Current number of parking tickets: 6

Mistakes. We all make them. Sometimes they're unavoidable. Mistakes can seem like a good idea but then turn bad. Other times you make mistakes just to make life more interesting (that's not just me, right?). But on those rare occasions a mistake can be a positive thing in your life. Before I get too melodramatic let me give you some examples.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Everyone thought this was a bad idea. Hell, people still blame her for The Beatles split and even I've been known to use her name in vain during a fit of road rage (... moving on). But no matter what you think, John Lennon and Paul McCartney both wrote some great songs after their bromance came to a sad and heartless end.

In many ways this is a huge mistake. But really, Will Smith made it through. We should all think of this during our rough patches. If Will Smith can overcome The Fresh Prince of Bel Air you damn well better be able to pass your comps.

OK ladies, we really have to forgive ourselves for this one. I mean, we were a product of the 90s, we were young, they matched our outfits. Let's just forgive and forget.

The Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder duet. Sounds like the best idea ever... until you actually listen to Ebony and Ivory.  What the hell happened? We all thought it would be good but the only good thing to come out of this was the SNL spoof.

The thing is I've made a lot of mistakes in my life. For starters, I have an internet blog. And let's not even talk about my dating life. Most of the time I don't know what I'm doing or where I'm going which seems to be more of a problem now as I see my 24th year quickly coming to a close.

How do we ever know we're making the right choices with our lives? I feel like I need to make a change in my life. I'm not saying my life is bad or I've made one giant mistake after another. I've never had a perm, worn stone wash jeans or been married to Charlie Sheen so on many levels I think my life is going pretty well and could be a lot worse. I'm lucky, but when is that luck going to run out? To quote David Bowie, "Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes/ Turn and face the strain." I think it's time for a change and I'm going to accept whatever the consequences (like an adult or whatever).

Well, how bad can it be?

yikes....

I have a knack for picking out really bad movies. Particularly really bad romantic comedies. I know they’re going to be bad when I pick them out. I always think to myself, “This looks really bad, but I’m going to give it a chance because I don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” Well, who ever made up that saying never saw When in Rome.

Don't make me be mean to you

Within the first fifteen minutes of a movie you can usually tell if it’s going to be completely stupid. Not that it matters. I watch it anyway. I watch them all the way through. You can’t just get off the train because you don’t like the destination (... um). I commit and watch every horrible second of them. I'm not a quitter.

If Peter Gabriel tells to you Don't Give Up, you don't give up.

My love for really bad movies is probably the same as my love for really bad Christmas music. I seemed to have missed the refined-taste-bus because it never picked me up. It just seems too time consuming to have good taste and really, isn’t that what makes people interesting? Their quirky flaws? I don’t know and I’m too busy listening to glam rock and waiting for Kelly and Justin to make a sequel to spend any more time considering it. 

You could cut that sexual tension with a knife

Maybe it’s because Valentine’s Day is quickly approaching or because my body is deficient at basic human instincts (like sleeping) but I’ve watched quite a few really bad romantic comedies lately.

The Price of Milk, for example. Have you seen it? I’m guessing probably not.

Here’s the plot:
A New Zealand milk farmer Rob proposes to his girlfriend, Lucinda. Soon after, Lucinda worries their relationship has lost it’s spark so she picks fights with Rob just to make him angry (am I loosing you yet? Wake up, wake up... we’re getting to the good part). Meanwhile, a string of quilt-nappings has been occurring in town. After Lucinda runs over an old lady with her truck, her quilt is stolen. She trades Rob’s dairy cows, worth $400,000 to get the quilt back. Rob is so angry he loses his voice and leaves Lucinda to plan their wedding alone.

This was a really awful movie that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone. It’s like one of those movies that you see on Comedy Central repeated every two hours on a Sunday. The only interesting part of this movie is the music played by the Moscow symphony. Harry Sinclair, the writer-director, was inspired by a Russian symphony by Anatol Liadov that he heard on the radio and wrote this story about it. I don’t know how he came up with story line about a New Zealand dairy farmer bothered by a supernatural, quilt-napper but he did.

And then there was The Truth About Love set in the United Kingdom with Jennifer Love Hewitt.

Don't give up, Hewitt

Hewitt’s character sends an anonymous Valentine’s card to her husband to test his fidelity. Basically she finds out her husband is cheating on her and she ends up with his best friend. Yeah, it was bad. OK, I probably could have just stopped at “with Jennifer Love Hewitt”and you knew it was going to be bad.

