Today I finally found myself in the holiday spirit, perhaps because of the news of our Hawkeye receiver Derrel Johnson-Koulianos’ recent drug charges. (Get it? It was a cocaine joke! Don’t worry, I’ve got plenty more.) Today I finally hung up Christmas lights in our living room (and made an inappropriate lighted appendage with the remainder of the strand on the wall above our TV) and got rillll domestic in the kitchen with peanut butter balls, chocolate covered pretzels, and frosted sugar cookie cut-outs. Unfortunately, I discovered that I hadn’t stolen any of my mother’s Christmas-themed cookie cutters like I’ve done in years previous, so was left with the only other cookie cutter in our house: the aforementioned inappropriate body part. For the record, the cookie cutter belongs to Roomie Lauren, and I believe was purchased as a gag gift and/or jello shot shaping device long before I came into her life. So really, I’m the innocent one in all of today’s debauchery.

SPEAKING of debauchery, my social networking sites have been understandably blowing up with the news of DJK’s arrest. I’ve seen some quite annoying updates, some really funny jokes, and everything in between. Personally, I have no feelings beyond mild amusement. Our football team wasn’t exactly having the immaculate season we were promised, and as someone said, he’s only human. He was given superstar status and everything he could ever want here, so I shouldn’t think it’d be surprising for a guy his age to think he was invincible when it came to his off-the-field drug habits. He is certainly not the only person on campus doing these drugs or selling these drugs, but he’s the only one who will be getting this attention because damn, can he catch a football. Honestly, I feel bad for him. He made a lot of dumb mistakes, but now he has to deal with the consequences for the rest of his life. Sure he’s an idiot and should realize that his legions of fans would hold him to a higher standard than the other coked out losers roaming Iowa City, but I’m an idiot sometimes and you’re an idiot sometimes– at least we’ll probably never be a trending topic on Twitter when we get caught.

Recent discovery: While I like both peanut butter and celery, I do not enjoy them together.

The grade for my midterm has been posted, and while I won’t reveal it here, let’s just say I’ve at least left myself room for dire improvement.

This weekend, NPH and I ventured outside of our normal home football routine and traveled to North Liberty for a bit of a pre-game soiree hosted by my former supervisor. She’s also a close family friend, thus NPH had the privilege of meeting more of my blood relatives. Unfortunately there are no entertaining stories to report, though it was very reminiscent of My Big Fat Greek Wedding in that from the moment we entered, food was (quite willingly) forced down NPH’s throat, not to mention we were loaded down with leftovers before leaving. Those have had to wait in the fridge though because I got all domestic Friday night and made homemade chili. I wouldn’t even say I’m a fan of chili, but after the boyfriend requested and then badgered me about it for weeks, I turned out a bomb-skitty (yes, a real adjective) meal. Spicy, two kinds of meat, beans. Cornbread. Oh, am I gloating? It was that yummy.

Triscuits are my favorite cracker, followed closely by Wheat Thins and Ritz. My father is a large fan of Chicken in a Biskit. These have confused me to no end since childhood– WHAT is a biskit and WHY are they called that because they definitely don’t taste like chicken. They are damn delicious, however. I especially like the little scalloped edges.

In the final bit of news before I go back to working on a scholarship application, 713 has two new important additions. One is thankfully temporary– Taco, a very small kitten that’s currently under the watchful cat-sitting eye of one shorter, more intelligent member of the house. The other arrived after all four residents went on a spontaneous, shenanigans-filled run to Wal-Mart Saturday afternoon. The second amendment is being exercised (no really, as I type this, it’s laying across NPH’s lap) in the form of a BB gun… that looks like a .22 rifle. Because THAT has “great idea” written all over it. I don’t like the idea of firearms in any capacity, though watching the boyfriend find his inner 10-year-old and make shooting sounds while guarding us from imaginary house predators is one of the more adorable things I’ve seen.

“Well now I’m just embarrassed– you’re clearly blogging about this.” Puts down gun. He knows me too well.

So it’s the Friday of Homecoming weekend. I am home at 10:30 p.m., have cleaned the kitchen of the catastrophic chili mess I made earlier, and am now in my pajamas trying to drink enough water to counteract the near life threatening amount of sodium that was in the sweet potato fries I had for dinner. This sudden sober clarity got me thinking on a few points, and since this is my blog, here I go a-sharin’:

First of all, this was not exactly my preferred place to ring yet another home Hawkeye football weekend. You best believe I ventured out with friends this evening, looking kinda tranny-ish, definitely with a goal in mind of sleeping most of the day away tomorrow. However, there are so many old people here. Sorry, but I’m just putting it bluntly– the amount of Baby Boomer alumni crawling the streets is just absurd. The amount of people crammed into the bars, even the shitty ones, is even more absurd. There was no space for anyone long before 9:30 p.m., and even if there were, I wasn’t about to stand in line for half an hour every time I needed to refresh my drink.

