IM MAKING A COMEBACK!!!!!

hello friends,
it has been far too long. and i know i have only myself to blame. but i needed a break. get off my back. its not easy to create geniusness. also during the summer months i reside in a place where i do not run into countless amounts of crazies everyday (as i do in chicago) who are basically the fuel for this "fun spot" i like to call my blog. Sure working at the pool in minnesota exposed me to the wonderful world of fecal accidents and led to me recieving more sweaty shirtless hugs than i care to recall ( my male co-workers were the ones that were shirtless, not me, although shirtless females actually aren't at all out of place in the world of "roch" gaurds, as we like to refer to ourselves), but absolutely nothing can compare to the craziness that i encounter in my beloved job at the evanston ymca. I've only been back 2 days and i have already exprienced this jewel of absolute insanity. so here it is for you to enjoy.
So lets begin by introducing our principle characters. First of all we have Mr. Tricked Me Into Putting Lotion On His Hairy Old Man Back. I'm sure all of you are familiar with this beloved character from previous mentionings by me. In case you are unfamiliar, he is a 40 year old lifegaurd who ocassionaly hands me rubber-duckies that have been left on the pool deck and expects me to be genuinely enthused at this gift. He also lives at the Y, so there is a high probability that he is more than a little crazy. In order to save me dear typing time, he will henceforth be known as Mr. Lotion Man Back. Secondly, we have Mr. Is He Hitting On Me? So Mr. Is He Hitting On Me? is another 40ish year old lifegaurd (are you sensing a trend?) who at first meeting seems like a nice funny guy, but then he says things like "Hey Colleen looking good this year" or "Hey Bob, did you even recognize this girl, or should i say woman( referring to me) she looks so different". Did i mention he also touches my hair a little more than i'm comfortable with. So now that we have our characters established lets get to the story. i'm sorry if this is a disappointment after the long build up. So, Mr. Lotion Man Back says to Mr. Is He Hitting On Me, " I think we need to change the lane lines." and Mr. Is He Hitting On Me responds, " I think you need to change your underwear."(so consice and so very wonderful) Shouting ensues. and my 18 year old boss is forced to seperate them while i chuckle heartily in the corner. Well that's my life.

On a side note, i decided to declare a major in anthropology. Here's to a life of unemployment!!

So fire alarms do weird things to me.

Now you must understand that the fire alarm in our building is no ordinary fire alarm. It is a deafening high pitched screeching sound of death and the loudest sound i have ever heard, by far. This pleasant noise is of course accompanied by extremely bright flashing lights and they always occur in the middle of the night. Now at the beginning of the year I reacted fairly normal to these violent disturbances that wake me from the dead of sleep. My roomate and i would run around the room in a state of panic yelling "WHERE ARE MY PANTS? I NEED MY PANTS!!" as we desperately scrounge through the piles of clothing in our room. all without realizing that the whole process would be a lot easier if we simply turned on the lights.
However, with the last two fire drills my reactions have just got increasingly more strange. Two firedrills ago i was sleeping soundly when the unimabinable blare began. My roomate however was down a floor talking on the phone. By the time she had hung up the phone walked up the stairs and back into our room i was still peacefully snoozing. Only when she screamed "COLLEEN WHAT ARE YOU DOING" over the shreiking siren did i wake up and say "What's going on?" she screamingly explained to me that it was a fire drill. I had simply thought it was my phone ringing.
But my strangest fire drill experience of all occured last night when the fire alarm went off at 5:30 in the morning. As soon as alarm went off i immediately jumped out of(and by jump i mean half rolled out of have fell of off) my top bunk of a bed. I landed in a hunched position facing my roomate who had somehow managed to remain sleeping through the screeching, and began to scream/groan at the top of my lungs. (i still have no idea why). My roomate waking to this terrifying image, had no other choice but to scream back at me.

Oh goodness how i pity my roomate.


o.k. this post sucked but don't blame me it's finals week

Sine qua non salons and a near death experience

So friends it is time for another story of terror in the big city.

So today the roomate and i went to get our hairs cut at this uber fancy salon type place that we have never been to. so of course we got utterly lost. After having a couple people run away from us in terror when we asked for directions ( seriously i made a 40 year old man cower in fear) we were finally told that the street we were looking for was 40 minutes in the opposite direction. Did i mention it was once again raining? So we decided to hail a cab. I used my excellently well developed cab signaling skills ( and by this i mean walking up to a parked cab and hovering awkwardly outside and ocassionally tapping on the window) to hail quite possibly the creepiest cab driver in all of Chicago. Yes!!!! So after this man drove us in clearly the wrong direction for several minutes to run up the charge. He asked us how old we were and began to describe to us why being eighteen and legal was such a good thing. Then he repeatedly pointed out attention to the butts of young female pedestrians. Then my favorite part happened. WHile questioning us about our age and quite possibly seeing our terrified reflections through his rear-view mirror, he locked the door. Hearing this sound i immediately looked at lock on the door to the back seat and noticed that the part you are supposed to pull up to unlock the doors was completely missing, likw it had been sawed off or removed with some other form of great masculine strenght. Yes friends straight out of an oprah show about kidnapping i was trapped in the backseat of a strange man's car ( and of course without my mace) . Anywho i'll leave you with that cliff hanger. but i am alive and well and still un-raped so all and all a good day.

