Halloween update is in the works. But for now let me share some ideas, briefly.

This will briefly become my own personal fashion blog. So that I can do this: 30 for 30, in which I take 30 items of clothing and wear 30 different outfits in the month of November.

Just a heads-up. Tomorrow: descriptions of my 30 items.

Let it be known that my weakness is thrift stores. I went with Annmarie and Lisa to Goodwill and Second Act (which is an AMAZING thrift store with an entire room devoted to vintage where everything is priced so reasonably I often do a double-take at the price tag) this afternoon to help them find bits and pieces of their Halloween costumes, and ended up spending more money than either of them and buying clothes. Listen, friends; I don't need clothes. My closet is bursting with pants and skirt and dresses; my drawers are overflowing with shirts, socks, stockings, and leggings. I have two shelves bursting with cardigans and sweaters. I do not need any more clothes. But I just can't help but look at them and when I see something with potential at a good price I just can't let it go. I pounce. And I don't usually regret it either, which only perpetuates the problem.

Tomorrow, Jess and I are hosting a Halloween FEAST at her apartment with several slow-cooker courses and mulled wine--and, most importantly, a viewing of Hocus Pocus. Don't tell me that you don't know about Hocus Pocus. I am dressing up as Jane Austen. I promise to upload photos of my costume, the gathering, and of course the FEAST. We are about to head to the grocery store now to buy the various ingredients.

Also this week: Ghostface Killah in downtown Iowa City, Culler and Derrida in my Ethics of Close-Reading class, and Heidegger Day this Tuesday in Theory.

It's not that things got complicated or I got that busy... well, maybe it is that.

Important Life Event: Alex and I Broke Up
-This happened about two weeks ago. He came to visit me over his fall break, and I felt that it was time for us to stop doing what we have always, always, always done in our relations, even a year before they became at all technically romantic: tactfully avoiding discussion of the future. If we took our relationship to the next level, as it were, we would have gotten engaged. And although it is fabulous that we know so many people (read: ex Ultimate Frisbee people) who are marrying young, that is just not who I am. I haven't really been single for more than a month since some time in high school, and he hadn't ever been with anyone else, so we decided that now, being across the country from each other, would probably be the best time to have those experiences. And the future? Who knows, I guess. I'm trying not to think about it too much because it is really upsetting, to remember how hard I tried to make this relationship even happen in the first place, only to give it up in the name of needing more life experiences... and yet I know I am right, that we are right.

Classes
-As far as these go... I am at the place in the semester where I am devising paper topics. For my Modernism paper I am going to try to write about repetition in To the Lighthouse and Good Morning, Midnight and its relation to affect. For my Close-Reading paper I think I am going to return to Women in Love (egads!) and flesh out this idea of performativity of the reader using that which I was always taught to find warm-fuzzy: reader-response theory. And Theory? Who in the world knows. Perhaps I will do something where I relate different theorists' ideas of the limits of language from feminism to post-structuralism to psychoanalysis to... marxism? Oh I hope not.

The Life Social (as Opposed to Aquatic)
-Great. I have really made friends with my fellow first-year English students, I feel. We've gone apple-picking and thrift-store-shopping, dressed up for tea parties and gone out to restaurants and movies. On most days I spend the afternoon at a coffeehouse or two with my friend Jess (a post-colonialist who grew up in Austin and went to nearby Grinnell for undergrad), and nearly every weekend I go shopping with Annmarie (a Victorianist who took a year off after undergrad to get involved with community theatre). Annmarie and I, along with Gemma (who is interested in emigre literature and is learning Russian) are starting a fashion blog because we came to realize that we were always complimenting each other's outfits.


(Annmarie, myself, and Gemma being fashionable and enjoying fall colours)

-My Theory class, which is from 5:30-6:45, has taken to going out to dinner together after class on Thursdays. This is particularly cool because about half of the students who participate are not from English, but other departments. While I really do enjoy immersing myself in Englishness, it is nice to have some acquaintances in other areas of expertise, though related such as Film, Communication Studies, and Education.


(Theory Class Cook-Out, circa two weeks ago)

-I am co-chairing the Jackobsen Conference (the cross-discipline graduate conference here at Iowa in the spring) as a senator on the Graduate Student Senate. I have two co-chairs that I meet with who are not in English (Kyle is in Journalism and Netta is in Nursing) and I also attend Executive Council meetings with GSS higher-ups, none of whom hail from English. I am easily the youngest person on the Exec Council, by probably at least 3 or 4 years. They like my ebullience, I think (hope).

What else can I tell you all that is important? I think I have covered some of the major points and updates. Expect better and more regular posts from now on, hopefully with photos as I had originally planned.Cheers.

The only big news I have is that I have finally started watching, and consequently gotten addicted to, Dr. Who. I'm not sure what it says about me when my three favorite TV shows are all of the sci-fi genre. I never thought of myself as a sci-fi person. And this is especially relevant because I put my name on a list to take a course in sci-fi next fall (and, bonus, to take a seminar in Victorian women writers!). In London Alex and I famously had a debate on whether or not sci-fi counted as legitimate literature, with Vonnegut being the obvious line-straddler. I don't know. But I guess, someday in my free time, I might think about this and revise my position, perhaps? (And: is film different?)


This weekend I am going apple-picking with a group of English folks, as well as consignment-shopping. Fall is about to hit--like tonight. I'm serious; the past week has had temperatures in the 80s, but after tonight the next 10 days (according to weather.com) will have high temperatures in the low to mid 60s. Hello, autumn. Fall is my favorite season, and I think I will love it even more here... though it is the introduction to the feared inevitable winter. I am going to order a winter coat this weekend/next week. Oh my.


So far I have deduced that I am not a Marxist or a Structuralist. There is a running joke amongst us that I have a very strong aversion to post-colonialism--which is fair, to a point. I just hate the way that it takes over discussions and that once people bring it up, it is as if the only aspect of a novel or an article that is worth talking about is the lack of mentions of India or Africa. I have a long rant about this (and it gets increasingly more intellectual, I assure you), but that will be for another time. Right now I have a phone date and stuffed poblano peppers to attend to.

One of the larger aspects of student life at the University of Iowa is, predictably, football. Now, I grew up in Austin, Texas, the daughter of a man whose license plate for-real-actually reads "U-TEX-1," so obviously football culture was not going to be a huge shock for me. However, attending a tiny liberal arts school devoid of any football team did ensure that I never really had any experience tailgating.

Apparently you don't need a truck with a tailgate in order to tailgate.

Around 1pm I met a handful of my first-year PhD comrades outside the library, all of us dressed in yellow and black (both Hawkeye AND Hufflepuff colors, as I did not fail to inform them). We marched onward to the neighborhood bordering the football stadium, and met a sea of black and yellow. There were large tents of people selling things like gyros and "big ass turkey legs" and other meaty essentials--and of course, just about every single person had a beer in hand. We wandered into a neighborhood alley where several smaller trailers were set up, many with long beer pong tables posted beside them. Everyone, in case I have not reiterated this enough, was wearing yellow and black.

After finding a cozy spot on some grass in the shade, we sat, drank PBR, and people-watched. The crowd began to thin out as it neared gametime, but every now and then a person would walk by and yell "go Hawks!" at us, to which we replied with fist-pumps or "go Hawks!" of our own.

It was very surreal.

I'm still busy. I guess that won't ever cease to be the case... for the next six years. But it still takes some getting used to, as the busyness does not come completely from schoolwork these days, but more adult-types-of-things. For instance, I got paid on September 1st and had to pay my rent, my cable bill, and my utility bill. I had to return a pair of TOMS in the mail. I had to go to the bank to change my PIN number and access a statement of the balance in my checking account. I try to go the gym every other day. On top of all of this, there is the schoolwork and the smaller things like remembering to take out the trash on Tuesday nights and cleaning the bathtub.

Please don't mistake this post as a complaint, either. I'm happy to be busy, delighted with having to schedule free time for myself. It is certainly more pleasant than the lonely, empty weeks I was spending in my living room before classes started.

Today Jess, Annmarie and I went to The Haunted Bookshop to make use of their large table in the philosophy section to do our homework at.



However, three English graduate students should have known better. Jess and I each bought at least four totally unnecessary books. (For my own part, I bought a literary biography of Virginia Woolf told through the lens of London, an interview with Simone de Beauvoir in 1984, a collection of letters from Zora Neale Hurston, a Kierkegaard volume, and three Nabokov books so that I might try to follow DS's seminar in my spare time. But hey, it all cost less than $30!)But there was something to be said for the bookstore's atmosphere for studying. The smell of old books permeated the air, and the only sounds were of book-lovers' feet on the creaking wooden floor. Not to mention, we also made friends with the cat.




He seemed about as skeptical of my assigned reading on "New-Formalism" as I was.



I want to keep going back there to study... but I can't afford to spend $20+ on books twice a week or whatnot.


In any case, Things I Love About Iowa City: independent bookshops.

