FAT TUESDAY CAN BITE ME. Okay, so being as I haven't gone out and acted like a total drunken idiot in years because apparently marriage has settled me--people say this to me all the time. Um...not accurate. I only mellowed because I gained a bunch of weight and don't feel comfortable being "that girl dancing on the stage" at all. You know "that girl"--the one everyone points at and says, "Oh my GAWD! Does she know her gut roll is bouncing in rhythm to the music!?! EW!" Where was I? Oh, right. Fat Tuesday. Mandy came over to hang out for a bit, and we decided since we knew we were going downtown later that we should pregame. I had four beers and two rum and cokes, apparently having forgotten the old adage about what happens when you have beer, then liquor. Oh, and yes, in my "I'm READY to PARTY" mindset, 6 drinks was PRE-gaming. So Mandy swings by her house to change clothes, and we meet her and Aaryn at the Tap. Now I have been ragingly, stupidly, ridiculously drunk before. I admit this. I don't know what got into me on tuesday, but I decided somewhere in my haze that I was going to top every incident of drunkenness ever experienced in my 26 years. If you keep that goal in mind, then Fat Tuesday was a success. The last thing I remember is standing on the patio of the Tap talking to Big James the Bouncer (I capitalize "Bouncer" because if you can deal with people as drunk as I was on a regular basis, you deserve the term "Bouncer" to be capitalized--kinda like with royals. Badge of Honor kind of thing...). We were at the Tap for another HOUR after that, and I got nothin'. Ric got me home and to the bedroom (which he says I covered every inch of trying to get to the bed because I was a zig-zag staggerer, and I almost pulled down the shelves in our room trying to balance myself), and he somehow managed to get me into the bed after about fifteen minutes of me not understanding that I was supposed to be UNDER the covers. He gets in the bed, I turn to him and hold up my arms and demand, "STRIP ME." Being as I smell like a brewery, that's probably the only good idea I had all night. So he starts trying to help me out of my bar clothes, at which point I slur to him, "This is half sexy, half NO." "Mmhmm," says Ric, probably thinking to himself that there is NADA sexy about me not being able to remove my own Mardi Gras beads. As he finally gets himself tucked into bed to finally get some sleep and finally erase the memory of what an idiot he married, I turn to him, smile sweetly and say, "What's YOUR half-sexy?" "Wha--you--just go to sleep!" "Uh oh." And thus the vomiting commences. Forget FAT Tuesday--I threw up enough that I probably lost fifteen pounds and at least three vital organs. It's amazing to me, however, that it took me forever to make it from the bedroom door to the bed, but I managed to make it from the bed to the toilet without any serious injuries or damage to property. So yeah, I spent all of wednesday and thursday with the world's nastiest hangover ever. Why is any of this relevant? Because after not remembering multiple HOURS of my life and being a total obnoxious brat (which reminds me--I have it on good report that I berated Travis for about ten minutes on how Ric and I were leaving, and if he didn't get Mandy home safely I would kill him, so I should probably apologize to him for that), I have decided to greatly reduce my alcohol consumption for the rest of my life. My liver is already grateful!

Brain Droppings on Writing

I've been doing some editing for one of my favorite people in the whole world, and all this thinking about writing has gotten me thinking about, well, writing. People always say, "Write what you know." I thought about it. I thought about all the things I know, and I decided that nobody would be particularly interested if I wrote a Faulkneresque novel about my personal feelings regarding which way the toilet paper roll should go on the holder. Nobody actually gives a shit that my cat eats leaves off the living room floor when I track them in from the patio. I know that 2+2=4, but that's hardly worthy of long-winded commentary. What I know isn't all that fascinating. Then I thought about it some more. What DO I know anyway? In the grand scheme of things, I don't have the answers to any of the important questions. Most of the time, I don't even know what the important questions are. Overall, I don't know shit. I don't know the meaning of life, why we're all here, what our purpose is, where I'll be in twenty years, or where my car keys are. I don't know how successful people succeed or why failures fail, and I don't know how to achieve world peace, cure AIDS, or create matter. So then, what does it matter? How does anything anyone says (or writes) actually matter if one only writes what they know? So that cancels that. The opposite of writing what you know, then, would be to write what you don't know. Now you're in trouble. Think of how many times a book has been written or a movie made where it was obvious that the writer didn't actually know ANYTHING about what he or she was writing about. Isn't the first thing that most people say something along the lines of, "That was shit. He didn't know what the hell he was talking about!" It's kind of difficult to write about what you don't know. If you're going to write about what you don't know, then you'd probably have to learn something about it first in order to do so somewhat decently. Of course, once you know something about it, then you're writing what you know again, and we've already covered how that winds up being an epic blah. It is my conclusion that "Write what you know" is categorically, empirically, undeniably 100% horse shit. Don't write what you know; write what you feel. Write what impassions you. Write what you absolutely can't NOT write. This is what I know. But as I already said, what do I know?

Some call this arrogance--I call it awesomeness.

Okay, so I may or may not have gotten lazy those last few days in York. My bad. Dinner fell through with Ben because he wound up having to work, but fast forward to last Monday night, and we ran into him at Mandy Monday Tap Trivia, so go figure! At some point, I'll steal Ric's camera and upload the last of the pictures I got while there, but now is not the time...mainly because I have no clue where his camera is, tehe! It's crazy that we were there for almost two full months, and after having been home for only a bit over two weeks, it already seems as if it never happened. So funny how the mind works, huh?

So last weekend was the JBFC cabin trip, and THAT was freakin' interesting. Poor Caitlin got stuck in the snow, so the Bellemares and Mandy walked over five miles total to go get her, then Marlene took Caitlin to her car the next day only to discover that Caitlin's car could now make it up the mountain but Marlene's could not, THEEEEN the next day, as we were all leaving, Melinda's car was having issues getting up the mountain, so all in all, it was interesting travel. I'm thinking maybe next year, we should avoid going somewhere where it snows! Hmmm...may have to start googling just to see what's out there. Damn, I'm nosy!

So yeah, I am now officially Mandy's trivia bitch. I help her come up with the questions (or last week, I just straight up came up with the questions on my own!), I go to trivia and keep score, and when she's busy, I call the questions as well. What are the perks of this arrangement? A $10 bar tab...for five hours of time and energy. And I have to share this with Ric. I make $1 per hour. On the plus side, it's a lot of fun, and my condescending side loves being in the position to marvel at the stupidity of others. Some call this arrogance--I call it awesomeness.