april showers bring may... snow bunnies?

It's April 12th, and it's snowing. What the f*(K, Mother Earth? To be honest, I'm actually okay with the snowiness of Christmas Island, because on Wednesday, I'm leaving for Nashville, TN, where weather.com predicts that it will be sunny and warm... with isolated thunder storms. Dammit. I just can't win.

So I went to Kohl's this morning to buy some clothing items for said Nashville trip with a gift card I got for Christmas (saving gift cards for long periods of time is one of my favorite things to do). The store was packed and I stood in line to check out for a good fifteen minutes (in Christmas Island, this is an eternity). The woman in front of me purchased FIVE HUNDRED AND THIRTY DOLLARS worth of clothing. FIVE-THREE-FIVE! She was with two smallish girls and all the clothing was clearly for them. I couldn't tell if this was a run-of-the-mill purchase or a we-haven't-bought-clothes-in-a-year-and-won't-for-another sort of thing. But either way, Holy Crap(!) If I spent that much on clothing in one shopping situation, I'm pretty sure that my heart would screech to a halt in a mixture of happiness and horror.

I'm eating subway and rocking the Pandora, two things that have historically been indicators that I will get-a-lot-of-crap-done. Which is good because in the next 87 hours i need to: do a bunch of grading, plan my oral comm. class, write an annotated bibliography, write critiques of three articles, do my laundry, run to the store, make nats packs for speechies, pack for nfa, draft at least 25 pages of thesis (I've given up on the original goal of 60 having recognized that not even I, with my above average last minute skills, could pull it off), and if possible get a little sleep. Sounds like quite the party, doesn't it? I'd invite you, but I think it may be a little too hot to handle.

buelsy (party hardy)

dejavu, but not quite as sweet.

It's the middle of the night. I'm in my office, jacked up on caffeine and chewing gum and barbeque soy crips. I'm listening to Tegan and Sara's The Con. It's like last fall all over again. Remember that time, readers? Back when I used to work on my thesis? Little by little, day by day? Just like my dear adviser advised me to? Yes, those were the days. These days, on the other hand, I have to write sixty pages of thesis in one week. Sixty Pages! ONE WEEK! Yes, it's totally insufferable, and yes, it's totally my own *freaking* fault.

My only consolation? The MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Sixth Edition. Is it a sign that you have obsessive compulsive disorder if reading and repeating the rules of ellipses and citing anthologies keep you from scratching your eyeballs out and then banging your head over and over again on your keyboard?

I NEED (and by NEED I mean have been trained by consumerist society to WANT): New Chucks. More coffee. A face implant that puts Chapstick on my lips 24-7. An iPhone. A footrest that is red. A tiny person to live on my desk and dust things. Free iTunes for Life. My left elbow to stop itching. A doppleganger who will write my thesis, defend it and then conveniently cease to exist.

-buelsy (tougher than the rest?)

weekends come and go.

When I was younger I was a huge fan of the Anne of Green Gables series (there, it's out!). One of my favorite Anneisms was "I am drowning in the depths of despair." I've used that wonderful, overly dramatic phrase a number of times in the past decade, and each time it has been anything but an accurate description of my life. But it occurred to me this morning that right now, I may in fact be drowning in the depths of despair. No drama, no over-exaggeration involved. I just spent an entire weekend doing... nothing. I mean, in all fairness to myself, I did do laundry and some major anxiety cleaning, which can both be considered fairly productive actions. I also went to downtown Main Street with some people on Friday night and ended up finding an apartment to sublet this summer. But I did not work on my thesis nor did I do any homework. Drowning, people, drowning.

We leave for NFA in a little over a week (GO PANTS!). After I get back, there are only a little over two weeks left of school. Point being, everything is happening too fast for me to be philandering with cleaning supplies on a Sunday afternoon.

-buelsy (needs to kick it into high gear)

because those sunny installations never came.

I miss California.

