GIRLS ARE NOT FUNNY

Two Boys, a Bag of Hangars and a Road Trip

Orlando, FL to Grand Rapids, MI

It’s the last Friday of May 2012, late into the night, so I suppose it’s really early Saturday morning. I have just celebrated my last night in Central Florida with about thirty of my friends and I have nothing left to do but lie on the couch with my feet propped, large grin on my face and repeatedly thank God for the last five months. The experience was rich, the people real and the time so regenerating upon the prior state of my restless, twenty something soul. If there were hiccups, they were mild and quickly remedied by a Family Dinner or a conversation with one of the many loving friends I had acquired. It’s almost unreal, maybe even incorrect how flawless that time was, but there I lied, into the night, relentlessly and joyfully thanking God for everything.

During my time there, I kept in touch with the three musketeers and even roped two thirds of them into driving up to the Midwest with me toward my next location. Jessica traveling with two boys, all of my dreams had come true.

The trip started off strong – last looks with my closest friends at a coffee shop. What exactly is a last look? How do you actually perform a last look? Glad you asked. A last look is an intensive stare designed to provoke emotion upon the subject in which you are giving the last look. Tilt your head in an unnatural direction, completely obsolete to which direction you are actually looking. Proceed to pierce your eyes upon your subject in a manner somewhere between a stare and a glare. This technique will produce effective last looking.

I did this all throughout my going away party. I’d whisper someone’s name across the room, grab their attention and last look the sense out of them. But seriously, it only made people self-conscious, looking themselves up and down wondering if they had something on them, or did something wrong. A couple people even left their conversations, traveled across the room toward me, with a raised brow wondering what I had to say.

Right before we left for the coffee shop, as the boys were so kindly packing up the last remains of what I own into my car, I hear one of them, Leighton, yell, “Jessica! We are not taking this bag of hangars!”

Stubborn rage instantly swells in my stomach. Last time I road tripped across the country, I left the hangars and you know what, I spent about fifty bucks on hangars upon my arrival into Florida. There was no way I was doing it again. We were bringing the hangars.

“Over my dead body!” I yell back, “We are bringing those hangars!” We do this back and forth for a while – iron wills battling over a trash bag full of about a hundred white, plastic hangars. I somehow let my guard down, get distracted and disengage from the battle. My first mistake.

On our way to the coffee shop, during mid-sentence, the other musketeer, Jason, begins cackling. His only excuse – he had just thought of something funny. My defenses build, my senses strengthen and I know something is fishy. It takes about thirty seconds and then I see it. As we were following Mj’s car, that resembles more of a toaster than an actual car, toward the coffee shop, I see it. There in her back window is a white trash bag bulging with hangars – my hangars!

“Leighton! Those are my hangars!” I yell, completely amazed with his unashamed, creative and strategic move.

Then, ever so calmly, as he was lounging in my backseat, through a cheeky smirk, Leighton casually states, “Oh yeah. We’re not bringing those.”

Through yells, rage and a whole lot of laughing, I assure him that we are in fact, bringing those hangars.

When we arrive, I immediately tell the girls what Leighton has done and recruit them to get the hangars back into my car. They oblige, but Danielle, who was conveniently in town and well acquainted with Leighton says to me, “You know Jess, even if you get these hangars in your car, Leighton will just sneakily throw them in a dumpster at your first stop.” Deep in my heart, I know this is true. He would stop at nothing and at the very least, throw them out the window one by one along the way. But my will raged on and I grabbed that bag and shoved it into the very last spot opened for any last piece of anything in my car. I pushed, I punched, I recombobulated. And no matter what I did, the hangars did not fit and only hung over awkwardly onto the lucky person who got to sit in the back seat.

Tragically, Leighton was right, those hangars were not going anywhere.

I took a deep breath, played my cards correctly and still battled it out with Leighton. I did this all so we could “compromise” by him paying me for the hangars. “Fine!” he yelled, “I’ll just give you money if we don’t take the hangars!”

Honestly, I think we all won, in some way.

After coffee, in a little less than a day’s time,

Leigh and Jason at The Chocolatier in Chattanooga, TN

the three of us booked it up to Leighton’s hometown, where we spent the weekend before I took my leave for my summer dwellings. It was an awesome weekend, full of relaxing, new people, a total crush on Leighton’s dad who spent the weekend trying to convince me to come back in November for deer hunting,

Picking out my gun for November

a family farm and an adult pool party – which sounds dirty, but isn’t, I’ve just never been to a pool party as an adult.

So here I have been now, for a few weeks, in Chicago.

I’m in Miami, Young-Respectable-Woman

Miami, FL

I just moved across the country. So naturally I am asked 100 times a day, “Why did you move?” And for some reason, “Because I could,” just doesn’t seem like an acceptable answer. Everyone is waiting for an answer that involves the clouds parting and an audible voice from the Lord telling me to head east. Truth is, I had just come off a couple years of intense growth and fulfillment at Impact, started school full time, and was simply, bored. Boredom is what probably gave birth to this blog.

