louis, out.

i'm boycotting louis armstrong and, specifically, "what a wonderful world" for the following reasons:

#1: no matter where i am, or who i am with, or what i am doing, or what i am thinking, i always end up in a puddle of snot and tears.

#2: do i need another reason???

louis, i love you. but i am 2 clicks away from deleting said above song from my iTunes and changing the channel absolutely every time "meet joe black" or any other royalty producing (congrats, by the way....that was pretty much a home run from conception, i'm sure) version of it comes across my airways . i'm just not in the mood to have to buy stock in charmin simply because i'm a wimp for your rip-my-heart-out-of-my-chest song which in actuality is astoundingly beautiful but heart-wrenching at the same time.

but had you lived to be 109 years old, i bet we would have been the best of friends. and we would have taken a butt load of pictures together because we have the same dopey over-achieving grin.

vertical.

truth be told, i really am not really tall. tall, yes. but at 5-feet 8-inches, i have to look upwards to all of those amazon chicks who tower over 6 feet.

but i used to be really tall. back in first grade (and 2nd, and 3rd, and pretty much until the end of middle school when the boys started growing up). and i hated it. my mom always told me i would one day appreciate my height, but i didn't believe her until i did. regardless, this little candygram would've been gladly welcome in my locker back in the days when all i wanted to do was cut myself at the knees and be short. oh how i used to dream about being short.

now, not so much. long legs are a blessing.

weddings are fun.

top 10 reasons i love weddings:

1. great excuse to be fancy.

2. Canon in D .... ummm, hi. everyone uses it and if they don't it's because they are trying to not be cliche when in fact they should have just jumped on the bandwagon and rolled with it. and they will certainly regret it when they look back at the video and see it missing.

3. open bar and free food . . . not elaborating here.

4. surprises. like the dunkin donuts truck that wheeled up at midnight and dished out their entire inventory. i don't eat donuts, never really liked them, but the concept makes me happy.

5. becoming bff's with random people for just one night.

6. dancing to all the awesome songs you always want to sing on karaoke night (and sometimes do) because they are feel good songs and everyone loves them.

7. witnessing true love and happiness . . . okay, so some love stories don't always end with rainbows and puppies, but at a wedding you are guaranteed to be in the presence of the truest form of love, and it is fantastic to see the bursting of hearts between two people . . . even if you don't even know them. or know them all that well (as was the case this weekend. but i don't care, it was beautiful)

8. twirling.

9. high heels. they make your legs look awesome.

10. getting home, still smiling, and saying "wow . . . that was really fun."

i won't deny the fact that i looked totally geeked out in this photo, but hey. i was happy and maybe a bit giddy. after all, i was at a wedding with some of my favorite people and had just done numbers 1-10, as mentioned above.

sister solidarity. and with prayers for maureen.

something amazing happened today. well, amazing to me, anyway.

once upon a college day, i was in a sorority. shocking? perhaps. but it's true. the 43 other girls in my pledge class were made up of 42 people i had never laid eyes on. through the coming first 9 months of college, we were bound together by a lot of great frat party/gameday/keg stand/one night stand(kidding)/pee in your neighbors bed/laugh until it hurts kind of times, but we were also bound together by tragedy. at the end of our freshman year, one of our dear friends, who had also become a sister beyond the scope of sorority, was killed tragically. and this group of 44 girls, who had always held hands walking home from the bars, were now holding hands around her coffin.

we were never the same.

nor should we have been.

tragedy struck us again the summer after graduation. and we knew how to react. we had been so bonded by our "sisterhood" in the previous 4 years that it was only certain human nature to respond and react again, as we had been forced to do seemingly so recently. the bond was still so intact . . . afterall, it had only been a matter of weeks since we had been together.

years have passed and we have all endured our ups and downs, highs and impossible lows. distance separates most of us and some of us haven't even spoken since the day we left our perfect utopia which was college. life happened. life is happening. it is impossible to think we can all continue to live under one roof, in one town, between one breath, only a mere 2 minutes from each other.

sadly, tragedy has hit one of us again. and here is the miracle:

within minutes . . . and i mean minutes . . . i was flooded with calls, emails, text messages, facebook messages, every possible cyber source of communication there is to ensure that this news had reached my ears.

certain friends whom i have not spoken to in years reached out. they wanted us all to know. they wanted us all to be solidified by the same unity we have only ever known. and in those moments, i was reminded that it is not the phone calls that keep us together. it is not the constant communication, nor the frequent visits, nor the flowers on birthdays, nor the random late night calls to say i love you still.

it is the fact that we have always been a group bonded by loyalty and friendship and a sworn honest promise to look out for each other. no matter what. that is what has kept us together through the 12 years since we first stood upon the lawn on milledge avenue and embraced the fact that we might have once been strangers, but going forward we would be nothing less than sisters.

i don't have any real sisters. you know, by blood or anything. but i have these 43 girls. and i am eternally grateful for every single one of them.

for angie, part 2.

i don't want to make a habit out of lying to you, so here goes:

12 Things About Me Right At This Moment:

1. My creative juices are at an all time low, so this is what you get.

2. I almost went to bed before doing this, but my blood pressure spiked at the thought of your sad face when you got online and I still had left you with nada.

