ecky-ecky-ptang-zoo-boing-zow-ZING!

The following exchange occurred on Gchat yesterday:

Matt: friendly's is open until 11
me: :-\
i can't control myself around a friendly's
i'm all like OM NOM MINI MOZZO STICKS
OM NOM NOM WAFFLE FRIES
Matt: well
let me be in control then
single scoop
one topping
me: D:
me: NOT THE ONE SCOOP
NO
NUUUUUUUUU
Matt: no no, you're doing it improperly
it's NIIII
me: ... nu?
Matt: ni
me: ... nu?
Matt: no no no
its ni
ni ni ni
me: ni!
NI!
NI!
NI! NI!
Matt: excuse me!
are you saying "ni" to that woman?
me: NI!
Matt: oh what dark times are these
me: LOL

Can I just say how lucky I am to be with someone with whom I can quote entire scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? If you'd told 17-year-old me that this would be my future, I probably would have laughed in your face (and then gone and watched some toons on Homestar Runner. I wasn't a very cool 17-year-old).

P.S. My IRL best friend, Linds, just resurrected her old blog -- you should all go check her out and leave her some welcome-back love. AND Matt started one too (but his computer died recently so he hasn't posted much.) Still, go check him out as well.

the great wallet debacle

Friday:
Work
Big family dinner (my sister came home from college AND my grandmother was visiting)
Stop-motion movie marathon

Saturday:
Work
Dinner date with Matt at the Kibitz Room
Flyers game! (We lost. WHATEVER.)

Sunday:
Early dinner at the Greek Agora Festival with Scotty and Jewel
Harry Potter D&D - that's right ... you heard me.
The Great Wallet Debacle (more on this later)

My Friday and Saturday were pretty low-key; I was counting on Sunday to be the Major Event of the weekend. And. Well. I definitely got what I asked for.

So we went to the Greek Agora, which is this big festival at this Greek Orthodox Church in my town. Matt and I met Scotty and Jewel there to peruse the handmade wares:

And to eat tons and tons of awesome Greek food. These fried honey puffs were our favorite:

We accidentally the whole thing. 

Naturally, Matt and I went back to buy another container-full. But when I got to the booth, I reached into my bag and realized that something was missing. Something extremely crucial. Yes. My. WALLET. 

Now, I have had this wallet for 2 years and I have "lost" it at stores, restaurants, and movie theaters multiple times. I always manage to re-trace my steps and find it again, thanks to the kindness of strangers who don't steal it and make fraudulent purchases. But this time we were in the middle of a huge festival with dozens of vendors and hundreds of people. Devour-The-Honey-Puffs time quickly turned into "FIND MELISSA'S STUFF" time. Matt and I asked every vendor, "have you seen a ladies' wallet? Tan, leather, about yey-big?" No dice. 

We even went all the way back to the Wawa convenience store where I'd taken 20 bucks out of an ATM. We asked the clerks, they hadn't seen a wallet all day. So then -- and this is by no means my shining moment, but I'll share it with you guys because this blog is about HONESTY (and pictures of food) --

I. Dug. Through. Their Trash.

And guess what? IT WASN'T THERE. 

So I accepted defeat. Matt and I deduced that the only way my wallet could be missing was that I must have dropped it in one of the parking lots, and someone must have picked it up, thought, "Hey! Free money!" and walked away with it. A sad day for humanity. Frustrated, I whined for the whole drive to Scotty and Jewel's place. Before we started D&D, I made the requisite phone calls.

Debit card customer service.

Credit card company #1.

Credit card company #2.

My mom, asking her to get my passport out of its hiding place so I could go to the DMV.

My local bank (they were closed).

Then I settled down for some D&D, figuring it was no use fretting now that it was all taken care of.

Then the phone rang. It was my mom. Probably to tell me some more bad news, like my passport had mysteriously been in a freak shredder accident. 

"Melissa, someone from St. Thomas Church just called! They have your wallet! You can call them back at [this number]!"

I half rejoiced, half face-palmed, because hooray -- my wallet's not stolen, humankind had redeemed itself! -- but BOO -- I'd just gone through all the trouble of cancelling all my cards!

So I called back Father Emmanuel, who was very nice and told me he'd lock my wallet in a filing cabinet, and I could come pick it up on Monday. 

And here we are. I picked it up today with little incident, then I called the debit card hotline and my credit card companies, who luckily had only put holds on my accounts and hadn't fully canceled them. All my cards got reactivated instantly. And I didn't even have to go to the DMV!

To celebrate my newfound financial accessibility, I did the most cathartic thing I could think of: I bought a new wallet. The old one was obviously a bad seed. Here's Dahlia:

I know she'll never hurt me like the others did.

Catch Me If You Can - Part One: The Wedding.

