Happy birthday, Ben!

I’m watching Say Yes to the Dress, a show on TLC about this wedding dress shop and their many whacked-out patrons.  When I was younger, I was ob-SESS-ed with what my wedding dress would one day look like.  Now?  Meh.  I know one thing: it will not be a strapless white gown.  So overdone.  And I don’t look good in strapless things.  Even though I’ll be getting married in Vegas, I’m sure a wedding dress of some sort will still be involved.  The ladies on this show bring an army of their friends and family to give their input on which one they pick.  Um, no.  I suppose T-Bone will get invited along, perhaps Neil for a manly perspective and Kayla because she’s never had a problem telling me when I look fug as a bug in a rug. 

Mondays are the creation of Satan. 

Tomorrow is my half birthday!  Six months til the big two-one.  Weird… 21 is like adult.  I am nowhere near being an “adult.” 

The season premiere of Intervention is on tonight (this post makes it sound like I watch a bunch of TV.  This is not the case, it just seems I don’t have much going on this evening and I am in a POOP mood.  Harumph.)  Do they ever show interventions where the people don’t agree to go?  And then die?  I’d like to see that episode.

My life is not that stressful, yet I’m finding as I get older I deal with even slightly stressful situations really ridiculously.  Perhaps I should get some strong anti-anxiety medication.  And then get hooked on it so I can be featured on Intervention.  How’s that for a life goal?

Cottage cheese is the bomb dot com.

Apparently I’m intimidating.  We were given feedback from our peers in one of my classes, and the instructor said “at first your group members found you intimidating, but later realized that was not the case.”  Roomie corroborates this character assessment.  I find this laughable, yet not surprising.  Usually people just say I’m a stone cold bitch when they first meet me.  More acquaintances than I can count have said to me, “You know, when so-and-so first introduced me to you, I thought you hated me.”  Methinks this goes back to the whole awkward thing.  And that I’m usually generally uninterested in meeting new people.  Especially if they are female.  As Neil pointed out today, I automatically assume an adversarial role with all unknown females in a situation.  I do not know why this is. 

Also, when I tell my friends that I am the least confrontational person they know and that I HATE conflict, they laugh in my face.  So apparently I’m an intimidating bitch who wants to rough your shit up.  You’ve been warned.

Tomorrow is my brother’s birthday.  He will be 19.  He will not be getting a birthday present from me 1.) I do not have the funds.  2.) We’ve never been big birthday gift exchangers. 3.) He told me people only think I’m funny when I bitch about stuff.  So he can just go shove it.

OH, so Neil never came to my house last night for the BBQ thing because his car started smoking on the interstate and he spent the majority of his afternoon waiting for it in a repair shop (he has assured me this was not a tall tale in order to get out of meeting my parents.)  So I decided to pack up and head back to the ol’ IC early and boy howdy I’m glad I did.  Not that over a week at home wasn’t fun and all, but last night was a quality evening that could not have been had elsewhere. 

Did you know that part of Turkey is in Europe and part of it is in Asia?  I’d like to think there’s a giant sign that says NOW ENTERING ASIA or something, and a nice tourist-trap type photo op where you can be on two continents at once.  NPH says I am an idiot. 

You know what’s on the ol’ jellyvision tonight?  Family Guy AND Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew.  Boy howdy my night is set, if I can keep my eyes open.  Then the best friend and I have a date with the grill because THIS GUY found a new BBQ sauce at Hy-Vee and we gotta test it out.  I’ve obviously already tried a dab of it, it tastes like barbecue potato chips.  Roomie was all, “Umm, crazy pants, why are you drinking barbecue sauce?”  And then I CUT HER THROAT with a kitchen knife cuz I’m so INTIMIDATING!!!  …or maybe I just said, “Not drinking, just sampling.”  And she thought, “The girl I live with has serious issues.  That tall Shrek-looking kid she’s always hanging out with has really poisoned her brain.”  Hey, if sticking your finger in a jar of sauce and discerning the aroma like a fine wine is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right.

