At least I’ve acknowledged it.

20May12

Me: I’m going to the grocery store.
Me: I could’ve come downstairs to tell you, but instead I’m texting you because I’m lazy.
Brother: Wow.
Me: Oh my God.
Me: I’m what’s wrong with the world.

Filed under: Texting   |  2 Comments
Tags: laziness, look at my choices, my brother

Venus Flytraps = badass

16May12

I’ve owned a lot of cool things in my day (lava lamps, marshmallow guns, life-sized piggy banks… once I even briefly owned a pony). But hands down, the coolest damn thing I ever owned was a Venus Flytrap. For the life of me, I don’t know where I got it or how it came to be in my possession. I can only assume I heard the phrase “carnivorous plant that eats meat and bugs” and shouted to the nearest person, “Sign me up!”

I think we named it something ridiculous like Fluffy, as opposed to something awesome like Jaws, to lull the bugs into a false sense of security (as if the bugs would hear us talking about it and catch on). Anyway, Fluffyjaws (as it will henceforth be known) and I bonded, because I treated Fluffyjaws like both a pet and a plant. This probably wasn’t the best strategy, considering my inability to a) keep pets alive*, and b) keep plants alive**. Predictably, after a week or two, Fluffyjaws died from… well, who knows? Not enough water? Not enough bugs/meat? Crazy fungus? Too much sunlight? Could’ve been any of them. Could’ve been all of them. Nonetheless, those few days I had with Fluffyjaws were indescribably awesome, because having a Venus Flytrap is something every wannabe badass should do at least once in their life.

* RIP Jazz the Hamster
** RIP every plant I’ve ever watered

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  2 Comments
Tags: awesome, Venus Flytraps

If you’re planning on reading this book… sorry I spoiled it.

12May12

My friend Allison is trying to explain this book, Eternal Eden, to me over the phone.

ALLISON: Okay, so there’s this book I got on my iPod, and it’s… okay, well, it’s kind of like Twilight, but—
ELODIE: Stop right there.
ALLISON: It’s good, seriously.
ELODIE: No it’s not.
ALLISON: I’m going to start explaining it to you now.
ELODIE: I’M NOT LISTENING!
ALLISON: So there’s this girl, she’s in college, and they like to stress the fact that she’s ordinary and can’t get guys. But then there are like nine guys willing to go out with her, so—
ELODIE: That sounds familiar.
ALLISON: You ARE listening! I knew you would. Anyway, so she meets this boy that she hates because he’s arrogant and stuff, and then they go swimming and something happens and he leaves because he can’t be with her, and his friends leave her a note—they’re immortal, that’s important—
ELODIE: Wait, what?
ALLISON: And so they become a couple, and he makes her immortal too because she almost dies, but they can’t be together because the guys in charge choose the person you marry.
ELODIE: What?
ALLISON: And they almost have sex, but they can’t because when you do your eyes turn bright blue.
ELODIE: What?
ALLISON: Yeah.
ELODIE: …
ALLISON: …
ELODIE: …
ALLISON: You should read it.

Filed under: Friends, Internet stuff, Uh what?   |  2 Comments
Tags: AHHHH, Allison, books, Eternal Eden

This is a useless anecdote of my day. Enjoy!

10May12

Today I was in town, ready to go shopping, when I realized a) I hadn’t taken a shower, b) I was hungry, and also c) I had to pee. But I was in town. I had gone through a lot of trouble to be there. (By “a lot of trouble,” I mean a fifteen-minute drive through mild traffic.) I’d be damned if I was going to go home without something to show for it.

First I had to make myself presentable. I went to Bath & Body Works and spritzed myself with free samples of various perfumes. (The saleslady informed me too late that “Moonlight Path” is more of a grandmotherly smell, so I doused myself in “Japanese Cherry Blossoms” and hoped that would cover it up. Or maybe I just concocted an abhorrent supersmell of yuck. Is it obvious yet that I don’t know how smell works?) We then spent an hour doing that customer/salesperson tango, wherein the salesperson tries to sell the product that the customer has already decided they’re not going to buy, and in the end I made up an elaborate lie and ran out of the store.

