Dread

I found out today that I move back to Athens on June 6th, a day earlier than I'd previously thought. This realization felt akin to that of the characters on all those sitcoms who realize that they're really a year older than they had believed (see: Phoebe in "The One Where They All Turn Thirty;" likely some old episode of Golden Girls). Why, oh, why do I not think things through when I sign up for them? Little did I know that I'd be dreading living in Athens all summer and taking classes every day for two months. It's not like I need the hours--at this rate I'll be graduating early, which I don't want to do. I don't need the particular classes, either. On the whole, I do sort of wish I could undo this decision and just laze around here all summer, because for the first time, I'm actually enjoying doing that. But I can't, so in about a week, I'll be in Athens, taking classes and probably just sitting in my dorm room all day, bored. To quote Something Corporate (though on a very different issue), "Why do I do these things I do to myself?"

"I wish my name was written and erased."

I love guitar solos.

I love chocolate chip pancakes at 4:30 in the morning.

I've been awake for just over 14 hours and yet I'm exhausted.

I spent altogether too much money on a chicken caesar pita, but I got a free Bain sticker, so we're even.

Cops lie in wait all along 316 even at three in the morning! What an awful job! (What an awful speed trap!)

I've been listening to the same short WinAmp playlist consisting most notably of "Green Eyes" by Coldplay, "Nothing Better" by The Postal Service, "Car Crash" by The Thrills, "Maggie May" by Rod Stewart, and "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" by Bob Dylan for more than a week now. Fairly constantly.

I'm too tired and it's too late for this to be interesting or logical or important.

David and Laura and I played 20 Questions in the car on the way home, and played the parts of things like hippopotamuses, Nancy Reagan, Sponge-Bob Square-Pants, and Dawson Leery. The latter (mine) took roughly 68 questions for them to figure out.

I will give you a free chocolate chip pancake (only slightly charred!) if you can tell me why on Earth I'm not sleeping right now if I'm so damn tired like I say I am.

I'm almost certain that I made plans for tomorrow with somebody, but can't remember them at all, so if they were with you, please call me and let me know.

Screw it. Good night.

Orange Power

I was browsing through the files on our old computer, which is mostly stuff from 10th and 11th grade, so I was hoping to find some nostalgia. (Really, I'm in the mood to do some creative writing and I was searching for some sort of inspiration, but that's beside the point entirely.) Instead I found a Notepad file labeled "Quotes" that, when opened, consisted only of this:

"Oompa loompas were the oppressed nation of the chocolate factory." --Sara Beverly

Think on that.

For Now

Don't care much to come around here anymore these days. I'm having conflicting views on what to write, whether to write, et cetera. In any case, I thought a slight update was in order. I've been alternating between having lots of fun with lots of friends, being terribly bored at home, and not going to sleep 'til five every night for the past couple of weeks. Also having conflicting emotions on going back to school--I'm eager to because it's dull here, and because living under the reign of my parents is getting to me again, and because several of my friends are in Athens, but I've been having fun here and part of me would rather just stay and have a lazy and unproductive summer here like usual. I'd be bored by mid-June staying here, I'm sure, but right now I just can't see all the reasons for going back to school so soon.
I am, however, going to Athens Thursday night with David for a Bain Mattox show, and possibly tomorrow night with Pennington for a Count Kellam show. So that'll be nice. Additionally: everybody should go to the Hey, Revolution! website and buy their CD ...like it's HOT! because I just got it in the mail today and it's wonderful.

Who Would Win In A Fight Between...?

1. Will and Grace?

2. Garrett and a bottle of Everclear?

3. The state of Georgia and the state of Florida?

4. President Adams and David Pollack's sweaty gym-sock?

5. Spring and summer?

6. Orlando Bloom in Troy and Orlando Bloom in Pirates?

7. Silver and gold?

8. North Point Mall and the as-yet-unfinished New Milton?

9. President Bush and a Goldfish cracker (we already know how well he does with pretzels)?

10. You and me?

Edits

A slight favor--if anybody with some HTML knowledge could View Source on my blog and see if you can figure out what the hell is causing that indentation above the title picture to your right, I'd be forever grateful. I've been trying fruitlessly to figure it out for ages now and I'm sick of it.
And I baked brownies today, so whoever helps me out--you get a brownie. I promise, they're free of poison and delicious.

Goodnight, And Have A Pleasant Tomorrow

Um, Jimmy Fallon, ex-Love Of My Life and actor with no discernible career outside of the television show that made him famous, is leaving Saturday Night Live and nobody saw fit to tell me? Boo, Powers That Be. Boo.
Television sucks. Maybe I should quit. All the shows I like are either ending or pissing me off. (But I'm no quitter! And besides, what else is there to do but watch hours upon hours of mindless TV? Nothing, that's what.) Maybe that's why I'm so eager to buy so many seasons to TV shows on DVD--because everything that's on currently is terrible.
Things are strange but visiting Athens what I remember about visiting Athens was fun! I'd post some pictures if the ones I'd taken weren't so damn boring, and if you guys knew more than just a couple of the people in them. Eh well, we'll see.

