Category: Guest Writer

 

Frances and Florida FUBAR

Florida is in trouble…

Hurricane Watches are supposed to go into effect for Florida sometime today. Home Depot’s around Florida are already shell-shocked because of shipping their goods to CHarley-raveged Southwest and Central Florida…

John is watching 'Friends'

IMO, this might be the worst “comedy” since Seinfeld.

Yet, John is a self described “sap” who is spending tonight watching both the final episode, and tear-jerking retrospective.

What a sissy.

Feel free to flame him mercilessly. >:)

(Hey, I need to get even)

In John's place…

Let me just say AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHH!

If there is anything worse than being single, and having to deal with a roomate who just started dating, and is all lovey-dovey, I have no idea what it is.

I’d prefer Chinese Water Toture right about now.

Happy New Year to everyone!

In memorium…

Seems John remains absent, so here I am again. Today, a little more personal.

I just realized (it is 10:30 PM) that today is the 5th anniversary of my aunts murder. I also realized that I completely missed the 21st anniversary of my fathers death on the ninth. Two days from now will be the 7th anniversary of the death of one of my classmates.

I’m not sure what suprises me more. That it has been this long since all of these tragedies affected my life (and there are more), or that there have been so many of them that I cant even keep track of it anymore.

As you might now guess, Christmas isnt much of a celebratory day in my household. At least, on this holiday season, I have yet to see my family mentioned in one of those “be thankful for what you have” stories newspapers like to write.

In short, be thankful for what you have. Remind your loved ones how much you appreciate them this christmas. A few words are far more profound than some cheesy toy picked up at Walmart.

Zip Zaps + Cats = fun!

Ok, I’m in a juvenile mood, and it seems John cant make an entry yet tonight, so I’ll post on the fun that was my day…

You know those little hot wheels like RC cars that Radio Shack sells? If you have a cat, get one. Hours upon hours of entertainment.

Neat little idea those little RC cars, but seriously, why do people take these Zip Zaps so serriously? The official website offers tips on tinting the windows, and on making your own licence plates.

People post on forums about how they turn the stupid little things into rice rockets, much as they would their real cars (when mommy and daddy buy them one, that is).

Seriously people. THEY ARE TOYS!

But damn is it fun to screw with a cats mind with them. Hopefully my roommate doesnt kill me when she returns from visiting her family to a pair of paranoid felines worried about traffic congestion in the living room…

BUSY BUSY BUSY

So, I have just been a busy little bee, or just avoiding computers. j/k Well I guess I have been taking a break from things. Especially since I sit in front of one all day long at work. A vacation was needed, so I took one.

On Thanksgiving I stuffed myself silly. I love food as I posted previously. Yum. My fiance and I ate at my parents for lunch and his parents for supper. And since we didn’t like doing all this traveling all in one day, we kind of decided to just spend Christmas on our own, and maybe invite the parental units to join us instead.

So that was my weekend. Hope everyone had a good one.

Common Sense is not that common

I’m guessing that very few people who read this know who I am, so please allow me to introduce myself: My name is Keith (no, really) and I live in Calgary, AB. I’m Canadian, eh? No doot aboot it. I work as a field tech, which means I travel. A lot.

I’ve seen a lot of odd things in my travels. But an incident that occured two weeks ago takes the cake. In the parking lot of the store I was working at, a man chased a hat that blew off his head, underneath a moving semi, with predictable results.

Just like that, a life snuffed out, all for a baseball cap. I didnt see the incident itself, but everything after. The failed attempt at life support, and the shocked reaction of everyone around.

Seriously, what causes a man to run under a moving truck?

The scary part? It was submitted to the darwinawards.com website, and REJECTED because it is too common an occurance.

Man is a dumb, dumb, dumb animal…

Giving Thanks

:sad Today my most awesome friend John goes under the knife. :sad I will definitely be keeping him in my thoughts and prayers this Thanksgiving. *hugs*

Thanksgiving. That word brings so many thoughts to my mind. My first thoughts are of food, you know the turkey, stuffing, sweet potatos, corn, and pumpkin pie. I am not terribly fond of the latter, I substitute cheesecake, yummy. So eating is my favorite thing to do on Thanksgiving. I am a pig, oink oink.

My second thoughts are of friends and family. This should really come first but I can’t control my stomach, it’s the ruler of my body. j/k But I am really thankful for the friends and family I do have. I have a man to spend the rest of my life with, great parents, and loving friends and family. I probably wouldn’t be where I am today without all of them.

So everyone have a great Thanksgiving and remember your family and friends.

:smile

Small Town Clique

Hey..it’s Sarah again…I just need to blow some steam tonight, so I’m very greatful to John to allow me to write on here when I want. Thank you John. So…here’s my steam..

