This delightful, delicious, de-lovely month of January for the year 2002 begins at the bottom of the page, so make your way down there for all of the sapid details.
January 17th, 2002: A few things that have happened lately:
1) My T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing poli sci professor opened up our second class by asking, "How many of you actually thought I would wear a suit every day?" Please refer to line 2 of January 8th, 2002.
2) Since I wrote a paper on tearooms last quarter for my sociology class, I now think that all bathroom activity is homosexual, that there would be much more going on if I wasn't there. Every time a girl coughs or washes her hands, I think, "Was that an invitation for sex?!" Geez.
3) The misuse of the phrase mental facilities is really driving me insane. What these poor souls mean is always mental faculties, but they just plow right through that second word without a thought. I hate that.
4) It sucks being an English major. All I've ever wanted is a man who is a better writer than me, has read triple the amount of books that I have, and has a better vocabulary than I do yet still doesn't try to make me feel like an idiot when we're conversing. This is impossible to find in the "real" world, but as soon as I became an English major, BOOM! Thousands of them swarm around me. But they're all gay. Every last one of them. I can't handle having any more male friends who would rather discuss with me than sleep with me, I swear.
5) It's amazing being an English major. A guy in one of my classes used the word rumination colloquially with me today. I love that. Also, in my English class a couple of days ago, the girl next to me gave a 15-minute discourse on how the term teenager came to be while we were discussing Mary Shelley and the fact that she wrote Frankenstein at such a young age. When she was finished and everyone in the class was asleep except me, I passed her a note that said, "You're a wealth of knowledge!" and put a little smiley face next to it. She smiled a shy, little smile and whispered, "Thanks!" I'm such a competitive fool that I usually set my sights on destroying girls who know more than me, but I actually found myself appreciating the fact that she knows so much about something that I know so little about. Hooray for growing up.
January 12th, 2002: I think that Chicago Mike purposely acts like an absolute ass and then changes his ways right before he leaves for college again just so that I'll remember why I love him so dearly and long wildly for his return home. His leaving this time was different than most, though, because my attitude toward him has changed a lot over the course of the last month. I think that his telling me that he could never marry me due to my melodramaticism really put me in my place. It's not like I didn't know that he felt that way, but hearing him say it to my face was a major blow. In a good way, though. Things are just really different now. It's so appropriate for my life that they would get so good right as he's leaving, but at least I'll spend the next months thinking about him in a good light.
See, yesterday afternoon, Mike called around 1 PM, just as I was getting up and considering going to my only class of the day, and then he came up to campus to hang out at around 4 PM. Things were as they always are - him meeting and making fun of my various friends and roommates and sorting through my MP3s and looking through any random Spins and Rolling Stones that I had sitting around, while I told him stories about school and life. Except that he made it aware that he was more than half-listening to me as he flipped through my magazines, and it was I, not him, who had to make fun of some of the songs found in my MP3 folder. He talked to Josh Rea for a moment online, and then we called Jonathan to see what the plan was for the night. Mike drove Jonathan, Jon's friend Regan, and me to Chipotle, where Jonathan pronounced fajita incorrectly so that it sounded a bit like vagina and then exclaimed things like, "Mmm. Chewy fagita." We then drove to the Lennox to see The Royal Tenenbaums, where we got behind a minivan with a license plate that said FUTURS. We began pronouncing it like food-er and mocking the owners of it for no reason at all, and then it stopped in front of the theatre to drop off someone inside, causing us to have to wait. A woman at the stop sign perpendicular to us thought that she had time to go through her stop sign, but Mike had to stop to avoid hitting her, so I shook my fist at her while Mike said, "You know whose fault that was," and muttered, "Fuckin' FUTURS," under his breath. I was amused by this and repeated it louder, whereupon it became Jonathan's running joke for the rest of the night. The movie was grand, though we had to sit in the third row back due to the extensive crowd and the fact that we arrived in the midst of the previews. I think I could make movies. Really. I think I could make really good movies, in fact. Or at least movies like The Royal Tenenbaums, movies that people either love or hate, depending on whether or not they like eccentric, plot-less, character-develop-y movies with lots of random weird happenings. And really, if people don't like those kinds of movies, I don't want them to like my movies.
