Author Archives: Emily Chapman

Highlights from Nerd Christmas

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Image courtesy of JKD Atlanta. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Labor Day weekend is nerd Christmas for the city of Atlanta. Most famously, this is because of Dragon Con, the three-day sci-fi/fantasy convention which rolls into downtown and briefly allows us to experience the fun and excitement of more than 50,000 nerds in steampunk storm trooper costumes taking over the metro area.

However, I tend to avoid Dragon Con after a particularly scarring experience as a 12-year-old left to wander through it on my own (protip: don’t let your tween wander around a convention alone; they will see bondage cosplayers, and they will be a alarmed).

Instead, while my classical nerdbros are having their day, I am busy spending hours hanging with my peeps (the book nerds, natch) at the Decatur Book Festival. It’s a two-day extravaganza of book nerds being quiet, earnest liberals together while eating popsicles and buying novelty bumper stickers from Flannery O’Conner’s estate. Continue reading →

Midtown Cat Studio

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Image courtesy of the DLC. Licensed under CC BY SA.

It has occurred to me recently that I might benefit from therapy. However, released as I have been from the comforting bosom of student health care, I have no idea about how to seek out a therapist.

I figured I’d start with Yelp.

It turns out that, unfortunately, the same site that I use to find every taco joint in midtown Atlanta is not a particularly appropriate resource for mental health care. All of the results it turned up were for massage therapy and marital counseling.

I did learn that I live next to a massage place, though, so that’s very exciting.

After giving up on that particular failed Yelpisode, I busied myself with my new favorite hobby: listening to this song, on loop, forever. (Occasionally I get bored with it, at which point I break out the best “Seven Nation Army” cover.) Last week, to expand my horizons beyond those two songs, I made a Spotify playlist called “Pretending I Live in an Anthropologie,” intending to fill it mostly with wispy, acoustic pop in foreign languages.

For authenticity, I Googled “Anthropologie music,” which of course turned up a comprehensive list of the music they play in the stores, typed out by a former employee, because Internet.

I am officially at a point in my life where I am okay having my personal soundscape curated by Very Cool 25-year-olds managing retail. Sixteen-year-old me is side eyeing hard through time.

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Traipsing through the cemetery moors

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Image my own. See the rest of the set here.

I was never a spooky wee goth in high school. Instead, I concentrated all of my time on becoming queen of the nerds. The goth streak I saved for college, where I wandered in to a class on mourning practices and basically never left (exhibit 1: the paper on Facebook and dead people that I spent a chunk of last year writing).

So, when a friend asked if I wanted to go visit a cemetery other than Oakland (so mainstream*) I was totally pumped.

Apparently, so was the weather, as our August heat was replaced for the weekend by a dreary sort of grey autumn weather. I felt like the appropriate weather for a Rookie photoshoot, staring dreamily off into teenaged ennui. That weather happens to coincide nicely with the weather needed for checking out mausoleums and traipsing through moors, which is exactly what we proceeded to do.

We visited Westview Cemetery. Wikipedia says that it’s the largest cemetery in the southeast, which makes me feel marginally less bad about the fact that my co-traipser and I spent the second half of the trip driving around, slightly alarmed that we would run out of gas before we saw the other wall of the place.

We started our visit in the Westview Abby, on the (mistaken) assumption that the giant castle building might have information about the cemetery. Instead, we managed to wander into a completely beautiful building full of vaulted ceilings (think Boston Library on a smaller scale), stained glass, and dead people.

It turns out that Westview Abby is a gigantic mausoleum. There were three floors of tombs that we saw, each with a plaque labeling its occupant. The bodies seemed to range in time–in the back corner we saw several plaques from the early 1900s, and several cremation markers that were older than that. We also saw tombs that were clearly earmarked but not yet occupied, and several plaques from the 2000s. It was very quiet. Continue reading →

Making Myself Useful

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Image courtesy of the Army Corps of Engineers. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This is the fourth time I’ve tried to write this blog post. I had a couple of ideas for topics, mostly centering on this John Green video about becoming an adult, but they all wound up mopey and self-absorbed and awful. They did not begin to approach the level of fun of, say, my piece on bears on leashes.

Basically, I am aware that being 22 sucks for a lot of people, but that does not make it less terrible for me, right at this moment. I feel like I’ve screwed something up by being in Atlanta rather than New York or LA or Tanzania, and even though I know that nothing about this is permanent, and that my life is likely to change more than I can possible imagine in the next 10 (or even five) years, there is a giant gulf between what I know objectively to be true and what keeps me up at night feeling somewhat adrift.

