Exams? What exams?

Top 3.5 Distractions From Studying for Exams

1. Target
2. Watching the best parts of the movie we rented on Friday night
3. Extreme Makeover: Home Edition
3.5 Re-organizing the living room

Let’s be honest: no one – no one – does their homework on Friday nights. Fridays are Blockbuster nights. And no one studies for exams on Saturdays because what you learn is not going to stick in your brain until Monday. Sunday mornings are for sleeping late and getting lattes at Starbucks. So by default, Sunday nights are for studying. But on Sundays, there’s a million things I’d rather do. This is just 3 ½ of them.

Target…Lucie and I usually hit the bullseye around 4 or so and wander the aisles starting with the shoes. We like to try on the flip-flops and sometimes Lucie will wear a pair around the store while we shop to try them out. This sounds tacky but you have to do this, you do. I have owned flip-flops where the plastic thong part never gets soft and I get blisters between my toes every time I wear them so naturally I don’t wear them and what a waste of money that is. You can usually tell this is going to happen if you wear them around for an hour or so. Now, if it’s cold in the store, Luce will grab a jacket and wear that around and never buy it and that IS tacky.

We hit the books and electronics section next and I’ll read some paperbacks for a few minutes while my sister looks at CDs and movies. We never buy anything in this section. Then we swing around and check out the bath area where we pick out vibrant color schemes and fancy appliances for when we win the lottery and finally can redecorate our apartment.

Lucie and I have wanted to buy an espresso maker for like, years. It seems like we would save money if we bought one, that we wouldn’t go out for Starbucks all the time but whenever we sit down to figure it out, the numbers never add up. We’d have to own one for like, seven years before it would start saving us money and who knows where we will be then? I mean, I like Lucie and all but in 4 years, I am out of here. I can’t imagine we’ll still be living together by the time that espresso machine pays off.

Anyway, around 5:30, we pay for whatever we have (sometimes nothing, sometimes shampoo and tampons) and then order a Pizza Hut personal pizza with pepperoni and a large Diet Coke which we split while we read magazines.

Then it’s time to go home where we…

Watch the best parts of the movie we rented on Friday night. Since we rarely agree on what movie to rent (Lucie has THE worst taste in movies), we alternate picking titles. Let’s say it’s Lucie’s night and she’s picked “Bewitched” (which was seriously the WORST movie of all time), I will probably only slightly pay attention when we watch it on Friday. But then two days pass and somehow on Sunday night, the prospect of watching it again before we return it seems very appealing. We skip all the boring crap and suddenly it’s two thumbs up from the Shanley sisters.

This past weekend we rented “Entourage,” Lucie’s choice. It was okay, I guess. I didn’t think it was that realistic and the guys were just mooching off their friend and not really contributing much. I don’t think Luce liked it either but she just wanted to show off how much she knows about Hollywood. Just because her boyfriend lives there, she thinks she’s some expert. She’s all like, that’s the Urth Café on Melrose and that’s Paramount Pictures, which I have to admit is pretty cool. She and her boyfriend Aaron, who’s an unknown singer/songwriter (no offense, Aaron) mostly hang out at his place or go to small clubs to check out his friends who are also unknown singer/songwriters (again, no offense, Aaron) so they’re not at like, red carpet premieres or anything but it’s cool that she knows where these places are.

So we return the video and then come back for…

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. I am such a sucker for this show. I can’t watch the first half hour of it because The Simpsons are on opposite but I flip back and forth on the commercials and then watch it when my show is over. What can I say? You’ve got needy families and Ty Pennington and great new furniture and lots of tears and happiness. What more could you want in a show? Sometimes they do the two-hour specials and then, well, I’m pretty much screwed for studying. And Lucie loves it, too, even though she calls it manipulative. I cry at the end, okay, there I said it but sometimes I see Lucie getting teary too, especially if the family only has one parent. I think that’s because our parents died but that was a long time ago.

Inevitably this leads to us…

Re-organizing the living room. Lucie will say, we should get on that show and have people build us a new house and give us all new furniture and clothes because our story is pretty sad, too (it’s also long and not very interesting so I won’t bore you with it) but then I remind her that we don’t OWN our place and you have to or else how can Ty destroy it and rebuild it? And then she’ll say, oh yeah, and pout and I’ll say, to be nice, we can do it ourselves and then we move the furniture around.

But since we don’t have a lot of room or a lot of stuff, we usually move it all back into place at the end.

And that, dear teacher, is why I didn’t study.

Oh and my dog ate my homework.