Pirates of the world, UNITE!

Funny story: we all know the guys who lived in this house before me were jerks, this much we know is true. Last Spring they stole the fraternity letters from campus and stashed them in the backyard, where they also stashed any dirty dishes they didn't want to clean. This wouldn't have been so ironic (the letters have all been stolen and vandalized before), except that last year... I MADE the TKE letters. Funny I should move into the house previously occupied by the losers who still my handiwork. (note: I didn't make them alone, TKE paid for them, Tim Jr. cut the wood and Nate and Mikey helped me paint.)

Well, last year when I lived on Merrick Street, I, thrower of great parties (it's true), asked Sarah if I could fly her pirate flag on our fifty foot flag pole (instead of the Texas flag) as a banner to the awesomeness of our fiesta.

Within three days, the pirate flag was gone, charmingly replaced... with a sock. Zack's forensic sleuthing determined that the sock was of male orient, previously owned by someone with cats.

Ah, the plot thickens.

This morning when the girls dragged the big trashcan to the curb, what did they find? Sarah's much abused pirate flag daggling out of the trash can. Not only were these guys so awesome that they stole the TKE letters and our pirate flag, they're so awesome that they didn't take out their own trash for more than A YEAR. I wonder if they realize that the dilution in their gene pools will have their genetic lines wiped out within two generations. And the masses cheered.

FYI: They live on Robinson street now. Hide your lawn ornements.

I got friends in low places...

Want an interesting experience? Go back and read your boyfriend/girlfriends yearbooks, especially their pre-highschool yearbooks. It's amazing how people stay the same. Tim's favorite food, as far as I can tell, is still pizza. He was voted most kind, most likely to become president of the united states and basketball allstar (though this may have had something to do with the fact that he was 8-feet tall in fifth grade). His favorite song was "I've Got Friends in Low Places," which explains the loud-singing, dancing spectical from Trina's wedding when the song came on. He predicted that at 25, he would be living on the moon. To him, being a grown up meant finishing college.

I find all of this enthralling, I suppose, because I've read my own fifth-grade year book so many times. I thought that at 25 I'd be living in a studio apartment, selling paintings, probably of myself. I too was 8 feet tall (okay, 5'2"), voted most artistic. In sixth grade I got "The Bohemian Award," probably for creative misbehaviour more than anything. Though this may be because I tried to get my P.E. teacher fired. This really has nothing to do with what's going on in my life at this point, I suppose, except one thing:

Ever since I got to college I always heard this little voice that said: "You don't do things this way... why are you changing?" It was as though I could actually feel my thought process changing. Yesterday I woke up and I realized I don't hear that voice anymore. That's the one thing.

Walking across campus I noticed that, while it used to be common, I no longer point out in what ways Centenary, or Shreveport, is different from home (colorado!). I don't ask questions about it anymore... I just love it. In the sappiest, grossest, wettest kisses sort of way... I sort of just plummeted into Centenary and I couldn't possible love it more.

In "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" the narrator says that it's not the things that are easy, or habitual, those things are moot, it's the things which are only come by after a series of fortuities. Evergreen lost my FAFSA, I went to Centenary, where I didn't want to go because of the proliferation of Greeks on Campus. My best friends turn out to be TKEs, one of whom is a kid (tim) who had no intention of joining a fraternity. I thought he was a republican. He thought I hated him. Now, no thanks to myfifth-grade predictions (thanks a lot fifth grade), entirely due to a string of fortuities (Whooooo! Fortuities!), I'm here.

And we're having a party on Tuesday. And if you read this live journal (still) even after all that exciting france stuff is done... you're invited. Consider this your invitaton. Bring an Hors D'ouvre (i.e. a tiny food).

If all this seems a bit too deep to you: Chris Comeaux has the thought process of a sandwich, wherein he likes penguins. Though if penguins could speak they would say they loved sandwiches.

And

Everytime an Education Major comes in to the bookstore I try to picture them as my teacher and imagine which subjects they want to teach to which grades. None of them look like my P.E. Teacher.

The barefoot Bride's Maid

Between then (see below) and now (see right here), there's been one marriage, four states, two houses and a bookstore's worth of "what's up?"