When my friends and I travel, we visit people, we visit people so hard. It was no wonder that Madi, Mj and Danielle at the end of our road trip found ourselves somewhere near Miami hanging out with a house full of boys. When we visit, we also do it intentionally; we even had a mission statement that involved passing out money to anyone in need along the way. But I ended up changing that to – get Madi and me someone to make out with. Harmless crude humor would do us some good, since we’re blatantly far too prude to actually see it through.

Back to the boys. There was the reason we were there, Danielle’s boyfriend. There was the three Musketeers – college best friends who are like N-List famous for a parody twitter account that stalk the daughters of political figure, Jon Huntsmand, and lastly, this blog-inspiring, video game-lovin’, “5^th roommate.”

5^th Roommate made a stellar first impression. Standing at 6’6”, he whipped out his obviously rehearsed, defense mechanism of asking all of us, “So how short are you?” In which we pulled out our obviously rehearsed gaming lingo to relate with him for comedy’s sake. “So I hear you like Zelda. Did you know I made it to the 39^th level of Zelda?” Danielle announced.

“Yeah, there aren’t 39 levels of Zelda.” He hesitatingly replied, bummed that she had never actually played.

I chimed in, “So do you like to play Halo?”

“Yeah, I like Halo.” He affirmed.

“Well, I’ve played once, maybe twice and you want to know my strategy?” I asked with raised brows. “I named myself Steve Irwin so people would feel real bad when it popped up on their screen of who they had just killed.” I scored some points with that one.

Madi didn’t make such a great first impression. When visiting a ministry that most of them worked at, Madi asked, “Is this the innovation room I heard one of you is going to renovate?” The room had already been finished, completely. The poor girl didn’t live it down all weekend and spent some serious time trying to make up for it, all the while the rest of us just imitated her by saying things like, “Is this your house? Is this your car? Is this a picture of your girlfriend?”

5^th Roommate, horny as I’ll get out, made some valiant attempts at Madi and I, the only single ladies of the four of us. He made eye contact frequently, asked questions he pretended to be interested in, and was somehow touching you when you didn’t even know he was in the room. But it only took one night of these valiant attempts to see we weren’t exactly picking up what he was putting down and finally, he probably deemed us – not that hot anyway and moved on.

We all thoroughly enjoyed observing 5^th Roommate, all weekend. For instance, Josh, Mj’s friend from home who came as well, comes into our room and says, “I think 5^th Roommate is high. Like seriously high.” Madi and I just shrugged it off. But then the next morning Josh came with some good news. “So when 5^th Roommate came in last night, which was like 5am (after a night of gaming), he farted. He farted like 16 times and after every fart, he would giggle. And I’m not talking about airy farts. He would just fart and giggle and I was the only one awake to hear it! And guess what? He was high! One of the 3 Musketeers told me he does a legal drug similar to weed.” Madi and I began dying at the thought of hanging out with the equivalent of a 14 year old boy.

Though it seemed like 5^th Roommate’s chances of finding love during our visit seemed slim, we were all proven wrong. A larger group of us rented a house on one of Miami’s canals and spent the night on the town in South Beach. Here’s the thing about 5^th Roommate, he is kind of striking, in a high fashion kind of way. Literally, though. When word hit that 5^th Roommate had done some modeling before he moved out to Florida, Danielle and I forced ourselves upon the contents of a potential portfolio.

Before we knew it, 5^th Roommate had us online showing us surprisingly good photos of himself. “Wow, do they tell you how to pose?” I asked.

“No, I just kind of did whatever felt natural.”

And then they started getting a little too high fashion. “Are you wearing a mesh shirt? 5^th Roommate is that your nipple? Are those little white shorts?”

Danielle and I were eating it up. We continued to scroll. “5^th Roommate, is that a tarp? What are you doing with that tarp?” Danielle asked. “Wait, go back to the tarp ones.” Sure enough, 5^th Roommate was twirling a blue camping tarp around like he was competing in the Olympics with it.

It was probably these striking, high fashion looks that got the attention of one of the girls that came out with us that night. Apparently she had a single cousin or something and sent a picture of 5^th Roommate over to her. By the next night, 5^th Roommate had scored himself a date and we were eager all to see how it went.

He walked in, smile on his face. We all began hollering. Once that simmered, he finally got out, “She is so gorgeous!” The hollering sparked up again. And then he just went into it, everything he said was gold, “She was like 5% Kim Kardashian. She even had a little cleavage. She was probably a 34C. Nah, well maybe like a very full 34B. She got a chicken Caesar salad. She even called me honey.” And then there was the best of all, what we were all wondering, “And she didn’t have one problem at all with my gaming!” Match made in heaven.

So there you have it, no make outs for Madi and me, but looks like love is on the horizon for 5^th Roommate, gamer-extraordinaire.