I miss the freeways, the sun, and the one hour dry cleaning.

I miss having to maneuver my way through crowds of people who won't look at your face.

I miss the Hollywood Bowl.

I miss standing in line for hours.

I miss Sig Alerts.

I miss going to the beach and hating the sand.

I miss the scratch of my dad's clock radio droning news about the world in the morning.

I miss things I can't even begin to describe.

--buelsy (likes dinners of cheese and candy hearts).

now, i'm not one to brag...

...but HOLY CRAP! I just got a ridiculous amount of work done tonight. Indulge me and let me list the accomplishments of Sunday, February the 3rd, of 2000 and 8:

• Long overdue creation of Oral Comm. Gradebook, Attendancebook, and Attendance Sign In Sheets.
• Grading and inputing of said grades.
• Filing of all sorts of paper mumbo jumbo.
• Updating of tournament files (yay for OCD record keeping!)
• Posting and publication of coaching hours for this week.
• Extensive redrafting of Interpersonal Comm. presentation and two page handout.
• Creation of extensive presentation and three page handout for Comm. Theory.
• Initial edits on paper nominated for Graduate Symposium.
• Scheduling to the hour (because to the minute would be excessive) of my life for the next four and a half days.
• Packing of lunch.
• Cleaning of kitchen.

This all boils down to the question: How cool am I? And how self indulgent?! I actually feel a little bit excited for it to be Monday.

IN OTHER NEWS:

1. The Yogurt-of-the-Year prize goes to Dannon's Light and Fit Vanilla, a happy experience for dieters and non-dieters alike.
2. Latest Pet Peeve: when certain co-inhabitants of Messy Manor do the dishes and put them away in completely wrong and illogical places. Don't get me wrong, I'm digging the shared domestic responsibility, but the lack of OCD in dish placement? Entirely unacceptable. (I love you, A).
   
3. Thank you, Hollywood and Hollywood Writers for coming out of your respective time-out corners and making up so that the rest of us CAN GET ON WITH OUR LIVES!!!
4. I need to wash the rug in the kitchen in Messy Manor. Who knew that rugs needed to be washed? While I consider myself to have been adequately exposed during childhood to the nitty-gritty aspects of survival in the suburbs (Buelsy cleaned her some toilets), rug-washing escaped my repertoire. Nonetheless, rug-washing has been scheduled to occur between the hours of eight and eleven tomorrow evening (do you sense that OCD is becoming an outstanding theme in this post?).
5. Go Giants, I guess.
6. Things you should remind me to get at Tar-jay this week if you're feeling benevolent, dear readers: more fifty-cent-orange-plastic-dish-scrubby-things (no, they do not have any other name), more plastic sandwich baggies (sorry, mother earth), and a new cutting board (snap-crackle-pop).
   

I think that is about all. Shower, tea, yogurt, bed.

--buelsy (feeling significantly better than in days past).

bottle it up, tuck it away.

As I reached for some hot pink staples in my top desk drawer a moment ago, I realized how much of my sanity depends on compartmentalized mayhem. Messy Manor is generally half-way clean these days (I blame A for a large portion of the remaining mess :) ), the Rav reached new levels of tidiness last weekend, and my office is pristine. However, there are little pockets of space that are all sorts of chaotic: The aforementioned top desk drawer, an aptly labeled "junk drawer" in the kitchen, a couple of baskets near the bathroom, a plastic tub pushed to the very back of the shelf in my closet. All of these spaces are jam-packed with odds and ends and have absolutely no rhyme or reason in terms of organization. Being the English major that I was, and still secretly am, I can't help but look at these haphazard hiding places as metaphors for the rest of my life. Good-to-go on the surface, but just barely keeping the chaos at bay.

--buelsy (buckling down).

xxx hardcore xxx.

It's 34 degrees in Christmas Island today, and I just got finished drinking a cup of tea on my front porch steps, sans coat, sans hat, sans mittens, and most importantly, sans goosebumps. I am so hardcore.

