Move It or Lose It.

It's official: all of our belongings are moved to the beach save one suitcase that I will be living out of for the next month. I would love to sit here and tell you that the whole process went smoothly, we became besties with the movers, and it was such good times that we decided to make moving an annual event for the foreseeable future. In actuality, it may just rank amongst the most frustrating experiences I ---nay, anyone---has ever had. And I am talking put all of the cell phone companies, cable companies and confusing instruction manuals together and they still don't compare to the white hot rage I felt this past weekend. Satan himself would have spent five minutes with this moving company and been like, "Man, you guys are kinda some shady bastards."

Sky Moving and Storage, which I have since dubbed Sketch Moving and Storage, was originally supposed to come get our stuff on Friday and do a same-day move to St. Simons Island for $1250. What actually transpired was several changes of plans about when our stuff would get there, some of the more questionable business people I have ever met, and a total bill of over $2600. And you had to pay in cash. Let me tell you, paying someone $2600 in cash kinda makes you feel like you're slinging drugs.

As if that wasn't enough, the guys from Sketch said that other moving men would be joining us in St. Simons to help them move things upstairs. This ended up translating into them wanting to drive around and see if we could pick up any cheap laborers around town. Not. Cool. To top it all off, the very first thing they pulled out of the truck, Mark's dresser, was broken. That was followed by a broken suitcase, ripped couch, broken CDs, and my broken hopes and dreams. When they finally left, Mark and I just sat amongst piles of boxes in utter, disheartened shock and exhaustion. What asshats. Dad wants to sue them as a fun side project, and who am I to deny my father what he constantly reminds us are the very few pleasure he gets in life?

We got an impressive amount of stuff unpacked and situated in the following days before I made the drive back to Athens. Now I am staying in my boss's empty house trying to resist the urge to drink by myself at night just for something to do. I had a moment the other night that brought the full extent of my loneliness to the surface when I caught myself talking to a spider the size of my face that I was attempting to kill by spraying it to death with Lysol Kitchen Cleaner.

"Okay, spider," my monologue began as I sized it up, bleachy weapon in hand. "The problem here is that you are larger than I would prefer to just flat-out squish you with a paper towel." This lead to me demonstrating by cupping my hand into a claw to see exactly where my boundaries were.

"So what's going to happen here is that I am going to drown you now with this kitchen cleaner, and it will be much more pleasant for both of us if you just go peacefully. Okay here I go...DIE SPIDER DIE!! Alright, you aren't moving so that's a good STOP IT! DON'T YOU DARE CRAWL AWAY FROM ME WHEN I AM TRYING TO KILL YOU! Take a little more of that...okay....okay. Time to flush you down the toilet."

As I watched the spider disappear into the plumbing of it's final resting place I realized I needed to get out of the house. Conversing with insects can't be healthy. Luckily I have tried to fill up my evenings with social functions as much as possible over the next few weeks. That didn't stop me from having the time to watch two very dramatic movies on ABC Family this morning: The Face on the Milk Carton and Death of a Cheerleader. Such emotional roller coasters.

I don't know how much more blogging will get done since I have no internet where I am staying and as I currently sit being one of those people typing away on my Mac at Panera I'm not sure how much more of this setting I can take. So possibly the next time I write will be from the beach. Or it may be after I succumb to the notion of drinking alone and need the distraction after realizing am chatting it up with some ants.

I Dreamed a Dream

Moving is expense as hell. I put my foot down last year as I was crankily fighting with our mattress trying to get it down two flights of stairs from my old apartment and up one to the apartment Mark and I are in now. (Whoever invented mattresses: First off thank you, because sleeping on them is a lot better than when cave people had to make beds out of leaves and hair and berries. But do you think you could have come up with an easier way to carry them? Not doing humanity any favors here.)

Anyways, pools of sweat were dripping down my face as I looked at Mark and said, "Light of my life, it would be my preference for the future if we would enlist the help of several capable men via a professional moving company to assist in all of our moving endeavors."

