Summer is the worst

It's the time of year where I start freaking out about summer being almost over. There are probably only nine weeks left of it if I'm being incredibly generous, eighteen weekend days and you'll definitely waste four of them so really just two weeks of summer left.

It makes me sad and then I think "If I'm sad, that will be a waste of summer" and that makes me even sadder.

The only thing that makes me happier is taking out the garbage. Because to take out the garbage I have to go down this little locked alleyway behind my building, where two baby birds fell out of a nest a few weeks ago and have just been slowly decomposing. Maybe I was supposed to bury them when I first noticed their bodies, but I didn't and neither did anyone else, and now it's so hot and they're just slowly baking on the sidewalk like the grossest barbecue I've ever seen. 

I have to take wide steps around the birds and then I have to carefully maneuver the garbage can area because ever since summer started half a dozen huge spiders have started building this complicated six-part web, and they're using half the garbage cans as anchor points. You have to pull some Ocean's 12-type moves to navigate through them without any of the spiders freaking out at you, and Ocean's 12 was the worst Ocean's movie and I only like spiders from a safe distance, and after I throw away my trash and walk back through the birds I can't wait for summer to be over and thank goodness there are only pretty much two weeks of it left.

Go to the beach while you can, you guys.

Name any place in the world

My sister has the same initials as me but is better at running than me, better at making scrambled eggs than me, and probably smells better than me, and she’s getting an envelope in the mail any Wednesday now that says where she will live for the next year and half while she’s on a mission. 

For some reason the envelope will definitely arrive on a Wednesday. We know that, but we don't know where she'll be going.

She could go anywhere in the world! Except North Korea. And a few other places. But other than that, anywhere in the world. It makes me so excited I can’t eat, but then every few hours it makes me so excited I eat lots, so it evens out.

Can you imagine my sister being gone for a year and a half? I guess first you have to imagine me having a sister. If you already know my sister, you have a head start on imagining this. My sister’s name is Bryn.

A year and a half is a long time. Sometimes I think of a good joke and am about to say it to my sister, but then I think, I’ll save that joke and tell it to her when she’s gone. That way the joke can cheer her up after a hard day in Botswana or Iowa or Iceland or the Maldives, or anywhere, anywhere in the world. Except North Korea. And a few other places. 

Here are ten of the thousands of places Bryn could possibly go:

Neft Dashlari a city built on some boats floating off the coast of Russia or something.

Somewhere with tapeworms I want to hear more about them.

A 21-Jump-Street-style mission where she goes to high schools every day and pretends to be a student.

Florence, Italy This is my grandmother’s vote. My grandmother has it on good authority that girls usually go where their dads go, and my dad went to Italy. This sounds about as reasonable as the theory that men only go bald if their mom’s dad went bald, but I think some scientists proved that recently, so this one might actually be pretty accurate. 

One of those states no one can remember when they’re trying to name all 50 states.

Tokyo, Japan If my sister goes to Japan I will be as excited as that dog in the YouTube video that sees his owner for the first time in 2 years and gets so excited he passes out. I’m not posting a link because the video itself was pretty underwhelming.

Marseille, France

Just the rainforest Is that a thing? I hope so.

Canada Everyone in my family has dual Canadian-American citizenship and we all talk a big game about being Canadian but if my sister spent a year and a half there she would honestly know infinitely more about Canada than the rest of us combined.

Portland, Oregon I would get to see her every day.

I miss you already Bryn. Mostly because you already live in another time zone but also because I love you a ton.

Guess my favorite word

If you had asked me a month ago to describe the world I would have needed a minute. Maybe my answer would have to do with people, or families, or traveling, or owning the right number of socks or being surprised or getting old, or animals. I would have said it was about a lot of things.

Now if you ask me to describe the world I can answer immediately HILLS. The world is about hills.

Because a month ago I started biking and guys, hills are everywhere. Hills are all that matters to me now. Does that road have hills? How many bike pedal rotations would the hill take to bike up? Are there downhills? Please describe the downhills.

I only think in hill metaphors now. Long line at the checkout is a hill. Someone smiling at me: short downhill. Learning Spanish: too hilly. Not even worth it. 

Most days are a mix of uphill and downhill and some days are a slow uphill then a downhill, and some days are just straight uphill which is the worst because where am I going, why do I need to get up there?

Every shape looks like a hill to me. Eyebrows. The letter n. Sandwiches are a good food because they're flat. And pizza because I love pizza.

Idioms with the word "hill" in them make me go insane. If I hear someone at a table next to me in a restaurant say "It's all downhill from here" it takes all the self-control I have to not turn around and scream HOORAY DOWNHILL IS THE BEST and high-five all of them because they get it. It's about hills.

Mothers Day however many days late

Lately my hair has been getting longer on one side than on the other. I think it's because I sit by a window but other people said it was because I did a bad job cutting it.

Everyone says I should get it cut by a professional hairstylist but the problem is my hair acts more like a liquid or a gas than a solid - it fills whatever space it's given so the size and shape and texture and molecular breakdown depend on the day. It seems more like a job for a scientist than a hairstylist.

I went to a professional anyway. I brought this list of things I wanted changed:

I DON'T WANT TO LOOK LIKE: Someone who owns a minivan, a child under the age of six, someone who doesn't shave, a talk show host, or a drug addict.

I DO WANT TO LOOK LIKE: Someone you would be fine with sitting by on the bus.

My hairstylist said that was pretty helpful. Feel free to copy/paste that and bring it to your next haircut.

My hairstylist has cut John C Reilly's hair before. What are the odds? John C Reilly sounds like someone I would love to meet.

My hairstylist says that since my hair is closer to chinchilla fur than human hair, hair products are all going to be pretty hopeless so should just mat it down with a generous amount of hand lotion every morning until it's small enough that I can walk through doorways.

"Any brand of hand lotion. But really massage it in," she said. "Your hair's going to fight it."

Considering my other haircuts have been zero dollars and this haircut was many dollars I thought it would look pretty good but instead I look like a bombshell. It's incredible how great my hair looks. It looks so small.

I am smiling in this photo but this is important: the smile is for MY MOM'S EYES ONLY because she hates that I don't smile in photos. But look at the haircut part - does this look like the hair of a five-year-old van-driving drug-addict talk show host? Definitely not as much as it did a week ago.

I'm out of chinchilla photos but check out these rats playing instruments:

And sit by me on the bus, this seat's totally available. I'm just a friendly-looking girl who's real into rats.

Another dimension another dimension

Every time I walk into the locker room and don’t recognize a single person in there I panic. 

Because the last thing I want is what happens in level three of Chex Quest, which is both the only game ever released by General Mills and the only video game I’m familiar with. In level three there’s one door you walk through and instead of taking you to the room on the other side of the wall it takes you to an entirely different part of the video game. Everything looks the same, but it’s slightly different and wrong and you’re lost. 

Then I have to think back of all the doors I went through that day, and figure out when people stopped looking familiar to me. Did I recognize anyone at the grocery store? The coffee shop? Did I walk into another dimension sometime last night? And I have to look in my locker to check if in this dimension I have better shampoo than I do in my regular dimension. 

At this point I assume the only thing making my hair look like a sad electrocuted dog instead of a wet glitter supermodel is that I can't use Bumble and Bumble's new Cityswept Finish Spray. The main ingredient is gluten. The packaging says it makes you look street-style ready in a New York Minute. No one's ever said that about the way my hair looks.

I would put up with a bit of alternate dimension weirdness for some really nice shampoo.