Tag Archives: me me me

Caroline’s Birthday

Twenty-five years ago today, I met someone. Whenever people had asked two-year-old me what I wanted to name the baby, I said something very quickly that sounded like “Dickynup.” But I seemed to be fine with the name my parents had picked out for my new sister, Caroline Elizabeth, whom I called “baby Caroyine.”

I wish I had a scanner so I could upload a picture of us as kids. She was adorable, and still is. Here’s a picture of us during the Princess Half-Marathon earlier this year.

She’s the blonde one on the right who looks nothing like me and is insanely proud of being a couple of inches taller than me.

Like most siblings, we had a lot of fights growing up. But we also had a lot of fun. When I went to preschool, she cried hysterically about how she wanted her “Kaykie.” We used to play with our gigantic collection of stuffed animals in my room on Saturday mornings. We’d play out in the backyard, inventing all kinds of crazy games (one of which involved pretending to be vultures). We share a kind of weirdness in our personalities that only siblings can understand.

As we got older, we got to be a different kind of friends. We talked about boys, vented about people at school, complained about teenage issues. We hung out by going to the movies or watching The X-Files together instead of playing in the backyard. We made fun of the characters on Law & Order: SVU. Eventually, she decided to go to BC, where she was a freshman when I was a senior, and I loved having her on the same campus as me. She was in the honors program and on the swim team, met a great boyfriend, and continued being her awesome self.

Today she turns twenty-five. I still call her by the embarrassing family nicknames she’d kill me for revealing here. She’s in her second year at Villanova Law School, where she’s involved with student government. She’s still with the same boyfriend. She trips over everything in her path, but always gets right back up and laughs at herself. She loves puns, Martha Stewart’s recipes, and Popsicles. She’s still adorable and hilarious, and I miss having her in the same city as me.

Happy birthday to the best little sister ever. I love you.

5 Years of SST-S: A Trip Down Memory Lane

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(By the way, thanks for bearing with me in my last post. I try not to get too angry or ranty on this blog, but secondhand smoke gets my blood boiling like nothing else, and venting about it was a long time coming. Now for a more pleasant post.)

Today is the five-year anniversary of SST-S. (Also my cousin’s birthday—happy birthday, Lauren!) Wow. What was I doing five years ago? And what have I done since then?

Five years ago I had just moved into my first apartment in Chestnut Hill with Christina and Chris. It was a fantastic apartment, and since it was about 500 feet away from my alma mater, I could kind of lull myself into believing that I was still in college. I was working at my first full-time job and making new friends. I had never been on a date. I was toying with the idea of eventually going to grad school for creative writing or journalism. Erin, Lindsey, and Jackie lived down the road in a tiny basement apartment. Julie had just moved to Inman Square. I was just starting to make friends at my new job. The Red Sox were at the end of a craptacular season, and Jon Lester had just been diagnosed with lymphoma.

The year that followed turned out to be a very, very hard one, for personal reasons that I still can’t write about on a public blog. Lots of ups and downs, and Christina was a saint for putting up with me through it all. During that year, I became obsessed with the final season of The O.C. The Boston Globe excerpted me a few times in their now-defunct “Readers’ Blogs” section. I went on Accutane and eventually stopped when I realized that it’s probably easier to get a handgun permit than it is to get a prescription for Accutane (you have to get a new one every month) when you’re a woman of childbearing age. I re-wrote my novel that was my senior thesis and started looking for an agent. I wrote for Not For Tourists and had an ill-advised biography that included the phrase “spews generational angst.” While researching one of my Not For Tourists pieces, I got lost in a park in the dark in East Boston and spent a terrifying half hour trying to find my way out. I tried to figure out which bars I could go to without running into too many college students. I went to a Christmas party where we spent the whole time talking about how tired we were and reminiscing about college. I went on a date with a guy I met at a bar. He creeped me out. I survived The Great Cartoon Bombing of Boston. I watched the 2007 Superbowl with a bunch of loud, drunk, slightly crass Greek Orthodox seminarians (aka my roommate Chris’s friends). Erin, Lindsey, and Jackie had to move out of their apartment after a sewage leak. I pigged out with Christina for the last episode of Gilmore Girls. I celebrated my twenty-third birthday by going to Potterpalooza in Brookline and getting the last Harry Potter book. I was happy. I was sad. I was scared. I cried, I had anxiety attacks, I had psychosomatic illness, I had hypochondria. Christina and Erin graduated from grad school and found jobs. Christina moved to Fall River just as I got a new job.

