Tears on my Cupcake

It's been an emotionally charged few days here in Savannah. You all heard about my "When it Rains it Pours" Week of October 2nd- 9th and now midterms are upon us. Oh and did I mention that we finally finished all four seasons of our favorite show, Felicity? I feel lost without the constant back and forth of Ben and Felicity and their sassy barista boss, Javier. I find myself wondering what they are doing now? Whether Felicity let her hair go back to it's natural curl and considering the pros and cons of Ben over Noel. (Losing her may actually be the biggest blow at this point).

The dishes in the sink are mine and they are dirty (I take full responsibility), there are matte boards and paint swatches all over the living room thanks to a especially time consuming repeat pattern project Claire and Frances are working on, little pieces of embroidery thread are stuck to the couch from Spencer's (amazing) fiber's embroidery situation, I can hear an English accented Olivia upstairs re-re-re-reciting the Shakespeare piece she must know by 11:00 today and I am just now noticing a lone box of tampons on the floor under the table perhaps strategically placed for easy access amongst the chaos that is this week.

We are all running on empty, but I must admit, I am coming out on the other side. My biggest low was definitely sometime last week post Shitfest 2011 in Fashion Tech when I had to baste and re baste my zipper 6 separate times to get the teeth to match up my seam line wasting all 2 and half hours of class on something that should take 20 minutes tops. This should not be that hard. I found myself leaving class and driving in auto pilot straight over to a local bakery to eat my emotions. This is when things got low. Reaching the front of the line, I noticed that they were sold out of my Star Brownie. What a joke. And there, in the line at Back in the Day Bakery, I broke down in tears.

Quiet enough to not cause a scene, but wet enough that the girl behind the counter noticed, I sort of kind of blurted/ kind of laughed/ kind of sobbed "So, you're out of the Star Brownies?" then holding my breathe in a way that I think makes me look normal. "No-- sorry, we just sold out." It was the culmination of everything that had me walking back to my car with a box of 6 cupcakes that I didn't want with tears streaming down my face.

I wouldn't really consider myself a big cryer. I never cry for pity or for attention or during hard conversations and I'm not one of those girls who seems like she cries almost more than she laughs or than she thinks. And I will not confirm or deny the fact that at one point in my life I was seeking professional help concerning my lack of emotion. But I will admit to crying at completely unexpected and inopportune moments of weakness. When it's the last straw that breaks the camel's back, there will be tears. And in the spirit of full disclosure, sometimes I like it. This is why I completely loved (and cracked up at the timing) of this article I recently read on public crying. Her description of the way crying is not only sometimes necessary but welcomed is so exactly spot on.

So here's to the tears! Let them flow like milk and honey at a time that couldn't be more inconvenient.

Also, this video of Dane Cook crying has cracked me up for years. Pretty much the perfect description of my crying routine. PLEASE do not watch if you are easily offended by language. He says the F word seven times and the S word twice. Oops. Contrary to recent posts, I'm typically not a huge fan of expletives (or Dane Cook for that matter) but this is too good.

Givenchy Couture

Just a little Tuesday morning high fashion to make your morning.

What a Week.

Honestly. How in the world has it already been a week since last Sunday? I'm sitting in our kitchen on the couch that we just moved into the corner of the room (best decision we've ever made) eating spaghetti and looking back on the week I've had and it is just ridiculous.

Let me give you a little recap:

(Heads up-- I'm not in the mood for sentence structure)

Sunday: Get a tour of the most amazing house for rent. In our price range. In a great location. Plenty of room. All we need to do is gather references and meet with the renters on Friday afternoon to convince them that we are competent and responsible. (AKA: we won't wreck the house in a drug fueled art school kid haze like the last renters). Yay! This is so great.

Monday: Woke up at 6:30 to go stand in the line at the SCAD theater for tickets to the Savannah film festival. The tickets sell out fast, so it's important to get in line early so when they go on sale at 10:00, we get first dibs. Things get awkward when we find out that the tickets are also available online at 10:00. And they sell out before we even get to the front of the line. The film majors in front of us in line are extremely disgruntled. One of them pulls out a video camera and confronts the volunteer in a heated rage. She is polite. He is not. He threatens to expose all of them for slanderers with this footage.



