Return of the Head-i

Good news, friends. After months of regrowing, my frozen, chapped scalp has finally produced enough hair that I can now mold it into what I have lovingly called in previous posts, The Whippy Dip.

[In my Environmental Ethics class, my hair was compared to a tsunami on Dress-Like-A-Natural-Disaster Day, and I can’t seem to shake that image.]

So have no more fears, faithful follower(s). My flippy-haired drawings are now accurate to the real life me. No more lies.

I Dream of Aliens

A dream in the form of a really lame alien movie played in my unconscious mind last night.

Along a dark, straight highway somewhere in the middle of what I would call Nowhere, I drove, squinting past the heavy raindrops that were violently pelting my windshield.

“How’s it going?” my dreamfriend—a dark haired, slightly tubby woman—asked from the passenger seat from my ’99 Buick Century.

“Fine,” I said, “If only this darn rain would stop.” It really wasn’t too bad; I was entertaining myself with thinking about the fantastic presentation I made in my class, in which I took everyone to my attic, which I had filled with billions of Skittles—enough Skittles for people to swim in, and they did. It somehow had an environmental message, too.

My dreamfriend was not so entertained during this quiet trip: “We’re never going to make it to—hey! What’s that?”

Just then a spaceship, a spaceship, whirrrred down in front of us.  I stopped the car. Dreamfriend and I, as any brainless sci-fi actors would, got out of the car to go examine what was going on.

The spaceship had landed fifty yards or so ahead and, let down a steel door and spilled smoke onto the ground. Aliens that resembled googly-eyed, smiling cartoon dinosaurs with AT-ST Walker from Star Wars pants ran down, giggling.

Clearly, they were terrifying.

The aliens then began to run toward us, waving small credit card-sized pieces of paper with something on them that I couldn’t recognize.

“Oh no!” my dreamfriend shouted, “Those cards have our kryptonite on them!”

(“Kryptonite? Really?” I said, “Like that’s original.”)

[I am mindful of the fact that this is probably the worst and lamest picture I've EVER drawn on this blog. I apologize. I really don't know what's worse: the smiling, stupid dinosaur, the spaceship shaped like a hamburger, or the fact that I've decided to minor in art.]

My dreamfriend was right, however. Somehow those googly-eyed aliens overtook her and dragged her into the spaceship.  I saved myself by running back to the car just in time to drive safely away. (I obviously didn’t care much for my dreamfriend.)

I drove frantically to my dreamhouse—not like the house of my dreams, but the house in my dream—and walked in to tell everyone there, including Christie, who was just hanging out, that aliens were probably coming to kill me.

To protect myself, my roommate gave me a small box with a tiny, dull knife, a fingernail clipper, and a magnifying glass.  Real great, I thought, The aliens are going to come and get me, and all I’ll be able to do is clip their nails before they dig them into my flesh.

Just then I took a look out of the window and saw that the alien ship was coming! What made things worse was that there was a little boy, in the pouring rain, sitting on a Fischer-Price picnic table.  I couldn’t leave a toddler out in that rain, so I went out and asked him where his parents were, and he said, “They wanted me out here,” in the kind of heart-breaking, pissed-off way that made me take him inside to take care of him.  Just the damn sweetest kid, he was.

The spaceship was fast approaching.  We needed to find someplace to hide. I tried the bathroom, but the closet in there wouldn’t fit both of us. Then I remembered…

The attic filled with Skittles!

Without a second to lose, I pushed the little kid up the ladder and into the room, where I followed him.  We were safe now, and even if we had to stay up there forever, at least we had billions of skittles to eat.

[Taste the f***ing rainbow.]

“Don’t worry,” I told the little guy, “We’re safe now.”

He then smiled at me, took out a walkie-talkie, and spoke in a strange language. The kid had turned on me. He was an alien, or at least an alien spy, and they all knew where to find me. I was so pissed.

And then I woke up.

Bird Brain

I saw the first robin of spring today. It’s January 11^th.

Apparently Mr. Robin got his signals a little crossed about this small heat wave we’re experiencing up here in the slowly-unfreezing-but-sure-to-refreeze North.

