I found some old love letters in my drawer the other week when I was packing up my life. I was sifting through the bits of paper I’d accumulated in my two years at 505 S. Busey Ave. I separated mementos from yellowed DIs, syllabi I had kept for no apparent reason, and notebooks filled with bad ideas for plays instead of actual notes. One pile for “keep” and one pile for “garbage.” I sat on my bed, with the orange and blue striped comforter that I didn’t realize were my school colors until after I’d purchased it at K-Mart two years ago — tricked myself into showing school spirit.

I found some old love letters. Perhaps “love notes” would be the better descriptor. Scribbles of emotions and thoughts, perhaps? Nonchalant words of legitimate feelings written on paper to fill the space between the greeting and the closing.

They were time capsules. Archaic tokens to help us re-construct the past. Artifacts to explain a history to a stranger. Proof of a era gone. Evidence. That there was once a time when you gave a shit about me, and I gave a shit about you. Irrefutable.

I read them.

I tossed them into the “keep” pile.

I continued packing.

A certain electricity is crackling in the Champaign-Urbana air today. The sweet smell of anticipation hangs in the sky. An itch is lingering over the skin of every inhabitant. And no, for once, it’s NOT chlamydia.

The freshmen. They’re coming. And so is everyone else that decided to go elsewhere for the summer. Can you see the sides of the Quad bulge, and the cracks in the sidewalk widening? Because this place is about to explode like a cat in a microwave and turn into the Great American Singin’ and Dancin’ Shit Show Variety Hour. This Champaign is about to pop its cork.

Get it? It’s a pun. An entendre, if you will.

It’s beginning as we speak. Last night, I saw more people on the intersection of Green and Wright than I have all summer. By “more people,” I mean “about 15,” but that’s about 10 more than I normally see. More and more people have facebook statuses akin to “Lisa is OMG I just moved into my new apt and I love it, my gurls are gonna rock it this year!!!”

I’m excited to see this place transform into a living, breathing organism. The Quad will suddenly become a microcosm of frisbee and fire-and-brimstone preachers telling me I’ll go to hell for not believing in God, when in actuality there’s much more interesting reasons why I’ll be going to hell. I’m also looking forward to seeing how many fliers I can throw away on the Quad this year!

However.

It all feels very bittersweet. I am possessive and protective of my Champaign-Urbana summer. I’ve grown accustomed to warm, quiet nights, a small and steady group of (mostly) sober regulars, and more importantly, the Murphy’s summer logo special. And come Thursday, freshmen move-in day, all that will end. The nights will be filled with the smell of ice bombs and vomit, and the sounds of shrieking sorority girls, booming bro-hams, and freshmen making mistakes. And all those friends I’ve created unique bonds with (spending a summer in Champaign is kind of like being in a war together, except for the fact that it’s absolutely nothing like war)? I’m gonna have to share them now. AND DAMMIT, I WANT $2 BLUE MOONS EVERYDAY, NOT JUST THURSDAY NIGHTS, AND I DON’T WANT TO WAIT IN LINE!

And as for the freshmen. Well. I think my friend Charlie put it best when he said, “Fuck, I’m gonna have to make friends with freshmen this year? GODDAMIT!” I’m currently playing a game of life limbo, and these incoming freshmen are 12-year old Chinese Olympic gymnasts — I’ll automatically feel defeated, and want to dispute their legitimacy to be here. I’m old balls (aka, an “alum”) so I don’t feel the obligation like I did this time last year to show the youngsters the ropes and take them under my wing. I am more inclined to sit in the wings and observe their hedonistic tailspins into adulthood, while quietly sipping on whiskey, and letting the string of smoke from my cigarette drift over my face as I make cynical, cryptic remarks and dark techno music plays in background. I don’t actually smoke, but I will still hold a lit cigarette as a prop in order to adequately create this image. And someone find me some dark techno music, quick!

At the very least, the freshmen influx will serve as a reminder to all of us jaded alums and upperclassmen of the inherent possibility and opportunity that surrounds us. And that Station sucks. A lot. Like, a lot a lot. Seriously, don’t go there.

But I look forward to rekindling friendships that were put on ice for the summer, feeling the energy of a campus bursting at the seams (not including the freshmen 15), and seeing how the future molds us. I’ll get used to the hustle and bustle quicker than it takes a freshman to wake up in someone’s else bed and remember the name of the person next to them.

Or I might not even live here, and not have to deal with any of that shit. Please life, get figured out soon.

It’s the end of the summer. And hopefully, the beginning of many other things.

Get ready.

This picture is metaphorical not only for the sudden influx of freshmen, but also for fun mistakes they might make!