Before you get excited and start looking through your old mail for a bypassed invitation, the marriage wasn't mine, and I didn't catch the bouquet. I'll leave that for the excitable folks. Rather, my best friend and adopted sister, formerly known as Trina the Bunny, is now one "Mrs. Hobbs." And despite much pre-ceremony calamity and skinny dipping, the wedding was the blast of blasts. Having pretty much already discussed her life plans with God, Trina wanted to focus not-so-much on one of those long, tedious, tear-jerking ceremonies, and went straight for the "pretty decorations, lots o' love, and a big, sexy party" philosophy.

I'm relatively certain that in the four days preceeding 4:00 p.m. on August 8th, everyone was just hoping the tents wouldn't fall over, simultaniously crushing the pastor and the cake, or some other equally horrible mishap, but then we bride's maids saw that Trina was more stunning than she has probably ever looked in her entire life, not because of the hair and the dress, but because she was so utterly overjoyed. The general expression of "meh, we're totally fine" that followed was the relief of a lifetime.

And then we got in the car and drove to Shreveport. Anti-climactic, yes? Not too much so. In all honestly, living in one's own house, within walking distance of one's own friends, at a school like Centenary... well, that might as well be the new American Dream.

Moving in was a disaster, finding enough money to pay the bills is a distaster, modifying schedules is a disaster, praying that I won't destroy the college newspaper beyond belief is a disaster, the bookstore (in all its disoriented glory) is its own disaster of biblical proportions... but in all honesty, I'd rather be here than anywhere else on earth right now.

We're having a Tiny Foods Party; you should come.

Mita: The Angry Squirrel

I like it when lots of things are going on, but nothing's happening. For example: we went horseback-riding Friday, but we're not being audited, or some other such tomfoolery. The human condition is such that people always have some stupid thing on their minds... but I don't really. It's neat. I feel like I'm defying convention.

I'm glad Tim's got nerve. Riding my family's horses can be a practice in monk-like, Zen self-centering techniques because they like to do things like scraping you off on bushes, kicking fenceposts and stopping, mid-canter, to pee (the horses, that is, not my family). Tim did amazingly well for someone who's never ridden a horse past a walking pace, which is to say he didn't freak out and he didn't fall off. And even though my cousin Amanda got stung on the forehead by a wasp, and my saddle nearly slipped off sideways... it was a great ride that ended without any major catastrophies. I also got a free spaghetti dinner, and my cousins and I picked gooseberries for the first time since Amber and I were wee.

Yesterday went much the same way... a whole of doin' stuff but nothing really happening. The Hotchkiss pool (where Trina was a lifeguard for a million and a half years) was as exciting as ever. My cousin Sam, who is the only little kid I ever babysat (because he's the only little kid I never wanted to throttle) is eleven years old. That means I'm like 80 and need to retire. I'm glad that my cousins are finally old enough to swim because I can do cool things like throwing them across the pool and swimming along the bottom while they sit on my back. I like not having to worry about accidently killing people I love.

Gooseberry Pie

3 Cups Black Gooseberries (Grandma's rolling over right now, she always used green ones)
1 Cup Sour Cream
1 Heaping Cup Sugar
3 Tbsp Flour
pinch salt

Combine, place in nine-inch pie crust and cover with second crust. Cut slits to ventilate and place in 350 degree oven for about one hour. Voila.

We Don't Need No Water

This has been a week of heat. Thursday night the mesa caught on fire. Tim had never seen a forest fire before (oh, you city folk)... and so, along with the rest of the sleepy hamlet known as Crawford, we went down to the lake to see whose house was burning down. Fortunately, no one's house was burning down (despite rumors) but Jed was still out there "whacking" the fire with a shovel until well after nightfall. Crawford isn't large enough to have a proper fire station so they depend on Volunteer Firefighters to put out the fires in the Valley. Everything from field-burns gone awry, kids starting fires out of boredom, lightening strikes, concentrated heat from the sun on broken glass/in car mirrors, to exploding meth-labs (or meth-lab cover-ups). Not that Jed is even a volunteer firefighter; like a number of people, he wasn't there in a fancy helmet-- just average people in shorts and sandals, trying to fight the fire and not get arrested by the cops for doing so.

All of this explains Crawford pretty well. Talk about an interesting mixture of regular ranchers, a youth population challenged only by the sheer lack of anything to do, and a serious case of nature having its own way with a place.
The best reason to live in a small town (besides the sudden appearance of a couple thousand more visible stars) is that everyone makes there own rules, firefighting protocol be-damned.

