Ramblings of an Awkward Turtle

Summer, you selfish tease, you’re finally here. It’s about time. Summer break is a funny thing for me. It’s fantastic because for 3.5 months I don’t have to hate myself and live my life around biology. Unfortunately, this freedom comes at a price—the high price of going from a social campus to isolation out in the middle of nowhere. Actually, it’s about 2 hours northwest of there, but now I’m just getting nit-picky.

Being out in the middle of nowhere would bring a calming sense of peace to most people. Of course I must find the complete and utter opposite. I generally don’t find myself to be a paranoid person, but if I’m ever home alone during breaks I give Jack Torrence a run for his money. I probably wouldn’t be so bad if I had siblings or if my mom wasn’t crazy-overprotective. But hey, you get what you get and I got an over the top survival system.

There’s not a lot of traffic on the dirt path we nickname a road, so if a vehicle takes more than 5 seconds going past my house (most people barrel down my road at 112 mph), they’re obviously staking out, trying to find out the best time to strike. Any small noise out of the ordinary and I’m convinced there’s a murderer on my property. I once convinced myself that I heard footsteps when I was in my basement, so I hid in the closet for an hour. I generally avoid the basement when I’m home alone because everyone knows basements are where murderers live. It’s ridiculous, but if I was ever in a horror movie, I’d live. Suck it all you “courageous” ones who go to investigate the noise and die.

Thanks to my yippie little dog, I have a state of the art security detection system. It works as follows: when she’s cool, I’m cool. However, because she’s a yippie little dog, she often has technical difficulties—such as going ballistic over a butterfly. Yeah, that’s happened. Household security isn’t always her main priority. She also likes to spend most of her time sleeping or treeing squirrels. There’s still a few kinks to work out.

If this is what I’m like living at home with my parents, I hate to see what I’ll be like on my own. Obviously, I’ll never be able to live alone. I can imagine my future roommate coming home to finding me in the fetal position in a corner because the air conditioner made a scary noise. Then again, I get like that at the sight of a spider so future roommates are in for a whole lot of fun. Even more fun for future husband, looking at you, Ryan Gosling.

I’ve really got to get a hobby or a job or something. Since home, all I’ve effectively done is sell my soul to Netflix and lay outside attempting to stop blending in with snow. One heck of an exciting way to spend my summer. Knowing my life though, this is just a fake-out and something ridiculous is soon coming.

I have a knack for having emotionally unavaliable guys fall for me, do nothing other than flop around and piss me off, then to come back crying how they miss me and cry about their problems and piss me off some more. Warning to future suitors: attempt to pull this and no guarantees that I won’t slug you for it.

Story Graph of my life.

(via justincalpin)

It’s becoming apparent that it’s a miracle I make friends. Normally, I’m a social butterfly. I can make small talk well enough to avoid uncomfortable silences. I’m pleasant and inviting. Rarely is there a time in a conversation where I’m not smiling. Today, however, I was more like a social moth.

Today was just an average day. I was leaving my dorm, making my way off to class. I came up to this guy I’d seen around my hall before but have never actually spoken to. He’s got dark hair, the right amount of stubble, and piercing blue eyes and to top it off, this day he was wearing an adorable little fuzzy aviator hat. The hat and the snow made for a picturesque scene that you’d see in a clothing catalog. So of course with him looking like a winter model and not wanting to run into him since I am a grade A klutz, I l looked at him. Our eyes met and to my surprise, he said, “Hey,” with a slight smile. Naturally, my response was to smile back and inaudibly say, “Hi.” After he was about ten steps away from me, I realized that no sound came out of my mouth. Nothing. Seriously? 

It’s pretty impressive how I can completely blow one of the most basic social interactions. I know I have my awkward moments, but good grief this one is a record for me. I’ll play it off on being a mix of stress from finals, running on 6 hours of sleep, and that it was freaking cold when I went outside. At least it’s a funny story and now my roommate Marissa won’t stop mouthing “hi” at me when she sees me.

• Joey: Besides myself, there will only be two other guys there tonight and there's 27 people going haha
• Me: Haha, well that sounds not bad
• This is part of a conversation I had on Facebook chat while holding another conversation with a person face to face. This was the best response I could muster at the time. My line is best read slowly, in parts. Seriously, how do I make friends?

I just have a general hate for Thursdays. People who hate Mondays have it all wrong. Mondays are pleasant. Thursdays have it out for you.