Okay... so maybe it wasn't quite that polite. But I avowed, as God as my witness, I would never move mattresses again. So as our move to the beach approaches, I started calling moving companies for quotes. I had no idea what to expect, but holy balls it's pricey. Apparently, since last summer proved I am capable if not willing to move crap from apartment to apartment, I should go into the moving business because I would make a killing. We are moving a minimal amount of stuff and it is still going to be over $1,000. I just keep having to remind myself that it will be worth it when I can point and laugh (and then shell out a crap ton of money to) the professional guys that will be moving all of our stuff instead of me.

As you can deduce, we finally locked down someplace to live at the beach. That makes two out of our three Components of Major Life Change: Mark getting a job, me getting a job, and finding somewhere to call our humble abode. Now it's just up to me to secure some kind of occupation. We all know that's not easy right now, but a small coastal island that totals 36 square miles? Damn near impossible. I realize I am just going to have to get down there and schmooze for a bit and hope something pans out.

In the meantime, I recently got inspired to start a new project, hence the blog neglect. It started when I went home for Father's Day this past weekend. Mom got us tickets to a small community theatre play called Till Beth Do Us Part for no other reason then the name. We joked that even if it was bad it would still be great fun.

So. Not. True.

We didn't know what to expect as we walked into the theatre, but we almost stopped dead in our tracks seeing entered the smallest theatre in world (I am guessing). The seating area was the same size as the stage, with enough chairs to house an unheard of mere 75 people. We nestled into our places as the show started.

I can only describe what happened for the next two hours as a trifecta of utter, utter sadness and failure: horrible acting, horrible directing, horrible writing. Now keep in mind I am a total supporter of community theatre, having had one of the best experiences of my life being in Little Shop of Horrors. But this was just unforgivable.

The premise of the show: a husband and wife's lives are shaken up when the wife hires a southern belle (Beth) to organize her life, but Beth's presence only drives the husband into an aggravated bonkers. We realize at the close of the first act after Beth tricks the wife into kicking husband out of the house that she has sinister motives and is just trying to oust the wife out of a job. The second act couldn't even be saved by a man cross-dressing as part of the husband's counteractive plan. It was overacted badly and the writing left a lot to be desired to say the least. I wanted to laugh, I tried to laugh. But when you feel a part of your soul dying it's not really that funny.

But not everyone seemed to feel the way my family did as we looked at each other trying not to let our mutual feeling of disgust show on our faces. Oh, no. There were two couples in their seventies sitting behind us, and one of the women giggled through the entire show. I kept being torn between turning around and saying, "Whatever you're on, I want some" or "WHAT IS SO EFFING FUNNY?" On top of this she had the desire to verbalize things about the play as she figured them out, but she was a couple of beats behind everyone else. At one point when she blurted, "That's a man dressed as a woman!" after about five minutes of him being on stage I wanted to pull my hair out.

We jetted out of there as soon as it was over and railed on it the entire 35-minute drive home. At some point I likened it to a festering turd in the plumbing of life.

"I could write something funnier than that," I moaned.

"You should!" My mom and sister said almost simultaneously.

This got me thinking. No one has told me my blog sucks yet, and I like making people laugh. I have certainly had enough crazy characters and stories come into my life that I can retell. Goodness knows I am going to have some time on my hands with no job prospects at the moment. So I am going to try my hand at writing a T.V. script. This may be ridiculous and unfruitful, but I need a project that is a little ridiculous. I've been fleshing out ideas, figuring out ways I can weave some real experiences Mark and I have had with some amped-up what ifs. We'll just see how it goes, because why not aim for the impossible?

*Cue inspirational music, applause and roll credits*

Knock, Knock.

Not meaning to sound paranoid or anything, but my landlord is out to get me. It has been a constant passive-aggressive battle with them since I moved in with Mark after we got married, mostly because they are slumlords and not very nice ones at that. They went through about a three-week period a few months ago where they decided to use our apartment as the model to show potential new residents. Our lease says this is kosher as long as they give us a day's notice, so while it was inconvenient there was not a whole lot we could do. Luckily they must have walked in and felt the hateful vibes toward them radiating from the apartment because they cooled it and left us in peace for a while.

