out of Kadesh

When Lance checks sound at church on Saturday, and says things to the bassist like “is your box plugged into the output?” it makes me want to jump off that stage and take him home and directly to bed.

I got some sad news yesterday. My college house is being demolished.

It may not look like much, but some of my most favoritest memories are things that happened in that house. My roommates were my two very best friends, Kelly and Hannah, and the following is dedicated to them. (Sorry other people, you probably will not get any of this. Except for our semi-third roommate and other BFF, Michael.)

An Ode to the Roach House

a collection of my favorite memories, with some of Kelly and Hannah’s thrown in too

• The time Hannah poured a cup of creamed corn on her face
• The many phone messages from Jonathan Hicks (who to this day denies that they were from him)
• Jamie and the DING incident
• Never finishing the bookshelf paint job
• The day Hannah and Kelly decorated the house in Christmas decorations as a surprise for me
• My one and only surprise birthday party
• The day we ripped open our Christmas presents to each other in like T minus 4 seconds, even though it was long before Christmas
• Leaving that tree up ALL YEAR
• Kelly’s Famous Roach Wall
• Walking through Kelly’s room to get to the kitchen
• Kelly’s art
• The coffee table
• The sofa
• The pillow stuffed through the hole in my door (and the picture of THE MOON)
• Video taping EVERYTHING
• Making a Reliant K music video
• SHOWING THAT VIDEO TO EVERYONE WHO CAME OVER
• Girl’s cell (especially Art Night)
• Theater Book Club
• The quote door
• The WALL OF SHAME
• Kelly vs. Megan Glue War of 2002
• Kelly vs. Megan Glue War of 2003
• Mikey flying over in his jeep. In his PJs.
• One of the MANY nights Hannah and I stayed awake for so long that we totally cracked, and I said to her “what if I just walked in the room right now, even though I’m sitting right here?”
• Putting together my futon bed and making totally inappropriate jokes
• YOUR DAD JOKES! Oh, the endless your dad jokes.
• Sitting in the living room with Hannah, hearing AAAHHHHH!!! then SMASH from the direction of the kitchen, then Kelly walking in and saying “Don’t pick up that book on the kitchen floor. There’s a dead roach underneath it.”
• Kelly and the SPONGE BOB MACARONI. Do not make the mistake of thinking any old macaroni will do.
• Cans and cans of roach spray
• All three of us doing our make up in front of those three mirrors… yuck.
• The day Kelly made me throw out the moldy spaghetti, and me just picking it up and chucking it out the back door
• Ricky coming over, Ricky cooking, Ricky sleeping in the driveway because he didn’t want to knock
• The standard open door policy (coming home and finding people in our house who definitely didn’t live there)
• Doing homework in the median
• Lea and Company
• Bean Bag Dogpiles
• Quinn, and the apple scented poop spray
• The bath tub that never drained, and the girls underneath that reported a leak in their ceiling, the whiny bitches
• Driving two blocks to the laundro-mat and being terrified of Scary Guy
• Hannah using Kelly’s big canvas to constantly entertain (going down stairs, boating, drinking coffee while in an elevator)
• Alex painting Bible verses on my bedroom walls in glow in the dark ink WITHOUT MY KNOWLEDGE
• The night we had a soaking party
• Telling Hannah I needed a tampon in front of John and watching him turn bright red
• Brandon Lee drinking his contact solution after putting in his contacts (STILL, WTF!?!)
• Singing with Jamie while he played guitar
• Lauren, Jessie, Calla Maria (back when she was just Maria) hanging out way too late and helping us kill roaches
• That one time we were watching Signs in the dark and a monster flying roach waged war on us by zooming over our heads (during a really scary part!), and we leaped across the room in unison
• That time Hannah told us she was going to fart, and then I did instead from across the room. Really, really loudly. Then DYING laughing. ALL IN FRONT OF THE CABLE GUY.
• Watching Wayne’s World, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Little Women OVER AND OVER AND OVER AND….
• Hannah to Jamie: “Oh yeah, what if I put a BOXFAN in your FACE?!?”
• Jessie and Maria’s pudding hand prints on our front door
• Dyeing each other’s hair (especially Hannah’s) a zillion times in that teeny tiny bathroom
• “Gallon Challenge” with Jonathan Hicks and Andrew Phillips (ew)
• Clearing away the coffee table when all the guys were on their jiu-jitsu kick, watching them wrestle, then the whole living room smelling like sweaty boys (why our house!?!??)
• The big jump in the middle of the median (I still have a picture of this somewhere…)
• Hannah forcing Kelly to eat ice that had just been in her butt crack (TOTALLY laughing out loud right now)
• Kelly and the Case of the Tiny Towel: “This is ruining all my dreams!”
• Really late nights on Kelly’s bed, or Hannah’s, or mine, just the three of us, talking.

There are so many more, I know. I’ll probably have to keep this an ever growing list. I love you guys. Kel, blow a kiss in the direction of our house.

I know he’s having a bad day, but how am I supposed to pay attention to anything he says when every time I watch him talk I want to kiss him?