Am I supposed to take shampoo & conditioner to Germany or buy it when I’m over there.  SO MANY LITTLE CONUNDRUMS!! I got my housing assignment and boy howdy am I excited.  I’ll be in dorm-style living (own room, but sharing a kitchen/living room/bathroom… I think, I actually just made up the majority of that information) with… drumroll please… 3 males and another female.  *Cue angels singing.  On my housing information sheet, I let the peeps over in Germany aware of my penchant for getting along with guys better.  My mother says this will be excellent practice for hopefully living in 713 next year.  My father did not have much to say, except to bring me back to reality when I was SUPER PSYCHED about the super low cost of rent.  “Wow, four months to live there will cost about what I pay for only two months rent in the States!”  He then kindly pointed out that the lower sum was in Euros.  Drat.

Neil’s happy ass is speeding (correction: driving at exactly the speed limit) down I-80 towards central Iowa as we speak.  He could probably get here much earlier, but for some reason drives as if he already has his AARP card. 

T-Bone has spent the morning putting up MORE Christmas shit decorations, stringing lights on the tree, that sorta thing.  We watched the Biggest Loser: Where are they Now special which made me feel only slightly more like a beached whale than I already did after this week of holiday indulgences. 

I toats-mcgoats forgot that Friday is our PRSSA downtown social (read: bar crawl) which is kind of my job to plan.  We decided to forgo (forego?  Google says it can be either) bar crawl shirts and instead will be wearing ugly holiday sweaters.  Thankfully if there’s one thing my house has plenty of, it’s hideous holiday wear.  Now to plan the list of establishments to patron, which will really only hold up for maybe the first three bars.  After that everyone either stays or goes to their favorite place, goes home pissed off and sober, goes home pissed off and drunk, finds a hook-up for the night and abandons the crawl, gets a hankering for Mesa pizza and abandons the crawl, or gets arrested.  Not all, though some of these, have happened to me in the past.  I have never successfully been on a bar crawl start to finish.  Friday will guaranteed be no exception. 

Oh, and by the by, I MISS THE SHIT OUTTA MY IOWA CITY FRIENDS.  We have been apart for eight days.  Take that times about 15 (a conservative estimate of how many days we will be apart spring semester) and you have one extremely sad Brittney.  You know that saying, what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger?  BS.  I heard an alternate saying a few years ago: what doesn’t kill you makes you want to die.  I’ve always preferred that one.  While not exactly applicable in this situation, it melodramatically spotlights how I will be feeling.

Now I must leave you to go “take inventory” of the amount of alcohol we have in the basement and see if we need to go buy more before the classy family BBQ tonight.  I feel a trip to the store is in order.

I’ve tried blogging a few times today and it just wasn’t happening.  The amount of food I’ve consumed (yes, I eat more the day after Thanksgiving than on the actual holiday) has apparently inhibited words from forming.  It was bound to happen someday.

My last DQ pumpkin pie blizzard of the season was had on the ride home from Grandma’s house.  There were too many crust pieces in it, but that’s kind of like saying there was too much money in my bank account– not actually a real problem. 

Going back to my apartment can’t come soon enough, though I’m SUPER PSYCHED for our VISITOR and BARBECUE tomorrow!!!  He will be here for less than 24 hours, but in that time I feel Bestie will be force-fed an inordinate amount of food by my mother.  His agenda seems to be shooting guns and drinking (perhaps together, whatever– it’s rural Iowa.)  Kayla is NOT coming over because she’s a butthead.  Yes, I called my best friend a butthead.  No, I have no used that term since approximately the third grade.  Some sort of familial obligation– whatever.

If you put up pictures of yourself on Facebook, that’s fabulous, but your tongue should be sticking out in less than 1/3 of them.  Anymore than that and you’ve just got real problems.

Carbs… hurting… brain.  Hopefully I sleep til noon tomorrow and Bestie comes shortly after.  You  know what?  His name’s Neil.  I’m done calling him Bestie.  Natalie calls him Neil Patrick Harris (and no, they’ve never met, that’s just how much he comes up in everyday conversation.)  So maybe I’ll just call him NPH from now on.  He doesn’t read my blog anyway (asshole) so there you  have it.  Bestie’s real name is Neil.

