I don't know what.

This is the month of resurrection right?

It is time that this old blog be dusted off and blogged in again. I can't help but hum Aaliyah right now.... "You can dust yourself off and blog again, dust yourself off and blog again." So motivational. Also her name looks more like my typical Words with Friends tile selection than a real name. But at least the Y and H are three points each so they could be useful. Nerd out? Hell yes, nerding out. I love WWF!

So yes. It has been quite some time since my last entry. My blog title is out of date. My last blog post was about being jobless and living in Muskogee with my parents. And that picture is from 2008. My name is still Camille though. I still love/hate nutella. And if you didn't know me when I used to blog or even knew that I used to blog, then you are in for a real treat because.. I love getting to ramble on this free limitless-character forum! Also I love quotation marks for things that don't really need it, weird side thought comments added in parenthesis (PEMDAS!) and alluding to inside jokes with myself. (Wine refill here). No seriously, you might want to as well.

It took me a while to get here. Not poetically, as in 'get here in life', but to this webpage today. I lost my computer somewhere around a year ago. This was about the point that I lost touch with technology. I still had/have my iPhone so I remained connected to human beings but frivolous luxuries such as blogs did not make the cut. There is a part of me that wishes I was kidding about losing a computer but I seriously still have no idea where the damn thing is. If you ever had a hermit crab growing up (or as an odd lonely, adult) then you know how they can just disappear unexpectedly and later on you realize it and think "My god! Did I unknowingly release that thing into the wild? Was it ready? Will it come back?" Computers are the same way if you aren't tending to them on a regular basis or caring for them at all really. (This may be a bad example but lately I have been thinking about our family hermit crab that ran away (scurried away?) and is still MIA to this day. My parents want to move houses but THEY CAN'T because our beloved hermit crab is still on the lam!) It also took me awhile to get here because I couldnt remember my blog name and then couldn't remember my password. My blog has really suffered from serious neglect these past two years, but I am here typing and resurrecting. And we really should find that hermit crab.

So that's the backstory. Now why is it that I blog? Well I am awful at journaling. I get really anxious about writing something dumb in ink (which lasts forever) but also anxious about writing something amazing in pencil (which doesn't last forever) and then I get super critical about my penmanship and can't continue. I am 13 years old if you guys didnt know. This is all happening in my Lisa Frank limited edition kitty kat journal. Again I wish I was kidding. But you know what? Journals don't last forever. The internet lasts forever. Will the internet get accidentally tossed into a box labeled "give away"? Or turn to ashes in a house fire? Or scurry away from it's cage? No, no and no. The internet is the perfect place for housing my weird incoherent ramblings. Except if I say something too dumb and it gets all retweeted and shit and I look like some Fox news correspondent. No offense, Fox news lovers. Just kidding, much offense intended. "Just because something makes you feel uncomfortable, doesn't mean it has to change!" (Heavy wine refill here).

I dont know where I was going with all this. Anyway, I guess now that the blog has been sufficiently dusted off, I can update on a life after Spain. Not that exciting. Don't get excited. Seriously don't. But I did go back and visit last October. I could retouch on that experience. Pubic transportation, 2 euro wine, socialism oh my!

Love you beaches.
Camille

The girl from Oklahoma .. is in Oklahoma.

People keep asking me what I do.
"So Camille what are you doing?"
"What now Camille? What do you do?"
"You're back, so what are you up to now?"


.......