It’s not like I needed to drink tonight. It wasn’t a close friend’s birthday, and I had neither anything to celebrate nor feel overly morose about. It’s just something that happens within the brain of 85% of the students here– it’s Friday at 4 p.m., I’m going to get hammered tonight. Sorry if I’m perpetuating any negative stereotypes of my school, but I was seriously giving this a lot of thought as I scrubbed my counters a few minutes ago: we drink because we’re Hawkeyes. We drink because of the reputation that precedes us. It is not, as some apparently suspect, because we’ve so long been able to get into bars at the age of 19. The 21 Ordinance, put into effect on June 1st of this year, is going back on the ballot for the general public to vote upon in November. There’s been a huge push on campus this week to vote early– not on how to vote, just to make sure that yours counts. I’m going to vote Yes, to strike down the ordinance. There’s plenty of signs around town urging us to “Vote Yes for Safety!” While most of these are in the windows of shops that make tons of money off our drunk asses around bar close, I do have to agree that the house party culture since the ordinance passed is far less than ideal. Personally, I’m not voting yes because I think 19 and 20 year olds have some constitutional right to be in a bar with the 21+ crowd after 10 p.m. Aside from the safety thing, I’m voting that way because some seniors voted that way when I was a freshman. We shan’t go into how my life would be different should it have gone into effect three years ago, but I shudder, cringe, and shed a tear at the thought. Quite frankly, there’s some damn good specials now, and cover is basically non-existent. I like that the bars are less crowded, but it’s the principle of the thing. The ordinance overall affects me very little, so I’m going to do my fellow underage drinker a favor, just like the former fellow underage drinker did before me.

But back to our reputation. There have been numerous campaigns in my four years on campus to curb binge drinking, perhaps one new catchy slogan every fall. This year it’s the Think Before You Drink movement. Has anyone seen any actual data that these yearly pushes to give students fun and sober alternate weekend activities is working? I’m certainly not trying to say that the amount of alcohol any given 21 year old senior consumes in a three day period at Iowa is at all healthy or something to boast about, I’m just trying to be realistic. If the president wants to really make some sort of effective change, the entire school is going to need a national, and most certainly statewide, re-branding. If the 21 Ordinance sticks, and I won’t exactly be unable to sleep at night if it does, that is the first foreseeable step, to me, in getting rid of our ridiculous drunken reputation. If we lose that stigma and essentially just become a house party central like Ames (but with more hipsters) students won’t feel the need to drink up to the blood alcohol contents of the alumni before them.

I realize I have organized my thoughts quite poorly, that I have probably often contradicted myself, and mostly just made my relatives quite concerned for my liver, wallet and waistline. I just don’t think that other college students have the same drinking culture that we do in Iowa City, certainly no one else in Iowa does, and it’s definitely something worth looking at. Perhaps I’m just that girl who can’t say no, who doesn’t realize it’s all in her control to stay in on a Friday night and not be in a stink about it. Perhaps my friends are all just a bunch of drunkards, and come May I’m in for the reality check of my life. For the record, my grades are just fine, I’m performing fabulously at both my job and internship– from the student perspective, I don’t see a problem with our campus-wide drinking habits. It’s just curious when you take a step back, as to why we have such extreme habits. That’s all.

