It's not an easy subject...

...but death is inevitable. I wish I was as strong as my words. Processing death is strenuous and it takes time, especially for those directly affected. As sad as it seems, people really recognize how lucky they are when something goes wrong. It shouldn't be this way. Why do we spend our lives complaining about traffic, gas prices and the line at Starbucks making us late for work? Why do we worry about not being able to go out on a Friday night because we have early obligations on a Saturday? Why do we bother to complain about how much we can't stand going to class, or work, or that meeting that we were trying to think up an excuse to be unable to attend? Why don't we consider ourselves lucky that we are stuck in that traffic and got to listen to that extra song? Why don't we consider ourselves lucky that we're able to purchase gas for our vehicle? Why don't we consider ourselves lucky to be able to stand in that Starbucks line and have a job to go to? Why don't we consider ourselves lucky to go to class? Most importantly, why don't we consider ourselves lucky on an every-second basis, just to be alive?

When trying to process death, it's not simple. It's difficult, shocking and a son of a bitch to even think about. Especially young death. Nothing is more terrible than a young life, taken. I'm not good at processing this. I'm vulnerable, shocked and shaken up.

May angels lead you in. Rest well.

Nightly browsing of the Internet...Links galore

This would be really helpful if somebody, somewhere is reading this and is going to Venice sometime soon:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/getaways/09/29/budget.venice.italy.ap/index.html

Right there, baby. Gives some great advice (although, I don't advise skipping a gondola ride. Even though it's pricey, it's still one of the greatest things I did while in Venice).

This will give you a pretty legit reason to take some time out of the office and go on a getaway (hey, it added to my reasons for taking the January trip to Spain!):

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TRAVEL/traveltips/09/11/reasons.to.travel.now/index.html

This makes me think of one of my very good friends from home who just moved to Spain and is going to miss out on her favorite season (this one is full of pictures, and they are beautiful):

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26866380/displaymode/1107/s/2/framenumber/1/

This makes me REALLY want Matt Lauer's job and to travel the globe as my occupation:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24349019/displaymode/1107/s/2/

Every Walk of Life...

I've always kind of noticed this, but it's becoming more and more apparent as I get older and kind of realize trends in and of myself as well as my terrible tendency to repeat history. However, that being said, I have been trying extra-hard lately to NOT repeat history...and with my choice in the opposite sex, I haven't repeated history in QUITE some time. Examine: first boyfriend: white guy. Standard. All I pretty much knew growing up in suburbia, country-town America. Nothing wrong with it, but it's all I knew. Pretty much as soon as I entered into college, also known as a world I basically never knew existed and even more so than that, a stomping ground of many different types of people (not specifically my university, but the environment around it and new things I would experience) my taste didn't necessarily change, but in essence, it did.

Let's just put it this way: I have the raw ability to attract everything but my own type of person. Which not only makes for fabulous stories, but it also makes for fabulous stories! It has now become more of a running joke within my group of friends that I always have a knack of attracting and being attracted to different guys, so let's get to some examples. I'm going to very briefly list what I can remember...that sounds terrible, I know. It's not that I have been in a blacked-out, drunken stupor (at least not some of the times), it's just that it's been 4 fabulous years of around-the-world males (haha). I'm like the goddamn United Nations sometimes and it's insane: Italian, Russian, Lebanese, Greek, Romanian, Portuguese, Brazilian (this should count as about 4 or 5 because there are so many Brazilians in my area of Connecticut), Indian, Albanian, Jamaican, British, Spanish, Puerto Rican, and I'm sure there are a few I'm forgetting.

Essentially, my point is this: what is so interesting about me to foreign males, but not homegrown American natives? (ha!). I mean, I've never had a problem with it, as ever since I was 11 years old I've been traveling internationally, at least a few times a year in some instances. I've also been itching to get out of the country since I was an actual resident of the city of Rome two summers ago. It always hits you as a completely different experience when you're actually considered a resident somewhere, and being a resident of the capital of Italy is nothing that I took lightly. Life was different there, and after about a week, it hit me that I was LIVING there. My primary residence for that time of my life was 82 Laura Mantegazza, Roma Italia. Surreal as it is, this has driven me to leave the States. I love America and I love where I'm from, but I realized there is so much more out there than what you could ever imagine. I guess that goes for both the world, and the opposite sex.