When that was over and many trips to the bathroom had been made, we headed toward Jonathan's house with a small stop at Tim Horton's for some Iced Cappuccino. While we were waiting in the extensive drive-thru line, Mike whipped out his parents' cell phone to give his new woman a call. It's the oddest thing in the world for me to imagine Mike actually thinking about another girl when he's with me, let alone call her. So, the rest of us discussed relations between India and Pakistan while Mike relayed the happenings of the evening to the woman, and then we ended up on Jonathan's couch, watching Ghost in the Shell, what is supposedly the second-best Anime film ever. And while I'm fairly interested in what happens at the end, it was less-than-action-filled, so after I filed my nails for an hour and Jonathan and Mike pretended that they could see up my skirt, we turned off the movie and flipped to Scary Movie, which I would definitely say is the worst movie I've ever seen if I hadn't seen My Own Private Idaho. Nonetheless, we watched that for a half an hour or so until I asked Mike to take me home so I could get some rest before work today. So, we hugged good-bye, and he told me that he would see me in several months, and it was over.
Until today, when Mike and his new woman came to my science museum for a visit with Mike's sister and her husband. He and Jessica came meandering up to the desk I was at and asked what movie they should see, so I gave them some pointers and asked them some questions about their day. It kind of hurt me that I was okay with Mike having the beginnings of a girlfriend. Really, if I don't have Mike to obsess over, what do I have? But I was actually seriously happy that he had her and that she was pleasant and cute (despite her bad teeth). I actually encouraged him not to come home during Spring Break and instead go somewhere with his Chicago friends. So, I guess what I'm saying is that I might have grown up somewhere along the way. That's a pretty okay feeling. And now I have several months to begin to hate Mike again for not calling me and not writing to me and forgetting important dates in my life. But well, that's something I look forward to.
Also January 8th, 2002: Today, I went to my first meeting of my political science class on foreign policy. I know not a thing about foreign policy, so this should be pure excitement. There's not much to say except that my professor is gorgeous and might force me to come to class if he wears a suit every day. Oh, and in his syllabus, he has a statement that reads, "Portable telephone are not to be brought to class. If they go off during class, you will be asked to leave." Just as he read this to us, my cell phone gave a little ring from my purse, and many dirty looks were cast my direction. Alllll right, Katie!
Then, I walked to my history class, where a beautiful Chinese boy was peeking in the doorway to the classroom. Finding another class still inside, he went and sat on a nearby bench, which I followed him to. I recognised him as a boy I had been admiring earlier in the day because of his shaggy haircut and his too-well-coordinated thrifty ensemble, but instead of saying anything, I took out my nail file and began shaping to pass the time. And then finally, I just got bored of our not talking and told him about my admiring of him. So, he thanked me in his very Chinese-accented voice and asked if I was in the history class he was waiting for. So, we talked. I never start conversations with the really beautiful, super-unapproachable people I see, but I'm glad I did with him. He told me that he was trying to add the class despite the fact that there was a waitlist for it, and then I knew that he was finished, for only the day before, the professor told us not to bother asking if we weren't already in the class. So, I knew that our relationship was doomed as he sat down beside me. I cringed when he asked to see my syllabus so that he could find out the requirements for the class. And so, when the professor asked if anyone hadn't been in class before and told my Chinese friend that she wouldn't sign his add slip, he smiled at me, gathered his things, and said good-bye. So close, man. So close.
Then, I went to my first meeting of my English class, an honours course for English majors. And it was joyous. Joe, a guy who lived on my floor last year, was waiting outside of the room that I was about to go into, and as I slapped him with my gloves and said his name, he looked at me with that, "I'm so slimy that I can't even begin to recall your name, despite the fact that you were one of only 48 people who lived on the floor of my dorm last year." See, Joe is on the undergraduate student government, and he is just . . . slimy, slimy, slimy. But really nice. And I didn't vote for him for senator and told him so, so he doesn't have a particularly soft spot for me. So, I asked him his major, surprised that he was going to be in my class, and he said, "I actually have three majors - English, business, and political science," and gave me a super-smug look while asking what my major is. I told him that I'm English/Communications, pre-law, and his face dropped a little, not looking so super-smug anymore. We talked about life for a bit longer and then entered the room (where he didn't sit by me, I might add).
English excites me anyway, but I was thrilled when my professor handed out her syllabus and told us that the first novel we will be reading is Frankenstein. I've read the book about 14 times now and have written countless papers on it, because well, it fits every paper topic ever assigned. And my professor has a passion for it, it seems. She told us that she wrote her Master's thesis on it, saying, "It's the most influential novel written. Ever." So, I think I'm in love with her, as I totally feel the same way about the book. She then went on to discuss her background in film and the fact that we'll be watching horror movies all quarter due to her fascination with them. Now, I'm not a fan of horror flicks at all, but I love anyone who appreciates film like I do, so dang it, I'm kind of excited about this quarter.
