When You Get To My Door, Tell Them Boris Sent You

Happy Halloweekend to everyone!  I love Halloween.  I guess you could call me a Halloween-aholic.  If you come to my room in the month of October you will see the walls decorated with spiders, skulls, and witches, my desk piled with candy and cookies, and light-up plastic pumpkins all over the place.  My room is basically equivalent to that house you drive by with the four gnomes, seven fountains, and three lion statues in the front yard, and you think to yourself, "how tacky."  But I love Halloween.

This obsession started at a young age, probably just because I liked candy.  However, I'm more inclined to think it was because I liked dressing up and being the center of attention...not that that's changed.  I actually wore gold sparkly shoes and a I'M #1 button to my pre-school graduation.  I was a pretty big deal.  Clearly, getting to wear pretty dresses and being sparkly were my top goals in life since the age of five.

I started out as being a bunny, and this phase lasted a short seven years.  Always the same costume, I actually didn't grow until junior high.  After the bunny years I became obsessed with Disney princesses.  Disney princesses embodied everything my little mind had envisioned for my life:  a handsome prince, ponies, elegant balls, pretty dresses, magic, and animal friends.  Not to mention the fact that I thought I actually was a princess who had been taken away from her magical kingdom to be kept safe from the evil queen.  I also had animal friends, they were imaginary raccoons.  I nursed them back to health after they fell through my window.  Over the course of several years, I went through every Disney princess.  I even dressed as Mulan one year because when I was younger I was Asian an empowered, independent woman.  After the princess years came the scary years.  The years of witches, ghosts, and devils.  Theses were not so notable because I was going through puberty and was awkward and just wanted to be "cool".

Now that I'm in college, Halloween is an excuse to dress up as anything with little clothing.  This is really a shame.  I feel like Lindsay Lohan in "Mean Girls" when she showed up at the Halloween party as a dead bride and everyone else was dressed as slutty animals.

I was thinking this year about being a slutty barn.  I would dress as a barn and when you opened the barn doors I would be naked and covered in hay.  However that required too much effort.  So then I thought about being a slutty lobster by being a lobster without the shell, but no one would get that.  I thought about being a slutty tree, where throughout the course of the night I'd lose all of my leaves.  I can't quite figure out the logistics of that one though.

Anyway, Happy Halloweekend everyone!  See you all at Old Kenyon tonight, I'll be the slutty piece of carpet.

If you didn't get the title of this post, you clearly need to get more in the spirit.  Now, do the mash.

 

Oh Mis Moscas, Donde Estan Mis Pantalones!?

Life is hard for a Kenyon College student.  Okay, not really.  It's actually pretty easy, but since we all like to complain:   

1.  My Pandora stations are all in Spanish.  Not the music, just the commercials and the writing.  I don't speak Spanish, I never have.  I just woke up one day over the summer and Pandora was all in Spanish, and it's never changed back.  However, when I worked at Pizza Schmizza I did pick up some Spanish slang.  Archie would always say "Oh mis gatos!"  Which actually translates to "Oh my cats!"  I think it means something like "Oh my gosh!" but as many memes and youtube videos have taught me: everything's funnier with a cat.  Sadly, Pandora isn't on my level yet.  Oh mis gatos...

2.  Everyone on campus is complaining about the ladybugs that have infiltrated their rooms.  I would love to have ladybugs in my room!  Instead I have giant horse flies buzzing around; and because I am a woman I am very scared of insects and because I am a college student I don't want to go out and buy fly repellant.  I compromise by spraying the flies with hairspray until they can't move and then sucking them up in my vacuum where they slowly die of asphyxiation.  Some people play sports to get out their aggression, I kill flies. 

3.  Now that I have a single, I no longer wear pants in my room.  This would not be a problem except since I'm pretty sure my suite-mate doesn't want to see me in my underwear, I am becoming a hermit.  A pantsless hermit.  My typical inner monologue is as such, "Hey, I'm really hungry.  Ooooh look!  Popcorn!  I'll just go microwave this and...oh wait...the microwave is in the suite.  Oh well, I'll just watch another episode of Bones."

4.  I do not appreciate the canceling of Phling.  I have some very nice dresses that I never get the opportunity to wear out here in the cornfields, and now the administration is taking away the only chance I have.  So, who wants to volunteer?  I'll be in my room.

