Because I am not going back to the familiar undergraduate college that I know and love, and am instead starting classes as the awkward grad student at a new college, I’m feeling a little nostalgic. So I’ll dedicate this Hump Day Cry Face to one of my old roommates, who is a phenomenal Cry Facer and loves polar bears, ABC Family, flashlight tag, and clothes. Steph, consider this a test of whether you read the blog:
Happy almost Thursday, everyone!
[Posted by Mallory]
Filed under cry face, post-college depression, TV
Due to my post-college depression, I don’t like change. Except when it comes with a healthy dose of hope and a large helping of Barack Obama. Haha. But you know what I mean. I feel myself especially threatened emotionally when staples from my younger years are changed. When I learned that Hasbro is totally changing the game of Clue, I immediately found myself drowning my sorrows in a box of Cheez-Its while whining “I’m so olddddddd” to my poor dog. I not crazy, I swear.
Clue is very near and dear to my heart! It was one of the few board games that I could actually win as a child. Monopoly taught me at a young age that I was miserable at math and business, but Clue, ah Clue– Clue made me feel as if I could one day work for the C.I.A. I was just THAT GOOD at finding out who killed Mr. Boddy in what room with what weapon.
According to the AP, the new Clue is updated to fit in with “tabloid culture”. I love me some tabloids, but geeez louise, keep it out of my board games.
The six characters’ last names remain the same, but their first names and bios have been updated. For example, Miss Scarlet is now Kasandra Scarlet, a famous actress often featured in tabloids. And Mr. Green is now Jacob Green, an African-American “with all the ins.”
HAHA oh man. “With all the ins”. What does that possibly mean? Hmmm. I wonder if he makes his final accusations in ebonics? One of my favorites, Colonel Mustard is now Jack Mustard, an ex-football player. Professor Plum is now a video game designer. I’m not making that up. How are we supposed to feel smart playing this game if our characters have gotten dumber?! And here is the greatest part of all, each character now has a special power to help them solve clues. LIke superhero powers? WHAT ABOUT MY SHARP AND NIMBLE MIND?! Ahh this is too much to handle. But wait, there’s more. No more revolver, lead pipe or wrench–instead we have a dumbbell, trophy or poison. Poison? Ehh, alright. Giving us Chuck Norris’ right leg would have been more practical than a dumbbell. Now there’s a weapon.
Clue has even gotten nouveau riche on us. There’s now a spa, theater and a guest house. Mr. Boddy’s classy, beautiful mansion wasn’t good enough. They made it a McMansion!
They are taking the original Clue off the shelves this fall. Go get it now, or forever be burdened with this travesty.
RIP Colonel Mustard. You will be missed. Here he is, in all his glory.
Rawr.
I can think of only one positive thing to say about this whole ordeal. Perhaps with this new version Miss Scarlett will finally be the slootbag we all knew she was/wanted her to be. Perhaps.
[Posted by Kathleen]
Filed under news, pop culture, post-college depression, random, RIP
For me, the thought of boxed wine brings to mind frat slaps (and subsequently the worst night of my entire college career) and the general lack of classiness that goes hand in hand with drinking in college: cheap beer shotgunned in a dorm shower; shots of Aristocrat chased by vending machine Diet Coke; shady water bottles smuggled into any and every event. Ah, don’t you miss it?
During my senior year of college, my roommates and I gravitated toward the super classy glass jug of Livingston Farms Blush Chablis, but I am no stranger to boxed wine. According to this New York Times article, boxed wine is becoming more common and more popular, partly because it is a heck of a lot better for the environment:
More than 90 percent of American wine production occurs on the West Coast, but because the majority of consumers live east of the Mississippi, a large part of carbon-dioxide emissions associated with wine comes from simply trucking it from the vineyard to tables on the East Coast. A standard wine bottle holds 750 milliliters of wine and generates about 5.2 pounds of carbon-dioxide emissions when it travels from a vineyard in California to a store in New York. A 3-liter box generates about half the emissions per 750 milliliters. Switching to wine in a box for the 97 percent of wines that are made to be consumed within a year would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about two million tons, or the equivalent of retiring 400,000 cars.
Pretty cool, right? Of course, there are plenty of people who would never resort to boxed wine (the horror!), like one dude who commented on the article and wrote: “Utter lunacy. I’ll buy wine in a box on the Tenth of Never.” Oh calm down sir! It’s not as if we’re asking you to do an ice luge in a tuxedo. Perhaps because I’m sort of poor and still drink like a college student, I think this is all pretty great. A decent boxed wine gets you more bang for your buck, is better for the environment, and has a longer shelf life. And now that boxed wine is getting sort of trendy and necessary, nicer wines are starting to become available in boxed form. Maybe you don’t want to be served from a box at a restaurant (…resisting immature joke), but why not pass around the plastic bag at a casual dinner party with friends?