On a different, but still hardcore topic, there's been quite a bit written about success fatigue, "an indicator that your work patterns are not meeting your long term needs, and that your resiliency is not what it used to be. It has been described as a state of tension and preoccupation with maintaining high standards of performance, until those standards seriously strain physical, emotional, mental and relational limits." The phenomenon is generally witnessed in individuals with high power jobs, like lawyers, doctors, and corporate climbers. But what about academic fatigue? Isn't the pressure that comes along with years of higher education bound to result in the same general misery?

I'm scheduled to be done with school in 15 weeks, which in the grand scheme of things is not that long. But in the meantime, the perpetual juggling that grad school entails is wearing me out. Teaching, speeching, classing, and thesising leaves little time for actual living. Don't get me wrong, I certainly set aside time for people and cats and websites and online television, but even those moments of down time are overshadowed by the stress of everything else. This afternoon, academic fatigue is feeling like a pretty accurate diagnosis.

--buelsy (has the sunday blues).

CALIFORNIA: FIRST INSTALLATION.

I moved away on July 10, 2006. I told SD that I wasn't coming back. And I told my sister. Everybody else received after-the-fact phone calls. In retrospect that was a little harsh, but most quarter-life crises are. A and I went to California for Thanksgiving four months later. Those four months were the longest I had ever been away from my family, and the trip home resulted in hardcore emotional whiplash. I think the whiplash happened because we only stayed for six days, which I know now is not enough time for a prodigal daughter to properly return. I spent those six days trying to see my family and all of my friends, A's family and all of his friends, and negotiate my relationships with everybody. I hardly saw my family, and when I did, things were definitely not the same as they used to be. I felt crappy about everything, and I didn't go home again for eight months. We had Christmas on Christmas Island that year, which was hardly as perfect as the name similarity would suggest.

I went back to California for the second time on July 5th, 2007, almost exactly a year later. I stayed for three and a half weeks. A was living in Pasedena that summer, working on a show in Hollywood. I saw him every Monday and Tuesday, but every other day, I would just stay home and do Simi Valley things with my favorite Simi Valley people. Things were a little shaky at first. There were some fights about things that matter less as I get older. I didn't get to see my dad very much for various reasons. I had to take way too many trains to see the friends that I love. But I did spend quite a bit of time with my mom and the little people (who are all very much taller than me now). Each day that I stayed at home doing normal home things seemed to erase the fact that a year ago I had run away. That trip home was important because it determined my relationship with my family as an adult, rather than as a two-week-old college graduate with a little money and a lot of angst.

Going home for Christmas and New Year's this year matched and improved upon everygoodthing that had happened last summer. There were no screaming matches about the place of women in religion, or gay rights, or Democratic vs. Republican politics (only a bit of friendly banter on the latter). A stayed in Simi and became one of the family. I spent a lot of time with my dad. I saw *almost* every friend that truly matters and didn't have to take a single train. It was a good time. Leaving was overwhelmingly difficult.

There's one thing that has remained constant throughout all of my trips home. The smell of the bathroom at my parents' house. It is, without doubt, my favorite smell in the world. I've spent years trying to figure out what makes the smell so great. I've tried using the same soap, the same laundry detergent, the same cleaning supplies. I've tried closing my eyes and smashing my nose up against the walls, so that later when I go to Home Depot I will be able to recognize the smell of their paint. But I've never been able to replicate that smell. It's just one of those things that makes you want to keep going home.

--buelsy (older and better).

lions and tigers and mancats, oh my!

I gave a quiz in Oral Communication last week. The quiz included several questions concerning the types of communication identified by our rather nonplussing textbook. One of the questions asked which type of communication is transmitted through radio, TV, internet, and other electronic sources. The correct answer is mediated communication. Unfortunately, most of the 24 answers deviated greatly from this, including "mecha communication," "internet communication," "technological communication," and good old "communication communication." My absolute favorite deviation, though, was "mancatical communicaton." Yes, man cats. Man Cats! MAN CATS! This has to be the best catch-all phrase in the history of catch-all phrases. In example:

Q: What would you like for Christmas?
A: Man Cats.