However, it is also totally possible to autopilot my weird bout of self-loathing and sadness–that’s part of what makes it so boring to read about. I am able to realize that I’ll probably feel that way no matter what I do, so it is easy for me to rationalize getting back out in the world to make myself useful. To that end, I went out to volunteer over the weekend.

I’m glad I did, because you know who’s super-nice, particularly after you’ve spent most of your weekend talking to no one but your cat and immediate family? Volunteers.

They are the actual nicest. Rather than being frustrated with me for not knowing what I was doing, every single person who was working with me over the evening thanked me for coming out, helped guide me through what I was supposed to be doing, and then made perfectly nice smalltalk about how I wound up volunteering there. It was really pleasant to be surrounded by kind people who were also not talking about tech support.

Plus there was free beer and cupcakes, which is not a bad volunteer perk.

Continue reading →

So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

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Saturday night, I attended the closing party for the 280 Elizabeth Street location of Dad’s Garage, the theater where I’ve been taking improv classes. On the one hand, it was bittersweet–I have been going to this theater since I was 12, and it is weird to see your hometown change. On the other hand, the party was insane.

Before we even wandered into the party, my friend and I had our first encounter of the evening: as faithful readers may recall, a few weeks ago I hit on a will call volunteer via Twitter at this very theater. Because my life is fun, he was in fact working will call for this event. Awkward banter was exchanged, we were set up with wrist bands, and my friend and I wandered inside. (The boring conclusion to the Twitter bro story is that he seemed to have a lady friend at the party, so, uh, whoops.)

A kindly volunteer, seeing my friend and I wandering around after we had come in, oriented us to what was happening: the main stage had turned into a four-table flip cup tournament moderated by Lucky Yates (who had a bullhorn because reasons), the part of the theater that had previously been offices had been transformed into a sweet black lit dance floor, and the back corner of things had been turned into something with a sign proclaiming it “The Bone Zone.”

“It was Lucky’s idea,” she said. “Don’t go in there. You’ll get pregnant.”

With that somewhat ominous warning (which we did heed), we headed off to wander. For the first hour, that was most of what we did–we’d wander into the dance floor, see that it was still empty, and wander back to watch flip cup or read some of the wall graffiti that was being added to the building. (Since the place is being destroyed soon, vandalism was encouraged so long as it didn’t involve punching through walls, because no one likes an electrical fire.)

Between the dance floor of people looking slightly uncomfortable, the flip cup tournament up front, and the dedicated portion of the theater for semi-public theater sex havers (or people doing cocaine, I have no idea), the whole event basically served as a reminder that frat parties pretty much never totally leave you. Unlike a frat party, however, the beer was good and the floor wasn’t even really that sticky. Continue reading →

Crying at the Doctor’s Office

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Image courtesy of beccafrog. Licensed under CC BY SA.

Y’all, I think I may have convinced my gynecologist that I’m having a nervous break.

It stated last week. Per her instructions, I had made an appointment six weeks before to make sure that my IUD had not, post-insertion, wandered off to parts unknown (or at least unintended). Since I was working a 2-10pm shift six weeks ago, I scheduled the appointment for 10am.

Unfortunately, in the last few weeks, I’ve started working 8pm-6am (ie the shift of champions). Ninety nine percent of the time, that’s totally fine. However, I realized–after calling to confirm that my appointment could not be moved earlier–that this was not so good for my doctor’s appointment. By the time it rolled around, I was going to have been awake for 19 hours.

I thought about moving it. Unfortunately, the thought of moving the appointment caused my armpits to break out in painful lumps that–in true Web MD fashion–screamed “cancer.”

(I’m going to cut the dramatic tension right here: not cancer. It appears to have been a bad reaction to my wearing Old Spice, because apparently my pits like gender norms.)

“Well,” I thought to myself, “I can do this! How bad can it be?” The answer, it turned out, was “godawful.”

The first few hours after work weren’t too bad. I went for a run on my workplace’s basement murder treadmill (which, I recently learned, other shifts do not call by that name). After a cold and possibly fungal post-run shower, I decided to go to a coffee shop to kill some time. Caffeine and a pastry sounded fabulous right around hour 16.

For an hour, it was in fact totally pleasant. I caught up on my reading, ate a croissant, and generally relaxed. However, with two hours left until the appointment, I felt myself flagging. I could feel my contact lenses. I resorted to pinching my thigh to stay awake, freaking out the aspiring actress sitting across from me.

