Siiiiiiiiiiiigh.

Everything is just a big ol' sigh. I can't even be more eloquent than that.

Word of the day: polyglot

True fact: sometimes I do really dumb things.

Example being the present. I stayed up far too late for no reason at all and will now get at most six hours of sleep. Awesome.

The past week has been pretty crazy (in the best way), but has certainly messed with the feng shui in my room: an air mattress is taking up most floor space, and the rest is littered with laundry and towels. My "Word Of The Day" tear-a-day calendar rests on my windowsill, and when I rip off the previous day it's usually as I'm scrambling to go somewhere so it just gets strewn wherever . . . I am now sleeping with a week's worth of lofty vocabulary words. Go derive a metaphor from that. I'm going to bed.

Sometimes I really miss Geneseo.

Viva la Vida

My bar is being lowered considerably day by day as far as work ethic and concentration go as the concert date approaches . . . today Viva la Vida was released (finally), and opening the store today went as follows:

1. Obtain caffeine from the green mermaid
   
2. Unlock doors and turn on lights
   
3. Coldplay the stereo
4. Fold and refold sweatshirts in a dreamlike state (repeat several times)
   

Yes, Coldplay is now a verb. I would absolutely love to go off on a winding tangent about my thoughts about the album (people leaving all the time/inside a perfectly straight line/don't you wanna curve away?), but I will spare you from reading and the fingertips of my left hand from typing. Suffice to say that I have already listened to it start to finish at least eight times: I have six days to know these ten songs by heart. Give me 'til Thursday.

Why do the fingertips of my left hand hurt, you ask? My guitar came yesterday in the mail! Thus far I have learned the names of all the strings (EADGBE, from lowest to highest) and the A family of chords (A, D, E). The guitar (which is yet to be named) came strung with steel strings, which hurt like hell while learning to play . . . hopefully I will develop callouses before long and it'll be a little easier. My goal for the end of the summer is to be able to play the chords for "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Part I;" I'm not sure if this is too lofty a goal or not, but as my well-meaning but completely inept public speaking professor from last semester would say:

"Shoot for the stars and even if you miss, you could land on the MOOOON!"

I wouldn't exactly call a lunar landing failure. All systems go!

Analyze this

The radio at work is set to Sirius Radio's Coffeehouse station; it's self-described as "acoustic reinterpretations from your favorite singer-songwriters" and while there is a lot of repetition when you listen to it for forty hours a week, it is generally a pleasurable listening experience. So Dave Matthews was on the radio before playing an acoustic version of "Grace is Gone," and the song was prefaced by Dave talking about how the song was written either for or about his stepfather . . . I was helping a customer at the same time so I didn't catch exactly what was said . . . anyways, it piqued my interest. In ninth grade, we read "Romeo and Juliet" in my English class and had to do a project in which we made a soundtrack to the play, choosing songs whose lyrics we felt described the play and its characters, scenes, etc. Well, ninth grade marked my discovery and subsequnt obsession with Dave Matthews Band, and one of the songs I chose to include on the soundtrack was "Grace is Gone." I was so convinced that this song was written about Romeo drinking the poison; I could justify every line's connection to the play and have it make perfect sense. Apparently not! My ninth-grade self would've been very disappointed to hear it.

Anyways, it's just another classic example of how anything can be twisted to mean what you want it to mean. How many times have we each listened to a song and thought we'd found our personal anthems? Read something and been convinced it was written expressly for ourselves?

Interpretation is so gray, which is at once a wonderful and a terrible thing. Too often I find myself reading into situations and interpreting the "he said, she saids" with ridiculous scrutiny, always seeming to forget that my take is usually radically different than someone else's. My sincerest condolences to fellow English majors suffering from that same inability to separate literature from life.

I love people

Encounters with interesting people make nine-hour shifts go by much easier:

Earlier this morning, a woman came in to order shirts for the business she and her husband are starting; it's a biodiesel fuel supply company! The two of them drive a 2003 Jetta powered by waste vegetable oil, and they're in the process of converting their home's energy needs to waste vegetable oil as well. How cool is that? My mom asked her if she and her husband have degrees in science and she replied, "Nope, he was in the Air Force. We both just have very green lifestyles."

Then, I was on the phone a few hours ago ordering heat-applied lettering from a company called Stahl's, and the operator I was speaking with was completely nice and friendly. She had a minor stuttering problem (which is not what I found funny, how m-m-mean do you think I am?) but the thing I couldn't get over was that while otherwise speaking normally, she said my name like a computer would: "Okay, so I have ten sets of pro-block in the letter U as in uncle, is there anything else I can help you with MEGHAN?" The absence of a comma after 'with' is intentional. Props to Stahl's for not having job discrimination against cyborgs!