It’s here. The week The Town comes out. Luckily, neither NPH or I have class on Fridays, and while I do have three meetings already scheduled for that morning, we should be able to make it to a matinee in time to view four more simultaneous screenings with ample discussion and squealing time in between. On my to-do list for tonight (because I cannot, not, NOT operate without everything written out in my planner which is chained to my hip at all times) is updating my resume. Somehow in the span of two weeks, nearly everything on it has become irrelevant. To say I’m stretched pretty thin is an understatement, but so far I seem to managing it pretty well (check in around Week 7 of the semester for the inevitable breakdown.) Don’t worry, my personal life has not yet taken a hit, and I in fact had a fabulous time watching us beat the Cyclowns– not like everyone in the state didn’t see that coming anyway. My apartment somehow became the hostel of choice for many of my visiting high school classmates, which was entertaining, stressful, and bizarre all at the same time. Oh, can we talk about the VMAs for a bit? Whatthedumptruck that was horrendous. Chelsea Handler was not even a smidgen of funny, Taylor Swift can’t sing live AND as Kathy Griffin later tweeted “For fuck’s sake, its not like Kanye raped you,” and I was even weary of Gaga and her damn broken record “Nobody liked me in high school” thing combined with the “It takes me 20 minutes to get on stage because I’m constantly trying to outdo my previous outrageous fashion choices.” And in the last bit of random updates for today (because that’s all this blog has become, at my least my grandparents are still reading) I really want a dog. No, Mom– not our dog. For some reason that relationship broke and I’ve moved on. Specifically I want a basset hound; I would tell you his name but you’d be jealous and steal it. I asked NPH if I was REALLY really good this semester and did my homework and cleaned my room and promised to clean up after it, would he PLEASE get me a dog and he said yes, but sadly I think he was joking. I wonder if he ever gets tired of dating a four-year-old.

I’m blogging from class, so shoot me. The most painful, dreaded class of my schedule just because it’s so gosh darn BORING. It’s a linguistics class (mistake) in which we learn about sentence order and prepositional phrases and postpositional phrases and relative clauses only we learn about them in languages no one has heard of. Did you know there are over 4,000 languages in the world, but no one can know for sure? Have you heard of Madurese? Don’t worry, it’s a traditional Subject Verb Object sentence order just like good ol’ English. I couldn’t tell you for $50 where in the world speaks Madurese without some Google searching, but alas I’m painfully suffering through 1 hour and 15 minutes of a woman who still writes on a chalkboard in two thousand freaking ten. (Rant over, for now.) The roomies and I have officially begun our change jar in the kitchen for Vegas Spring Break 2011, made only that much more exciting by Lauren’s birthday being on St. Patrick’s Day which is the Thursday of that week. (Ok, I said I was done, but the professor just said “We’ll be looking at a language I can’t pronounce.” Then WHAT is the point. Clearly no one here can speak it, WHY does it matter?! For the record, the language is called Hixkaryana. Apparently it’s spoken in Brazil. No, I will not be participating in this part of the class exercise.) Other big news is that it’s Beat State Week on campus. Activities leading up to our annual Cyclone ass-kicking include free t-shirt giveaways, a slip-n-slide on campus, and speed dating tonight that I’m SO pissed I can’t make it to, but alas have a meeting. Tomorrow is the IA/ISU rugby game, um– yes please. I will wear my one Iowa State t-shirt for that since my loyalty lies not with my school, but with the attractiveness of the boys on the team. Our tailgating plans for Saturday are essentially the same as last week’s trial run, though perhaps with more vigilant peeing in the woods since the dickhead Iowa City police (no, I’m not apologizing for that adjective) were handing out public urinations in literal droves last weekend. I did my first big grocery shop of the year yesterday– yes, my Costco run from the parents lasted that long– and am sososo excited because I got bread ‘n butter pickle slices which are the BEST snack/breakfast/dessert/accent on really anything. First of all, Aldi is the absolute best thing that’s ever happened to my wallet and secondly, HOW GOOD are bread ‘n butter pickles?! I used to be a dill girl (SNOOOOKI!!!) and I’m not adverse to them, but the b-’n-b’s have suddenly taken strong hold of my heart and tastebuds. And there’s your random, unnecessary fact for the day.

My black and gold fingernail polish is chipped, my hangover has subsided, and I’ve declared Labor Day “get my life back on track day.” So far, it’s been moderately successful since I’ve gotten one and three-quarters homework assignments done AND introduced NPH to the wonder of peanuts mixed with candy corn (if you haven’t tried it– it’s gotta be Brach’s candy corn and salted, dry-roasted Planter’s nuts. There’s a certain ratio that I’m kind of forgetting right now, but one bag and one jar should do ya. Beware, the entire bowl will be gone in a sitting if you don’t watch yourself.) Needless to say, the first tailgate of the season was a rousing success. My Crock-Pot breakfast casserole was a surprising hit, and no one brought a bat to do Louisville Chuggers, thus making us able to stay upright far longer than most games. Sunday was a fabulous day for laying and contemplating suicide and half-watching trashy reality television. Fortunately, I start both of my jobs this week (thanks for the well wishes– they apparently worked as I got the second internship I interviewed for) so the level of debauchery brought upon by the first home game will be unattainable for the rest of the semester. On a different note, happy birthday to my father, who is currently on a plane to Las Vegas (only a stop on the way to visit some relatives.) Either way, I’m very jealous because being in Vegas or even Eugene, Oregon means I wouldn’t be in school, the absolute bane of my existence. Yes, perhaps that WILL be the running theme of the blog until graduation– it’s just not. getting. better. I loved school until about high school, but since then it’s been an unfortunate means to the ultimate end of having a real career. No, I didn’t get my dad a gift, but I would want a blog shout-out over a package of Twizzlers or grill accessories any day. HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