Finally, it was time to go. I rallied enough to drive safely to the hospital and into their parking garage. As it was already 9:30 in the morning, the garage was already packed. It was right about the moment where this fact started causing me to tear up that I realized that maybe I wasn’t on my emotional A-game. Continue reading →

On Shaving My Head

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Image courtesy of Vanessa_Hutd. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

On Saturday, I paid a very nice woman a sum of money to shave off most of the hair on the sides and back of my head, using a variety of clipper guards for reasons that she explained to me and that I did not understand. Afterwards, she gleefully Instagrammed my head, which was charming.

This was a little bit of a personal dare. I am afraid of so (so!) many things in my life–chief among them looking foolish. I have been trying to be better at confronting this by going out and doing those things. Mostly it’s worked out well (or at least not awfully–my improv teacher told me last week that he thinks my face always looks like I hate him, so).

I have a massive, dorky, middle-school-sized fear of trying to do something fun, or cool, or interesting, and being called out on it when I fail. This is tied up with a summer that’s been spent feeling boring and unattractive, for reasons which are unexciting to anyone but me but which involve OKCupid being a Kafkaesque hell-scape.

This haircut managed to combine both of those fears: there is a part of me which still thinks someone is going to see it and realize that I’m not an art school girl who weighs 90 pounds while sitting and smoking cloves in some sort of Instagrammed photoshoot that will wind up on my very popular tumblog. (You guys, I use WordPress. I am so square.)

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Small Town Summer

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Image courtesy of Rysac1. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

This weekend was a nice reminder that–no matter how far away you move from your parents’ house–Atlanta will always be a little bit of a small town.

It started with a party invite. A coworker of mine was having a birthday party at which he was going to have a rented inflatable slip and slide, which–of course–meant that I RSVP’d yes. (Also may have done a small “huzzah, work socialization!” dance. As you do.)

I secured the cooperation of a friend to attend with me and facilitate small talk, as a) friends allow you to beat a hasty exit if needed, and b) she can charm the pants off of anyone, and is as a result a fabulous party co-attendee.

Armed with the address and our smart phones, we headed off Saturday afternoon. Having glanced at the directions earlier in the day, I had assumed that the place was near our workplace, west of me. It was not. In fact, finding it involved driving through West Atlanta, past Bankhead, and into quasi-wilderness that looked more at home on the highway than the Atlanta city limits. We passed three cemeteries before we passed a school. After the school, we passed a crematory.

It was a little alarming.

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Alcohol is in it!

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Alcohol is in it!

Image courtesy of Seth Tisue. Licensed under CC BY SA 2.0.

I have kind of a weird Thing about inane marketing copy. It delights me in my heart of hearts that there’s someone out there who has to write up 20 different ways to say, “It’s a crew neck t-shirt advertised via soft core porn” for American Apparel. (This is part of why I love Decoy Bride: our unlucky protagonist has returned home after a failed stint writing catalog copy for a menswear company.)

The alcohol industry is a particularly fertile stomping grounds for this kind of weird, relentlessly-cheerful copy. After all, there are only so many ways to say, “This will get you drunk, which you enjoy!” that still involve you being coy enough about it that the consumer doesn’t feel like they have A Problem.

Until this weekend, my favorite version of this was the Daily’s Cocktails pouch copy. For those of you who spent less of the last few years in college town liquor stores than I did, Daily’s pouches are basically Capri Suns for adults. They contain a mix of sugary-sweet cocktail mixer and malt liquor, flavored like any number of beverages that one might conceivably order at a bachelorette party. You pop them in the freezer and then enjoy them in a hazy cloud of self-loathing/beach vacationing. They are reviewed, wonderfully, in this ChowHound article.

The Daily’s cocktail pouches proclaim, cheerfully, that, “Alcohol is in it!”

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A Very Special Tweet

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Image courtesy of TopGold. Licensed under CC BY 2.0. 

My experiences at the local improv theater continue to be a delightful combination of fun and profoundly mortifying. 

It all started on Thursday. I had decided to go–as I have been doing for the last few weeks–to see a show there on Thursday night after work. Due to the weather and some miscommunication, the friends I had invited were unable to come, which was fine. I am comfortable attending things (concerts, Paris) on my own.

I filed in early, grabbed a middle seat in a middle row, and waited for my fellow improv enthusiasts to file in. And they did–in front of me, behind me, but none next to me. I wound up sitting in my row completely unaccompanied, surrounded by an otherwise-packed theater. 

Determined not to be bothered by this, however, I tweeted a joke involving the hashtag #improvleper. Tickled with myself (hashtag joking with the youths!) I followed this up with a tweet noting that at least that night’s will-call guy was cute–a pleasant fact of an otherwise kind of embarrassing evening. (And he was!)

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