5.  Why did the Dairy Queen in Mount Vernon have to close!?  It's not like it has any real competition, and a girl needs her Blizzards.  They even flipped them upside down before they gave them to you, which I have always wanted to do but was too scared.  

6.  Gourdzilla is going to be given away as a prize to the winner of a pumpkin-carving contest.  However, you don't actually get to keep Gourdzilla, you have to carve it.  I can only assume it's because they don't want to have to move it again.  Second place gets 50 dollars.  Anyone else going for second place?  I personally think a better use of Gourdzilla would be to drop him off the top of Peirce and let us all place bets on where the farthest piece of The Zilla will land.

7.  I bought some small pumpkins from Walmart about a week ago so that I could festively decorate my room for Halloween.  They molded within the week and stuck to my wood shelf.  Not only have I learned never to buy pumpkins from Walmart but I'm afraid that my shelves are infused with mold and I'll get fined at the end of the year.

That is all, I'll leave you with your thoughts and some gatos.

To Abroad Or Not To Abroad

For the past two weeks my entire existence has centered around going abroad.  Although, here at Kenyon we don't like to discount the many opportunities in the United States so we call it OCS (off campus study) which I think is stupid and prefer to call OCSTRESS.  I was super excited about going abroad before the first meeting, where I learned that applying for programs was going to be like applying for college but with fewer options.  This made me want to curl up in a fetal position on a kitchen floor and ask my mom to buy me coloring books.  Which may or may not have been the way I spent my winter break senior year of high school.

However, after going to the OCSTRESS information fair I do have a rather romanticized idea of what it would be like to study abroad.  I blame the pamphlets that are telling me things like "you can stroll through Covent Gardens on your way to the theatre for rehearsal"  I mean COME ON!  That sounds so cool!  Not to mention that they spell theater in the pretentious "re" way like I imagine people in London do, so they can say it like "the-ah-trr." I can just picture myself in a peacoat and knit cap, strolling through the gardens on a blustery autumn day after an afternoon in the pub with my mates.  Also, all my internal dialogue is in a british accent now.  In preparation.  Granted I may want to go to Scotland instead of London, in which case I really should ask my mom to send me the dialect tapes we bought when my high school did Brigadoon.

Speaking of plays, KCDC's next play is Hamlet and along with every other female drama student at Kenyon, I'm drooling over the prospect of auditioning for Ophelia.  This means I spent two hours in the library yesterday trying to get a copy of the audition "packet" and I am not ashamed of this.  I reached level 7 in brick breaker, which is a new record for me.  I say "packet" because it was 80 pages.  When I read the email saying there was a "packet" at the circulation desk of scenes to prepare, I imagined maybe 12 pages.  Nope.  But I'll be damned if I didn't spend my given hour with the Great Hamlet Audition Novel copying every page.  However, I forgot to staple it all together before I left, and I now have 80 loose pages of iambic pentameter strewn across my Caples suite.  Woops.

My boyfriend has decided I should audition Hamlet because I'm crazy enough to play any character.  I'm not sure if I should be insulted or complimented by this, because I'm pretty sure he's basing his opinion off the time I threw a quart of melted Ben and Jerry's ice cream at him in the heat of an argument.  Maybe not my finest moment, but calm has never looked good on me.  Another reason I'm a drama major and not too good at physics.

 

Undercover at THE NAZ

After attending Kenyon for a full year and almost a half, I came to the realization that I had never actually seen a student from Mount Vernon Nazarene University, or as we affectionately call it, The Naz....until last week.  I was having a fine dining experience at Ruby Tuesday's, when I saw one.

SIDENOTE: Ruby Tuesday's cheesy garlic biscuits are TO DIE FOR.  I plan on taking over the Caples kitchen for weeks until I discover the secret recipe.

I will enslave this man and force him to bake me cheesy biscuits

Yes, a real student from The Naz.  I could tell because this specimen was wearing a sweatshirt from the university and looked like she had crawled out of a cornfield.  It was at this point when I realized that not only was this the first bonafide student I had ever seen, but that despite all of the signs pointing to The Naz, I had never actually seen any evidence that it existed.  I was now determined to find the fabled university, no matter how far into rural Ohio I had to venture.  Luckily, my boyfriend was equally curious, and we took off to search for the Promise Land.

