My suitcases are full, the Post-It lists on my wall are mostly checked off, the Hawkeyes are on TV in six hours.  I’ve been much calmer today than anticipated, kind of like the night before studying for a final when you just can’t care anymore about what grade you’re going to get.  I did have one mild to moderate breakdown (not for any particular reason, though being in a cemetery may not have helped) in which I found myself in a vehicle with no tissues and resorted to using my new scarf to wipe the streaming snot from my face.  But other than that, pretty freakin’ excited.  The German foreign exchange student my brother went to prom with lives in the town I’ll be studying in and although (I’m fairly certain) we never met, she’s excited for me to come and show me around and take me out on the town.

Internship application 3/3  was sent today, the one I’m most excited about, the one I’d PEE.MY.PANTS. if I got.  Maybe I’ll get ambitious and apply for more while abroad (HA).  Apparently with my spending habits, I need to find more than 10-15 hours at a sandwich place a week  to supply some cashflow.  I’m predicting around mid-March or April I’ll start freaking about my nebulous summer plans, don’t worry– I’ve accepted my self-diagnosis of CRIPPLING NEUROSIS.  I think when my mom and I went to the mall last week and I wouldn’t go up and ask the hair salon lady if I could get an appointment she realized that her daughter is a social FREAK (perhaps a new spin on the blog could be WhatMentalIllnessIsBrittneyOnTheCuspOfToday.com)

NPH keeps telling me to calm the truck down (<–see?  2010 resolution of swearing less), that “everyone loves Americans” (blatant lie) and “you’ll make friends so fast you’ll freak” (blatant Jimmy John’s rip-off.)  I’m no longer talking to him however because currently he and three other of my good friends are drunk in Miami for the Orange Bowl.  When he asked if I was just “chilling all day” and I said AREYOUHIGH today might be one of the most critically busy days of my life he responded “Oh yeah.  Well I just have drinking and football.”  I’m just SO happy for you.

My layover tomorrow in Chicago is four hours long.  I will not have a cell phone, thus it’s really a crapshoot as to whether I’ll have my sanity.  My trusty shiny new blue laptop will be with my however so I will be blogging, Facebooking, Twittering up a storm– how excited are YOU?!

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.

Pita chips for dinner= totally acceptable and completely awesome.

I am beyond exhausted– the wedding was beautiful, the raspberry/almond cake was outta this world, my waffle at Waffle House this morning was one of the best I’ve ever had.  I also had two scrambled eggs which were beyond yum– scrambled eggs are one of my top five favorite foods, did you know that?!?!

Also, I’ve officially decided that when that day comes for myself, I will be married in Vegas.  Not necessarily in some blacked out state at 3 am by an Elvis impersonator, but definitely in Vegas, definitely In-n-Out Burger as the reception food.  Feed each other french fries and a shake instead of cake, that kinda thing.

I just KNOW you’re wondering “But how was the rehearsal dinner barbecue, Brittney?!”  so I’ll TELL YOU.  Amazing.  Holy ribs and BBQ sauce.  My uncle can smoke some meeeeean ribs.  Also, Jack Stack’s  in KC makes some of the best baked beans I’ve ever had the privilege of inhaling– there’s pieces of brisket in the beans. 

The dryer was broken at home so the two baskets of dirty laundry I lugged home got lugged back untouched.  Thanks for the quarters though, Ma– now I just have to find the motivation to actually get ‘em in the washer. 

My friend finally got a headstone after only, oh.. eleven months– it’s really nice and its got a picture of him and says “Boner” on it and it made me very sad. 

Goodwill and Second Act were both closed by the time I got back, so I stopped at the specialty Halloween shop just to see what I could find.  SIXTY DOLLARS for a Halloween costume?!  No, thank you– I have booze groceries to buy.  Bestie and I are going to scrounge around for something to wear, anything… anything at all.  I brought home some dress-up clothes from home, but I’m not sure what we can make out of two pairs of suspenders, five pairs of ladies’ gloves and a can of temporary blonde hair color.