The next year started with a new roommate, Stephanie, moving into the room that Christina had vacated. I started my new job and hit it off right away with my new boss. Within four months, I got promoted, which I’m still insanely proud of. I made new friends at work. The Red Sox won the World Series again. I joined Match.com and went on some awful dates. I had a huge crush on a coworker. I reviewed books for TeensReadToo. I went on my first business trip to San Francisco and had the time of my life. I went on another business trip to Philadelphia and sat next to a hilarious woman on the way back. A lot of my old coworkers ended up working with me again due to a merger and the incestuous world of college publishing. I tried sushi for the first time and got completely addicted to it. I drooled over Michael Phelps. I got bitten by a dog. I got so sick of riding the Green Line to work all the time (Ginny just posted about how annoying all the college students on the B Line are) that I decided to move to Davis Square.

Year 3 started off in Davis Square, which I absolutely love. My commute to work was cut in half. I traveled to Savannah on business. Julie and I joined a chorus, which was a lot of fun. I voted for Obama and watched his inauguration with my coworkers. I got hooked on Damages and reruns of The Golden Girls. I went on a business trip to Georgia where, for the first time in my life, I got pulled over due to a broken taillight on my rental car. I also went to Chicago on business. I joined my office softball team. Unfortunately, I also started experiencing anxiety again that year, and I began therapy, which helped me a lot.

In Year 4, I went on more dates than any other year. I dated one guy for two months, then decided I didn’t want to keep seeing him, but the experience gave me hope. I took a great Grub Street class that helped my writing out a lot. I watched all ten Best Picture nominees. I went on Celexa for my anxiety, which massively improved. I got a new roommate, who told me within a week of moving in that my alarm clock was too loud and causing her to lose so much sleep she might get fired. (Seriously.) There was some drama this year—I didn’t get a job that I really wanted and thought that I would get. I was so upset—it felt like a bad breakup. There was some family conflict as well, and to this day I’m hurt by it. But plenty of good things happened, too. My sister ran the Boston Marathon. I traveled with my family to Aruba. And the year ended with me getting another promotion and traveling to Washington, DC on a business trip.

Year 5 was pretty awesome. I saw Wicked. I ran the Princess Half-Marathon and went to Disney World and The Wizarding World of Harry Potter with my sister. I went to my five-year college reunion. I went to Las Vegas for Jon and Steph’s wedding and went to a Celine Dion concert. I went to Aruba again and went parasailing. I went to my cousin Ryan’s beautiful wedding. I had a kick-ass birthday party. I started training for my second half-marathon, and I moved to a new apartment, still near Davis Square. (More on that in an upcoming post.)

I’m still single and still struggling. But would I ever go back to five years ago? Hell, no. Life has gotten so much better in so many ways.

I’ve now been on about twenty first dates. I’ve decided not to go to grad school, although never say never. Erin, Lindsey, and Jackie finally all moved out of their apartment. I’ve moved up within my industry and am hoping to move up even more. I’ve made a lot of new friends, particularly through work. Oh, and the Sox are currently battling it out with the Yankees for the division title and will probably make it to the playoffs this year. And Jon Lester recovered completely and went on to pitch a no-hitter and win the final game of the 2007 World Series.

CS&T

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When I was a kid, I never went to camp in the summer. I never visited relatives (they all lived near me in Massachusetts) and I never traveled outside of New England.

All I wanted to do was swim.

When I was six, my family joined a swim and tennis club in my town that was more like a community pool than a country club. C-Town Swim and Tennis Club (CS&T) had an L-shaped, 25-yard pool and a baby pool behind a clubhouse that had a lobby and two bathrooms. There were vending machines, lots of grass, and a four-square court. The tennis courts were located off the driveway.

In a game of word association, it’s the place I associate with both “summer” and “childhood.” I can’t remember what I used to do in the summer before we joined. From the time I was six, every summer was the same. I was at the club every day. I saw the same families every year and the same old friends. I started competitive swimming, the sport that consumed my life in high school, on CS&T’s swim team when I was seven years old and didn’t quit until I was too old to swim on the team anymore. And every year, the swim team was undefeated, like the basketball team in the movie Pleasantville. Actually, CS&T was like Pleasantville in a lot of ways: nothing ever changed, everyone was usually happy, and no one ever wanted to leave.