This poor little guy is going to experience either a long, embarrassing trip back to where the rest of his wiser buddies stayed, or a long, shivering winter shoved in a tree and hopefully finding a friendly squirrel to cuddle up next to.

A Chilly Run-In with a Famous Witch

This dream should have been posted probably about a month ago. I’ve been planning and planning and planning on writing it, but clearly it never really happened.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Jake’s Bike Store in Roseville had never been so crowded. 

“Really? A line?” I said, knowing that all I had to do was pick up Christie’s bike which we had been waiting forever for and that I couldn’t really try again another day because I was already there which is like five minutes away from campus and who knows if I would ever be able to make the trek from Bethel again and wow what a very runny run-on sentence this is.

And this really was quite a line. Queued in front of the repair desk were about twenty people, each with a different bicycular problem—a bent wheel, broken chain, stuck gears, and one snobby douchebag in a hoity toity cycling suit with who I’m sure said that his expensive bike “just doesn’t feel right.”

I got in line and resentfully masticated the crap out of my chewing gum.  I could totally be considering doing homework back in my dorm right now.

A friend from class, I noticed, was standing about nine people ahead of me. Waving was not an option; she was too far away.  “But wait. Does she have braces?” I thought. “No way! Her teeth were always so straight. I can’t believe it.”  I didn’t realize I was rudely staring until she caught my eye, made a sort of creeped-out look that slid into an excited smile and wave. “She must think that stare was me just being a jokester. Thank god for using humor to get people to like me!”  

And yes, she had, for some reason, braces.

The wait was long, but soon enough I had advanced at least four spots. As I was trying to shake the repeating Ashley Simpson song Pieces of Me out of my head, Professor McGonagall from Harry Potter appeared in front of me. It was really the Maggie Smith version of McGonagall from the movies who was standing there, cloaked and witch-hatted, staring me down.

Shuffling hurriedly toward me, she said in her shrill, properly-English, every-important-word-elongated-and-emphasized-in-a-really-bitchy-way voice, “If you want to be seeeerved, you’re not going to want to be chewing guuuum, aaare you?”

“Of course not, Professor McGonagall,” I said, as I put my gum into her bony, wrinkly, cupped hand.

And then I woke up.

Enough with the Absences, Already!

I realize I haven’t posted for way over a week.  I realize that, okay? And don’t think it hasn’t been weighing on my mind, either—guilting and insulting me, reminding that I’ll lose all my follower(s), that I haven’t really been too busy not to blog, “You said that once a week at least you were going to post something, Shreds. Once a week!”

I hear you, Popcorn Day.  And thanks for calling me Shreds.

Although I severely neglected my poor little bloggity blog, I am proud to say that I did accomplish and experience numerous feats during my break from school: I introduced Christie to eggnog and the movie White Christmas, two things she had never had or seen before; I visited Rotary Lights in La Crosse, as mentioned on my previous post; I went sledding at midnight on Christmas Eve, and only cut my lip, which qualifies that as a relatively safe ride; beat my dad eleven games to ten in ping pong (that’s right, math people: I played 21 games of ping pong this break), I read two books, My Lobotomy and Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone; I had curried moules and crème brulée* which I hadn’t had since my summer in Europe; and I drove Christie to the airport where she flew off, all the way over to India, leaving me sad and alone until the end of January. (Read her blog.) 

As you can see, I did many a thing this break.  And now I’m packing up, laundering every article of clothing I own, and eating all of my parent’s food I can before I leave tomorrow morning for J-term.  Environmental Ethics is what I’m taking for the month. Three hours a day, starting at one o’clock. J-term is a very good thing, minus the fact that my little omelette folder is gone.

Now I can confidently say that I’m back, follower(s). The chilliness of January will most assuredly keep me in my dorm room nice, warm, and slowly getting fatter (unless my New Year’s resolution to hit the campus gym at least twice a week doesn’t fail). Hibernation, frozen nose hairs, and frostbit toes await me. And that, my friends, is the perfect recipe for blogging.

*And look at this feast! I'm sorry, I have to talk about it. Kafé 421 in Dinkytown. Delicious Curried Moules and Créme Brulle. Mouth watering. Perfectly prepared. I-think-my-tongue-has-died-and-gone-to-heaven good. I mean hello.