. And mom opened it and cried and I was sitting there with all my siblings thinking, "Dang mom, you read us The Prince and the Pauper when we were wee children, so you deserve that. And now you are reading The Prince and the Pauper to your grandkids, so you deserve that with two scoops."


*Seriously, family. If I am dying, bring my copy of Les Miserables to my deathbed. Possibly bury it with me. Maybe bring Crime and Punishment along too. 

Thursday, April 5, 2012

Because everyone knows it is very foolish to shut oneself into a wardrobe

Today I had an inner battle, which commenced when ten minutes before my geology review Blake texted me to ask if I wanted to go get Jamba juice with a bunch of work people. The inner dialogue was as follows:

Responsible Amy: Can't. Nope. Do you wanna pass Geology or fail like a wimp?
Irrational Amy: Please! Please! Please! Holy Crap I really want Jamba!
Responsible: No. You have no money and you must pass geology.
Irrational: But you are always telling me to be social! I like these people and I want fruit, dang it!
Responsible: tell yourself no, like a champion. You will feel better if you study.
Irrational: Fine. I'd feel better studying with a carribean passion, you know.
Responsible: somehow manages to stick out her tongue and retain a triumphant facial expression.

The win of the responsible half of myself was rewarded when I was walking across campus and was suddenly encountered with a  man wearing hoofs, leg fur, horns, and a scarf. That's right. Mr. Tumnus was walking towards me, asking with a perfectly straight face, "Have you seen Lucy? I lost her."

I know, right?

I was pretty excited about it. As I was leaving (having responded that I had no knowledge as to Lucy's whereabouts and that I was sorry Aslan was so upset about it) he was chasing someone down with a sword yelling, "FOR NARNIA!" 

I am a hermit, and sometimes I have a hard time being social. I have a bad habit of shutting myself into a wardrobe, so to speak. So those times when I really want to be social, I usually jump on it. And those times when I get to have jamba with some of my favorite people, I really jump on it. Except that I really have to pass geology. So today when I forced myself to choose between responsibility and irrational lapses of responsibility,the irrational half wanted to jam a spoon in the responsible half's eye. But then I learned a miraculous lesson.

Moral of the story:
When you make yourself be a big kid and go to your stupid exam review even though you really want to get out of the wardrobe and go to jamba with your friends, sometimes the universe will reward you for your efforts and let you experience all the good things you never knew were in the wardrobe. Like Tumnus. 

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Snarky and shrewish. That was my day.

Twelve hour Tuesday has once again spawned a violent reaction. I have no faith left in humanity today. People have been rude and irritating and ill-mannered and a lot of them did it on purpose. I have been holding in the Ilse Burnley-esque urge to go into a rage and throw things just to hear the "jolly smash!" basically all day, because I want to keep my job but mostly because there weren't any large vases accessible.

First, all the kitchen staff stole my dressing bottles and it took an hour to find enough lids. Which is nobody's fault but was inconvenient anyway. And then the pans in pasta station were extra opposite nonstick today, and then there was the epic battle with my mortal enemy the sneeze guards at pasta station. There were casualties. Windex bottle down.  It is with great luck and self-control that I report there were no actual human casualties, because:

We are in college! We are big kids! We should know that you should not put your feet on a table in a public shared dining room, nor should we clip our fingernails and leave it for the employees to clean up, not should we leave our trash and food lying everywhere, nor should we give the pasta lady dirty looks when she asks what you wanted again cause you are mumbling enough to make anyone's blood pressure skyrocket, nor should we spill orange juice everywhere and not tell the employees with sanitation rags who can clean it up, nor should we harrass the employee who is not allowed to give you more shrimp, nor should we be snotty to the cashier when she has to walk across a room to get to you when you didn't bother to push the button that will let her know you are there, nor should you purposely move the tables around and strategically trap all the chair legs under the table legs so it is impossible for the cashier lady to move back, once she has finished cleaning up the garbage you've so artfully strewn about and the chairs you have moved into the middle of the floor nowhere near a table, that is.

That was an epic run on sentence. McCuskey would laugh and then tell me I could probably phrase it better with some extra work. But I'm not going to cause I walked around at work for twelve hours today and most of the time I was forcing a smile and breathing deep. 

Sunday, April 1, 2012

It is Freaking April, guys

You know that moment when you realize that finals are in a month and you panic?

I had one of those tonight. I think I need to start spending a whole lot more time at the library. Especially if I am gonna do well in this geology class. Cause Anthropology comes naturally and you can even fake it to a certain extent. But when your Geology TA  tells you to draw the canyon in cross section and asks you what formation you just drew and you come up with a snakey thing, it doesn't count for much.

By the way, the formation was a syncline. I was drawing the cross section wrong. I'm not very good at this anything that isn't humanities thing.