The most evil of the pond creatures

Ducks are just fuckers.

Also: geese, swans, and water-chickens

Mah Hand Hurts

As we all know, The Van is a big, green hazard on wheels.

I visited home to hang out with the BB before she left for summer camp 2010, and we ended up taking The Van to Walgreens to pick up some pictures.

Except, I haven't ridden in the back of it in a while, and I'm pretty sure BB is a little violent when she drives anyway.

And I ended up falling over, but breaking my fall with my right hand--like ya do.

Except instead of having my hand hit the floor of The Van, it hit a chunk of The Van which happened to have a screw sticking out.

So my right hand got screwed and now it's got a little hole and a smallish bruise which hurts and makes me feel nauseous when it gets touched.

Eff The Van.

/bitching :D

College Was Bumming Me Out

So that second half is gonna have to wait.

But maybe that will mean I post more, and Betsy won't be the only daily blogger, eh?


And so I give you a poem:

Choco taco crunchy delight
remnant of a childhood reward
sweeter than a cinnamon twist
and all from Taco Bell on Power Road
by the places I once went
preceded by a Nachos Bell Grande
that seems too dry now
Weren't you better before?
Or was that simply the novelty
of a chocolate ice cream taco
with the only sauce I ever wanted
more chocolate
and were there nuts on top?
or was that lettuce
I'm not sure
But choco taco,
you're like Hawaiian Shaved Ice
or Pie from Village Inn
You're a deep-rooted desire
like test tubes and brand new rocks
and all my dreams are sure to come true
if I just take a bite of you
and remember how it felt
when I held you in my little hand
as we drove away
triumphant
and bell-shaped bushes marked the path to success

We Interupt This Program For An Urgent Message

Dear Betsy's Uterus,

WTF, dude? I understand that when you get all sheddy, you get kind of grumpy. And hey, if I were losing a layer of myself I'd probably be grumpy, too. That makes sense.

BUT, maybe you should lay off Betsy a little when you're doing that. She's doing stuff, too, you know.

Be a little considerate. She does keep you warm and full of oxygen and shit.

Love,

Amanda

Sophomore Year Me

Sophomore Year Me wasn’t quite as overwhelmed by the ASU sensory overload as Freshman Year Me was.

Sophomore Year Me knew how to get around campus while avoiding at least some of the flyers and petitions and yelling religious folks.

Right before school started, Sophomore Year Me sprained my ankle because I saw a roach. SO, Sophomore

Year Me was supposed to be on crutches and in a weird, ankle bracey thing, but crutches suck. Instead of

listening to the ankle doctor, Sophomore Year Me just walked around slightly gimpy for a while, which kind of

messed up my ankle.

Totally worth it, right?

On moving day, Sophomore Year Me took all my stuff to the Cholla Apartment Dorms, which were located

approximately 5 billion miles away from campus, then crammed it in a very tiny, very slow elevator, and shoved it

all in B 201.

Betsy and Rachul did the same, and in order to celebrate our newfound roommatery we decided to munch on

some food Rachul had brought from last semester. It was Honey Bunches of Delight—the kind with delicious

granola chunks that totally doesn’t even need milk to be good, which is awesome because milk is disgusting.

The kind you just eat right out of the box, except we didn’t. We poured a bowl so that we could easily access what was going to be a crunchy, munchy, honey bunch of yum.

Except it wasn’t. It was Honey Bunches of Bullshit, because Rachul brought a box somehow turned into a cockroach graveyard.

I don’t even think there was any cereal in there anymore. It was just a bunch of crispy, crunchy, fall-aparty cockroach corpses.

As someone who sprained her ankle as a result of trying to flee from a bug earlier this summer, this did not bode

well.

I was extremely suspicious of Rachul for about a month after this incident.

Man, that bowl was the best idea anyone ever had. Ever. Fuck you, wheels and electricity or airplanes.

You never kept me from a handful of bug corpses.

Then I met Savannah. She was the person with whom I was actually sharing a room.

She seemed pretty cool at first. Kind of weird, but that’s usually a good thing. I thought I had probably got the better end of the housing deal, since she seemed pretty laid back I figured it’d be like Lisa all over again.

Have you ever been so wrong about something that you just don’t understand how you came to that assumption

in the first place?

Savannah was one of those things.

Sure, things started out innocently enough. We both liked Nightmare Before Christmas and went together to get

free smoothies at the Dutch Bros right by the dorm. We discussed ground rules for visitors and they were basically, “sure, do whatever” on both ends.