Thursday morning, Mark took his car for routine maintenance so I hopped in the shower to start getting ready for work. As I was getting out I thought I heard a knock at the front door, so I poked my head around into the living room to listen. Another knock, and I still just thought it was a persistant FedEx employee.

But then the lock started jiggling as if someone was opening it. "Hmmm," I thought to myself. "I wonder why Mark knocked before unlocking the door? He's soooo special."

All of the sudden the door opened...and in walks the Leasing Lady for our apartment complex.

And there I was standing in a bathrobe, towel folded into a turban on top of my head sporting glasses and no make-up, toothbrush dangling from my mouth as I gawked at the woman who had just entered my apartment while I was at my most vulnerable.

"Oh!" she said. "Didn't you get my letter?"

"No," I said through a mouth full of toothpaste, not-so-subtly double checking that none of my lady parts were peaking out of my robe. "Whatsh gon om?"

"I have the person who is moving into this apartment here to look at it. But I caught you at a bad time."

I wanted to yell, "NO SHIT IT'S A BAD TIME! DON'T YOU SEE I AM NAKED AND OUR APARTMENT IS A MESS? GET OUT, YOU HORRIBLE WOMAN! LEAVE, AND NEVER RETURN! YOU SHALL NOT PASS!!"

"Ub," I stammered instead, trying not to choke or spray Colgate Total everywhere. "Gib me ten minish."

I scrambled to get some clothes on and made sure nothing embarrassing was laying out, all the while cursing under my breath at how just minutes ago I was blissfully belting Adele into a shampoo bottle at the top of my lungs in the shower like a scene out of a Disney Channel Original Movie. I opened the front door to look out and found Leasing Lady with some dude.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I really thought I had sent you a letter."

"It's fine," I said curtly with my best Totally-Not-Fine face. "Come in. Please shut the door behind you so the cats don't get out."

The guy awkwardly stepped in behind Leasing Lady into the apartment.

"Uh," he said sheepishly. 'This looks good. Pretty much what I was expecting."

Leasing Lady tried to make painstakingly awkward small talk with me while he looked around but I was having none of it. I reaffirmed that we were to be out July 15th (free at last!) and that we would have to pay ourselves to steam clean the carpets (ridiculous) before ushering them on their way.

I dialed Mark's number, fingers still shaking with my agitation. After confirming that he did not in fact get said letter and neglect to tell me on accident, I made a sassy call to the landlord to tattle on Leasing Lady before finally hauling ass to get to work.

What a nightmare. But HA! We found a condo at the beach to live in and *fingers crossed* we should be set. The sooner we can blow this joint the better.

For anyone that is curious, the crazy people downstairs with the cat poop and horrible parking jobs moved out in the dead of night a few weeks ago. No joke, totally was the sketchiest operation ever. Now I am just dealing with the guy next to us that likes to turn his bass up way too high so that, even with out T.V. on, we constantly hear thump thump thumpthump thumpity thump.


Home. Sweet. Friggin'. Home.

A Little Bit Homeless

The following is a re-blog from my attempt at Tumblr. It scares me and I don't know if I like it.

This has been a Big News week. A lot of life-changers are happening to people I know and it all seems to have fallen over the last few days. I am like, people, whatever happened to checking in to just see what’s up? I’m getting paranoid to answer my phone or check my Facebook because it’s probably going to be another piece of Big News and make me want to dig my heels in because I don’t like change. If you only knew the inner turmoil that happens when I grocery store and debate whether I want to stick with the same cereal or try something else. Therefore if something life-changing happens to you that you think I need to know about, try me next week. I have filled my quota for now.

The saddest part is that my only big news is that I am going to be a little bit homeless come July 15th. You might wonder how someone becomes just a little homeless, because it doesn’t seem that homelessness is a thing you can half-ass. It happens when your landlord decides to break his promise of a lease extension and boots you out to make room for a shiny new tenant. Too bad your job goes through the first week of August.