Anyway, next time you’re spinning in circles chugging directly from a bag of Franzia while your friends cheer you on, remember this: you’re not just blacking out; you’re saving the environment.
[Posted by Mallory]
Filed under drinks, news, post-college depression
It seems that every so often, Kathleen or I get busy with exciting things going on in our real lives, and then we write a post apologizing for our embarrassing lack of blogging. I clearly just took a little hiatus myself, so let’s get you updated on my life, shall we?
The reason I’ve been more or less out of commission the past few days is that I made a huge, grown-up move to Washington DC. Hooray for me! I’m so mature that I even ordered our cable and Internet and bought (and put together!) my own bed. Chuckle all you want, but these things are huge for me. We didn’t have to do that stuff at my college. (Side story about the bed: I ordered it from Craigslist from this stranger boy, and arranged for it to be dropped off the next morning, while I was alone in my apartment. I told my mother this plan, and she immediately freaked out and assumed that I would be raped and murdered by said stranger boy. So naturally, I Facebooked him to see if I could gauge his rapist tendencies. Turns out, we sort of have a mutual friend, and also, he’s a professional lacrosse player. He didn’t rape or murder me, and now I get to sleep where a professional athlete once slept. Take that, Mom.)
Aside from slowly becoming a huge fake adult for the past few days, I’ve also been up in New York/New Jersey visiting some of my best friends from college. I hadn’t seen any of them all summer, and I was insanely excited to be reunited. The weekend did not disappoint.
For starters, I got to see the Counting Crows live, which made me giddy because they are my favorite band and I’d only seen them once before. Katie and I maybe had a little too much cheap wine before the concert, and we maybe forgot to eat dinner, and Katie maaaybe slept through Maroon 5, who opened, but it was still wonderful. I don’t care if Adam Duritz is old and kind of unattractive; he has dreadlocks and I’d like to marry him.
The rest of the weekend was filled with straight-up college-style debauchery, just as we hoped. There was drinking, excessive eating, obnoxious dancing, and enough stories to fill several books. Here are some highlights (and I truly wish I didn’t have to censor these, but if I’m ever going to change the world, people have to think I’m respectable):
Filed under adventures, blogging, celebrities, dance, drinks, food, music, post-college depression, religion, TV
You people may not know this, but I am an extremely mature human being. (Perhaps you gathered that from my previous posts.) In fact, I am so mature that last night I went out and had only ONE glass of wine! This is historic! Sure, I may have also eaten Smartfood for not one but two meals earlier that day, and maybe I stole the wine I was drinking from my mom, and maybe I drank my glass of wine while trying to one-up my new Denver friends with fratty college stories, but that is beside the point. And the point is, I drank in moderation and then went to work the next day. Which means I am basically an adult.
Speaking of work, guess what I did today? I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t get a chance to end the war in Iraq or invent a kind of cheese that doesn’t make you fat (there’s always tomorrow). I did, however, get to stuff checks into envelopes for nearly six hours. The thing is, I was REALLY good at stuffing the checks into the envelopes. I don’t mean to brag, but other people actually complimented me on my speed. Just saying. Perhaps I’ll nix the grad school plan and find a way to use my envelope-stuffing skills full time.
Anyway, here’s a photo of my coworker and me taking a break:
In other news, it’s almost Friday! YAY!
[Posted by Mallory]
Filed under drinks, post-college depression, random
Today’s video is brought to you by the number 4! Here is Feist (who I L-O-V-E) on Sesame Street singing a Sesame Street version of 1-2-3-4. I giggled the entire time. I think it’s really cute how in to it she gets. Also, this really struck me because I suffer from post-college depression and yearn for my youth and I was talking about an old Sesame Street video featuring Smokey Robinson with my mom just a few days ago. Kudos if you remember it too. If you don’t, maybe watching it will help you remember and make you nostalgic. Here’s You Really Got a Hold on Me, featuring and brought to you by, you guessed it, the letter U! I am such a child.
[Posted by Kathleen]
Filed under music, post-college depression, YouTube
Filed under post-college depression
May I rant?
