Current Obsessions

I have to preface:  my mother always fancied herself an amateur interior designer.  As such, we were allowed to do almost anything we wanted to our bedrooms as kids, barney-purple, navy carpet w/ pancake batter colored walls, whatever.  So when it comes to being brave and selecting home furnishings, I find myself to be incredibly particular and concise about what I want.  And I will search for, wait, and price the perfect item for months/years before I buy the perfect piece.  And I'm constantly happy with my purchases under the current system of selecting furniture.  As a kid, my mom always decorated country/primitive/antique style.  GAG.  I trend either super traditional or super modern.  Currently my budget dictates that most of my furniture is from Target (HEY don't judge.  I will stalk that Target website until the perfect piece turns up, thank you.)  So recently I've been feeling the strong urge to create.  I'm a creative person.  But I don't paint, don't sculpt, don't draw...so maybe if I at least get all of my random decorating ideas out of my brain, it will free up some space. 

So given these explanations, if I were to ever win the lottery, my first non-necessity purchase [how amazing would it be to call the student loan company and say....*ahem* "I'm feeling saucy my good man, what say we take care of this $**,*** bill" and you run it on your debit card AND IT CLEARS...they would think it was a prank... ] would be this: 

No, not a car or a home or a boat or a vacation (obv those would happen too, it's the lottery after all.) But a couch.  Utterly perfect in its rigid squshy-ness.  Uber traditional and somewhat (ok a lot) Pompus-looking, yes, but friendly too, imagine how squishy and comfy it must be.  I mean, can't you just smell the leather?  Don't you love?  It's saved in my email as "do not delete this link until you can afford one."  It costs as much as my car, which I had to take out a loan and obtain a cosigner to buy, so ya know, it might be a while.  But I can wait. 

Next would be something like this:

Because it's just not home to me without a huge bookcase full of books.  I'm a reader...a re-re-re-re-reader (I honestly have read "A Time to Kill" so many times I can't remember) so I hold on to books. 

Right now I'm currently working on gathering the Penguin Classics in the vintage-ey looking cloth bound editions.  I know if I have them I'll have to read them, which isn't necessarily a bad thing either.

I mean, I'd LOVE to have the leather-bound sets my parents had, but the cloth are charming, no?  I think leather-bound may be a little stuffy for me anyway.

The only other thing I would purchase immediately if finances would allow, would be

Blue for me, Orange for sissypoo.  The whole damn set.  ooh and a couple'a viking ranges.  and a bakery downtown. 

After that, I do believe I'd have to go car shopping. 

Fluffy-headed foolish child

I was an audacious child.  Chubby, a head taller than even the boys, with a head full of white-blonde hair always flying everywhere (and was permed all to hell most of my childhood, thank you mother.)  I stood out.  And I didn't mind, honestly, I didn't know enough to mind.  I liked being loud, know-it-all, wise-ass, the kind of kid that annoy the living shit out of adults because I just wouldn't shut up.

I was also a child that was voracious for knowledge.  I can remember reading anything and everything I could get my hands on.  My parents, while they were no intellectual slouches, were damn near appalled when I picked up the 1975 Guiness Book of World Records, because it was the biggest book in the house, and proceeded to read it cover-to-cover multiple times.  I can remember overhearing (eavesdropping was another of my many talents) them discuss whether or not I was normal.  The consensus was probably, but dad wasn't ever entirely convinced. 

Now, most people my age will tell you their favorite books at age 10 were something of the Babysitter's club variety or the "Are you Afraid of the Dark" series.  And while I had read every single one of these books that I  could get my hands on, at age 10, I started my first James Patterson novel.  At that age, it bored me, and to be honest, my favorite book was always "The Big Book of Tell Me Why," a 600+ page behoemeth of scientific questions, answers, experiments and inquiries.  While I'm not sure if my mother gave it to me to see if I even comprehended, or was just trying to keep me entertained for an extended amount of time, I have to say, she succeeded in encouraging my pursuit of knowledge of anything and everything. 

She never said it, but I guess, in her own way, by allowing me to march to my very loud, out of tune, unfashionhable, off-beat drummer, my mother was telling me that it's OK to be smart.  It's OK not to care about hair or clothes or fashion.  This must have been difficult for a woman who cared very much about how we (she, us and dad) looked upon exiting the house.  While life may be a little more awkward, painful even embarassing in the younger years without these less lofty pursuits, I have to say that it is infinitely simpler to learn fashion at age 20 than learn curiosity and thirst for knowledge at that age. 

So thank you mother, for giving me my very own little freak flag, and allowing me to let it fly.  It couldn't have been easy.

Also, a nod to the blog who inspired me to write this post:   http://iammommahearmeroar.blogspot.com/  as she's dedicated to letting her little men be who they are going to be.  Even if (when) they have mustache fascinations and crusty boy-looks in photos. 

OH, college...How I miss you.

I work near a small University, and every fall, when I see droves of soror-stitutes prowling the streets late at night, I wax poetic about my own college experience.  I constantly wonder if I went to the right school, and I also wonder why I'm struggling to pay for a degree that I don't use in my secretary-ish day job.  I wonder why I squandered my first 2 years and spent my second 2 years clawing back from a seemingly unrecoverable abyss of a gpa.  I never went Greek, the timing was never right (freshman year I would have been chewed up and spat out, and probably would have never recovered.  Junior year, when I finally did rush, I was too far in the GPA trashcan for anyone to take, despite my winning charm  and the efforts of my little sister and roomie, who were both Greek by then. 

To put it mildly, I went to a nerd school.  A guy who was a 10 there was a good, solid 7 anywhere else.  The football team sucks, which makes sense, have you ever met a guy who's brilliant and who is willing to smash into other dudes at full speed?  No.  They've thought it through and realized that football's for those who can't get academic scholarships. 

I was originally in the Biology program, simply because it was the hardest major.  Now, in High School, I was smart, and I was cocky about it.  I didn't study, didn't have to.  I was bored out of my mind and figured that college would be as much of a cakewalk as high school.  Not so much.  The reason high school was easy is because po-dunk, small town, Midwestern high school is the equivalent of 8th grade in any major metropolitan area.  I realized sophomore year that I was drowning, and subsequently enrolled in summer school and changed my major.

Having a real job (you know, the whole 8-5 m-f schtick) I now know that I should have been an art major somewhere, studied my ass off, and gone to architecture or interior design school.  My heart lies in old buildings, most specifically queen-Ann Victorians, and the classical art masters, something I would have never known if I hadn't changed my major Junior year and been unable to get into a single psych class, forcing me to take 2 different art history courses. 

I'd love to say I've come to some profound conclusion.  I still can't decide if I'd been better off going to an easier school in-state and close to home like all of my (equally as smart) friends, but these are the things I know:

-All 8 minutes of "Crazy Game of Poker"
-Straight (cheap) gin tastes like a pine-tree air freshener
-Studying to keep your scholarship is a hell of a lot easier than paying student loans
-How to write a standard 5-page essay
-The difference between they're, their and there, your and you're, its and it's. 
-Calculus and I will never be friends (and really, who uses calc in real life?  anyone?)

Intro

When I was a child, and my mother punished me or forced me to do something I didn't particularly like, she'd tell me "Tough shit, tell it  to your therapist some day."  20 years later (over-priced and unused psychology degree in-hand) I would much rather put into writing my memories of my childhood, so that others may appreciate them as well.