I had a surreal experience today as I was walking home from a park in northern Iowa City where the Associate of Graduate Students in English (AGSE) were having a Labor Day BBQ. My friend Jess (grew up in Austin before moving to New York; attended Grinnell for undergrad; post-colonialist with an interest in Virginia Woolf;) and I heard cheering and clapping as we walked down College St. and, 'lo and behold: a sorority!

Ive seen the houses, and it's not as if I don't realize that they are there. In the evenings you can usually spot over-dressed girls in too-high heels meandering in large groups from one mansion to another. But this sorority encompassed everything I have ever suspected a sorority to be. Thin blonde girls en masse, grouped thickly in tides of short-shorts and tight pink t-shirts, jumping up and down and cheering... leaning out the window over the door and yelling... throwing water balloons and squealing...

We laughed and continued to walk.

Then we spotted ANOTHER sorority, further down College St. These girls, similarly thin and blonde, were chanting. Here we parted ways and I continued down Lucas. However, I had not made it down the entire block before I was halted by a true spectacle.

It was another sorority. A giant cardboard strawberry was perched beside the human-sized Greek letters in the front yard, behind which was a gigantic inflatable... thing?



It appeared to be the type of obstacle course that you see late at night on television, often with Asian people trying to go through.



I called Jess on my cell phone and she joined me in watching the events in the yard unfold. All of the girls were wearing blank tank tops with strawberries painted on the back, and a girl who must have been in charge told them over a megaphone that it was "time for the group picture." I was disappointed not to see the giant inflatable obstacle course in action.

For tomorrow's Ethics of Close-Reading class, we each have to write a "lexia" of our own from a passage of a text. This means that I have had to imitate Roland Barthes's S/Z style in close-reading a passage from... well, I chose Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Garrett told us to "have fun" with the assignment, which he devised on the spot during class on Tuesday, and not to be "afraid of parodying Barthes." So I thought, why not take something utterly unacademic and attempt to make it into something incredibly academic?

Lupin was lowering his wand, gazing fixedly at Black. The professor walked to Black’s side, seized his hand, pulled him to his feet so that Crookshanks fell to the floor, and embraced Black like a brother. * Remus’ actions are all presented as very deliberate and decisive. The use of “was lowering” rather than merely “lowered” suggests that the act is done slowly, taking up more time. Such concentrated thought is characteristic of Remus Lupin in general (SEM. R.J. Lupin). ** “Gazing” not only cements the idea of how much time is passing, but also lends an air of admiration to the type of look Remus bestows upon Sirius. (HER. – What is the relationship between Remus and Sirius?) *** That Remus walks to Sirius’ “side,” rather than to the space directly in front of him, indicates both to poor, confused Harry and the reader that he is, both figuratively and literally, siding with him. Crookshanks falls to the floor as Remus succeeds him as Sirius’ closest ally (SYM. Loyalty). **** From “like a brother” we deduce that of course Sirius is not Remus’ actual brother. Though we receive a hint at the depth of the intimacy between the two with “like”, we still do not know the nature of it. In fact, the simile points us more directly towards the question of what type of relationship they had by specifying in a roundabout way what it was not (HER.- What is the relationship between Remus and Sirius?)

It's not very polished. I'm not sure you can have two of the same HER in one passage. Or that Loyalty is part of the Symbolic over the Semic. But this is what I've been doing for the past hour.

Oh my. I have been quite busy. You know how the first week of the semester in undergrad is usually pretty slow and you have a lot of time to ease into your workload and your new surroundings? NOT SO in graduate school. I found myself scrambling to do readings while still cooking for myself, maintaining a clean and organized apartment, and managing my burgeoning social life. I only managed to go to the gym twice before the weekend! (And for those of you who don't know, the gym is somewhat of a priority for me because I'm trying to fit firmly into my size 8 pants by the time it gets chilly here).

The good news is that I am still glad to be here. The most intimidating class that I have is easily The Ethics of Close-Reading. Garrett, the professor, says all of these amazing and excitingly brilliant things during class... but I don't always immediately grasp their meaning. It is sometimes akin to how, when you know a foreign language but do not have much real-life experience with it, you listen to someone in France speaking French but you have to think about the words they are saying and so don't grasp their meaning until after a minute or two has passed. For example, we were discussing "Ode to a Grecian Urn" by Keats and "Seven Types of Ambiguity" by Empson, and Garrett said something, just in passing, about "adverbial modifiers." Well I understand that an adverbial modifier is the word that modifies the adverb, it took me a few seconds to translate it thus, and a minute to spot the instance of one in the poem. The one hour and fifteen minutes of this class is FULL of experiences like this, and I think it comes down to the fact that I never had technical grammar or literary terms (i.e. terms like "chiasmus" or "enjambment") drilled into me. Of course, close-reading can be an incredibly technical process, so I am a little worried that I won't be able to perform up to par. I need to find some website that has worksheets for high school English teachers to teach their students grammar.

In my Intro to Contemporary Theory course, we had a great discussion about Kant on Thursday. Thank God. It boosted my spirits tremendously to participate intelligently in a discussion after the Ethics class. I'm still afraid that I am not the kind of student who completely articulates my thoughts to myself before sharing them with the class, which inevitably makes me come off as less intelligent than everyone else. But luckily Jess, who is in that class with me, was apparently telling Justin, another first year (he's married and has a daughter and another baby on the way! and he is only 24!) that during our discussion I called Kant a snob (which I did and which he is!) and what was nice/refreshing/cool was that I clearly knew what I was talking about. So... hopefully I don't come off as an idiot. I am the youngest person in the program, it looks like; the other first-year who just recently graduated is actually a year older than me.

We haven't had a true discussion yet in my Modernist Arts in Britain class yet, but I think that the perspectives of the students in that class are so varied that the discussions will be rich. A couple of us are self-proclaimed Woolfians, but it sounds as though the majority of the class actually wants to work in areas outside of Modernism. Annemarie, for example, who is a year older than me and in all of my classes, wants to work with Victorian women authors and narrative theory.

This week has been full of little "meeting people" functions and so I feel like I have been asked about "what I want to specialize in" about a million times. In the email sent around to the department by the Director of Graduate Studies in English, my interests were ever-so-suavely listed as "Transatlantic modernisms and relations among language, affect and truth." My God that sounds sophisticated. I felt very legit after reading that. I've been telling people in my classes and at the social gatherings that I am also potentially interested in doing something with cultural studies and Jane Austen--what makes her so popular now, for instance. It's fun to come up with these ideas... but when in the world am I supposed to have time to actually pursue them?

Throughout the week I have somewhat inadvertantly been seeing who I am likely to be spending a good chunk of my time with. Because Annemarie and I have all of our classes together, we've been seeing a lot of each other and taken pains to spend time between classes working on our homework together in the library. Jess lives just up the street from me, a 5-10 minute walk, and so we have been walking to gatherings together. The three of us went to see Scott Pilgrim on Friday, and to a picnic with some other first year students at a nearby lake on Saturday morning together in my car. I have also seen a lot of John, the other first year who graduated this year. He lives about two minutes from me, so it's been easy to fall into chatting at each others' houses. We went to the gym together this week and talked at the pool before going back to my place and talking for two hours until midnight. Yesterday Jess and I walked to to party for first years together, but because I wanted to leave early and get some reading done, I rode back to Lucas St. with John--and we fell into conversation first at my place and then carried it over to his, where we went from reading to talking and back to reading for a couple of hours before his roommate Carmen (in the Writer's Workshop, I think) announced that she was making fuzzy navels, and we spent the rest of the evening (until 1:30 in the morning) exchanging stories, watching music videos, and laughing.

So I suppose I can say that I am settling in. The real trial is going to be managing my time properly so that I am not stressed out just trying to fit schoolwork and working out and cooking into my schedule comfortably. I also have a Graduate Student Senate meeting on some Monday evenings, and in September I have yoga on Wednesday evenings. I can do it! (I hope).

On the plus side, I am extremely excited about The Ethics of Close-Reading, and moderately thrilled with the syllabus for Intro to Contemporary Theory.

On the down side? You'll have to wait until Thursday night or Friday morning to hear from me again.

As promised,

Butternut Squash Pizzas with Rosemary



1 cup sliced onion
1/2 butternut squash, peeled, seeded, and sliced very thin
1 tsp chopped fresh rosemary or sage (or 1/2 tsp dried)
salt and pepper to taste
3 tbsp olive oil, divided
2 individual pizza crusts
1 tbsp cornmeal
2 tbsp grated parmesan or asiago cheese

-Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place the onion and the squash in a roasting pan. Add the rosemary or sage, the salt and pepper, and 2tbsp of the olive oil and toss well. Bake the vegetables for 20 minutes or until the onions are browning and the squash is tender.
-Increase the oven temperature to 450. Sprinkle the cornmeal onto a baking sheet and then place the pizza crusts on top. Distribute the squash mixture over the two crusts. Bake the pizzas for 10 minutes or until the crust is firm.
-Sprinkle the pizzas with the cheese and drizzle them with the remaining olive oil. I put them back into the oven for about 2 minutes to melt the cheese, but that is a personal preference. Cut into quarters and serve.