So you know what i hate? Nose plugs. actually, its really the people who wear nose plugs that upset me so much. I see these pathetic excuses for human beings everyday at work and everytime i want to beat them with my floaty tube thing and yell at them for their stupidity. Come on people it's just breathing. I mastered this skill at a very young age and i think its time you conquer it too! Seriously, you'll learn to love the sting of the chlorine water in your nasal cavity, either that or breathe out while your underwater (really not that difficult i promise). So there's one being in particular that has spurred this rant of mine. He is an eight year old boy who takes lessons at the y where i lifeguard and he is always wearing these disgraceful pieces of plastic which contort his face into a sight that makes me vomitous. Sometimes i feel slighty sad for this child who has clearly been brain washed by his parents into thinking that this is socially acceptable. IT'S NOT. By wearing one the kid is practically screaming I'm a prick, please beat me.( a request which i am only too tempted to oblige). This kid will never amount to anything if he cant face the friendly sting of the chlorine water.


I hope none of you were disturbed by my desire to beat an eight year old. But nose plugs really upset me. Like a lot. Maybe there was a trama with one in my childhood.

Hazzah!! I learned how to title my blog

All right so here goes: the story of my saturday night. a story of drunken debachary, minus the drunkenness and probably the debachary, because i don't actually know what that means.

So on saturday evening me and My Roomate and my good friend, The Italian decided that we had lived here much too long to not know where the nearest target is. We got directions from the friendly kid downstairs and hopped on the L around 7 o' clock. Now in order to get to this target you have to transfer from the L to a bus. Now usually i resist The Italians cry of "let's take the bus" and refuse to go anywhere that you can't get to by L, because not only are busses incredibly irregular and slow, they are also sketchy. i know kids that have been shot at and molested on the bus. However, on that night i decided that target was worth it. Near death and possible molestation were a risk i was willing to take for hair dye and a body pillow. So after waiting a rediculously long time (at a rather sketchy stop) for the bus to come, we finally boreded and took the fifteen minute ride to the center of all wonderfullness that is Target. We shopped around target, marveling at the sponge bob body pillows, two shaded eye liners and face masks (which pictured a girl with a blue face and birds nests on her eyes on the package). We off course bought the face masks, although great force was needed to make The Italian comply to the girly wonderfulness. After about an hour we decided it was time to leave this two floored land of happiness before we spent any more money. By this time it was about 9 30. We returned to the bus stop where we had gotten off and began to wait. Oh and did i forget, It was raining, quite hard. also the temperature had dropped by about 15 degrees, making me and the Roomate quite chilly in our thin sweatshirts.
Now this is where the story starts to get interesting. After waiting for about 10 minutes we were approached by a rather drunken man. Now usually whenever we are out in public and a man above the age of 12 comes near us. I hushedly assure my friends with "don't worry, I have my mace". However on this night when My Roomate said, "Colleen, get out your mace" I was forced to respond, "i don't have it, It's in my coat". Then the drunken man, who shall from hence forth be called Stewart, began to speak to us. He shouted something like, "How long you girls been waiting" and "I dont think the busses run this late" ( i reall wish i knew how to portray drunkenly slurred speech properly through type). Now there were two things that really impressed me about Stewart. The first was his ability to dodge in and out of traffic (and by dodge i mean force the cars to swerve dangerously to avoid killing him as he crazily meandered through the heavily trafficed street looking for a bus). As we stood shivering at the bus stop we were in constant fear that Stewart's head or arm would come flying at us after he got hit. The second thing that really impressed me was that he remembered to bring an umbrella which was something that none of us had the brain power to do even in our sober state, even more amazing was the fact that he had enough skill to hold both his umbrella and his beer can in one hand, leaving the other hand free to do whatever it is that crazy drunken people do with their hands (flail perhaps). Finally, Stewart decided that a bus was not going to come and headed on down the road, leaving us to ponder our predicament. We had now been standing at the stop for almost twenty minutes and hadn't seen a single bus going in any direction. Perhaps the drunken man had once again exceeded our intelligence and was correct that the busses had stopped running. We then decided to look up at the sign that had been hanging over us the entire time. we were pleased to see that the sign clearly states that the busses run until early evening on weekends.
So being the intelligent girls that we are, we decided to begin walking the approximately three mile trek back to the L stop, hoping that we would run into a stop on the brown line on the way. We began walking and about two blocks later i realized that i really had to pee. I informed My Roomate and The Italian of this and they dismissed it saying, "Come on, we're not stopping, you can make it". About a block later i realized that i in fact was not going to make it when i started laughing. In order to prevent the flow from starting, i assumed my "i really have to pee" stance. Which involves me crossing my legs while bending my knees slightly and leaning to one side. My friends continued to walk along, not noticing that i had fallen behind. When they finally turned around and realized that i was a ways back they began to laugh quite hard at my stance. This did not help my situation in the least. I held out for as long as i could but the trickle would not be impeded. Yes friends, I peed my pants. However, i was not alone in this regression to pre-school mentality. I was quite pleased to hear my roomate who was also laughing quite hard say sheepishly "Guys i think i peed my pants". Luckily there was a McDonalds quite near. We snuck into the bathroom and changed into the jeans that we had luckily just bought. After much giggleing and difficulty (the stalls were quite small and the floors disgustingly dirty) we were ready to head back out into the cold, both of us going commando and probably contracting nifty diseases from our new jeans. (perhaps that was more information than you needed). The story gets somewhat anti-climactic from here. we wandered around for quite a while after this looking for the brown line, encountering several more wonderful characters including a beggar who got uncomfortably close and called My Roomate "Boo". which quite possibly could have been my favorite part of the night. We finally hailed a cab, which was rather exciting, and made it back to campus without getting murdered, raped, hit by a car, or catching any diseases (that i know of). We returned only to be awaken from our toasty warm beds by a fire alarm at 2 30 in the morning and were forced back out into the rain.


