This morning, in my Victorian Literature class, we were analyzing the significance of names of places and people in Jane Eyre. One girl in particular raised her hand and remarked that Gateshead, the place where Jane’s story begins and the place where Jane is the least happy, is the only place that doesn’t have some sort of nature word in its name: Lowood, Thornfield, Marsh End and Moor House are the other places Jane has interacted with so far, and they all have nature words in their names, and all of them serve Jane to rather better ends than Gateshead did. While this girl was waxing on her splendid point, our professor was walking floatily back and forth in front of the class, swaying forward and backward as she made noises that would not have been out of place in the bedroom. “Oh, yes!” she cried breathily (and very loudly, which was why it was so notable to me) as she paced, listening happily to her student. “Oh, lovely. Just lovely! Yes!” She sounded like some music teacher hearing a brilliant new pupil for the first time and being thoroughly roused by the talent presented - “that is simply wonderful! I love it!”
This is maybe the most visceral reaction to a literary analysis that I have ever heard. 

There’s a pizza place down the road from my apartment called Penguin Pizza. They have really good food and lots of beer, and purposeful typos on their menu. The most hysterical and nonsensical of these, to me, is the substitution of the word “penu” for “menu.” Penguin Pizza…penu…get it? As in, “the Penguin has a new dessert penu.” But humor me for a moment - say “penu” out loud, in just the same way you’d say “menu” but with a “p” at the beginning instead. Is it not a funny-sounding little invented word? “Penu.” Sounds French. I just don’t understand why the Penguin thought it would be kitschy and cute to make up a word such as “penu” to try and tie the menu in with the restaurant theme…that seems like such an insignificant and silly little thing to commit to. When the waiters talk to one another, do they ask “hey, could you grab me two more penus?” When the owners and managers meet to talk business, do they say things like “what kind of dishes should we add to the penu?” Every restaurant has a menu - that’s generally what makes it a restaurant, the presence of some sort of booklet of offered fodder from which patrons might choose. Did the first owner of Penguin Pizza, while sitting drunk at his desk one rainy night with a cigarette turning to ash in his fingers and a radio noising quietly in the corner, run his fingers through his hair in frustration before perking up with bright eyes and realizing - “I know what will set my pizza restaurant apart! We’ll call the menu a penu, because it starts with the same letter as “penguin!” It’s the perfect business model!” 
I just don’t get it, I guess. 

Before he moved to NYC, my boyfriend worked at a gym and enjoyed regaling me with stories about the wacky people he encountered at work. Part of his job was cleaning the bathrooms, and one day he went into the women’s restroom ready to disinfect and tidy up. Upon pushing open one of the stalls, he was met with a strange sight: a half-eaten corn cob on the floor, kernels strewn about, and an unflushed dump in the toilet. He called to alert me to this particular hysterical situation, and it has been cemented in my brain ever since, surrounded by hundreds of questions. Apparently some woman was very hastily eating some corn on the cob while relieving herself, but beyond that things make very little sense (if there was even any sense to be had in this situation in the first place). Was she interrupted, prompting her hasty exit and failure to flush her leavings or clean up her corn mess? Is corn forbidden on her diet and she feels the need to eat corn in private while also doing other things? Is this part of her workout? How did she get the corn into the gym in the first place, and how did she get it into the bathroom without raising suspicion? I can just picture her shadily tucking a cob of corn into her purse or gym bag, peering around to ensure she isn’t caught. But…corn isn’t really a guilty pleasure food so much as it is a barbeque-and-Thanksgiving staple, and I think that’s where my puzzlement comes from. Why was this woman so ashamed of enjoying some delicious golden corn, and why was it necessary for her to do so while she was at the gym? And it’s stories like these that help me to really appreciate the relative normality of my existence - I may be a college student who gets stressed and never has money, but at least I don’t have to eat my corn in secret. 