I could go on for days about all my memories of that place. The day I started swim team and was so tired that I collapsed, exhausted, into bed at home, ready to quit. My first ribbon when I was eight, for twelfth place at championships, which I was incredibly proud of. Draping towels over picnic tables and playing house with my friend Caroline in between swim team and swim lessons when we were little. (We usually pretended we were orphans who would get rescued by a rich old lady—we must have been reading the Samantha books in the American Girl series too much.) Playing games with friends over on the grass—I can still hear everybody screaming, “Witchy Witchy, are you coming out tonight?” Staying up all night in a tent at the club sleepover. Going out for ice cream with Andrea, my favorite lifeguard, whom I worshipped. Celebrating my ninth birthday at the club on a cloudy day and having the whole pool to ourselves. Spending all season trying to learn how to dive with Andrea when I was nine only to get the hang of it on the day of championships. Winning my first medal, for fourth place, at championships when I was eleven. Watching my dad win the cannonball contest at the club’s annual Family Day. Running away from Caroline as she tried to wipe her egg-smeared hands off on me after the egg we were using in the egg toss on Family Day broke all over her. Participating in skits at the club pep rally before championships. Going on a cruise of the Boston Harbor Islands with older kids on the swim team. “Catching” the little kids in the six-and-under age group, who only swam to the halfway point of the pool in meets and needed older kids there to help them when they finished. Going to Canobie Lake Park on a club-sponsored trip. Taking pictures in the deep end with an underwater camera. Celebrating my fifteenth birthday with a surprise party my friends threw for me at the club. Baby-sitting for CS&T families. Winning my first “Most Improved” trophy when I was fifteen. Taking a lifeguarding course with a bunch of friends when I was sixteen. Working at the club for four years when I was in college and becoming one of those lifeguards I had idolized.

You get the idea. As Josh, who was the teacher in that first swim lesson of mine twenty years ago (wow…twenty years ago?), says, it’s a special place. And he should know. He was a member as a child and joined the maintenance staff when he was fourteen. He became a lifeguard, then head coach, and until last year, when he was promoted to dean at the high school where he was previously a teacher, the club’s manager.

This summer, there are all sorts of things I’ve wanted to do. I made a list of everything I wanted to do this summer and have made good progress on it. I’ve also made a “Bucket List” of things I want to accomplish in my life and a list of places I want to travel. I’m amazed at how different I am now from that kid who just wanted to swim. As a child, I didn’t care about seeing the world. I didn’t want to travel when I had all I wanted right in my hometown. Why, I thought, would I want to spend my summer doing anything other than what I already knew I loved?

I’m twenty-seven now and don’t know what my future holds. I am, as my blog title indicates, a struggling single twenty-something who doesn’t yet, and may never, have the husband, kids, and house in the Boston suburbs that I so want. But if I ever do have kids, what I had with CS&T is what I want for them. Not necessarily the specifics of the way I used to spend my summers, but I hope that my hypothetical future children will be so happy with what they have that they can’t imagine that anything else could be better.

As for me, I’m working on getting myself to that place in my current life. Stay tuned.

Fifteen Years of Melodrama

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Today I turn 27, which Jill and Rebekah have called the “scary age.” I am now officially in my late twenties, which is so weird. And it sounds so much older- maybe it’s the extra syllable. I look around at the company I’ve been working at for four years, where I was one of the youngest people when I started working here, and realize that I no longer fall into that category, not by a long shot. I am still single and still struggling, but will only be a twenty-something for three more years.

Before I made public my desire to spew generational angst, I wrote my feelings down the old-fashioned way: diaries and journals. Sometimes they had locks, sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes I wrote “Dear Diary,” sometimes I called my diary a name like Anne Frank called her diary Kitty, and sometimes I didn’t call it anything. Sometimes I wrote every day, sometimes I caught up later, sometimes I waited until I had some kind of deep thought and then wrote about it. In elementary school, if no significant events occurred that day (and to be clear, significant events included having pizza for dinner, getting a video from the video store, and going to the pool), I wrote, “Nothing happened.”

I’m about to move to a new apartment in the same area, and as I was moving, I found all the old diaries and journals that I saved. It’s funny looking through them now and seeing what was so important to me back then. I was so melodramatic- everything from not being allowed to carry a backpack between classes to the results of Making the Band sent me into a tizzy.