And most recently I was serenaded by a five-year-old. He came into the store with his mother to buy a few shirts, and while I was ringing up the sale he told me he had a talent show in school that day; his talent was singing Raindrops On Roses. The little troubadour didn't need much coaxing to sing the entire thing to myself and my mom. ADORABLE. If you ever see me on America's Most Wanted for kidnapping, just know that I had good intentions.

I can has pen name

While my guitar gently sleeps

I just placed a bid on eBay for an acoustic guitar!

Stay tuned for auction updates.

Spidey sense

One reason why summer drools: bugs.

There I was, lying in bed and typing about how one must wade through the air because it is so humid outside when I caught something moving from the corner of my eye: it was a spider the size of my big toe, scuttling across the ceiling over my head.

I ran into the bathroom and got a wad of tissues, then leaped onto my bed and tried to grab it without leaving a splattering of bug guts. However, my hesitation in smushing the stupid thing gave it half a second to jump off the ceiling and onto my bed, thus causing me to jump off my bed and go crashing to the floor with a squeal. How girly. Jainists, I'm sorry, I squashed it without mercy after that.

The spider run-in reminded me of a dumb story, though . . . flash back to Meghan in the first grade. Chapter books were my crack addiction, and as such, I had these preconceived notions about what everything was supposed to be like according to these stereotypical children's books: the nurse's office always had a scary stigma to it, new babies always stole the spotlight from their older siblings, and classrooms always had class pets.

To my dismay, Mr. Hommel did not have a pet in his first grade classroom. It became my sole mission that year to find a pet for our class, and adoptees ranged from a small plastic dolphin floating in a soda bottle filled with water to a tadpole from the pond near the primary school. After the dolphin and before the tadpole, though, I found a spider and put it in a fish tank with twigs and torn-up grass. Sadly, one of the girls in my class let it escape one day. Tool.

It seriously amazes me that I was able to retain friends throughout grade school.

Down a latte and quit mopin'

So I'm over myself. I stayed up all night watching decent movies and taking a bath for the first time since I don't know when, and getting no sleep actually feels pretty good. I will take part in the morning hours for once!

Also, I would like to take this moment to explain Charlie Bucket three posts down in saying that I WON TICKETS TO SEE COLDPLAY AT THE END OF THE MONTH. Point to be made: stop being a big crybaby, Meg, because as several people have already told you, you are a lucky bitch.

Is Starbucks open at six on Saturday mornings?

Ugh.

To be blunt, today just sucked.

Prefaced by the fact that I'm sad to be out of touch with some of my friends, I received news that another good friend really isn't doing well at all and could use some pick-me-up mail . . . I just feel so incredibly sad for her because if I'm feeling bummed, my heart practically breaks at the thought of her on her own waiting to hear from her friends.

I just hate today. I want to be everything and everywhere I'm not.

Sorry for the melodrama.

Two things

1. The inordinate amount of sleep I've been getting recently is starting to weird me out. I go to bed at twelve and wake up uninterrupted twelve hours later. No one requires that much sleep.
2. Correspondence (or lack thereof) is really getting to me. Enter sad face here.

It is 12:28 and I am supposed to be at work in half an hour. Let's see how this plays out.

I'VE GOT A GOLDEN TICKET

hypotheses

the great scientific mysteries
of eighth grade lab science
were hypothesized in
if, than
statements:

if
oil and water are mixed
then
they will separate according to density

if
a plant is grown in artificial light
then
it will not thrive as it would in the sun

if
you step off the seesaw
then
i go crashing back to earth

if
a tree falls in the forest but you aren't there to hear it
then
i listen to the boughs snap by myself

if
then
then
now
see
saw

take me back to middle school
when long distance meant your friend
was in a different homeroom

Al Green, that folk singer guy

I was working today and this older man was trying on hats; he must've put every single one in the store on his head at one point or another, and when he finally came to the conclusion that not a single hat fit him just right, his wife began looking at jewelry. So as she's trying on necklaces in the mirror, he comes up to the counter and starts talking to me. I had Al Green playing again and he asked who it was on the radio; after I told him he said, "Oh, that Al Green, have you ever seen a picture of him?" I said that yes, I had, and he went on about how shocked he was to see him because his voice was so soulful and far-ranging, he'd thought he was black; he didn't think a white man's voice could sound like that.

Now, as we all know, Al Green is black. For once I decided that I would just smile and nod instead of correcting the person, and he kept rambling on about how Mr. Green had this place up in Lennox near the Berkshires, and how there was a diner there that served an "Al Green omlette" because he and his wife would frequent there, and blah blah blah . . .

After about five minutes of him talking out of his posterior, he goes, "HOLD ON, THAT'S JAMES TAYLOR I'M THINKIN' OF!"

You're killing me, Smalls.