It felt so strangely like a movie, wandering through the spices aisle amidst obnoxious “Oh the weather outside is frightful-ing” going on over the Smith’s stereo system. I swear as I dropped my third lean cuisine into my basket—just enough food to just subsist throughout the next solitary week– I heard my feelings plink into to interwoven black plastic. As I turned the key into my apartment later, which is now completely devoid of roommates, I realized that if I had a cat, I would be pulling a Sandra Bullock and dipping my oreo into its milk bowl. Truly, this feeling can only be described as cinematic. That special sort of holiday loneliness that only has an end in sight when the radio will stop playing “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”

How do I combat this? Any tips?

The silence sat under my toe the same way a crunched leaf wiggles after the savor of its crunch has been extinguished. It tiptoed across my shoulders and put its weight around me like a blanket. It muted the passing cars in their tracks by creating the tracks that muted them. And it pushed the forming tear back into my tear duct as I began to feel like a martyr.

You know those impossibly bad days? Those days where you swear that the cosmos crooked their pinky finger in your direction, which pulled the bench out from under you right when you sat down to eat your lunch? And then, oh Academiaus, who had a hoot watching you wipe the macaroni off your forty dollar blouse and climb back onto the bench, decides that messing with you is fun, so he will watch you squeam and squirm as you get your grade back on an essay that you thought you nailed. And then, of course, Cupidus Maximus Meanus comes along and shoots you with an “embarrass yourself arrow,” which takes over your vocal cords and forces you to say something that makes you beat your head against the nearest lunch tray and/or wall repeatedly until you think you can show your face in public again (even though it’s red and bruised from the lunch tray beating). You know those days?

Those “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad” Days where you look into your wallet and realize that you don’t even have enough money to move to Australia?

That has been my today, today.

And then there was silence. A blissful, glorious silence of snow blankets that wrapped around my shoulders and hugged until the tear in my duct slipped quietly back inside my eye and decided not to freeze down my cheeks.

Snow, my friends. It makes the world so quiet that even the air ventilation in a building seems loud. For whatever reason, the snow has enveloped me today in a little air pocket of solitude that makes my bad day melt away in the ice, as oxy-moronical as that seems.

The snow saved me today, in all of its silent goodness.

When I was a little girl, and required any special attention from the school nurse (which usually meant she would give you a swig of children’s Tylenol and allow you to call your mom to inform her that you were sick before escorting you back to class), the afore-mentioned school nurse would greet me like this for a good solid six years:

“Why! I know you! You’re the girl that got a rock stuck in her ear!” And it was true, that was who I was. I remember the day of infamy. I’d spent a delightful recess outside being rough and tumble, but when I came inside to Mrs. Mallaber’s first grade classroom, I noticed the jiggling–Like a little tickly bug skittering across my eardrum any time I made a move. This was a curious thing, and until it started messing with my balancing ability (for I am told the inner ear is where balance is regulated) that I started to consider the new addition to my ear cavity as a detriment rather than a cool new feature in life. My teacher only believed me when I shook my head back on forth, and the mysterious object rattled back and forth like a maraca in my head. And then she sent me to the clinic where I got to spend the next three hours ear down on the sterilized paper atop the uncomfortable bench while I waited for the unsuspecting piece of gravel to dislodge.

I was pleased to hear that I belonged to a heritage of people who got objects (inanimate, or perhaps animate in the case of my sister) stuck in their bodily orifices. The reference I draw here is of my father who had to control his gag reflex as he tweezed Rolly Pollies from my sister’s nostrils.

So it only seems fair that, considering our genetic make-up, that my nephew Doug should surface from the basement, clutching his ear and complaining that it felt weird in his ears. Upon closer examination, it became clear that the yellow air soft pellets that Doug had been hoarding all week, now had a new stashing place—his ears.

All the way to urgent care, my sister asked him “Douglas, do we stick things in our ears?” It was only until several hours and one doctor later that Douglas was able to answer “No,” with supreme confidence.

Way to follow those genetic inclinations, buddy boy.

I felt small today, remarkably small. noticeably small. I noticed this as I was walking across the grass in front of the JSB and I noticed how extremely close my head was to the ground in comparison to other bodies. I noticed it when I realized that my shadow, cast by a premature descent of the sun, was a foot shorter than everyone else’s six foot shadows. And while my smallness is something that everyone in the entire world seems to notice, today I noticed how very small the world sees me as. I am small.

I felt small when I got a French paper returned to me positively barfed on with red ink of corrections to make. I felt small when I got an English paper back and I got only 7’s as a score and not 8’s. I want eights. I felt small only making 75 dollars on a Friday night of work. But it’s nothing compared to the feeling of absolute smallness of huddling over a toilet dry-heaving all the smallness out of you because it hurts so much to be this metaphorically little. For the first time ever, I felt like the person inside my small little frame might actually be a small little person.