Oh, and in case you hadn’t heard… 8-0, FIRST TIME IN SCHOOL HISTORY.  Me being the Negative Nancy I am, thought we had zero chance at winning, and we barely did, but WAYTOGO Stanzi for those final two seconds.  I was getting minute-by-minute texts updating me on the score during the reception, and we’d all written us off until I got the “hawks win” text and I went be-serk.  The home game this weekend should be beyond insane.

I have now come to a crossroads in my life: 1.) take a nap, possibly (ohmygoodnes it’d be so amazing) just sleep til class tomorrow or 2.) do homework.  This homework will not be hard, I am in no way going to put in even what could remotely be mistaken for effort, yet it needs to get done.  I was following someone today with an license plate frame that said Alumni and I actually had a thought along the lines of “they did their time…” and then realized I was equating college to prison.  College is no way a prison– well, the classes are, they are absolutely mind-numbingly not awesome at all, so in some ways I absolutely do feel like I’m just biding my time til my four years are up.  The extracurriculars though (and not so much the leadership experience one puts on their resume) make me never, never wanna leave.

Piano Lounge = awesome.

Work tonight was the busiest I have ever, ever seen it.  Not to be outdone, Mesa also had the longest line I’ve ever had to wait in (spincach, tomato & feta?  Ehhh, turns out cooked spinach still isn’t that great…)

Speaking of work, at the very beginning of our rush, I looked over at the line gathering out the door & a guy about my age had just come in with a group of friends, overweight & with an afro of curly dirty blonde hair extending about a foot over his head.

It was the hair.  Not even bright red, but that apparently didn’t register with me.  You’ve probably heard the phrase “my heart leaped into my throat”?  There is really no other weay to describe the physical reaction I had to this person (the name he put on his bag was Turk) sharing the same airspace as me.  My initial thought was,

“Ohhh cool, Boner came with some of his friends for homecoming!!!”

About 3 milliseconds later, however, I remembered that nope, the jovial afro kid wasn’t in fact my prom date from senior year.  He wasn’t the guy I let get away with giving me shit for all of my dumb high school mistakes when no one else was allowed to breathe even a word of them.  He didn’t even order the Subway equivalent of the BMT, Boner’s favorite sandwich.

This kid wasn’t Boner because Boner isn’t around anymore.  And that really, really sucks.

(Disclaimer: I certainly didn’t mean for this to be only post #3, but this happened today so I’m going to talk about it today, suck it.)

We were too busy making sandwiches for me to lose my composure, but goddamn if I didn’t want to lock myself in the cooler and sob my eyes out.  I full on stared at this kid every chance I had, just willing for the name on his bag to be Jesse, just waiting for him to wink at me and tell me the joke’s over.  I guess I was just surprised at the suddenness of it all– here I am having a perfectly normal day/week/month and then BAM he’s right there, his absence, staring me in the face saying You’re not over it, you may never be; if one of your favorite people in the world can be gone in that quick of an instance, how much faith can you have in the rest?

Like I said, feel free to just skip this one if you didn’t know him or don’t care.  Sometimes I wonder if I dwell too much on it because believe me, I dwell.  People often say “there’s not a day that goes by…” and it’s true.  I think about Boner every day.  I’ve often wondered if I’m remembering him better than he was, but I think we all do that with the deceased (horrible word choice, I apologize, but it is what it is.)  No doubt about it, he could be an asshole.  They were all jackasses, but him always less.  He was always in on the joke with you; while what he said was offensive, it was never malicious.

I won’t even go into how Thanksgiving ‘08 will be the defining moment for our class, how much we’ve all changed and grown apart as a result of it.  Thinking about it, I didn’t really tell any of my college friends when or after it happened.  Describing him wouldn’t do knowing him justice, and I guess I don’t want to be that girl who has the dead friend so be extra nice to her, ok? 

In closing, I have no idea why I blogged about this.  Perhaps because there are approximately three people, on a good day, in my life actually reading this and this might be of some relevance to them.  Perhaps because I’ve wanted to talk about it for a really long time, like 11 months long time, but no one else likes to acknowledge it happened.  Perhaps because sometimes I just really miss the shit outta him & when freaky look-alikes are spotted I’m not strong enough to not notice and be really, really floored by it.

Weems’ class, while reviewing for a vocabulary quiz sophomore year.

“What does ‘predilection’ mean, Jesse?”

“Before an election.”