"You're not straying far from who you were in high school/Everything is exactly what it seems."

This morning I woke up (about ten minutes before I needed to leave, of course--damn worthless alarm clock) and drove over to Milton to meet Ashleigh and Michelle to visit old teachers. It was an interesting afternoon--more productive than the last teacher visiting expedition we went on, which I believe was back in August. We were met with the same weirdness that I expected--the school felt incredibly weird and awkward, while at the same time like we'd never left. It has a distinct smell to it that I never noticed until I'd been away from it for a year. Everyone looked so incredibly young. It was nice to see old teachers though. We hit all the good ones--Serkie, Hammack, Wade, Jones, Friedman, Burrell. I think that's it. We managed to embarrass Dexter Bateman, which is always a plus. Despite things that Drew's talked about before, about how the teachers don't really care to see us, and stuff, but I didn't really get that impression today. I mean, I'm sure it's true--why would we really matter to an old teacher, two years after the fact? But everyone acted happy to see us and told us to drop by again, so maybe it's not entirely true. Or maybe they're big liars.
The fun part was post-visit, when we went out to our respective cars and found that Ashleigh's and Michelle's had both been booted. $75 it would cost to get them off, it said, so they tearfully told a half-true story to the new butch female resource officer and convinced her to make Newman remove the boots. Oddly enough, my car (which was in The Pit right next to Ashleigh's) was left alone. Although Newman apparently said something to Ashleigh after I slipped out to go save my car, something like "Do you know whose red car that is next to yours with the expired parking permit? I think I'll move your boot to that car if it's still there." Ha, Newman. Good thing it wasn't.
Tonight, then, I went to see Mean Girls with Beth, which was entertaining. It fit the day. Cute movie. If it was meant to convince us that we shouldn't make fun of people, though, it was unsuccessful. We're still as snarky and bitchy as ever.
Next: outlet-malling and Athens tomorrow! Fun!

I Miss Mr. Feeny

That's it! That's three nights in a row now that I've turned the TV to the Disney Channel, only to catch the last thirty seconds of Boy Meets World. Why can't I just get it through my head that 2 AM = Boy Meets World O'clock? I don't want to watch damn Jett Jackson, famous or no.

Everything Is Exactly What It Seems

I've never been a big fan of summertime, but it's generally always been a welcome reprieve from regular life. This summer is different. Nothing feels right here. Earlier this evening, I momentarily forgot I was in college. When I remembered, I was a little bit disappointed. That's not supposed to happen. It's not supposed to feel so nostalgic to be here, and it's not supposed to feel like, "Well damn, the good part is over." Everything just feels unsettling and just a little bit wrong, like things are almost the way they're supposed to be, but not quite. Everything feels forced. It's like I'm trying to make things be exactly like they've always been, but the circumstances have changed, and so they can't be. I'm never tired anymore, which is weird, too. I just stay up very, very late, watching more infomercials than I know what to do with and Googling things. I wish I could just sleep all day. It's all so ridiculous. I'll be grateful to get back to Athens in a month or so, where everything can get back to normal.

Search And Destroy

I was looking at my Extreme Tracking stats, which I haven't done in quite some time (perhaps because the numbers have gotten so low that I don't like to look at them, which incidentally, is the reason I don't open my bank statements anymore), and it seems that some interesting search queries have resulted in people visiting my blog these days. Nine out of the last twenty searches involved "Lindsey Lohan"; seven of the nine involved "Lindsey Lohan's boobs". Somehow I don't think they found what they were looking for.
There were the obligatory "Amy Farley" searches, which makes perfect sense; an "Alan Sell" search, which makes less sense, and a "Webb Bridge blog," which makes sense but I don't like. I'm hoping nobody finds my blog and assumes it's written by a seventh grader (though it really wouldn't surprise me, these days).
There was a "Gideon Yago UGA" search, which I'm going to optimistically assume was Google'd by Gideon Yago himself, and that he came across my blog, saw the picture of the two of us a few entries down, and thought, Hey, she's pretty cute, even though she looks bald and her head's remarkably tiny, and pretty soon he'll be getting in touch with me so we can go get coffee sometime if I'm ever in the New York area.
My favorite of the twenty latest queries, however, was a Google search from this morning: "grr boobs israel." Grr! Boobs! Israel!

In The Room

Lindsey came over tonight and we went over to Blockbuster, having decided that there were no appealing movies out in theaters right now. After many minutes of indecisiveness (you know us), we chose Elephant, the Gus Van Sant movie about school violence.
I didn't really know what to expect from the movie--I'd read a review in Entertainment but it said little of any relevance about the movie--and Lindsey'd never heard of it. Basically it's an extremely realistic account of an ordinary day at a suburban high school where things essentially go awry. As I'd read in its reviews, the "actors" weren't actors--just regular kids, which may have detracted a bit from the acting but added to the realism. The dialogue was insipid but because of that, also quite realistic. The whole movie was very unsettling, even though it was pretty much seventy minutes of exposition and a climax. I find it really interesting when filmmakers put a face on violence and the like. A lot of people disagree, saying anyone who would shoot up a school is "pure evil," and that they shouldn't be humanized, and we talked about that a lot in Sociology last year. It's ridiculous, I think, for people to say that criminals or murderers, even the really demented kind, aren't human. Nobody is pure evil, and just because somebody does something horrible, they shouldn't be treated like they're not a person. I'm glad this movie explored that a little bit, putting faces on the killers and showing that they're quite a bit like every other highschooler that was profiled in the film. Again, it just made it more real.
Oh, and I realized when I read Laura's blog earlier that I completely overlooked my second anniversary of blogging. So, happy belated Blogday.