So Mark will go ahead and move to the beach in early July, but I will be left slumming it for a month. Lovely. Luckily when I approached my boss about my soon-to-be nomadism, she generously offered her house for me to stay in. I think part of the motivation is free babysitting, which she will soon regret when she sees how helplessly awkward I am around children.

While I am tentatively taken care of, there is the issue of finding someplace Mark can actually move into come July. In a college town, if it is February and you don’t have somewhere locked down to live for August you need to get it in gear. Apparently, me looking in early May for somewhere to move in July means that I am over-enthusiastic and need to wait until closer to move-in time. This is simply not suitable to my need to have a plan for everything. I get uncomfortable over minor unplanned things, like not knowing what I am going to wear the next day. Not knowing where I am going to move in two months? Please. Stress city.

There is also the matter of me not having a job lined up at the beach yet. I haven’t yet ruled out the possibility of entrepreneurship, like opening a tiki stand on the beach and making a career out of carving famous people’s faces into coconuts. But something a little more legit and less knife-wielding would be preferable.

People question why I am not falling all over myself with unbridled joy at the thought of no longer having to be so pale I am practically see-through and spending half my time in a bathing suit. But I am sure that all of our friends, family, and probably some people that will conveniently try to re-connect with us want us to have someplace for them to stay. Also they probably don’t want us to be so broke that we charge them a rental fee.

And the obligation to spend more time in a bathing suit? Please. If you think that is something that brings me joy you clearly fall into the need-to-re-connect category.

As things settle more into place, there will be joy. It may even be unbridled, who knows. But til then, I am just trying to avoid even a little bit of homelessness.

New Look...

So I have started using Tumblr as I am re-entering the blogging world. Don't know if it will stick, but we'll see!

hitchedat22.tumblr.com

All the World's A Stage

Alert the media everyone, because I am poised to make a comeback. You are now looking at (well, looking at the text of) the newest member of a community theatre production of Little Shop of Horrors. The part? Church Lady. Go ahead and Google search it, but you won't find anything. That's because it is a made-up ensemble part. And I couldn't be happier.

I was one of those theatre kids in high school who you probably threw dirty looks at because we were obnoxiously in-your-face and fancied ourselves hil-ar-ious. After a phase of treating everything like it was a performance, I calmed down, went to college, and busied myself with other things. I always missed theatre but it seemed like you couldn't be involved unless you were a "serious artist."

Around Christmas I happened to go on the web page for the local community theatre and saw they were holding auditions for Little Shop of Horrors. I put the idea in my back pocket for a while, and by the time I decided to casually check the site again I was startled to find auditions were taking place that evening. An internal debate ensued culminating in me making the decision to just go for it and scrambling to find and practice 30 seconds of a song to sing for the audition. I belted a few ballads in my car on the way home from work, eliciting a few double takes from passing drivers. A quick hello and kiss for Mark and I was off to the theatre.

I had no idea what to expect, but was still taken aback by the turnout for auditions. Thirty or so people were crammed into the lobby filling out info sheets and sizing each other up. I grabbed a paper and nestled into an empty space on a bench sandwiched between two people who were about 15 years older than me. The woman to my right looked reasonably normal, but it was when I took a look at the Guy to my left that my nervousness ebbed away for a second while I choked back a snicker.

Here, at a small community theatre in a small college town, Guy had come to the audition dressed up to look exactly like the main part. He had the nerdy outfit of the lead character down to a tee, sporting thick rimmed glasses, a sweater vest and bowtie. I caught a snippet of  the conversation he was having about recently moving to Georgia from Chicago where he was trying to make it as an actor. I didn't catch how exactly he went from Chicago to small-time Georgia, but I could only deduce that he held his talents in a little higher esteem than they actually deserved.

