Don't leave me high. Don't leave me dry.

Tonight was one of those nights (yesterday for all of you reading this on Sunday). One of those nights where you just have a really good time with the people around you and feel incredibly blessed to have such amazing friends and acquaintances and the chance to be with those people. I also can't believe that I just used the word blessed, it's so Samantha of me. There's something about hanging out with girls though that is so different and fun than what I'm used to though. Maybe it's because I work with guys and my best friend is a guy, but there is still something fun about women and the reckless abandonment that you can have with them when there's no guys around (I'm not talking lesbian fun Take Out Boy, I know that's where your mind is right now). Whether it was skipping to MGMT in the alley or singing Radiohead's "High and Dry" in the middle of the bar, it didn't matter that people stared, that I can't sing in tune, or that we had goofy grins on the whole time. We were having fun and we were ourselves. Tonight I got yo play with girls who weren't concerned with silly things or about acting grown up. It was like finally being allowed into the tree house or indoctrinated into their club and after this working weekend I needed to feel like that.

On the way home I also heard my new favorite song of the night, "What you know" by Two Door Cinema Club. The lyrics themselves are a little irrelevant to me, but the melody is really catchy and it's easy to sing along to. One of my friends told me that I sing decently, though that comment was probably filled with ulterior meaning at the time, but now I sing out lout in my car all of the time and that's just watch I did tonight. I've posted the video below, the leader singer looks like a male Adele and the video is a little weird but the song is really great and really fun. At first I though it was Death Cab, but nope it's a new band.

Next time you're in Upper Darby you better let me know. I'm about to get laid off and I live with my mom.

The heartland of Uzbekistan is the Fergana Valley. Located across most of the country, this valley is extremely fertile and protected by mountains at the north and at the south. Two rivers run through the valley supplying life to area. Once part of the Northern Silk Road, it sustains the country's silk industry. It is a beautiful part of a often overlooked country in western Asia. I want to go to Uzbekistan and see the Fergana Valley. I want to stay in a yurt and hike through the mountains and travel along the rivers.

Fergana Valley

I just got back recently from a trip to Ocean City, NJ with my Hebrew Friend to see some friends who are staying at the shore for the week. It was the perfect day for the shore. Completely flawless skies and just the right amount of waves to go swimming and body surfing. We left the city early and were able to have a full rich day in Jersey. The shore was not too crowded, kind of like going to the Park on a weekend when the state park is too full to get into. We were all able to swim (those of us that actually like water), read, rest, and play Frisbee. Hebrew Friend taught me to play football though I still need some help with my catching and aim. He and I are going to have to go throw a ball around when I get back from Vermont (I'm not terribly excited about driving home alone tomorrow evening). Mini golf and pizza concluded our day and I did get a chance to see Chem Anna in action at the coffee shop. On the way home I nearly fell asleep, but then had a extremely enlightening experience with a friend. 

Yes I was with this person and yes he wore socks and shoes on the beach.

This time last year Chem Anna began her senior freak out. She would unexpectedly cry and fret about the idea of leaving school and getting into grad school. She had a hard time letting go of her safety net and preparing for the scariness of the real world. I though she and my other senior friends were crazy for crying about leaving school. They were only nine months away from no more homework. I thought that they should be celebrating and not mourning. Now that it's my turn, I feel even less prepared and successful than Chem Anna and some of my other friends who recently graduated. I just cry and cry at unexpected moments about school and the paths I've taken and how my life is going to turn out at the end of the next nine months. I'm scared about graduating especially since I will only have been working at my chosen major for three semesters. I don't have enough material for a portfolio to send to graduate schools and I haven't started studying for the GREs. I'm also terrified about leaving because I don't know where I'm going and I know I can't go home. I also don't want to leave my best friend. For the first time I have someone that I am unconditionally close to and I'm not quite prepared to put any distance between us. When I was in Vermont last time Lance said some very sage words to me: "Most choices aren't wrong, they're just not right." The decisions that I've made may not have been the best or the wisest for me but they've led me to finding a passion or two and to Yonni and to new skills. I'm just waiting for when I can start making the right choices the first time around. 

