Where in the world is Adrianna?

I hope you all realize that whenever you read my complaints on blog, you have to take it with a grain of salt. I enjoy a bit of theatricality. My mother and sister do not understand this, even though they are way more theatrical than me. After not calling my mom back the day she left a message, I got several frantic messages from her varying from the very angry/"SO HELP ME GOD I WILL DISOWN YOU" to concerned/frantic to wondering what clothes I would like to wear in my casket. And my sister echoed these messages, only adding at the very end "Oh, and mom wants you to call her." So it runs in the family.

I'm living in my friend's apartment until I can move into mine. My friend moved into her parents' place for the summer. This might come as a high price to pay for air conditioning, but then again I did stand on the bus on the way home last week and realized that it looked as if I had peed in my pants. And I had to walk home like this. Maybe my priorities are switched around after all, but I have no reason to complain about the heat. Two summers of mindblowingly sweltering heat without any air conditioned buildings in the vicinity has toughened me.

I've got several roommates in this apartment, insect and human. As I've said before, I don't really mind insects. However, the situation in this apartment lead me at the start to go to the bathroom clutching a can of Raid and multitasking while performing various other duties. By the second day I had a small little battlefield of dead/dying roaches, one of which was dying for over 12 hours. And did I do anything to put it out of its long, agonizing torture? NO! In fact, before I got Raid I was pouring anything over the buggers with the "Keep out of reach of children" label on it, and entertaining the idea of setting them afire after they were sufficiently coated with rubbing alcohol. Unnecessary? Maybe. Theatrical? Definitely.

To further illustrate my point that college students, that sometimes put up with a couple of unnatural phenomena, let's turn to my friend Michal Lynn. She lives in what could potentially be an adorable apartment with two boys, one of whom is quite odd. When over there one night, I heard him asking in a voice bordering on irritation where is drying fish bones were. The bones of that small fish that had died in his fish tank. I mentioned potentially adorable, because it's things like drying fish bones lying around the apartment that keep it from achieving its full potential.

Oh, and also mouse patties. Mouse patties are definitely a hindrance.



Returning to theatricality, it would be interesting to develop a few theories as to how it became so immensely flattened. Did someone try to have a mouse patty in his hamburger? Did a person stomp on him? Maybe it was dropped from a great distance. I am clearly not the only person who at one point entertained alternate methods of disposing with unwanted roommates.

Shaking Things Up

This week has been long. Loooooong. That “long” should be read during the span of an entire week, 9-5, for you to get a feeling of just how long this week has been. I like what I’m doing at The Art Institute, even if some of it does fall under the category of “seemingly minute yet oh-so-important” work, like cataloging artwork in the database. Which involves the occasional research, like today when I had to find information about an art dealer whose name wasn’t even established, and reading through French (why is French so important? Why doesn’t anyone care about ravioli? What is it with the brie?) books to figure out states and editions of prints.

The other side of it is helping out with recreating lost colors in Winslow Homer watercolors. I would tell you more, but I would have to kill you.

The other shaking occurred in housing. I had to move this week, which happened in the space of about 2 hours on Wednesday.

Moving also means that I will have to somehow have to say bye to Mary Kate and Julie as roommates. They have been the most constant people in my lives for the past 3 years. They’ve seen me at my very worst, at my better times, with my head in the toilet, out of the toilet, when I purr, when I’m too moody to purr, when I’m happy, sad, mad, sleeping, awake. I can confidently say they are the only two people in existence who know the true content of my iTunes music library. Within the first week of living together first year, our RA wondered if we knew each other before college. Nope. We just had personalities in which our humor would build on each other until sometimes it nearly spiraled out of control. We just clicked. Plus, we were all almost the same size. I’m a wee bit taller.

However…

HowEVER…

(there is always a “however”)

Not everything was perfect all the time. Yup, we were that 00.0001% of college students in the world who had problems as roommates. I still don’t know exactly why there was always tension at the end of the school years, but I think it has to do with limits. You seem, first year I entered college too eager to make sure that people liked me. Which means that as a roommate, I tried initially to be very accommodating and doing things I would not normally do, and then you try to go and turn things around after months of pretending to like something differently. It’s hard. It makes you feel like a fraud. So then instead of talking I would sulk which, as everyone knows, solves all ills. And get increasingly frustrated.

I’m not shouldering the fault all onto me. I already blame myself for enough. I am convinced that my existence is responsible for chemistry, but I recognize I am a difficult long-term roommate. I get along with strangers and friends well, because limits are clearly defined, but how do you combine friendship with people you want to do their own dishes and take turns taking out the trash? Where you want everything to be fairly divided in close quarters and you can’t help but keep score in really, really meaningless things?