Next I went to the local grocery store and ran around trying all the free samples until I had basically made myself a meal. The meal consisted of some very strange milk and a lot of sausages, plus something I couldn’t pronounce so I’m not even going to attempt to spell it. Then I remembered I had to pee, but I had already left the grocery store and I had to drive around looking for a place that would let me use their bathroom without buying something.

By the time I had solved each of these problems, I was tired and no longer felt like shopping.

Filed under: Driving, Shopping   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: shopping, town

Bowling & birthdays & Joey Richter

09May12

It was my friend Tara’s birthday, so Tara, Keira, Brianna and I all went out to lunch and then bowling. Since all of our combined skills range from “awful” to “likely to cause injury,” we all just derped around a little bit. For example, we all gave each other what we considered hilarious names for the screen showing our scores. I, for instance, was Joey Richter. Tara was Darren Criss. Keira wanted to be called Trudy, and Brianna was “Girl.” (Parks and Recreation reference alert!) Whenever one of us got the occasional strike, we brought the entire bowling alley to a standstill because we were so excited because it was just THAT occasional.

First we played next to these old guys that were extremely serious about their bowling. When they left, this pair of teenage guys came in and bowled like eight strikes in a row, making our gutter balls and granny shots look even derpier by comparison. Halfway through, Keira left at the same time Allison arrived and took the name Trudy. At one point, our machine that spits out the balls malfunctioned; bowling balls started bursting out and flying all over the place, and since we were sharing that machine with the guys, all of us were running around trying to grab the balls rolling around on the ground. After four games, we finally decided we’d done enough damage, and we gathered up our shoes and went up to the counter.

“Lane 23?” said the guy. “Name, please.”

“Elodie?” I said, confused, because I hadn’t given my name; then I made the connection. “Oh. Right, uh… Joey…”

“Rich-ter?” he said, pronouncing it like “rich” instead of “rick,” to which I nodded solemnly.

“Darren Criss,” Tara piped up, snickering.

“Trudy,” said Allison.

“Girl,” said Brianna.

Then we paid and ran out into the parking lot.

Filed under: Birthday, Friends, Funny   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: bowling, Darren Criss, fun, I suck at bowling just FYI, Joey Richter, Parks and Recreation

Ogling boys from afar (JUST LIKE OLD TIMES!)

03May12

Now that it’s summer and I’m home from college, it’s my job to pick up my brother from school every day. I don’t mind, because I’ve missed him this past year, but I also like waiting in the parking lot so I can gawk awkwardly at the high school dramas playing out before me. It’s like a bunch of mini soap operas conveniently located in the general vicinity. Sometimes I buy food on the way there so I’m literally sitting in the parking lot, snacking and eagerly watching like it’s my favorite TV show.

This whole scenario presents its own set of problems, though. The high school parking lot is where it’s at. People chill on the hoods of their cars long after school gets out. Even on the weekends, people meet up there if they’ve got a big group and only want to take one car. I cannot stress this enough: it is the epicenter of our lives. That’s why it’s somewhat awkward, because now I’m seeing every guy I ever had a crush on. Today I saw Spencer. The other day I saw Ace. And what do I do? Say hi? Wave? No. I almost run them over with my car out of sheer alarm.

Last year’s football players who went off to college are starting to trickle in. It’s only a matter of time before I see That Guy and fall in love with him for the 76th time since junior year. But I’m not going to squee. I’m not. I’m not even thinking about him and his luscious hair. (GOD, HE’S PRETTY!)

Filed under: Driving, Embarrassment   |  1 Comment
Tags: crushes, high school, my brother

This is something that happened.