Excuse me. Was I supposed to plan something? What do I do? What kind of question is that? Uh a whole lot you know. I do a lot. What do I do. What do I dooooo. I get up. Kind of early. Not because I'm energetic about the arrival of a new day, more just because my bedroom is downstairs and my roommates have no problem making lots of noise in the morning. So what do I do after I get up? I read the scrawny Muskogee Phoenix newspaper. I have Multi-grain Chex, my dad makes a blend of Cheerios. I gripe that not enough coffee was made. Can someone PLEASE remember that I drink coffee too?? I then read CNN and NPR on my phone because unbeknownst to the Muskogee paper things happen outside of Braggs and Wagoner. I pet our cats. That's plural. I untangle necklaces that I obtained cerca 2001 and have been in a draw since a month after obtainment. I check my email. I remember that I can check the real mail. I think about sending some mail so I can get mail. I drive my car. I go to Wal-mart because that's where people with cars go. No, that's not why. I go because my Amy's Indian meals are cheaper there. I find out they stopped selling the ones I like because people don't buy enough organic frozen meals here. I grump about this. I make chicken salad. And I even add weird ingredients because I'm spontaneous like that. I try not to think that spontaneous used to mean weekend trips, now spontaneous is carrots in chicken salad. I go "junking" with my mom. We note that area junk stores are getting too nice. We hate when they try to be cute. Don't stencil your old bread box. Feathers never belong on lamp shades. Let the junk be junk. Ugh. I ride my bike. I almost lose my life to a white Ford Taurus. How depressing to lose your life to a Ford Taurus, I think. I play scrabble. I play words with friends. I prefer scrabble but my roommates always quibble and take too long on each turn. So I play words with friends while I play scrabble. I eat dinner with the roomies. We intensely discuss my mother's hatred for the grasshoppers eating her garden. We despise them. Jim says he caught one and bottled it in a coke bottle. You wouldn't believe their jumping power! Fran still hates them. She says she would feed them to the fish at Sixshooter if she could capture them. I hate them too. Horrible awful grasshoppers. 


Oh yeah! and after Chex and Cheerios I have a conversation with Jim like this. 


Me - Hey what's that vocabulary word that like means a name for something else? It's like monotony or misdemeaner or nomenclature or something. None of these but maybe with the letters. You know?
Jim- I know I know! Let me think about it. It's right there.... I'll get back to you on this. You had to ask!


(Later I'm browsing vegetables at the farmer's market....)


Mundane, meager, misdemeaner-no stop thinking misdemeaner, not misdemeaner! Normandy, hominy, mockery, monarchy, monocle, moniker. MONIKER! MONIKER MONIKER MONIKER. MONIKER! Hell Yes! I am amazing! I am word champion. Moniker. Moniker. How much are these tomatoes? Is it shameful to barter at a farmers market? Will hippies come out and chastise me for trying to swindle a poor local farmer? Oh wait I'm in Muskogee. Hippie free. Ha. Oxymoron. I'll tell her 50 cents. 






Anyway back to those questions, what in the hell do they mean what do I do?

The PP Gets a Headache

Today I have been thinking my eyes hurt. Oh shit my nystagmus is making my eyes hurt! Wait no, its my eyeballs. My eyeballs hurt. And my head is hurting quite alot too. Right behind my hurting eyeballs. And then it hits me. I realize what is happening to my body. I am having a legitimate headache. The kind that people always say hurts behind there eyes and then they touch there temples really dramatically. I never knew what this meant until today. And I found out 26 1st graders yelling at you isn't the right medicine. Anyway this realization has been a shocker for starters.

The problem is that I am an extremely healthy person. Healthy, ha, well, that's not the right word. I mean to say, that I have avoided corporal harm for 25 years. I have lived a pretty pain free life so far and going strong. My concept of pain is a pre-zit, a stubbed toe, an indian burn, retainers worn once every year, touching the "hot plate" at the mexican restaurant, and chapped lips. I don't think I have experienced anything truly painful. I mean I know what emotional pain is like when you lose the Mad Men episode you just downloaded or when your kindle dies but physical pain is not something I encounter often. However I've gotten pretty good at pretending it.  I even remember doing it as a child. Which side is my appendix on? Well yes it is hurting quite a lot! And even as an adult I may have sometimes been a bit dramatic and embellished some "headaches" so I could use the excuse like everyone else. ("Its behind my eyes, and these temples! Oh its the temples!). Now as I find out that there really is a way for my brain to cause pain right behind my eyes, and I am vulnerable to this heinous torture, I repent. Dear baby cheeses, I repent.

I am nervous for when I have to encounter something actually painful. I have never broken a bone, had surgery (except for wisdom teeth removal and even then I was given pain killers that might have been used longer than necessary for especially "painful" days). What if I break a bone now? I can´t even imagine. 