So, I wrote a blog this weekend. About bats. Vampire bats, to be exact. They’ve caused an outbreak of rabies-related deaths in Venezuela. Quite sad, actually. But I wrote a meta-paranoid blog about how this is proof that vampires exist and are plotting to create the apocalypse. It could have been quite clever. But, truly, it was shit.

I didn’t write it because I was inspired. I didn’t write it because I had an important life experience that I felt was interesting or funny enough to share with you, or because I felt it would make a comment on religion, sex, or any of the other forces that drive our lives in the contemporary moment.

I wrote it because I thought it would distract me from the real world.

You see, I’ve had the real world on the brain lately. I’m not referring to the true story of seven strangers picked to live a house, have their lives taped, find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real. I mean events and decisions that will determine, at minimum, the next year of my life. This is a very exciting time in my life because there is so much possibility, but it is at the same time absolutely frightful. I’m finally at the point where I’ve been setting up and going to job interviews, which in and of itself is a wonderful step in my life. But the prospect of possibly having to make a decision about my life scares the living bejezzus out of me. I also spent the weekend at my parents’ house in the suburbs, aka, that place where I have no friends and nothing to do except watch a marathon of “Keeping Up with the Kardashians” and nap. And when I start to think about things like that with nothing to occupy my time, the thoughts build and build and build, until my mind is consumed by “what-ifs” and hypothetical situations.

And it started to get ridiculous. My mind started to run like a choose-your-own-adventure book (which by the way, is sort of a fitting metaphor for the post-college transition). So I decided that writing a blog about a completely different topic would get my mind off matters, and result in a much better perspective. Plus, I’d have written a blog, so that’s productive, right?

WRONG. I wrote this blog, and (pun not intended, but definitely appreciated) it sucked. It sucked vampire balls.

Because I have to write about what’s on my mind. I can’t write something in an attempt to replace my current thoughts; I can only displace them onto paper or a computer screen. It is then that they take a tangible form and make sense. It is then that I can work out the problem in my head and begin to think like a rationale human being again. If I’m thinking about vampire bats and write about vampire bats, it’ll be the best damn piece about vampire bats that you’ve ever read in your life, and you can quote me on that. But thinking about your future and writing about bats is just stupid.

It’ll drive you … batty? Hmmm?

When I write, I need to let whatever’s inside of me at the current moment pour out. Normally this results in something humorous, since I’d like to think I have a sense of fun and joy pumping through my blood usually, and I constantly want the surreal situations I have bouncing inside my twisted mind to become reality (if you’ve seen my Liza sketches at a Fishing with Dynamite show, you know what I’m talking about). And when I wrote about Jesus camp, it’s because Jesus camp was on my mind. And when I wrote about sex ed, it’s because I read an article about abstinence-only education and remembered how much that pisses me off. But in the rarer times when I’m overwhelmed with heartbreak, or depression, or anger, I need to let this live on paper too.

Once I puke out my mind-guts on paper, then the shaping begins. Edit edit edit, tweak tweak tweak. I know at times it might seem like this blog is word vomit glued on a web site, but I assure you I take great detail in arranging that word vomit just so. And I take pride in the writing I release to the public, so I wasn’t going to let a post laced with dumb jokes and allusions to Buffy represent me in the interweb. Which is what I decided when I took a second look at it during the editing process.

I don’t know why I decided to try to be “cute” when I didn’t feel like it, or why I wrote about bats. There were so many other things going through my head that I would have rather written about and somehow developed into an entertaining blog: how I watched SNL’s Best of Chris Farley last night, and I thought about how the funniest comedians tend to have these really dark, tragic sides to them that no one ever really sees. I don’t put myself into the same realm as these great funnypeople, but I see myself having similar characteristics, like using humor to hide pain. Or I’d rather write about my interesting bus ride home to the suburbs, where I sat next to and talked to a black man from the ghettos of Chicago who made me realize how privileged my white middle-class ass is. Or I’d rather write about how obsessed I’ve been lately with the musician Ben Lee, and how I can’t stop thinking about the significance of his lyric “And they all say that to pour, it has to rain,” which makes me think of how things sometimes have to get shitty before they get really awesome, which goddamn, I hope is true.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is, I tried writing a blog about vampires, and it was really bad.

And I hope this one was better.

Thanks, Ben!

Hey folks, long time no blog. I apologize for my lack of witty musings and paranoid confessions lately. After the wedding, my life took a sudden turn for the stressed out and confused. We are talking Britney-and-K-Fed chaotic. I kind of had to get some space from a few personal issues before I wrote about them. When I tried writing a blog in the midst of them, everything came out whiny and angry and rambling. And this is not TeenOpenDiary. This is Triple Entrendre. KA-ZAAM!

(Angry, whiny Mary disappears in a cloud of smoke)

So let me tell you about my life lately.