Tuesday: A blur. All of us working our butts off to get tons of recommendations for the house. Got an awesome care package from mom. She rocks. Ate too much candy. She still rocks, but I am irrationally mad at her for making me eat all of that candy.

Wednesday: Started my own mini fashion club with Baille Younkman to motivate, inspire and hone our fashion souls in each other and ourselves. Good conversation ensues. I love Baille. Also, on Wednesday, we begin to smell suspiciousness in the downstairs bathroom, but think nothing of it. What fools, we are.

Thursday: The toilet explodes. We are all familiar with that story at this point, no? Shit everywhere.

But, hey-- at least we are moving into our beautiful new home soon! And, my equally beautiful new loafers made it in the mail. My life is complete.

Friday: Wake up in the morning already anxious (good anxious) for the meeting with the renters tonight at 5:00. Can't wait to impress them with our manners and cute outfits that we have been planning all week. Chic and serious, yet still true to our own individual style. Get home from some errands to find that the renters have cancelled our meeting because they decided that they just didn't want to rent to SCAD students. But, they didn't even give us a chance to show them our recommendations! So lame. Kind of grumpy all day. Go see the Ides of March. Politics get me riled up. But Ryan Gosling makes everything better.

Head home and laugh with my roommates for a solid 4 hours. Discuss how mad we all are about the house. Laugh some more. Decide to hit the hay. Everything is quiet. Gunshots fire. Someone has been shot! I call 911. Just kidding. It's just the transformer outside my window blowing up thanks to the neighbor's walnut tree branch falling on it and starting a fire. No biggie. But, I actually did call 911.



We take advantage of the power outage and light candles and take pictures.

Saturday: I wake up tired from the lack of rest in the last few days. No time to sleep in because we are having a brunch with the most loveliest of girls. It's entertainment time. I put on bright colors to distract from the bags under my eyes. Baked goods errywerrr. I contribute home made scones with blue cheese spread and blackberry jam. Divine.

The brunch went swimmingly and now I can finally sleep. Change into dark colors. Climb into bed. Close eyes. Drift, drift, linger, sleep. Door bell rings. IS THIS A JOKE? Matt and Tyler are here to eat all of the brunch leftovers. Eventually the day ends with a walk, coffee, and charades.

Life is so good. But such an emotional roller coaster. What'd I tell you? What a week, am I right? I am so full of spaghetti I can barely breathe. But I couldn't be happier. I am so thankful for my roommates.

For the record, this week also included a naked bottom. But this cannot be blogged.

Shit Happens

Remember a few weeks ago when I posted that delightful video about the wonders of our downstairs toilet? Remember that disgusting black sewer water that filled our toilet and poisoned our nostrils if you stood too close? Remember how we thought it was bad then!?

Well, let's just say, shit hit the fan.

Let me just say that this did not happen due to negligence on our part. We were responsible. We called the plumber. We did the work! And after about 5 different people came in to look at it told us that, yes, we did have a plumbing problem (duh), none of them seemed to be able to fix it. Thank you. For doing absolutely nothing.

So, because we are in the process of moving out and we are doing just fine with using the two bathrooms upstairs, we decided to cut our losses and just avoid the money pit, that is the downstairs bathroom, until we all left dodging a major shit bullet. Plus, as long as we kept the door closed, the smell wasn't that bad...

(In case you haven't caught on yet, I'm using far more expletives in this post than usual because... well... I can. And because "shit" has become a bit of a catch phrase around these parts that last couple days).

This whole Avoiding the Situation Plan was working out swimmingly until Wednesday. It was about 11:00pm when we all noticed that terribly familiar stench making its way into our living room. We'd been plugging our noses and complaining for about an hour when I finally decided to step into a major shit storm and see what was up. So, I said a little prayer and opened the door. That's when I saw that disgusting black water starting to make its way from the toilet to the floor. Disgusting. Instead of going in at that moment and turning off the water, we decided to just go to bed and call the plumber first thing the next morning. This was our first mistake.