I spent my entire childhood and teen years dealing with cliques. There were the popular girls, the smart-suck-up girls, the drug addicts, and then there was my group…the somewhat unpopular people who stuck together because with out each other, we had no one.

In sixth grade I started hanging out wiht the smart-suck-up girls. It was the year from hell. I was the butt of the jokes, the one being laughed at, the one forced to sit at the other half of the table when there wasn’t room for everyone to sit on one half. I hated it, and it didn’t take me long to decide not to hang out with them anymore. I felt like shit though…because I had made fun of the people who were my friends before because I thought I was better..I had moved up in the chain of popularity. But I went back to this group, and never left them out again.

I hated the cliques of middle school, and they were still very prevalent my senior year of high school. The good thing was that we all started to get along in high school, because we left the petty things behind. I thought I’d be able to leave the pettiness and cliques of my home town in the dust and be able to form new relationships with many people…and hang out with them all, not having a clique of my own or others to worry about.

I was wrong. I went to lunch today with three girls from my floor…I hardly know two of them, but they are truly nice people, like the third girl that I’ve known since she moved in. One offered to get me a drink, another recommended trying a dessert…they were nice people that I didn’t expect to be nice people.

Then for dinner I went with three people who I know very well. My roommate, Katrina, and Jozie. My roommate and I get along pretty well, so I was thinking. We haven’t fought, nor has she shown any sign of a problem with me. Katrina’s ok…kind of judgemental as I’ve gathered. Then there’s Jozie, who I haven’t had a warm feeling from since I met her. She never seems to want to talk to me..and when she does talk to me, she’s always short and snappy. So I was the last to sit down to eat, and when I sat down they were talking about going somewhere tonight (last night since it’s after midnight now), and then the conversation stopped.

They talked about a lot of things, but didn’t really include me in the conversation..and when I tried to speak up, someone interrupted me…no one laughed if I said something that i expected would be funny. On the way back, they kind of asked each other if they were going to take showers and what not, and when we into the dorm (it’s about 50 steps to get inside) there’s two stair cases, the first goes only to the 1st level, and the second goes all the way down here. Katrina, Mary and I live on the lowest level. Jozie asked if they were coming to her room, and they all went. Feeling enough of a “third” wheel (though I was indeed the fourth person), I said I was going to go down here right away.

And off they went. I went into my friend Louise’s room to see what she was doing, and about 45 minutes later, went to my room to drop off my keys and id in the room. There’s Mary and Jozie all ready to go out… They never asked if I wanted to go..never acted like they wanted me to go…and I didn’t want to go with them anyway. Not after they had treated me like shit at dinner.

What pisses me off is that I’m going to be the one to hear all about it tomorrow (today…time thing), and how much fun they had…and frankly I want to rub their nose in it. That’s how I felt in 6th grade. And in 6th grade, I just changed my group of friends.

It’s not so easy to do, though, when you don’t have people around to catch your back when you fall…When you have no history with people and they already have their friends that they hang out with…

It really feels shitty…much like reliving 6th grade all over again.

Six Flags Water Park

I was healthy enough to go to the wonderful Six Flags St. Louis park today, so I woke up at 8 am to my stereo. The week before I moved in, there was a blackout because a transformer had a problem. Today they were fixing the problem, and they pre-warned us that the power would be out from 6 am until 11 am today. So thank God I put batteries in my stereo before I left home, just in case. Otherwise my roommate and I would have had to wake up to a cell phone alarm.

Also, my dorm happens to be in the basement, and for one reason or another, they never installed emergency lights. As soon as you walked into the hallway, the only light was the exit signs at either end. The bathroom had some light in it, luckily, because of the window. About 45 minutes later, my roommate and two other girls from my floor were ready to go. I was thinking about grabbing my jacket, but then I decided that I wouldn’t want to carry it with me if I didn’t need it.

That was a mistake.

We got on the bus and you could tell it had been raining all night, and it was sprinkling. The sky didn’t show any hope for clearing off, but we thought it would surely stop sometime during the day.

The park was great because there were no lines. We rode Mr. Freeze, Batman, a Scooby Doo ride (you had laser guns that you could shoot at targets while floating through this ride..and yes, it’s made for little kids), Ninja, The Boss, and some other little fair rides.

However, the rain never stopped. In fact, it began to downpour. I didn’t have a part of my body or a piece of clothing that was dry by noon, and we weren’t going to be picked up until 5. The rain stung your face when you were on any fast moving ride so opening your eyes was unthinkable. We decided at one point to try to get out of the rain and go to a show. It was so cold because of the air conditioning that we left before the show even started. So we stood. We stood and waited under awnings, we found a place selling hot chocolate, and then we stood there for probably a half hour. Occasionally I would go to the bathroom and wring my shirt out because it was so wet.