(Notes: out of Vegetarian Planet by Didi Emmons. The recipe has you make your own dough, but since it didn't work for me last week and it was a pain in the ass with all of the flour, I wimped out and bought ready-to-bake crusts at the store. I used ground sage and would in the future only use fresh spices so I could really taste their presence. But otherwise, it was quite delicious. I had thought I was only going to make one pizza, so I roasted less butternut squash and onions, only to find that I had enough to just barely cover both crusts. In retrospect I wish I had piled all the ingredients onto one, because one pizza was not filling enough to be full, but enough for me to feel like I would not be justified in eating the second one. We'll see how well it does as leftovers.)

Today I had my very first graduate course. Here I am, Lauren Rosales the graduate student:



Of course, being the first day of class, not much actually occurred. And since I only had the one class today, from 10:55 until 12:10, the day itself has not been much different than other days. But it is, symbolically, significant nonetheless.

The course I went to today was Modernist Arts in Britain. Here is a brief snippet from the course syllabus:

"We will pay particular attention to the arts of modernism in early twentieth-century Britain, focusing on three interrelated and overlapping areas: 1) The near obsession with houses, rooms, their interiors, and the narrative representation of interiority in modernist fiction; 2) Modernist magazines and the manifestos through which various arts groups (the Vorticists, Omega, Bloomsbury) and individuals (Wyndham Lewis, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf) promoted their versions of the “new”; 3) Modernism and public/popular culture, including the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley, exhibition posters, the London Underground, advertisements, and documentary films."

I am excited to consider Virginia Woolf through her use of public spaces in London, and to see how her own writings on the city might be able to inform such an angled reading of the novels. I bought a book this summer called The London Scene which has I think six essays that she wrote on the city; obviously, my own love for London is very compatible with the angle that this class is taking. Oh, sweet London. I miss thee.

After class, I joined a couple of my classmates for sushi in the mall up the hill from the main library. We discussed the difference in size of our previous schools, and to explain how small Hendrix was I mentioned the tradition of the senior superlatives. Both my companions denounced it as "awful" and rather catty, to which I of course agreed. Tradition or not--the more I think of it, the more I see Hendrix's student body as a mean-spirited bunch. I know I myself am rather harsh and judgmental, as well as prone to bitterness, but that doesn't change anything. Perhaps I fit in more than I thought.

In any case, I have officially begun graduate school as of today!

It's totally fine if you aren't going to answer my letter. I realize it is an outdated way to communicate and that it actually takes time and a conscious effort, and that we weren't super-close friends to begin with.

But by God, do not get on Facebook to send me a message asking me a personal favor and then try to tempt me by saying that you are going to respond to the letter when you actually aren't. And please don't make a show of asking for my new address if you aren't going to use it.

Thanks.

Since I last posted, a few things have happened:

-on Friday, the English graduate orientation, where I became acquainted with the other 13 incoming graduate students during a tour of the building and at a bar/restaurant afterwards (incidentally, the bar/restaurant, The Mill, had delicious cheeseburgers as well!)
-on Thursday, I managed to switch into The Ethics of Close-Reading, and dropped Modern Confession; to sell the books I had bought for the class I went to The Haunted Bookshop and ended up spending all of the money I had made in trade
-also on Thursday, I volunteered to be the 3rd senator from the English department on the Graduate Student Senate (GSS) and was thus appointed
-yesterday I went to El Cactus, a Mexican restaurant recommended to me by a professor at the English orientation, with Sydney (the Physics grad student) and enjoyed a decent enchilada, pretty good taco, and quite good rice and beans before heading downtown to Joe's, a bar where grad students hang out, for a PBR

During the tour of the EPB (English and Philosophy Building) on Friday, I felt occasionally disappointed that I'm not teaching this year. Everyone else in my tour group was greatly enjoying pointing out their offices to one another, and discussing using the copy room as they claimed their individual mailboxes. I felt left out, and had to remind myself that it is actually a good thing, a mark of my perceived intellectual worth and diligence, that I am on a fellowship and not teaching just yet. I imagine that once my classes begin and I can dismiss the bout of ennui I have been enduring, that I will be thankful to have the extra time on my hands. I do look forward to setting up a routine for myself, between meals and classes and going to the gym. The past few weeks have been unreal... and I am ready for reality to sit in. I have one class tomorrow, and then it will all begin.

For later this evening: Butternut Squash and Rosemary Pizza

Today was the orientation for all graduate students. Initially, it wasn't all that useful. There were a bunch of booths, each representing either some type of student organization or some type of student services. I put my name on the email list for Hillel, and talked to a priest about when and where I can go to confession. Luckily, at the recreational services booth, I learned that there is intramural Ultimate Frisbee, but only in the spring. Still, that is better than nothing!

I sat through talks on payroll and health insurance that were pretty useless in that all of the information I was getting was available on the website.

Afterward, however, I decided that I would stay for the reception. There would be food involved, and I didn't feel like biking home to make shrimp scampi at that moment. I sat down at a table with a girl who had, like me, been searching frantically for the restroom after the talks. As I sat down, she complimented my dress, introduced me to the Asian girl sitting next to her, and we were off. Her name is Sydney and she is in Physics (GAH! I know, like actual physics, like, she wants to shoot lasers and study their effect on atoms for the rest of her life), and the other girl is Vicky and she is studying to be a Rehabilitation Counselor, which sounds like Psychology to me. It was overwhelmingly refreshing to be chatting with people who were not cashiers at the grocery store--almost for the first time in weeks. After we stood in line for food, we found a whole group of people congregated at our table. They all turned out to be English people! My English orientation is on Friday, so I would certainly be meeting these folks soon. But it was nice to know that they exist and that they don't all already have an MA or an MFA or some other PhD (or, like someone who added me on Facebook, a JD... from Harvard).

After eating, a great number of our table decided to hit up the Farmer's Market. When I was unlocking my bicycle to walk with the group, one of the pedals somehow scratched the back of my heel where a blister was forming. I didn't feel it until a little later, but realized as we trekked on that my foot was bleeding profusely, onto and into my beloved Sperry Topsiders. To save the shoes, I went barefoot. All my companions voiced their concern and I was very embarrassed.

The Farmer's Market was very unlike the one I went to a few times in Little Rock. The one in Little Rock was always more expensive than what I could find at Kroger, and so I always felt kind of cheated when Alex and I bought overpriced fruit and it went bad quickly. This Farmer's Market, which is on the ground floor of a parking garage to shield it from sun and rain, hosted incredibly reasonably-priced produce, as well as various vendors of jellies, breads, pies, meats, and spice plants. One vendor sold small boxes of different fruits and different peppers. I sampled a few salsas (a habanero salsa with apple and peach in it was not bad) and even a BBQ sauce (very unimpressed; it was a Memphis-y vinegar-based sauce). I found a booth where a man was selling salsas, guacamole, and tamales. We had a nice chat about the importance of using tomatillo salsa on chicken enchiladas, and he wrote me out a coupon for his restaurant for free drinks! Then I bought 8 tamales to freeze upon my arrival home. Tamales are so grievously bad for you... but I couldn't resist. They will be something easy to throw in the oven when I get back from my evening class.

After the market, Sydney suggested we could try to fit my bicycle in her car so I wouldn't have to walk barefoot all the way home. This turned out to be quite the hilarious adventure indeed, as she ended up having a Toyota Corolla and we foolishly attempted to squeeze the bike into the back seat... where it inevitably got stuck and we spent the better part of 20 minutes just trying to get it out again. Eventually, after much giggling and after I managed to snap the buckle on my new favorite belt (a skinny brown belt with a gold buckle with a little sail boat on it--$8 at Blue Velvet), we got it out and situated it as best we could in the trunk. She dropped me off and I came inside to figure out how to get blood off of my Sperrys.

All in all, a pretty good day.

I should probably explain that Iowa City is nextdoor to Coralville, and that it is about a 15-minute drive to Coralville, if you get stuck at all the traffic lights. (I inevitably do). You don't get on any highway to get to Coralville, so it doesn't even feel like you are driving into the next town over. The best way to note that you have entered Coralville is by the big-name businesses you begin to see, such as Walgreen's, and various fast food establishments. Iowa City is comprised almost entirely of small, local businesses--it's so small that it can do so-- which is great from a buying-local standpoint, but kind of a pain in the ass when you just need that one damn thing from Target or Best Buy. Then you have to drive all the way out to the mall in Coralville, which is about 20-30 minutes of traffic lights. (It may be less than that, but my father continuously bemoaned the "half hour" spent in the car whenever we had to go back to Target when he was still here).