Thursdays mean getting up two hours earlier than I normally have to, to go to a class that is three hours long. Thursdays mean having to deal with Boy-thing’s obnoxious face since we have class together. Worst of all, Thursdays mean the most awkward bathroom situation to ever exist. I feel I should explain that our bathroom consists of two rooms: the main room which our two rooms attach to that contains the sinks, then a room for the toilet and shower, referred to as the main room and bathroom respectively.

I’m pretty sure it’s my suitemate’s goal in life to make me feel as uncomfortable as possible when in the main room together. We have this unspoken rule about not speaking in the morning. It’s quite paradoxical.

She insists on wearing a towel as she gets ready in the morning. This is a totally normal behavior. What’s not normal is holding the towel and adjusting it with one hand while you blow dry your hair. I’m no prude, but at 7 AM I seriously don’t care for a reenactment of Janet Jackson at the Super Bowl. With every change of grip, I wince at the possibility. I could look past this if it wasn’t for the fact that there is a perfectly good bathrobe on the door—her bathrobe.

This robe is the bane of my existence. It’s always keeping me from being able to use the bathroom and it’s always there but never used. Actually, I take that back. The one time it was used, it was worn like an evil dress-snuggie hybrid. The top of it was around her chest, with the arms used to tie it around her. I have no remote clue as to why you would ever want to wear a robe in such a way, other than she realized that the whole towel hair-drying situation wasn’t awkward enough.

When I first wake up, there’s nothing I want more than to pee and world peace, in that order. World peace can only be accomplished with an empty bladder. When I come in to use the bathroom and I see that bathrobe on the door, world peace is the very opposite of what I want. At that point, I just want to morph into Godzilla and stomp around and breathe fire until the robe goes away. Why put the robe on the bathroom door? I wasn’t aware our bathroom door needed a doorstop. I would think that the robe would be much more useful if you wear it.

So instead of utilizing her bathrobe for its intended purpose, she’d rather make some kind of rebellious statement about it. Cool, I can respect that. We all have our causes and hers is something related to bathrobes. Alright. All I ask is that if you’re going to make me feel as uncomfortable as you possibly can, can you at least make it quick? Nope. She’s going to try to adjust herself in that towel—or backwards robe—as long as she possibly can. I’m pretty sure that if it takes over 20 minutes to blow-dry shoulder length hair, it’s time to invest in a different hair dryer or a class on how to blow-dry your hair efficiently.

Once again, the intelligent thing to do would be to verbally discuss these issues with my suitemate and resolve them. However, due to our amazing communication, that’s not going to happen. Until I figure out a way to make a post-it note eloquently say, “Please learn how to use your bathrobe and drier, thank you,” I’ll just stick to avoiding the bathroom as long as she’s in it.

I haven’t posted anything in over a week and I just wanted to let you guys know I’m still alive and my life is still awkward. Yay. I had Thanksgiving break all last week and I did nothing other than sleep, shop, and play video games. It was glorious. Unfortunately, I didn’t work on my posts—much. 

I did manage to get a little done, so I hope to get two posted in the next week. I may disappear again after that because I’ll be in finals mode. After that, I’ll have three weeks off and I promise I won’t be so lazy this break.

College has redefined everything I thought about hygiene. 

At first, I thought sharing a bathroom with five other girls was going to be a nightmare due to how many generations of may flies that could experience the circle of life while a girl gets ready. I know first hand. I’m guilty of even my speediest showers being at least 20 minutes. Going from my house where I had to fight only my mother for the shower, dorm living seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. However, much to my surprise, the only issues we’ve ran into time wise is the elegant “I’m about to pee my pants, HURRY YOUR ASS” dance performed while someone had the shower occupied.

If I had to choose between being in a room with Freddy Kruger and being in a room with our toilet, I would actually have to pause and give great consideration to both possibilities. On a usual given day, our toilet would appear to be made of speckled marble. It’s not. I’ll let you pause to gag now. I have no clue how our toilet gets so ridiculously gross, especially in places where you wouldn’t normally have to worry about getting dirty. Have you ever seen the back part of the toilet that sits on the floor have debris on it? Me either, until this year. I’m still flabbergasted as to how that happened—twice. Most guys’ toilets would put ours to shame. Heck, most port-o-potties would put ours to shame.