The thing is, I really like Jennifer Love Hewitt. She seems like such a likable person and I think she could be a good actress. I always want her movies to be really good, but they aren’t. One of these days, Hewitt. One of these days you’re going to make an awesome movie and I’m going to be proud of you.

You may ask yourself, How did I get here?

Boredom. There are few times in my life when I ever been truly bored. But when boredom returns to my life it’s like welcoming home an old friend for a long weekend. Boredom and I have a long history. We don’t get to see each other very often but when we do it’s always memorable.

Lately I’ve realized, to my relief, I’m not the strangest person in my building. Like the guy living above me that’s probably the last surviving Vanilla Ice fan.

Hard knock life for a white guy growing up in suburban Dallas

And I won’t even begin to describe the conversations about women I’ve heard from the hallway. This is probably because I’m one of the maybe three girls living in my building. While I, like Oprah, am not even kind of gay, boys are gross. Let me explain.

There’s this one guy that belches into the stairwell so he can listen to it echo. And then the guy that leaves his clothes in the washer for hours so I have to touch his damp skivvies to do my own laundry. He also doesn’t sort his clothes so they’re all the same weird brownish purple color.

But the worst is the neighbor that comes home from work and yells into the corridor, “Honey, I’m home!” which echos up through the stairwell into my apartment.

I guess it could be worse.

I can only assume he thinks it's funny. After hearing him the first time all I could think was, “If that is the symbolic corridor of life, sir, you are failing.” Boredom makes me think in really dumb metaphors.

When I’m really bored I like to go to antique malls. Sometimes I go to find something useful but usually I’m just looking for the ridiculous or creepy. Like the time I found these pumpkins:

Or the time I found the head of Liza Minnelli:


I really considered buying the Minnelli head but I think I already have enough on my plate of weirdness.

There was a night when I googled myself and actually found some interesting information. Apparently, I’m married and making $137,000 a year but sadly still living in Missouri with my parents. I don’t know if I should be happy that Mr. Google thinks I’m married and actually making enough money to pay back my student loans or depressed that he thinks I’m in my mid 20s and still living with the parents. I think I’ll go with depressed. Mr. Google, you have both under- and overestimated me.

Mr. Google in his youth. Snappy dresser.

Most recently I rearranged my apartment and rotated my mattress. I think the rearrangement makes my apartment look a little bigger. So that was a good decision. Rotating the mattress? Not so good. It almost smothered me. Death by mattress suffocation, probably not the most peaceful way to go.

Not what Robert Johnson had in mind

(This is a road trip story. Don't expect too much.)

Recently my dad and I went on a road trip. I guess it wasn’t a real road trip, he was just picking me up in Wisconsin and driving me home for the holidays. But really they’re all the same, aren’t they? Sitting in a car, driving on a few highways, trying to stay awake and eating crappy road food.

Quality time with the old man

This got me to thinking of road trips my family took when I was a kid. My mom would always try to find little games my brother and I could quietly play in the backseat to make the time go by quicker. My dad would always buy us Mountain Dew and Skittles, of course, ruining the quietness of my mothers thoughtful planning. I don’t know why every road trip my dad thought Skittles and Mountain Dew was a good combination for two little kids. We would get really hyped up on sugar and then I would usually get car sick. It also didn’t help that my father liked to “play a game” by accelerating at the top of hills so the car would lift slightly and my tiny child body would get flung into the air.

So anyway, my dad drove 8.5 hours from Missouri to Wisconsin, picked me up, and then drove another 8.5 hours back to Missouri in the same day refusing to stay the night. Did I offer to drive some to give him a rest? Of course. Did he let me drive? Of course not. I decided if he wasn’t going to let me drive, it was my job to help keep him awake.


For probably the first two hours we talked off and on about what we’ve been doing in the last few months. By the third hour, I decided we needed to listen to some Christmas music. Unfortunately, my dad doesn’t share my enjoyment of bad pop Christmas songs and he definitely didn’t enjoy my imitations of them. After about two hours of our Christmas Song Marathon or "This Horrible Crap" (his words, not mine), I think his mind was starting to break.

Before leaving Wisconsin and driving through Iowa, we passed this little town that had one of those drive through light displays. You know the ones where they string lights across the road and have light scenes of reindeer jumping over your car or Santa climbing up a chimney. They’re like a tacky, roadside, Christmas gem.