This week was so insane.

Our computer, also known as our life blood, blew up in our faces. We tried to turn it on and it exploded, and along with the sound of sizzling the sound of weeping and gnashing of teeth could be heard in our apartment. So we braved the horrors of the Pentagon City Mall in order to see if we could get it repaired for, I don’t know, say 40 bucks or so. However, Steve Jobs had other ideas. The Apple store destroyed all my dreams when they said it was going to cost us 800 DOLLARS to fix the damn thing, when it only cost us 800 DOLLARS TO BUY IT IN THE FIRST PLACE!! So as my head is spinning around on my shoulders, I ask Lance for an explanation to this madness. And HE said it probably had something to do with the Great Lance/Megan Fight of 2007, when the laptop may or may not have been thrown across the room by one or both parties. Which makes me think it really should have broken THEN, when I wouldn’t have cared, instead of lying in wait for my innocent fingers as they reached for the “on” button A YEAR AND A HALF LATER. Curse you, you piece of crap macbook. May you feel every second of the pain when I SMASH YOU TO BITS WITH A HAMMER!!!

As if that information was not crippling enough, and AS IF I was able to even come CLOSE to recovering from my anxiety at no longer having our computer (what do you DO these days without one!?!), Friday morning we woke to find that our car was leaning over to the left. “Hm… that doesn’t seem quite right…” we thought, calmly and rationally. Our tire had also exploded, it so happens, and we thought, “Ah, well, we’ll just put the spare on and take it to get the tire replaced.” We chuckled, “Ah, life. At least it will probably only cost us 40 bucks or so. No harm done!” And we skipped off into the rising sun. Five hours later, we walk zombie-like back into our apartment, having gotten all four tires replaced for 700 DOLLARS!!! 700 DOLLARS! No joke! I’ve never even SEEN that much money. Next time, Tire Jerks, WARN ME before you stick your FIST UP MY ASS!!

The sadest part in all this is that my sweet hubby had planned to go on a men’s retreat over the weekend, and finally get some guy time, but with all the running around tire nonsense, he missed it. And I felt sort of guilty that I actually thought him having to stay home with me instead was the best news of my day.

Random thought #3: Fun Size Butterfinger Bars are NOT FUN SIZE. Do not be fooled! Give me a Butterfinger that’s like a foot and a half long, and at least 3 inches wide. Now THAT would be fun.

Random thought #2: Have I mentioned today that I hate Windows Outlook? Why can’t Outlook be more like gmail? When I need to find an email, why can’t I type in a keyword or two and get what I need!?!? Why do I have to spend four and a half hours searching through my “Sent Mail” folder? IT’S JUST SO INHUMANE!

I’m lonely.

Why keep lying about this? I miss my friends, and my family. I don’t hang out with people on the weekends. I don’t look forward to social events. I keep thinking, it will be better; soon I will have so many friends and I’ll wish I had enjoyed my free time while I had it. But it’s not getting better. I’m not making friends. And I’m really, really lonely. It hurts like a dull ache that won’t go away. Some days it’s so bad I really hate living here, in this completely awesome city. This isn’t me; this isn’t right! I feel like there’s this monster named DEPRESSION that has taken residence right inside my chest, and it makes me feel heavy, and even though it lives in my chest, it has sprouted tentacles and tries to ruin every aspect of my life. I start thinking the friends I do have aren’t really friends. I can’t really talk to them. They don’t really know me.

Then yesterday at NCC, we prayed for women who have been victims of human trafficking. These women were sold into sex slavery as children, and have been raped their entire lives. And a mission team from NCC is going to Thailand to try and minister to these broken women, to try and do something, ANYTHING to help them. Listen to them, cry with them, pray for them. And I thought, how do you convince someone who has been so deeply scarred, so emotionally mutilated, that there is a God who loves them, and that they deserve better?

And somehow, in this light, my First World Loneliness doesn’t seem as crippling. Maybe I have to get out of bed in the morning because THOSE WOMEN deserve better, deserve to be honored.

I deleted my Xanga account after two years of non-use because well, it was time. Those posts were so old, and I was so cheesy back then. But I was a total pussy about it and decided to copy and paste all my posts to a Word document just in case I wanted to look back at my cheesy self and reflect on how far I’ve come. Also, I had a few keepers, like this great post about how Lance was a total supportive and loving rockstar the day I got food poisoning, even though it was his birthday. But as I hit the “save” button in Word, I got this error message that said “Dear Megan. I hate you and want you to die. But I can’t kill you because I’m just a computer. So instead, I will make you totally miserable by fucking up RIGHT NOW so that all your blog posts are permanently deleted and you can NEVER see them again. Plus, you deserve this because are a total idiot for deleting your xanga account, THEN attempting to save me. Why don’t you kick yourself in the ass?”

Lance will never believe me, but I SWEAR that’s what it said.

Am I a pretentious poser for writing this blog post at a cute coffee shop on a Macbook? I’m not even drinking an espresso, just an iced tea. Am I even more of a poser for pretending to have deep thoughts when I don’t even like HOT tea??