It’s pretty shocking how much hair six girls can leave in a bathroom.  I’ve been the brave soul who decided to take one for the team and try to tame what we dubbed, “The Hair Monster”. Initially, this endeavor would be made easily known by the loud heaving noises. After living in a dorm for two months now, I have a complete tolerance for hair. This unsettling discovery was made when I was eating dinner with my mother (the infamous dinner of CHAMPIONS) and I found a small hair in my burger. My mother freaked. She was about ready to take my burger to the counter and demand a fresh, untainted one. I merely shrugged, plucked out the hair nonchalantly, and resumed eating. What has college done to me?! On the plus side, I can clean hair out of drain without even batting an eye. 

Why does it get so bad? My roommates and I, granted, are not anal neat freaks. Sure, Marissa has her occasional cleaning spree when she makes our room shine brighter than Snow White ever could, but we still generally keep above liveable conditions. When we make messes, we clean them. Simple as that. Our suitemates, however, don’t always follow the same code and apparently, they have a much greater tolerance for filth than we do.

Our suitemates rarely take it upon themselves to clean the bathroom. Usually Marissa does it because otherwise it’ll reach a point that will send her into a germaphobic panic just by stepping foot near it. Madison and I will contribute to the cleaning effort as well, but effectively it’s just our room that cleans it. After noticing this, we decided to have an experiment. Since it’s always us that takes out that nearly overflowing trash, we wanted to see how bad the trash could get before our suitemates would take the trash out. Our results were appalling. The trash had piled a good half a foot above the can when we took it out.

So how do you talk to your suitemates about the messes they leave in the bathroom? Well, probably the best way would be face to face. However, our communication with our suitemates is just about is good as their cleaning habits. So for now, we’ll stick to post-it notes with smiley faces. Smiley faces make everything less offensive.

That awkward moment when Madison barges into the bathroom freaking because we just got friend requests.

How suave of him to wait 24 hours before requesting. We’ll see what comes of this.

That awkward moment when you and your roommate are getting hit on by a guy and she thinks he’s a complete creeper but you think he’s good looking and funny.

So it’s apparent that Madison and I have completely different tastes in guys. Rarely do we ever agree on whether or not a guy is attractive, let alone his attractiveness level. She has a thing for Asian guys, I like guys with beards. Given this, there’s no surprise that we had two totally different takes on our dinner one night.

We had planned on just picking up some food from the SUB and taking it back to our dorm. On our way out, I saw a guy that lives in our dorm sitting at a table with another guy and politely nodded at him. He waved and said hello. His charismatic friend attempted to start conversation with us from 15 feet away, then asked us to join them for dinner. I thought, why not? It could be more exciting than just eating dinner and watching Sex and the City.

This guy you could tell already is quite full of himself. He’s got Prince of Persia hair, so I’ll give him that right. He was very social, engaging us in conversation before we even sat down. He asked us about our majors, talked about his. He had a tremendous amount of energy, which I’m guessing is from the ego boost of having two girls come and join him for dinner. With this ego boost comes flirting—lots and lots of cringe worthy flirty.

His flirting was unbelievably blunt and cheesy. Pretty much every other sentence there was some quick line inserted. At first, I just smiled and thought, Hahaha, oh my goodness, you did not just say that. It was ridiculously entertaining. There was even an attempt at Madison along the lines of, “Oh yeah, you with the pretty hair, the gold nails, and the cute earrings?” Seriously, I couldn’t keep a straight face at this point. It doesn’t help that he made direct eye contact with us the entire time. It was all I could do the entire conversation to not burst out laughing, but this was too much. Between his lines and the look of pure horror and oh my god, please make this stop on Madison’s face, I lost it. Even as we were leaving the SUB, he fished for compliments on his looks and his hair.

I mean, I’ve got to give this guy credit. He’s got two girls with their attention on him and he just goes for it fearlessly like he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to the world. Even when we laugh and it has to be painfully obvious how bad the flirting is, he keeps the lines coming. I rather admire that. Most people, myself included are too concerned with what will happen if we let our guards down and actually go for what and who we want. Granted, Madison fails to see his admirability. He is very much still a creeper in her eyes and after finding out later that he was trying to play a make-shift game of footsies with her, I respect her opinion. I’m not 100% convinced he’s a creeper, but I understand her general discomfort. Lesson of the night: say yes to life. It might not lead to dramatic changes instantly, but you might get a good chuckle over a pb & j. 

Am I going to fall head over heels for this guy and dream about our future together? Oh no. That’s absurd. Am I going to have a good laugh for at least a week about how shameless his flirting was and how Madison could barely keep a straight face? You betcha.