The next day, we did indeed call the plumber, the one who had supposedly fixed it a couple weeks earlier, to get his butt over to our house to shut this shit down. Literally, seconds after hanging up the phone with him, I was walking to my room when I noticed a large, black, stinky pool of SHIT. Leaking from the bathroom. Out into the hallway. All over our floor.

I screamed.

I don't think you understand how gross it was.

Everyone came over and we had about a 2 minute panic where we all were total girls. And then all of the Don Patton training for the last 20 years kicked in. Turn off the water. But how? All of the shit is completely covering the floor an inch deep. Shit shit shit! Shit.

Basically, I manned up and put on Claire's pink boots and turned off the water. Like a Boss. Unfortunately, that did nothing to help clean up the mess. The next few hours involved a nice gentlemen from Roto Rooter who was sort of useless to the problem, a bunch of back and forth calls to a cleaning service called Serv Pro who eventually came at 8:30 and stayed until 1:30am. Jujie sleepy.

Here is a short video during the mayhem of discovering that we were in the middle of our Slumdog Millionaire moment.

That awkward moment when you have to move. Again.

Alright guys. Here's a story about how much life sucks sometimes. But then, it's also a story about flexibility and... exciting twists and turns? (check out that positive attitude right there).

About a week before I left Newport to come to Savannah this year, I got a dreadfully disconcerting phone call from my favorite roommate named Claire about how our house may or may not be going into foreclosure.

"But don't worry," She said, "the owner has just been in and out of the hospital for months and that's why she's behind on her payments."

How comforting.

So we moved in. Pictures were hung. Blog posts were made. There were oohs. There were ahhs. And our house was flawless. Except for the fact that every 5 days or so, we would get very official looking mail explaining that our house had been sold and we had to be out in 90 days. Or else!

Making the 100% wise and adult decision, we decided to just ignore the problem until it went away. Unfortunately, it seems that large corporations like Freddie Mac who buy foreclosed homes, such as ours, don't take too kindly to being ignored. And the fact that we are just five studious, hard working, adorable college girls just trying to get by in this big bad world means nothing to these heartless bastards. Come on. Do we really have to move? But we love it here!

After lots of unreturned phone calls and tons of legal jargon-y e-mails (thanks, Mr. Barnhardt!) it was discovered that yes, we do have to move. And yes, we really do only have 90 days. I know. I'm devastated too.

So, it got me thinking. Is it me? Was it something I said? You know how some people believe that they sort of have a cloud of bad luck that follows them around everywhere they go? Well, maybe I have a moving van that drives about 100 yards behind me and waits around every corner. Perhaps this moving van followed me all the way from California to Georgia and is now infecting my roommates as well. They didn't ask for this!

Immediately, I went into moving overdrive mode and the thought of looking for a place to live, that fits five people, that's within our budget, that's in a safe area, and that we even like for that matter completely consumed me. I voluntarily took the weight of the responsibility on my shoulders and began to majorly stress. The behavior I have taught myself to take ever since I was a little kid moving from house to house was starting to take over and by Thursday of last week, I was quickly letting go of the attachment that I had already grown to this house to make room for the fun, new and exciting opportunity of a new home/adventure.

But I did not take my roommates into consideration.

It dawned on me that not everyone was on the same timeline as I was on Friday afternoon (yes, the same day I posted this-- talk about being oblivious to the feelings of those around you!) when, after only 2 days of looking, we were standing in the kitchen of a house we'd found and I was ready to sign a rental agreement while two of my roomies were on the verge of tears. Hmm. Wake up, Julia. Sensitivity calls. Practicality can wait.

Eventually, we all got on the same page. Thank heavens. And after a two hour leisure cruise with all of the girls, snaking the streets of Savannah while playing an intense game of "Eye Spy with my Little Eye a FOR RENT Sign," we came up with some pretty solid leads. One in particular. By the end of this week, we will hopefully know more. But in the meantime, keep us in your prayers that this transition goes well and that we are able to embrace whatever/wherever our new home may be with hearts of gratitude and excitement.

When Harry Met Sally

Autumn always makes me want to watch When Harry Met Sally. I love everything about this movie. In fact, I may go watch it right now.

I recommend you do too.

Also, is it weird that I love her hair in the bottom picture?

10

Finally. A month I can stand behind. I simply love October.