A little more than a week ago, this is what I held to be true: I was going to have a gay old time at my sister’s wedding, ride out the rest of my lease in Chambana, move back home, get a job in Chicago, and find an apartment with my Lez-Be-Friends-4-Life Amy and Kathryn, and live happily ever after in our bat-shit-crazy-single-women haven we would create.

Oh, what a difference a week makes.

A few hours before my sister’s wedding rehearsal, Amy and Kathryn hit me with the Hiroshima-sized bomb that they would both be accepting (good) job offers here in Champaign and were hustling to find an apartment.

I also almost fainted at my sister’s wedding out of exhaustion, in case you were wondering. But I digress.

I’ve tried to write this blog many times in the past 10 days, and I’ve failed every time. What makes this entry hard to write is that, though I have moved towards a level of acceptance with this situation, I keep trying to write about what it was like during the few days when I was angry and highly resentful of my best friends. And like a ‘Nam flashback, I start reliving those days again and experiencing those emotions again.

Don’t worry, this blog ends on a note of optimism. But getting to the optimistic ending will be ridden with frustration.

Just like life?

Did I just blow your mind?

Because I don’t like being an angry person who resents her friends’ successes (and also because Amy and Kathryn read this blog), I am trying to discuss these events as rationally and mature as possible.

(Cut to me crying in a playground sandbox, screaming “WHY…WON’T…MY FRIENDS…PLAAAAY WITH MEEEEE?!”)

Essentially, I felt left behind. Abandoned. Ignored. Very angry that my friends had been telling me all year they didn’t want to live in Champaign, then suddenly did. What about our (drunken) plans we made (at Murphys)?! I didn’t want to talk to them or even look at them. Even when I was experiencing this, I saw how counterproductive this passive aggression was — “Hey, I’m angry that I’ll have limited time with my friends. Let’s NOT enjoy the moments we have left! Yaaay!”

To be completely fair, once I told my friends how I was feeling, they suggested we look for 3-bedroom apartments together. But I turned them down, because signing a year-long lease without a full-time job lined seemed like a recipe for delicious disaster with a poorly-thought-out-idea hollandaise sauce. And besides, acting like a selfish child was much more fun!

Any ill feelings I had towards my friends were based in pure love. Well. Probably a lot of jealousy and bitterness too. But mostly love. I was mad because honestly, I don’t know what I would do without these two gals in my life. They are the Rachel and Monica to my Phoebe (let’s me honest, I’m totally the Phoebe. Amy, in case you’re wondering, you are Rachel). Without them, I was going to be alone in the suburbs. With no job prospects. No creative outlet. WITH MY PARENTS. The term “solitary confinement” comes to mind.

I started thinking about what my life would be like if I stayed in Champaign longer. And I liked the life I saw.

Now that you’ve indulged my selfish resentment of my best friends, let’s get to the optimism, eh?

When I was mingling at my sister’s wedding reception (and chuckling at my relatives’ jokes about how I almost fainted during the ceremony — listen, I can’t let HER have all the attention, can I?), I started chatting with my cousin Julie. Julie is a better person than you are, for numerous reasons. But what I like most about her is that she’s a globally-conscious, liberal-arts-educated, gonna-save-the-universe-minded person who does more to change the world in a week than you will your whole life … but she will never rub this in your face. She’s totally aloof to the fact that you probably aren’t worthy to talk to her. And she watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Score.

I was chomping down some saltines (gonna get some food in my system after my borderline fainting spell) and sipping on some champagne (ok, maybe I’m not that focused on my own well-being), and she was asking me about what’s going on in my life, what my situation is. I very half-heartedly replied, “Oh, just gonna live at home with my parents for right now. I don’t know, a bunch of my friends told me yesterday they are staying in Champaign. But I don’t have anything lined up.”

Her response?

“That’s so exciting! ANYTHING can happen to you!”

Goddamn, that girl is gonna change the world. Her optimism penetrated my anger, and this idea has kept me warm for the past 10 days (that, and the awful humidity in Urbana). It’s so true! I’m at a point in my life where ANYTHING can happen to me. This is both terrifying and thrilling. Crippling and liberating. I love it.

I decided that living here a bit longer would be better than being a sad bastard in the suburbs. I’m currently squatting in Hot Town’s apartment, working at my current job, and trying to figure out my life. I’m lucky enough to finally have some job interviews lined up, thank you, non-existent God. The past ten days have been trying to teach me that, at this point, my life could take me anywhere. I believe it was Shakespeare who said that it is futile to make plans. Or maybe it was the Joker in The Dark Knight. But regardless, you have to realize that the events of your life might not go according to what you’ve planned with your friends drunkenly at Murphy’s. Life doesn’t always take you where you expect it to.

It might take you somewhere even better.

I’ll miss Tuesday nights like this.