A couple days ago I started watching Sherlock, a series on the BBC that takes on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes and Watson adventures in a modern context. All of Sherlock’s quirks and personality traits are present in the series, including his love of playing the violin when he’s thinking. When I heard it mentioned on the show, a glimmer of hope shot through me - maybe they’ll handle his violin playing appropriately, or maybe they just won’t show it at all, but oh dear do I ever hope they don’t ruin it! And then, one episode later, Sherlock picks up his violin and, to my chagrin, starts playing. It’s funny, though, because the notes his fingers are making and the strokes his bow is taking are obviously different from the music that the audience is hearing. This happens in every single movie or show I’ve seen that features a musically-inclined character (with very few exceptions), and it always niggles me. In the corny-yet-emotive music movie August Rush, the main character’s mother is supposed to be an extremely gifted cellist, and the actress who plays her apparently had no experience with the instrument whatsoever - watching her fingers move sluggishly over the fingerboard when she’s supposed to be playing a lively Bach sonata made me cringe in my theatre seat. In Master and Commander, Russell Crowe’s character Jack Aubrey plays the violin…but from the portrayal of his musicianship in the film, he doesn’t appear to be very good: sloppy fingers, bowing that doesn’t match up with the music, really horrible and painful-looking posture. Now. I fully understand that stringed instruments are difficult to learn and master - I did that shit, and it took me YEARS. However, the actor’s craft is to portray a character from his head to his toes, and if a character is supposed to be extremely proficient with a musical instrument, it would seem to logically follow that the actor put some time and effort into learning how to convincingly fake-play said instrument. I’m not at all saying that every actor who plays a musical character has to learn their character’s instrument - that would just be absurd. What I’m saying is that actors who work on big-budget productions like the three I mentioned above have a shit ton of resources at their disposal, and I’m sure it can’t be that hard to consult with a violinist or cellist to learn what it sounds like when a bow changes direction, what it looks like when playing chords rather than individual notes, how fast one’s fingers actually have to move, and (at the very fucking least) proper posture. When I’m watching a show or a film that I’m really enjoying and suddenly the musician character pulls out his violin and starts “playing” a beautiful cadenza or partita, I want to keep watching and believing in the show or film’s world…but I can’t. When what I’m hearing is so vastly different from what I’m seeing, it takes me out of the created environment and ruffles my feathers a little bit. I’m pretty sure this doesn’t bother people who aren’t as terribly familiar with stringed instruments as I and other orchestral musicians are - I’m not sure if they even notice that something is amiss. But I always notice, and it makes me clench my fingers into fists and close my eyes exasperatedly. Is a little bit of effort to make the character entirely believable too much to ask?

I know a lot of words and I know a lot of synonyms - when I’m trying to think of a particular word, sometimes I also think of all that word’s synonyms and then try to say them all at once. For example, slouch + slump + hunch = slunch. “Slunch” actually came out of my mouth when I was trying to describe my shitty posture to my friends - when I’m playing violin I throw my shoulders back and my chin up and everything is right and great, but when it isn’t violin time my shoulders slope and my head hangs forward just a little on my neck because my muscles are always tight and tired. The resulting effect is something close to a hunchback, and I was desperately grasping for the word “slump” when my brain was like “hey! I can’t come up with the word you really want right now but you could also say “slouch” or “hunch” because they mean nearly the same thing!” So “slunch” fell right out of my mouth. This idiotic mixture of synonyms in my brain happens far more often than I’d like to admit. Edit: for those wondering, “slunch” is also the term I’ve appropriated for food in between lunch and dinner: supper-lunch or super-lunch. The more you know.

One of the things I appreciate most about the aging of the Internette is the evolution of “lol.” Initially it meant “laughing out loud” and was appropriated as shorthand in AIM and MSN messaging. It was rapidly discovered, however, that everyone who types “lol” does not actually literally laugh out loud, and so “lol” became closer in meaning to “haha,” which I’ve always thought of as a sort of lazy punctuation mark with which one opens or closes a sentence to a crush or frenemy in text or online. Recently, at least in my experience, “lol” has become the text equivalent of a nervous laugh. What do you type when you have no idea what to say? You type “lol” or “haha,” which is literally transcribing a nervous and uncomfortable laugh into whatever textual conversation you may be having. If you were having that same conversation in real life with your mouth instead of your fingers, that would be when and where you would giggle fakely and glance around for an out, and now I can’t stop reading “lol” as that same sort of fake and socially uncomfortable laugh. I think that’s what it was meant to be all along.

I’ll update with some actual substance soon - this “winter” break has pervaded every nook and cranny of my functioning existence. 

This year for Halloween, my costume was “slutty grocery bagger” or “Whore Foods,” a concept which stands in accordance with my usual costume formula: the lamest thing + slutty = MacKenzie Halloween. However, every year I wish that I had a friend who is equally as into Lord of the Rings as I am so I could dress as Orthanc and they could dress as Barad-dûr and at every party we went to we would stand on opposite sides of the room and just sort of wave at one another. That is all.

