Author Archives: Emily Chapman

The Cakening

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I went as king cake.

So on Friday, I had a cake party (aka “the cakening”). The story as to why this happened is long and boring (short version: I like actualizing stupid jokes!), but the results were adorable, as my friends were game enough to actually come to my apartment dressed as cakes. My friends are delightful.

Costumes included a pancake (a girl with a pan), a poundcake (with a scale), a golf-based Portal reference, an Occupy Cake protestor sporting a “down with cake/up with crepes” sandwich board, a pair of birthday cakes (birthday banners, balloons, and a glitter hat the remnants of which I cannot for the life of me vacuum out of the apartment carpet), two carrot cakes, two cupcakes, and (the most surprising duo of all) two beefcakes. My favorite costume was a girl who came dressed as a bun(d)t cake in a baseball uniform and a bat, mostly because another attendee noticed that she could also play the costume as “cake batter.”

Basically I really like puns. And my friends. Continue reading →

Revenge of the Ents

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It’s a running joke in my family that Atlanta is populated by angry tree gods. Perhaps they’re a splinter cell of ents. We’ve never been sure. But every single time that it rains here (and it rains a lot), trees fall down. Big trees. In the roads, onto houses, onto peoples’ cars.

To shamelessly steal a joke from my thesis advisor, the “Decatur difference” is that the trees will kill you.

But today the trees reached a devious new low. Today it didn’t rain (yay!). And yet, when I turned away from Piedmont Park and into the main drag of Atlanta’s small-but-hearty downtown, there was a fallen tree blocking all but one lane of the six-lane road.

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Seeing Kathy Reichs

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This morning was not, broadly speaking, a success.

It started in a promising fashion. I grabbed two friends and headed to the local library to hear Kathy Reichs, author of forensic anthropology-tastic crime fiction, speak as part of the Decatur Book Festival. Unfortunately, I had misread the schedule–while doublechecking that we were in the right room (yay, neuroses!) I realized that we were at the panel for Kerry Reichs. She does not write about murder. You can understand how I might have misread all of this in the catalogue.

My friends and I beat a hasty retreat. Since there were four hours or so until Kathy Reichs was actually scheduled to appear, we hauled over to the second planned event of the day–a trip to meet a dog that I might possibly adopt from Urban Pet Project. I had emailed the manager the previous night and so was operating on the assumption that there would be someone at the shelter. Because of the long weekend (which the shelter manager had forgotten) there was no one there.

After some less-than-fruitful doorbell ringing, my friends and I managed to chat with some employees at the Barking Hound Village next door, who figured out what was up. Though very apologetic (and helpful!), they weren’t able to get us in to the shelter. Slightly irritated, we tried to salvage the morning: I suggested we get cupcakes at West Egg Cafe, which has the best cupcakes in town and is less than a mile from the shelter.

We walked in and almost immediately turned around: the cafe had a 40 minute wait. Though I do love the cupcakes, there are no baked goods that I love enough to stand in line for 40 minutes. (I’m fickle.) My friends, game for anything, walked with me to the yogurt shop next door. It was closed.

The morning was not going as planned.

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Car Cake

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Yesterday morning, I sat in my car and ate cheesecake.

I mean, I wasn’t alone. So there’s that. And no one at Emory shops at my grocery store, so it’s unlikely that anyone saw me. But outside of Your Dekalb Farmers Market, my friend and I ate (delicious) red velvet cheesecake and had a complete freakout. Because it’s senior year of undergrad, and that’s both terrifying and underwhelming. And that is a weird combination of feelings. So we drowned them in cake.

It’s terrifying because I only have nine-ish months (simultaneously a very long and very short period of time) to figure out what I’m going to be doing after undergrad. And I have had it beaten in to me by scare pieces about millennials that there are no jobs. And it would be one thing if–like some of my friends–I knew what I was doing when I finished school. But I don’t.

And at the same time, it feels totally insane to think about the end of school now, as it is a reasonable amount of time away and things could change dramatically in 9 months. I could physically create another small human out of my cells in that period of time! (I don’t plan to.) I could accomplish a lot in that span of time, but it still does not feel very long because it is all one unit–the school year–in my head.

I have a few friends who are engaged or on their way to being engaged (or are otherwise in fairly stable relationships that will probably last post-graduation). I am not, which is fine. The same is true of the friend that I was eating the cheesecake with. But there is something that makes both of us pretty jealous of those of our friends who have some sort of life plan in place at this point.

Anything past graduation is a gigantic black hole, and that is incredibly frustrating. I’m the girl who plans her homework six weeks in advance! My main destresser is writing things down, in bulleted lists, and then doing what is on the lists. Not being able to do that for most of the next nine months is going to drive me insane. I don’t want a wedding, but stability of some kind would be nice.

The underwhelming part of this whole thing is the feeling that I am limping towards my finish at Emory without anything concrete to be moving towards. I am excited to be back, and to be academically engaged, and to learn and write a thesis. But (and perhaps this is true for everyone entering senior year) I feel less and less tied to the college. I’m simply continuing to do the things from the summer with the addition of classes, rather than starting a concrete new phase for the year.

