I was going to talk about cable-knit stockings, but...

Okay, so sorry about the lack of posting. Normally I can at least manage some random creepy observations about people who don't know I exist....but let's move on, shall we? Let's talk about Maryland.

The state of Maryland (perhaps excluding Baltimore...we'll see about that one later) is like a guy who wears a cowrie shell necklace. He thinks he is SO cool. He probably has convinced quite a few clueless chicks who wear too much black eyeliner (even though they are blonde and it looks tacky) that he is SO cool as well. Really, he is a self-absorbed asshole who nobody likes. Only wait, people do. And I am left scratching my head, trying to figure out what anyone sees in him.

For the metaphorically challenged, let me break it down for you: I still hate Maryland. I hate it as much as I do pseudo-surfers.

So.

Sorry about that. The reason I avoided posting was because I have been feeling particularly bitter lately. I wanted to wait until I had something to say besides "Maryland sucks", but who knows when that will be. After two years and STILL NO FRIENDS, I'm not holding my breath.

Go college!

At least I'm not addicted to nicotine...

Oh, community college: "Where nobody actually wants to be".

Alas, I am stuck stuck stuck for this year, and while there are worse alternatives (senior year of HS), community college is living up to its unofficial slogan. I am utterly apathetic. Like everybody else here. We're all just kind of going to class (or not), usually with some sort of goal in mind, but nobody (save the nursing students) are actively working towards it. We're just biding our time until circumstances change, and change comes slowly at community college. That's what I don't like about it here. Honestly, I was excited to skip my senior year and start college, even if it was "only" community college. I wanted to move on, but community college seems like a place where everyone is doing everything BUT moving on. They're stuck in high school, or in their minimum-wage rut, and they like it there. Spare time is spent working their lame mall jobs or spending their pay on cigarettes (did I mention that EVERYONE smokes here?). And they all seem perfectly content to stick with whatever clique they fit into in high school. Isn't that the oposite of what college is supposed to be? Doesn't everyone look forward to going somewhere they can be whoever they want, try something new?

And I think I just found my answer. Everyone wants to GO somewhere, and community college isn't going much of anywhere. It's twenty minutes away from your house, in your parents' car, in the dreary suburbs of your adolesence.

So I'm stuck here, like everybody else, only without a driver's lisence or group of friends leftover from high school, and that's just the way it is. I haven't hung out with anyone particularly interesting, despite my fascination with several individuals who shall remain nameless (you know one of them by his piercing). And, it seems, I don't really care.

Because that's what community college does to you.

LR Update!

So. I forgot to tell you earlier, but LR sort of talks to me now! An actual conversation follows.

(I walk into class on a test day, to find LR there, flipping frantically through his notes)

Me: So did you study for the test?
LR: A little. (scans notes for highlighted sections)
Me: Is "a little" what you're doing right now?
LR:Nope. I actually studied.
Me: Wow. That's more than I can say.
(LR is still looking at his notes)
LR:.....


Exciting, right? I think we are well on our way to being best buddies.

So much depends upon the kid with piercings

Last weekend I cleaned my room, and I was going to take pictures and show you all how clean and nice it was....but I never got around to taking out my camera, and now it's a mess. So that's not happening. Maybe someday, but for today I've given up.

So what am I supposed to tell you about? I've kind of actually done stuff lately, but I don't feel like sitting here and listing off the events of the last ten days. I guess I'll tell you about Lip Ring.

Lip Ring sits next to me environmental science. He, oddly enough, has a lip ring. Hence, the name. LR has sat next to me since the first day of class. He does not have to sit there. He chooses, consistantly, to sit in a corner next to moi. He also chooses, consistantly, not to speak. I don't mean that there's no chatter, or smalltalk, or regular conversation. I mean he does not speak. Ever.

Example of a typical (non)conversation, at the attendance sign-in sheet:

Krissy: "Hey, can I borrow your pen for a sec? I forgot to bring mine up with me."
LR: *hands me pen*
Krissy: "Thanks!"
LR: *blinks*
Krissy: *signs initials, gives back pen* "Thanks again."
LR:*signs initials*

He simply would not speak. He did not nod. It is clear he could hear me, he responded, but entirely without words. I thought he really didn't like me, except that he continued to sit next to me.
Why??

......


......


......