Things I'm Excited About

1. The weekend!

2. Being able to catch up on seasons of LOST this weekend

3. The new season of LOST which starts in January

4. January trip to Spain

5. Easter in Aruba

6. Seeing my family/friends over Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years (yea no, this isn't chronological)

7. Seeing Jeremy Piven on Broadway!

8. Starting to travel for work--even though I heard it gets old really quick

9. My winter intercession class

10. Choke (the movie based on the Palahniuk book)

11. Being able to see all the movies I really want to but STILL haven't seen, a.k.a. Dark Knight, Pineapple Express, Vicky Christina Barcelona

12. Winter
--let me expand on this. I love all seasons. Right now I'm really enjoying fall, I enjoyed the summer like there was no freaking tomorrow and the spring is always great because you can start wearing all the cute clothes again. But winter is something entirely different. Winter to me is hot chocolate in the family room with the fireplace going, watching some kind of sporting event on the television because that's what my family has always been known to be doing. Winter means trekking up to New Hampshire to the appropriately titled "New Hampshire House" to go skiing for the weekend, shop the outlets and eat at Tony Lena's pizza (still hands down the best pizza in America). This winter is going to be MUCH different. I'll be spending the majority of it at my new apartment in Connecticut with the same roommates I've been living with for basically 4 years. I love them like they are my own sisters, so it should be fun. Also, I plan to purchase a NH ski pass to a bunch of different mountains. I ski and I love skiing and I REALLY want to learn to snowboard. So this is going to be my winter for learning how to do that. I'm pumped.

13. Finishing the book I'm currently reading: La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind by Beppe Severgnini. I've had an obsession with anything Italian since I studied abroad in Rome 2 summers ago.

14. Reading the new books I just purchased: Marley & Me and The Alchemist

15. The beginning of Christmas shopping

16. Thanksgiving for the 4 F's: family, friends, food and football! <3

17. Soxtober (that is for the Red Sox fans!)

18. Christmastime in New York City

This list could probably go on, however I feel the need to cut it off before it gets too lengthy.

Just when you think your life is at it's most bizarre moment...

...it's not. I'm living proof that life only gets stranger the moment when it seems it's at the climax of strange.

Let me start with a disclaimer saying that I HATE MySpace. Yep, I said it. The thought of it makes me cringe. That being said, a FABULOUS friend of mine created one for me (you'll probably rot in hell for this) and it's pimped out and whatever else. But I really just can't stand it. This is a story that legitimately just happened the weekend before last. I always talk about how I'm going to write a book someday and this will definitely be a story within it. I've changed the names and left out specific locations, as if you do know me, you can probably guess who is who and where I was.

I’ve always had this tendency for being quite the 007 type of chick. Some may call it nosey, I prefer to call it intelligent and curious. For no particular reason other that looking at other people’s online habits (so maybe this is nosey..?) I’ve always had an urge to find things about people online. I’ve done it all: I Google more people than I do actual pieces of information I need and I even managed to find the mugshot of a guy I had been talking to, for a recent DUI (unbeknownst to him…). It’s truly for no other reason than I love to be a FBI type of person. It runs in my family to do somewhat investigative-esque work, as my father has done similar things throughout his entire career, however I just do it out of pure interest. I probably should have been a criminal justice major instead of business economics, but I digress.

I had spent a harmless, enjoyable and intoxicated night with some girlfriends at our favorite dive bar that is known for it’s scantily-clad college females, trashy dancing and overabundance of Brazilian immigrants, who I must say, do spice up the night in ridiculous ways. This place is not only a dive bar, it’s a somewhat underage bar, geared toward your college freshman thru seniors. Many would say we had no business being there, as we are pursuing Master’s degrees and hold real-life work positions. We would argue otherwise.

Spending a night at the bar with the girls. Seems normal, no? I had known that a guy I had talked to for a period in time, who I had actually met at this bar because he was a bartender there, was going to be back to work, as the colleges were back in session and there were $2 pitchers of Natty Light and SoCo and Lime shots to be served. I knew he was back working and I figured, “hell, let’s get an indecent amount of liquor and be on the verge of inebriation before we even arrive to this place”. Again, sounded like a plan to me. I rounded up the girls and got an insane amount of vodka, enough to probably quench the thirst of a Russian street gang and a ton of wine, including that which this particular guy had brought over to my house. Out of convenience in this story, let’s call him Mufasa. Mufasa had brought me a great bottle of Italian red when I had first moved into my new apartment in Connecticut. It was sweet and being that we only each had a glass before going out that night a few months back when he came over, I had plenty to indulge in before I actually had to face him at the bar. This had been the first time I had seen him in about two and a half months.