All dads like what their sons get them.

Last night I had dinner out with a friend and I can't believe how much I've missed just having a nice dinner with good company. Too often I'm just at the bar with friends and it's too loud to actually spend any quality time, and someone always leaves too early, and of course someone always drinks too much. It just gets old too after a while and it becomes more like people drinking in the same place than friends spending any real time together. Having dinner with my friend tonight was nice. We went out which I haven't done in a while and got to catch up and be together. I prefer doing dinner at home because I like to be in charge of the food I'm eating and I like cooking with other people and it's infinitely cheaper to cook at home for me. But the point of all this is that I need spend less time at the bars and more time in with friends.

 "All this over a book? I have cousins who shot each other, and they got over it."

I watched Peep World when I got home form dinner. It was an interesting and funny movie about a son who wrote a thinly veiled tell-all about his family and has gone off to make a ton of money and a movie about his family's dirty secrets. The movie takes place the day of his father's 70th birthday and how the family reacts about coming together for the first time since the publication of the book, Peep World. It's fantastic and completely true for everyone, we all have dysfunctional families, some more than others. The casting was prefect for this movie too. It starred Ben Schwartz as the youngest brother who wrote the book depicting his siblings, played by Michael C. Hall, Sarah Silverman, and Rainn Wilson, in bad lights. The acting by these people was phenomenal and very different from the roles that you usually see them in. The supporting cast of Judy Greer, Kate Mara, and Taraji P. Henson was also outstanding. And nothing is better than Lewis Black as the narrator. 

A walk by definition has no destination. Even a cat knows that.

Second round.

I'm in an office right now doing absolutely nothing and I'm unsupervised and if I were doing this four or five years ago this would have been a very bad thing. For example (and mind you I still do this) whenever I am in one of my parents' offices I tend to find things to amuse myself even if it means disturbing their papers. I can definitely say that one has a better collection of junk than the other. Anyways instead of being my usual moderately destructive self, and because I already know where everything is in here, I am blogging, which is way more productive than anything that I would be doing anywhere else. Run ons ;)

Friday a successfully busy morning/day for me. I started in Jersey and now I'm in Philadelphia. Along the way I have handed in my portfolio for my nonfiction shorts class, sorted a ridiculous amount of text books and watched leftover clips from old Chelsea Lately shows. Okay maybe it hasn't been entirely too busy, but I do have a busy night of work ahead of me. Hopefully. I feel extremely proud of myself for completing my portfolio on time and was particularly impressed at my own personal effort to actually make multiple drafts of a piece before handing the portfolio in. It was a little tricky for me this time to get everything organized and together because it had to be handed in one long single word document. Usually each piece gets printed out and I can sort through it all and make sure that I have everything. This time I had to keep scrolling up and down the document and do a lot of cutting a pasting. The portfolio ended up being 35 pages so I had to be extra careful about sorting and layout. I also became particularly paranoid about not saving enough and probably messed up the word program with all my command+s-ing. Either way I am proud that I finished it. My writing has greatly evolved because of it and I owe a lot to my Hebrew Friend for pushing me and making me write properly and for an audience. He's very good at pushing me to make a piece that  much better and if I ever get something published he is definitely getting at least a footnote.

This weekend I read the first two books of The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. I only really decided to start reading them because two of my friends are excited about the movie coming out and talk about it all of the time and I wanted to be able to participate instead of blankly sitting there listening to them talk. I first heard about these books when I was a freshman in college. I used to follow a Twilight podcast that was more of a book club than a fan site. After the podcast people finished the Twilight books they moved on to The Hunger Games books and of course I was still aboard the romantic vampire train and stopped listening to the podcast and forgot all about The Hunger Games. Three years later I could kick myself because these books are awesome. I read the first one on Thursday at the beach and then purchased the second one on Friday and finished it at work on Saturday. The bookstore near me in currently out of the third one so right now I am debating on whether or I want to drive to find it after work so that I can take it to the beach tomorrow.

