Perils of assimilation

If only life came with subtitles.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Are you ready for a disaster?

I am! Let the New Year's Eve festivities commence!

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Damage Control

For the last two days, I have been trying to keep the situation managable around here. We had a freak heat wave, about 50 degrees, which brought a thunderstorm and flooding. The rain had dripped in, down into Caroline's closet, through the floor and onto my bed. I'm still airing the bed out.

We purchased a kitchen table yesterday, and chairs. The legs of the table wobble, and one of the chairs is actually a lawn chair, but you can't argue with the price. We had it delivered, and were told the delivery was free. After everything was moved in, we were informed that we had to pay 15 dollars which we didn't have.

We waited for him to pull away, just in case he decided to slash Caroline's tires.


This morning we found Roommate #3 passed out on the bathroom floor, after two solid days of drinking. She was so dehydrated, she could not stand. We took her to Urgent Care as soon as they opened. She decided it would be a good idea to lie to the doctors, and told them she had only had five drinks total.

"So we're playing pretend, are we?" her best friend said when he arrived, "This is what happens when you drink tequila."


I'm sick of damage control. Imagine what our lives could be like if we didn't always pick up the pieces? How much we could get done?

Thursday, December 11, 2008

This Is a Bad Joke

I have been living in Milwaukee for a month or so now, scouring the city and the internet for a job. I finally got an interview, my first one, at the local PicknSave for a cashier job. I got up early this morning so I could get ready and still have plenty of time to walk down to the store, and to tell the truth, I looked totally hireable. But when I arrived, I was told that the woman I was suppose to interview with wouldn't even be in until noon(!) and the woman who scheduled the interview was AWOL for the day. Why do they keep jerking me around like this?

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Roommates

I have come to realize just how much I LOVED living with my old roommates, and how desperately I miss them. I miss waking up and having Amber pop up out of nowhere to say hi and giving me a hug. Lucy was never that affectionate, she hates talking in the morning, but she always made enough coffee for me. Then I would put on reggae music, and Erin would poke her head out.

Monday, December 01, 2008

Midwest Slacker: Ghostbuster

I moved to the East Side of Milwaukee about a month ago. I didn't look at the apartment before agreeing to move in -- I was in Savannah at the time. I didn't expect much, houses in this area were built in the 1870's, and in general are falling apart. This one is in pretty good condition, considering. But there was one problem we never anticipated-- a spirit problem.

No one has ever been able to prove the existence of ghosts, despite legions of psychics and scientists working to prove the existence or nonexistence of ghosts. Some think they are the restless dead, my own theory was that ghosts were strong memories imprinted on a place. I grew up next to a cemetery, and the house I grew up in was built as the parsonage for the church. We had ghosts, but I liked having them around. Our ghosts were a german family, a very comforting presence. I cannot see ghosts, I only feel them.

The ghosts at my new apartment are not comforting. There's one that lives in the upstairs, a man that I hear walking around at night. When my roommate Caroline was moving in, she was hit by vertigo. She figured she just needed to eat, so she did. The Vertigo did not stop. That night, she slept at her old place.

She called the old tenants the next day, Mike and Dawn, and asked if there was a ghost. They confirmed it.

Caroline brokered a deal with the ghost: She didn't want to se him, feel him, or hear him. All conditions have been broken. I still hear the footsteps, Caroline's seen him glaring at her, Ashley's bed, a mattress that sits on the floor, was punched from below repeatedly.

We decided to get help. We went to an occult shop on Murray Ave, and consulted the owner. She hooked us up with a number of protective herbs (before you think she was just trying to make a buck off of us, she gave us a good number of things for free), and her friend offered to come by to check out the problem.

Nancy is a short woman in her twenties, with dark curly hair and nothing occult about her. She wore no amulets, no otherworldly voice, just a normal looking girl. We started in the basement.

All basements are creepy. Ours is extremely creepy. As soon as you descend the stairs, your heart starts to race and your body tells you to run. It looks the same as any other basement: it has a cement floor, a furnace, and a root cellar. Immediately she told us that she felt three distinct presences. Nancy zeroed in on the root cellar.

"Is anyone there?"
"What do you want?"
"Can you hear me?"

She recieved no reply. Something about the root cellar was filling us with fear, and a feeling of being pushed away. Nancy said she heard heavy breathing in front of her. She turned to take more photos of the basement. I felt something behind me, and I grabbed Caroline's hand and strated to move to the door. She stopped me and turned around.

Now, as I said, I cannot see ghosts. But Caroline can. She saw it move from one corner of the basement to the other, and up towars the furnace. Nancy and Ashley confirmed it's movement, and also that it was wearing a noose. The Hollywood version of a glowing spirit is wrong. It's dark, dark smoke.
UWM is screwing me over! According to them, I don't fulfill their foreign language requirement because the classes I took before count as upperlevel humanities, and will not be included for FL credits. I am going in and arguing this, this must be a mistake. Where are my English competency credits? Why have my AP credits not shown up?