Jayna, Tamara, Jill and I all seemingly enough overdosed ourselves on my bitter mix of Stoli Bluberri and cran and were eventually off our asses in laughter over a drinking game we had created to get us as obnoxiously drunk as a sorority house full of first-time drinkers, granted, there was nothing first-time about us. Our other friend Aimee came over shortly thereafter with her boyfriend so we drank some more and took too many pictures in all the same pose. Eventually we make it to the bar and I spot Mufasa. He’s working at the bar outside and quite obviously I do what all girls do and warn my friends that if they speak to him I may or may not tell the entire bar they have a sexually transmitted disease and then leave the bar without them knowing so they are left all alone. Of course, as I lead the pack of girls to go back inside, he yells to Jayna that she neglected to say hi to him. Jayna says hi and I about throw a shit-fit.
Things continue as normal, dancing on platforms and poles with the girls, for the remainder of the night and I even scored a couple free drinks from Mufasa, who clearly does not remember giving me the free drinks as I had brought it up to him the morning after in a text message. Towards what quickly became the end of the night, I noticed Mufasa’s roommate taking pictures of my friends and I. I figured it was one of our cameras that we handed off to him and demanded him to take pictures, being that he had a good angle of us. Unfortunately enough, I would find out two days later that this was not the case.

On a dull Monday night of reading and laying on my bed in procrastination to return a few phone calls, I decided it was due time to do a little investigative research on Mufasa. For one reason or another, while most likely intoxicated, I had found Mufasa’s MySpace page a number of months back and had browsed it every now and then when I was feeling bored. Well this was one of those times and then by curiosity the mouse wanders and it happened to wander right onto the MySpace page of Mufasa’s roommate, Abs. Abs was just that: obsessed with himself, his looks and especially his abs. This may come as a rash statement, being that I knew virtually nothing about him except that he was Mufasa’s roommate and that my friend Tamara had once forced him into buying she, myself and Aimee drinks at this same bar in another awkward run-in. Abs would just hang out at this terrible boozefest every Saturday night that Mufasa was working. It was really sad, actually, because they lived quite a distance and I’m pretty sure unless Angelina Jolie and Chelsea Handler made guest appearances every week you could not get me to hang out in this place alone every Saturday night.

I wander onto Abs MySpace page and decide to browse his pictures. “Nice,” I thought to myself, “he updated pictures, maybe there’s something interesting that will kill a few seconds of my time”. Lo and behold, I see pictures of Mufasa with the extremely foreign looking female bartenders and as I kept clicking through I saw a picture of myself and my friends. WAIT, WHAT?! It was a picture of me, Jayna, Tamara and Jill standing by a stripper pole in the middle of this dive bar. This has got to be a joke. He didn’t even know me! Why did he have pictures of random girls he doesn’t know on his MySpace page. I’m hoping that as you read this, none of you have ever stumbled upon pictures of youself on someone’s MySpace you do not communicate with. If you have, I’m sorry and I totally understand your pain, as the pictures were probably not the most admirable photos you’ve ever seen of yourself.

There ended up being two pictures of my friends and I and to be completely frank with you, I was creeped out an horrified. I immediately sent Tamara a message online telling her and she demanded to see the link. Just when you think your life can’t get weirder, it does. Nothing is impossible. I pondered the idea of bringing it up to Mufasa, however I would blow my cover and he would know that I’m the modern day female James Bond, which I didn’t want him to find out, as I wanted to keep some sort of “normal” reputation with him, if for nothing else than future run-ins at this shanty establishment we classify as a bar. I barely knew of Abs, nevermind had a conversation with him. However, did I mention that same night that I did a body shot off of his stomach? Again, not one of my prouder moments. Oh, the effects of liquor…

You can’t make this stuff up.

I'll be totally honest...

I'm being semi-forced to do this. For a class I'm registering for during the Winter Intercession (I'm a graduate student), I'm being forced to start a blog. It can be about anything I want and should show off my personality and basically what I go through in everyday life. Or maybe not everyday, but most days.

I'm being told I need to share my life with the whole blogging world and that's quite fine, as I do have many many ridiculous stories to tell. However, I'm pretty new at this. A freaking ton of my friends have created blogs to write about their adventures in other countries (which I actually did for my family when I was abroad in Rome) or to just blog for the pure enjoyment of it.

SO, try your hardest to hang in there with me through this little adventure. Maybe I'll learn the ins and outs of blogging, or maybe I'll fail miserably. If nothing else, you'll FOR SURE see my personality (ahem, the title of the blog is a dead-giveaway of what I'm like..and no, I'm NOT a recovering alcoholic, I just enjoy a great beverage) and see the tales of my life. Thankfully, my professor has a great outlook on life and has a fabulous personality, so I'm not going to censor this bad boy much at all.