So I thought that I would summarize the fifteen years before SSTS by sharing with you one bit of overreaction for each year. Without further ado:

Age 21: Really funny in retrospect
“Editing jobs for recent college grads also don’t pay much. I read somewhere that it’s actually better to get a job in sales or marketing or something at a publishing company and switch over to editing later. Unfortunately, not only would sales or marketing bore me, I would suck at them. Like I said, my people skills leave a lot to be desired.”
(I did, of course, end up landing one of those low-paying editing jobs, but I’ve also worked in marketing and am now hoping to move into sales and then a higher marketing position eventually. Go figure.)

Age 20: Emo-Katie
“Sometimes I feel completely crazy and sometimes I feel like the sanest person in the world. Sometimes I’m totally comfortable with myself and sometimes I think there are a million things wrong with me that I need to fix.

I think I missed out on a lot of the anxieties that people have their freshman year of college, and I’m making up for that now. I don’t know where I’m going or what I want. I feel like this T-shirt Jon has: ‘I’m Confused…Wait, Maybe I’m Not!’”

Age 19: Not the holiday most people would romanticize
“I wish we could go back to April Fool’s Day. We were all so happy then.”

Age 18: Mortal sins committed against me on AIM
“Around the time I started to realize that BQ didn’t like me, I noticed that she didn’t have me on her buddy list. I asked her if she had my screen name and she said yes. But she didn’t have many people on there, so I didn’t care too much. I only IM’ed her I think twice, both times in response to away messages saying she was upset or sick. Not long after that, I noticed that she wasn’t online anymore, but she was on C’s computer. So I figured she made it so only people on her buddy list could view her info, which is a pretty bitchy thing to do in itself. But last week I noticed that while she didn’t show up under (first screen name), she did show up under (second screen name). So you know what she did? She blocked me. SHE FUCKING BLOCKED ME!!!!! THAT FUCKING BITCH!!!!!!!!”
(Remember when life revolved around AIM? Getting blocked on AIM was the ultimate insult–even worse than being defriended on Facebook. This girl BQ (Bitch Queen) had done plenty of bitchy things away from the computer, but for some reason blocking me on AIM was what sent me over the edge.)

Age 17: College application angst
“Nothing makes me stand out. I’m not good at swimming–I couldn’t even make sectionals– I don’t have A’s in all my classes, my class rank is only 18, I’m not president of Student Council or editor-in-chief of the Voice or the yearbook, I haven’t had a lead in any of the plays or even a big part, I’m not a National Merit Semifinalist. Even my essay wasn’t that great.”

Age 16: The woes of junior year
“I have a ton of homework, AND the musical, AND track starts next week. And my English teacher is really pissing me off. She grades so hard and I’M DOING SO BAD! Plus, I have other things to worry about. Like studying for SATs, and looking for colleges, and looking for a summer job, and trying to get my writing published. I have like no time for fun anymore. Life is sooo stressful!”
(I’ll cut myself some slack on this one because junior year of high school was, honestly, pretty jam-packed. I don’t know how I ever made it through high school doing everything I was doing.)

Age 15: Reality TV angst
“THEY ANNOUNCED THE O-TOWN MEMBERS ON MAKING THE BAND!!! And one of them is Ikaika!! I can’t believe it! He’s never even there! How could he be in the band! And Bryan and Mike didn’t make it!??? I thought Mike was the one guy who was definitely in!…At least Ashley Parker Angel made it. I looove him.”
(If you don’t remember, the first Making the Band was about the making of the boy band O-Town, singers of such brilliant lines as “I’ve had the rest of you now I want the best of you, it’s time for show and tell.” For the record, Ashley was hot and Ikaika was a whiny bitch.)

Age 14: Honors class snobbery
“I really hate my health class. With honors classes you’re in with mostly nice kids. Even chorus has mostly nice kids. But in classes like gym and health, you’re thrown in with all kinds of kids. And my health class is the worst. It’s full of juvenile delinquents and druggies- how ironic. My only real friend in the class is S. I mean, there are a few nice kids in my class, but for the most part, it’s all druggies and jerks.”

Age 13: The first “horrible, tragic thing” was probably a B+
“But another horrible, tragic thing has happened. I suppose it’s not as bad as war or death or even flunking a course, but it is such a disappointment! We can’t go on the Spanish field trip. I was wicked looking forward to it, but it’s on the same day as another field trip. It wicked stinks.”
(I notice in these diaries that I used to say “wicked,” in the Bostonian sense, a lot more when I was younger. However, here I’m completely misusing the word.)