After about ten minutes of driving through Mount Vernon we saw a church.  After passing this church we saw...a university!  But it was not just any day at The Naz, oh no, we happened to stumble upon SonFest (Son, like God...not sun, like the planet).  SonFest appears to be somewhat like our Sendoff, only it happens at the beginning of their school year, there are more small children, and there's no alcohol (The Naz is a dry campus, who knew!?).  My boyfriend and I thought we would just crash the carnival, listen to one of the Jesus bands performing, grab a cotton candy and head out.  However, apparently you had to pay something like 20 dollars for a ticket, so we decided to just walk around campus instead.  I even adopted the codename Delilah in hopes that The Plain White T's would serenade me I could stay undercover.  Here are our findings:

The Bookstore:  Very small, and all the books (novels included) were about religion.  My personal favorite was the section devoted to dating while staying abstinent, and getting others to join you in this venture.  

The Student Lounge:  My only note about this is why don't we have a legit student lounge??  

The Academic Buildings:  The academic buildings at The Naz are reminiscent of your high school science corridors.  They are completely linoleum, cold, and avoided like the plague.  Also, courses like Home Ec. are still taught The Naz, along with courses that we could only assume were something along the lines of "how to be a good mother".  This makes sense since there is a preschool on campus.  A preschool!  For children!  Like the children of the students!  This is confusing though because there is a strict curfew in place for all students and you can't spend in the night in another student's room (however you CAN be signed out for the weekend...whoopee!).  Sex and dancing are also outlawed.  Like BYU for the uncoordinated.  Or high school.

 My previous ideas of The Naz were blown out of the water.  Still sore about not being able to get into SonFest, my boyfriend and I high-tailed it for the car and I am so happy to be back on a campus where I can stay out past midnight and wear clothes that show my shoulders.

Is There a Doctor in the House?

For some reason unknown to me, our health center is closed on the weekends.  This seems very counterintuitive but I guess even nurses want to get crunk on saturday nights.  As a result of this, I had to go to the Knox County Hospital.  Unlike the people with bleeding fingers and crutches who kept me company in the waiting room, I just had a really itchy rash...seriously, it was really itchy.  I was skeptical of the KCH before this visit, but now I am pretty sure the doctors there got their degrees online to get a discount on "Grey's Anatomy" Halloween costumes.

Finally I got to see a doctor, I showed him my side and my arm where I was covered with red bumps and he just said "Hmmmmm" and pulled out his Iphone, searched "chicken pox," and compared the Google images to my arm.  I enjoy a shirtless cell phone picture of chicken pox taken in a dimly lit bathroom as much as the next girl, but preferably not when I'm having to pay for it.  After the picture of the cartoon dog with a thermometer in his mouth passed, Dr. #1 was convinced I had chicken pox.  Until he asked me if I had been vaccinated.  I have been.  So it wasn't chicken pox.  It was shingles!  It had to be shingles!  But Dr. #1 couldn't be sure so he had to go search for another doctor.  Several minutes later Dr. #1 returned with Dr. #2.  Dr. #2 said it couldn't be shingles because I didn't have a fever (go Dr. #2!  Way to check WebMD before coming in here!).  They gave up and decided to prescribe me steroids for my mystery rash.  I got four tubes of steroid cream from that prescription.  Enough for me and my rashy elephant.  

I'm pretty sure that as soon as I stop putting on the cream, the rash will come back.  I'm probably deathly allergic to something that I'm eating on a regular basis (so gummy bears, chocolate, or goldfish).  Or from my own google image search, I learned I could actually have Psoriasis, bedbugs, Gangrene, Perioral Dermatitis, or Leprosy.  Google is so handy in self-diagnosis!  I should go pre-med.  Unless my nerves become too damaged from the Leprosy.  Or I lose my arm from Gangrene.  

This is very similar to a medical experience I had at home.  One morning I woke up and my legs were covered in small circular bruises, so obviously I went to a doctor.  She asked me if I had put anything with small circles on my legs.

..........

No.  I did not press soccer cleats into my thighs, or a bunch of upside-down tacks.  But thanks for asking.

I was then told that I had to have blood tests done because it was possible that I had Leukemia, HIV, or Lupus.  It was like an episode of "House".  Next I'll have a seizure and they'll figure out that the medicine they've been giving me is actually causing kidney failure.  Needless to say, I'm actually fine, I just occasionally have outbreaks of small bruises.  Maybe I should try steroid cream.

