Whine Tasting

While I'm still at it, this is a column I wrote that appeared in this week's Issue of The Advocate (MSUM's campus newspaper)


I think we can all relate to the fact that over the course of a semester, vocally being annoyed becomes increasingly easy.

There’s the Facebook-induced whining. “I just spent nine hours on Facebook and I have a test to study for!” Or whining because Facebook has turned you into a creeper, or the famous, whining because someone doesn’t have Facebook.

Or of course, the obligatory academic whining, like about the class with course objectives clearly stating, “will make student want to injure self and others.” Or the ever-present “My professor must get sick pleasure from this.”

Another favorite is campus-related whining. Personally, picking up litter causes angry muttering to bubble up from the depths of my being. Or the “There’s nobody in the Wellness Center!” As opposed to, “The Wellness Center is packed!”

It’s not hard to complain about insensitive people in the library and computer lab. “Do those guys really need to be breathing so loud/playing that game that involves laser noises and assault rifles on FULL VOLUME!? “ My favorite though is the dude having the apparently hilarious online conversation.

I was in the lab really late one night, hating my life and writing 17 papers simultaneously. The girl next to me was playing Internet pinochle. For some unexplainable reason, it made me so angry that I was worried for her life.

This leads me to other complaining I’m personally guilty of, or rather, just general things I tend to complain about: Paula Abdul, wallowing in my own clutter, restaurant forks whose tines don’t line up, when people pronounce my last name wrong on purpose (it’s love-ah-chee-uh), expiration dates, when you’re passing a car on the interstate and the driver looks over at you. Etc. etc.

Although the frequency of whining is pretty intense right now, no worries, it will soon morph into a whole other animal – being bored over the summer.

Reasoned like a true English Major.

Sometimes I disappoint myself. I hope I am not alone in this. I acknowledge that I'm probably not. Alone, that is...in disappointing myself.

After maybe the initial 1/8 of the semester sneaks past, my ambition and optimism sneak away into the popcorn of my bedroom ceiling. It never fails. (I don't either, which I always half-way expect slash think if I did I would go catatonic if ever my seeming laziness amounted to the dreaded 6th letter of the alphabet.)

So lately, I've been overwhelmingly dragged/sucked into that familiar downward spiral which seems to culminate in tears, self-loathing, yelling, and hair loss/other severe stress-related afflictions.

Deja Vu, right?

But to place myself as the object of the sentence above ("So lately..."), implies that I am a victim in a situation or have no way of impacting my lowly circumstances. This is simply farce. Although I can visualize myself as the innocent college student being plagued by that awfully mean procrastination (picture that word embodied in a silent movie, Charlie Chaplan-esque bad-guy-who-ties-the-pretty-woman-to-the-railroad-tracks-and-giggles-silently-while-frantically dramatic-piano-trills-are-heard) which can materialize in any number of enjoyable distractions (kind of like Satan?), it is ESSENTIAL that I remember I am not an object here (of a sentence). I'm the SUBJECT; I'M THE VERB. Translation: it's all on me, baby.

So after a particularly horrible week, today I have started over. I will consciously make positive decisions. I will blog every day, if even just tossing a new-found, appreciated word. I'm in the process of cleaning my room at 4:16 in the morning because it's at the top of my "things I've been not doing for eons" to-do list.

To be promptly followed by emptying the dishwasher, scrubbing the mascara off of my bathroom mirror, and writing a letter to my grandma.


Synecdoche (sin-eck-duh-key) n.
when one uses a part to represent the whole (literary term)

Example: mouths to feed, or a set of wheels

Restless on the homefront

Tomorrow I will have been here for a week already. I miss my apartment with its moderately bare walls and large emptily awkward spaces, its nine different kinds of cereal, its inconspicuous amount of t.v. channels, and large bathroom mirror desperately in need of a streak-free wipe-down. I've been banished from the place I speak of, banished to my parents' home which is not actually (despite a good number of arguments from my mother) my home. And I'm not allowed back yet.

It's been lovely spending time with my baby sister (who's almost 16 and itching to purchase her first prom dress) and having spare hours for things like eating food I didn't buy, getting oil changes I'm not paying for, wearing a new pair of jeans that didn't come out of my pocket (no puns here), and maybe best of all, having those phone conversations with my boy.

You know, the achingly ridiculous "I miss you so much!" phone conversations. And when he calls after a drunken late night of risk which he lost (seeming to prove an incapability for dominating the world) even a "You're my princess, you know." As much as I really do dislike this time away, I also am hesitant to admit that I cherish times like this. Being that we live in the same city the majority of the time, getting to miss someone and feel excited about seeing him again is a thrill.

Other time-occupying activities I've participated in on my seemingly unnecessary week off of school are drinking the taste-bud-tinglingly endorphin-releasing Sunkist (carbonated lemonade = drink of the Gods), putting off posting facebook albums (among other things I've been putting off), making itunes playlists, and reading a wonderful book called "Beloved" written by Toni Morrison.

The main character, a slave named Sethe (Seth-uh), ran away to Ohio with her four children. When the master comes to retreive them, she kills her baby to save it from a life of slavery and is about to kill the others when she's stopped. Twenty years later when the book takes place, the baby is still haunting Sethe's house.

So I give the plot of the book a B, but if asked to describe the actual writing style of the novel I'd say it's - fricken beautiful.

Some random snip-its:

"Not only did she have to live out her years in a house palsied by the baby's fury at having its throat cut , but those ten minutes she spent pressed up against dawn-colored stone studded with star chips, her knees wide open as the grave, ( she had sex with the headstone engraver for seven letters - Beloved) were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil."

"Denver stood on the bottom step and was suddenly hot and shy. It had been a long time since anybody sat at their table, sympathetic voices called liar by the revulsion in their eyes."

"They sang it out and beat it up, garbling the words so they could not be understood; tricking the words so that their syllables yeilded up other meanings."

Sadly however, "read enjoyable literature" is the only homeworkly task I can cross off the list. Come tomorrow, my head will finish forgetting what the point of school is. Sunday's my day to remember.


micawber n.
one who is poor but lives in optimistic expectation of a better fortune