Dear Girl of Apartment A-18…

Today was move-in day at my apartment complex. As you may guess, move-in day is rather hectic and usually involves watching heavyset men curse as they drag even heavier furniture up impossibly steep flights of stairs. To say that I look forward to move-in day each month would be a gross understatement. In fact, this source of entertainment has become almost a first of the month ritual for me; demanding extensive preparation and a rather exhaustive routine.

On the first of the month, I wake up early and proceed to the common grassy area located in the middle of my apartment complex where I sit at my normal picnic table under an oak tree, Dr. Pepper in hand, and prepare myself to bask in the misery of others. Typically the events that unfold are common place….hilarious, but common. However, today’s events were anything but common, in the most amazing way possible.

While I was enjoying the sunshine and a chorus of obscenities, a moving van pulled into the parking space next to my jeep. I immediately took notice because I feared for my car’s scratch free exterior, and because driving the van was tall, beautiful, red head whose legs rose from the pavement all the way to her chin. Normally, I would not be so interested in a complete stranger, but as she exited the van, emblazoned on her sweatshirt was the one thing that will turn any man’s head….ASA….she was a sorority girl!

As I attempted to scrape my jaw of the sidewalk, I did was any single male would have done, I trotted over and offered to help her with her things….in the most “neighborly” way possible. Before she could answer, a man emerged from the other side of the truck and my heart sank. No, it wasn’t her husband, finance, or even a boyfriend…it was the dreaded father. Considering his size and apparent temperament, I did not want to push the issue so I quickly excused myself and retreated to the picnic table.  

As the day progressed and the redhead slowly faded away from my memory, I began to deeply ponder if I would ever get back on my feet relationship wise; that’s when it happened. She approached me and looking deeply into my eyes as if she was searching my sould, she asked me… “Do you know where the mailboxes are?” I don’t want to brag, but not only did I tell her where they were, I also told her what time the mail typically comes in each day…smooth I know. However it was to no avail, because she merely thanked me and then walked away. Ugh! Defeat!

Looking back I may never be the guys who says the right thing at the exactly the right time, but at least I am trying to move on. Who knows, maybe the redhead might knock on my door one day and ask me for a cup of sugar, or maybe she won’t. Regardless, I will find the special someone and will always continue to enjoy move-in day, because in the end it’s the simple pleasures and the misery of others that really makes life special.

Donate Here, Stay Here

For this posting, I thought I would briefly depart from my usual in-depth exploration of living the single life in order to promote a worthwhile cause benefiting the Springfield, Missouri community.   Each year the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at Drury University sponsors a local food drive to support the Ozark’s Food Harvest which services all of the food banks in Southwest Missouri. This year’s drive will be taking place in mid-October with the ultimate goal of raising 10,000lbs of food for area families in need. For more information please view the video below or visit this website: http://www.ozarksfoodharvest.org/

The Food Pyramid Be Damned

Scientists have long struggled to recreate the conditions found on the former planet Pluto because it is an unfamiliar, cold, empty, unforgiving atmosphere with the only signs of normalcy thousands of light years away. It is with this understanding that I have decided to lease my refrigerator to NASA for experimentation and testing. In case that was too subtle, I will put it another way: my refrigerator is so barren that Congress as allocated funds to build a bridge inside of it. Sadly enough, there are only three items living within this frozen desert: beer, pizza, and expired milk now turned science project (cottage cheese, here I come!). While I realize that man cannot live on beer and pizza alone, I usually balance out the meal with cherry Twizzlers to fulfill the USDA recommended daily nutrition guide.

My rationale is as follows:

• Pizza – four main components: cheese (dairy), bread (grains), oil, and tomato sauce (vegetables…let’s face it, tomatoes are not a fruit).
• Beer – three main components: hops (grains), barely (grains), and water (basic life-sustaining necessity)  
• Cherry Twizzlers – two main components: sugar (discretional calories) and cherry flavoring (it may be a stretch, but I classify it as fruit).

In my mind this just serves as further proof that I do not need to learn how to cook in order to eat healthy. Instead, I only have to look at my diet from the right perspective and then swallow my cognitive dissidence with a fistful of cherry Twizzlers.