God I Hope I Get It

Take it from a girl who knows.  Auditioning is hard.  Rull hard.  I know you sang a cappella in high school, and had the lead in Cinderella in elementary school, and you went to all those camps for "dance" where you ran in circles and rolled on the floor, and now that you're in college it's the perfect time to re-visit those lost talents.  You were AH-MAZING back then and nothing has changed...right?  Wrong.  So wrong.

I did showchoir in high school and we sang some songs a cappella so I figured I was a shoe-in for Take 5 (because obviously I am full of soul and coming from a suburb in Oregon, have much experience in jazz).  So I signed up for my audition slot at the activities fair and prepared my verse and chorus of a song.  I chose a song from Duffy because she's white and blonde like me, and has a rockin' voice like I pretend to have when I'm driving in my car listening to Beyonce.  I showed up to the audition all smiles and rainbows and sang my song, I know I wasn't the best person they heard but to keep some of my dignity let's pretend I wasn't the worst.

But the real kicker came when they asked me to scat.  I really wanted to be in an a cappella group, so I figured, "How hard can it be?  You just 'scooby dooby' to some notes."  The piano started playing and I channeled my inner Ella Fitzgerald, started swaying to the music, really feeling it and I was ready to let out the most rich, soulful 'ba da doo' you have ever heard in your life, when I actually opened my mouth.  This was my first mistake.  I sounded less Billy Holiday and more like a chipmunk on speed.  My voice went up about seven octaves and as I tried to squeak out sounds, I realized I wasn't even with the music, let alone hitting any notes.  Well if they're going to laugh at you anyway, might as well make them laugh with you.  I began to make up my own scat-song with good old verses like "why is this music still going? A dooby dooby" and "I'm trying really hard but I don't know what I'm doing" but don't forget "I don't have any more words, I hope this stops soon scat a ramma doo"  But the music kept going!  The pianist kept playing along, probably too busy being confused as to how I ended up in his audition room to notice my look of sheer panic.  When he finally did stop, I didn't notice and had to trail off with a "Oh I guess he stopped now doo-waaaaaa"  (with jazz hands).  Needless to say, I did not make it into Take 5.  But my roommate did.

Welcome Back to Kamp!

Around this time last year I was bright faced and hopeful about what college would bring.  I was looking forward to Old Kenyon parties, meeting cute guys, and freedom.  I didn't have too many friends and the humidity made my hair poof out like this:

The hair and the lack of friends may have been linked.

Now I'm back for a second year and things are basically the same.  Except I've learned that Old Kenyon is mostly just a good place to get beer spilled on you and make out with people you didn't want to, the cute guys are all gay, and I have all the freedom I want to decide between Walmart and Kroger.  Speaking of Kroger, apparently I look like the albino who works there.  This doesn't surprise me.  I haven't met her, but if you have tell her congratulations on her wedding and that Billy thinks the price for a six-pack of Natty Light is too high.  

I thought that by my Sophomore year I would know not to bring so much random shit with me.  But this is not the case.  My broom closet single in Caples looks like an episode of Hoarders, and I think Parents' Weekend is just an excuse for my mom to come up here and stage an intervention.  It's not that I don't want to clean my room, it's just that it's a vicious circle.  I'm at the point where I can't even enter my room, I can only take a HUGE step onto my bed to sleep at night.  I'm afraid the next step is taking in all the stray cats in Gambier and learning how to knit them sweaters. 

Help.

Now I do live in Wellness so becoming a cat lady isn't too much of a jump.  I may be the only one on campus living well for all I know.  I never see my hall-mates.  Never.  Not even in the bathroom.  So I have come to this conclusion:  Either 9th floor Caples is the Twilight Zone, or no one in Wellness bathes...or needs food.  However, I know I'm not the only resident of Caples because I can usually hear the normal people having fun on the floors below me.  For the first week back here I remained pretty vague about where I lived though, and my conversations went something like this.

Random Person:  Hey!  Where are you living this year?

ME:  Oh...north.

RP:  Oh hey, me too!  Where?

ME: ...Caples.

RP:  Nice, nice.  What floor?

ME:  YouknowIhavetogofluffyneedsanewsweater...bye!

But now that I've learned that the 9th floor is 8 flights of stairs too many, I have accepted my fate as a Wellness resident and allow people in the elevator to see what button I push.  If that's not maturity, I don't know what is.