I’ve never been through one before so I told my dad that we had to do it. He looked really unhappy but took an exit and drove up to the entrance.  I immediately started snapping pictures. But as we drove up to the entrance my dad realized he didn’t want to waste money on driving through a Christmas light display and turned around. I shamefully told him he was ruining Christmas. He laughed.
A little while later the conversation started to take a nosedive. I had run out of good topics to talk about and that is never a good situation for me. I get kind of uncomfortable and then the endless chatter begins and I spit out whatever comes to mind. One of the first signs of this was after we stopped for gas we saw a giant bronze statue of a jaguar. The conversation went as such:

Sam: So which one is it that doesn’t exist? Jaguars or panthers?
Dad: (Confused silence)
Sam: You know? Which one is made up?
Dad: (More silence, heading toward disappointment)
Sam: I saw on PBS one night this special on wild cats and they said something like jaguars or black panthers don’t really exist. I don’t really remember. But isn’t that true?
Dad: (More silence) No.
Sam: (Confused silence)
Dad: The push mi- pull yu is a made up animal. Is that what you're talking about?

Probably extinct

In my defense, I really did see a special on wild animals; however, I was slightly confused. It’s the black cougar that is believed by some biologists to not exist.
Not this kind of cougar:


but this kind:

I wish I could say I redeemed myself later by starting an intelligent conversation but I didn’t. After saying something else stupid this was the conversation:

Sam: I should get a leather notebook to carry with me so I don’t forget all my ideas.
Dad: Like a moleskin notebook?
Sam: Yeah! That’s something that white people like.
Dad: (He made a strange face followed by silence)
Sam: Haven’t you seen that website? Stuffwhitepeoplelike.com?
Dad: (Exasperated face and more silence) Why would I look at something like that?

All in all it wasn’t a bad road trip and I got to spend some time with my dad. But I think now he is questioning how I ever made it through six years of college.

I was asked a week ago if I had any special Christmas traditions and I couldn’t think of any. My family does all the normal stuff. We open gifts Christmas morning, eat a nice meal in the afternoon, then my mom, my brother and I usually go to my Grandma’s house later in the day. We usually end the night watching Christmas movies.

It’s always special and fun to me but nothing really out of the ordinary. Actually, it sounds like kind of like a picture perfect Christmas, right? Well, almost. 

I tend to cause a little bit of mischief every year on Christmas, usually to my older brother, Eric.  Who wants a perfect Christmas anyway?

Eric

Before I get into how I terrorized my brother every year, it’ll make more sense if you know a little bit about him. He’s only a year older than me but we are almost complete opposites.

He’s six foot and looks like he would have made a pretty good football player (if he was into sports as a kid, which he wasn’t). He has a pretty mellow nature and doesn’t get excited about anything too often.

The holiday season tends to make him a little uncomfortable because he’s not really into the whole family time “let’s get together and emote.” So basically, Eric is never very thrilled about the holidays and mostly keeps to himself trying to stay under the radar. Unfortunately for him, I know his aversion for the holidays.

Over the years my stupid pranks usual involved wrapping my Christmas gift to Eric.

Several years in a row, I got the bright idea to wrap his gift using box, packing tape instead of regular office tape. After picking out some the most feminine Christmas paper, I would wrap the entire gift with layers and layers of packing tape. Not only did this make the gift completely water resistant it also made it extremely difficult and time consuming to open. Eric never really saw the humor in this.

Then there was the year that I decided to get a little bit artsy with my wrapping. I remember looking down at his gift that year and it looked so ordinary. I couldn’t possibly let him down with a normally wrapped gift. So I made it into a Christmas origami bird.

Thrilled

There were the years I wrapped his gift with as many bows and ribbon as I could find making his gift the most attention grabbing and ridiculous under the tree. 

Ashamed

My parent’s Christmas tree is another normal yearly Christmas tradition in our family. They always buy a real tree and decorate it with white lights and red and gold ornaments, taking time every year to find new ornaments to match the color scheme. It is always very pretty and smells perfectly like Christmas.

Every year I go out in search of the most bizarre ornaments (It’s really not that hard to find some really weird ones, Americans have pretty bad taste). One of my favorite parts is the look on the cashier's face while they are wrapping whatever strange ornament I picked out. It’s always the same forced bright, smile while they’re choking out, “This is... sooo cute” or “What a fun ornament! Where are you going to put it?”

This should probably embarrass me. But what makes it all worthwhile is the exasperated look on my father’s face every year as I hang whatever sequined, glittered monstrosity on the front of their carefully planned and decorated tree.

These are the ornaments I found this year. Try to guess what the second one is. Don’t worry if it takes a little bit to figure it out what it is, that’s all part of the tradition.