January 8th, 2002: So, classes are fun. And by fun, I mean horrid. Yesterday, I had my first Journalism/Communications class since I switched my biology major to communications. I said a good morning to Tracey as she headed to her philosophy class, and as I never see her on campus because of our totally dissimilar class schedules, it started the day out nicely. As I sat down in the lecture hall of 412 people, I immediately recognised the back of the head of a girl I went to high school with, but I didn't feel like gathering my coat, scarf, mittens, and bag, so I just sat back and looked around. My professor is a huge, huge socially inept. (Yes, I'm using socially inept as a noun now.) Seeing as the room was the size of the rest of all of the classrooms on OSU's campus combined, none of us could hear a word that she was saying, so she unwillingly clipped a microphone on herself and complained about it for the rest of the class. She started things off by calling herself a bitch and telling us that a third of us will be failing the class and should get out now if we weren't JCom majors and were just taking it for fun. So, as soon as the mass exodus concluded, she continued the class by making fun of everyone she could. Now, I don't mind being made fun of at all. I don't mind when people try to embarrass me; I'm pretty confident in what I do, and whatever someone points about me, I'm probably already aware of. However, I don't try to embarrass other people, because really, I've discovered that most people don't like to be embarrassed. (Shock! Surprise! Disbelief!) So, it kind of bothered me when the professor started to insinuate that one of the married men in the class was actually a woman posing as a man and that a girl in the back smelled kind of rank and forced a girl who didn't want to talk in front of the class to do just that. But she was also rather amusing in a "Dear God, is she really that lame?" sort of way.
And then, in the midst of a discussion about whether we can actually be alive and in the presence of another person without communicating, from across the room of 412, I heard a guy who works at my science museum, Rich, speak up about the fact that his roommates used to hold conversations with each other in their sleep. And then, I spotted the back of the head of a guy named Justin, who I've gotten to know through his apparent utter obsession with Tracey. So, after class, I waited for Justin and walked out of the room with him, when I ran into James, who goes to my church, is THE nicest guy alive, and still manages to be really fun to be around. (Imagine that. Someone who's nice and interesting.) So, I know four people in the class. And I was in a really good mood.
Then I went to history. History is just plain not one of my favourite subjects. It's not that I'm not intrigued that things actually had the audacity to occur before my birth, but I just have a horrid time remembering the dates and names, and teachers don't seem to like that, for some reason. This teacher is actually a doctor and made it clear that usually doctors don't teach classes of only 50 students, so we should be quite proud that she lowered herself for us. I was unimpressed. The woman thinks she's teaching a high school class, I swear. She plans to give us plusses, checks, and minuses depending on our level of participation in each class. Joy. I made everything all right with myself, though, when she handed out "about you" sheets for us all to fill out. It had the normal questions about our names and phone numbers and all, but she left a massive blank space at the bottom where she told us to fill in anything that she should know about us, like handicaps and whatnot. So, I wrote, "Potatoes are my favourite food," and handed it to her. She looked at the paper, looked at me, and gave me a dirty look. I do like to start the quarter out right.
Then, Ben and I went out for dinner, Targeting, and Krogering last night. He drove me to Chipotle, where we inevitably starting talking about German, and I realised something about myself and my friends. I realised that I'm very attracted to people who talk a lot. I don't know if it's that (at times) I don't talk very much without being asked to and don't want there to be uncomfortable silence or if I just like to take in information about other people to use against them later (Laugh. It's a joke.), but I don't like to be the one who has to keep up the conversation. Maybe it's because I think about things too much and would totally ignore everyone around me most of the time if they didn't force me to talk. Or maybe I'm just lazy. Yeah, that's probably it.
January 7th, 2002: Well, I moved back into the ol' dorm yesterday. I worked from 8:30 until 6, and by the time I left work, I was pretty much dreading the move-in whatnot. Nick walked me out to my car at the end of the day, and I stalled my leaving for a good 10 minutes while I kicked snow on his boots and frolicked about. I'm not sure why I was so anti-move-in, but the feelings of the day before, feelings of elation about getting back into the swing of things and having a fresh start after a great autumn quarter, were suddenly replaced by a slight depression. I carried my everyday bag (read: bowling bag used as a purse) and a grocery bag full of shoes up the stairs to my building, in the dark, through the dirty sludge that the snow had become after eight hours of college students trekking in it.
