Author Archives: Emily Chapman

Juggling Chainsaws

Posted on by

2

Do you ever have such a wonderful weekend that–though you totally intend to update your blog–you spend most of it baking cookies, watching Shakespeare, and drinking sangria with your friends (followed by napping!) and totally forget? Just me? Oh, whoops.

This weekend was wonderful, because that is pretty much all that I did for it. (I took a break to read 200 pages of class things, which involved learning more disgusting facts about monkey sexual behavior, ie the most lasting educational legacy of my time at college, fun fact.) And you guys, it was necessary for me to continue to get out of bed.

That’s because last week I simultaneously started my first week of my last semester of college and my fancy new 40-hour-a-week, yes-we-have-a-401k-and-snacks job. Which is great! Employment is wonderful! My coworkers are a delight! The snacks are great! I am taking a class with someone famous enough to have a Wikipedia page!

And I am so! Very! Tired!

That + my weakling college vegetarian immune system meant that I spent most of last week sort-of-kind-of sick. You know, when you feel like you can’t legitimately take medication without Raising Eyebrows, but you would still prefer to stay in bed? Super fun!

And you guys, I am kind of freaked out by the semester ahead. Continue reading →

Notes From Boston

Posted on by

1

Hello, friends! I am back from the frigid wastelands of Boston, which–though lovely–caused the lower part of my face to peel off. I am pleased to be back in my swampy, humid, grey homeland. (Besides, does Boston have a Twin Peaks-themed bar with a heated outdoor patio and funnel cake on the menu? Psh.)

The frozen tundra really was lovely, though. Boston is basically a European city, but in the US. I had a moment while I was there, where I was standing outside a CVS. Except across the street from me was the Boston Public Library, which is built as a fantastic public temple (it is so cool, you guys, I am a complete sucker for publicly funded monuments to education), and then on the remaining two corners that I could see were gigantic, cathedral esque Catholic churches. The library and the stained-glass church were in some sort of across-the-street staring contest. And I was sitting there with some hydrocortisone cream for my skin rash. And that is the kind of thing that just does not happen in Atlanta, or in any of the other places that I have lived. So that was wonderful. (Also wonderful: cannoli.)

There was a hilariously weird moment, however, that happened in the Boston Public Library. Led in to the space by my fantastic traveling companions (were it not for them, I would have missed the door), I spotted some big lion statues flanking one of the stair cases. We went up to get pictures in front of the big lions, because statuary! And then, we realized what the inscription on the lions was commemorating. (You can play along at home with this person’s vacation photos.)

The lions were a monument to the men of Massachusetts who had died or participated in Sherman’s March to the Sea. For those of you reading this from the UAE (WordPress tells me there are a few of you), Sherman’s March was a campaign during the civil war in which Sherman marched through the Southern US and–from Atlanta to Savannah–set All The Things on fire in order to capture them.

Continue reading →

2012 Wrap Up

Posted on by

1

This was written a few weeks ago in preparation for my trip to Boston, where I am at this very moment ringing in the new year while being terribly, terribly cold. Enjoy!

In the shower today, I was thinking about this past year. There are some years where you can’t really remember what happened in them–they’re a pretty standard accumulation of the component parts that make up most of your life. This was not one of those.

This time last year, I was preparing to go to Dakar. I spent January through May of 2012 in West Africa, with a stopover in Barcelona and Paris. I had never been out of the country for that long, and I had never been to Africa or to Europe.

While in Dakar, I got used to taking cold showers and malaria pills. I sweated a lot. I drank in parks and was mopey and climbed inside a baobab tree and on a termite mound. I learned how to carry money, ID, and my phone tucked away in my bra after I had my phone stolen on my birthday. I was homesick. My dog died.

Continue reading →

Plastic Christmas

Posted on by

0

20121222-200815.jpg

This year, my family finally relented: we bought a plastic Christmas tree.

When I say “my family,” of course, I really mean “my grandparents.” My immediate family, due to the fact that my mother is Jewish, has never had a Christmas tree. (We also used to celebrate Hanukkah at Thanksgiving. I had a religiously confusing childhood.) So every year that I can remember up until now, we have gone to my grandparents’ house and decorated the shedding fir tree in which between one and three cats have nested.

The whole week around Christmas is the most heavily-ritualized time of the year for me. The tree is the kick-off. Later on there’s a family viewing of the lights in the town square, then a singalong on Christmas Eve before we do presents Christmas morning. In between, there is ongoing gossip about people my dad went to high school with. We eat divinity and fudge. (Divinity is like fudge if you abandoned all pretense and just made it out of corn syrup. On a related note, my grandmother is from Alabama.) There are obligatory references to state and local Democratic politics, and there is a three-Clinton-reference quota.

Continue reading →

Big Rock Sadness Mountain

Posted on by

0

While grabbing lunch with a friend a few weeks ago, I managed to move a conversation from lunch food to the overwhelming terror of family illness within the span of about ten minutes. She took up the conversational reins and–despite her best efforts–we moved from talking about finals to discussing the prospect of unemployment and destitution post-grad.

Clearly we needed cheering up in the form of obnoxiously-sized, frosted cookies. Cookies procured, we tried to find something nice to talk about. A few sentences later, we were talking about general ennui.

At this point we burst out laughing, because clearly we are broken in the sort of way that turns cookie cake into self-examination.