Q: How was that Thai food you ate tonight?
A: Man Catastic!

Q: How are you feeling about the fact that it's almost February and your thesis is far from complete, Buelsy?
A: Man Catastical.

See? Try it out. It's about as good as the English language gets. Except for the word "schmaus," which is another story for another night.

--buelsy (is back and wants her a man cat)

hi there.

It's been a while. Crap, it's an entirely different year since I've posted last. I've been meaning to post all sorts of lovely installments about the California trip and how interesting and wonderful it was, but this week is proving treacherous. If you don't hear from me by Monday, consider me a goner.

buelsy (band-aids on her finger-tips).

goin' to the big city(!)

I went to Cedar Rapids with K today. We shopped at Steve & Barry's, which was a little too good to be true. Everything in the store was nine bucks. I bought three things for my sister, and two things for myself. As long as the purchases for others outweigh purchases for self, I figure that Christmas time personal splurging is okay. S & B's apparently maxed out* our karma though, because we spent the following hour and a half searching for and finding two different Indian restaurants that upon eventual discovery... were closed. We then opted for an establishment called "Sushi House" which made us both want to throw up. The sensation of wanting to throw up led to a rather sketchy stop in Brandon, Iowa (Home of A Very Large Frying Pan), where we peed in a "Kwik Trip" that I'm pretty sure is going to be featured in Saw 5.

It was an extremely fun day.

*Speaking of maxing things out, one of my favorite Life Stories of all time happened in New Orleans in 2006. Clutching neon green hand grenades, SD and myself attempted to rebuild the city of Nola through the purchase of excessively priced souvenirs. At one particular establishment, SD's card was declined. So she tried another. And another. All declined. Although most people would be visibly flustered in this situation, SD calmly sipped her hand grenade, motioned toward my wallet, turned to the cashier and said: Oops. I maxed out.

RANDOM MONDAY NIGHT MUSINGS:

1. Hugs and love for the random girlfriend on The Real Housewives of Orange County who just pointed out that one mother's expectations for her children are particularly gendered in nature.
2. Final grades have been submitted. It was an A- sorta semester. That's what happens when you grade under the influence of Cup Of Joe's.
   
3. There is a sign near the condiments and other food amenities in Maucker Union at UNI that says: We have switched to a "greener" napkin. Please pull carefully as they tear easily. Every time I read this sign, I make a slight alteration in my head: We have switched to a "greener" napkin because they are cheaper. Please pull carefully as they tear easily because they are shitty.
4. Glamour magazine (which is on my highly preferred reading list) did a story about the fiance of a sex offender that was arrested for soliciting sex to a fake 14 year-old virgin on Dateline: To Catch A Predator. The woman decided to stay with the offender despite having two daughters, aged 11 and 13. In fact, she married him during her lunch break less than a month after the Dateline incident went down. My favorite part of the story was on page 187, when the woman revealed that in 2003, she was briefly addicted to crystal meth.
5. Clearly, I am watching the Real Housewives right now. A 21 year old without a job just got a fairly large tattoo with his mother's credit card. The mother asked her 7 year old what he thought about the tattoo. He said: "Um. BAD." Like, duh, Mom.

Speaking of moms, I'm going home tomorrow night. A and I are leaving for Des Moines (where all the prettiest girls live) at 2 a.m. We fly out at 5 and will be in L.A. by 9. I get that prickly feeling under my eyes when I think about it.

--buelsy (back to l.a.)

middle of the night moves.

The semester's over. Well, almost. I have to go to Cup O' Joe tomorrow and finish reading final papers so that I can turn in grades. I actually like grading, though. Yes, I am freaky/cool like that.