Age 12: Holy overreaction, Batman!
“We’ve got a BIG problem here. The teachers have decided that from now on we won’t be able to carry our backpacks around from class to class with us. Is that unfair or what?”

Age 11: Fuzzy math
“I have mixed feelings today. Half of me wants to shout for joy and half of me wants to cry. And part of me is confused.”

Age 10: People never even solve mysteries
“Books always tell you not to give up, and I’m not going to give up, but I won’t do well. In books, when people say these words, they always turn out not to be true. But in real life…it just doesn’t work that way in real life. Books just aren’t honest. I mean, I love books, but they lie. People never even solve mysteries. Like I said, life isn’t fair.”
(A recurring theme of my childhood– I read so much and always wanted, and in many cases expected, life to turn out the way it did in the books I read.)

Age 9: Let it snow
“Today was the most boring day. We went to Grandma’s. She wasn’t home. We went to a store. It was boring. Then it snowed. At least I can look forward to that.”

Age 8: Poor little Katie- bad haircuts will never stop sucking
“Dear Diary,
Today I went to McDonald’s. Then I got my hair cut. The great hair disaster. I look so stupid. Katie.

Age 7: Sorry, Caroline
“Nobody is any fun anymore. My dad’s on vacation so I can’t play with my friends. L. is on vacation. C’s mom is having an operation. And I hate playing with my dumb sister.”
(Note: when my dad took a week off and we weren’t going anywhere, my parents didn’t want me playing with my friends because they wanted the whole family to do things together. I was not so crazy about that idea.)

And here I am now:

Katie, survivor of a lifetime of angst and melodrama. But of course, some cool stuff occasionally happened to me, too. So I’ll leave you with a record of one of those things:

November 29, 1992
“Dear Diary,
A spaceship landed in my neighborhood. We have proof. I went bike riding. Katie.”

Filling Up the Bucket

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Today in “I’m a Moron”: you know that camera cable I was looking for so I could write this post? IT WAS IN MY CAMERA BAG. Duh.

Anyway: two weeks ago, I flew out to Las Vegas for Jon and Steph’s wedding. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but I will say that their wedding was lovely. The vows they wrote were very sweet, the decor was beautiful (all in my favorite color, purple!) and the reception was just the right mix of classy and fun. They had appetizers themed after places that were significant to them (i.e. Sam Adams and Fenway Franks for Boston, Bass and mini fish and chips for London, etc.) and table numbers with numbers that had meaning to them. They also gave away flip flops to everyone at the reception for dancing and had both a photo booth and an Elvis impersonator who showed up for one song! Also, it was kind of a weird mix of people at the wedding– a handful of people I knew from college, but many more I didn’t: Jon’s friends from home, Steph’s friends from home, Steph’s friends from when she studied abroad in London, Steph’s friends from when she worked in London for a couple of years, Jon’s work friends in LA, Steph’s work friends in LA, their neighbors in LA…you get the picture. But they were all so much fun! After an awesome bachelorette party, a day spent by the hotel pool (part of it in a rented cabana), and an after-wedding trip to a club in the hotel, I made a lot of new friends. We’re all in a wedding Facebook group now and want to reunite to party again.

It was great to see Jon and Steph, whom I hadn’t seen in awhile, again. It was also awesome to spend more time with Christina- after not seeing her for almost two years, I saw her for two separate occasions in one month. We enjoyed staying in a lovely hotel, played some slots, went to a cool aquarium, and ate some great food.

Also, I crossed a couple of items off my bucket list.

You have a bucket list? you’re now saying. Why, yes, I do. Housekeeping detail: if you read this blog in Google Reader or another method that’s not directly on the site, I now have a new design (it was time for a change) and some new pages. One is on me, the other two are on my bucket list and my travel goals.

I first made the bucket list (which includes the travel goals) the summer after college, just a couple of months before I started this blog. I’ve only modified it a bit since then, and I’ve accomplished some of the items on it–living in Davis Square, traveling to places like Philadelphia and San Francisco, etc. Some items on it are totally do-able (taking a Spanish class, joining a book club, spending the whole day reading a novel); others are harder (becoming a best-selling author, attending an award show, owning a boat). The travel goals range from typical (London, Paris, Rome) to more quirky and Katie-specific (Washington Depot, CT, which inspired Stars Hollow from Gilmore Girls, and Quechee, VT, where I used to go skiing, in the summer rather than winter). As my life progresses, I will update you on which items have been accomplished.