I seriously need this book, now!

This is kind of a weird scheduling week for me because I have two days off from work instead of my usual one. Last week a friend said that they wanted to go to the beach this week so I took tomorrow off of work to go. I love the place that I go because I have a yearly pass so I don't have to pay for parking and pay a separate admission fee to lie in the sand for a couple of hours. The place where I go is also a state park so the land is protected and natural. There aren't any beach combers tearing apart the beach and rebuilding it all of the time. It's really cool that way because nature controls it which means that each time I go it's a little bit different looking. I've also found that as much as I love being alone on the beach I also like to have someone there to go swimming with and to talk to just to break up the monotony. It's get too to have someone to ride down with and inexpensive too. All you really need is to stop at a store a pick up some cheap eats for the beach and that's it. Besides gas in the car that I already have and the $4 toll coming back, thank you EZ Pass for making me not worry about routing around foI'm in an office right now doing absolutely nothing and I'm unsupervised and if I were doing this four or five years ago this would have been a very bad thing. For example (and mind you I still do this) whenever I am in one of my parents' offices I tend to find things to amuse myself even if it means disturbing their papers. I can definitely say that one has a better collection of junk than the other. Anyways instead of being my usual moderately destructive self, and because I already know where everything is in here, I am blogging, which is way more productive than anything that I would be doing anywhere else. Run ons ;)

Friday a successfully busy morning/day for me. I started in Jersey and now I'm in Philadelphia. Along the way I have handed in my portfolio for my nonfiction shorts class, sorted a ridiculous amount of text books and watched leftover clips from old Chelsea Lately shows. Okay maybe it hasn't been entirely too busy, but I do have a busy night of work ahead of me. Hopefully. I feel extremely proud of myself for completing my portfolio on time and was particularly impressed at my own personal effort to actually make multiple drafts of a piece before handing the portfolio in. It was a little tricky for me this time to get everything organized and together because it had to be handed in one long single word document. Usually each piece gets printed out and I can sort through it all and make sure that I have everything. This time I had to keep scrolling up and down the document and do a lot of cutting a pasting. The portfolio ended up being 35 pages so I had to be extra careful about sorting and layout. I also became particularly paranoid about not saving enough and probably messed up the word program with all my command+s-ing. Either way I am proud that I finished it. My writing has greatly evolved because of it and I owe a lot to my Hebrew Friend for pushing me and making me write properly and for an audience. He's very good at pushing me to make a piece that  much better and if I ever get something published he is definitely getting at least a footnote.

This weekend I read the first two books of The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. I only really decided to start reading them because two of my friends are excited about the movie coming out and talk about it all of the time and I wanted to be able to participate instead of blankly sitting there listening to them talk. I first heard about these books when I was a freshman in college. I used to follow a Twilight podcast that was more of a book club than a fan site. After the podcast people finished the Twilight books they moved on to The Hunger Games books and of course I was still aboard the romantic vampire train and stopped listening to the podcast and forgot all about The Hunger Games. Three years later I could kick myself because these books are awesome. I read the first one on Thursday at the beach and then purchased the second one on Friday and finished it at work on Saturday. The bookstore near me in currently out of the third one so right now I am debating on whether or I want to drive to find it after work so that I can take it to the beach tomorrow.

I seriously need this book, now!

I love the beach.

So anyways to end this, I have a friend who is going through a rough patch right now and as frustrating and annoying it is to be around them when they are acting this way, I love my friend and I want them to be happy. It's just very frustrating because there isn't a whole lot I can do for them right now because they have a lot going on in the inside that they need to sort out first. The best I can do is just listen and be supportive as best as I can. Really though I just want to do what I do when Max crashes into something a little hard: pick them up, squeeze them tight and watch the adult equivalent of Thomas the Tank Engine episodes. Too bad I'm only a five foot girl with the inability to lift anyone other than Max.