Today, that "one thing" for me was a sports bra. I have been going to the gym 6 days a week, and I don't want to have to do laundry every 5 days to accommodate this practice. But the sports bras had apparently been on sale, because the entire shelf was wiped clean. Bloody hell.

Anyway, on the way home I got a new wall charger for my cell phone, having lost the last one somewhere in Oregon. I have been charging my cell phone in the car for a month now.

My apartment, as you probably know, is one unit in a "fourplex." When I arrived home, the guy who lives in the basement unit, Jared, was smoking a cigarette outside so we chatted. He is probably in his late 20s and works two jobs while simultaneously doing his own independent film-making activities. He told me he was currently attempting to convert a short film into high-definition on his laptop, which is apparently an intensely tedious and time-consuming process. After giving me his phone number and email address he dropped a short screenplay by my door for me to read.

I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on Covert Affairs, the new show on USA that comes on every Tuesday at 9pm. I am getting a little hooked, almost certainly because I have a huge crush on the blind analyst, Augie.

Now, the moment I am sure you have all been waiting for: my dinner.

Asparagus Taquitos


5 6” corn tortillas
10 thin stalks asparagus, cleaned, ends trimmed
1 15-oz. can black beans, drained and rinsed
1/2 cup shredded queso quesadilla
chili powder
olive oil

-Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
-Heat the beans in a small saucepan over medium heat until heated through. Mash with the back of a fork until nearly smooth. Set aside.
-Microwave the tortillas on high for 20-25 seconds or until pliable (in the absence of a microwave, wrap the tortillas tightly in foil and bake at 350 degrees F for 10-15 minutes).
-Gently spread each tortilla with a thin layer of beans. Top beans with two stalks of asparagus and a sprinkle of both cheese and some chili powder. Roll tightly and place, seam-side-down on a clean plate. Repeat until all ingredients are used up.
-Place taquitos in a small baking dish and brush olive oil on top. Bake in oven for 30 minutes, until browned and crispy.
-Serve with sour cream for dipping.

(Adapted, once again, from BrokeAss Gourment, here. The original involves frying and I opted for baking.)

Overall, QUITE good. I had a serving of Spanish rice with the meal, and would probably next time only make myself four taquitos rather than the five.I recommend this very highly--particularly with the sour cream as a condiment.

Now, to settle in for the new Covert Affairs and pick out a new book to read.

I set off on an adventure today. You see, I don't really like to cook meat. This makes me a kind of hypocrite-meat-eater-who-is-too-lame-to-be-a-real-vegetarian, I know. Alex was always the one to handle the ground beef, the spicy Italian sausage, the chicken breast, the pork chops, and the salmon fillets. But I found a recipe on Broke-Ass Gourmet that was irresistible. I had to try it... and it required uncooked shrimp.

At Hy-vee, the Kroger-ish grocery store here in Iowa City, the only raw shrimp still had little legs and, worse, even eyes! I was mortified. I went home in defeat.

But, today, I ventured to the New Pioneer Food Co-Op that is a couple of blocks downtown in search of an avocado. I took a gander at the fresh meat window and counter, and saw that this raw shrimp was not so raw that I would have to deal with eyes and legs and shells. I think it is called "deveined." I bought a half-pound.

So, this evening, for the first time in 22 years, I cooked shrimp.

Almond-Crusted Shrimp over Mixed Greens with Lime Dressing





1/4 lb medium raw shrimp, de-veined, tails-on
1/4 cup raw almonds
2 tbsp whole wheat flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/2 cup half-and-half
2 tbsp olive oil
juice of 1 lime, divided
1 clove garlic, smashed
mixed greens
cherry tomatoes, halved
1 avocado, diced
Newman's Own Light Lime Vinaigrette

-Combine 1/2 lime juice and garlic in a bowl. Add shrimp and toss with hands to coat well. Set aside.
-Crush almonds (I used my new Pampered Chef smasher thing). Combine almonds in a bowl with flour and salt. Set aside.
-Set up an assembly line of the seasoned shrimp, the half-and-half, and the almond-flour mixture. Dip each shrimp in the egg white and then dredge in the almond-flour mixture. Set on a clean plate.
-Heat the olive oil in a large frying pan over medium-high heat. Cook shrimp for 2-3 minutes on each side, or until the outside of the shrimp becomes brown and crisp. Drain on paper towels.
-Drizzle salad dressing over mixed greens, tomatoes and avocado. Toss well. Add shrimp.

(I had to adapt the original recipe because I had forgotten to purchase a few of the ingredients. The picture above is off the Broke-Ass Gourmet website as well.)

I would recommend the recipe, absolutely. I only wish I had used more shrimp!

Pear Scones

1 3/4 cups flour (I used whole wheat)
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 pinch salt
1/3 cup butter, chilled
12 cup half-and-half
1 cup chopped pear

-preheat oven to 375
-sift together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and salt in a large bowl; cut in butter until mix has a crumbly texture
-whisk together egg and half-and-half in a separate bowl, then stir into the dry ingredients and mix until combined
-still in pears
-drop large spoonfuls of dough onto ungreased baking sheet and bake in preheated oven for 15 minutes or until golden brown
-rest briefly to cool before serving

Some of you may remember these--I made them quite a few times last year. I'm not sure how many of them the recipe is supposed to make; this time I had seven. I suspect I made them a little too large and there are meant to be 8.

I am going to set a chair on my little porch and drink some iced pear white tea and eat a scone with it as I finish up Virginia Woolf's The Years. I wish I had someone to share them with!

I finally did it. I finally went to a Mexican food restaurant in Iowa City.

It is, frankly, quite amazing that I managed to hold off this long. My father was here with me for three days, and this is the man who raised me on Tex-Mex at least once a week, and, truly, often twice (though usually we did not inform my mother of the fact). I have been hesitant because, well, it's Iowa City. When I first went to the grocery store, the cashier at Hy-Vee did not recognize a poblano pepper that I was buying, and when I told her what it was she asked me what it was for. In addition, when I visited the university in April, every single person (students and professors alike) that I spoke to told me not to bother with the Mexican food here. Chipotle, they insisted, was the best that Iowa City has offer a gal from Texas.

But this evening I had a conundrum. The pizza dough I was making did not rise, so my butternut squash and rosemary pizza was out of the question. The corn tortillas in the refrigerator had not thawed, so I could not pursue the asparagus taquitos, either. I haven't been to the co-op to purchase fresh shrimp yet, so I could not make the shrimp scampi or almond-crusted shrimp salad with lime dressing. (Note: when I do finally make these things later this week, you will be sure to read about the attempts, possibly complete with photos and recipes). And I was getting hungry.

In my failure to be a decent chef, I sought comfort. And if you know me, you know that my comfort food is Tex-Mex.

I decided upon Carlos O'Kelly's Mexican Cafe because it is very close to my house, and I have noticed on my trips to the grocery store that it often has a pretty good crowd. I ordered the "Enchiladas de Poblano" because I am on a poblano kick. The chips and salsa that came before the meal were extremely disappointing. The tortilla chips tasted like Tostitos straight out of the bag, and the salsa was very tomato-y. It needed cilantro, desperately.

My enchiladas were not bad. The chicken filling was nice and spiced, and moist. If the tortillas were not good, I did not notice. The sauce was different. I expected a sour cream sauce, with poblano peppers throughout. Instead, I got a very poblano-pepper-y sauce that might have had some sour cream for consistency, but you couldn't taste it. They came with a lime on top, but I couldn't get any juice out of it, which was a shame because I think it would have added a lot to the enchiladas.

The beans and rice were no good. I could not eat the rice, which was dry and spiced with all the wrong spices. The beans were sub-par, but only with the addition of the poor salsa.

For 10.00 plus tip, I would say I was disappointed. My meal was worth about 7.50 to me. But hey, at least I know that Mexican food in Iowa City might be edible. I feel up to the task of further exploring the other Mexican establishments, at any rate.

I think it's important

I think it's important to have somewhere other than tumblr for me to post to. First of all, tumblr does not seem to me to be the type of place where one has actual posts with text in them. Secondly, it's just time to have somewhere a little more private to post to.

It has been a long time since I used this blog. A lot has changed. I hope I can keep up with it this time. It might be my very first emotionally-mature blog! What a concept.

The URL is four (five?) years old, dating back to my obsessive love for Achilles. Forgive me my rich fantasy life.

no no no no no no

I know I'm pretty singular, quirky--irreplaceable. It's a good feeling, when I can remember it.

Silliness with Meghan and Kara as well as nighttime Darjeeling Limited viewing with Harmony have saved my night I think.

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all, right? It might be slightly immature to ignore a message that contains unwanted questions and brings up undesirable insecurities, but at the same time it can't be worse than responding in all-out Lauren-Passion. Pondered answers range from viciously cynical to gut-wrenchingly punctuated and precise. The mature thing to do, I feel like, is to wait until my existential crisis is over. I am being very conscious about every decision I make and what it says about me right now. My decision to postpone a fb reply may seem childish, but it seems the lesser of all the possible evils. In any case, I feel like I deserve to be sought out in person or at the very least via telephone.