So, what’s now been crossed off the list? Traveling to Vegas, first of all. But also?

I WENT TO A CELINE DION CONCERT.

…I KNOW. You’re jealous, right? Well, you should be!

Okay, in all seriousness, I know that it’s not a concert most people would make it a life goal to see. She’s not, and never has been, what the cool kids are listening to. Some guy wrote a book about her that’s subtitled “A Journey To the End of Taste.” Ana Gasteyer did a famous parody of her on SNL. Most people roll their eyes at the mere mention of her name.

You know what? I DON’T CARE. I’ve been a huge fan of hers since I was twelve. There is nothing the least bit ironic or guilty-pleasure-ish in my love for her. I genuinely enjoy her music. I love the things she does with her voice. I love almost all of her songs, from “Where Does My Heart Beat Now” to “Taking Chances.” I love that she seems like a genuinely nice person, and that while people sometimes trash her music, I’ve never heard about her doing or saying anything bitchy or controversial– and with her level of fame and the kind of celebrity culture we live in, the press definitely would have jumped on any story about that. I love that she takes her singing seriously, but not herself or what other people are saying about her, as you can see in these videos.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEggoXwoXEY]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7sTDpAtjEo]

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pytrKPnhwlA]

And if you don’t believe me? Believe Michelle Collins (thank you, Megan and Rebekah, for introducing me to her brand of hilarity). She will never apologize for her Celine Dion love and neither will I!

The tickets were an early birthday present from my parents. The seats were awesome and did not disappoint. (They didn’t allow photos in the theater, so I have no pictures from the actual concert.) I could see her really well, and she sounded fantastic. She did a lot of covers, which surprised me- it was about half and half her own stuff and covers like Journey’s “Open Arms” and Janice Ian’s “At Seventeen.” One of my favorite songs she did was actually a French song called “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” I don’t speak French at all, but this is a sad love song, and she cried while singing it- it was surprisingly very moving.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxjYv0N6PoQ]

And of course, the finale was “My Heart Will Go On,” a favorite of mine since my days as a Titanic fangirl. It was amazing, and I didn’t stop smiling all the way to the airport.

What’s next to be crossed off the list? I don’t know, but I’m ridiculously glad to have checked these things off my list. What an awesome trip this was.

My Summer To-Do List

These Are My Confessions

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We are now nearing the end of Lent, and I’ve heard that there’s an initiative in the Boston Archdiocese to encourage people to go to confession. I’ve written before here about my religious habits, but I haven’t been to confession since my confirmation retreat when I was fifteen. I was sharing a room with a girl I went to school with, and I confessed that I’d snuck a look at her retreat notebook while she was in the bathroom.

So while I might not be headed for ten Our Fathers or whatever they give you for penance nowadays, but there are plenty of things about myself that I’m not proud of. So I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you guys some of the more unfortunate facts about me.

Without further ado, here’s what I have to confess to my readers:

-When I was a teenager, my sister and I both went to the optometrist. I was sitting near this table and had my hand under it, and I felt a button. When I pushed it, it made a noise like a doorbell. The optometrist apparently didn’t know the bell was there, because she was all confused and tried to figure out where it was coming from. I pressed it one more time to make sure, and it sounded again. I was too embarrassed to say that it had been me, and my sister didn’t even believe me when I told her.

-My first-ever concert was Backstreet Boys.

-It takes me over an hour to get out of bed on a normal day, regardless of how much sleep I get. My bed is just so soft and comfy that I don’t want to get out, so I can never get anything done before work.

-I don’t do laundry until I run out of underwear, and underwear and socks are about the only thing I wash. As long as my clothes don’t smell and don’t have any big stains on them, I just put them away.

-Although, I only own about three sports bras, so I very often take a sports bra out of the hamper, put it on, and hope that I run fast enough that people walking by me don’t have to smell me.

-While I love the Red Sox, I can’t claim to be a lifelong fan. I’m a lousy athlete and a bit of a girly-girl, so when I was a kid I was all, “Ew, I hate sports.” By high school I’d changed my mind, and I’ve been a die-hard Sox fan for the last ten years or so.

-I still have the keys from my summer job in 2001. Oops.