Glitter, feather, bright purple

The tail is the best part

Hot pink with glitter

Sequined eyes = Christmas cheer

As I’ve mentioned before, I really like Christmas music. But not just any Christmas music, I like the really bad pop ones. Sure the old classics like Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Andy Williams are great. But let’s be honest here, there's something really entertaining about bad Christmas music, right?

It's not that I go out of my way to listen to bad Christmas music, but it's kind of like that drunken co worker at the yearly Christmas party. It’s not that you want see a him get smashed, poorly try to recreate the evolution of dance, or make suggestive jokes about being Santa’s “little helper,” but it’s more entertaining if it does happen. To me, pop Christmas music is that co worker doing the stanky leg.

My all time favorite Christmas song is by Wham! “Last Christmas.” The original version, not all these modern remakes. There is something so good about hearing 80s keyboard sounds on a Christmas song. And I mean, young George Michael? What else is there to say? Just makes you want to pour some bleach on your jeans and get a bitchin’ perm.



Another awfully good Christmas song has got to be “Christmas Shoes” by Newsong. I realize this is a touching song about the true spirit of Christmas and those special moments of humanity in the world. It's a very sad story that would break anyone's heart. But did they have to make it into such a horrible, cheesy song to make sensitive, middle age women cry?

Each year driving home for Christmas I got to hear this song every 20 minutes or so on the 24 hour Christmas station. Missourians really love a country singer singing about shoes and Jesus. Basically, what I’m trying to say is I know every word of this song right down to mimicking the little boy’s voice at the end (which does make me feel like a bad person).



I was feeling a little sad about not having a Christmas tree in my apartment this year. The last few years I’ve collected some Christmas decorations but I wasn’t able to bring any of them with me. So I broke down and bought a small tinsel tree. It’s silver with blue and glittery ornaments. It’s pretty gaudy but at least I have a little bit of Christmas spirit.

Charlie Brown would be so sad

 Oh yeah, we've been getting a lot of snow. Well, it's probably normal for Madison but it seems like a lot of snow to me. Here are some pictures from the latest snow fall.

I’ve mentioned before I’m not very good at cooking. I go through spurts of trying to get better at it. Like after watching Julie & Julia or reading some terrifying article about Americans slowly killing ourselves because of our high fat diets. Or seeing some consumer alert about sneezing restaurant workers and the disturbing amounts of E coli on spatulas.

It doesn’t make me proud to admit that the only good thing about my cooking is that I know I washed my hands. But I have gotten a lot better at baking. And the holiday season has always seemed like the perfect time to bake some unhealthy food.

He's a closet Paula Deen fan

I’m not too bad at baking some things. I can make a mean vanilla cupcake so by default I’m not too bad at cakes. Really I should stick with those. But every year I find these recipes and I think to myself, “Oh, that would be really good. I like cranberries and pumpkin, I’m sure they would taste great together in a cookie!”


That’s when things start going wrong. I don’t have the culinary skills to pick a recipe by just looking at the ingredients. And unfortunately I don’t have a taste tester to warn me before I take a bunch of weird cookies to school to feed some potential new friends.

That’s the thing about moving to a new town, you don’t have a special friend to taste test your experiments... ahem, cooking. A friend is going to be honest but still nice about it. They’re not going to spit it out in front of your face while making loud, theatrical, gagging noises. A kind taste tester is a true friend.

This is also a good opportunity to see how long your current relationship is going to last. For example, you’ve just spent hours trying to find the perfect recipe online. You’ve found all the ingredients at the grocery store and just spent the rest of the afternoon mixing, measuring, and stirring. You're hovering in the lava hot kitchen because it’s been preheating for the last two hours as you debated how lumpy a batter should really look.

Enter your new boyfriend. You have high hopes for this one. He’s got a great personality, clever sense of humor, and to top it all off a lush head of hair. He  tastes the food of your laborious day and remarks unenthusiastically, “Well, it’s not bad.” I give that relationship two weeks.

Since it is the holiday season, I already did a little baking. Some of it turned out good and some not so good.

Cranberry- pear crisp. Not bad.

With my apartment being so small, it makes sense to have a small kitchen. But small doesn’t even begin to describe it. My kitchen is only about 17 square feet. It has a beverage refrigerator. Yeah, just like the one you had in your freshman dorm.

So damn cozy

It’s hard to cook much of anything in such a tiny space, let alone try to mix and stir baking batter but it seemed to work out OK.

The vast counter space

Well, the pumpkin- cranberry cookies didn’t really work out but that’s not my kitchen’s fault. The cranberry- pear crisp turned out really well. However, it should have come with a warning that you’ll attract older divorced men.