One way or the other, I need the weird holding pattern of this summer to hurry up and finish. I start classes and two of my jobs this week. If I stay busy enough, there will be no more car cake. I hope.

And with that, I am off to my first class of the year.

Freshman Freakout

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Freshmen move in was this weekend, which leads me to the horrifying suspicion that my senior year of school is really, truly starting soon. I feel more unprepared than I have felt for anything that I can remember.

This year, I worked as a tech for the incoming frosh–I helped them troubleshoot troublesome mobile devices, connect to the wifi, and set up their email. Since my normal job consists mostly of windexing tables in a room that has computers, I was mostly there to deal with the easy cases and charm moms while the professionals fixed the most difficult machines. This all would have been great (paid!) fun, had it not been for the fact that I had to be at school at 7 am on Saturday morning.

Let me tell you about the last time I was at school at 7 am on a Saturday:

Oh wait, I can’t. Because it has never happened. I got up at 5:30, and it was still the same color as it had been when I went to bed four hours before. It was the sort of thing where my body wasn’t even tired–just disoriented.

So, of the four hats I have worn for freshman move-in (freshman, RA, transfer student, and tech), this was certainly the earliest. To my employer’s credit, everyone felt so bad about the hours that they gave us a great breakfast buffet to choose from. And at least I wasn’t a manager–they had to be there at 6:30.

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Summer’s Ending at the McChevron

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“Are you taking this photo for your blog?” “… Yeah.” “It’s okay.”

Atlantans may talk about our native Waffle House as the only place to be when it’s two in the morning and you want to make terrible decisions (food-related or other). And certainly WaHo reigns supreme when you want to hasten your demise with hashbrowns and the possibility of aging rockers trying to punch you. But it’s not the only option.

You could, for example, swing by my neck of the woods and go to what has been charmingly termed the McChevron. The McChevron (always with the definite article) is exactly what it says on the box: a McDonalds attached to a Chevron gas station. The Chevron is the classy kind of joint where the cashier stands behind plexiglass, and the McDonalds is a) open 24/7 and b) inexplicably sock hop themed.

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Netflix Makes Me Sad

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The cat watches me brush my teeth kind of always. Cute/creepy?

As of two days ago, I have internet access. I was joking to my roommate that this meant that we’d basically quit talking to each other, now that we had the internet to occupy our time.

We spent the rest of the weekend in near-silence. Bless our poor self-control, every one.

I managed to use the free time to watch a British TV series that Netflix recommended to me in the “You Seem to Like Accents, Nerd” category.  In true UK fashion, the first season included a marriage dissolving, two affairs, and a main character choking to death on his own vomit. The season was six episodes long. The show is nominally about a book club.

No one does depressing quite like minor British TV shows. Continue reading →

Cats, Vampires, and Occupation

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So it turns out that my readership is apparently attuned to my moods. Within a few hours of posting Movement Boredom, I had

  • Encouragement from my grandmother to go hem some curtains.
  • An offer from my mother to amuse myself at the house.
  • A friend offering to bring over board games. Which, impressive. (One was French Revolution themed! The other involved the Italian perception of the Wild West and was correspondingly insane!

So I can safely say that I have lovely friends and family and should never, ever complain about being bored on the internet again.

And I’m not! Because now my apartment has a) my roommate, who I walked in on listening to Chameleon Circuit the first night she was in the apartment, and b) my roommate’s cat, who is basically an (adorably needy) mop-shaped animal. I want her to be best friends with me. So far, she insists on hiding under the couch while I read, but I foresee the growth of a beautiful friendship.

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Movement Boredom

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The great movening of 2012 is finally finished. (Huzzah!) With the exception of internet access in the apartment, my humble new abode officially has all a girl could dream of, apartment-wise. So that’s very exciting. Blood pressure is back down to normal levels, and I plan to spend the rest of my next internetlss week alternately lounging in the apartment, drinking beer on my porch (I have a porch!), and frantically walking to the nearby library when the internet DTs hit. Ah, vacation.

Now that I’m not worried about the move, however, I am forced to acknowledge that I actually do not have that many hobbies. Yesterday morning, finding myself without plans, I spent most of the morning taking naps just to eat up time.

Basically, I need access to Netflix, stat. We don’t want a rehash of the electric skateboard boredom/sadness purchase of 2010*, do we? I think not.

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I’m ISPicky

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As you may or may not know, I’m moving out of my parents’ house on Wednesday. And, though terrifying in that “oh god now I have to pay power bills” kind of way, it’s going pretty well. Once I buy renter’s insurance later today, I’ll be all set to get my keys. Yay!

Since the essentials are taken care of, I thought I’d move on to things that–though not necessary to move in–make apartment living nicer. I settled on getting the apartment’s wifi set up.

This was a horrible decision. Unlike the other utilities with their beautiful government-enforced monopolies, there are many options for selecting your ISP. Except it’s a trick, because all of them are terrible.

Continue reading →