-At said summer job (lifeguard at a condo complex), I once accidentally left those keys, and all my other stuff, in the pool building and locked myself out in the pouring rain. I managed to climb over the fence and get myself back in through an unlocked door, but not before getting soaked by the rain. I don’t want to think about how many people in the condos must have seen this all happen.

-I watch Toddlers and Tiaras. It’s a horrifying, ridiculous show, but I just can’t look away! I’m too embarrassed to put it on my DVR, but I watched almost every episode of the most recent season. This one little girl, Makenzie, cracks me up. Sometimes I’ll randomly start laughing thinking of her saying, “I think waitresses are really cool…they bring food.” (That’s at about 11:47 of this video, but watch the whole thing!)

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_vQ3kIXVNE&w=480&h=390]

-At chorus a couple of weeks ago, while having a conversation about Disney princesses, I told this girl how Hans Christian Andersen’s version of “The Little Mermaid” ends. (Don’t look it up if you don’t know and don’t want to be disappointed.) Uh, that was a mistake- I think I ruined her day.

-When I went to see Wicked last fall, my friend Amy and I walked over a sidewalk vent on our way there. Um, bad idea when you’re on a major street and wearing dresses.

-If you have ever been a competitive swimmer, at some point you have peed in a pool.

-I was a competitive swimmer as a kid. Make of that what you will.

Princess Me!

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Two weeks ago, I was here:

If you couldn’t tell from the picture, “here” was Disney World. Specifically, for the Princess Half-Marathon!

Last year, my sister ran the Boston Marathon. I am not quite that crazy, but I thought a half-marathon might be something I could manage. When Caroline mentioned that the Princess race would take place during her spring break from law school, I hesitated at first. “I don’t know if I have time to train.” “It’s in Florida- it will be hot.” But then I looked at the half marathon training schedule and realized that it was completely do-able. So I was in.

I am amazed that I actually managed to stick to the training schedule, which involved four days of running per week, including one long run over the weekends. While I do like to run, and like other forms of exercise as well, I have a tendency to be lazy. I have a whole gamut of excuses for skipping the gym—everything from “It’s raining” to “I don’t want to miss The Office.”

Furthermore, if you haven’t been paying attention to the weather in Boston, we’ve gotten snow up to Shaq’s earlobes this winter. This meant running on the sidewalks involved getting my feet soaked in frozen puddles, trying not to slip on ice, climbing over snowbanks to avoid stepping on puddles or ice, trying to squeeze around people when the sidewalks were too narrow from the snow, being stopped dead in my tracks when I realized that a sidewalk hadn’t been shoveled and having to figure out how to get off the sidewalk without stepping in knee-deep snow…you get the picture. After awhile, I started longing for Florida just so I could run a long distance without being interrupted by the elements.

We had to get up at 3 in the morning for the half-marathon to be on the bus by 4 and start the race by 6:30. And so my sister and I, along with 13,000 other runners (mostly women, and many of whom were wearing tutus, tiaras, or princess costumes) ran 13.1 miles.

Along the way, we saw all kinds of Disney characters and entertainment:

And when it was over, we spent the rest of the day in Disney World!

I love Disney World. I had been twice before, once when I was eight and once when I was thirteen, and I think I was just as excited this time. We covered a lot of ground in one day- we got to the Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM), and World Showcase in EPCOT on a one-day pass.

The day after that, we headed to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, which was awesome. We went on all the rides (Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey is maybe the best ride I’ve ever been on ANYWHERE), hung out in the wand shop and Honeydukes, and had ourselves some butterbeer.

And what’s next? Well, I think I’ve caught the running bug. I still don’t want to run a marathon (I don’t like running that much), but I think I’m going to sign up for some 5ks and possibly another half marathon.

I don’t think any other race will give me a number like this, though:

My So-Called Valentine’s Day

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I used to hate Valentine’s Day, which is such a cliché. Every year, you hear people bitch about how it’s just an excuse to sell greeting cards and chocolate and how it’s “Singles Awareness Day” for people without significant others. All that is true, but in spite of that, I’ve found myself enjoying Valentine’s Day more and more in recent years.

Why? For the simplest reason ever—there are worse things than being single. Being in a good relationship > being single >being in a bad relationship. I’d much rather spend Valentine’s Day unattached than with someone I just started dating, or someone I’ve been dating for awhile but no longer want to be, or someone who likes me a lot more than I like him or vice versa. I know people who are spending V-Day with people it would be better for them not to be with, and I don’t envy them a bit.

