Out of State

I've been unnaturally quiet this month - on the internet, at least. In real life I am as loud as ever - always the loudest person in my class, or at least my group of friends is. I am sure everyone finds us obnoxious but laughing gets me through classes about Africa (so over it.) My workload this semester is already worse than I was hoping for just 12 credits; I gave one class presentation on Friday and I have another one on Tuesday, not to mention all of the reading.

I'm writing my senior thesis on Mikhail Gorbachev - uhh. I'm not thrilled with this topic but out of the possibilities, it was the one I felt the most comfortable with, since I studied him last year in Communism's Collapse and I feel like I can write a decent paper on him. I'd much rather be writing about something in pop culture, or 20th C America, or maybe Ancient Rome - a topic I actually find interesting enough to want to spend at least 25 pages on and months and months of research - which is pretty much my biggest complaint about CNU's history department. The faculty are amazing but there's really no specialization.

So... At one point - I think it was freshman year - my roommates Melissa and Alanna taught us a game about license plates from out of state. Basically - the first one to see an out of state license plate can punch someone else in the car (Montana! PUNCH) and then the other person just has to deal with it and hope that they find the next one. I taught Woody this game - although the punching is replaced by any sort of physical contact like tapping- and we had gotten pretty competitive about it. So naturally we decided to turn this into a real game. I made little score cards with the 50 states listed - and we keep them in my car. And any time we go out the game is ON. Today I found Texas, Tennessee and Michigan - and I'm currently winning. Being able to keep score makes this game so much more fun. The first one of us to find all 50 states gets dinner and a movie from the other, so the stakes are high. It's intense, let me tell you.

What I love about our relationship is that it is so fun - he keeps me laughing every day, even when I'd rather not, and he always knows just what to do to make me smile. It's a pretty amazing talent because when I've just had my presentation torn to shreds by the professor or done poorly on a quiz I can be really hard on myself, but he gets me to take things less seriously. And somehow I think I get him to take things more seriously. We definitely bring out the best in each other.


Also - do NOT challenge us to a game of Scramble with Friends because you will lose. This game is super addictive and super fun, and we are an unbeatable team of word-finding awesomeness.