It kind of hurts my feelings to be this small.

I’d like to echo my friend, Lanee, when I say “For the Beauty of the Earth.”

My apartment smells like pooh, and I’m not talking about A.A. Milne’s cuddly bear. As a whole our apartment has had to cope with an over-abundance of unpleasant odor, which I will now chronicle for you now.

The Rotten Milk incident- I have since wrote about this on previous blogs so I won’t go into large detail except to say that it was enough to trigger my gag reflexes in an impressive way.

And then there was the mold ordeal. Please don’t think we as an apartment have terrible hygiene. I think we have about the same amount of cleanliness as most college co-eds, which is to say, we shower daily, wash our hair every other day, and fuss with our hair far too much and usually we do our dishes within an hour of having eaten them. It was an apartment malfunction that led to mold, where our air conditioner leaked coolant into our carpet steadily for about a year while maintenance men were continually stymied by the repair, and thus mold began to grow. Now I know how to diagnose a mold problem: The carpet smells like BO.

But today, today, might be the worst of all smell problems that we’ve had, and I feel like I’ve encountered more than my share of nasty smells in my life. But last night when I returned to my apartment after some late night homeworking, the overwhelming unpleasantness of methane gas hit my nose, and knocked me to the floor. My apartment smells like pooh, like now we also have a plumbing problem to contend with. I say this not to be crass but to be blatant and truthful. It smells so bad. Don’t be surprised if you see the residents of #9 running around with gas masks for the next week until the problem is fixed.

In Summation: It is time to move. It is time to move. It’s time to move.

I could navigate C-470 with a blindfold, that’s how familiar I feel with Colorado’s roadways. I could identify the time of day in Colorado, judging by the sun’s radiance behind the clouds as it slips behind the hogback. I could smell my way to the valley, I could taste my way home with Simon and Garfunkel harmonizing through my speakers something about being homeward bound. There’s nothing like that lamppost at the end of the cul-de-sac where I used to watch snow fall into the Colorado dark. There’s nothing like watching Blake Collins unwrap his latest injury with Starbucks Earl Grey in his left hand, and feeling sudden complacency with the world. There’s nothing like collapsing into a bed that saw all of my dreams, and held me tightly through them.

Apology: I am sorry to be using my blog as a public forum to discuss my grief. I never envisioned becoming one of these people. In fact, I even vowed not to become one of these people that use their blog this way. But since I am not using my blog in much of anyway, and since I have all of two readers (thanks, and a special apology to you in particular) anyways, I figure I might as well use this medium to send my martyrdom into the abyss. I think for Robinson women, it just feels better when someone knows we are suffering. So, my readers, I shall punish you for perhaps a few more posts yet, but stick with me, I will recover from my funk.

I think I choose to share this particular sad thing because it is so intensely relatable. It seems like almost everyone has suffered some sort of heart break in their life, whether it was Judy stuffing the Valentine you spent a week crafting for her back into your own Valentine Box, or whether it was Brian, who broke off your engagement two weeks before the wedding. I argue that a humanizing element of life is this current break-up, because I can now empathize with Brian and Judy’s victims. So there’s a silver lining.

Please blame the following cliché on the fact that I am sad and lacking in creative energy, but today Ifeel like there is a gaping Shaun hole in my life that I wish he would just come and fill with his skinny little arms and a shovel full of love. Is that how this is supposed to feel? Anyone got any particularly good post break-up advice for me. I’ve got a hole to fill.

I just went to my very first movie by myself, and I’m sitting on my bed now, listening to “She’s got you high,” off the (500) Days of Summer soundtrack and ripping open my box of “Buncha CRUNCH” TM, and licking the chocolate off the box seams, and wondering how in the hell am I supposed to respond to this? Going to a movie by yourself seems to connote one of two things in American society: 1) Either you are so self-confident and/or pretentious that movie-going with a companion is so beneath you because they can’t possibly understand the complexity of the themes the film presents or B) you’re so lonely you can’t even muster up one companion to join you at the latest blockbuster, or in my case, burgeoning indie-flick. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy my own blissful box of Buncha Crunch, or that I didn’t laugh at elements of the plot that might be considered socially unacceptable, or that I didn’t still get annoyed at the people walking out of the theater at the climax of the movie, especially because it was only mildly offensive. But overall, I must confess that the movie-going experience is just not the same without having someone beside you to brush buttery knuckles with in the popcorn bag (which are five dollars these days). Something about seeing this particular movie, or something about seeing this particular movie by myself has made me curl into my nearest Teddy Bear and sob off all of my synthetic eyelashes into his synthetic bear fur.