Also, a lack of a relationship doesn’t mean a lack of love. At this point, I see Valentine’s Day as a time to celebrate the loving relationships I do have—with my friends and with myself.

Last night I went out with some of my favorite single ladies for our own Valentine’s Day celebration. We ate some fabulous unhealthy food at Coolidge Corner Clubhouse and then headed over to My So-Called 90s Night at Common Ground in Allston. For those of you who have never experienced this particular event, it is possibly the best time you will have at a bar in Boston—hours of Backstreet Boys, Third Eye Blind, Coolio, Ace of Base, Britney Spears, Chumbawumba, etc. We danced, yelled out the lyrics, did shots, and drank a lot of beer. When I’m finally not single, I’m going to miss this built-in excuse to go out with my girlfriends. Maybe then, Flag Day will become my new hang-out-with-the-girls holiday.

Tonight I ordered sushi, poured myself some wine, took a hot bubble bath, and watched my DVR’ed TV shows and some of my favorite chick flicks. I also bought myself a heart-shaped box of candy and a single red rose. Why not? While there are certainly things in my life that could be improved, for the most part, I am very, very happy. (My whole house is great! I can do anything good!) And if that’s not something to celebrate, what is?

In Which I Put My Jesuit Education to Use

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There are a lot of things I plan to do in the coming year- run a half-marathon, take a vacation, attend my first friend wedding (Jon and Steph’s), attend my cousin Ryan’s wedding, lose weight, donate more platelets, date more, cook more, do more of the writing that I’ve neglected, try some new restaurants. But before the new year even started, I knocked one thing off my list: I got rid of my dinosaur phone.

I’d had my old phone since my 22nd birthday- the day before, my old flip phone had inexplicably snapped at the hinges when I’d just ended a call. I replaced it with another flip phone that had basically no features- it could call and text, and that’s it. I’m kind of amazed it lasted me four and a half years, and I probably would have gotten more use out of it if I hadn’t decided to get to join the modern age and get…a phone with a camera and a QWERTY keypad.

No, I opted not to get a smartphone. Aside from the facts that they’re expensive, don’t hold enough mp3s to justify getting one when I just got a new iPod, and would probably cause me to spend my entire day on the Internet, I have another reason for not wanting an iPod, Droid, Blackberry, or Nexus One, and that reason is…Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

In its infinite wisdom, my Jesuit university required us to take a core curriculum that included English, history, math, science, social sciences, foreign languages, cultural diversity, and…philosophy and theology. To fulfill those last two, I took an awesome year-long class called Perspectives with the amazing Professor Kerry Cronin. It was a class that examined the question, “What is the best way to live?” from the perspective of different philosophers, theologians, and the Bible. And while philosophy wasn’t something I’d previously thought I’d have any interest in (I remember in college, when a guy told someone he was majoring in philosophy, she responded, “So you can sit on your ass and think all day?”), Perspectives turned out to be one of the best classes I took in college.

And it turns out I can use it to illustrate a point. Rousseau believed that in a state of nature, humans possess two distinct qualities: sympathy and the desire for perfectability. The latter is what leads to the downfall of people—they don’t just want to preserve themselves, but to preserve themselves as well as possible, and thus develop tools to help themselves do so. They then become dependent on those tools rather than on their innate ability for self-preservation. And this is what makes people weak.

On the off chance that you are still with me, this is what smartphones make me think of. I just imagine people becoming dependent on them and unable to trust themselves to do things the way they used to do. I bet that already, somewhere, someone has counted on the Internet being available on a smartphone to give them information, only to find that it didn’t get reception or wouldn’t work as planned. What’s going to happen when people get so used to looking up information on their cell phones that they don’t know how to do it any other way?

Okay, so maybe I didn’t have to reference a philosopher to say so. But that’s my main point. I just see a smartphone as something that would become a security blanket, and it makes me uncomfortable. Right now I’ll stick with a phone that was all the rage…about six years ago.

Pure Bright Fire

Formerly a struggling single twenty-something

Tag Archives: me me me

Caroline’s Birthday

5 Years of SST-S: A Trip Down Memory Lane

CS&T

Fifteen Years of Melodrama

Filling Up the Bucket

My Summer To-Do List

These Are My Confessions

Princess Me!

My So-Called Valentine’s Day

In Which I Put My Jesuit Education to Use