Harmony and I have bright ideas and aspirations for the near future, including early morning WAC ventures and a sex-zine and

"to say yes to everything, even if it's shocking and painful."

So, I don't really work as a person. I've got to change something and it has to be me, all me, completely internal, done myself out of pure will.

Gavin once told me over the break that my only real, serious flaw is my dependence on others. I can see more clearly than ever what he means. Obvious example being Alex.

Alex stays 3-5 nights a week, generally. The sex is pretty good, the snuggling seems sincere, and before the sex the dialogue is almost always fabulous. But I need to stop feeling like I need him (/just anyone?) to be in my bed at night (not even for sex, but just for holding). I don't need it. Alex is my best friend and sex+snuggling=bonus points. I am going to have to teach myself to enjoy spending time alone again. I used to love alone-time for reading and writing and listening to music purposes. Now I feel like I tend to consider this alone time more of a failure on my part to attract people to my side. Obviously this is not the case--I have several great friends here at Hendrix and of course back in Austin and all over the place. I see a lot of Meghan and Kara and Lily and Zach and Joseph. Harmony and I chill a lot at the House, and I know I could always call Katie and Anna. I've even hung out with Gavin a handful of times, and I never eat lunch in the caf alone. So really it just boils down to Alex, and that is just unhealthy.

Mostly I came to this realization very suddenly last night while listening to a new Decemberists song from Gavin and sitting with all my stuffed animals. I just sort-of burst into tears and started thinking terrible thoughts, and even sought out housemate Zach for sleeping pills. Of course, he wasn't home so I mostly just cried until I told myself to snap out of it and just fucking deal.

Alex most likely does not want to date me, has no romantic feelings for me. It doesn't matter what other people think about it, it doesn't matter what my English major nature wants me to reveal. He's my best friend and I have to TRUST the things he says to me, and I am going to TRUST his October words and his words from Saturday night when he said "we're friends and if you wanted to date someone we would have to stop sleeping together" which I feel like means "all I want from you is your friendship although the sex is a nice bonus." So I am going to have to stop focusing so much energy on it. Guh. Read more and do other things, think about something else.

Anyway, that's my only real epiphany for the moment.

Harmony moved in today, so my existence in this house is infinitely less awkward. We cleaned up the kitchen, gossiped with John Drew, bought dish soap and then cooked pasta with yellow bell pepper for dinner and John Drew made a good salad with feta cheese in it. It felt like a real house finally, and just in time, too. People start arriving tomorrow. Elliott is moving in in the morning. I'm picking Gavin up at the airport around 8 in the evening and Alex is arriving, too. I told him I'm at his disposal, he said he would call me around 2:30 and that he hopes I enjoy running errands and moving boxes.

I am scared.

The last time I saw Gavin was when he came to visit me in Austin, and we said goodbye in the Austin airport tearfully and with kisses and I pleaded with him not to forget me. It is going to be so odd to see him and not be automatically just... touching him. I mean we'll hug and everything but the context is so different, I feel so displaced already. It's easy for us to talk on facebook and gmail chats and to text each other as friends, although the conversations sound exactly the same, Muffin and Schmoo and all. I wonder if that's healthy.

And Alex? He'll call me to say he's here. I guess I'll invite him to stop by the Brick House so we're only in one car and so he can see it. But that will take us upstairs to be alone in my room. And when he steps out of his car, we'll hug but am I going to tug his hair, is he going to feel my curves, and importantly are we going to just kiss? When we said goodbye at the Goodge St station I hugged him and he kissed me, the kiss was all his doing, I didn't know if he would want to leave it on that note but he did, and then I cried when I turned back at the lift to see him still standing there, watching me.

So my question is, what the hell do I wear on the day I am going to see both my most recent ex who still calls me Muffin and the boy I slept with in 6 different countries who is my best friend and may or may not want to continue to sleep with me? I don't know if I can ever look good enough to step outside my house on a day like that. I don't own the right clothes or the right body! I'm not sure anyone does.

I'm sitting here in my huge room in the Brick House and laughing at myself. Because we're not sick of hearing about Alex yet, let me say something on the subject:

I actually just spent 5 minutes trying to think of how I could refer to him. OU lost the championship and I sent him a message that originally said "I'm sorry, hon," and then realized it might be a little to affectionate and familiar and so changed it to "I'm sorry, friend."

Friend? Really? Oh, dear. I am actually ridiculous.

In other news, I'm sitting in my huge room in the Brick House. Oh my god. Hendrix better not really try to take this away from me. I love this room. It's huge. And I have my own bathroom and a door that opens to a wooden staircase outside so I don't ever actually have to go into the rest of the house (I'm not saying I don't want to, it's just cool that I could). There's a recliner a previous resident left and I'm sitting in it right now. Serious bonus points. I have a mini fridge and a microwave and a sink with cabinets and hooks above it that I dangled some mugs from. I have a desk I don't need because I always write papers lying on my tummy in a bed, but whatever it looks more professional. The only problem is that the house was already lived in when I got here... by 4 boys. It is a mess. It is trashy. It's huge and has potential to be beautiful and amazing. The kitchen is a real kitchen but a complete mess. And it smells. The fridge was not cleaned out before break and is full of bad things. Dishes were not washed before the break and are scattered across the countertops. Most of the cookware is going to be gone with Drew who is dropping out, so hopefully the mess will be cleaned but I don't know who is going to empty the fridge so we can start anew. The living room is trashed with loose magazines and papers and clothes and old beer cans. Stuff is just everywhere. It's kind of disappointing--everything needs to be vacuumed and mopped and Windexed and everything needs to be sprayed with Febreeze and the cat just kinda poops wherever it wants (Harmony's soon-to-be-room whenever she gets here, the one next to mine, has cat poop in it so I don't envy her and I would like to thank Blake from the bottom of my heart for keeping our door CLOSED to the cat unless he was supervising. Although Blake also did not take out the trash and I desperately want to vacuum my room and windex all the mirrors and clean the bathtub.

I will have pictures eventually once Gavin gives me the rest of my posters back so I decorate completely. Right now I've only put up one concert poster because a screw was already in the wall perfectly above the mini-fridge.

I don't know where everyone is--Drew's out and Zach was here earlier in a towel but I guess he put clothes on and left, and Harmony was supposed to come this evening but hasn't, so it's just me and the cat. The pooping cat. It's name is Hobbes but it isn't orange so I'm not feelin' it. Also I'm a dog person but we'll see how that goes.

I'm playing that silly game again. I'm getting up at 6:30 in the morning to make 9 hour drive and I still find the time to play this stupid game. Oh dear.

so this is the new year

Official Score

Frisbee: 1
Me: 0






















...Okay, I know I shouldn't be looking at it that way. I should be mature, self-confident, and not feel threatened. But he knows I'm driving up to Conway on Tuesday. He chooses Monday to go up and then changes his mind to going on SUNDAY in order to "play Ultimate" and he "is so excited."

It's difficult not to feel slighted.

And I can see where this is going. This means he has friends in Conway already. This means when he moves in before classes start, it's them he's going to call to help him move and to hang out with and to go shopping for furniture.

I honestly feel like I should just say good-bye to Alex now and get it over with. Because our last good-bye involved a kiss I'm not sure it really counted, and the long messages and skype conversations since were also kind of a hitch in it. But now, now that I had begun to convince myself that continuing a close friendship was possible... it's time. He said he was glad he talked to me at midnight on new year's as well, but I was tipsy so he probably just didn't want to upset me. Oh well.

I really need to get back to Hendrix so I can find some other things to think about.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?
really truly cook, trip on shrooms, take absinthe, have sex while others were in the room, cook naked, drink beer in the shower, a great number of things involving foreign travel and living in England

[2.] Did you keep all of last year's resolutions?
I doubt it as I probably resolved to lose weight, which I did but I gained it back.

[3.] Have you any resolutions for next year?
Absolutely.

[4.] What countries did you visit?
England, Ireland, The Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Spain.

[5.] What would you like to have in 2009 that you didn't have in 2008?
some self-suffiency, less dependence on others, more of a sense of self-worth

[6.] What date in 2008 will remain etched in your memory?
December 4, the day I left London. I'm not big with dates, so I think I might also say I don't think I will ever forget that beach in Barcelona.

[7.] What was your biggest achievement of the year?
I'm not sure. Probably not getting disasterously lost/mugged in any of 6 foreign countries.

[8.]What was your biggest failure?
anything involving the opposite sex from September to December

[9.] Did you suffer any illness or injury?
I had either the stomach flu or food poisoning back in I think February and that was kind of awful. I told Gavin to bring me "the big knife" so I guess that means I would rather have died than been experiencing it. I also had a kind of epic cold from Thanksgiving until a little while after I returned from London.