PS. The title is a wonderful line from my favorite dog Wilfred.
r change, it literally costs less than $10 dollars to go to the beach with me :)

I made him, I can break him.

God I watch weird television shows with weird dialogue. That's usually where I get my blog titles from. In fact absolutely nothing in the title relates to the content of my blog post, most of the time. So now you all know what's going on up above, though for the life of me I can't remember where this one comes from, probably an ABC Family show or Glenn Martin, DDS. BTWs if you like Kevin Nealon, watch Glenn Martin.

So good news: I don't have work tomorrow. I always have Wednesdays off and usually I go to the beach but I have so much to do before I go up to Vermont. On of my friends had expressed interest in going but then they changed their minds and I'm actually a little grateful that they changed their minds because I would have gone even though I didn't really want to. I'm retarded like that, I do things for my friends sometimes when I don't want to because I feel obligated to as a friend and usually I don't mind because I love my friends, but sometimes I have to think about me.

So bad news: I got into a bit of a fight with a friend tonight. It was really more of a tiff, but I didn't listen to my friend and I think I made him feel a little bit embarrassed and uncomfortable. I feel really bad about that. We were at a bar with another one of my friends and I wouldn't let go of something so he left.  My other friend totally called me out on it later, but then he got tipsy on his beer challenge and forgot about it, but I still feel bad. Sometimes I pick up on things, even things that I don't really care about or make a big deal about, and don't let them go. Even if there is absolutely no point to my argument I still feel like I have to win. I get like that with the people I feel really comfortable around, it's a weird quality about me.

So good news: I bought an amazing strapless push up bra last weekend and I am in LOVE with it. I used to hate strapless because they aren't as supportive as I like on my chest, but I got one from Victoria's Secret a few months ago and I wear it almost all of the time. Last weekend I found a similar one in black with a bit of padding to create plunge and it is perfect. It supports everything and I fill it out. It also helps that I got measured and realized I needed a bigger cup size for that collection. Sometimes I'm worried that when I get pregnant I'm going to have huge chest and will have to hire two men to carry each one around for me. I have several years to contemplate that plan though. I will say that I am in love with this new bra. I was never a fan of any sort of push up because of the false illusion that it creates, but fuck it, this bra is awesome.

I love coming home late form the bar. I get super tired, but am just awake enough to get home and get into bed and fall into a deep sleep. I love having a nice time out with friends and trying new beers with Neil from his beer challenge. I'm a little bummed with my second beer tonight because I couldn't finish it. It got to be too sticky and sweet by the end, but I did love Neil's beer with the piggies on the can. Not so much the beer, a little hoppy, but the dancing pigs on an orange can were cute and fun. 

Swallowing makes my tummy hurt.

Hebrew Friend beat me to it, but yesterday I went to the beach with some friends. I wasn't even thinking beach trip when he called me Tuesday and asked what time we should leave by. And when he said that he wanted to drive and that there were a few extra people coming I wasn't even thinking about where we would be going. I was just excited that there would be more than just myself this time. While I am all for alone time on the beach it is nice to have others around to talk to and go swimming with. I was also thinking that we would be going somewhere other than the state park since Yonni's a big fan of the southern beaches as well as the state park. I guess he's found his spot though because he asked for the park pass and knew exactly where to go down at the far end. It was a really nice selection of people who were with me too. There was my Hebrew Friend of course, but also Erin a girl I used to work with and Dev a lady that went to school with Yonni. I hadn't seen Erin at all since I left my job at the bookstore so it was nice catching up with her and I had only spoke a few words past hello with Dev when I first met her so it was excellent to get to know her as well.

