fancy feast...

a cat food commercial just came on the television. my sister's commentary was the following:

"ugh, why would you want to make cat food look appetizing? cats don't fucking watch commercials!"

the post-holidaze...

so, katie (my step-sis) is leaving tomorrow and will be out of town for the rest of the time i'll be here in mississippi, so tonight she and i went out to get drinks. note the plural.

where did we go? well, apparently there are only really two bars in pascagoula that aren't scary, so we went to the one called the jazz club. and before you ask, no -- they don't sell t-shirts, and no -- there is no jazz. there is, however, a helluva lot of lynard skynard on the jukebox...

now, this bar is that hometown bar where all the kids from high school go when they're home for holidays. and so, i saw a lot of people i knew. nobody from as far back as my high school years, but a good number of my brother's and step-brother's and step-sister's classes. i know some of these kids, in particular my brother's old high school crowd. and this made for some good storytelling and laughs.

my favorite part of the evening was when my brother's friend nick, whom i adore, says to me, "hey, i thought of you the other day -- remember that joke you told when you were running for student council president?"

gasp! GASP!!! because yes, i do remember that joke i told. or rather, i remember telling the joke, my sixteen year old self, delivering my campaign speech at the podium of our lady of victories church, a wee junior in high school, back in the spring of 1993. i didn't remember the actual joke, having successfully blocked a lot of those humiliating high school memories from my adult brain.

nick, of course, did remember the joke, and he told it to me. it goes like this:

there were two ducks in a bathtub. one duck says to the other one, "hey, can you pass the soap?" and the other one says, "what do i look like, a typewriter?!"

huh? yeah. hence the blocked-a-lot-of-those-humiliating-high-school-memories thing. wow. WOW. i mean, wow.

hurray for the hometown bar scene! i left humbled. and a lot less drunk than katie, so i drove us home. and now it's time to go to bed, and with the exception of having just memorialized the joke that had been deeply buried under fourteen years of post-student-council-presidential-campaigning recovery, i hope to never think of these things again.

merry christmas, bedford falls!

christmas cheer...

woot! this is my sister and me on christmas morning. last night i had a dream that my sister was a small child and i was helping her wall off her emotions with a color-coded system of yarn.

what the?!

more egg nog, please!

happy christmas to all!

feliz navidad from the mississippi gulf coast! it's late at night, and i spent pretty much all of my christmas eve knitting a last-minute gift for my stepmom. now i'm sleepy, santa's elves are still up and working througout the house; my brother, sister, and i are tired and camped out in the living room watching the 24 hour _a christmas story_ marathon.

it's raining and about 60 degrees outside -- typical pascagoula christmas weather. while i'm sure my feelings will vary throughout this week i'll be spending at my dad's, as of right now i'm happy to be home and looking forward to spending christmas day with the family.

but now it's sleepytime on bellview avenue. gotta get up and do the church thing in the morning. then the gifting. then the eating. then the football watching (GO EAGLES!).

to all of my friends across the land, i send holiday cheer and glad tidings your way! merry merry merry christmas!

xoxo,
emily

aw, but ain't that america...

so, here i am in north carolina for my cousin's wedding. all of the family is staying at a hotel in chapel hill, but the wedding itself is in rocky mount, which is about an hour and a half's drive away (no, i don't know why we're staying so far away -- i wasn't responsible for making these arrangements). anyway, so my aunt and uncle chartered a bus to haul all of us from the hotel to the rehearsal dinner last night and then to the wedding this evening. the trip to the rehearsal dinner was relatively tame, except for the beer i spilled on my crotch about 15 minutes into the trip. lucky for me, i had a long ride ahead of me and my pants dried before we arrived.

however, on the trip back, everybody had a few drinks in their systems, and somebody (my uncle pat) got a hold of the microphone that the bus driver had for announcements. and a singalong ensued...

hilarious!

it started with christmas carols, then turned into a karaoke free-for-all. my particular favorite was the bus-wide rendition of "pink houses", by john cougar mellencamp. fucking amazing! my brother and i were adding lots of harmonies and obnoxious background vocals to all of the tunes. at one point i yelled out, "sing tiny dancer!" but i think only my brother and i appreciated the _almost famous_ reference.

of course, things kept devolving... the songs got worse, people started grabbing the microphone and telling jokes. somebody told a stupid racist joke at one point, and i yelled out, "BOO!!!" to which one of my uncles yelled, "shut up, emily!" and i said, "how did you know it was me?" he said, "are you kidding?"