[10.]What was the best thing you bought?
That's difficult. The red dress with white polka dots from the vintage store in Paris is up there because of the memories associated with it, although one could also say all the plane and train tickets I bought to other European countries were the best. Maybe even the shrooms in Amsterdam.

[11.] Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Probably my own, to be honest.

[12.] Where did most of your money go?
Pints of Guiness, Foster's, and Hoegaarden.

[13.] What did you get really really really excited about?
Ethnic food! The weekend my roommate went to Barcelona and I got to cook and eat naked--and yes, not alone.

[14.]What songs will always remind you of 2008?
Werewolf by cocorosie, both God of Wine and Motorcycle Drive By by Third Eye Blind, I'm Yours by Jason Mraz, Inherited Scars by Sage Francis

[15.] Compared to this time last year are you :
[A] Fatter or thinner? about the same
[B] Happier or sadder? just as confused as ever
[C] Richer or poorer? so much poorer

[17.] What do you wish you'd done less of?
crying for no reason

[18.] How will you be spending Christmas?
It was nothing special.

[19.] Did you fall in love in 2008?
Yes, although that did not ultimately work out.

[20.] How many one night stands?
None.

[21] What was your favourite TV show?
I got really into Reba.

[22.] Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
No.

[23.] What was/were the best books you read?
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, She Came to Stay by Simone de Beauvoir

[24.] What was your greatest musical discovery?
My Brightest Diamond, Shearwater, and probably most notably Alex is instilling an appreciation of rap and hiphop in me.

[25.] What did you want and get?
A lot of sex. Seeing Okkervil River in London. Dresses in Paris.

[26.] What did you want and not get?
clarification, the joy of completing a short story, skinny

[27.] What was your favourite film this year?
I didn't see many new films this year, but I continued to watch The Darjeeling Limited constantly.

[28.] What did you do on your birthday and how old were you?
I turned 20, and drove with Gavin from Austin to Conway. Hollis had made me cupcakes which was the best surprise of the day.

[29.] What one thing would have made your year more satisfying?
if I had cried less when drunk, and handled things with Alex much better at the beginning

[30.] How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2008?
cinch belts and high-waist skirts, or skinny jeans with cowboy boots

[31.] What kept you sane?
quite possibly sex.

[32.] Which celebrity did you fancy the most?
I remember telling Alex in a bar in Barcelona when the music video for "Make it Mine" came on the telly, "Jason Mraz is the epitome of my type of man." James McAvoy gets points from Becoming Jane.

[33.] Which political issue stirred you the most?
the economy sucking has sucked

[34.] Who did you miss?
Gavin, intensely.

[35.] Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned this year?
Chill out.

[36.] Quote a song lyric that sums up your year...
"How do I get back there to
The place where I fell asleep inside you?
How do I get myself back to
The place where you said

I want something else
To get me through this
Semi-charmed kind of life
I want something else
I'm not listening when you say
Good-bye"
--from Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind

I want to write an anthology of short stories called "These Things Happened."

I absolutely refuse to be the first to speak. He knows I'm on facebook, I know he's on facebook. He knows when I'm on facebook that I'm on skype. And three or four times this has led him to log onto skype and say something so random or irrelevant it's awkward. I know I'm thinking about it too much. If he wanted to talk to me, he would. I want to ask him to call me at midnight on New Year's. What purpose would that serve? Whenever I've even vaguely referenced anything leading back to our sentimental/sexual moments he's dodged them. It could be that the references were so vague that he didn't get them, but I tend to imagine the worst. I want to say "since you aren't doing anything on New Year's Eve I thought you could call me at midnight; after all, if we were in London you would be my midnight kiss."

WHAT A BAD IDEA.

He never sent me any postcards from Greece. What the hell should I expect? I thought I could maybe count on his friendship, since he answers my messages. But this is absurd. The moment we get back to Hendrix all I will know is an overwhelming disappointment.

and right now, I honestly truly believe that I think I wish I had never gone to stupid London or at least never shared that stupid bottle of wine that stupid first potluck night with previously mentioned stupid person and I definitely wish I had never gotten lost on Oxford St that night after Walkabout on Lily's birthday with him and MORE THAN ANYTHING I wish I had never stayed in the room with him that Saturday and gone out with everyone else and not stayed and not had sex and not fallen asleep and not kept doing it for months on end and I wish I had never cried or vomited or confessed or given that handjob or ANY OF IT particularly fall break and Barcelona and I HATE THAT RED DRESS with the white polka dots and I hate dinosaur ties and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and the word "sous-cheffy" and the phrase "so it goes" and I hate myself a lot right now too.

I spend a great deal of time at work, which is a little frustrating because I never have time to just sit at a coffeehouse and read. Yet I am making a decent amount of money, and I do enjoy talking to the ladies I work with. So much for writing about my daily life, eh? Alex and I have been sending messages back and forth ever since we left London, and today I realized I had nothing interesting to say about my day without going into unnecessary detail about a not particularly interesting job. Does anyone actually want to hear about the how clueless the north Austin store was and how cute this old lady was who kept trying on ugly jackets? No, not really. I spent all day in the fitting room though, in my black skinnies, surrounded by mirrors. So if I learned anything today, it was that I need to be hitting up the WAC quite a bit upon returning to Hendrix in, what, two weeks?

I think about that return more often than I should.

Each December I have ever experienced in college has been one where my position in life and with certain people was completely unclear to me. Now that Gavin and I are most certainly only going to be friends, I have no real base to begin from. I have no idea who I will spend my time with, who will want to see me on a regular basis and not just "every now and then" (the words I got from Gavin when I asked if we would still do our homework together and read each other interesting bits from our textbooks). Despite what I tell him, I'm still terrified that Alex is going to conveniently forget my existence when he gets back with his frisbee comrades. I sneakily get him to say that we will do things in January so that at least if he does abandon me, I can be self-righteous and smug and say that he lied, that he was breaking promises. It's either very immature or very clever, and I can't decide which. I don't know why I distrust him so. I trust everyone else from London to keep in touch, and that's silly because he's the one who writes to me every day! He responds to my messages without fail and I haven't gotten Zach to reply to my texts half the time... and yet I absolutely believe in Zach's friendship.

In reading She Came to Stay (by Simone de Beauvoir), I began to absolutely question myself. I question how I see myself, how others must see myself, what exactly "myself" even is. Sometime I wonder if I am doing things in layers. If I am consciously acting out a conscious version of what I pretend is my subconscious, if that even makes sense. Am I fooling myself into fooling myself? I don't know. My head hurts just thinking about it.

So it's a good thing I'm reading Invisible Monsters now, because it's well-written and not as deep, certainly not philosophical. I'm entertained mostly by the number of things I find that are obviously being referenced in Panic! at the Disco's song Time to Dance.

I need some serious New Year's resolutions, but the only ones I can really think of are

1. lose weight
2. save money
3. write more
4. stop being effected by every damn thing ever

And on that note, I am going to write or read now.

I am considering a revival, don't worry. More when I am not exhausted.

What exactly have I been up to? Besides, that is, drinking incessantly, and somehow catching an inconvenient cold from one of my companions.

Last weekend I went to Dublin. I am not sure how to sum up the experience, to be honest. We went with no plans but where to sleep (because I had spent days finding and booking the hostel, and no one else wanted to do any of the work I imagine). In retrospect that was a bad idea. The other two ladies on the trip went on day trips to see the Irish countryside, whereas the two blokes and I wandered around the Temple Bar district and Trinity College on our first day there. Dublin, it turns out, is one of the most expensive cities on the planet, and not just as a result of the euro. On Friday, Alex and Joseph and I went to Burger King before a rugby game and our meals were 8 euro. Almost 16 dollars. And while we were ashamed of stooping to Burger King, it was really all we could afford. At least pubs and restaurants had lunch specials during the day, but in the evening an average dinner was 14 euro. So we ate at Burger King.

The three of us went to a rugby game that was enjoyable. You know how mascots are usually elusively silent? The person wearing the lion suit at the game was not so. He had a very heavy accent and yelled at the crowd that they were not cheering enough, which I suppose was true to a certain degree because what was coming out of their mouths weren't exactly cheers. Alex kept a list going and the one I remember best is the guy two rows behind us who stood up and yelled "you fucking wanker!" As for the game itself--I had trouble understanding it. Like football, all the players often ended up in a pile. However, unlike in football, the referee would only very seldomly blow his whistle at this and usually someone would emerge from the pile victoriously with the ball in hand. I never figured out what caused penalties, or why the game ended when it did. The time stopped at least 15 minutes before the game did, and we started to leave twice before realizing that the game wasn't yet over. However, I had a good time trying to piece together what was going on, and it was faster-paced than football because time was never stopped.

On Thursday we had gone to a pub by our hostel, but this night we felt compelled to branch out a little and go to the famous Temple Bar area. However, none of the pubs there would let us in because we are under 21. The drinking age is undoubtedly 18 in Dublin, so we still don't understand what kept us out of the pubs that night. Luckily we did not have the same problem on Saturday and got gloriously drunk before our 8am flight back on Sunday morning.

