If there's one gender stereotype I will admit to, one that is applicable to almost every girl out there, is the female tendency to overthink things. We girls will think about a situation, approach it from a different angle and think about it some more, put it aside for a while to think about other stuff, then come back to it a third time and think even more. It can be something relatively small. Guys, ever wait half an hour for your girl to pick an outfit? Know why? Because not only is she trying to decide what she looks best in, she's thinking all the way ahead to the next laundry day to decide whether she can spare this shirt or this sweater now or if she has to save it for some event later on in the week. Women live by the economic principle of opportunity cost. Before doing anything they will weigh the pros and cons of every conceivable outcome. Except when buying shoes. Most considerations go out the window when shoe-shopping. If it's cute and it fits, it's mine, bitches. I will admit to that also.

Thinking ahead is valuable sometimes, but a lot of the time it gets in our way. I can't sleep some nights because I can't stop thinking. Tonight is like that. I only slept four hours last night. I babysat all day. I'm tired. But my damned brain Will Not Turn Off. My mom has that problem too. But the worst is when absolutely irrational, random-ass stuff just pops into my head and won't go away. That, incidentally, is why I only got four hours of sleep last night.

Here is roughly my train of thought on Thursday e'en. My window was open and I could hear the eighteen-wheelers go by every so often. I thought of our country highway and how dangerous it is. I wondered why there weren't more accidents. I thought of some of the accidents I have seen. I thought about the people in those cars. And that's when the random-ass thought decided to appear: right now, as I lie here at two am, someone is alive and well, probably sleeping right now, who will be dead tomorrow because of some car accident. And that thought stuck around for a long time. Everything in me wanted to know who it was so I could somehow try to put a stop to it. I wanted so badly to somehow help, and I could not. I could only wish upon that person, please, stay home tomorrow, whatever you have to drive to is not worth your life, what it'll do to your family once you're gone, anything. Please stay home. But I am not omnipotent or omniscient, and here in my room I was helpless to stop the inevitable. After maybe an hour I finally fell asleep.

I didn't think about it much today. Then I got home and at six o'clock turned on the Channel 6 Action News. And the lead story, out of everything else that could possibly be happening in Philly or in the world, was about a car wreck on 95 that closed both lanes. Apparently some guy, drunk at the clearly understandable hour of ten am, swerved into a pickup truck, which then flipped onto the other side of the highway and hit two more cars. The drunk dude is still alive, but both people in the pickup were thrown from it and the driver was pronounced dead at the scene.

The drunk guy, incidentally, was from Jersey, and normally my first thought would have been god damn Jersey drivers, you fail at life, rawr, something like that. But all I could think about was that random thought I had the night before, how I tried to warn that guy, and could not. In a weird, twisted way I felt somehow responsible, like thinking about something like that caused it to happen. Now, am I in any way responsible for an inebriated New Jerseyan hitting someone on 95? I don't think so. But I can't shake this funny feeling.

And so here I am again, unable to sleep. I'm trying my damndest NOT to think. Really I am. But I'm a girl, and it's hard. Really, really hard. Guys, I hope your brains give you more peace than girls' brains give them. x.x

1. Mass Appeal of Soccer

Look at the girl in Carolina blue.

Her name is Tobin Heath. She's on the U.S. Womens Soccer Team and she will be playing in the Olympics this year in Beijing. She is also my suitemate. She lives next door to me in our dorm (in a room that, incidentally, Mia Hamm stayed in during her Carolina years). I share a bathroom with an Olympian. I have a picture of an Olympian post-food-fight at the end of freshman year, covered in strawberry shortcake and dish soap. She had a 'dorm sale' at the end of the year to get rid of stuff she didn't want to take along. I now own a hat that belonged to an Olympian. And in the fall I go to womens' soccer games a lot, as often as I can, because besides Tobin, I know a few more of those girls (Casey, Ali, Nikki). I've played Apples to Apples with them on occasion. I know a guys' soccer player too, and I support them when I can. But I have a rule. I never go to games alone, because I did it once, for the playoffs in '06 against Tennessee, and... I can't do it! There are just too many dead periods in soccer when it seems like nothing significant is happening. Sometimes entire games will go without goals. Just lots and lots and lots and LOTS of running. As long as I have friends there to make chitchat with, it's fine. I love these girls dearly, I respect the hell out of them for the endurance to basically RUN for 90 minutes straight (Tobin is fierce and rarely subs out), they have National Championship rings from freshman season. But. I'm sorry, soccer is still really boring. (Especially when compared to basketball, where stuff is Constantly Happening.)