Leaving Philadelphia it was extremely hot so we had the air conditioning on in the car for the ride down, but when we got out onto the beach we found it to be rather chilly and windy. The water was excellent with big waves and much warmer than it had been, but a few hours in I was huddled under two towels trying to keep as warm as possible. I swear it was going to storm, but then the sun came out and warmed us all up. Some even got a bit sunburned. It was nice to have so many people in the group because it gave us more things to do with each other. Yon brought a Frisbee as always though the wind made it hard to throw well at some points and Dev brought an excellent card game called Five Crowns. It was a bit like gin rummy and poker all mixed together but with a double deck of cards. The cards were really beautifully illustrated and reminded me of characters from an ancient Babylonian royal family or something you would have seen on one of the crusades. I even got a chance to read a little from Lolita and write in my log book. I showed the book to Yonni, but it's not finished and there isn't a whole lot about him in it. I need to start writing his stories down too so that he has a place in the archives. I want to finish the log book by the beginning of next summer so I need to be more diligant about writing in it.

After about six hours of beach time, my uncle invited us over for dinner and a chance to use a real toilet. Everyone agreed to some food before the trip home and I warned them that he likes to talk a lot. It seemed like a good time was had by all, Dev was really wonderful with my uncle, I think he liked her the best. It was a quick visit because we were all tired and wanted to get home. By the time we were back at Yonni's house I could barely keep my eyes open. I helped him clean up our beach mess as best as I could before I had to get back to my apartment and crash. It was wonderful to be tired from the sun and swimming because I soon fell soundly asleep and didn't even get a chance to read my Hebrew Friend's beach review until I woke up this morning. It has really been a wonderful summer so far. Vermont in a couple of weeks.

When I look out my window I see my friend's apartment building.

Soooo....I wasn't going to write and then I was going to write and then I wasn't and then the Captain said to Alfonso, "Alfonso tell me a story so Alfonso began: "It was a dark and stormy night and the Captain said to Alfonso, 'Alfonso tell me a story,' so Alfonso began," you get the point. So I decided just to write. I also have a boatload of energy because I'm eating way too late (I usually like to have my last big meal before 8pm but I got distracted) and I also took some old Robitussin that I found on top of my fridge and I'm not sure it its the AWAKE kind or the kind that makes you drowsy so I'm now trying to wear myself down and channel some of the energy.

Today started out bad and got exponentially worse in a very short time and other than a nice phone chat with Yonni (he passed his Praxis! Virtual high five bro!) and some potentially good news from my school boss, it wasn't until 5pm that things started to turn around. But hey we all have those days, hopefully yours don't include getting a boot on your car or locking your keys and your school books inside the car and then having to haul yourself across town to find keys to get yourself into your apartment and then into your locked car. Mine did! But thanks to Kat, Anna, and John who let me vent extensively to them, and to my advisor who gave me the number to AAA and didn't mind that I spent the entire class talking about registration instead of reading, and to Chris who was totally adorable to me for some reason. Boy you are going to be such a hottie in two years, it's a shame you're only nineteen now. And really once I got back into my apartment and chatted with my dad I really calmed down and didn't care about the day. In fact after I got de-booted, I went to Old Navy and picked up another work shirt (thank you small fat kids) and took a really long walk around Lower Merion. Thank god I walked because with this cold I came home with a giant trail of snot running down my face because I didn't have any tissues and I didn't want to wipe my nose on the sleeve of my good fleece. Gross, but I really like my clothes. My mom really pulled me through the day very unexpectedly when she sent me a text telling me to read the biography for Cathy Lamb on Amazon. Her books look lame and kind of like the stuff Samantha is into, but her bio is great. I swear I'm the East Coast version of this woman  minus twenty years. I've also become the Iron Chef of leftovers. Tonight it was just chicken, spinach, a leftover tomato, and leftover pasta. Totally tasty, but as I now look at the cooked spinach I am reminded of a friend who won't eat spinach because of a bad experience he had with it and the thought is making me vomit a little inside my mouth. Yuck.

OOOOoooo! New song of the day! I know I'm bad, but I swear I better about other things like boys and shoes, but maybe not majors since I did change that. But anyways here it is: The Naked and Famous - Young Blood.