3. I spent 5 hours in a movie theater today and almost watched the last half of Iron Man standing up because my butt hurt and I was overly fidgety.

4. I am dreading tomorrow because it is cleaning day and I hate cleaning day.

5. I discovered "Chewy Lemonheads & Friends" tonight and am pretty pumped about them.

6. I'm wearing striped socks.

7. I'm planning a solo day at the beach on Friday because the beach is my favorite place on the planet and sometimes going solo is the most therapeutic thing ever.

8. I want to move.

9. My legs feel like I ran back to back marathons.

10. I'm probably going to take a double dose of Unisom in about 7 minutes and fall into a sleep coma.

11. I have dirty dishes in my sink and that annoys me.

12. If I choose to love someone, I will in some way love them forever even if they stop loving me. That's just the way that it goes.

kloveyoubye.

bye, y'all.

i'm trading cold air for 90 degree temps. trading jeans and a sweatshirt for shorts and a bathing suit. trading a mess of a week for a long weekend of heaven (which includes, but not limited to: pool parties, dance parties, riding bulldog statues, riding mechanical bulls? okay, maybe not likely but you never know. super long lunches, super long dinners, stalking old abodes and possibly inviting ourselves indoors, mimosas and limosas by water, by land, by foundry, by just about anywhere. and a whole slew of other things that involve ruckus i'm sure.)

see ya on the flip side.

oh, and in case you were wondering: this is what riding a bulldog statue means. only with a lot more enthusiasm. check back next week for photos which will wow you. surely.


and disregard his LSU shirt. he doesn't mean it.

georgia on my mind.

it is no coincidence that i'm wearing an athens shirt just.one.week. before i'll be storming into that little town. guns blazing.

humor me. it's a photo montage . . . someone's excited.

beeteedubb: someone should remind me not to scrunch my forehead.

kiss kiss no more.

i don't remember when it became necessary to kiss people on both cheeks upon entering or exiting their presence, but i am requesting that it stops. now.

first of all, we aren't european, so let's quit pretending that we are.

i am totally in favor of hugs, a kiss on one cheek, or even the ol' traditional solid hand shake. but the double kiss kiss . . . well i find it wildly unnecessary for more than 2 reasons.

#1: was the 1st kiss not enough?

#2: is there anything more awkward in this scenario than when Person A goes in for the 2nd kiss, but Person B has already leaned back just far enough to suggest he or she does not need said 2nd kiss, but Person A has already committed, thus leaving Person B with no other option but to super-awkwardly lean BACK IN for round 2 of cheek kissing?

#3: 9 out of 10 times, lips never even touch flesh. therefore, this is really only an "air kiss" and what in the world is the point of that?

#4: double-cheek-kissing really only occurs between two people who don't even know each other all.that.well. because if it were an actual friend, surely you would give a hug. and if it were someone you see pretty regularly, then you don't really need to greet them each and every time with anything more than a "hey, what's up". and if it were a total stranger, a handshake does just fine.

#5: in situations where you might be greeting more than one person in the room, there becomes this unnecessary necessity of double-cheek-kissing everyone in the circle. and this just takes to long.

#6: often times it just flat out looks stupid.

i'm boycotting all of it. i'm sticking to hugs. or waving. or a simple hello.

if you don't like it, then send me a postcard from france.



^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ useless.

my heart hurts.

a lot.

i can't even wrap my head around it enough to give it the full commentary it deserves. in part because i'm living on about 6 hours of sleep over the last 3 days. in part because i have already devoted an enormous amount of time to this already today. in part because i can't find anymore tissues to wipe the snot from my nose. and in big part because there just aren't words to do any of it justice.

i invite you to read this teeeny snippet and then i beg you to ask yourself how this is even happening. and for those who say "oh, that's sad, but there's nothing i can do" then i plead with you to think on it for 4 additional microseconds while i ask you: if this were your son, your brother, your friend . . . would you have the same response?

Clark Kimble's Story

exhausted and unimaginative.

it's shoot week in the apple for the next couple days, which means i get far less sleep than i'd like, receive far too many e-mails marked "urgent" when in fact they probably aren't, and basically check-out of the real world for a few days, leaving me with way less trash tv and absurd news articles to comment on.

but i did manage to kick off summer O-Ten the right way by venturing to the beach, where i watched dozens of people lather themselves with dark tanning oil -- sure to be a tremendous mistake this early in the season -- rode in an ambulance, sirens and all, spent 2 hours in a hospital waiting room reading 18 month old articles about bernie madoff while my sidekick was pumped full of steroids [bees are not meant to be swallowed whole. actually, they are not meant to be swallowed at all], and made my way back to my favorite tiki drenched summer watering hole for cold beverages.

donovan's reef is open for business. and will be for the next 3 months of summer bliss and dance parties in the sand, and 9:00am amstel lights, and beach parties that last way past sunset.

all are welcome.