In an effort to catch you all up with my life, I'm picking up where my last couple posts left off in a little series I'm calling Catch Me If You Can. We'll see how long I can keep this up until I just decide to go back to posting the boring details of my everyday life in the form of bulleted lists.

***

Things really started to fall apart for this blog around July 4th weekend, when my cousin's over-the-top New York City wedding weekend happened. There was just too much going on, and my computer was dying a slow death, and my relatives came to live with us for a week afterward, and there's just not enough time in the day for shit like that.

But. The wedding. At some points it was really, really fun, and at some points it was just kind of annoying, and there were things that I thought were going to be lame that turned out unbelievably cool and things that I thought were going to be cool that turned out awkward and weird, and there were things I finally saw done right and things I would have done differently were I planning a wedding (like not having it in New York City on July 4th weekend, for starters).

But mostly, it was just great to see all of my favorite family members in one place for three consecutive days.

Maid of honor extraordinaire.

My grandmother, who came all the way from the Philippines.

There was a portrait booth set up between the bar and the dance floor -- things got weird.

There were so many people at this wedding -- but you wouldn't know it from this picture. Those empty pews are sad.

I grew up with this motley crew. Don't let our fancy outfits fool you -- we're a bunch of freaks.

Ahem. Case in point.

Professional pictures are here, and I really hope you check them out if you are even remotely interested in wedding photography, because they're awesome.

five things: a very short dramatic play

Scene: A phone conversation

Our players: 
MELISSA, half-asleep and isn't so much holding the phone to her ear as much as she has the phone balanced on the side of her head. 
MATT, similarly delirious. 

MATT: I seem to remember a certain person saying they would write a five things post on their blog today.
MELISSA: Ummmm but I am le tired. Plus no one even reads my blog I don't think.
MATT: (mildly offended) *I* read your blog!
MELISSA: But you already know five things about me. You already know ALL of the things about me.
MATT: That's not true. I could stand to know five more things.
MELISSA: (pregnant pause)
MATT: C'mon....
MELISSA: Ugh ok I will tell you five things FINE:

1. I like cats,
2. dogs
3. rabbits,
4. ....ka... kangaroos, and
5. um, babies.

MATT: Whoa, I didn't know you liked kangaroos.

MELISSA: Yeah I like them! They're cute. They hop all around and stuff and keep their babies in pockets?

MATT: Kangaroos are douchebags! They kick people in the face.

MELISSA: Oh...then I don't like them anymore. I changed my mind; I like ... fish. 

MATT: What kind of fish?

MELISSA: .....blue fish.

MATT: .... it's time to go to bed, isn't it?

MELISSA: zzzzzzzzz.

insane in the membrane: the story of my weekend

This weekend Matt and I descended upon Lambertville, NJ, a small, historic town near our alma mater that is known for its art community, antique shops, and all-around quaintness. It's the kind of place that I guess people go to retire. Honestly, after spending the weekend, now I kind of want to live there when I retire. It was awesome, is what I'm saying.

Some of the highlights of the trip:

• The FOOD, OMG. We just picked restaurants at random but we happened to end up at the best places in town. And the breakfast our B&B served was insane in the membrane. Warm scones with blueberry preserves, fresh fruit from the farmer's market, and blueberry-cornmeal pancakes from scratch. I nearly died.
• Touring River Horse Brewery and facepalming (in amusement) when Matt insisted on asking the geekiest questions like "What sanitizer do you use on  the bottles?" and "What kind of machine you use to flash-chill the beer?"
• Stumbling upon a secret room in an otherwise typical curio/antique shop that was literally jam-packed with pop culture memorabilia, records, action figures, old magazines (from Tiger Beat to Rolling Stone), pulp fiction books, and kitschy toys. Matt, who is a collector of classic rock LPs, found original presses of Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience AND Aqualung by Jethro Tull and he bought them both for FOURTEEN DOLLARS. 
• The fact that the B&B had A Mighty Wind in their DVD collection. It was slightly less exciting when the DVD crapped out just before all the good stuff happens, but still. It's the concept. 
• Discovering that I fucking love B&Bs and I don't care who knows it. All I can say is that instead of being worried that it would be lame and annoying and I'd have to make chit-chat with pretentious Princeton retirees [note: I actually did have to do that, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be], I should have been more concerned with the monster that a B&B would unleash in me. As soon as we got to the house and dropped off our bags I dragged Matt downstairs into the common area for way longer than necessary in the hopes that we would run into the owner again or come across another couple. So, yeah -- the B&B experiment went, like, outlandishly well.  

And now. Pictures.

Here's the pop culture room I mentioned before. I seriously had to catch my breath when I first walked into this room. It's like Geek Heaven.

This is Peddler's Village, where Matt and I had dinner and window shopped. I took this picture while he was buying us some ice cream. 

