Hey Monday

Oh my gosh. I realize I have been quite absent over the past couple of weeks and I am so sorry! Things got super crazy with finals and work and packing up my old apartment and shoving everything into my little car and moving it all into my new apartment and going on a mini vacation to Grand Haven, Michigan. But now I am happily settled into my new place, enjoying its many quirks (to put it nicely), and making friends with all my new neighbors, so I can finally get back to writing! Yay!

First of all, my apartment. You guys. It's an experience. Day one of living here the neighbors saw me shut my door and then immediately started pounding and singing carols to me to coax me out to party with them. Little did they know, there was no way I was getting out of bed after working all morning, moving all afternoon, and dancing all night at Amy and Luke's wedding (which was amazing). I was exhausted, it was midnight, and I just wanted to crack open my book and drift off into hazy dream land. Sorry, guys. It wasn't you, it was me. So naturally I couldn't turn them down on night two. Turns out everyone is pretty great. And we're getting a "house" puppy. You have no idea how excited I am to welcome that little ball of fur into our "family". (Literally a ball of fur. It's a husky!) But aside from the perks, there were some interesting quirks to the place. For one, as soon as I turned on the living room light, a bulb started flickering in a very horror movie-esque fashion. Creepy at night, especially when you're the only one in the apartment. Two, the first shower I tried to take probably took about 10 minutes longer than usual because I couldn't tell if I got all the shampoo out of my hair and the stream of water barely reached my body. Seriously, we had like, zero water pressure. Rough for a girl with really thick curly hair. Third, there were bugs EVERYWHERE. Centipedes in the bedrooms, ants in the kitchen, a giant ant crawling up my arm (yes, I did squeal and almost die). But after spraying the place down with our trusty cleaning supplies (probably not actually intended to kill bugs, but this is college and you have to be resourceful), I haven't found anything creepy crawling up any more of my limbs. :)

So ok, once everything was settled in and I was getting ready to leave for Michigan for the weekend, guess what I did. Seriously guess. No? Ok, I lost my darn phone. My pretty much still brand new iPhone. And I'm about 90% sure it just grew legs and walked away because it's nowhere to be found, and it has to be somewhere in this apartment. (My money is on the ants...) Thankfully my wise old mother (not to insinuate that you're old mom......) told me I should keep my old phone instead of giving it to the nice Verizon man to recycle just in case something happened to my new one. So after over half an hour on the phone with customer service, I am with a phone. It's a total junker, but it sends texts and it makes phone calls, which is good enough for me! But I am on a continual manhunt for my iPhone because I miss unblock me.....yes really, I miss my puzzle app. Haters is gonna hate.

Once my old/new phone was sufficiently active, my old roommate Kristin picked me up from my new place and we were headed to Michigan for a weekend of fun at the beach and seeing our old friends. The drive up was really great. Polar pops, 90s playlist (thanks, Spotify!), and pretty much no major traffic. Once we got to Em's, we prettied ourselves up for girls night out. This is where things get good. So we go to this bar on the corner called Kirby. It has three levels, which coincidentally correspond with the ages of the people in attendance. The top level is for those of the middle ages. Like, your parents' age. Street level was those in between their clubbing phase and their top level phase of life. You know, still trying to cling onto their youth by dancing around in front of the live cover band like this is spring break gone wrong? Yeah. That age. Now that left the three of us with the lower level, also called the Dark Room. Sounds pretty ominous, right? Yeah. Should've headed that warning. So we get downstairs and the first thing we see is lasers. Laser lights everywhere. I had to remind myself that I was in small town, coastal Michigan. However, the people in attendance really made for a great combination with the ambiance. It was like people who were either out of college or who decided higher education was not their forte, who are trying WAY too hard to "liv it up!" like their still in college. The dj was good, so at least the place had that going for it. Mostly though, it was a hot mess. People dancing on each other like it was a bad high school homecoming, people way too old to be drunk out of their minds, drunk out of their minds, and men with cheesy pick up lines trying to get you to go home with them. Yikes. Not my scene. I'm far more of a pub girl than a club girl. Like, the HIMYM (how I met your mother) bar, McClaren's. A place you can have an actual conversation with a person, the atmosphere is nice, and the alcohol is like a bonus. But despite the dismal start, the weekend quickly picked up when we decided to spend the day at the beach on Saturday. It was hot, but armed with a good book, a few gossip magazines, and Lake Michigan, we were prepared for a good time. Turns out if you're white, you should wear sunblock even if it's only May and the UV rays aren't that intense yet. We got so sunburned. Like, crispy burned. Like an entire day's worth of applying aloe still hasn't really calmed it down. Whatever though. My mother always said beauty is painful and after a couple of days, my shoulders will have a nice golden tan to them, thanks to the 1/4 of me that's Mexican. We ate the local grub, numbed our legs in the cold waters of the lake, and had the awkward moment of seeing our bartender from the night before who sucked and thus also who we didn't tip well. Successful weekend if I do say so myself.

Well, I think that's sufficient for now. Feel updated enough on my life? I hope so. Otherwise I may have to call you out on a stalking problem...