When I approached my suite, I noticed that the walls that were barren when I moved out on December 7th were once again (sigh) covered in one of my suitemates's high school art, and the wall of nearly-nude men was intact. As if that wasn't horrid enough, a new poster had been added to the suite room's collection - one that reads Royal Treasures and has pictures of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. I just don't get my suitemates, I swear. God love 'em. I walked to my room, passing by my suitemates' rooms without a word until two of them stopped me to see how my Christmas Break was, and then I stepped into the shoddy wreck that Elaine had made our study room into. It was just like I remembered - stained carpet, clothes strewn about, not-so-pleasant music playing. Elaine was nowhere to be seen, though, so I made three more trips to my car alone and brought up all of my junk.
Joshua and I were supposed to go out to eat to welcome in the new quarter, so I went around the corner to his room and found out that he had left me an away message on his Instant Messenger, asking me to call his friend Ben's cell phone if I still wanted to eat with him. After we laid out the plans and he said that he would be back from Ben's in 15 minutes, I sat in the middle of the mess and smiled. I don't know what did it, but somewhere between the drive home from work and the call to Joshua, something made me happy. I sang along with Elaine's Tom Petty until Joshua came over, and then we drove to Champps, where Ben was meeting us. I swear, I don't know what I did at school before I began spending every waking moment with Joshua. He's so clever and amusing sometimes that it physically pains me. So we ate. And Joshua and Ben made me try French onion soup. And we discussed Ben's transformation. Ben is Asian and therefore beautiful and has spectacular taste in clothing despite his supposed heterosexuality, but he used to be the hugest geek alive (and I mean geek in a bad way here, folks). In fact, he carries around old pictures to prove it. Joshua and I then discovered that Ben's middle name is Yik Ming, and Ben granted me permission to adopt that as my own middle name, so you may now refer to me as Kathleen Yik Ming Ett if you wish.
After dinner, Joshua, Joshua's suitemate Jeremy, and I took our cars back to the parking lot where all dorm-dwellers must park, and riding back on the bus, Joshua told me about his thoughts on love and his theory that he won't really fall in love with someone until he understands himself and knows where he's going in life. Good thought, I thought. And then The BIG K.N. came up to my room for a little Christmas gift exchange-age, and we discussed the happenings of Break. You see, despite the fact that Katie and I live but a few miles apart back in Ashville, we didn't visit each other even once, and we only talked on the phone a single time when she called me to ask if I needed a place to live next year, as her roommate from last year is looking for a flatmate. By the time this was all over, it was 11:30, so she went back downstairs to take a shower while I pretended that I was going to unpack. Elaine still wasn't home at that point, so I settled in to sleep at around 12:30 in my bouncy, springy, all-too-comfy dorm bed.
January 1st, 2002: My New Year's Eve was . . . not as it should have been. Chicago Mike is home for the holidays, of course, and he wanted to do something new and different, having spent most of his New Year's Eves at Jonathan's. However, when he finally gave in and came to grips with the fact that we don't have anything better to do, we found out that Jonathan had decided to attend one or two parties with his high school friends. Naturally, we shunned him and decided just to sit around by ourselves and be boring. When Nick from work told me that he and one of his friends were doing the same, though, I told him that he should meet Mike and me someplace like Damon's for some trivia. The next day at work, he informed me that his friend had checked out Damon's and discovered that it closed at 9:30, so he gave me his phone number and instructions to call him when we figured out what we were doing.
I drove to Mike's house and arrived before he made it home from spending the day with Jonathan, so his younger sister, Karen, taunted me with half-consumed chicken legs and apple butter until Mike came. Jonathan called shortly after that and had some lame story about not wanting to go to his parties because his car broke down and none of his friends could take him. It was clear that he had actually realised that he couldn't spend New Year's Eve with anyone but me and had purposely set his car on fire, so I let him plead a little before I gave in and told him that we would be over shortly. He was at his friend Regan's when I called to let him know that we were a minute away, and they were in the middle of a rousing game of Halo on Regan's new XBox, so Jonathan wanted us to come over to Regan's and wait for him to finish. I sighed and said, "I really need to get new friends," as I exited my car with Mike, which I didn't mean at all but didn't apologise for. Mike thought that I was talking about the fact that he didn't want to go anywhere due to his lack of a job and consequential lack of funds, but I didn't explain what I was talking about, probably leaving him feeling a bit hurt. We sat down, and what seemed like many, many hours passed as the men took turns throwing grenades and shooting small, bouncy objects. Mike tried at one point to turn their attention to something else, but soon, he was caught up in the game again. Jonathan, taking a break, modeled his new corduroys and stroked his thigh in a supermodel pose, so I took that as a cue to call Nick and tell him to come over to Jon's.