aw man... family time! it's pretty fantastic. i'm pleased as punch to be with this crew. but my cousin informed me last night that he's expecting me to share a particular story from our childhoods at the reception tonight. ugh -- no pressure there!

okay, gotta hit the books for a little bit until it's time to get ready for the wedding.

travails and travels...

for about an hour today, there was a very real probability that i would be spending my night in laguardia airport, in the american airlines terminal. yuck. i'm too tired to go into the details, but long story short, all worked out, they got me on the flight, despite some irrationally emotional sleep-deprived tears. hooray!

and i got to have steak with my fantastic dad on his birthday, along with my fantastic brother and fantastic sister, and all of our fantastic aunts and uncles and cousins. hoo-ee! also, my southern accent is in full force right now! awesome!

and caitlin and i are all set up in a swanky hotel room, were we just watched charo singing "feliz navidad" on pee-wee's playhouse.

the bad news is that rumor has it that the wedding on saturday is going to be dry!!! wha?!?! DRY!?!? this means nothing but bad.

early christmas present...

okay, so maybe it's wrong of me to buy myself a christmas present, but i did it anyway. i just purchased _the god delusion_, the newest richard dawkins book. i have no idea what i'm going to think of it, but i'm really intrigued. and i knew that if i asked for it from a member of my family or, erm, "santa claus", it would mean having to endure at least one, but maybe several awkward conversations in which i would be asked why i don't believe in god and other nonsense.

so, yeah. there you go. thoughts to follow.

inksplosion!!!

so, today on my way into school i was on a pretty crowded bus, so i put my giant backpack on my lap so it wouldn't be in the way. what i didn't realize was that a pen had made its way to the bottom of my backpack and had lost its cap. when i got to my stop, i had bright blue ink all over my way-cool light brown plaid pants because my pen had leaked through the bottom of my bag onto my leg. OH NO!!!

so, i dug the pen out of my bag, gave it a scornful look, and threw it in the nearest garbage can.

then i went to the registrar's office. why? because i was scheduled to proctor a test this afternoon and i needed to get my official training on how to read instructions and deal with honor code violators and all that stuff. so i arrive at the office and immediately make a joke about the giant ink spot on my pants and the kind women in the registrar's office (my new heroine) said, "do you have any hair spray? that's what you should use." now, i haven't owned hair spray since about 1994. but lucky for me, she had some in her desk! hooray! so she handed me the bottle and told me to follow her.

off we went to the secret 2nd floor bathroom, back where all the administrative offices are. i ran some water over a paper towel, and used it to soak the area on my pants where the ink was, then, at my new heroine's direction, saturated the ink spot with hair spray. and then there was much rinsing and re-spraying and rinsing and re-spraying. my new heroine went back to the office, i went into the handicapped stall (which has its own sink), where i could de-pants myself to better my cleaning efforts. it worked, for the most part. i still have a blue smudge on my pants, but i'm hoping that it will come out when i do laundry. and lest anyone fear that i was destroying the ozone layer with my stain removal tactics, rest assured that i was using a non-aerosol hair spray.

the annoying part, though, was that after my pants dried, they were all stiff for the rest of the day in the place where they had been hair sprayed. oh, and i smelled like rave. good times.

file this under "emily is her own biggest liability".

oh, the places i'll go...

so, within the next month, i'll have been in eight states. EIGHT! they are:

pennsylvania (duh), new york, north carolina, tennessee, mississippi, georgia, michigan, and nevada.

of course, four of those states (NY, TN, GA, MI) are because of crappy holiday travel layovers, so they don't really count. i'll be in north carolina this weekend for my cousin's wedding, and of course i'm christmasing in mississippi with the family. but the best adventure of the next month is the extended MLK day weekend that carson and i are spending in las vegas!

vegas! emily in vegas?!? wha? i'm imagining it to be a spectacle to behold, five days of pure ridiculousness! and i can't freakin' wait! carson's gonna be a fantastic tour guide. and the really great part is that i NEVER take actual vacation-y trips. all the traveling i've done in the past several years has been to visit friends or family. i don't ever just go somewhere for the hell of it. this vegas trip? definitely falls into the category of "just for the hell of it" and it's going to be
rad!

woot!

also, i'm sorry i haven't been worth a damn lately w/r/t this blog -- finals will be over as of next tuesday, and i plan to resume the blog-o-rama. rest assured that nothing terribly exciting has been going on for me to write about anyway.

oh! except i did manage to pass the MPRE! and my score is good enough for any jurisdiction! hooray for the educated guess!