I have used a similar title before, back in October, when all sorts of school-related things had to be organized, parties had to be attended, birthday gifts had to be wrapped; to make a long story short: CHAOS HAD TO BE DEALT WITH. This title, in case you were wondering, is also stolen from the lyrics of Robbie Williams’ song Love somebody. Just sayin’ - so that at the end of the day you can brag about how you have actually learned something by reading this blog.

So much is going on these days, I rarely find the time to blog about what’s currently happening. Ergo, this bullet point list:

• My friend N has accepted the study/apprenticeship deal that she had applied for and passed with flying colors. As I have mentioned before she’s flying up to Scotland at the end of the month to check out the company that will train her. She is, however, going to be studying here in Germany, flying back and forth all the time, so she’s currently looking for an apartment down in Cologne where the private college is located. I’ll be going to Cologne with her to look at a couple of places next Tuesday. It should be fun!

• My mom’s birthday was on the 11th, and so was my grandma’s. We had a cook-out here at my parents’ house and the usual crowd showed up. We put some brats and some steaks on the grill and had tatersalad with it and, you know, whatever the heck else people brought along. My uncle P and I had built Cornhole boards last summer and we put them out to play last night as well. Obviously, his girlfriend and I beat my brother and him effortlessly; THE GIRLS BEAT THE BOYS, just in case that needed clarification.

Grandma and all four of us will go to brunch at one of my favorite places ever, the Bernstein, tomorrow morning. I’ll go and pick her up from her house and then get my mom, dad and brother from our place and then on we’ll roll!

• My other grandma’s sister Anni died this morning in an old people’s home. She had been physically challenged all her life and over the past couple of months her condition had worsened dramatically. The doctors say, she basically died of starvation. Her body had been too weak to accept any sort of nutrition any longer. Other than my grandma, nobody is particularly upset about this - meaning, that we can go on with our lives because her death was really just a release to herself, above all else.

What bothers me is that I had promised Anni to come see her before going off to Kentucky back in 2005 (!) and I didn’t and also haven’t visited her ever since then. This seems especially cruel, now that she’s no longer with us.

Tonight I went to my grandma’s place to write addresses on the funeral notifications. I did the same for her when her husband - my grandpa - died a couple of years ago. It’s depressing but I’m obviously always glad to be of help. The funeral is next Thursday.

• I’m having trouble figuring out what to do about television at my new apartment. I won’t have cable TV or anything which doesn’t bother me but I need to have my TV and my DVD player with me. The thing is that there is no room to put my almost-vintage only two-year-old CRT-TV but I hate those silly flatscreens because the quality is never as good as on CRT screens no matter how much money you pay. My grandma has a smaller CRT-TV that she doesn’t need anymore so I may just use that one.

The girl that is renting the apartment to me suggested that she just leave her small flatscreen-DVD-recorder-smooth-black-blue-light power station in there for me but I hate these things and I’d rather just have my grandma’s old TV.

My dad is going to find out tomorrow how big or small my grandma’s CRT actually is and then I guess I’ll check with that girl how much room there really is left and I’ll make a decision based on all that.

• In other apartment news, I have been buying a few more things that are not worth photographing (there not as photogenic as, say, a can opener - geez, I mean, did you think I’d take pictures of anything?) - such as a funny bottle opener, a measuring cup and an electric kettle (is that the right word?).

• Also, my dad and I have been checking online to get me a better cellphone deal. I never really use my cellphone to actually call people because I hate talking on the phone and love short, concise text messages but once I will have moved to the apartment in Aachen I won’t have any other phone than my cell. So far we haven’t really found anything satisfying and my dad is somehow excited about the idea that with a new deal they will probably throw in a new phone and I’m all like, NO TOO MUCH IS CHANGING AND I LIKE MY PHONE.

• My parents are debating where we’re going to go on vacation and if we should go. They are determined to squeeze in some sort of quality time at the beach with the whole family between now and my moving-out around July 27th. It’s getting alarmingly close to total madness. The worst thing is that they just won’t decide! In the case that we would actually rent a house on the coast, it would be as of next Friday which is less than a week away. For heaven’s sake, just say yes or no already!

I’m not your typical girl and I’m just gonna come out and say it: I don’t like shopping for clothes. Is that weird at all? I feel as though I should have boy parts because seemingly every female walking this planet gets orgasmic pleasure out of hitting the mall.

Now, there used to be a time where I had lost a significant amount of weight and had unlimited access to my dad’s credit card. This was, of course, during my stay in Kentucky and I bought more clothes than I would ever need (or be able to take back home using illegal methods but that’s another story for another time).

Since I have been back home I have gained all that weight back and even more on top of it and I have also been busy with school and then organizing everything for life after graduation and so I sort of kinda somehow neglected all the pretty clothes.