After several losses of signal later, it was determined that Nick was uncomfortable coming to the house of someone he doesn't know, so he asked what my next day at work is and told me that he was just going to spend the evening with one of his friends. I, being the melodramatic type, took this as him saying that he doesn't care at all about me and wasn't willing to make the effort to see me, so I was upset. A lot. Okay, fine. I cried for a minute. Or two. Canceling plans is typical Nick, and I know this all too well, but I somehow always seem to let myself forget. Mike offered the suggestion that we meet him in a neutral place as planned, but I was totally uninterested in ever seeing Nick again at that point. We went to Blockbuster to rent something dark and depressing and ended up with The Professional, which was neither, as far as I could tell. I watched perhaps a half an hour of it after we downed two pizzas, and then I felt my eyelids sinking a bit, so I plopped myself down on Jonathan's leather couch and went to sleep. I woke up at several points in the film, once because I snorted in my sleep, but not finding the onscreen action enticing, I drifted back in my slumber every time. Jon woke me up at 11:59:40 PM to watch the ball drop as Mike attempted to use the restroom in less than 15 seconds. He succeeded, and as soon as the ball dropped and Dick Clark kissed a random blonde to ring in the new year, Mike turned the movie back on and I went back to sleep.
I woke up around 1:30 to the sound of Jonathan blowing up a queen-sized air mattress for me to sleep on, so I stayed awake until he finished that and then romped around on it while Mike watched Turner Classic Movies or a nature show or something. Regan went home while the rest of us all settled into bed about an hour later, me on my velvet-covered air mattress on the living room floor, Mike and Jonathan in Jonathan's room.
The next morning, I woke up around 10:30 and began watching a marathon of episodes of The Twilight Zone, which was not at all scary like I remember it being when I watched it as a child. It turned out that I was to spend the rest of the day in front of the television, watching the Outback Bowl with Jonathan's dad until he gave up on OSU, with Jonathan's mom until she gave up on OSU, and then with Mike and Jonathan's mom when OSU started a comeback, As Good As It Gets with Jonathan's mom, When Harry Met Sally with Jonathan, his mom, and Mike, Dave with Jonathan, his mom, his dad, and Mike, and then a stream of crazy Peter Sellers movies from the 60's with the cat. Jonathan's mom made apple pie, so Jonathan, Mike, and I made a trek to the store to get vanilla ice cream as we always do when Mike and I come over. Not that we always buy vanilla ice cream. We always go to the store. You understood that, though, didn't you?
Finally, around 11 PM, Mike and I said our good-byes, and I drove us back to his house. It's strange how Mike and I don't seem to have a thing to talk about anymore. As he gets more and more involved in his life in Chicago and in his plans for Oregon and California, we get more and more silent. I don't know if it's really a bad sort of silence, but I feel like the stories that I tell to Tracey and to The BIG K.N. and to all of the other people I tell stories to are of no interest to him. The thing is that I know that some of them are of interest to him, but he doesn't receive them well. He scoffs or calls me a random name or just stops me and tells me that he doesn't want to know, and after a few times of him doing that, I just stop wanting to tell. I think somewhere along the way, Mike began thinking that he's somehow got better taste than I do. This is probably a bad place to bring this up, but toward the beginning of break, I was rummaging around on his computer and discovered that he had a couple of songs by Jets to Brazil hanging out in his MP3 folder. I exclaimed, "You like Jets to Brazil!", because well, no one likes Jets to Brazil. And to this he replied, "You're just happy because I like your stupid, little band." Now, foremost, his statement didn't make sense. And secondmost, he was making fun of me for liking something that I found amongst his MP3's. I wasn't so bothered by this, though, as I was by the fact that he wouldn't leave me alone about liking Dashboard Confessional. When I saw that he had two of their songs downloaded and asked him about them a bit later, he told me that one of his friends had gotten them and that he doesn't like them. I was fine all right with him not caring for one of my bands, as we agree very little on music these days, but he just kept saying over and over how much he despises them, prattling about how awful their music and lyrics are. If you have me on your AOL Instant Messenger Buddy List, then you know that I went through a period where I was using nothing but Dashboard lyrics to describe my mood in my away messages, so obviously, I love them, but Mike claims that he doesn't want to hear about someone else's pains and heartaches. But truthfully, that's what all the music that we listen to is about, so I took it as him just arguing with me to argue. The point of my little märchen is that when Mike disagrees with me, he doesn't just offer his opinion as another take on the subject. He doesn't even just tell me that I'm wrong and he's right. He actually makes me feel stupid for holding the opinion that I do. And I don't think I like that. But well, such is Mike. And I suppose I like him for that.