Apparently, while Pierogi Zbylut was collecting acceptances to every elite school in the country, said elite schools were busy rejecting the rest of the qualified students out there, those students with names containing less z’s. One of the elementary school friends from the Rockies game has a little sister who’s headed off to college next year, and this girl’s college-rejection story makes me truly furious with the way our country deals with college admission. My friend’s sister — let’s call her Emily — was rejected from Dartmouth. Nothing shocking on its own; I’m among the ranks of prospective Ivy Leaguers who was flat-out rejected from the Big Green. Emily, however, was the the valedictorian of her high school (one of those truly hard high schools that have difficult admissions processes all their own), was a successful two-sport athlete who was being recruited by Dartmouth, was involved in a million activities, AND had a father, sister, and several cousins whose brains were filled with knowledge in Hanover, New Hampshire. Now I understand as much as anyone that the college admissions process is a crapshoot, and that there are a ton of factors that go into it, but SERIOUSLY? If a girl like that isn’t a shoe-in, something’s wrong. Maybe Pierogi can pass his Dartmouth acceptance on to Emily, since he won’t be needing it at Haaahvahd.
For a speech class I took a couple of years ago, I spoke about kids growing up too fast (taking full-time language classes at age four, for instance), and I feel like the college admissions process is just part of the screwed up way we are forcing kids these days to do everything and be perfect. A high school student shouldn’t have to spend all of her free time studying for AP tests, captaining a sports team, working on a student government campaign, volunteering with refugees, and curing cancer just to get into college. Give ’em some time to breathe, America.
And to the Emily’s of the world: it’s their loss. Anyway, I hear New Hampshire’s like really, really cold.
[Posted by Mallory]
Filed under post-college depression, random
I’ve got one thing to say to this guy: FREAK.
He moved from Poland just 5 years ago. But whatever, kid. You might have gotten into the entire Ivy League and a million other good schools (for sure the University of Richmond, heyyyyy) but this doesn’t change the fact that your name (Lukasz Zbylut) is going to get butchered by every professor you meet- just like the rest of us!
I also suffer from post-college depression and am taking it out on this defenseless, but brilliant, child. Do not judge me.
PS- He chose Harvard.
[Posted by Kathleen]
Filed under crushes, post-college depression, random
So last night I went out with two of my friends from elementary school (look at the longevity there). We went to a Rockies game, which is always a good time, and then stopped by a bar to see another friend’s band play. Various events in the night got me slightly freaked out about this whole being-an-adult thing (that is, if you consider living at home, temping as a receptionist, and still making bad decisions with alarming frequency being an adult). For starters, at the baseball game we sat in front of these obnoxious kids (including boys who were wearing strangely short shorts) who felt the need to comment on every aspect of the game, and loudly say things like “Should we take the shooters now?” I was blissfully happy eating my burrito, drinking my Coors Light, and staring at the mountains, so I was more entertained than annoyed by these strangers, but from an objective perspective, I could see that they were irritating as hell. My friends and I joked about this and laughed at the antics of these young hooligans, and then I realized…that was me. And I’m not talking that was me like waaay back in college a month ago, but that was me approximately a week ago, at a different Rockies game. People like that aren’t exactly loved by the rest of the population. How long can I get away with shit like this?
After it was clear that the Rockies were going to win (take THAT, Cleveland), we went to the bar to watch my friend’s band play. The band turned out to be awesome, and it was generally a great time. One of the highlights of this little concert was watching the hammered parents of the band members acting like college students, which means they were dancing on tables and making out in corners. This seems to answer the earlier question with a resounding “You can get away with shit like this for a long time! You can get blacked out on a Tuesday and grind up on strangers even when you have children of your own!” And even though I assume, if I’m being honest with myself, that I probably will be one of those parents one day, it still doesn’t seem quite right.
So after watching these drunk adults for a few hours, my elementary school friends left and I decided against my better judgement to stay for a while. After dancing like a hippie to the next band, whose lead singer had one of the greatest Jewfros I’ve ever seen, I started thinking I should go home, and I called a cab. Because my other friends didn’t have important things like filing invoices and answering phones to do the next day, they decided to stay. Which means I had to take a cab home alone. Now, I’m not the type of person who necessarily hates being alone, but I felt self-conscious and pathetic hopping into that yellow sedan all by my lonesome. I knowww that adults do that sometimes — I’ve seen it in the movies — but I didn’t like it.
As much I want to end this bit of rambling with a Carrie Bradshaw-esque conclusion that ties this all together with a neat analogy and an “I couldn’t help but wonder,” (i.e., “And I couldn’t help but wonder…was my fear of being alone in the cab indicative of a larger fear of being alone…forever?), I really don’t know where I’m going with this. I think part of me is still devastated that a night out is no longer a trip to a campus bar where everybody knows your name, you can pay for beer on your meal plan, and you can walk home in five minutes. I’m also not entirely sure what I can do with this borderline-alcoholism that we all pick up in college now that I’m (GASP) not in college. On the weekends, when my drink of choice is still a whiskey coke in shady water bottle form, it’s easier to pretend that nothing’s changed. But this whole “work” thing, this whole “growing up” thing, is really cramping my style. Thank god for grad school.
[Posted by Mallory]
six words to change the world. 