I still don't know. But I do know that today, things changed. LR spoke. During a "group quiz", LR spoke to me for the first time in three weeks of sitting next to each other. Sure, he only said "Uh, what'd you get for number eight?", but to me, it mean so much more. It meant that maybe, if I keep working at it, I'll be able to walk into environmental science one day and say "Hey LR. How was your weekend?" and he'll say "Meh. It was pretty cool." and I'll say "Cool." and it will be wonderful.

Almost like having a friend.

Everyone's a suspect.

So. Today was garage sale day....


6:05- Wake up for the first time.

6:10- Wake up for the second time.

6:15- Wake up for the third time. Get dressed, stumble downstairs.

6:20- Growl at my mom for not putting the muffins in the oven yet. Make three more signs leading to our house on old window shades.

7:00- Assemble way ghetto signs. (Window shade signs+garden stakes+coat hangers+lots of duct tape)

7:25- Wait on first paying customers (and non-paying customers) of the day: A lady and two guys. I take the lady's money for some random household crap, my mom takes guy #1's money for a microwave, and guy #2 walks off with an antique adding machine. My dad gets pissed and won't shut up about it. So a guy stole our adding machine. You're out maybe three dollars. Get over it.

7:40- Leave with still pissed-off father to put signs up.

8:00- Return to garage. Eat muffins. Sell random crap to random people.

8:30- Biker guy shows up, in full spandex and helmet with mirrors. I stifle a laugh and sell him random crap.

9:00- Kylie comes and hangs out in the garage with me. I make her go buy me iced coffee.

9:35- Kylie comes back. I listen to Belle and Sebastian (pretty inoffensive music to shoppers) and half-listen to Kylie while I sing along. We talk about sidewalk chalk, the Prince of Space, and spunky Asian chicks.

10:30- Kylie leaves to get ready for work, I keep selling random crap. People buy the refrigerator and cabinets and leave. They'll pick them up later.

11:00- Parents ditch me to go eat macaroni. I listen to Sufjan Stevens.

12:00- I yell inside and make my mom come be cashier while I eat. I go iside and eat Chinese BBQ pork buns and green pepper.

12:30- I reluctantly return to the sale. My iPod dies. I grumble and refold stuff that customers messed up.

1:00- Biker guy comes back, sans spandex. He buys two bike seats (of course), a polo, and a dehumidifier. Fridge lady comes back and loads fridge into pickup. Her nephew (or something)'s house burned down. He needed a new fridge. Makes sense.

1:30- Cabinet people show. They load the cabinets and buy a hat shaped like a dog's head. I go inside and make my mom watch the sale until it closes. I go watch cooking shows in my room.

2:00- I go back outside and start packing up. It's hot and my feet hurt.

2:30- Stuff is pretty much packed up, I go with my dad to take down signs. We get to the place where the last sign was, and it's nowhere to be found. The day ends as it began, with my father getting pissed because people stole random stuff that's really not valuable.

So. Now you're up to speed. I'm bored and tired, and my neighborhood is full of thieving idiots. Whenever I see someone closing a garage door, or opening their car, I quickly look to see if they appear to be harboring stolen goods. Now, everyone is a suspect.

The end.

Iron deficiency

For a long while now, I haven't been able to think of anything to say. Anything, that is, that wouldn't be cause for you to worry.

I've become so stuck in this place that I'm in that sometimes I wonder if I shouldn't worry. I'm hanging in some sort of limbo between real life and total meninglessness, where I exist but don't participate.

I can excuse it now, sure. I'm hundreds of miles away from the only friends I have, I'm too sick to go to school and make new ones, I don't pursue any hobbies because of my physical state, I don't read because my head is too clouded by medications. Nobody's blaming me for sitting around doing (literally) nothing. But I wonder what my excuse was last February, when I was surrounded by friends and seemingly happy with my life. What will be my excuse when I head off to college on my own? My isolation and disinvolvement, while currently pushed to an extreme by circumstance, may not go away.

It's a frightening thing to contemplate. For so long, I've romanticized college, convincing myself of is magical transitional powers. And while I maintian that getting out of Maryland and sorting out my medical concerns will improve my condition, I'm afraid I'll still do this to myself. Like I know, while invisible, that I'm doing now. Like I've done before.

It is not the incapablity of happiness. I enjoy things and I still laugh. What I'm describing is the incapability to sit, alone with my thoughts and decisions, and be fine. Not happy, just fine. Happiness is something else entirely, something fleeting and needing no contemplation. But what I'm talking about, what I'm struggling with, is something more closely related to satisfaction or fulfillment of the self. And while I don't expect my own or anyone else's levels of this thing to ever be complete, I'd like to be a little less anemic.