2. High School Musical

Oh, sit the hell down. Crazy punk teenagers.

Now I've never seen this movie, because I don't need to. I already know the plot. Basketball star must overcome macho jock culture in order to fulfill acting dream. And it's not the formulaic, see-through plot I take issue with. It's the conflict itself. Namely... why is this a conflict?!?!

I don't know about YOUR high school. Maybe this was just because we had a graduating class of only about 200. But in mine, the jocks WERE the actors WERE the smart kids. A kid named Joey I had Enrichment with in middle school, for example. Obviously has at least a few brains. Was also one of our best comedic actors and was also on the football team! And there was no conflict. There were no drama club nerds. In fact, almost everyone who was in Drama Club was a really popular person (with the possible exception of 29, but he of course remained oblivious). Meg is another fine example. Tough field hockey player (once got a nasty black eye from a high ball), great actress, ridiculously intelligent, got voted to speak at graduation, second in the class overall, now goes to Brandeis. No conflict there either. So I'm sorry, I can never take this movie seriously, because none of the issues in it were EVER issues at my high school.

3. The Continued Existence of Dick Vitale

The picture almost speaks for itself here. I read in Will Blythe's book (excellent book, fyi) that he talked to some Carolina students who had invented a Dick Vitale drinking game. Players must drink any time Vitale says something about Dook. The catch: the game is only played when Vitale is announcing a game that Dook is not playing in. Quoth the students: "we're usually drunk by halftime".

I've been told that once, a long time ago, Dick Vitale was an interesting and enthusiastic commentator. Now every year he becomes more a caricature of himself. "Slam jam bam! Diaper dandies! Dipsy doo dunkaroo! That's awesome, baby!" Not only does he bring up Dook constantly, he's gotten in the habit of telling the same stories over and over again. Yes, Dick, we know you used to pull your granddaughters out of school for Dook-Carolina games because you think they're so great. Yes, Dick, we know about the double-overtime game in '95 when you banged your head on a pipe in Cameron, busted it open and just kept on going. What's worse is when he starts going off on some subject that isn't even remotely related to basketball, which has been happening more and more frequently. I know there were a lot of us, Carolina fans and others, who silently cheered when we heard he'd have to miss several weeks this past season because of a vocal cord injury. Really, Dick. Enough is enough.

Fun Fact: put Dick and Billy Packer together if you want to see a whole lot of Tar Heels go insane and kill themselves.

4. Purse-sized dogs

I'm sorry, but isn't the very nature of a dog supposed to be a decent-sized, tough thing, something to play with, maybe hunt with, something to protect the house? I really wouldn't want a dog that I might kill if I accidentally stepped on it, not to mention the fact that my ~15-20 pound cats would tear the thing to pieces. What a humiliating way for a dog to go.

5. The Way My Dad Eats Jello

He scoops it into a bowl, like that, and then pours milk over it. MILK. Wtf? It's not a damn breakfast cereal. I have never heard of anyone else doing such a thing and I don't know where he gets it from.

Perhaps this will continue later, since there's plenty of other stuff I Just Plain Don't Get. Anything you out there in xanga-land are mystfied about? I may be able to clarify, especially if your topic involves anything liberal, or the Amish. :)

It is a fundamental characteristic of beauty to be subjective. I happen, for example, to think Tyler Hansbrough is very beautiful. Jourdan thinks he is cross-eyed. (Which is fine; more for me.)

It's also characteristic of beauty to be heavily influenced in this subjectivity by social norms. African women who extend their necks with coils or put plates through their lower lips do it because that's what is considered beautiful.

Now perhaps this has only come into my head because of a steady tirade of insults that come on weekdays from my twelve-year-old charge and her ten-year-old cohort (who I am not being paid to watch but somehow lack the authority to ban from the house), but it occured to me yesterday that I never feel as badly about myself as I do when I am home. That perhaps my self-worth, and maybe my actual relative worth, have more to do with location than anything else. I have reason to believe that I am not ugly so much as I am Pennsylvania-ugly.

Now by Pennsylvania I do not mean the entire state. If you've never had the misfortune of driving through it, Pennsylvania is huge. I myself have never journeyed much further west than Harrisburg or much further north than Allentown, so Pennsylvania in this case means my particularly southeasterly country part of it. And according to the sensibilities of this place, I am ugly.

It's not entirely looks, although that's a part of it. Perhaps it's my heritage. Something about a broad Italian nose and a pair of narrow Polish eyes set far too deep offends something rooted in these people of German descent, people who come from good Northern European stock. But it's deeper than that; it's that in a lot of categories, I'm just not what these people are.

