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.

We left for Maastricht and Aachen at 6 in the morning, a time at which I’m usually sound asleep or still up. Needless to say, I had a hard time looking forward to anything about the day. Additionally, my allergies gave me a hard time and so I ended up closing my eyes and listening to my Creative Zen throughout the whole three-hour drive there.

We had an appointment at 11am with a local realtor who had specialized on assisting students. I had decided that this was going to be the least comfortable part of the day; strolling around with an important looking businessman, having my dad talk shop back at him. The main focus of our trip was to find me a place to stay that was both affordable and inhabitable. Unfortunately, neither was accounted for by said realtor.

I’m not sure if that is just the way it is in Maastricht or if we just happened to go with the wrong realtor and the wrong websites prior to our visit but of the three places that lay within my budget (below 500 euros/$780 a month, all expenses included), only one looked remotely nice. And I’m not talking luxury here, I’m not talking about special extras - simply a nice enough place that anybody would want to live in.

Don’t get me wrong, the realtor was essentially a great guy. He was young, friendly, good-looking and spoke almost flawless English. So did his colleague who was even younger and drove us around town to look at the different apartments. But the places itself - I WOULDN’T HAVE WANTED TO STAY THERE IF PAID FOR IT. Let alone spend such a ridiculous amount of money on it.

At the third place, the current student living there stumbled upon us in a robe out in the hallway. I’ll spare you the details BUT IT WAS NOT A PLEASANT VIEW.

So, apartment-wise Maastricht was a disappointment. But the city itself was as beautiful as ever. The calm, broad river, the old bridges, all the cafés and restaurants and clubs and bars, the expensive designer stores next to cheap tourist spots - it’s so perfect, it’s worrying. I posted more pictures here. They are, however, low quality because I took them with my cellphone.

I had made an afternoon appointment with a landlord in Aachen - also known in the English language as Aix-la-Chapelle, by the way, which is confusing because, really, that’s actually French. She was going to show me two apartments of different sizes but in the same building. Although I had been so worried about Aachen being an hour away from Maastricht by bus or train and had considered it my last option, all that went out the door when my parents and I entered the building. At first glance it was already in such better condition than anything we had seen in Maastricht and at a cheaper price, mind you!

The two apartments themselves, though, didn’t look all that great either. They also didn’t have connections for a washing machine which was an important point because I won’t be able to drive home that often and so I’m going to have to do my own laundry. There were at least ten other people there with me to look at the places and they seemed a little more enthused than I was. I also liked the bigger one of the apartments - especially compared to the dumpholes we had seen in Maastricht - but it still wasn’t good enough. If I was to rent a place in Aachen, it had to be close to perfect because just the distance to Maastricht University was downside enough.

So my parents and I went on to the last option for the day. I had contacted this girl named N by email when I found her ad that she had posted just a day before and we agreed that I should come by to take a look right away.

And what do you know? Sixth time’s a charme, right? Her apartment is perfect for me. It’s right next to the Aachen Cathedral, as in ALMOST PART OF IT. And it’s tiny tiny tiny but it’s already furnished since she is leaving all her stuff behind because she’s returning to the place in March 2009 after spending one semester in Chile. This is great for me because it gives me half a year to see whether it’s a good thing to live this far away from Maastricht without having to spend any money on furniture or other necessities. Maybe by next March I will have made friends in Maastricht and we will want to all move together into a bigger place - who knows, right? This way, I’m not bound to sign a two-year contract and right from the start I have everything I need. I’m just more flexible that way.

The above graphic is both proof of my fer0sh PSP skillz and the layout of the apartment. It’s of course not very detailed and probably not very accurate but it gives you an idea. It’s a very cute place in a great building which, I think, is actually part of the original cathedral compound but it’s been fixed up, of course. Most of her furniture is from Ikea and so, obviously, I liked it instantly. There are a few things I found out but don’t care about (there’s no television, for instance) and a few things I do care about but haven’t found out yet (like, where I can find the next bus stop and how far it is to a grocery store and the train station) - but I’ll go back to Aachen next week and sign the contract and talk to N about the rest.

It’s so exciting, MY FIRST OWN PLACE! I hadn’t expected to actually find something yesterday but I’m glad it did work out that way.

On our way back home, and we drove back right after leaving N’s place to be back in time for last night’s Euro half-final Germany versus Turkey, we got stuck into a major traffic jam 10 kilometers (6.5 miles) long. There was no going back or forth. Four huge trucks had collided and lay across all four lanes, two drivers had to be air-lifted to the hospital and they announced on the radio that it was going to take until 9pm to clear the way for traffic. 9pm - at the time that was four hours away. 9pm - the game would have been on for 15 minutes. And after 9pm; after they had cleared the autobahn, we still would have had three hours to go! It was almost sickeningly devastating to just sit there, unable to do anything.

After about an hour, someone had the idea to get off the autobahn through a rest stop and although nobody knew if that would work, everyone - except all the big trucks - followed. Thing was, that now everybody was driving, or rather crawling, down those backroads and straight into another traffic jam who had emerged because police had closed of the end of the original jam and bypassed traffic this way as well.

So basically, THERE WERE THOUSANDS OF CARS WITH ANGRY PEOPLE IN THEM WHO WANTED TO GET HOME TO SEE THE GAME BUT IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO MOVE EITHER WAY.

We ended up having to listen to the first half of the game on the radio which was torture. Whoever thought that listening to a soccer game would be a satisfying experience must not be a person I’d want to spend time with.

But as we all know, all in all the game was great and I found an apartment so I’m not complaining, in case it seemed like I was. Oh, official moving in date is August 1, by the way.

So there’s tons of time left to be irresponsible and waste time. Goody.

I, Anne, take you, Peter, to be my husband,
to have and to hold from this day forward,
for better or for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish;
from this day forward until death do us part.

This - or something like it - is what my mom said to my dad twenty years ago today. TWENTY YEARS. That is an awfully long time and I had no idea that they’d been married this long until my dad happened to say during dinner tonight, you know, the least you could do is congratulate us, and I was all like, wedding anniversary, right? Because now that he mentioned it, I remembered. And then he got all testy and emphasized, twentieth wedding anniversary.

Yeah so, what’s that?, my brother mumbled dismissively, aluminum foil?

Anyway, I went through some old photo albums to find a nice wedding picture to post when I remembered that my mom and dad never did the whole white wedding at a church thing. I also couldn’t find a very good picture of both of them together. One reason for this is that my mom actually used to be into photography, she took classes at college and knows how to develop pictures in a darkroom and all (not that that’s of any use nowadays). But part of the reason may also be that, from the start, they’ve been her and him and not them.

However, my mom used to beautiful. Beau-ti-ful. Photogenic. Mysterious.

Also, maybe, whistling. And did I mention beautiful?

My dad, in the meantime, was really just a regular guy. Traveling in an orange VW bus across France, camping, listening to rock and raggae, watching birds. Or, possibly, spying on French hookers.

My mom also had a VW - but it was more a Beetle than a bus. I’m also not sure where she was traveling here. But I’m sure there are no hookers around - after all, my dad took this picture and so, apparently, wasn’t distracted at all.

My mom was also really beautiful, in case I hadn’t mentioned, and happened to be modeling like this from time to time.

My dad, au contraire, was basically a regular Beatle from the 60s.

And well, as of today, they’ve been married for exactly twenty years. I guess, CONGRATS are in order. Raise your glasses.