Then we heard that the park was closing at 3 instead of at 8pm. But wait, our bus wasn’t coming until 5! We wandered around, riding some other things for another hour until 3pm. We found a pay phone and called the coordinator for the trip–thank God two girls I was with remembered the number he dictated to us on the bus before we left.

He said he’d call the bus company for us and be sure that it got there early. It was already 3, though, and we were at least 40 minutes from our school. We didn’t expect the bus until 4. About 3:20, we were told by a security officer to go out to the pavilion where people purchase their parking passes and wait for our bus.

No more than ten minutes after we had been moved to the pavilion, the coordinator for the trip showed up. He couldn’t get hold of the bus company. The dispatcher wasn’t working or some B.S. like that. So we were stuck there until 4:30, freezing cold and soaking wet.

So, now that I’m feeling healthy again, I only hope that today doesn’t send me into another sick spell. I have to admit though, today wasn’t a total loss. I met some new people, got to ride every ride I wanted without a wait, and had some fun doing it all.

Lost that healthy feeling

I’m planning on going to Six Flags in St. Louis tomorrow and hopefully everything will go alright. If you look, there was no entry yesterday. The reason things might not work out for me going to Six Flags and the reason there was no entry happens to be the same. Yesterday I was miserably sick. Terrible sinus headaches, stuffy nose, sore, ichy throat, ichy eyes, and I can’t hear myself talk.

Last night I woke up at about 2:30, my roommate had just come home, and I couldn’t fall back asleep because my body ached and I started coughing. I ended up going and taking a really hot shower, trying to let the steam help me breath again.

When I first woke up this morning I wasn’t feeling nearly as bad. I still wish I were home in my bed…with a stove where I can make some soup…and lay on the couch and watch a tv where I know what channel corresponds to the number. I suppose I’m home sick, though, I think “at college and sick” defines it better. I’m about the only one who didn’t go home because they were sick. Everyone else’s parents picked them up or they drove home.

Anyway, I’ll most likely be laying in my bed all day again. Today I’ve got to try to do some kind of work…school work or just cleaning up…I’ll be bored to death if I don’t.

Día Aburrido

It’s friday night and I’m sitting in my dorm room doing nothing. That’s really pathetic as some of you may know from going to college. Today has been eventful enough for me, though. I have a really sore throat, I’ve been sneezing, and I think I just need to slow the pace down a bit.

The day was rather uneventful. Once again, Spanish brought the hilight of my day. We talked a lot, so my throat started to hurt, but after class I had my first one-on-one encounter with a college guy. He was in my small group for the class period, and we were talking about different stuff in spanish..and when we’d have class next. “See ya on Tuesday!” he said. Yeah, so I felt good. Senior named Stew. Nice guy.

I’m not going to jump to conclusions and say that he’s in love with me or anything like that. He asked me about our Spanish Lab that he missed. He wanted to know what we did and if attendance was taken. That’s all that really matters to most students. Anyway, after last night, I think I’d come off really wishy-washy if I drooled all over this guy I hardly know. He was really nothing to drool over anyway.

Damn..I just sneezed again. This really sucks. I think I’m going to call it a night (at least for the journal entry thing) and go chat with some people online tonight. I’m trying to keep to myself in my dorm, so I don’t infect others. Plus a lot of people have left for the long weekend, and those left went out tonight. Not many around to converse with.

John should be back tomorrow, I believe..we’ll see. He says he’s doing well, and “site traffic will return to normal levels without your presence on the site.” Does that mean they’ve dropped or they’ve gone up, and will return to normal?? Why don’t you let me know and leave a comment or two, so I know how many people are actually reading this. It’d be really cool…plus it’d make John a little jealous I think…lol. Not that I want to, but I think he has a really nice site that not many get to see. So tell your friends! I look forward to hearing from you!

Loneliness

I’m quite sad right now..without a reason really. I’m quite lonely and I have this yearning inside of me that just wishes I had someone here to curl up with and watch a movie or to sit and talk with while we listen to music. The feeling is indescribable to me…like fingernails on a chalk board it really gets me to the point where I want to grit my teeth or throw my head into my pillow until I pass out from exaustion.

It has taken my energy away and made me feel a wave of depression sweep through. I am supposed to be reading my history but I cannot focus to do so. I cannot focus enough to do much of anything, especially writing a journal entry. Generally when I get in this mood I write until my little hand cannot take any more writing or I type until my wrists hurt. There are just so many thoughts that I throw down on paper or onto the screen that I could go through for you right now.

