My New Orange Dress

I've decided that I would like to start blogging again. I've spent the last two years in the marathon that wouldn't end, of work and grad school and everyone I've ever met and loved getting married and all the other miscellaneous things I could seem to fit into a day.  I just kept waiting to get to the end of 'that season', whichever one it was that I was in, only to be washed over by a brand new season of a different kind of busyness.  The truth is that it felt very dark at times.  I was tired, and I felt useless, and most of all I hated being made to draw my feelings with crayons during class.  So I decided to take it easy this semester, cut it down to one class, and reluctantly let go of my Religious Education class, also known as the first graders who asked "did you had tv when YOU were a kid, Miss Miller?" First of all, you're six, so you can just suck it, and second of all, YES, we did have tv, but I wasn't allowed to WATCH it. Are you happy now?

The moral of that story is that I now find myself with expendable time for truly the first time in two years, and the idea is so wide-eyed-blinking-in-confusion to me, that even after a few weeks of a semi-normal schedule, I still haven't figured out how to cope, and frantically spend my evenings trying to cram in as much reading and bath-taking (I like to think that 'bath-taking' is different from 'bathing', being that one is done for the purposes of relaxation, while the other for cleanliness.  I only partake in the former.) as possible, before the 'crazy schedule' takes over and I spend the entire waking portion of my days away from home again (which is convenient when it comes to energy bills and toilet paper usage, but less so in the sleeping and sanity departments).

So I haven't been more productive yet, at least not in the way of "I made these baby booties for you child out of yarn I spun myself after a post I saw on Pinterest!" and instead all I've managed to do is re-watch two seasons of Friday Night Lights and cry at every.single.episode.  But this new schedule is here to stay, at least for a couple months, and if I ever hope to motivate myself into dragging out my sewing machine or finally learning how to (properly) use the hot curlers I got for Christmas last year, I think I need to give myself some things to do.  You're welcome, world. 

The big news here is that after two years at Clemson, I, for the first time ever, have a student ID card.  I've never needed one, because I spend as little time on campus as possible, but my awful, mean professor this semester decided he was going to go old-school on us and make us *gasp* go to the library to check something out instead of finding it online. I suspect this is because the necessary publication is "Special Educator Weekly", a periodical which I doubt gets much play with the collegiate crowd, and Coach K (no, seriously- that's what he told us to call him) needed our numbers in the flesh to keep the circulation alive. Cruel and unnecessary, but it did force me to literally triple the amount of campus buildings I had previously stepped foot in over the course of one afternoon.

Now I'm like a real student, and just in time for my first Clemson football game.  I'm headed to Death Valley this weekend, courtesy of a well-connected coworker, and as proof that I am fully living in the South now, I had to buy a new dress for the occasion.  I could write a blog that never ended of "things I never knew existed or could even imagine that I would one day be doing but are completely normal and second-nature now that I live in South Carolina."  One of those things is the fact that I will be donning a brand-new (orange, obviously) sundress and fancy sandals for a college football game in the middle of September and will likely be under-dressed and over-heated.  This from the girl who didn't wear heels outside of show choir until she joined a sorority at 20 and packed multiple sweatshirts to survive summer camp in Michigan.  Life. Amiright?

So that's it.  I hope to write here occasionally, and a little more honestly.  Not honest like "it all started when I pretended to shoot my dad with a fake gun from my carseat during a roadtrip when I was three" but more in a way that isn't me trying to (badly) write a humor column. My dear friend A once said that I write the best emails (I don't think a lot of people write her emails. She has a very low standard by which to measure) and so I'm going to aim for that.  Like I'm writing an email to my friend, the Internet.  Who, by the way, has been a steady and reliable companion to me for more than a decade, bringing me both good news and bad news, helping me get the stains out my carpet and settle bets about whether people from Michigan prefer to be called Michiganders or Michiganians, but The Internet probably deserves its own post...  Just something to look foward to.

PS) It's Michigander, by the way. (And I won the the bet.)