Our room. It was way bigger than it looks and so cozy. That bed was the most comfortable bed I've ever slept in. I have to admit, though, when I saw the flowered wallpaper I had a bit of a moment from the episode of Gilmore Girls I talked about last time. You GG fans know what I'm talking about. And no, there wasn't actually any foil in the paper.

I just needed you to know that our toilet paper looked like this when we got to our room. This is the level of service we received, people.

I can't believe I'm even posting this, but I just wanted to show you how Matt has this uncanny ability to ruin pictures of us. 

See?

And of course, the obligatory food picture. This is Matt's order of Chocolate-Banana Coconut French Toast. I bet you can guess what happened approximately 1 minute later.

Gone.

true life: i watch way too much true life

Today Lindsay (my BFF) and I were texting back and forth while simultaneously watching MTV's daily one-hour block of True Life (a tradition spanning several years) and the following exchanges occurred:

Oh P.S.  - The first episode was "True Life: I'm a Fanboy" and the second was "True Life: I'm Ex-Amish."

BFF: omg wtf THIS kid has a gf!? ["this kid" being the wannabe low-budget horror filmmaker]
Me: lollll i am just as surprised as you

BFF: awww awk nerdlove [sent when the two Power Rangers geeks went shopping together and shared a cute-but-cringeworthy moment]
Me: HEY! nerdlove is beautiful

BFF: this is SO WEIRD [sent when the wannabe low-budget horror filmmaker debuted his short film about a person who wakes up in the middle of the night only to find that Freddy Kreuger has possessed his penis]
Me: i'm afraid. mama? are you there, mama?

BFF: [just before the ex-Amish True Life starts] yesss i don't think ive seen this one. i was confusing it with that other documentary we saw i think.
Me: ohhh yeahhh. man, you know you're weird when you don't know which amish-based thing you're about to watch cause you've seen too many.
BFF: hahahaha oh mannn, and i made fun of the fanboys??

Me: [upon discovering that the Amish speak a different language sometimes] whattt is this language! this is new to me!
BFF: oh it's like german. i forget actually if it's regular german or an amish version. but yeah.
Me: oh man that didn't sound german at all! but i guess he wasn't using very german pronunciation
BFF: right yeah i'm sure it's been modified over the years. i know bc i read those religious romances written about amish people
Me: WHAT OMG I NEVER KNEW THAT ABOUT YOU dude i'm gonna call VH-1 right now and you can be their amish enthusiast for "i love the pennsylvania dutch"
BFF: shut uppp lollll

Best friends. You can learn everything there is to know about their ways in a month, and after a hundred years, they can still surprise you.

Okay, that may or may not be a quote from LOTR that Gandalf says about Hobbits. But I still think it applies. I never ever ever knew that my best friend had an Amish romance fetish. And now I do. I think I need to go sit down.

make my dreams come true

[First things first: Happy Cinco de Mayo! I am celebrating by cleaning my room, watching BBC's Life, and eating cookies. Later: Work! Olé!]

So here's what happened yesterday:

I got into graduate school.

I realize that I have never mentioned in this blog that I had any ambitions whatsoever to go to graduate school. So let me explain.

No, there is too much.

Let me sum up.

I want to be a librarian. More specifically, I want to be a youth services librarian. And I've been taking a lot of steps to achieve that goal. Many of those steps entailed getting as much hands-on experience as I can working in public libraries and school libraries. But the biggest step I took was applying to graduate school for my Master of Library and Information Science (or MLIS). Experience is important -- really important -- when it comes to getting hired as a librarian, but the MLIS is the golden ticket. It's basically the prerequisite for every library job beyond support staff.

I applied in December to just one school. In retrospect, that could have been a huge mistake, putting all of my eggs in one basket like that. And at first, it really seemed like I had fucked myself over majorly. Because the deadline for admissions decisions came and went, and I hadn't heard a thing back from my One and Only School. No acceptance. No rejection. Just dead silence.

I was convinced I'd overestimated myself. I started having tons of negative thoughts: How could I have been so stupid to just apply to one school and assume it was in the bag? This university is ranked #6 in the nation for overall library science -- #3 for youth services. They wouldn't want me, a fresh-from-undergrad wannabe whose GPA barely met the admissions standard, whose GRE scores sucked balls. 

Fed up, I turned to the Internet, and I found some forum where people who had applied to library school were discussing their school decisions. I found out that the people who'd applied to my program had already received their acceptances via email. It hit me like a train. I'd been snubbed. I hadn't even gotten a rejection letter.

I was so embarrassed. All of my fears about my shortcomings were true, apparently. I got really upset. Then I got mad. Then I started trying to figure out a Plan B.

This was all about a month and a half ago. Since then, I'd been struggling with where to go next. I half-heartedly filled out another application to another popular MLIS program whose deadline hadn't passed. I looked in vain for more support staff positions in public libraries. And I became more and more panicked about how my career was going to fall into place.