My uncle drove up to surprise his mama, which I thought was very nice.  I was the only one made privy to this information ahead of time– I’m actually very good at keeping secrets if I think they’re legitimate.  Myself, I don’t have that many secrets, I’m like a gd open book, but as my older brotherly figure in 713 once told me, “I feel you know all this stuff about everyone, but you don’t share it.”  Really it’s just because I’m a stalker.  And also fabulous at picking up little bits of info about people and then storing them in my brain and whipping them out at random times.  Also, my mind is like a steel trap with dates.  Like, creepily accurate.  The other day someone needed to know what day of the week November 12, 2007 was.  It was a Sunday.  We won’t get into how I knew that.

I’ve been telling you what I’m thankful for over the past two weeks, so I feel I don’t need to dedicate a whole Thanksgiving post to it.  If I were to make a post about the things I’m not thankful for, that would just be bitchy (and in no way out of character) and I’d probably jinx myself and then BAM!  She said she’s not thankful for her bad complexion and suddenly she has rosacea… so I just won’t go there.  Though I will say I am not thankful for my new ability to not sleep more than eight hours at night.  I’m sure this would come in handy if I were some sort of Eagle Scout and needed to develop an internal clock for a patch on my sash or whatever, but as a college student, I’d like to sleep past 8 am. 

This all started with the second to last home football game, when I got approximately 45 minutes of sleep one night then just went about my day tailgating, then working, then hanging out at 713 and finally going down at about 2 a.m.  I am no rocket scientist, but that’s not much sleep (stop yelling at the computer, Mom– I KNOW, I’m an idiot.)  My theory as to my superhuman ability to stay awake is in the form of a little yellow caffeine pill (available at Walgreens, people, PERFECTLY safe) from one of my friends.  He said it was equivalent to one cup of coffee.  Methinks it was equivalent to a few hits of meth.  Since then, my sleeping has just been a little off.  I’m sure the staying up, mind racing with anxiety each night over all the shit I have to do before Germany doesn’t help.  “MDMA got you feelin’ like a champion/ this city never sleeps/ better slip you an Ambien.”  Ahh yes, thanks Hova.  I knew you’d make it into my holiday post somewhere.

ANYWAY, the last of my thankful posts… Thanksgiving 2009, I am thankful for being single.  (No seriously, follow me on this one.)  We’re coming up on the anniversary of me getting dumped on my ass whilst speeding down I-80 back to school after Turkey Break last year.  At the time I was all Whatever, small bump in the road, I give it three months tops, and everyone who knew us was like Que horror! If this dynamic duo can’t make it then for the love of God WHOOOO CAN?!?!?  (Apparently I have some very melodramatic friends.)  But, we were all wrong and we split ways never to so much as pat each other on the back again.  And it has been one freakin’ fabulous year.  Sure, the first month or so wasn’t exactly rosy, I recall there being a lot of crying and de-friending then re-friending on Facebook.  (The lack of appetite though was ballin’– when you can only eat a few bites of oatmeal each day for a week, those jeans pushed to the back of your closet suddenly make your ass look bangin’.)  But once I got over that, I had some A+ friends waiting in the wings to take me out and introduce me to being single in college.  In the words of my man Borat “Eeets niiiice!”  (<–that sounded creepy.  I swear I did not take my newfound singledom as a ticket to sexual predator-dom.) 

It appears that I’m rambling (and I hear some elevated, aggravated voices from downstairs– it wouldn’t be a proper family gathering without) so I will cease.  I will also shower today, since it’s a holiday and I feel like being generous to those who have to spend the day around me.  And oh look, IT’S NOT EVEN 9:30 AM.  For the love of potato pancakes, I’m gonna need a nap.

Ahh, where to begin?!  Thanksgiving 3 of 3 has commenced at my mother’s mother’s house.  Grandma made a lasagna the size of Texas and now we’re all anticipating tomorrow when we eat a turkey about the size of a small elephant.  Go big or go home, I suppose.

If I had a dollar for every time someone asked/assumed/insinuated that Bestie and I are dating/going to get married/doing the horizontal no-pants dance, I could pay off the rest of college and at least a semester of graduate school.  Apparently his friends from home are now in on the act, as well as my grandfather who calls him “Beastie.”  I suppose this new nickname could catch on if he didn’t sleep til Brooklyn (<–Beastie Boys reference.  Did you get it?  I should have made it easier and said “if he spends most of his time fighting for his right to party.”)  We have decided the way to best remedy for this is for me to punch him square in the face when he gets out of the car on Saturday.  Or let everyone privy to one of our riveting conversations where he sits on the couch watching Cops and I sit next to him fah-REAK-ing out about something and after a few minutes he’ll turn and say, “Oh, were you talking to me?”  Hmmm… in retrospect I have just presented you with even more evidence that we are, in fact, a couple.  Whatevs. 

Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving so I should probably stay up all night thinking of something REALLY good to be thankful for.  I suppose today I’m thankful that I’m right-handed.  Because statistically, if I were left-handed, I would die ten years earlier.

Sorry so short, but you know, family calls.  You should be with yours anyway, too– GET OFFLINE!

Dad just asked why exactly I’m going abroad again.  “You won’t be able to see this face for five months!”  Well, it’s more like four…  My impending exit is on many people’s brains lately– when I go back to Iowa City I will have THREE WEEKS to find a subleaser, pack my apartment, finish classes, take a final, and say peace out to those I love most.  So you know, piece o’ cake. 

Barring natural disaster or terrorist attack, Bestie will for sure be having the sheer privilege of visiting on Saturday.  He and Lauren are the two people I will miss most in Iowa City.  She will be in my wedding, one of those classy bitches I can see being in my twenties with, swirling martinis and complaining about the lack of men in our lives whilst lamenting the size of our upper arms. 

My mother has officially turned into her mother.  Christmas vomit has covered every inch of our house, including the bathroom off the kitchen where a patriotic Santa the size of a toddler is just hanging out next to the shower and it scares the BEJEEZUS out of me everytime I go to relieve myself.  Neither of the trees are up yet and I plan on not being in or near the house when it gets to be that time.  I’ve seriously contemplated converting to Judaism because I am so that person who has a tree up 365 because I’m too gd lazy to take the thing down.  I feel that eight pronged candelabra thingy would be much easier to stuff in a closet.

Two days til Thanksgiving which means today I’m thankful for heat.  This elusive element is something I’ve heard other houses have, but apparently we haven’t caught on yet around here.  Supposedly there’s one of those fabled “heaters” in the basement, but it must be broken or something.  I mean, why else would could we hang meat in the living room like it were an effin’ butcher shop?  I think I’ve experienced this feeling called “warm” sometime during the summer, but my brain is half-frozen so it’s hard to remember.  Perhaps Grandma’s house will be liveable without socks, longjohns, and a down parka.

Congratulations, you’ve been awarded a study abroad scholarship!  What a sweet way to start my day.  It’s not like I’m getting handed thousands of dollars to learn how to sprechen, but my program is throwing a couple Benjamins my way to lighten the load that feels pretty heavy given my penchant for going downtown every chance I get often.

T-Bone’s playing arts and crafts time in the kitchen currently, glueing some shit to a giant map of the world for some fundraiser for church.  If she’d like to move said map out of the way of the pantry, I could eat lunch, mmmkay?  Thanks.  Christmas carols are also wafting from the living room (Norman Rockwell ain’t got nothin’ on this family.) 

Later I will be baby-sitting my neighbor boys who I haven’t seen in eons.  They’ll probably be taller than me and think I’m the lamest person on earth, but whatever.  I changed them diapers once upon a time, ya hearrrd?  The worst part is, at least the older one has definitely learned how to tell time, so I can’t pull the old “OMG IT’S SO LATE, time for bed!” when the sun has barely set.  Yep, I was definitely that baby-sitter.  Should God have a lapse in judgment and have me bear kiddies, I will most certainly be that mother as well.

Ick, it’s basketball season.  I pure straight hate basketball. 

AND NOW KIDDOS, democracy in action.  Or at least an awesome example of where some very public bitching will get you: the hospital is canceling it’s dumb dumb dumb program to solicit donations from patients.  As avid, loyal readers of this, my dear blog baby, you are all well aware that I was not exactly a fan of the proposed plan.  I’m sure my well-thought, eloquent, and completely level-headed opinions against it were weighed heavily by the geniuses behind it.  HA.

It rained, meaning the outside of my car is clean, so I DETAILED the inside as well.  I hadn’t so much as vacuumed it since April.  There was still a bunch of grass and straw on the floor from when I mud-wrestled at VEISHEA (ohhhh boy, if I had only been blogging then!)  It also smells like cupcakes because I put in a brand spankin’ new air freshener.  So basically, I’ve been more productive today than I’ve been all week.  Go me!