This blog post, I suppose, is to say what I don’t know how to say to Mary Kate and Julie in person, because I’m very, very bad with saying how I feel with people I’m close with and who mean a lot to me. Public display of affection has always come easier to me than sitting down and saying “Look, so this is how I REALLY feel…” And even if they never read this, maybe someone will and tell them how Adrianne is crazy about her old roommates, Mary Kate and Julie. Because at the end of the day, despite artistic differences and all, there were no other people I would have preferred to go home to at the end of the day to let them see my deep and burning passion for Dancing with the Stars and to just sit in the Armenian chair at the eating table with my feet on the chair, spinning around, complaining about every living creature on earth while sarcastically holding a running commentary during Queer as Folk. Or with whom I would have talked about the complications in my life I did actually choose to share with people, or done the floppy man or Center Stage moves for.. Sorry about the snags that came with being my roommate. But when all’s said and done, I remember more the times when you guys would make me laugh so hard I’d cry instead of the times I’d get annoyed over the head hairs hanging on the wall of the shower. For better or worse these young ladies have changed me, I've done a lot of growing up with them, and I don’t know how to properly thank them.

So just in case you see them around, tell them that Adrianne might seem a little distant now, but has something really important to tell them that she just doesn't know how to say in person. You tell them that, I'll take care of the hugs. Thanks.

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

I haven't updated for what would qualify as A Very Long Time. This is because Finals happened. I know this happened from my powerful deduction skills.

Proof:
1. The kitchen sink looked like this most of the time


2. By the third straight 8 hour+ day in the library I thought it was appropriate to pop one of the blisters on my feet, and then to actually describe the consistency of the pus and show off my sore to Michal Lynn. So really, not updating was to protect you all, because I probably would have ended up talking about something gloriously inappropriate, like boogers.

So school's ended. That means I can't complain about homework anymore, but I can complain about a myriad other things. Like moving. I am starting my job tomorrow at The Art Institute, and I would give you more details about the job, except when I went in for training then the lady explaining everything to me was sitting at the far end of the table and I felt embarrassed to keep on asking her what exactly I was going to do because I couldn't hear what she was saying.

That's it!

Marine Machine

Last night I went over to my friend Linda's house to help her put her stuff in storage before she left for Marine bootcamp today. When I had called at noon to see if she was ready to perform the grand move, she had said that no, she still had to finish her paper and do a million other things. At 8 PM, the situation was exactly the same, only she had ordered dinner. Whoever says college students aren't productive is a liar.

I got there and immediately I felt like whatever I said was The Thing to Do. Linda, get your stuff out for bootcamp. Linda, throw away all your papers. Linda, stand on your head. Linda would submissively comply with all these things while our arms churned like windmills through clothes, papers, books, bedding, boxes, and lotions. I thought it was absolutely hilarious she was relying on me to motivate her into moving, since my current tactic to moving is to not unpack from the previous time you moved. Which is why I still have a ton of my stuff in boxes and why they're all on top of my desk, which has probably been opened a total of ten times this year.

By 11:30 we had basically finished putting everything into storage, and sat down with a bottle of champagne to figure out what 4 unarmed liberal arts majors could do to get rid of a bed. Without the correct tools, we didn't have the option of disassembling it and without a chainsaw or an axe, we weren't (yet) sure how we could break it apart. Carrying it down the narrow hall and even narrower stairwell wasn't an option. So as the champagne bottles got emptier, the solutions became increasingly creative, such as pushing it out the window, burning it, breaking down the wall to get it out, or eating it. Finally, brute strength was the answer as we started twisting it like clothes being wrung out. Only since Linda's room is only slightly larger than a matchbox, the whole process was conducted by us contorting ourselves into increasingly odd positions to actually break the wood that was holding everything together. Making a bed to be broken the way that we broke it was truly the apex of IKEA design and ergonomics.

This morning in the lobby of the library I ran into Linda looking extremely disheveled, panicked, saying that she was supposed to have left a half hour ago but still had to print something out. She left with "What am I thinking! What am I doing!" That's not really an easy question to answer. But after seeing her rip into her bed last night to break it apart like a gladiator, I think I can safely say that the Marines had no idea either what they got themselves into when they accepted her into the program. I fully anticipate that by the end of the summer the Marines will be called Linda's Legion and she will come back to school in September with their anthem being a remix of Justin Timberlake and all members being required to own one pair of spandex glittery shorts. Semper Fidelis? Sexy Forever.