In Spain, pretty much everything is blamed on the weather. I said my head hurt and I got a "Es el tiempo Camille." Same with a cold I had in February. The flu? Weather. Seriously, we should just say this damn economic crisis is the weather's fault. But anyway, when I look for sympathy I find it's just a phone call away. I recommend everyone to move to a foreign country. The distance really elicits your mom's affection and sympathy. I called my mom when I had said flu this winter and she didn't say one thing about the weather, just "Oh my poor precious princess." And I thought, that's right, the poor precious princess! I may call her right now about this headache business.

A side story about "pain" in Spain (yes, sPAIN)... Last year at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning I remember crying to a doctor at the emergency room pleading for some kind of pain medication. I had a bad ear infection. She just gave me high milligram IB Profen and a smirk. At the time I thought "Estas de cono!?" (Are you of the vagina?) Now that I think back on this, I would say this was a quite painful experience but then again I am comparing it to chapped lips and hangnails. So I'm not really sure if pain meds were really needed. Apparently my sobbing didn't convince her that they were. I might have even pulled the card, this isn't even my country and I would really appreciate if you would adhere to what I'm used to.... (Shame, I know). She obviously didn't realize she was talking to someone's precious princess. She did give me the common courtesy to not blame it on the weather though. To prove just how courteous this woman is, I saw her like 9 months later when I went to a family Christmas dinner and found out she was related to the family I am good friends with. She didn't even bring up my bawl fest. What a woman. 

Anyway, I think I should be talking about Spain and the fact that I am leaving in less than two weeks. But I tend to focus on the right now. And it's headache. Which actually is receding now that I am away from hoopla. I hope my eyeballs and back of eyeballs never go through this again. I just don't think I could take it. I'm an epidural kind of girl. 


Next post, will be the final farewell to Metropolitan Vigo, the best gym there ever was. 

What is an SUV?

When you have friends visit you in Europe, you start to see things again from the American viewpoint. Being over here I tend to forget about the way Americans see things until I have an American next to me pointing out every difference, and then I remember very clearly.

Yes, Europe is rather grimy. No, that man probably shouldn't be smoking in our elevator. Are we almost getting hit by every moped? Yes, that's true it is rather inefficient to go to the fruitera, bakery and grocery store. Have I kissed 14 peoples' cheeks today? Yes that is quite a lot of kisses. Is 11:00 pm late for dinner? But I ate lunch at 3:00 pm. Oh, that's late too isn't it. Take this food to-go? Like not eat it at the restaurant we came to? Right, I remember. Two euros for a wine, I suppose that is pretty cheap...

The last one is the one that takes the cake for me. Because now my view is that anything over 3 euros a glass (at a restaurant) is crazy expensive. I am going to just fucking lose it when the american restaurants try to charge me their ludicrous prices. The bottles I buy at the supermarket are always under 5 euros and fantastic. Can someone do some research on this issue? Why the hell are the prices of wine so drastically different? Do we just need more vineyards in the states? Pues, empezamos ya! Sometimes the spanish sentence just comes out first. But seriously, you Americans are really good at getting shit done, and getting shit solved so listen to me. Stop fussing over birth control and gay marriage and fuss over something important. I will return thirsty and broke, so you guys have about t minus one month to give me an answer.

Cono! Only one month until I leave. No, no, no......

(These are just random thoughts they have nothing to do with friends who have visited or friend that is coming TODAY.) I need to go americanize myself. Carlita will be arriving in two hours. And I hope she is bringing her mexican accent. I honestly don't think she will be able to use her travel Spanish without the mexican accent. She is so damn good at it. Oh my god I can't wait to see the spanairds' faces, they will be so offended!

Wednesday Science

I finally weighed the water collected from the dehumidifier! You will not believe how long it has been on my list of things to do. Yes, it made the list. The thing is, the dehumidifier's container fills every few days and when its full an obnoxious "beep beep" noise ensues until you empty the water container. So of course the beep beep drives me rabid. I always rush to dump out the water just to pacify the beeping gods, and then think, "Cono! I wanted to weigh that water first!" Too late. Too beeping late.