Congratulations to anyone who read all the way through this post. You get two points.

Hello friends,

It is now time for me to regale you with a delighful story from my youth, a story of an event that scarred and shaped me into the wonderful human being i am today. It all happened one day early in my freshman year in a delightful land i like to call century. First you must obtain a visual image of me as a freshman. I had yet to break the five foot mark and weighed somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 pounds. I had an incredibly attractive and stylish haircut freaturing thick, straight bangs. As a freshman i was even more shy and awkward than i am now (if that's possible). Now the most important detail of my appearance that day was my enormous backpack. While this backpack was normal in height, it had an immense expanding capability. Me being the studius student that i was, i carried lots of books around with me, causing my extremely expandable backpack to protrude literally 2 feet from my back. Anywho, back to the story.

After eating lunch, i was waiting in the crowded hallway near the cafeteria with my good friends mollly and martha. The underclassmen were forced to stay in this hallway after lunch because we were to wild and crazy to wander the halls unwatched. The upperclassmen however were allowed to charge through the huddled masses of freshman into the freedom of the rest of the school. This is where the trouble started. As i was happily chatting with my pals, an upper classman of enormous stature, probably about 7' 10" weighing 390 pounds came charging past. Without either of our knowledge our backpacks somehow linked together and i was imediately pulled backwards away from my friends. The looks of shock and confusion on their faces haunt me still today. Because of the burliness of this charging man he did not even notice the little fly of a freshman attatched to his back and continued to push through the crowds while i clumsily stumbled along behind him. Once i gathered myself enough to realize what had happened i began to say things like "ummm.... Sir". However, he was much to focused on pushing the underclassmen out of his way to hear my week pleas. When out train of awkwardness finally reached the end of the hallway, the lady gaurding the door so freshman wouldn't sneak out pointed out to my burly abductor that he had a small child atatched to his backpack. He turned around and with a single burning look of disgust unhooked us and carried on his way.

There is no real point or moral to this story, other than the fact that it has had long lasting psychological effects on me. and that's it. Good Afternoon.

So a couple of days ago my friends and i were insanely bored. and thus decided to take a tour of the greatest places in the swell town of Rochester, MN. We began by stopping by the bowling alley and the infamous corn cob tower. We then of course hit up the giant plastic wheel chair. Then it was time to visit the most beloved and poop covered Rochester land mark, Silver Lake. By this time it was about 1 in the morning. Usually at this time Silver Lake is only inhabbited by stoners, rapists, and thousands of sleeping geese. We decided to ignore the suspicious characters lurking in the distance and the awkwardly empty (maybe there was a bum slumbering in the back seat that we couldn't see) cars nearby and get out and take pictures surrounded by the geese. We turned of the blarring sounds of Hanson's classic hit, Mmm-bop and ventured out of the car. Things were going pretty well, except for the slipperyness of the ground due to the accumulating ice and goose poo. The geese were slumbering peacefully ( and by peacefully i mean creepily, doing that awkward standing sleeping thing that geese do so well). My friends and i hovered closely to the ginormous ( jy- norm-ous) pack of geese and snapped a few pictures. The flash of the camera seemed to disturb the geese in some way, the began to honk and flap about. My friends, who were in the thick of the pack became extremely frightened and began to scream and run back to the car. This only seemed to make the geese angrier. The geese seemed to unanimously make the decision to charge us, surround us and proceed to peck our eyes out. As my friends and i reached the car, we turned around to see thousands of geese marching toward us, in a hitler-esk way. We screamed at my friend to unlock the car. In her terror she nervously fumbled with the keys. All the while the goose army marched closer and closer, rearing their ugly tongues. Finally my friend managed to unlock the door and we sped out of that parking lot before the geese were able to eat our innards. Good times.

Happiness = driving the beast down highway 52( the best highway ever created) past the elk farm while chuckling and the humourous signs with my two bestest pals as co-pilots, singing and dancing to the wonderful soundage of Drops of Jupiter ( which happened to play 4 times in the 3 hour trip and never got old, ever) headed for a delightful evening of shopping at the mecca of all wonderfulness, the mall of america.

sorry for the display of emotion, which i usually pride myself on my inability to feel.