She joined a sorority and Sophomore Year Me almost joined it, too. See, Sophomore Year Me went through a

phase getting involved with something on campus seemed super important. Why a sorority sounded like the way

to do that, I can’t tell you. Probably because Savannah was in one and she didn’t seem like a typical ASU

sorority chick.

Sophomore Year Me even went
to one of the college parties she
got invited to and drank shitty
keg beer and slept on a stranger’s floor after venturing
out into a weird neighborhood
to a 7-11 for nourishment in the
middle of the night.

Well, things changed. And fast. At first Savannah made fun of the other sorority sisters because they were dumb

as hell.

Her sorority actually had one of the lowest GPAs in the school. Slowly but surely, though, she began to

assimilate. Maybe they were the Borg and the whole sorority thing was just a front.

Actually, I think she had an ocular implant and there was definitely an alcove underneath her loft bed.

She also nurtured a severe hatred for my boyfriend. Sophomore Year Me didn’t find out about this until much

later when she got really pissed and exploded, but apparently the “do whatever” rule was not working for her and

she felt Devin was around too much.

He was around a lot, but the entire fight thing probably could’ve been avoided if we had talked about it before she hated his guts. Or maybe made better rules.

Eventually, it got to the point where Devin and Sophomore Year Me had to sleep in the living room when he

came over and then she and I would have a night and day of bitchy text message fighting.

Since tensions were running high in my bedroom, Sophomore Year Me used to hang out in Betsy and Rachul’s

room a lot.

We went to a Wizard Rock Concert and made crazy YouTube videos and beat up Guitar Hero 3 bosses together.

We de-stuffed the couch cushions and used them to play as sumo wrestlers in the hallway.

The three of us would sit

around and IM each other

about the various things

Savannah did.

Was that weird?

Probably.

But it kept us entertained.

From the various frat boys that spent the night, to the mysterious wine box which then turned into the mysterious

wine bag that we ransomed, to the many arguments she had with her sorority sisters and mom, Savannah was

having a lot of issues, especially with her mom, and somehow it came down to this:

I WANT A HAMSTER! NOT A GOLDFISH!

I think maybe it was about university housing versus living in the sorority house, but whatever the case having a

hamster, and not a goldfish was some serious shit.

Later, I found out she was probably as irritable as she was because she was on really strong anti-depressants that

weren’t working pretty much at all.

I fact, I found that out because I felt it was important to inform her when I got on my anti-depressants that I might be acting crazy for a month.

See, Sophomore Year Me went bat shit crazy.

It was a pretty stressful life, afterall.

Sophomore Year Me was a full time student with a part time job who was living with a really grumpy Borg.

Sophomore Year Me couldn’t eat things that were baked in an oven unless I went elsewhere, because the crazy,

Cholla oven burned half of everything.

Sophomore Year Me couldn’t sleep very well at night because B 201 was right next to the gate leading out of the

dorm complex.

That gate had a delightful little mechanism that made it bleat like a goat that died from eating 5 fire trucks but instead of digesting the fire truck alarms, they just sat in its stomach and wailed when Sophomore Year Me was trying to sleep.

This was to let everyone know that the gate was not shut so we wouldn’t get killed and turned into skin purses by

hobos who had a need for murder and high fashion.

Except no one really cared. And if you were standing outside of the gate without a key or a Sun Card to let you in, someone would let you in or prop the damn door open so that it could bleat all night.

And bleat it did.

Sophomore Year Me had a shitty job, a creaky and kinda crappy relationship that wasn’t going very well (we

even broke up for a whole week), an angry roommate, lots of homework, a really boring oral traditions class, a

strict schedule of bussing to get to and from work and my boyfriend’s house, and all those same worries from

Freshman Year.

Except now because there were cockroaches in my cereal and scary hobos everywhere and the change machine

in the laundry room never worked and someone puked over my balcony when we got drunk and we de-stuffed

the couch cushions to sit on them better so maybe we were going to get charged for that.

And we played Guitar Hero all night so maybe Sophomore Year Me was too tired to go to class.

Or trying to figure out how having a job would change my financial aid.

Or how to find food that wasn’t McDonalds.

Or a million other things.

Yeah. Sophomore Year Me really went off the deep end.

