Cross THAT off the bucket list

This morning I got an email from Overheard in New York telling me to keep an eye out for the posting of a submission I sent back in March . . . here it is!

I feel so accomplished.

Pre-holiday anticipation

I cannot wait to go home. Realistically, most of my time will be spent writing the two fairly substantial papers I still have to do for next week (I finished Shakespeare this morning), but I am so looking forward to spending time with my family. I miss playing board games and singing in the car with Keira and pretending to hate Ginny . . . something tells me I won't absolutely hate working on stuff because I'll be surrounded by the lovely frenzy that is the Pipe household.

I'm also somewhat excited for the legitimate Christmas season (i.e. AFTER Thanksgiving) . . . I realized before that we'll be able to drive around and look at holiday lights up in Geneseo this year because Katy has her car! Cocoa, Christmas music, and admiring the people who waste energy in the most adorable ways. It's the holiday season.

Shakespeare paper-writing stats

Word count: 62.

Sentence count: 3.

Pages to complete: 9.8.

Cups of coffee consumed: 1.

Hours until due date: 26.5.

I voted for good grammar

I didn't watch 60 Minutes but I may have to find it on YouTube just to hear the sweet, sweet symphony of sentence structure.

Bard break update

Macbeth is so fabulously sinister. I can't get over it. Perhaps it's partly due to its length (or lack thereof), but I think it's just so succinct and sharp and yet packed with human conflict and the supernatural . . . I'm gushing, I know. Anyways, I'm in the middle of outlining my term paper for Shakespeare. It is snowing. I am boiling water for the new tea I got at Wegmans . . . chocolate chai, which I expect will either be completely delicious or completely revolting. I'll let you know.

'Tis the season

One wonderful thing about Christmas products encroaching upon shelves in early November: Keebler's Almond Crescent holiday cookies. I am currently planted in the study room trying to formulate an outline for a humanities paper about the Bible and Dante's Inferno and eating these terribly good cookies. If someone doesn't take the box away from me soon, I will most definitely be condemned to Dante's third circle of Hell with all the gluttons.

So late so soon

Dr. Seuss: It's night before it's afternoon. December is here before it's June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?

The Genny translation: People were wearing shorts on Friday and the temperature hit 70 degrees. By Monday it was snowing. How did it get so late so soon?!

I dunno if it's the weather or what, but all of a sudden I have at least twenty pages of various term papers due before Thanksgiving and another ten right after break, at which point there will only be one week left of classes before finals begin. Oh, and I will be turning twenty in the midst of it all. I would very much like to shout at the person upstairs orchestrating this cruel fast forwarding and tell him/her to ease off the gas a bit, but my yells would be carried off by the wind that will be here 'til April.

Also, the heinously early advent of the red Starbucks cups is NOT appreciated by their best customer. Can we please acknowledge the fact that it is still autumn?!

No end in sight!

I have dug myself a nicely sized hole. Copies of my fiction draft are due tomorrow (uhh, today technically); there is an approximate ten-page minimum and I have almost eight written already but the story itself is nowhere near complete and I am already nodding off.

I'm almost considering writing in a meteor crash to end it in the next page.

Down a rabbit hole

Halloween weekend was totally bizarre, and I blame my choice of costume. While dressed like Alice in Wonderland, I must've fallen down a rabbit hole into some crazy parallel universe . . . a recap:

Halloween itself just turned into a series of unfortunate events. End of story there. Nothing went according to plan and a crummy situation got exacerbated by a lot of bad timing.

So Saturday I volunteered at the haunted house for the last time; there was a cast party afterwards and we took turns trying out this crazy rope swing that you clung onto after jumping off a giant pile of baled hay and went flying across the giant barn. It was terrifying but fantastic. Anyways, one of the actors was taking pictures and after he snapped one of me on the rope swing, he hurried over to me. "Meg," he said, "look at this picture, how weird is that?" For whatever reason, the picture had fogged up. None of the others he took had done so, so I privately started freaking out as my mind began jumping to every horror movie where death is preceded by a warped photograph of the person slated to go. I left shortly after and while I was pulling out of the long, dark, winding driveway, this light flashed through my rearview window out of nowhere at almost the same moment that the pumpkins I'd forgotten about in the trunk slammed against the backseat like a dead body. I drove home down unlit abandoned roads, passing lonely cornfields while continually relocking my doors and scaring myself half to death.

When I woke up Sunday morning and reached for my tear-a-day calendar, the word of the day was scarily indicative of the events that would later pass that day . . . which was creepy. Perhaps the weirdest thing to happen, though, came on Sunday afternoon while Katy and I were sitting in Starbucks doing work. These older ladies were sitting at a table right next to us talking, and after a while I couldn't do anything but listen to them because their conversation basically mirrored my entire life. They talked about a girl named Meghan and threw around the names of my boyfriend, father, and an estranged friend while making comments that were scarily accurate to current situations. Katy and I just eavesdropped, staring at each other wide-eyed until it just got too strange to handle.

I am happy to say, though, that things have come around, normalcy has been restored, and I have never been gladder to wake up and go to class. The moral of the story, boys and girls? Watch where you step. Don't fall down a rabbit hole. Wonderland is a little too weird a place to find yourself.