Little kids are cool.

You know what I think is the coolest thing about being kid under the age of 10? You can get away with behavior for which anyone over the age of 10 might be reprimanded and/or considered borderline insane. I have a little sister who is seven. Almost eight. Her name is Hannah and she's the bomb. Yes, the bomb. I know, the term is outdated but she is just that cool. And you might have gotten caught up on the part about how I have a little sister that's seven. I could go into the whole story about how, yes, she's seven and I'm 24 and yes, my brother is 26 and my other sister is 18 blah, blah, blah. It's a big family and we're just a wee bit spread out age wise. If you're super duper concerned, I'll let you take it up with my mom and dad. Let's stick with the point: Hannah is hilarious. Here's a smattering of things she does that I find amusing. I imagine these types of behaviors still hold true for the majority of child kind.

1) Inappropriate commentary: She can say things that are socially inappropriate because she probably heard it on TV and doesn't know any better. She probably actually knows exactly what she's saying, but it's funny to hear these silly things come out of such a small person. So we let it fly.

2) Rolling in the dirt: No. Seriously. I watched her do this last weekend. She was bored. So she just flopped down in the dirt.

3) Running through sprinklers/fountains: That looks SO effing fun. I want to push all those little kids out of the way and run through the water. I bet it's refreshing.

4) Leaving long winded phone messages that make almost no sense: Wait, I still do that.

5) Refusing to wear an article of clothing or color simply because you just don't want to: Hannah went through a 5 year phase where she would not wear anything girly. No pink. No dresses. No ribbons. For Halloween, she would only go as superheroes like Spiderman and Superman. Nobody asked questions.

I wish I could apply these principles to my life now. Refusal to do things because, you know what, I just don't wanna. Pay rent this month? No thanks. Have a roll in the dirt followed by a run through the sprinklers? Yes, please.

What Just Happened Here?

Sometimes I do something and then, in retrospect, I wonder why in the hell I did it. For example, I just spent the last hour cleaning my computer. No, not like cleaning off the hard drive of meaningless files that I no longer need. Cleaning the hard drive would be pointless. It's only 60 GB and that 60 GB breaks down into: 50 GB music, 5 GB operating system, 5 GB leeway for downloading more music. My plan is fool proof.

Side bar - When I ordered my dreamy iBook G4 circa February 2005 and I upgraded the hard drive space to 60 GB my brother quite vehemently assured me there was no way humanly possible that I would EVER necessitate such an impossibly gigantic hard drive. Moving on.

The day progressed thusly: I woke up to the gigantic mess that is my apartment, as I have yet to clean it. I hate cleaning. I am procrastinating the cleaning. It's kind of gross outside and I'm feeling a little sick. I can't do outdoorsy mountain things so I will do something geeky. I will download some new music. Let's see how full I can pack this computer.

Now, I've had this fine machine for a number of years and I love it. I have been an Apple nerd since before it was cool and hip to be an Apple nerd. I realize it's pretentious to say that and no one will probably believe me, but you can ask my parents. I annoyed the hell out of them for a Mac long before I was lucky enough to get one. I had to accidentally (oops) kill my PC laptop to get this one. It's been a good companion. We've been through a lot together. It's only had to go to the repair shop once because someone accidentally threw a full drink on it in the dorms. That person very nearly lost his life. He's lucky he's a very large man and that I'm a relatively small and weak girl. Relatively.

Anyway, after many years of use, the white case iBooks get, well, a little gnarly. Like, really gnarly. I tried to help by covering mine in sweet stickers which shows that I am an independent thinker and that I like really sweet bands while simultaneously hiding the really big scratches on the lid. There is very little you can do, however, about the gnar level of the keyboard. It gets gross. Just gross. Which I have usually been able to keep under tabs in the past with a low-level use of elbow grease.

It seems, though, that conditions here in the mountains have made for a far nastier computer dirtiness level than anywhere else I've had this thing. It's never been like this. I think the dirt is part cement. It might cause cancer. Or cure it. That would be my luck, now that it's all cleaned off my keyboard. Anyway, I started with my usual method, the iKlear Apple Polish product. Didn't touch whatever kind of mutant dirt was all over the keys. I tried Windex on cotton swabs. Nothing.

So then I moved on to rubbing alcohol. What just happened to the last hour of my life? Seriously. An hour. I am not this OCD about ANYTHING else. I'm slightly ashamed. I went as far as to use Q-Tips to clean in between the keys. Q-Tips for Pete's sake. THOSE ARE FOR EARS. Someone might need to send help. I might do the dishes next or something productive like that.