& Improved

Well isn't this cute. Much like Laura, I'm away from the blogging world for just a few short days, and I come back to something entirely different. I liked the old blogger, I really liked BloggerNew, but this just looks like some Fischer-Price Baby's First Blog toy. Well at least this gives me something to do--I'll need to have this newness all figured out within a day or so. And on a sidenote, why is it that when websites like Blogger update their look and their features, they mean to make things simpler and more user-friendly, but everything just ends up muddled and more difficult to decipher? I don't appreciate it.
What I've been up to the past few days:
Got back from Athens. Promptly became bored. Saw 13 Going On 30 with Laura. Saw eighty ex-Miltonites at Starbucks (go figure). Shopped for Mother's Day and for myself. Discovered that the internet was down. Stayed up all night (I had stuff to do!) Made a CD and a birthday card for Bidwell. Went to Columbus for Mother's Day. Discovered that the internet was still down. Layed out in a pathetic attempt to rid myself of this paleness. Internet back up, discovered the new look of Blogger.
Now you're up to speed. Call me, I've no plans for the day.

ATTN: UGA Kids

Run, don't walk, to your nearest row of newspaper racks and pick up a copy of the Spring edition of UGAzine. It took me awhile to track one down, 'cause the UGAzine kids are lazy and probably only put them out by the Journalism building, but they're out there, and my article is on pages 7-9. If you want to see it but are already home or can't find one or simply don't care enough to go look for one, they'll be out 'til September, so don't worry about it.
Oh, and if part of my article sucks, just assume that's one of the parts they edited weird and made me change. Yeah, that's the reason.

Just Another

Today after my Sociology exam (which I'm entirely unsure about), we got back our Sociological Diaries, which we were supposed to have been keeping throughout the semester, writing little entries about things that happen to us relating to sociology or responses to class discussions and what not (which, of course, I wrote in one sitting the night before it was due). I got a hundred on it (I believe it was one of those follow-the-rubric-and-everybody-gets-hundreds type grades), and the professor wrote all sorts of nice comments on it, so during my post-final breakfast I read over what I'd written. A few thoughts repeatedly popped into my head as I skimmed my entries:
"That's really clever..."
"This is fucking good..."
"Amy, you rock..."
I know, I know--what the hell? Don't think I'm just inflating my own ego here, because I'm saying this to make a point. (So get to it already!) My diary was good--very well-written, my style was clever and interesting to read, and I'd written about some good content. But all this infuriated me, because, well, it was all useless. I'd written some very interesting, intelligent stuff--while watching Real World, the night before it was due, for a paper I was sure to get a hundred on regardless of the quality of it. Meanwhile, anytime I sit down weeks in advance to write something important, like a 40%-of-my-final-grade paper or an article for publication*, I blank out and can only write terribly boring, cliched tripe. When it matters, all I can come up with is bland bullshit. Even my blogs tend to lean towards the bland bullshit side. Now I find that I've gotten myself involved in a major that essentially means that my career goal is to be a writer, albeit of magazine articles and not bestsellers, and I wonder how this is going to work out. How can I be some sort of writer if I can only be clever and entertaining when it doesn't matter?
Maybe this is what college is for, to teach me how to write when it counts. Maybe some of the classes I'll take for my major and otherwise will show me how to quit being so trite and start sounding clever more than 5% of the time. Maybe I'm doomed forever to write meaningless, dull, and oversimplified crap, and the only magazine I'll be able to write for will be the Milton Memo (see? Not even a magazine! I'm not majoring in newsletters!). More than likely, though, my diary entries weren't nearly as good as I'm making them out to be and this mini-crisis will pass, leaving me the moderately okay writer I've always been. Pardon me while I go bask in my perpetual mediocrity.

*UGAzine is coming out by the end of this week, guys! I know, everybody's going home, but if you're still here Thursday or Friday, keep your eyes peeled for copies.

But I Don't And You Do

There's a lot I could say, but I feel like it'd all just sound repetitive and redundant. If you've heard me ramble on about a year ending once, then you've heard it a trillion times. Don't mind me.
I'll just say we watched SNL last night, and aside from noticing that Lindsey Lohan's boobs are bigger than God, I really did love the Debbie Downer sketch. I have a soft spot in my heart for SNL sketches where they just can't stop laughing long enough to deliver their lines. It just makes it funnier.
Now it's down to the Brumby rotunda for an "Ice Cream Study Break." I haven't exactly been studying, so for me it's more like a little pre-study snack, but hey, free ice cream.
It doesn't beat the free Chik Fil A chicken biscuits Creswell got the other day though. Damn those Creswellians. Grr.