Ta-ta for now!
Liz

Ya Dig?

Do you ever have those moments when you see something and you're like, "Oh, I have to have that!"? Yeah? Me too. There are a few things out in the world of fashion that I've been seriously diggin on that I want in  my wardrobe so I can wear them every day! So I thought I'd share them with you all, and hopefully I've found some things you love too! Let me know what you think. :)

First of all, this trend of floral pants is way up on the top of my "to buy" list. I mean really, how stinkin' adorable are these?!

Seriously. And then I want to pair them with something like these:

For the blouse, I would definitely roll the sleeves and tuck the front into the pants, possibly to show off a cute belt!

I'm also seriously loving fun colored blazers, like hot pink and purple and cobalt blue. And the hair in that picture? So much love!! I wish so dearly that I hadn't chopped all mine off so I could dye it like that! Also, I'm totally into everything of the modern flower child genre of clothing. Flowy maxi skirts, crochet tops, head wraps, and feather designs on shirts and accessories. Given, I was pretty much raised by repressed hippies, so this is probably just a product of my youth finally expressing itself. Man, can you tell I'm a psych major? :)

I'm also totally into birds. Maybe not so much the actual animal, but their silhouettes. I enjoy a good mural painting session, and I'm thinking about painting a few around my room when I move into my new apartment. Something along the lines of this:

I love birds on necklaces and as a print for tops as well. They can be a really fun, quirky addition to a more subtle outfit.

Share with me what you're loving this season!!

Peace and love,
Liz.

Confessions of a Self-Proclaimed Introvert

So you're probably wondering when the confessional takes place, and to that I must say, "Hold your horses! Almost there." Because surely, it was the snazzy title I fashioned that brought you here today. But first, you need briefing on why this post is even coming into existence.

So recently, I've had a lot of work to do, which really means I've had a lot of procrastinating happening. Most would procrastinate by, say, visiting friends, watching tv, or perusing the internet for new cat videos. Me? No, I can't be tied down to the absolute normalcy of those various forms of procrastination! Instead, I tend to do a lot of introspection, which is really just a big, fancy word for literally thinking about myself. Soul-searching, if you will. Well, my friends, some of the things I have begun to realize about myself surprised me. Which, really, is quite sad. Ah, the life of a psychology major...always trying to figure people out.

Ok, the part you've been anticipating like Christmas morning (exaggeration? perhaps.).

Things I've realized about myself during the last 12 hours of intensive procrastination:

1. If I have free time, I will fill it with something. Anything. I cannot simply do nothing. Though I suppose I shouldn't say I will fill that time with "anything," because just today I had about 5 hours to work on projects, but instead I decided to go see and movie and take a quick, dearly needed nap (rough night. a different train went by about every hour, blaring its horn, reawakening me from my already restless slumber). I've never been one to just do nothing. My whole life has been scheduled to the minute, starting when I was about 5 years old. School, dance class, soccer practice, home, dinner, bath, bed. Yes, that was my schedule of activities as a 5 year old. And it never did cease. Thinking back to high school, I don't even know how I'm still alive and functioning. I had class for 7 hours a day, then rehearsal of some kind for at least 2 hours, either work or dance class after that, and typically about 5 hours of homework per night on top of that. That's approximately 18 hours of the day jam-packed with things. Rough.

2. Settling down scares the piss out of me. I used to have this mindset of go to college, meet a man, marry by graduation, settle in somewhere not too far from home, kids by 26, two dogs, white picket fence, the whole nine yards. But now, that seriously makes my stomach tie in knots. I've never wanted to explore more in my life than right now. I want to get away from comfort and experience this world we've been blessed with. I want to move far away and start living. Travel. Go on adventures. Meet people. Experience cultures. Funny, how you think you know exactly what you want when you're so young, only to find out its what scares you almost more than anything. Maybe it's fear of commitment. Maybe it's just my form of repressed teenage rebellion finally leaking its way out drop by drop into consciousness. Whatever it is, I know it's not time for me to settle. There's too much life to live to risk wasting while I'm still able. Also, it really is hilarious that it's only after you've come to this determination that your friends try to set you up with guys. (Sorry, those of you who have requested a date. I don't date. I relationship. [Yeah, I turned it into a verb.] So no, I guess I'm not afraid of committing, I'm afraid of commitment holding me back, which is exactly what starting a relationship a year before I graduate and move on from this place would do.) (Also, sorry if that sounded snarky. That wasn't my intention.)

3. I've begun to realize the sheer finite-ness of our existence on this planet, and it's made me appreciate the relationships I have that much more. I'm realizing how much more we should tell people we love them and how we should revel in sharing stories with each other. It's really a bit trite, but there's real truth behind the newly-popular acronym, YOLO. You only live once. Live hard, love harder, share your story with someone, because who knows when the battery on your clock will run out.

Well, that's it. Disclaimer: I swear I was not on any sort of substance, other than caffeine, while I was thinking these thoughts. Sometimes I just get extra caught in the net of thoughts in my mind.

Hope you found what you came here for.

Peace and love,
Liz.