I turned my focus to filling out my own form, relieved to see this wasn't going to be a super serious audition when two of the questions were "What is your street name?" and "Draw a picture on the back of this paper of a unicorn doing something unlikely." Just as I was finishing my drawing of a unicorn sitting at a computer and complaining that someone defriended him on Facebook (brilliant, I know), Guy tapped me on the shoulder.

"Do you think I should staple or paper clip my resume to the form?" he asked, holding a copy of an actor resume and two full-page headshots. I looked at him blankly.

"Uh....." I managed to get out.

"I think I'll see if they have a stapler," Guy said, completely unfazed. As he got up I shot a confused look to the woman on the other side of me, who just shrugged a little.

The director came out and explained that we would all wait in the lobby and go in the theatre one by one to sing our song snippet. The first audition started, and we realized that we could hear the audition from the lobby. We all lapsed into a nervous silence. All of us except Guy. Oh, no. He's a thespian. He stood up and started making a production out of stretching and shaking it out while we all watched him out of the corner of our eyes. When they called his name I curiously listened to see what kind of chops this ridiculous human being actually had.

The sound that filled the lobby next was something of a cross between a 13-year-old boy going through a particularly rough patch of puberty and a goat being castrated. I winced as Guy kept trying to hit higher and higher notes, voice painfully breaking which he seemed to think he could fix by just singing at a louder volume. After what felt like a million tortured years, it was over and Guy made his way out of the theatre to sit back next to me.

"I am glad we did those vocals warm-ups," he said a little breathlessly. "I think it went better than usual."

I mean, really. This is just not even the kind of shit you can make up.

By the time I was done with my audition Guy had whipped out a Macbook from the large man bag he'd brought with him and was silently mouthing words to a script he had pulled up on the computer. Complete with hand motions and everything, he sat their pantomiming while I waited for the rest of the auditioners to have their turn. Guy suddenly turned to me.

"What kind of acting experience do you have?"

"Oh," I said, caught off-guard. "Nothing major, just a few things in high school. But that was a long time ago."



"What is your job?" I asked politely.

"Well, I'm working as a janitor."

And that was the end of that conversation. But it must have sparked some fond memories of the Shakespeare production he was in because the last time I looked over before the director came back out Guy was grinning ear to ear watching a computer slide show of himself onstage.

They didn't call my number to stay for the next phase of auditions, so I didn't feel too encouraged about my chances. To my surprise, the cast list arrived in my e-mail inbox the next morning and my name was on it. I made the rounds of calls to my family, telling my sister that I met someone that will be a lot of her musical theatre major peers in 20 years. Just to be on the safe side, I waited until we had our first read-through last week to be absolutely sure something had gone terribly wrong in the order of the universe and Guy was going to be my fellow castmate. As soon as I could breathe a sigh of relief at his absence I knew it was totally blog-worthy.

So now I am resuscitating my career as an actress extraordinaire, though Mark doesn't seem to fully appreciate that he is now living in the midst of celebrity. I just can't work in these conditions. No one understands my genius.

Except maybe Grover. He's just the gift that keeps on giving.

Hair Today, Gone Tommorow

On the whole, I have had an extremely lame couple of weeks. My routine has consisted of work, home, sleep, work, home, sleep, etc. I made the determination a long time ago that I was not going to be one of those people that word-vomits a stream of consciousness onto their facebook/blog/twitter, documenting every little thing I eat or mundane thought I have. Therefore, I have not blogged.

But something horrifying happened last week. The catalyst to shake up my monotonous routine was making a truly sobering, tragic discovery: not one, but two WHITE hairs growing on my poor, unsuspecting head. At the same time. Like two little white hair friends set out to be a bad influence on the brown hairs and turn them against me too. Not to mention this was coming on the heels of having already discovered one a few weeks ago and yanking that sucker out before it stood a chance. For those of you counting at home, that is a grand total of three white hairs growing on my otherwise brunette, 22-year-old scalp.