In which Krissy upsets herself

I started to clean my room today. When this occurs, it is not generally prompted by my mother's requests. Nor is it prompted by her threats ("No Martha Stewart magazine until your room is clean!"). Rather, it occurs only when I have the desperate need or want to find something long buried by piles of clothes or hidden in shoeboxes of random junk.

Today I remembered something, and realized how sorry I was to have forgotten it.

Wasting time on facebook, I began to think about (naturally) my friends. I started to miss them, like I always do, and I began to reminisce about last year, before moving to Maryland. Then I started thinking about my going-away party, and then I started thinking about the going-away gifts, cards, and letters I received. I suddenly had the urge to find them, to sit and reread what had been written.

And so my search began. I started with the bin I keep pictures in, and began removing albums and loose photographs. First I unearthed my Damn Yankees phone tree, then my G.I. medals. I hadn't found what I was looking for, but I was on to something else. I continued my search elsewhere, in shoeboxes, folders, and bins. Now I was looking for not only going-away letters, but, reminded of G.I. and my various E.R. and hospital visits, for get-well cards and pictures, and perhaps most importantly, a set of notes written on Hilton notepaper that I received at G.I. state finals last year. I thought about this more and more, about how I had almost missed it because of collapsing, how my mother drove me down by myself because I missed the bus for a doctor's appointment, and how, upon my arrival in Springfield, I was greeted so warmly by my friends. Sometime that weekend, several of my friends gave me notes or drew me pictures (a certain someone surprised me with fruit snacks). I kept those notes, and put them on my bulletin board when I got home. I remembered now how I had packed them, along with everything else pinned on that piece of cork, and everything else inside my room, in an assortment of boxes and bins one week last June. And now, digging in my closet in Maryland, I wanted to find those notes.

I can't exactly explain why I wanted to find them so badly, aside from sentimentality. All I know is that I tore through dozens of still-unpacked boxes that are housed in the back of my closet, under my bed, and stacked in corners of my room. I dug, frantically, through every receptacle that had even the slightest possibility of containing that for which I searched. At the end of all this, I sat.

In the middle of the floor, surrounded by throw pillows, unironed slacks, human Geography papers and more, I began to cry. I couldn't find them. I had come across some letters sent by friends after I moved, and read over them fondly, but they weren't what I needed to find. Wiping away my seemingly unnecessary tears, I began to understand why I needed to find the particular notes that I did. It was because if couldn't find them, every scrap of paper and photograph and unremarkable object that I had ever saved and placed inside a shoebox was random junk. If I couldn't find them, it meant that somewhere along the line of packing and moving and unpacking, I threw them away. I discarded something meaningful, irreplaceable, and truly valuable. I left myself only with random junk.

The phrase "random junk" is significant, because you see, I used to think of my shoebox stuff as "homeless mementos". I would occasionally keep something given to me by a friend, or made by a younger cousin, and stow it away in one of these boxes, because I had no other place to put it. But all of this time, I believed that I cared about my shoebox stuff. I believed that I kept it for a reason. Upon the realization that I had disposed of such wonderful gifts from friends, I could no longer continue thinking that kept that which was important or meaningful. At whatever point I started "cleaning out" my boxes to save space (or whatever reason I had at the time), I turned my homeless mementos into random junk.

I'm still looking, in binders and drawers and folders, for those couple of notes. I'm quite sure that they're gone, because I've searched everywhere I can remember packing that sort of thing. Because sifting through my memories like I have today has made me want to read them. More than that though, it has made me want to prove to myself that I was not so foolish as to cast off a crumpled letter, and to keep only what was framed or purchased.

I feel like Harry Potter, and for once it's not teen angst

Last night, I had a terrible dream. I can't quite recall what happened that made it so terrible, but I woke up trembling, with this awful feeling in the pit of my stomach that can only be described as a feeling of dread, or possibly doom. I keep getting that feeling, or a random shiver, and I'm not sure if I caught whatever nervous disorder Kylie has over Thanksgiving, or if some subconscious event (that of my dream) is goin' all psychosomatic on me. Or, perhaps it is dementors! I haven't noticed any frosty windows around the house (it's 70 degrees here), and eating chocolate doesn't work, so I guess not. Perhaps, though...

Anyhow, I haven't the foggiest what's really causing it. Maybe it's just Maryland. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I should try the chocolate one more time, just to be safe.