I’m off to go make pie crust for the mother (she’s what one would call Pie Crus’tarded, and yes, that’s a real word.)  She’s going to make three pumpkin pies, for like, other people.  Pffffffffff.  What is this, the season of charity?!  Oh speaking of, I feel SO GUILTY when I go by those Salvation Army bell-ringers.  So I guess today I’m thankful for, you know, the stuff everyone’s usually thankful for.  Warm house/apartment, family, money, food, friends, real Charlie Brown-type stuff.  Oh, and the fact that KAYLA AND SAVANNAH are coming tonight!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  See Mom, I do have female friends.

The irony is not lost on me that I HATE hospitals yet work in one.  I spent about ten hours in my place of employment today, though I went for moral support for a family member instead of a paycheck.  Holy suck balls it smells bad there.  And is creepy.  Thankfully it was nothing life-threatening and he was able to have an outpatient procedure sooner than they thought and I should be DONE with being in any medical facility for visitor/patient purposes for a while.  Luckily I brought my hospital badge so was able to save $1.69 on lunch.  Way to go, employee discount!

GUESS WHAT?!?!?!  Bestie might come visit on Saturday.  I am piss-my-pants excited.  Tomorrow my two girl besties from high school will finally return to our blackhole of suck hometown and we’ll get to go out for Savannah’s 21st birthday and have fun girl time and tell secrets and hang out in the Subway parking lot and be super awesome!  And now there’s a possibility that Bestie will get bored at home in Illinois, return to 713, then traverse to visit moi next weekend?!  Woah-uh, awesomeness overload.  Mostly we’re trying to pack as many activities (Stepbrothers reference, obviously) into our last two weeks of friendship as possible.  He would also really like to shoot guns off the back deck with my father since he’s in awe of Iowa’s lax gun laws in comparison to the ones governing our neighbors to the east.

My mother would very much like us (or even apparently just me, should he not be able to come) to attend church on Sunday morning.  Apparently it’s “the rules.”  I will not mention how “the rules” seem to change everytime I come home, depending on what “rules” she’s feeling like making up at the time.  We grew up going to church most Sundays and I’m definitely not opposed to it.  In college, however, sleeping in has trumped going to church about 98% of the time.  I am definitely more religious than the vast majority of my college friends, and this has nothing to do with my Sunday morning worship attendance.  When I come home it’s nice to go and see all the old ladies who watched me grow up, but our pastor who was BOMB-DIGGITY has left and now it’s just weird and people look at me like “Ohh the liberal from Iowa City is back, I wonder if she’s withchild.”  Not to mention if Bestie and I rolled in together, they would presume he and I are dating.  (Mom, you know me telling them “no, we’re not dating” would so not work on those Lutheran women.)  I can handle all of Iowa City and the tri-county area assuming this, but those church ladies are too much to handle.

Apparently there’s a large stink over Adam Lambert’s performance at the AMA’s last night.  I did not see said performance, a quick YouTube search doesn’t provide me with anything interesting.  He kissed a guy and simulated oral sex on one of his back-up dancers and grabbed his crotch a lot.  The first one is so Madonna and Britney, I seem to remember them getting a lot more praise than flack for that.  The third point of contention is straight outta Michael Jackson’s book, and the glove that did a lot of that very self-gropeage just got sold for an ungodly outrageous amount of money.  So really Adam Lambert just needs to get off his knees and those 1,500 angry phone calls to ABC needn’t have been made.  Personally I like the guy for some reason, and I haven’t ever really heard him sing.  His fellatio-centric stage time had to have been more entertaining than Jennifer “I couldn’t act or really sing my way out of my marriage to the most hideous man ever even if I tried” Lopez falling off the back of one of her dancers (which I did find video of online, and homegirl did a pretty good job of making it look like part of the performance.)

If you’re thinking about having kids, you should probably just adopt.  Don’t be selfish and have your own.  There’s plenty of perfectly good babies who need homes.