As for Saturday, we had planned a trip to the Guinness storehouses and Dublin Castle, but we lost one of our number and instead spent most of the day sitting in the lobby of our hostel, falling asleep on each other's elbows jackets and taking shifts to go eat at nearby pubs. The waitress at the pub we ate lunch at was a real hoot and a half, though.

We returned on Sunday morning and from what I understand all collapsed into bed for most of the day before performing some last minute homework miracles.

A typical day for me here in London begins with the toasting of a bagel in my oven and then eating it with cream cheese and a towel on my head as I either read Ginny/Draco fanfiction or perform general facebook stalking. I have one class each day, usually for 3 hours. Before class I usually eat another small snack, and then walk with my headphones on if it is being held at our classroom, although half the time we have class at a museum or we meet at a tube stop to have class as we walk. Afterward I will usually grab a cheap bite to eat with some of the class and then go back to my room to read before fixing myself dinner, then going out to the pub, which is usually followed by Greek takeaway. We've been frequenting a club called Roundabout on Thursdays because they have Jack and Coke for a pound fifty, which is fucking amazing compared to the three to four pounds we pay for pints at pubs.

This weekend is my first solo weekend. I take the train from Waterloo to Alton on Friday and stay at a Bed and Breakfast that night and Saturday night before heading back to London on Sunday to see what messes my comrades have gotten themselves into whilst intoxicated. I imagine I'll be spending most of my weekend walking and reading Sense and Sensibility. It will be pretty tame, to be honest. If you think it sounds like I drink a lot here in London, it's because I do. We get 80 pounds a week for food, and I always put 20 aside for future travels. Of the 60 pounds left I spend about 20 on groceries. Of the 40 left I spend almost all of it on drinks and late night Greek food runs. Maybe a lunch or two. Although to be fair I did go see My Brightest Diamond last week and bought a shirt for 15 pounds (mistake) and the week before I bought a pair of skinny pants at H&M for the same. But I do drink a lot. What can I say, I'm enjoying it.

Next Friday we are all heading down to Brighton (the coast) to visit one of our professors. She has promised to take me to Virginia Woolf's old house and to the spot where she drowned herself. I'm going to try to finish To the Lighthouse before then in order to prepare myself. The weekend after that begins our fall break, over which I am going to Amsterdam for 3 days, Brussels for 3, and then Paris for 4. I'm not sure how I am affording any of this, to be honest, so I will probably be paying my parents back for the next decade of my life. So far however I believe it has been worth it.

Alright, alright, I have Internet now. I've had my classes but who wants to hear about those? I'm sure everyone mostly just wants to hear the story of when I accidentally met Paul McCartney.




Which hasn't actually happened yet, but I'm still here for two and a half more months so give me time!



All of my RP friends will be pleased to note that on my first tourist day here in London, I went with some of the others on my trip to King's Cross where we saw Platform 9 3/4. Let me say--not as exciting as I would've hoped. It's not even actually between platforms 9 and 10, just off to the side. They've got half a cart glued to the wall as if someone were coming back through the barrier I guess, but it looks kinda cheesy. On that same day we went to see Tower Bridge, which is famous apparently, although not that exciting, to be honest.

There is a pub right down the street from us called The Malburough Arms (probably spelled differently)that we go to every couple/few days and get some pints (3 pounds each!). That's been rather fun, actually, which I am sure ought to be frowned upon. But I do like the beers they have on tap here in London.

This past week I went to see a few plays. One was an Ionesco play called Exit the King that was meant to be absurdist although I didn't think it was so completely absurd. I liked it, the themes centered around death which is always ever so uplifting. That play was double billed with a truly odd play called The School of Buffoons by some Romanian playwright, and its message in the end seemed to be that art is inspired mostly by cruelty, although I didn't understand that until the last few lines which were the head buffoon yelling "CRUELTY" over and over again while cracking a whip at the floor. Those two plays were actually in the upstairs room of a pub called The Lion and Unicorn pub, which was pretty neat. A couple nights ago I went to see Fragments by Samuel Beckett, which was basically five short bits in one play, kind of like some short stories in a collective anthology. I still have mixed feelings about it, but had been very pleased to see old people in the audience.

Last night I ate some truly delicious Chinese food. We accidentally found this one restaurant while looking for a different one, and out of pure hunger chose it instead. For an appetizer the four of us (there are 12 of us on the trip and 3 are boys, so it was myself and the boys) ordered some kind of duck that we put into sweet tortilla-like pancakes and it was seriously tasty. I had a chicken and sweet corn soup for a second appetizer and then my main course was stir fried beef over crispy noodles. For dessert they served us oranges! Anyway, for all of that and my Chinese beer it was only 11 pounds. I was very pleased.

Afterwards we went back to the flat and retrieved two of the other girls before setting out to go to Bloomsbury Lanes--a 50s bowling alley turned into a club. It still retains its bowling alley, and there is also a bar and booths to sit in with 50s American food being served. It would have been fantastic if it hadn't been so crowded--the bar was even out of the cheap beer it had on tap, so the boys and I were drinking gin and tonics all night. And despite having about 6, one of which was a double, I never got drunk because the line at the bar was always so long that I had time to completely recover from whatever I'd been drinking. The highlight of the place was definitely the large hipster boy clientele. We want to go back for dinner and drinking during the week and think we will enjoy it better then.

I had some kind of cheap Greek lamb thing at about midnight and then trekked up to bed. Today my roommate and I have been planning a trip to Dublin for the 18-21. The weekend after that I am going to discover Jane Austen.

I'm here.

We don't have Internet yet, and I don't want to pay to have it, and I don't have a converter plug thing ANYWAY, so god only knows when I will be able to update regularly. (Don't even get me started, I'm pretty effin' irked about it).

But, I am in London, after all. Our flat is tiny, and we have to trek up several flights of stairs to get to our room, in which there is a small kitchen and two slender beds, and a hotel sized bathroom.

Mostly we walk around a lot, and are trying to deal with things like groceries and having to buy our own TP at present. Fun to come later.

So I leave in less than a week, but it still feels like years.

I planned my Bronte and Ireland excursions in great detail, and Liverpool in general. I still need to go to my parents with the list and get the amount of pounds approved, although I don't think I will have much of a problem because none of these trips are very extravagant.

I hope I get excited soon... right now I'll just be glad to get out of this damn house.

I think I will apply to work at the American Apparel on Oxford St. in London, as well as the Urban Outfitters. You never know what might happen.

So far, I have purchased three concert tickets: Shearwater, My Brightest Diamond, and I THOUGHT St. Vincent but she canceled and now I am trying to get Gavin to call and get a refund on my ticket because it makes me nervous to use the telephone. If I can get my St. Vincent ticket refunded, I may go see Camera Obscura with Frightened Rabbit, or just save the money and use it on Okkervil River. Oh God, London, I love you already.

I have planned my Jane Austen pilgrimage, and am waiting to hear back from a bed and breakfast in Haworth concerning my Bronte trip over my fall break. I ought to plan Galway and Liverpool but I'm getting afraid of money so I am going to wait a little.

Before I go, I need to eat copious amounts of Mexican food. What, me, gorge myself on tacos? Ha. Never.

I don't want to be worried about money, but I am.

I'm selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control, and at times hard to handle, but if you can't handle me at my worst the you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best. - Marilyn Monroe


I'm headed to "the bay" tomorrow with my mother and with Kristin. I am taking a shitload of books. I want to read, maybe write, and definitely relax.

I've just returned from Chicago, and I'm not sure what to say except that something has got to change. Perhaps it's perfect that I'm going away to London for these few months, perhaps when I return I will be a different Lauren, one I can stand, one who actually deserves... things.

Against the unfamiliar background of Chicago I think I have remembered why it is I should not like myself in the first place, and although I felt like a giant hippo around all the hipsters, my loathing had much less to do with weight than I predicted. I don't feel unattractive when Gavin is around--period. I sometimes feel like I'm the chubby girl on the arm of the attractive boy that passersby glance at and wonder, "how the hell did she get him?" but that wasn't the main problem.

It's difficult to explain, but, things will be different now.

I've been planning my literary pilgrimages in England, and they are not going to be cheap. This is made extra-stressful by the fact that Coldwater Creek is giving me less than 20 hours each week. I've started to look for a second job, but I don't think it is going to work out very well. I emailed a resume to several places on Craigslist, and I am turning in applications to Michael's and Barnes and Nobles, but in reality I think these places are on the look-out for someone with an open availability and who... I don't know, isn't me.

Sometimes I wonder if I even know myself. Once Ben told me that I could not possibly be selfish because I hate myself so much. I don't know if that is true.

I know that it's difficult to balance emotions. I'm stressed out right now because I don't know where I will live when I get back from London. I'm lonely because I don't spend time with people outside of work. But I'm happy sometimes--at work, talking to Gavin, or even just reading. Yet even at those times, there is a hint of the rest... it's difficult to explain. Am I just always a little bit depressed?