But I'll be damned if my computer doesn't look effing amazing.

It's Opposite Day

One of my little sisters recently started her first year of college at the University of Colorado. Recently, like two weeks ago. I have made it no secret that I am wildly jealous and would probably do something regrettable to trade lives with her right now. It's because I have this really ridiculous and romanticized memory of college in my mind. Anyway, her existence in the fantasy land of unicorns, rainbows and cheap beer got me thinking about how I now lead a life that is pretty much the polar freakin' opposite of what I lived while I was in college. In the course of two short years, I turned things right around. And I don't really know if I did it on purpose. Let's break it down:



1.) Popular ways to pass idle time

I went to school in the Dallas/Fort Worth, TX. Now I live in Vail, CO. If the oppositey-ness of that isn't blatant from the get go, please stop reading.
TCU: I think I spent all of my extra time in college either a) drinking beer, b) spending money on things I didn't need or c) spending money on things I didn't need while drinking beer. Now there were other things to do, but I generally didn't participate in them.
Vail: I live in one of the most physically active and fit places in the country. I'm pretty sure there's some kind of silly statistical fact about that. Lazy and chubby college me probably wouldn't believe it if you told her. Hell, I spent like 15 hours a week at the rec center, but that's because I worked there. Not because I ever actually worked out. I was too cool for that. There was beer to be consumed.

2.) Average use of the word "bro" in casual conversation

TCU: never
Vail: 1,000 times per conversation. Maybe my coworker Jens and I started saying it in the workplace in regular conversation to make fun of the bro-brahs (if you need a definition, please ask). But now we do all the time in the ironic-but-not-ironic way. Sigh.

3.) What I wear on a daily basis

TCU: People expected me to, like, get dressed up to go out at night. Like, literally wear a dress. To a house party. Or even to my most favorite bar where you walked out smelling like a big cigarette even if no one was smoking (the smell just oozed out of the walls; it's the best bar on the planet). I should clarify, however, that if I wasn't "going out" I wore jeans that smelled like the aforementioned bar and a t-shirt from any number of fraternity parties to class. And sunglasses.
Vail: I wear jeans to work. I wear hoodies to the parties. During ski season, it's 100% acceptable for me to still be in my ski clothes at 8 p.m. and at the bar. This is preferable.

4.) Vehicular expectations

I have had the same car both places. It's a Jetta. It's the bomb. Except the trunk doesn't open. And the hazard light switch tweaks out ALL THE TIME and just makes an erradic clicking noise all. the. time. And it's been sideswiped on both sides. Oh, and it smells like crayons inside. What is that? It was like that when I got it, but seriously, why does my car smell like crayons? It's just weird. Anyway...
TCU: BMW, Mercedes, Tahoe, something similarly way fancy
Vail: BMW, Mercedes, Tahoe, but busted ass Subaru or off road machine of interminable origin will also suffice.

5.) Ratio of dudes to ladies

TCU: It's a well known fact (to anyone who went to TCU) that girls outnumber guys at TCU approximately 457 to 1. No exaggeration whatsoever. Any 18 year old guy that hasn't figured out his odds at TCU are better than anywhere else, quite possibly, on the planet (barring an all girls school isolated on a deserted island), he should probably have his man card revoked. Do 18 year old guys get those? Am I allowed to talk about man cards? Because I'm a girl, so I obviously don't have one.
Vail: The Vail valley, also known as the Male Valley, is crawling with men. Last winter I had a girl (who'd recently moved here, so we'll forgive her this one) ask me how to get a guy in Vail to buy her a drink. After secretly judging her for having to ask I told all she had to do was walk up to the bar and guys would just start throwing them at her to get her attention.

Moral of the story: things are a little different these days for your dear friend Kelly than they used to be.

My apartment is a HUGE mess, I'm writing instead.

I've often found that my best personal motivation to participate in borderline pointless activity is the avoidance of doing something that I actually really need to do. In college if I had a paper due at 8 a.m, I would clean my room or do laundry until about 1 a.m. and then frantically start writing. Interestingly, I find myself two years out of college, down to one clean pair of underwear and sitting on my couch writing my post-collegiate version of the personal essay. Irony. Anyway, I've been formulating a lot of pointless ramblings in my head lately that I feel like sharing with the amorphous Internet readership. Well, with the aforementioned faceless population and my friends who follow me on Twitter who might conceivably follow the link I post, come here to read this and think, "Wow, Kelly is hilarious. I'm so glad I'm friends with her."

Thanks in advance for that one, guys.

Oh, hi there...

Yes, yes. It's been a while. Ok, a really long while.

Moving right along...