Drives me rabid? That may be exaggeration. It annoys me a touch.

So why would I want to weigh water? Good question. It is a small accomplishable task. And I tend to have a habit of adding extremely trivial tasks like this one to my to-do list. I do this so that when the more important (always more mundane) things don't get done, I can feel better seeing the other lines boldly crossed out and think, "Well thank God someone q-tip cleaned the keyboard!" These tasks make you feel good when they are marked off. They are a confidence safety net.

The other reason I wanted to weigh the water is because it is like a mini science experiment. (Weighing water is science right? What if I call it H2O? And if I ask myself "Wanna hypothesis how much it weighs?") Because I do those things. And I call it science. And I won at a science fair in 6th grade so I know.*

If you are still reading, I am so very grateful!! Was reading my blog a trivial task on your to-do list?! I hope so. Tell those other boring things they can wait for some Monday or whatever. Now back to my meanigful, scientific task.

Those reasons before were hogwash. The real one is that I weighed the water to justify my complaints about the humidity in Galicia. Oh the humidity. Its been raining for the past month. Month. That is a lot of rain. The biggest problem for me and the humid weather is trying to dry my clothes. I hang them up to dry, but they take days and days. I then end up re-washing clothes to take out the incumbent mildewy smell but it still lurks. Finally I just resort to wearing weird clothes that are clean and dry. Purple jeans + arkansas t-shirt, yes, done, beautiful, outfit destroyer. Its just too humid to dry clothes. Even with the dehumidifier. This has been the first time in my life to use one of these apparati. That means it takes out the water. (The dehumidifier, not the word apparati. That's just apparatus plural.) I didn't even know dehumidifiers existed to be honest. In Oklahoma we fill the air with water. And on top of that dryers exist there. Like they are even necessary, clothes would dry in less than 24 hours with that dry, crusty climate! What fucking paradise those Oklahomans have.


So that's the reason why I weighed the water. It's now time to hypothesis how many kilos of water my apparatus collected! Go ahead, just hypothesis!
............
6.4 KILOS!!!!!  Oh what's a kilo you ask? It took me a while to figure out how much exactly but it's a bit more than double a pound. So yes, this is like 14 lbs. Of water. Sucked from the air. And collected in my apparatus. For me to weigh. On my kilo scale.

And I know what you're thinking. My dehumidifier is a bad ass. And it's true. It magically steals water from the air desperately trying to give me my normal jeans in a dry, clean state. I appreciate that little machine. That's why I decided to rename it to "the humidity-defy-er."
I sure hope a child with dyslexia didn't already beat me to this wordplay. (Aka Camille's worst fear).

And here's the humidity-defy-er, defying humidity:

And that's all. Time for bed.
XOXO COCO



*Winning a science experiment in 6th grade deludes one into thinking they have a proclivity for science. It should probably be noted though that in my case, I went to a tiny, Catholic elementary school with a class size of 12 and I entered two experiments that year because I couldn't decide how I wanted to decorate my board. I would say I had pretty good odds of winning. But I'm not a mathmetician. I'm a scientist.

Full bellies and cold showers

I just finished eating the most gastronomically orgasmic meal. It was obscene. And I loved it. I love food so much!!!!! It's totally in my top 3 favorite things in life. I don't know whats going to happen when I have a child or dog that wants to encroach on my list. There are only three spots! But this is mas adelante.

(Just reminded myself I am getting a dog this year! Ok maybe he can have one of the spots.)

Anyway I rolled myself home in an ultra food coma state, happy as a lard lark. During dessert (white chocolate mousse with strawberries and chocolate syrup) my friend offered a post-dinner movie night at her house. She described the movie as I contemplated the offer. Not for the movie night or girl time of course but because her house was downhill from the restaurant and I like going with gravity. Stuffed Camille's don't care about whether it's a comedy or a drama, they just need a comfortable sitting device and yoga pants p to the pronto. After much internal deliberation I finally decided to walk myself to my home. (The movie did sound pretty painful.) I think it was this. The first few steps though I did lots of exasperated sighing about this "uphill" walk I had to do. I decided to time myself. It took 5 minutes. It's not even that uphill. Your mind just tells you it is when you think you have added 10 kilos to your caboose.