I was on my way to Mozart's earlier this evening and I just randomly burst into tears and could not stop crying. I don't know why. It must be a mixture of things--the stress of the brick house, lack of friends, confusion over Ben, my house falling apart, missing Gavin--but I had to pull over in the parking lot of an elementary school and call Austin. Of all people? But I called him, and he said to give him 30 minutes. Where could I go? I went to Barnes and Nobles and immediately bought a copy of Jane Eyre. God only knows why.

Anyway, Austin met me there and we stood in the parking lot and talked for half an hour. I tried to explain why I was upset, but it was difficult. We ended up just having a normal conversation and I felt like I had kept him up past his bedtime for no reason. This I know is absurd, because I had been so so upset just half an hour before... there is something wrong with me.

And I can't decide what I want for myself. I want to be thin so I feel attractive and am thus happier in general. But what if I can't get thin? I still feel attractive sometimes, so what if I could just feel like that without losing 30 pounds? Some girls are bigger than others. Thanks, The Smiths.

I really should not be listening to Placebo right now.

I came to Mozart's to write and to calm myself with an italian soda, but all I'm doing is being angsty on my blog.

Strangely enough, after that nostalgic blog entry below, I received a mysterious (and wordless) email from Ben that contained an mp3 to a song in Spanish. I'm still trying to figure out what it means. I went to http://freetranslation.com but because it makes my life easier I am not thinking about it. All I can say is that sending me little messages like this (the last was a package of some of my clothes from 9th grade that had no note and was postmarked from New York) is not alright--it seriously fucks with me psychologically because I know it has to mean something (he was the one who taught me that belief!) and I don't know what. I am not the type of girl you never get over. Am I? Me? Chubby little faux-poet with literary aspirations? I'm pretty quirky. I might be unforgettable, and god knows I've stirred up some weird emotions in people, but I never saw myself (really) as that girl who is impossible to fall out of love with. And even if he thinks he is still in love with me (if he really even was to begin with), it's not ok to do these sorts of things when I have a boyfriend. It's just as bad as what Gina did with Austin, if not even worse.

This morning I received a facebook message from Blake. He is not in fact ignoring me and is not mad at me, just not quite sure, apparently, how to tell me that I may not have anywhere to live when I get back to Hendrix in the spring from London! I don't know how to talk about this one right now, because my feelings are so intense on the subject.

I'm reading THE story, the novel-length Beatles fanfic I discovered in the 6th grade and learned all about sex from. It always brings back strange memories for me because I have always associated my sexual adventures with it, because when I had them I thought back to the story to compare description to actual experience.

And even more than just sex, I learned about mature emotions from it. I relate to it every time I read it for new reasons, and can link certain passages back to certain boys.

Ben was the first boy to really touch me, the first to turn me on. He was my first real kiss, first serious relationship, my first notion of what love was supposed to be. Every expectation I have of boys who claim to love me was originally set by him; he conditioned me, in a manner of speaking, to take every detail to mean something important, to be suspicious and jealous, to expect both a selfless lover and a boyfriend who would literally do nothing without thinking of me and acting in my interest. How awful. Although I have always possessed a more sentimental nature than normal, I firmly believe that I owe most of my inclination towards melodrama to him.

Paul was the first boy I dated who saw me naked. He was also the first I went down on, the first I brought to climax entirely on my own. He was also the first (and only) one I have cheated on. He was the first (and only) to write me poems because he felt like it and not because he felt obligated to. I have learned in retrospect from my relationship with him that crying out "love" is possibly the heaviest matter of all.

Austin was my first of so many things. He was the first boy I spent the night with, and of course, I lost my virginity to him. He was the first person I seriously would have married. Although I believe I may have loved Ben, Austin was what we in cliche romanticism would term my "first love." He was the first boyfriend I have actually traveled with, and the first one my parents took seriously. He was the first to actually, truly break my heart. He gave me my first orgasm. He was the only boy to this day who has spent a holiday with my family and whose family I myself have spent a holiday with.

And Gavin. Gavin is the first boy I have lived with, which entails countless other firsts. It's more difficult to describe a relationship when it is still happening.

The point of this entry is that I am feeling nostalgic towards my romantic and sexual past. I am 20 years old and sometimes I really do feel mature, although usually it is not something I consciously consider.

I'm also more conscious of my physical appeal. I go to the gym everyday and it is beginning to show. I dress well. A lot of times I walk with the confidence of a young woman who knows she is truly loved, which I am aware in itself adds a copious amount of attraction to my appearance. Boys looked at me today--in that way, and they flirted a little. I learned that one of my co-workers, Nikki, who I went boating with a couple of weeks ago, has been denying her boyfriend's friend who went with us my phone number. Apparently he will not stop talking about how I am cute (in my bikini??) and her boyfriend Andy is continuously pestering her about getting my number but she has held fast and insisted I am quite taken and very happy about it.

I just need to hold onto this confident feeling and keep it going.

i was out of your league; you were twenty thousand underneath the sea

I go to work, I work out, I talk to Gavin. I go to Barton Springs with Stephanie and sometimes others (read: Mary, Austin). It isn't the most exciting existence ever, but it is not a depressed one for the most part, and as long as it carries me quickly to July 17th, it t'will serve.

Blake has yet to answer my letter and I think he is just going to ignore it. This frustrates me and occasionally upsets me, but if he is not mature enough to respond and confirm his unexplained anger towards me, what can I do? I keep telling myself that he might be out of town or simply just not had a chance to respond, but I can't disillusion myself forever. Sam cut me gracefully out of her life by blocking me on AIM, and I imagine that Blake is trying to do the same. I wish I knew why, but to actively seek answers would only create more drama and this is the one thing that this friend-group (former friend-group?) does not need.

I've been trying to read, and after two quick successes I have come to an obstacle in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth. I dislike the heroine and care very little of what will happen to her, but as there are less than 100 pages left, I feel I ought to go ahead and complete the novel. I don't know what I will read next. Austin offered me the book he just completed by Ayn Rand, but I don't think I'm going to stray from my own bookshelf unless it is to read something contemporary from the list that Dr. Stuber emailed me.

Speaking of Austin, we hung out. It's rather exhausting to explain it. I didn't cry, I didn't get upset, I didn't long for physical interaction, I did talk about Gina, and he did avoid the subject of Gavin. I'm not even going to try to do anything about that, because I love Gavin and he makes me immensely happy and has managed to actually make me take care of myself like no one else ever could.

I'm trying to write again! I wish I knew where to go next, how to polish it. My angst about the future is heavy, but at the present I am just trying to live practically and keep busy to bring my week with Gavin closer. I don't think I have ever missed anybody this much.

if you were here, would you calm me down?

These days (that is to say, summer), I try to do practical things. I go to the gym in the morning before work, I read classic novels, and I go to Mozart's at night to work on my writing. It's productive. Between work and the gym alone, I feel grown-up and accomplished.

Then, I talk to Gavin at night.
I miss him, as would be expected.

I'm trying to remember if it was this difficult when I was away from Austin back during my freshman year at Hendrix. I think I was probably busier, so it was probably not as hard to avoid just lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling wistfully. Also, having a roommate made it more difficult to cry at songs and from bad dreams.

Still. I'm 20 years old. I am most definitely an adult. It's seriously time that I started doing adult things--maintaining a long-distance relationship of substance without unnecessary drama is one of them. I can be an adult about this. It is less than 2 months before I go to Chicago to visit for a week. Of course, then we'll be apart for, oh, 6 months.

I'm trying not to think about England, which is difficult because everyone I talk to is super-excited about it for me. I don't want to think about the money or the absurd separation from Gavin, although I have a feeling that it will be much easier to be in London and be away from Gavin than it is to be here. I'll be busier and I will have so much more to say to him in letters and so much to send in packages. Right now, here in Austin, everything just seems so stale. I have uninteresting days for the most part. As long as they go by quickly, however, I really don't care what they are like. Just get me to Chicago and then get me to London.

Get me to Chicago.

don't give me that

My love life sounds much too interesting for a gal my age and with my weight in those previous posts.

In light of the fact that I'm going to London in 4-5 months' time, I am going to revive this blog and get back into the habit of updating it. Then, when I am abroad I will continue to update this for anyone interested in my adventures. Some lucky ones will receive letters, but I know how poor you all are at responding to them, so...

My gpa is going DOWN. I will almost certainly receive a B if not a C in Lit Theory, and a B in Po-Mo Lit. I should pull an A in Sports, and an A in Screenwriting unless he is too severe with attendance. My major gpa is sinking. I am getting more and more terrified of grad school as time goes on and more and more seniors that I know with better grades than I are getting rejected. Is there no hope for me?

I think I want to go into RTF at UT or Magazine Writing at NYU.

I think I may give up on my PhD in Literature.

Christ, that's sad.