29Apr12

When I was about twelve, my brother Alex, my cousin Jase and I thought it’d be fun to play baseball at a nearby high school (probably because we were tired of playing in the street and having to run from cars). It was a Saturday, so we frolicked over to the field and were disappointed to discover that it was heavily locked up and surrounded by a twelve-foot fence.

“There goes that idea,” said Jase dejectedly.

“Nonsense,” said Alex, “we’ll figure out a way in,” and he promptly grabbed all of our stuff (baseballs, water bottles, bats, cell phones) and chucked it over the fence and into the field without a second thought. Jase and I stared with our mouths open.

“What?” said Alex defensively.

“There aren’t words,” I said, shaking my head.

“C’mon.” Alex looked at the fence, sizing it up. “We just have to climb it…”

We tried. God knows we tried. We went at that fence from every angle; we tried hoisting one another up over our shoulders; we took running starts. Nothing worked. We started trying to create a human ladder, and it was around this time that we discovered an actual ladder lying in the dirt a few yards away. Despite it being the most rickety, dangerous man-made construction ever built, Jase and I angled it against the dugout and slowly climbed onto the roof while Alex held it in place. We slid toward the other side on our butts, craned our necks, and looked at what now appeared to be a hundred-foot drop to the ground below.

“Nope,” said Jase, shaking his head. “No way. Can’t be done.”

“Wimps!” Alex called from below. “Somebody come back down and hold it for me; I’ll do it.”

“Yeah,” snapped Jase, “if you want to break both your legs. It’s too high. We should just—”

And in that moment—between when Jase said “if you want to break both your legs” and “we should just”—something happened. I had been seized by this “oh, screw it” mentality and I was going to do it. I was going to be the hero. It was an idea born from adrenaline and far too many action movies, and it was both spectacular and idiotic in the best possible way. Who the hell cared about the consequences? What even were the consequences? I foresaw vague, shapeless bad things happening to me as a result of jumping off the roof, and as long as they remained vague and shapeless, I was good. But that was when Jase said “if you want to break both your legs,” and suddenly… well, I could picture myself breaking both my legs, and suddenly the idea seemed more stupid than spectacular. But the sequence was already in motion. I had already started to spring.

What happened was I propelled myself off the roof while also trying desperately to cling to the shingles with my fingertips. The result was an awkward and graceless roll off the roof, and I plummeted twelve feet into the dirt with an all-mighty thump that jarred every bone in my body.

“AHHHHHH! OH MY GOD!” I shouted. “Holy crap! I think I broke everything!”

“Are you okay?” said Alex, smashing his face against the fence. “That was awesome! What even was that?”

“That was awesome,” agreed Jase. “Awkward, but awesome.”

With the awesomeness of my stunt no longer in question, I was able to assess that my butt took the full brunt of the impact. It was the first of two times I would bruise my tailbone over the course of my life, but I quickly moved past this and settled on the “what the hell do I do now” aspect of it all. I was now trapped inside the baseball field, and I was probably going to have to stay here until the students came out for gym class Monday morning.

Jase and Alex were trying to find a solution to what had mushroomed into a full-scale Problem (I heard things like “We could dig a tunnel…”) while I explored the dugout. I found a few bottles of Gatorade, some peanuts, and some keys. Keys?

“KEYS!” I yelled. “I FOUND THE KEYS!”

And that’s how we accidentally broke into a high school baseball field, drank some of their Gatorade, and booked it before they could ever know who broke their rickety ladder.

Filed under: Family, Funny   |  2 Comments
Tags: baseball, childhood, idiocy, what

This title has nothing to do with the post! Flamingos!

19Apr12

Hey! Psst! Hey you! Look at me, I’m updating! But don’t tell my rigorous self-imposed exam studying schedule—it’ll be PISSED. I’m using one of the five minute breaks I allotted myself to let you all know that I AM ALIVE, and that I am not updating my Twitter from the trunk of my kidnappers.