You may be thinking this is an overreaction and a few white hairs is nothing to justify these dramatics. I might agree with you if my dad hadn't gone prematurely white in his thirties, thus setting me up for a little smack in the face by genetics. I had always thought I would be the kind of person to age gracefully, but not starting this young. This young I plan on being dragged kicking and screaming if my body continues to not act its age. The saddest part of it all was that I pulled out several perfectly nice brown hairs trying to get at those white bastards. If they insist on trying to come back around, I can promise I will be even less forgiving.

Feeling prematurely old is bad enough, but then something happened to make me feel dumb. And feeling dumb is bad enough when you are fully loaded with brown hairs. Feeling dumb with white hairs is just demoralizing. I've been casually applying to jobs in Athens because filling up my tank three times a week due to commuting and additional travel is just not ideal. I saw there were openings for a few jobs at JcPenney, which is definitely not my department store of choice but I figured I could fake it. I go in with my resume in hand before realizing that of course you don't actually meet with a person so they can evaluate your people skills. That would make too much sense. You sit at a kiosk and fill out an application on a computer. A computer is way better qualified to gage how you might do at a customer service position.

So I filled out the basics about who I am and where I've worked, and proceeded to the 50-question survey portion of the application. This basically consisted of personality assessment-type questions: "How would you best describe your character? A) Honest, B) Hardworking, C) Determined, or D) Loyal?" Mixed in with these questions were ones that anyone could plainly see what the correct answer was: "If you were to catch a co-worker stealing from the company, how would you react? A) Report them immediately, B) Warn them that if you caught them again you would tell the supervisor, C) Not say anything, or D) Join in with them?" Oh yes, I am absolutely going to divulge that I would be totally on board to become a criminal, Caribbean Joe Fuddy Duddy Shirt-Stealing dream team with my delinquent coworker.

The final portion of the questionnaire was a series of two opposite descriptions from which you had to determine how much either of them fit your personality. Example: On one end you had "I openly express my feelings" while on the other you had "I never show how I am feeling," with the "strongly agree" option for both, "somewhat agree," and "neutral." I tried to tailor my answers to make me sound like a superstar potential employee- agreeable enough to work on a team but strong enough to work independently, confident enough to say I am right but humble enough to know when I am wrong, ambitious enough to have goals but wise enough to know my place on the totem pole. I thought I was a shoe-in....

Until I got to the end of the 50th question and hit the submit button. A window popped up on my screen, which I cheerfully read thinking it was further instructions or just letting me know someone would be in touch. But as I read further, it went a little something like this:

"Based on your answers and application, you have been determined to be unqualified for the position(s) you applied for. You may reapply to JcPenney in 180 days. Really, you are better off trying to find something else, because JcPenney kinda sucks anyway. I mean, if you look at our junior section it is reminiscent of what your grandmother thinks the kids are wearing these days but in actuality is completely devoid of anything attractive. And we really don't even have good deals. So you are better off going to Macy's or Belk. Hell, even Sears seems to know what the trends are and they sell dishwashers! Overall as a company, we just fail."

Okay, maybe that last portion may be slightly exaggerated in my memory. But the part where they essentially told me I am unqualified to fold shirts is ingrained forever. I sat there stunned for a moment then got up with my head held high and sauntered out of there. As soon as I was in my car, I gave Mark a ring.

"Those mother effers at JcPenney told me I am not good enough to work there!" I spat as soon as Mark picked up. "I have a college degree in public relations! PUBLIC RELATIONS! That means that the University of Georgia deemed me fit to RELATE with the PUBLIC. But nooooooooooo, apparently that is not good enough for JcPenney. There are people that get jobs there that don't even have a HIGH SCHOOL diploma. What the HELL? I am never shopping there again!"

"Whoa," was Mark's reply. "That sucks. Whatever, screw 'em. You don't need them."

"Damn straight," I said, bitterness ebbing away. "You can still shop there, though. I know you usually find stuff there that you like."

"Cool. Thanks."

I then got an earful of mockery from my parents, which was fine because it had evolved from humiliating to hilarious. I know that there are plenty of jobs out there I am qualified for that are a lot more stimulating than cleaning out dressing rooms. But my boycott of JcPenney still stands. Never again. Long live Macy's!