Saturday was our annual Crawdad party (yes, Louisianians, crawdads. Deal with it). Every year we go to the lake and sit under the full moon, with a string in the muddy water, like idiots, just to catch a cooler full of Crawdads. They're disgusting, they make wierd noises, and do this thing we call "the moon dance:" coming almost to the edge of the water and waving their claws in the air... Still, every year we catch them at the dam and the next day we party. This year was not only our first year in a new house, but Tim's first year of the explain-your-life-plans ritual while the little kids "organized" (read: destroyed) a bunch of stuff in the barn. I made my margaritas, which everyone underestimated (as usual) and my Grandpa told me that all I need to know in life is this:

The world will end when the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

I'm not sure who said it first, but I can tell you who said it last.

My senior year of highschool we raised funds all year for our senior trip and then spent the last month of school convincing people it wouldn't be that cool. Our logic was that if fewer people came, the people who did go would have more money to spend per person. I'm convinced we could have wittled the list down to myself and my two best friends and gone to Vegas, but we were too young to get into the casinos at the time anyway. Instead we went to Arches National Park outside of Moab, Utah, where I fell in love with the Mormon State. I haven't been back since then, until yesterday.
The park is full of places with names like "the Devil's Garden" and "the Fiery Furnace" because, in all honesty, if it wasn't so strangely beautiful, you could imagine that this is what the nicer parts of hell might look like. Even though Edward Abbey might roll in his grave every time someone opts for the "scenic drive," the park is still marvelously lax on safety measures (one trail goes along a six-foot wide rock fin with a thirty-foot drop on one side), and that should make a mountainier proud.

The rock formations are absolutely beyond words (unless you've ever seen that episode of Star Trek where Captain Kirk gets stranded on a desert planet).

That brings us to today, wherein I sat around and did nothing. If anyone can tell me where Trina is, I'd be much obliged. I hear tell she gets married in two weeks and I haven't seen hide nor hair of her yet. Maybe that has something to do with the whole "making of one's own rules" thing.

Tanya and her damn insects.

Look. Look at this. This is what happens when my auntie gets a new camera and plays with it around the yard.




Am I jealous of her photographic abilities? Yes.

Listen, for those of you who plan to be born into a family of geniuses, prepair yourself for a lifetime of never getting to sit down and relax or else your own genius (and I am a genius, I must confess) will be outdone by your aunts/cousins/parents.

How am I supposed to be a prodigy when this is what I have to deal with?

Conversation Starters

Going home after such a ridiculously long time is an exercise in re-adjustment, like readjusting to free public toilets.

for Instance, I had forgotten that my mom's boyfriend (who shall henceforth be refered to as "Jed," because that is his name) greatly disapproves of small talk, instead opting for such conversation starters as:

"What was that one about the diaper?" (To my mom, instead of "hello.")
"All you gotta do is give that sucker a shove and we can roll it across the road!" (Trying to recruit Tim and me into acts of hay-bale vandalism)
"Just eat some horny-goat-weed, Bob, and get it over with." (Commenting on a TV commercial)

and my favorite recent conversation:

Jed (out of nowhere): "I just wanted to look at the freakin' toys but the clowns kept harrasing me?"
Mom: "What?"
Jed: "Oh, I was going into the toystore and they wouldn't let me get past unless I put on this freakin' balloon hat."
Mom: "Well did you?"
Jed: "Well, yeah."
Mom: "So where's the balloon hat?"
Jed: "It popped. So now I'm a dollar short and all these freakin' kids are looking at me like I'm the crazy man. (Makes a crazy face) 'Check me out, man!'"
Mom: "You paid the clowns a dollar for a balloon hat?"
Jed: "Well, yeah... everyone can tell I'm a pushover"

This, this, is why I love coming home.

Another example of Jed's brilliance is the natural progression of our pet names. For instance, our dog, Dixie, AKA "Silly Smells," watch:

Dixie
Dixie Loo
(or Stiffy Loo, or Whackin' Loo)
Loo Loo Belle
Looley Belle
Wooley Belle
(or Whackin' Belle)
Silly Smells

I know it's a bit of a leap from "Wooley Belle" to "Silly Smells," but it fits. Our dog is a melange of silly smells.

In short, anything I learned about French in France is dwarfed by what I learn about the English Language in my own household.

"You buy 'em books and buy 'em books,

you buy 'em a mule to ride to school

and what do they do?

Stand on the books and eat the teacher."

-Jed Hart