Filed under: Uncategorized   |  1 Comment
Tags: college, exams, flamingos, updating

Once I failed a math test and almost lost my hand, all in the same day

21Mar12

When I was in high school, our sociology class did this thing called “Handicap Day” wherein kids would adopt physical handicaps to learn to empathize with the day-to-day challenges of actually being handicapped. So once a semester, about forty or so kids would roll into school using wheelchairs, or wearing blindfolds, or with noise-cancelling headphones to simulate deafness. Well, when it was my turn, I opted to lose the use of my dominant hand, so I went to school with a nub for an arm and came perilously close to having that be my new reality. (I wore a mitten and wrapped it tightly in duct tape. By the end of the day my hand was going dangerously numb and I had to have some of the other kids pry the device off.)

Anyway, we all learned our lessons a little too well. My friend Claire spent the whole day inadvertently banging into things with her wheelchair, and I had to help a “blind” girl go to the bathroom, which took our relationship to a level I wasn’t entirely prepared for. And then there was the matter of my math test.

My sociology teacher made allowances for special cases, like a certain math test that would be a deciding factor in my final grade, and said I could take the nub off for that class only. My math teacher, on the other hand (no pun intended), said, “A real handicapped person doesn’t have that option,” gave me the test, and forced me to make illegible scribblings with my left hand. Sure, I saw his point, but I’d been preparing for this test for weeks. When I handed it in, he chuckled at my efforts in front of the whole class and promptly failed me.

The lesson here is that the world is a cruel place… which is why I LIED. In my last post, ALL OF THEM WERE TRUTHS. ALL! Ha! See that, Math Teacher? Do you see what you’ve done to my compassion and humanity? *sob*

I did get stuck in a Target dressing room and had to awkwardly army-crawl under the door. And I did use electricity for evil instead of good. (Most of my town had lost power during the MOTHER of all blizzards. I was fortunate enough to have power, and I used it to play Mario Kart. I was Bowser. Thus, evil.) And I did learn that one of my distant relatives was a murderer, but my grandma randomly threw that into casual conversation. So it was like, “Did I ever tell you my great-grandfather was a killer? WAIT! Was that Dancing with the Stars? Change the channel! GO BACK! WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHY DID YOU STOP?”

Filed under: Embarrassment, Math (a category I will probably never use again), School   |  6 Comments
Tags: incompetence, well that is uncomfortable

The takeaway here is that I suck at Monopoly.

05Mar12

I feel like I start off a disproportionate number of posts by saying, “I’M ALIVE! I SWEAR!” Although you can’t possibly know that for sure. This could be the kidnapper updating all my online things so nobody will be suspicious. (If there’s suddenly a halt in the flow of TV show-related Tweets on my Twitter, that’s when you should probably alert the authorities.)

Why do I stop posting? My life stops being the action-packed Hollywood thriller we all know it’s destined to be someday. So I think to myself, “Why post anything? Nothing’s going on.” And then a bunch of noteworthy stuff happens, and I realize my life is so full of writable things that I can’t possibly pick just one. But THEN the nagging guilt starts tugging at me. And THEN I get so bogged down with homework that I’ll do just about anything to escape the hellish torment, and then I run out of things to watch on Netflix, and finally I sit down and blog. So that’s where we are.

Let’s play a GAME! And this isn’t like Monopoly with the family where your dad takes it so seriously that your mom and brother quit and finally it’s just the two of you playing into the wee hours of the morning until somebody cries. Nope. This is not like that. This is FUN and not traumatizing. Here are three things that happened. Only one of them happened to me. The others probably happened to somebody somewhere. Just, you know, not to me, and I’m the one in charge here. In short, one is truth and the others are lies in a lie sandwich with a side helping of lies.

Over spring break, I…

…got myself stuck in a dressing room at Target and had to crawl out under the door.
…used the power of electricity for evil instead of good.
…discovered that my great-great-great-grandfather was a murderer.

WHICH IS IT?

Filed under: Family   |  5 Comments
Tags: Monopoly, spring break, this is my life