My friend drew a comparison to a mountain. No matter where our conversation started, we tumbled down the side of Mount Conversation–ricocheting off mountain goats (perhaps listening to the Mountain Goats) and rocky outcrops–and landed in the river of sadness.

In the four or five times I’ve seen her since this realization, we haven’t been able to escape it. It got to the point that a few nights ago I was joking about doing this family coat of arms craft with a crest composed of a mountain, with 40 of cheap malt liquor being poured out, down the mountain, into the river of tears. Perhaps with, “Where I go, sadness follows,” in Latin (for class!). Perhaps a tiny violin could be floating down the river.

At some point, we made the decision to give up trying to avoid our clearly melancholy inclinations.  Continue reading →

Parties and Nail Polish and Drinks, Oh My

Posted on by

2

It’s nearing finals week, which of course means that I spent most of the weekend the hell away from campus. Currently, campus smells of dispair and freshmen who are freaked out since they didn’t do any of the course readings. Given that the only final exam that I have is during the very last slot, a week away, this is not anything that I need. So instead I experimented with having friends and hobbies and a social life again, which was exciting.

Friday morning involved some unusual (for me) on campus time. One of my final research projects for the semester involves measuring tiny pieces of rock to learn about cognitive evolution, so I spent most of the morning in an on-campus computer lab, using very expensive software to make very accurate calculations of just how statistically insignificant my sad little undergraduate rock measures are. These are things that I am fairly certain are significant, so I got to have the always-fun experience of writing a paper conclusion that basically boiled down to, “next time, maybe don’t have undergraduates do this.” The glamour of science!

Continue reading →

Female Revenge Ballads

Posted on by

2

Seriously what is this weaksauce bullshit?

The semester is nearly over, and I have potentially awesome New Year’s plans, and I am happy. As a result, I’ve been taking a break from the (now seasonally-appropriate) constant loop of hippy Christmas music, and have instead been rocking out to 94.9 The Bull, the Decatur area’s answer to all of your pop-country needs. Since the weather’s been nice, I’ve taken to blasting my music at the top of the Wee Honda Civic’s speaker capacity with the windows rolled down. My neighbors love me.

Folks are sometimes surprised by my tolerance for pop-country (and my straight-up love for good bluegrass). I will be the first to admit that this makes sense. Mainstream country music is often super–problematic. Sometimes, it’s just dopey and bad. Sometimes it’s all of Taylor Swift’s whining! I don’t know that it’s any more problematic than other genres, necessarily, (see Katy Perry’s visually arresting alien rape song) but the problematic things that crop up in pop country are not alien to my experience.

Like, other small children tried to witness at me for being Jewish back when we lived in Oklahoma. So certain flavors of Very Vocal Evangelism (and its friends Rigid Gender Roles and Woo America) make me wary, and they are more present in pop country than other genres.

But country music does one thing consistently well that I think is less of a Thing in other genres: female revenge ballads.

Continue reading →

Eu-said-what-now?

Posted on by

0

Y’all, yesterday was not a good day for reasons that a) you already saw on Facebook if you know me in real actual person life or b) will not hear about right now because I am maintaining an Air of Mystery.

Hahah, ugh, being kindly let down and still kind of disappointed? The worst! We’re trying round two today, so fingers crossed.

But I will not leave you hanging, readers. Instead, I’m going to tell the story of how I remembered why I cannot be in departments other than my own for more than like 20 minutes.

Continue reading →

Thanksturkening is Ended

Posted on by

0

I told you I overdress.

As I said, slightly overdressed. And not smizing.

Thanksgiving is over and done with, huzzah! It is absolutely my favorite holiday (stuffing + sweet potatoes + getting slightly overdressed without traveling), but this one was a doozy. High points this year included the truly ridiculous cherry pie that we impulse-bought from Southern Sweets, which I swear to god weighted six pounds. Low points included the fact that my dad tried to get us to go to Cracker Barrel instead of cook, which… no. Plus two members of our four-person party were sick, one couldn’t eat, and things were generally Not As Usual.

Still, though: pie.

As I was noting with a friend a week or two ago, this has been a memoir year. It sucks while it’s happening, but you get the sense that in a few years you’ll be able to spin something out of it into your memoirs.

I know this will happen, because most of my favorite stories (the time I headbutted the piano, the time I got dumped via GChat and then had to go to a birthday dinner, the time I turned 20 on a roof with a giant inflatable nautilus and a bunch of people from the internet) actually involved me crying at some point during them, despite the objective hilarity of the proceedings in retrospect. Continue reading →

Skinny Little Dude in the Air Vent

Posted on by

0

This weekend, I managed to dance along to a room full of people who jumped so enthusiastically that you could feel the floor flex a good six inches. It was a great deal of fun.

The floor-creaking incident happened at the Macklemore show at the Masquerade I hit with a couple of friends this weekend. Given that Macklemore puts together a strange Seattle rap-dance hybrid, I wasn’t totally sure what to expect from the show (my usual concert bands are along the Avett Brothers/Decemberists continuum, and no one dances because of feelings).

Two songs into the set, Macklemore noticed one of the folks wearing thrift shop coats and asked to borrow it. It was duly passed up, and he broke into the one track off the album that every drunk college kid in the audience knew by heart. There was jumping and lights and at one point Ryan Lewis, Macklemore’s producer, climbed on an air vent and jumped into the audience. It is rare that I see skinny little white dudes from Seattle leap from the ceiling.

Continue reading →