After a mixture of crying all the time, semi-paying attention in my Religions of the World class (mostly I was

ogling Professor Matt Correa. Seriously. If you go to ASU, check that guy out. Mmmph. Also, he teaches well),

and being lectured by my family doctor on the pressures of pre-marital sex and its effect on a young person’s

sanity, I ended up here:

Citalopram 20 mg, a generic pill for depression and anxiety.

I also got a tattoo.

And let me tell you, both of those things hurt like hell for the first month I had them.

Sophomore Year Me thought I
was crazy before getting on
medication, but it was nothing
compared to that first month of
“adjusting” to the pills

Sophomore Year Me didn’t even know wtf I doing on these pills since they seemed to be making things worse.

Sophomore Year Me was nauseous and angry and a little fatter and it felt like there was a fuzzy blanket on all of

my smarts and creativity and emotions.

And Sophomore Year Me
couldn’t write. As an English
major, this was problematic.

Whenever there was an essay
due, Sophomore Year Me
would skip a few pills and then
crank out an “A,” but it was a
bitch on my moods

These pills were a pile of suck that turned into a pile of Don’t-Give-A-Fucks. But, maybe that’s what it took to

get through another crazy year of college.

All in all, it was a big, crazy bunch of crap mixed with a lot of really awesome stuff.

It was my favorite year of college.

Freshman Year Me

High School Me was full of an odd mix of angst and naivety. Freshman Year Me was full of curiosity.

Freshman Year Me wanted to know why the bus planner told her to go north, south, and west when I just wanted to go east to Mesa. I think Columbus planned my first bus trip, which ended up stranding me in Phoenix outside of a shiesty Circle K and a construction site.

Freshman Year Me wanted to know why the girl's bathroom was ten million miles away and full of urinals.

Freshman Year Me wanted to know why everything in the ASU cafeteria (Pitchforks) was secretly made of crap-nasty tofu variants.

Freshman Year Me wanted to know wtf was going on.

See, there was a lot to deal with.

Everywhere I went people were hanging me flyers, or yelling at me to buy things (from magazine subscriptions to crazy, gypsy wares), or telling me I was going to burn in hell for being a mouthy jezebel, or trying to run me down with beach cruiser bikes.

I had a real boyfriend for the first time ever, and I had to ride the scary, confusing bus full of drunk people who followed me to and from my dorm just to see him.

Ever tried spooning someone on a dorm bed? They’re not built big enough for one person, and my boyfriend is roughly the size of a wookie.

There were also some big personal problems Freshman Year Me had to deal with.

. My dad got off his medicine and had a bi-polar manic episode which meant I got lots of upsetting, raving phone calls at all hours of the day and night, and it ended up taking him to California where he crashed his car and ended up in a mental institution.

And then his dad died while he was out there, so I had to take my little brother and one of my sisters on an airplane to the funeral. Dad still wasn’t all the way better, and he actually didn’t remember us being there at all.

It was awkward and upsetting.
Balancing dorm life with classes with having a boyfriend with having a family and having friends got hectic sometimes. I used to see my best friend every weekend, but we saw each other fewer and fewer as I got more and more caught up in dealing with the new elements in my life.

But, on New Year’s Eve my best friend was raped, and I would’ve been there with her, but I was really stressed out and didn’t feel like going out to Apache Junction to hang out.
Around that time, I had a pregnancy scare, too.

which lead to my boyfriend singing me a weird song including the line, “you don’t have a baby inside of you.” This turned out to be true, but was more upsetting than not at the time.

Sure, school work wasn’t really challenging. But being an 18-year-old college student was lots of crazy shit all the time.

Instead of a delightful, easy first year of college, Freshman Year Me ended up getting all B's (and one A- in Italian) the first semester, which was sort of balanced out by all A's the second semester. But Freshman Year Me was sort of adjusting.

And it wasn’t all bad.

Freshman Roommate Lisa was pretty awesome. We decorated our dorm door with free flavored condoms we collected around campus and some cheap, brightly colored ones from the boy’s bathroom, and created a character called Trogwhore the Safe Sexinator.

Freshmen Year Me got to find out what chocolate flavored condoms taste like (as a result of blowing them up, not anything shiesty).

Freshmen Year Me also took some really interesting anthropology classes, an intro to psych class, and (with the exception of English 105) some very interesting English classes

Freshman Year Me also played dress up a lot and had Betsy in most of my classes, and got to meet Rachul. Plus, my best friend back home and family were there on the weekends. And, my boyfriend was really great about all the crying I did, and at cheering me up.

Then came Sophomore Year Me.