So now, sitting here in my maternity yoga pants (that's not redundancy, they are in fact stretch maternity pants and they are incredible) I just realized that we finished dinner at about the same time people are eating in the states. With the time difference. I am going to flip when I get back.
Just flip.

I was also thinking of how great it will be to have constant hot water in the states. Oh yes, this is something to be thankful for. This morning the propane tank ran out while I was in the shower. I of course had just put shampoo in my hair. So I grabbed the shower hose, closed my eyes and started a pattern of spraying myself with ice cold water, spazzing out and stifling profanities. I tried to get the important parts but honestly it was just too unbearable. I think I looked worse after the shower. Its weird to think that this hell-like rejuvenating experience doesn't happen in the states. You guys are missing out on exciting showers! And after the wild shower I ended up boiling some water and having a proper facewash, that scorched my skin and felt sooooo good. It made me feel rustic survivally for thinking up such a brilliant idea and seeing it work so well. (Despite bright red face). 


The girl from Oklahoma shows Spain!


Also central heating will be nice. This pioneer girl doesn't like the cold.

From my terrace

I just watched something incredible take place.

I live on a fairly long one way street in Vigo. I like to go out to my 2 ft. by 4 ft. terrace and watch the people move about in the street. I say Hi to my bartender friend at the bar next to my house and then I just take a long pleasant gander. Tonight there weren't many people out but I saw some cars. Which brings me to the "big event" of tonight's gandering. At around 11:05 p.m. a smartcar came happily cruising down my street. Suddenly it decided it was going the wrong way (ruh roh!) and wanted to start back at the beginning of the street. I don't know if you all know how one way streets work, but you can only go one way. This smartcar however thought it could outsmart this accepted norm by going in reverse. But behind the baby smartcar was a large trash truck performing nightly trash collection. So what happens? The smartcar simply extended an arm and motioned backwards and forced a the trash truck up my entire street! The two of them reversed the entire length of the street until the tiny smartcar made its way in a new direction and beeped a friendly gracias. I watched flabbergasted at the entire situation. Here are the points I came up with for why this is all backwards (literally).

1.) The trash truck is a mammoth! It could easily have squashed the smartcar which is about 5 times bigger than the barbie car I wanted when I was five. (No I never got this).

2.) Can't smartcars like turn around in a doorway? It could of just turned around and squeezed past the trash truck without being so petulant, right? Or just zipped around the block!

3.) Did I mention the audacious smartcar was yellow? Of course it was. For me I can't even take smartcars seriously, and on top of that it was a goofy yellow color. Because don't we all already imagine the dashboard of a smartcar to be like a life size Boppit? There are just knobs and buttons and gadgets. And when you it runs out of gas it just chimes, "Game Over!" So, going back to point number 1, the trash truck totally should have stood up for itself.

My mom always told me she liked driving her big suburban because small cars moved out of the way for her. I would have liked her to be here tonight instead of the friendly trash truck. The smartcar would have said "Oh you didn't hear me, I said 'beep beep!'" And my mom's suburban would have said "Yes, and I replied 'honk honk... No'".

You see, in America big cars win! They say "No to going reverse on one way streets!" No time to reverse for you! Rush rush! Time, stress, one-hour lunch!! Big cars intimidate the little cars. And to keep little cars in their place we even host televised events where big bad trucks crush 10 of them at a time. But...... I am in Europe, where little cars are just as important as big ones and the people are nice. They have all the time in the world and no one cares about time efficiency or say, reversing up a street for a poor disoriented toy-car.

What does this ludicrous blogpost mean? It just goes to say that the logic I was raised with of big car vs. small car doesn't apply in Spain. Big cars coexist with small cars in the most Marxist automobile utopia you can imagine.

And also that my Tuesday nights are very uneventful.

That is all. Goodnight.