While the growing pains of going back to class are slowly working themselves out, it is safe to say I am psyched for the next chapter of my life. The job hunt part, the getting back to the office and have meetings and a desk and getting satisfaction from my work part, heck– even the “I’m so busy/stressed/overwhelmed I could puke part,” because it means I’m doing something. During my internship and even sometimes just jobs as a student, the signs of a budding workaholic have started to emerge. (Somehow this has never, ever translated into being a study-aholic. Huh.) Over the summer on my weekends off, I’d be up early on a Sunday at 713, writing cover letters, sending emails, doing research for our events at work. (Can I say where I worked yet? I think I can, it’s over with. It was a zoo. No, an actual zoo.) I’ve officially had five days of class this semester and already had two job/internship interviews, got one of them (the other was literally like 45 minutes ago, keep your fingers crossed) and have taken on at least two other side, unpaid projects that relate to my major because I want RESUME EXPERIENCE, DAMMIT. And because these things keep me much more personally fulfilled than relearning the functions of a subject and direct and indirect objects like we’ve been doing in my Languages of the World class. Sorry, lady– you’re very nice, but far too old to still be teaching, plus I learned that “cat” is a noun like twelve years ago. Another emerging theme of this semester seems to be the whole “I went abroad, now what?” thing, though it’s gotten better than me looking for flights to Munich during all free time with my laptop (that time is now reserved for looking for post-graduation PR jobs in Boston, duh.) I’m a Global Buddy for the Study Abroad office, and we have a returnee reunion this afternoon for all of us post-foreign study kids to get together and commiserate over why the hell America has such stringent open container laws. Finally, in other WAY more exciting news– this weekend is the kick-off of what is sure to be the Iowa Hawkeyes’ greatest football season to date. The only thing that trumps my excitement for tailgating this weekend is that the Iowa vs. Iowa State game is next weekend already. And the only thing that possibly trumps my excitement for that is that the movie The Town comes out not even a week after that and it’s set in Boston and is by the same people as The Departed and you can bet NPH and I will demand Coral Ridge Mall has a midnight showing for it.

Sports Illustrated cover + parents’ weekend + Ashton Kutcher in attendance + Northwestern = inevitable loss.  All season people kept saying “When we lose it will be to someone like  Northwestern” and then their friends around them would explode into a fit of giggles because the 9-0, 4th ranked Hawkeyes are just so much better than that.  Except everyone, including us, knew we weren’t.  As someone from my immediate family who was not my mother or brother texted me after “Thank God that’s over.”   I’d have to agree– we had a nice run, but OMFGSHUTUPPPPPPPP.  And now they will.

Last night was my final shift at my beloved job, at least til I return from abroad.  My boss and I decided I’m the Stanzi of the store, with me being out for the season and all.  I also was complaining that my leg was broken hurt  a lot because my back was hella messed up from some awkward couch-sleeping followed by miles of trekking to tailgating before 7 am.  In flip-flops.  All night I was having quite the mental struggle over what my final free sandwich for a while would be.  In the end, I got my favoritest favorite– I can make a ham sandwich at home anyday, but the world does not get any better than  black bean patty with avacado, BBQ sauce, some hummus, some other stuff that’s SUPERDELICIOUSINMYMOUTH.

If it rains this month, I will fah-REAK out because it will be November Rain.

Today I have to like, vacuum my living room and dust the TV and get things all ready for our PRSSA social.  I may even put out a plate of cheese and crackers.  Step aside, people– domestic goddess coming through.

Bestie’s parents came yesterday and his mother brought the best pumpkin bread in the history of the world.  You think I’m exaggerating here, but nay. It had raisins and walnuts in it (don’t barf, it was sophisticated quick bread).  Unfortunately the pan was set between college boys wielding a knife– I fear that one slice will be my only experience with that magical, magical treat.

This was my last weekend in Iowa City until the last weekend in November, and I am beyond ok with that.