We’re talking laundry baskets full of stuff here. Mountains of clothes. And what strucks me most is probably that I have three different outfits all of which include the same pair of jeans - and that’s all I ever wear. The other 150,000 pieces of clothing are just sitting there, staring.

And staring they do. Actually, they seem to feel rather outraged about their neglect. Let me show you.

This is a neat little thing which, I suppose, could be described as a walk-in-closet although it’s really more of a seperate room off of the second-story hallway in my parents’ house. It has beautiful, milky glass doors that slide open soundlessly and a long time ago we put wooden closets inside of it. Both my parents and I share this thing. Fancy, isn’t it?

Thing is, you see, I’ve been neglecting my clothes and so when you slide aside the elegant doors, what you see ain’t pretty.

Basically, all my clothes - and I should refer to them as stuff from now on because it only serves them right; all my clothes are sitting in a humongous, ugly pile on the dusty carpet. Those that haven’t made it to the floor yet…

… are cramped into those shelves. And I’m sorry for the crappy quality of the photos, by the way. I was in a hurry and, as usual, I didn’t know how to avoid the bad lighting.

There’s not a single shirt here that’s properly folded up. And oh, it’s been like this for months. Like I said, I don’t ever wear any of these clothes because they don’t fit me anymore or I just don’t know of them and, sure, my parents have thrown fits over this situation, but they’ve given up eventually.

Today, this was all going to change. With the prospect of having to move all my stuff to my new place in a few weeks looming over me, I realized that this needed to be cleaned up. So I pulled things out of the shelves at random, stuffing them into a laundry basket. That one load was full within seconds is an understatement, the first pile went up to my belly button.

I heaved that heavy bitch into my room and started folding. And folding and folding.

Neat, little piles began to form. Have you noticed that my clothes are unnaturally colorful? Why is that? That hot pink G-string up there, by the way, was bought at Victoria’s Secret in Washington, D.C. - it’s so fancy, I think I’ve only worn it twice since back then. But hanging it up on the wall as a souvenir doesn’t seem quite right to me, either.

While I continued to fold shirts, tops, shorts, socks, pullovers, sweaters, pajama pants and underwear, it was astonishing to see what things had hidden between all this stuff for all this time. There were three single push-up bra pads (seriously, three?), one bra strap and an unforeseeable number of scrunchies and bobby pins.

By the time I went back to the walk-in-closet to get the second load to fold up, I had found many, many hats from Kentucky and scarfs from H&M and jeans that literally haven’t fit me for four years. I found shirts that still had the tags on them (from the Hard Rock Café in Louisville, for instance) and things I seriously didn’t know I owned.

Like this furry sweater-jacket from Abercrombie&Fitch. I had totally forgotten about it but now I remember that it was astronomically cool to have one back then and that I paid $98 for it which made my dad kinda unhappy. I also remember that for some reason, when I had just bought it, it came with an overwhelming smell of enticing men’s cologne which I loved. I sniffed this thing for weeks. And, of course, smelled like a man myself. Hm. Moving on.

Anyway, I kept on folding and kept on finding things that reminded me of Kentucky. It is literally impossible to touch anything in my room without stumbling over something Kentucky-related. My closet, evidently, is no exception.

By the time I finished folding everything, there were piles everywhere. Piles of shirts and piles of pants and piles of underwear. There was a pile of clothes that definitely hadn’t seen the inside of a washing machine for way too long a time, a pile of things simply smelly and a pile of things that weren’t even mine but had accidently been burried underneath all my stuff.

When I was done, I took my aching back and my crampy-from-all-the-folding fingers and took a short break to email my mom at work about this extraordinary achievement of mine. It’s almost too pathetic to be true, isn’t it?

Then, I hurried to put everything back on the shelves. All clean and neat and folded.

I’m actually glad that at least my pants don’t seem to be affected by the bomb of color that must have exploded all over my clothes a while ago.

Now would you look at the floor in the walk-in-closet? That huge pile of stuff, it’s gone! And everything is back to order and open for business. Or whatever.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, the allergic rash on my arms and hands and my runny nose are getting worse. Must be all the dust and dirt and pollen that have been sleeping soundly in that big ol’ mountain of clothes for the past 8,000 years and have now waken up. They are in disbelief and enraged.

They are currently attacking my immune system which has been known to react sillily to them. But I guess that’s alright. I more than likely deserve it.

I just got back from my little trip to Ikea to buy my first set of silverware and my first set of dishes and a whole bunch of other firsts. I spend a good 160 euros ($250) which seems like a lot but I also bought a couple of things that are not necessarily for the kitchen.

Everybody shopping at Ikea is always happy and witty and dressed beautifully and wealthy but not showy and just plain perfect. It’s a freaky phenomenon.

More on the stuff I bought and pictures and news about my apartment tomorrow.