Grad school has wrecked havoc on my life in many ways. I'm unable to sleep with out medical aid anymore. When I lay down I can't relax my muscles or my brain. My doings-of-laundry are few and far between. I call my house Messy Manor for a reason. My nails are bitten. My hair is a little bit more gray. My caffeine addiction is infinitely worse (as if anybody though that were possible). My utilities bill is currently late. I think about speech all the time.

But, oh my god. I am so *freaking* happy.

--buelsy (going home on wednesday)

getting jiggy with it.

During the first five weeks of my first semester of UCLA, I was a great student. I remember taking this one class in particular, American Literature 1800-1900. I read all but 1 of the 11 books, foregoing lots of Welcome-To-College activities to do so. Once, I even locked myself in a study room on the first floor of Hedrick Hall, without my phone, without the internet, and without music. I stayed there for three hours in the middle of the day, and I wrote a paper. This behavior is incredible to me now. I was so cool back then. Not so much anymore...

It's been a while since I've posted, which is not a good thing in the grand scheme of life. When I write in this thing, it's usually as an escape-slash-writing-warm-up for thesis work. This means that no posting equals even less thesis writing (yes, there can be negative quantities).

The weekend was chaotic in a typical end-of-semester fashion. Enough said.

I just put on Tegan and Sara's The Con, which has historically transported me into a middle of the night productivity rampage. I'm of the belief that putting music on repeat can do that... literally force your brain to remain in one place long enough to get things done.

OTHER PAST MIDNIGHT MUSICAL REPEATS INCLUDE:

• David Bowie, Portuguesed
• Rachael Yammagata, "1969"
• Nelly, "Ride Wit Me"
• Damien Rice, "The Blowers' Daughter"

Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right tune.

--buelsy (not gonna sleep tonight)

snow and sniffles.

BUELSY IS BEING SO DAMN DRAMATIC:
I'm in a funk today. I woke up early, taught, imbibed large quantities of coffee, got ready to do the 485 things that are on my to-do list today, and then flopped on the ground (yes, the ground) in front of my tv, watched an episode of "What Not To Wear," slept for a while, and then drove around Christmas Island listlessly. I feel crappy and what's worse, unmotivated and depressed. It's one of those days.

REASONS TO STOP BEING SO DAMN DRAMATIC:
It just started snowing outside. Watching snow fall (the flaky kind of snow, not the demon-ice-slush kind of snow) is therapeutic. It also happens to be Tuesday, the day upon which The Library gives people tacos for two dollars because they are a kind and loving Institution. The Golden Compass comes out this Friday. Most importantly, I get to go home two weeks from tomorrow. You may or may not have guessed that the lack of home in my life right now (it's been four and a half months) may or may not be the root of all problems.

REALIZATION ABOUT DAMN DRAMA:
I think sometimes your body forces you to escape as a last ditch effort to save your brain and your soul. Even if the escape includes very nearly throwing up in Wal-Mart while buying new gloves, it's a good thing.

--buelsy (still eats lunchables)

summer always makes us forget.

Well, it's official: life sucks and will continue to suck for the next four and a half months. It started snowing/icing/hailing/raining early this morning and now Christmas Island is a miserable place to be unless you can stay home, watch movies, and drink hot chocolate. I'm planning to do my fair share of these activities tonight (thank you, Netflix!), but until then, I have to be at school with the baby. Sad times.

RANDOM FACTS FOR THE DAY
1. There are two approaches to eating apples: as a whole, or in pieces. I am an advocate for the latter. It just tastes better.

2. Only 18 days until California.

3. Today has made it clear that I need new snow boots. I have been coveting these, but they are ridiculously expensive, and I've had to settle for putting these on my Christmas List. A calls them sl-uggs. Ha.

4. I failed in my attempt to go to the library. With the all the above mentioned weather suckage, my cozy-ish office is as good as it's gonna get.

5. The plan is going well so far. I like it.

--buelsy (snow in her socks)