This is a religious place, the Amish only being the most extreme example. And I am not religious in the slightest bit.

This is a politically conservative place, sometimes very close to racist (sometimes racist outright, as it was many times on my school bus), and I am certainly not that.

It is above all a place fiercely loyal to itself. Devoted to the local sports and businesses and intent on keeping its children close. There is no room for people who dislike the Eagles and whose great grand ambition in life involves something bigger than a house on a hill in Wyomissing. If you decide you are too big, too ambitious, too good for this place, the place and the people suddenly decide they are too good for you. You're not staying? Then you are irrelevant. You either go unnoticed or are actively repelled, because what you are is repellent to these people and their values. You are Pennsylvania-ugly.

Now this is not necessarily to say that I am somehow Carolina-pretty. But I have noticed something. I have not fundamentally changed since high school. My parents (or at least my dad) thought I had poor social skills because I hate small-talk and I'm very direct to the point of bluntness when I carry on a conversation, in the interest of absolute honesty, and because I had only a few close friends. I didn't actively seek people out and the people were happy to leave me in my shadowy corner because I was irrelevant and Pennsylvania-ugly and what did I matter?

Nothing has changed since then. I still hate small-talk and I am still blunt and I don't seek people out. But for whatever reason, people now seek me out. Even though I don't party or do most of the cliched college-y stuff, I now have friends upon friends. Good friends. Friends who are guys, which was basically impossible or at least very unrealistic of me to hope for in Pennsylvania, where I am ugly. So I must conclude that there was really never anything terribly wrong with me. I am just wrong for Pennsylvania, or for this part of it at least, if this hypothesis is correct.

And so I must ask you, Pennsylvania and fortunate non-Pennsylvania public alike: do you think it's possible to be regionally ugly?

I don't know if the ag department was experimenting on us all that time, or if it's some kind of socio-cultural thing, or if it had to do with the economy or what have you. But there are just too many from the Weiser class of '06 that suffer from a really serious lack of any sort of ambition whatsoever.

I'm not talking about the bottom third of the class or anything, either. I'm pretty sure Stoltz is still working at the movie theater and probably getting blazed out of his mind at least once a week. Although there are a few of these. (Almost all of the following is hearsay. Nothing I've discovered myself but things told to me by friends. But they are friends I am inclined to believe.) For example. My friend Melissa works at a campground and someone came in the other day to reserve some part of it for a wedding reception some time from now. It was a boy by the name of Brent Fisher, who is apparently getting married and already has a kid. At the age of nineteen. I cannot fathom this.

An old friend of mine, Amanda Jones, who went from being heavily into rap as a young teenager, to slightly-almost-sorta goth by the end of high school, to a working-class country music girl as of late, just got engaged. At the age of nineteen. She lives with the boy (who is apparently a Mennonite- I really can't fathom that) and they just got a puppy.

But no, what really gets to me is the fates of some of our best and brightest. Out of a graduating class of slightly over 200, I think four or five opted for an out-of-state school. These are people with not only the intelligence but in some cases the money to attend prestigious schools. And yet they never ventured far from the womb. Millersville, West Chester, Shippensburg, East Stroudsburg, Bloomsburg, Kutztown, Susquehanna. DeSales. We were never close, but I liked Melissa Egan alright. She got an absolute boat-load of scholarships... and went to DeSales. Nothing against her, of course. I'm sure she was thorough in her selection process and was happy with her choice. But I was at DeSales once and it is one of the most depressing places I have ever been. Maybe it was just the day we went, but everything just seemed so terribly bleak. Everything was gray and outside of campus were endless fields of nothing. It just didn't make any sense. That out of this many people, so few of us were really aiming high. I guess Penn State is moderately prestigious and I know it was a lot of people's grand goal in life to go there. But what I didn't understand is why almost no one even applied anywhere they thought was out of their reach, either academically or financially. Even if they wanted to stay in-state, I mean... why not try UPenn? What the hell have you got to lose?!

And now Annamarie McCormick is engaged too and I really don't know what to think. How can anyone be so sure that a person they've found at nineteen is the person they want to spend the rest of their life with, when they haven't even finished school or experienced a fraction of what the world has to offer? Am I crazy? How can you know what you want when you don't even know who you are yet?

These people must have a level of self-assurance I may never approach at any point during the remainder of my life. Maybe I'm the one with the wrong idea and my life ambition ought to be an engagement within the next year. Sorry I didn't come to college for my Mrs. degree. I guess I was wrong to assume we were no longer living in the 1950's.

No offense to anyone who might be nineteen and engaged. But... damn. That's one of those things in life I Just Don't Get.