Quite frankly, when I fall into this slump I feel like talking to John the most..he can usually bring me out of it. He’s the one guy I’ve almost always been able to depend on for anything. I can’t wait until he gets back to talk to him..after being away from him for a while I start to feel like part of me is missing..somehow he seems to bring it out in me.

I think he knows that…I think he feels the same too. So maybe I’m not feeling a sort of loneliness..maybe it’s more of a heartache.

Well…that’s all for tonight. I think I’m going to just lay on my bed and let my mind wander for the next couple hours.

Beautiful Day

Ever have a day so wonderful you didn’t and couldn’t let go of it? Ever wish you could live it again and again? Prom was always one of those days for me..or the weekend of homecoming. The energy is so positive all around you, you get to dress up, and you feel so beautiful and important. Yesterday was one of those days for me. Except it didn’t start lovely..nothing that big even happened.

What started this awesome day was a workout at about 1:20 yesterday. I ran and walked with a friend from my floor for about an hour, and afterwards I was refreshed by a shower. It was a nice cool shower that washed the heat away. I pulled my hair back into a low, parted ponytail and finished up my writing for all of you in cyber space. I was nearly late (so I thought) for my Spanish class, but I got there plenty early.

Spanish class is so much fun for me…I love the sound of hearing any foreign language, especially Spanish. More importantly, I love to hear myself speak in Spanish when I’m having a good day with an accent. In class we talked about all kinds of things…boyfriends, girlfriends, painters, writers, books, heroes, and anything else that came up. It was all in Spanish. This was much like my Spanish classes at my high school. I came out of that class with a smile on my face, and suddenly this spark of energy and happiness that had no end. I hurried back to my dorm to share my happiness with everyone.

Many people couldn’t believe how peppy I was just because of my Spanish class. It was as if I were high on something (but I don’t do that sort of thing so believe me, I wasn’t). I smiled and laughed so much with my friends that my cheeks actually hurt. My roommate and I finally got to talking about ourselves a little deeper and now I see how much I really like her. Everything just seemed to click.

Last night I couldn’t sleep because I was still in such a good mood. Mary (my roommate) had the Dave Matthews and Tim Reynold’s Live at Luther CD and we were listening to that before we went to bed. The cd is completely laid back and awesome, exactly how I felt that day. Dave Matthews Band is my favorite one out there…if you’re a fan, let me know…we need to chat sometime.

Finally at 12:45 AM I had to draw things to a close. I had my 8 AM today and I needed to get some sleep. I only hope that today will be half of the day I had yesterday.

Glimpse of Heaven

I saw a beautiful and rare sight today as I went to class at 8 AM. On my way towards the stairs I heard that it was raining outside so I grabbed a jacket out of my darkened dorm and made my way to the lobby of the Griesedeck Complex. It was my first time to see the campus after a downpour. The trees were dripping, grass seemed greener, and one could smell the dust that was beaten down in the rain. It was relatively calm all around. As I gazed across the campus skyline, I saw the powerful steeple of the University Church jutting into the air. It seemed as if a person could climb to the top of the steeple and leap into heaven. You see, the storm was building on the right side, and other ominous clouds were crowding toward it on the left. The sun could barely peek through, but the light that escaped through this gateway was brilliant and of a rich color. I think this morning while God was “moving some furniture around” (my excuse for thunder when I was little), St. Xavier, the patron saint of the church, was smiling on all of the freshman leaving Gries for their 8 o’clock class.

I’m sure everyone wonders who I am. John isn’t in college… he doesn’t live in a dorm. My name’s Sarah. This is my entry. John left this in my hands for the next couple days while he’s undergoing surgery and recovery. I have great faith that he will be back in only a few days and you will not have to deal with my crappy writing.

I’ll give you a bit of my background just for the hell of it basically….I’m from a small town in Illinois, just outside the Quad-City area. I’m 18 years old and I’m now attending Saint Louis University, home of the Billikens. Woo Hoo! My graduating class at home was 59, and I have twice that many people on two floors of my dorm. It’s and adventure so far, but it’s definitely an adventure that I’m learning to love. The paragraph above about the clouds this morning was written between classes of mine, and I decided to include it in here as kind of an opening.

John and I met in a chat room over a year ago, and although he never says my name in his journal entries, he’s talked about me once or twice. Actually more than that even. Usually I appear in here when we’re arguing about something..I don’t really like arguing with John because it takes so much out of me, but shit happens I suppose. I know he realizes this, and I do to….I always come back. It may take a few days, weeks or even months, but I do. Although we’ve never actually met in person, I think we probably will someday. I don’t know if he thinks that, but I still do.

Well, until tomorrow folks, take care and God bless. (And I promise tomorrow will be better!)