I have always very much enjoyed reading until I fall asleep. When I was younger and I understood the meaning of “a good night’s sleep,” I would sit in my bed with my nose in whatever book I was reading that week until I got to a good place to stop, and I would mark my page and turn off my light and curl up and wander off to dreamland. In high school my nightly readings usually consisted of texts that had been assigned to me, and now that I’m in college I’ve finally been able to get back into my habit of reading books that I actually want to read before I go to sleep. However, due to my recent and unrelenting lack of sleep and my resulting half-zombie existence, I’ve become pretty bad at staying awake while reading at night. I’ll be immersed in the plot, my eyes feverishly scanning the pages faster and faster (don’t fall asleep yet, don’t fall asleep yet, you need to turn off your light and put your book away so don’t fall asleep), and then I’ll start to notice how very soft my bed is, and how sleepy I am, and my eyes will start to roll around, and the next thing I know it’s 4:00 in the morning and the sky outside is light grey and my lamp is on and burning hot and I have a couple lines of text smudged onto the cheek of my sleep-sweaty face. This is when I grumble at my own tiredness, my eyes aching from being half-open for four hours of unsatisfying snooze, and turn out my light before rolling out of bed and onto the floor and pulling myself up to put on slippers and go to the bathroom. The halogen light is too bright, and I stare blearily at my reflection: two bloodshot blue eyes, a slightly sweaty philtrum, some Times New Roman imprinted on my cheek. I run the water until it’s warm, and I rub half-heartedly at the words on my face with the heel of my hand - I learned a long time ago that just going back to sleep with part of a book on your face makes it about twenty times harder to clean it off in the morning. Once my face is prose-free, I shuffle back to bed and I’m out like a light as soon as my head hits the pillow. I awake feeling unsatisfactorily rested, one of my cheeks rubbed pink, and I can never remember where I left off in my reading. This happens to me nearly every night these days, but I don’t ever really seem to learn.

You’re walking. Just walking, right down the street on the right side of the sidewalk because you’re a practical individual. You think for a moment that it might be a really prime idea to get some food, and you head for the nearest eatery of your choice. You watch as someone pulls the door of the restaurant open, about one hundred yards in front of you. He glances back as he strides through the door and sees you approaching, and he pauses - he is holding the door for you, even though you’re much too far away and this door-holding seems more cruel and unusual than polite. You quicken your pace ever-so-slightly; your bag slides off your shoulder and your scarf comes unwrapped from your neck. You struggle to walk even faster as you fix these mild wardrobe malfunctions, and you see the person holding the door standing there nice and still, like he has all the time in the world. For some reason, though, even though that other person is the one who decided to hold the door for you (it isn’t as though you requested that the door be held open - he elected to do so out of the goodness of his own heart!), you are convinced that you are somehow inconveniencing him and you desperately walk as fast as you can without running, trying so hard to reach the door in a timely fashion so that both you and door-holder can get some food. Door-holder flashes a small grin at you and makes a head motion that suggests it’s okay, you don’t need to hurry, I’m just fine right here and I’m doing this for you. Somehow, this does not calm you down at all; instead, you are spurred on even faster by his reassuring expression, and you try to return his small smile but it turns out looking more like a grimace. Finally, finally, you reach the door and graciously thank the door-holder in a breathy, hasty tone. After your hundred-yard speed-walk, your hair is unkempt and your clothes are all crooked and your face is slightly pink, and you really need a drink of water, and as you sit at a table and scan the menu you have to wonder why anyone would do such a thing to another human. You, of course, brought this upon yourself - you didn’t really need to hurry or get flustered, it was his choice to hold the door. But you can’t help but wonder if the door-holding came at the impetus of the door-holder’s hypothetical tendency toward schadenfreude. Certainly he may have just been trying to be polite and make things a little easier on you, but he may also have been cackling madly inside his head as he watched your approach. This happens to me far more often than I’d like to admit, and it never gets any less uncomfortable. 

If you could see how big I’m smiling right now, you would laugh right in my face. I totally understand - getting together and wearing matching letter shirts and bows in your hair and singing a lot and little ~*things*~ like that aren’t really my scene, but that’s what’s really nice about Eta Omicron - everyone gets that that isn’t my thing, and they are more than okay with it. People seem to have a hard time separating the sorority personality from the sorority as an organization - I’m not in Kappa to dress the same as everyone else or pee myself about socials and formals or get really cliquey. I’m in Kappa for my GPA, for philanthropy, and to meet new people because that’s what sororities are supposed to be for. Just a few weeks ago a woman at the company I co-op for introduced herself to me as a Kappa, did the grip, and gave me her personal email address and phone number with directions to “call if you ever need anything - a job, a reference, anything.” These sorts of connections are important to make - anyone who says that connections don’t matter in the real world is lying to you - and Kappa can really help to make those connections as well as strengthening your college resume. It’s an after-college society as well. Just keep that in mind if you’re ever feeling weird or left out, and know that if you ever want or need to hang out with one of the least sorority-esque girls in our sorority, my phone number is on Facebook and, even though I sometimes look like I might, I don’t bite. <3