Krissy Triumphs Over the Poor Design Choices of Middle America

I win!! My parents said when we move we can remodel the kitchen right away, rather than waiting for several months. That means that I won't have to go through with my threat of not cooking until it's de-vinyl-pine-and-laminate'd and granite-hardwood-and-tile-ified, which I was prepared to do in the name of good taste, but didn't really want to. True, this change of plans is based on the fact that someone actually wants to buy our house!!! and therefore my dad's company won't have to buy it, and therefore we get more money for it, but still, I like to think that I, alongside my crusade for a tasteful culinary environment, won.

Also, I am very excited to shop for bedroom textiles. 'Twill be very fun and stuff.

Quality time

"Zinzi, I hate this."

Zinzi trots over and stands in front of me. I look inside my house, barely able to make out my living room furniture for the glare. I am sitting on the steps to my back patio that come out of our dining room. The steps are green, and our patio is the faded, whitish color that asphalt gets when it hasn't been properly maintained. I look down at my dog, then again at the window, squinting. This time I can see my grandmother sitting inside, reading a book, and my grandfather stooping over a newspaper propped on the footstool. Zinzi sits down.

"What will you do, Zinzi, if you don't make any new friends in Maryland?"

She inches towards me to rest her chin on my lap.

"What if the other dogs there are all just a bunch of golden retrievers and labaradors? What there aren't any poodles, or Spainish water-dogs, or cumberland spaniels? What if they're mean to you?"

Zinzi snorts.

"Awww. Well, we will come bakc and you can visit your friends from the pooch parlor, Zinzi, don't you worry. Even if the doggies there aren't nice, we'll come back to see your puppy friends."

Zinzi sees a bird and chases it. I sit still, by myself now.

Zinzi can't come back for visits. They don't let poodles on airplanes. As much as I want to tell my dog that she will get to come back as much as she wants, and that she'll be happy, it might not be true. Zinzi will probably never see her puppy friends again, quite frankly. Zinzi, though, will get along just fine. You see, Zinzi likes other dogs. She does not think she is too good for some, or dislike the nature of others. She wants to be friends with everyone. She is very nice to other dogs, and does not cynically disapprove of their decisions or motivation. Zinzi will be very happy.

"Come on, puppy, inside we go."

She bounds back and grins at me, in that goofy way that only a friendly dog can, and trots ahead of me to the door.

"Go on, Zinzi."

I hold the door open and she walks in. I follow her, and sigh.

Today is one of those days where I don't really have anything to blog about. It also happens to be one of those days when I nothing better to do than blog.

I did spend the last twenty or so minutes myspacing out. Now, I don't have a myspace,nor do I particularly like them, but I've found the website a useful tool for research. I look up a town that I will probably be living in next year, such as Catonsville, and find high school/college age students that live in or are from the area. It is through this research that I have decided that I hate Ellicott City. I hate Catonsville less, but don't get me wrong, it still sucks. You see, Catonsville is the sort of small town that isn't small. It's got its historic small town feel, with a downtown area, (which I must say was better than Ellicott City's historic downtown, which had only hippie shops and yuppie shops) but was still a bit "quaint" for my liking. Given, I'll take Catonsville quaint-ness over Columbian sprawl, but I still find it irritating.

Anyway, Catonsville highschooloers: Are they cool? This is what I'm struggling with. I mean, they have myspaces, wich already lame-ifys them, but that aside, would I like them? I'm sure that if I saw some of my current friends' myspaces that I would like them less, but it is some indicator of personality and interst...The Catonsville kids altoghether seem to be an artsier, more offbeat crowd than Ellicott City, but I've got some problems with them. I'm going to make you a list describing the Catonsville youth, as per Myspace. Draw your own conclusions.

1. Every Catonsville myspace that I saw had Harry Potter listed under its "Favorite Books".

2. There are self-described "theatre kids"...

3. There was this, which displays a disturbing amount of town pride, but was actually kind of funny. It even made me like Catonsville for a minute there...

4. There were far fewer trying-to-look-sexy/beauty/airbrushed fifteen-year-old type profile pictures.

5. There were far fewer drunken/polo-wearing/asshole-looking/party-at-John's house-'cause-his-dad-has-a-full-bar-in-his-basement-and-we-can-totally-get-some-chicks-drunk-and-hook-up-with-them pictures.

6. There were less myspaces.

So overall, Catonsville is "Less Up Its Own Ass than Towson" (a suburb we looked at but was too far away and sucked)but still not great.