I’m re-reading A Million Little Pieces because I don’t know, I’m oddly fascinated by drug rehab I guess.  An excellent movie you should watch is 28 Days (with Sandra Bullock, not 28 Days Later with zombies.)  The phrase “chemical dependency” really rolls off the ol’ tongue.  I also really like the word “environmental,” in case you were wondering.

Things I don’t like: sunsets.  They make me sad.  Not like boo-hoo cry sad, but you know, sad.  Sunrises and I are a-ok, but their nighttime counterpart and I have some beef.  Methinks this is because when I was a little kid, I had a freakishly early bedtime during the summer.  It would often still be light out (the damn sun was starting it’s horrid setting) and I’d sit at my window and hear other kids playing and thinkof all the stuff I was missing out on and be really upset.  I’m one of those people who has zero problem with it getting dark out at like 5 pm now that it’s not Daylight Savings Time.  The sun sets in like two seconds– HA!  Take that, dusk. 

Man am I gonna be sore tomorrow.  From the GYM, get your mind outta the gutter.  My aunt is a personal trainer (or as one could call her, a freak anomaly in the sea of ”not-exactly-what-you’d-call-active/ could-I-just-get-a-trough-instead-of-a-plate”-ers who hail from the same gene pool.)  She honored us with the privilege of getting up at a single-digit hour in the morning to sweat out yesterday’s shameful show of How Many More Ribs will Brittney Eat Before she Actually Passes Out?  Which I’m glad she did because the answer to that question is a much higher number than even I was expecting.  So, an hour on the elliptical followed with some fun ab/arm/leg contortions will leave me feeling absolutely peachy tomorrow.  Don’t worry– I know you’re all probably quite concerned– I’m eating jerky as we speak.  (Oh, PS Mom, I found some jerky in the fridge.  Hope you weren’t saving it for anyone else.)

We have returned from the land of the south, and after about two minutes in the house I realized I was going to be here for a week.  A WEEK.  Do you know the last time I spent a week at home?  Uhhh maybe Christmas Break freshman year?  Oy vey.  When grumbling about this aloud to the one they call T-Bone, she told me I could separate the laundry for her.  HA.  What is this “laundry” you speak of?  And I certainly can’t figure out why anyone would “separate it”– isn’t it just a dump in magic machine, pour three cups of pretty blue soap on, hit a button & pray for the best activity?  Uh-oh, the jerky’s gone.  That doesn’t bode well for the rest of the week.

Today I’m thankful for… airplanes.  I hatey-hate-HATE flying, but damn it’d be a long walk to Germany.  (For those of you counting at home, t-minus 45 days until departure.)  Oh wow, so this is what hyperventilation feels like.

As many of you know (partly in thanks to an after-bar post that you can read here) a classmate of mine passed away ONE YEAR AGO today.  So I went up to hang out with him in the cemetary today, seeing as I have a WEEK here and all.  It wasn’t really sad, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You” was on the radio and really that song’s so awesome it could bring war-torn nations apart, so I was in no Debbie Downer mood.  Someone had brought flowers up there today, but there was also a new pack of Swisher Sweets (the kid smoked em like they were going out of style, long story).  This was in addition to the OLD pack of Swisher Sweets someone had put there.  On top of the MULTIPLE DOLLARS IN QUARTERS that are just chillin there.  Am I missing something?  Is this some sick joke and Boner’s gonna come back, need a bunch of smokes, and have a shit ton of dirty clothes to clean at a Landromat?  He’s dead.  First of all, if you’re making wishes with coins (which I always thought there needed to be a fountain involved, but whatever) wouldn’t pennies be more of a recession-savvy coin to use?  Also, anything tobacco-related ain’t cheap anymore, go ahead and save yourself the couple dollars on the smokes for the dead guy because I guranTEE some high school hooligan from ADMHS will lift those babies within a week.  Those were just my thoughts. 

Methinks tomorrow I will accompany my mother to “tea” with her friends.  I have not been invited, but feel it would be kosher pickles if I showed up anyway.  Those crazy pre-menopausal vino-freak ladies are the shit.  I baby-sat for most all of their kids who were younger than me, and I illegally drank in barns, cornfields, and parent-less houses with the ones who were my age or older.  Ahh, the unbreakable bonds of the Tea Kids.  Perhaps we’ll get a cheaper rate on group therapy.