Someone Thought I Was a Man Yesterday, So I Ate Half a Pizza By Myself

Hello. My name is Sara, and I am not a supermodel.
Now, that is perfectly easy for me to say. I am not upset that I will never strut the catwalk during Fashion Week wearing clothing that costs a gajillion dollars while people take endless pictures of me. I happily accept that I will not be featured on the cover of a magazine for my beauteous looks. I will never be the girl that walks in a room and every guy turns to stare, and I prefer it that way.
I am content with being ordinary looking.
Now, that being said, I do try to keep up with my appearance, and I have a perhaps slightly unhealthy love of clothes (hence the bargain fashion blog). I make an effort to at least negotiate some sort of treaty with my ungovernable hair, at least when I’m going out in public. I don’t wear eye makeup, true (every time I try I inevitably forget I have it on and rub my eyes), but I do wear some makeup. In short, I try to look at least presentable, and I am usually happy with how I look, even if I’m not the fairest of them all. I can accept that.
But does it really strain credibility for me to believe that I am fairly easy to recognize as a girl? Is it asking too much to expect people to be able to identify my gender?
Apparently for one of the employees at CiCi’s Pizza, it is.
Yesterday for lunch my dad and I went to CiCi’s, which is a pizza buffet if you’ve never eaten there. It’s already pretty cheap, but then from 2-4 they have a happy hour sort of thing where you get the buffet for $3.95. That’s all the pizza I can eat for cheaper than a gallon of gas costs in some places in Oklahoma right now. Let me stress that I really love CiCi’s and its great bargainyness. So we roll up for lunch and I’m all excited, not just about the price but also because CiCi’s has one of my favorite types of pizza ever- Alfredo Cheese Pizza. If you’ve never had any… I’m sorry. It’s glorious. But more on that later.
So anyway, everything goes normally; we pay, select our pizza, get our drinks, and then go to sit down. As we are doing so, there is a busser who goes around and cleans up the tables after people (there’s no waiters or anything), and he’s cleaning the table next to the booth I choose. So my dad and I are about to sit down, but we stop to let him push past the booth with his cart so he can go to the one behind us. He does so, and just before we go to sit down, he says, “Can I get you gentlemen anything else?”

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What.
What.
WHAT.
I was honestly so shocked that I just didn’t say anything. My dad says something, and I just go to sit down in the booth, when the busser apparently seems to realize that I was not, in fact, a man. He says embarrassedly, “Oh, sorry. It’s been a long day.”

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Um, I’m sorry, but it’s barely two in the afternoon. What kind of day have you had that by two in the afternoon you’re so frazzled that you mistake me for a man? Because, and I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY QUIT. I didn’t think I was dressed particularly boyish either. I mean, I admit I think that I look like a boy with my hair up sometimes, but it was totally down. Guys, I’d even CURLED IT for the first time in ages. I’ve been sleeping in til like 1:30 every day and my straightener is in its death throes and nearly impossible to keep on for more than 30 seconds at a time, so I’ve just been throwing my hair in some sloppy side bun/pinned blob/hair style using lots of clips (oh, the glamorous life I lead). I mean, I’m not saying it was the BEST look I’ve ever done, but I was planning on taking a picture of the outfit to put in my fashion blog. I just… I don’t know. You be the judge:

I mean, perhaps camel isn’t my best color, BUT OMG DO I REALLY LOOK LIKE A MAN

You can tell from my not quite full, patently unreal smile that I was feeling very bitter when I got home afterwards and took this picture. I just… the silky shirt, the curly hair, and the statement necklace? I was wearing navy shorts and leopard flats. There were no clues for you, CiCi’s guy, really no clues??
Sigh.
Backing up a little to regain the thread of my narrative (see, that English degree was worth something), as I mentioned I absolutely loved CiCi’s Alfredo Cheese Pizza. Now, I already have a tendency to eat more at CiCi’s than I should, because IT’S A PIZZA BUFFET. But honestly, I pretty much just eat the Alfredo Cheese Pizza. Now, the nice thing about CiCi’s is that if the pizza you want isn’t out on the buffet, all you do is request it, and they will whip you up as many slices of it as you want. ACP is usually not put out on the buffet, so I almost always end up requesting it, and when I do I usually request like four or five slices, because go big or go home. I figure if I’m going to request it, I want to make sure I get enough. Well, today I was feeling especially hungry, so I requested six pieces of ACP. The poor guy gave me this sort of aborted, partial double take, but bless his heart, all he said was, “Six it is.” He somehow managed to not give me a disbelieving look because I was requesting half a pizza, which I was impressed by.
So fast forward, and I’ve gone to sit down at my booth, with the number for my table so they know where to bring all that hot, alfredo-ey goodness clutched in my hand, and The Incident happens. Five to ten minutes later, they finally bring out my 6 pieces of ACP (on two different plates). In the interim while I was waiting for my ACP pizza, I had already managed to eat a breadstick, some pasta, and another small piece of pizza. And yet, when it arrived, I ate all 6 pieces of ACP in about five minutes. Absolutely demolished them. I then got up and had a piece of dessert pizza and two cinnamon rolls.
I ask you this, Dear Readers. What else is a girl to do when someone mistakes her for a man?
My solution– eat like a man. Then go home and take mopey selfies to use when you go cry about it in your blog.

Tonight I will be attending the bachelorette party of one of my incredibly sweet friends from high school, Kady Groh. A couple of weeks ago, I bought myself a new dress that was $23, way more than I usually spend on any one clothes item. But I really wanted to look good, because it’s my first bachelorette party I’m attending as a 21 year old, and we’re going OUTTT. So tonight, I’m going to curl my hair again, and put a flower in it. I’m going to put on my pretty, beaded dress. I’ll pull on my black heeled boots, and BY GOD I’M WEARING EYE MAKEUP.
And if someone mistakes me for a man, I will not be held responsible for my actions.

Миний агаарын даралтыг ашиглан хөвөгч усан онгоцийг дүүрэн могой загас юм,
Sara

PS So this is a good one today, I decided to do Mongolian because I felt like I wanted to disappear to Mongolia because I was so embarrassed by The Incident. So on this random site I clicked on that purported to have useful Mongolian phrases, I found the one from above which apparently means, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” That makes about as much sense to me as yesterday did, so it seemed appropriately awesome.

Why Camus is Responsible for Me Missing Class, Wanting a Tattoo, and General Other Tomfoolery

Hey, Readers.
In case you were sad or missed me (optimism), I apologize for going so long without writing. The problem was that I’ve been buried under a landslide of homework, especially relating to a class I’m taking called Senior Seminar. You have to take this class to graduate from my college, and basically all you do is write a really long essay. For some reason, I decided to specially arrange mine with a different professor and choose my own topic. I then proceeded, for some reason, to go with existentialism as my topic. I have been wading through an avalanche of Albert Camus for the past week. If you know nothing of existentialism, don’t look it up. It will probably make you very depressed. I find it fascinating, but somewhat overwhelming, and I’ve been drowning in something of an existential sea lately. I just finished (mostly) a book-long essay by Camus. It was admittedly pretty rough. But I’m here now, and hopefully I’ll be able to refrain from bombarding you with Camus-esque sayings and existential despair.
There’s been a strange repertoire of thoughts jostling around in my head for the last week; today was a Tuesday and in Political Geography Hitler guy continued to astound me with his painful awkwardness, constant commenter guy tried to chat with me, and Dr. Crow told a story about how for three days in a row in 2006 he beat geese with a stick at a local park. My mind was a little bewildered after class today.
I’ve also been terribly poor lately, and with my apartment bill coming due this week I’ve been avoiding shopping like the plague, and it’s been really hard, okay. I finally gave in yesterday and went to a thrift store with my friends, and even though all I bought was a shirt for 91 cents, I still felt a little better just for having tried clothes on. Speaking of, I’m going to be putting my outfit and my cute, less-than-a-dollar shirt on my other blog, so you should definitely do me a favor and check that out. If  $0.91 isn’t a bargain, I don’t know what is. Also, I don’t know the next time I’ll be able to go shopping because, frankly, the only way I’d have the money to is if someone took pity on me:

In the same vein of wildly improbable things that will never happen, I have decided that my next post is going to be a list of either my top favorite wedding dresses that I could never afford that I’ve ever seen on the internet, or my favorite hot guys I want to marry but will never even come within a mile of. Since I wrote so much on the hopeless romance of my life, I vowed to avoid it for awhile, but I have to comment on something frustrating- why is it that every hot guy you randomly see on TV, even if they’re not that famous, all already have girlfriends or are engaged? I was watching the FA Cup this weekend, which is a soccer tournament in England where all the lower level clubs get the chance to play bigger level clubs. There’s a lot of “giant-killing” that goes in, if you’re familiar with the term, which is why I love the FA Cup. In some instances, it’d be like if the University of Oklahoma basketball team beat the OKC Thunder. Now, I’ve already noted the fact numerous times that English soccer leagues seem to have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to hot guys (strangely, especially goalies), but the FA Cup has taught me this is true even in the lower levels of English soccer. Consequently while I was watching this weekend, I saw this super hot keeper playing for the lower league team. Naturally, I creeped him… and he was engaged. Sigh. And recently my favorite club, Tottenham Hotspur, signed a 22 year old player from Germany who is terribly attractive. I checked him out… and he has a long-term girlfriend. My plan to marry someone out of the English soccer league (they will have two of my big wish list items for a potential mate, an accent and a love of soccer) is never going to work if they all ruin it by already having significant others. It’s terribly inconvenient. I’d been planning for years to set my sister up with one of our favorite single players from Tottenham, only to discover he’d gotten married behind my back and ruined my dream of a sister/brother-in-law that would provide the necessary access to all these hot, young soccer guys. It’s no wonder that I’m so accepting of this:

This was made by my brilliant best friend Skye, by the way, and I was absolutely remiss in not including it in my last post, where it would’ve been so appropriate. However, the only slight alteration I would make is to change “spouses” to “spouse.” While I have no doubt that Skye (who is like one of those girls you see in movies, aka gorgeous, smart, funny, and yet still so genuinely nice that it’s impossible to hate her even a little bit) will end up with a spouse, I have my doubts about myself. But I don’t doubt that we will end up with cats together at some point in our lives, because we are catmates (our souls are bonded with friendship and a love of cats).
And if this is not proof enough that Skye is awesome, then let me just share something with you- she gave me the password to her Amazon Prime account so I can watch the second season of Downton Abbey online, since only the first is on Netflix. (At this point, I hope you’re saying, well of course this girl likes Downton Abbey. I assure you, it was inevitable). That is true best friendship. Sadly, the overabundance of Camus I’ve been soaking in lately has rather prevented me from actually catching up on Downton, much to my frustration.
Camus is also partially the reason that I missed my first class this morning. I was up really late trying to finish the Camus book essay I mentioned (The Rebel, if you’re interested), and it took me forever. And then, to compound matters, I got sucked into the black hole of the internet and started looking at literary tattoos, a topic I find fascinating since I plan to get one soon. Long story short, I was going to get approximately four hours of sleep when I laid down for bed, but then I couldn’t sleep. I maybe got two hours total before my alarm went off at 8:15. Groggily I rolled over to look at it in a stupor before hitting the snooze button. The third time it went off, I finally picked up my phone and actually looked at it. I randomly get the forecast on my phone every day, and what to my wondering eye should appear, but the alert that we were in a TORNADO WATCH. In JANUARY. That’s just Oklahoma for you, guys. One of the most famous quotes about this place is from Oklahoman Will Rogers, about how if you don’t like the weather here, wait a minute. It’s so true. Anyway, so I noted in disbelief that we were in a tornado watch, listened to the rain absolutely hammering down outside, considered the fact that I didn’t bring my rainboots to school this week because I had no idea it was going to rain, and decided I was going back to sleep. I’m not going to class during a tornado watch. Especially when I’ve been up all night reading Camus. It’s just too much for my soul to handle.
Something else that occupied my time last night is that I….drumroll, please… PAINTED MY NAILS! You might not be impressed with this, but you should be. I never paint my nails because I’m terrible at it and my nails are usually so short there’s barely anything to paint. I can’t stand for my nails to be long, plus I have tiny hands, and these two things combined make it look like a five year old has painted her nails whenever I do it. But I actually like how it turned out:

I always see nail tutorials that call for nail polish that costs tons of money, but I got those two colors and topcoat from Dollar Tree for $3. I call this look “The Shimmery Mermaid.” I’m sure you’re very impressed. Also, if you’re curious as to why I have the number 11 on my hand, it’s because that was the snack count for my kids today. Because that is what working at a daycare reduces you to- writing down snack count on your hands.
The last thing I want to talk about in this post is another thing that’s really been taking up my attention lately. I found this blog on Pinterest and decided to check it out, and let me just tell you, it’s awesome. It’s a list of ways to travel cheaply, something I am incredibly committed to doing. Pretty soon I’m probably going to do a travel blog post, where I show you pictures and talk about the different amazing places I’ve been able to travel to so far in my life. But from this other blog post, I have been poring over the first entry, Work Away, which allows you to select pretty much any country you might want to go to, and then shows you job openings from people all over the world. They can range from anything; from working on a carnival in Romania to house-sitting in the Swiss Alps to lambing on a Welsh farm. The variety is amazing, and the best part is that to be on this website, you must be checked out and verified as a legitimate host, so it’s safe. I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to take one of these jobs, now it’s just a matter of finding the right one! I’m sure I’ll be talking about it more in future posts.
Well, everyone, I feel like I’ve sufficiently bored you all with a glut of random, useless details from my life to make up for my week-long absence, so I’m going to wrap it up. Please check out the new outfit post on my other blog, and also, please check out this write-up that my wonderful, talented friend Lauren did over my blogs in her online article for a local newspaper. That’s also a sign of best friendship right there, when your friends use their job to promote your hobby! Go give her some love, and check out and like her photography page as well. She’s not just a wonderful writer, she is also an unbelievably talented photographer and she took my favorite picture of me ever.

Adieu,
Sara

PS I had to go with French tonight, because that is the nationality of the great Camus (even if he was born in Algiers, he was still very, very French).

And So It Begins

Heyyyy errybody.

So. I thought I’d just start off straightforward with you all. I really, really, really like to sleep. Honestly, I’m afraid I’m never going to amount to anything but sleepy. It also, at times, affects my productivity. And that’s part of the reason I took so long to write my first post on here.
The second reason is, I couldn’t think of the right thing to say. This is my very first blog post; it seems like it should be something really momentous to properly celebrate the occasion. Perhaps it’s from numerous English classes and four years of being an English major. I was always taught that one of the most important things that you can do as a writer is to create a gripping, enthralling hook at the beginning of whatever you’re writing to draw people in and hold their attention.
I have been distressingly hook-less the past few days.
But eventually (tonight) I just decided I had to go for it. I’m terrifyingly nervous, for some reason, so much so that I don’t want to post this. But you have to start somewhere, and I’m going to start with just telling you a little about myself, and why I’ve decided to start this blog.
I am a senior in my last semester of college, and I admittedly am in a bit of a daze over the fact. It seems impossible to me that in a few short months, April to be exact, I will be done with the main occupation of my time since I started pre-school at the age of three. I’m about to have to be an “adult.” I cannot express to you how woefully unprepared I feel for this. I have no idea what job I want, and I have no practical experience in my degree field. This is slightly distressing to me.
Knowing this, I also know that this year is going to be one of incredible change for me, and one of the most important transitional periods of my life. Considering I want to be a writer, it just made sense to me to write about it. I want to travel, I want to try new things, I want to do something that makes me happy. I’m hoping here is the place where I can record all of the things I will hopefully be accomplishing. I honestly don’t know yet what exactly I’m going to be saying in any given post, or how often I’ll want to write, but I do know I’m excited to do this. And I hope you all will be excited to share it with me.
I don’t have too much else to say that’s terribly exciting tonight. I’m getting sick, and it’s rather cold in Oklahoma currently. I have been watching videos and pinning pins on Pinterest, wrapped up in two blankets, since I got back from work at like 5:30 (it’s 11:05 now, in case you didn’t know). I feel slightly miserable and not at all like doing anything. That’s why it’s unfortunate that, alas, I have homework still. I’m minoring in Spanish, and it’s a lot of work, you guys. Oh, the woes of a college student. But I suppose that those won’t be mine to bemoan for much longer…. So. Strange. But for now, I will bid you all good night, for I have homework to listlessly attempt to do and a bed to get sleeping in. Hopefully I’ve got a little bit of a hook in your attention, and you’ll come around for my next post. In the meantime, feel free to check out my other blog that deals with bargain fashion. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing. You can also check out my permanent about me posts if you’re interested in learning a little more… about me. Imagine that.
For now, I have mildly sick person whining to do.

Buenas noches,
Sara