Then yesterday happened.

I was eating breakfast and watching Sabrina the Teenage Witch, waiting for my computer to start up and wondering how it is I never realized what a horrible show Sabrina the Teenage Witch was. I absentmindedly checked my personal e-mail, the address that I can't give out to employers because it's from when I was 15 and thought "liketotally" belonged in an e-mail address.

Then I logged out of that account and signed into my "offical" e-mail, the one I put on my resume and give to stores because I'm too embarrassed to give them the other one. I chomped down on a strawberry and bit my tongue and cried out in pain. Then, dabbing at the inside of my mouth, I glanced at my email and I saw it.

[Fancypants] University MLIS wait list - space available for you this fall

My jaw dropped. I blinked. I read the line over and over and over. I clicked on the subject line.

You are the next person on the wait list for the [Fancypants] University online MLIS program so we'd like to offer you the opportunity to begin your online studies this fall if you'd like.

My heart started pounding. I couldn't believe what I was reading. I'd been on the wait list the whole time? Why hadn't I gotten a letter or an email letting me know? Was this real? Or was it spam? Or maybe a cruel joke from the admissions department? I read on.

The new student orientation will be in late August at the [North Fancypants] campus ... Please let me know ASAP if you'd like to join the fall 2010 cohort so we can help you get registered and send you detailed information about orientation. Classes begin Wednesday, September 1st.

Oh my god. This was real. This was real and I was accepted. I am accepted.

I am going to graduate school, to attend one of the most high-ranking and well-known MLIS programs in the country. I am going to be a youth services librarian.

Of course, I ran around my house screaming and I called my mom and my dad and I frantically texted my sister and my best friends and Matt. Then I went to work and told my co-workers and they were so excited for me. I'm so excited for me. I mean, soon the boring stuff sets in: applying for a loan, registering for classes, learning to deal with bullshit university bureaucracy.

But today I'm not thinking about any of that. Today I'm just basking in the warm glow of Getting What You Wanted. Today, this is me:

shake it up and down

One thing you should know about me is that I spend nearly all of my free time with my boyfriend Matt, and I'm not particularly ashamed to admit that. I mean, I'd love to divide my time evenly between my friends and my boyfriend, but I don't get to see my BFFs on a regular basis, because one of them lives in Queens, one of them lives in Hartford, CT, and one of them is a first-grade teacher and therefore has no life. It's sad because we all used to live 8 minutes from each other and some of my best memories were made possible by this proximity. But that's another post.

Anyway, Matt and I are usually pretty boring. We're always having a blast, but from an outside perspective you probably wouldn't think so. We wouldn't make for very good reality TV, is what I'm saying. 

Sometimes he comes over and we do couples stuff like go out for dinner or ride bikes or sit in a Starbucks and discuss whether we prefer the Marvel or DC universe. 

Sometimes we stay in and watch Mythbusters or a movie or try to get through as many episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion as we can before I fall asleep (I actually like NGE... but that's another post). 

Sometimes we end up spending 3 1/2 hours doing quizzes on Sporcle, my absolute favorite procrastination tool. Once we did one where you have to name all the Generation One Pokemon characters, and we got all of them except two. #thatkindofgeek

Sometimes I realize I needed to upload and edit some pictures and I do that for 40 minutes while Matt watches hockey (alternately, sometimes we watch hockey together). 

But yesterday my sister Melanie joined us. Mel is basically like a perfect clone of me. We have the same face and body type, the same voice, even disturbingly similar personalities. Our only difference is that my boobs are bigger and more luscious and appealing than hers.

But my point is that when my sister, Matt, and I get together, everything is way more hilarious. For instance, Matt and I had played Super Mario Wii before, and we'd had a good time marveling over the game and taking it extremely seriously. Here's a sample of quotes from those nights, to give you an idea of the mood:

Wow, this level is really fun. 

I love how faithful they were to the original game.

What are Goombas supposed to be?

I wonder why we haven't found any Warp Zones yet.

etc., so on.

But last night Mel played too. Now I'll share the quotes that were generated from that event. 

The "Anyone Listening Who Didn't Know What We Were Doing Would Be Confused" ones:

It'd be nice if it were the end of the world, but it's not.

::Gasp! It is! It IS the end of the world!

The "Penguin" series, which there were many of, since we were in the ice level:

It's impossible without being a penguin, don't you agree?

It's never a penguin when you need it to be.

I don't think he needs to be a penguin here.

And my personal faves, the "That's What She Said" ones:

Awww, you forgot to be big.

Oh! Shake your thing up and down. Shake it up and down. There you go. 

Yay! Now you can beat it even more!

So I guess the moral of this story is, hooray for sisters. And hooray for video games. And hooray for quotes taken out of context. All of those things make life a little more awesome.