Attack of the Bed Monster

Even though I do enjoy the fact that I can sprawl out and somehow cover every square inch of my queen sized bed, I am decidedly not a big fan of sleeping alone. It’s not that I am scared someone will break-in during the middle of the night and steal my prized collection of stolen hotel shampoos (though in my neighborhood it is a definite possibility), but rather its nice knowing that in your most vulnerable state that someone is there for you. Plus when its 2 am, it’s storming outside, the whole place is dark, and you are all alone, it’s just downright creepy….as was my experience last night. I was comfortably sound asleep in my cocoon of pillows and blankets when a crack of thunder jarred me awake…well into that stage when you are conscious but not all there…kind of like Lindsay Lohan on any given day of the week. Anyways, after my pulse slowed to a mere 6,000 beats per minute, I began to settle back in and drift off, when a bolt of lightning lit up the sky. In the brief flash of light I noticed something moving at the foot of my bed under the covers. At this point I did the most productive thing I could think of…I stopped breathing. As I laid there paralyzed wishing that whatever it was would go away if I just hoped hard enough, another bolt of lightning revealed that my unwelcome guest had stopped moving, but was still there. So I quickly devised a plan, and with all of my courage and all of my might, I leaned forward and punched the strange thing as hard as I could. In that instant I felt more pain than I have at any other time in my life. Ladies and gentlemen, the strange monster moving at the foot of my bed was none other than…my foot. As much as it pains me to say this, I am a 21 year old man and I got scared by and beat the hell out of my own foot.  Epic living alone fail.

0 for 1

Well…that didn’t work out so well, everything that I own that was at one time white is now this indescribable gray color. In retrospect, it would probably have been a good idea to separate my laundry into three categories: socks and underwear, white things, and everything else. The good news is that according to Google, you aren’t supposed to wear white after Labor Day…so the way I see it, I am golden for at least a few months. That being said, I tried folding clothes for the first time tonight…“tired” is the operative word. I spent probably 20 minutes trying to fold just one shirt and the end result was something that resembled the paper airplanes that I used to make in elementary school. Needless to say, the pile dirty clothes that used to occupy the corner of my room has now been replaced by a better smelling clean pile of clothing. All in all today was not a total waste, as it turns out the laundry mat is like a buffet of beautiful women…I will be returning to this magical place as soon as I go sofa diving for quarters.

Man vs. Machine

So college can teach you many things such as astrophysics, economics, the proper way to perform a keg stand, etc. but despite this abundance of knowledge and ever increasing costs of tuition, every college leaves out one thing – all the important stuff that you need to know in order to live!  Specifically, I am referring to laundry. We are taught the secrets of the universe, but why must the washing machine remain such a mystery, especially to the males among us? Since my break-up, my clothes have made their way from the closet, to my body, to a pile in the corner of my bedroom, back to my body, and then back to the pile. I know most of you must be thinking, “ew! that sounds absolutely disgusting, not to mention smelly,” but you would be surprised…axe body spray can do wonders on clothing. That aside, from my observations over the past few years, it seems that all women have a sorting system when they wash clothes. Unfortunately, this is where my observation stopped, so I have decided to chance it and create my own sorting system: socks and underwear in one pile, everything else in another…what’s the worst that could happen? Wish me luck, the washing machine won’t know what hit it!

So this is life…

Though I am just a college student, I have always considered myself mature beyond my years and extraordinary stable; well that was until about a month ago my fiancé announced that she had several affairs and that she was leaving with most of my stuff. For the first time in my life I was on my own, with the exception of the cat that she left behind. Needless to say I fell…and I fell hard. Well after several John Candy marathons, a stack of pizza boxes that would rival the Sears Tower, and a boat load of happy pills, the time has come to begin picking up the pieces of my life. My hope is that through this blog I will be able to find myself, resume my quest for a soul mate, teach myself the basics of how to live on my own, and answer some of life’s most difficult questions like: at what point exactly does the expired milk in my refrigerator become cottage cheese; exactly how many times can you wear a pair of boxers before you have to wash them; and, what the hell is the point of that brush looking thing on the vacuum cleaner?  I have no idea where it is going to lead but I do know that I have less than a year to teach myself how to live because soon I will graduate and be unwillingly thrown into the real world….here we go.