Pig Roast, Hypnotism, Paranormal Activity

This morning, my sister and I drove out to West Virginia to meet up with the rest of my family at my uncle's house. There were a lot of hugs exchanged, a lot of loud, obnoxious stories told to catch up with my aunt and one of my cousins, and, of course, a lot of pie. Oh yeah... and a hundred-pound slaughtered hog, sodomized by a metal pole and rotating slowly on a spit.

What can I say? We're a little bit country. As a vegetarian, you'd think this practice would gross me out, but for some reason, I don't have any qualms about watching a carcass leak watery blood onto a grill. I laughed uncontrollably watching my sister scream and flail as my brother threw the pig's tongue at her. My dad, uncle and brother barbarically sawed off chunks of hide, wiped the knives on their bloody aprons, and licked the organ juice off their fingers. And I, frankly, found it amusing. I mean, I'd rather eat insect excretion than gnaw on a slice of fresh jerky peeled from a mammal with eyes and teeth still intact, but I find the practice itself kind of pleasantly homey. We may be slightly trashy, but at least we've got identity. Hael yeahuh, ya'll.

Anyway, last night was really fun, too. I went to this free indoor pre-Halloween fest with Heather, my roommate, Katie and Kelsey from down the hall, Heather's boyfriend, and Heather's boyfriend's roommate. We were first in line to see a hypnotist perform, and spent the next hour and a half listening to a strange little man with a thick Bostonian accent tell us we were getting sleepy-- very sleepy. I volunteered to have my mind controlled, and admittedly, I did start to doze off after ten minutes of calming music and being told to imagine myself lying in the grass on a summer day. And I tried to stick it out, but somewhere around the fifteen-minute mark, I couldn't stop thinking about how uncomfortable it was to close my eyes and let my head hang in front of a crowd of strangers, and my shoulders started to shake from my desperate efforts to suppress my giggles. "Hayley's laughing," I heard Roomie say. "Look-- she's laughing." I lost it, and was nudged to return to the audience. Hahahahaha. Story of my life.

The audience ended up proving itself the place to be, though, because it was extraordinarily entertaining to watch Heather's boyfriend, Johnny, valiantly keep a straight face while he belly danced, pretending to be in a trance. Katie, however, claims to have been legitimately hypnotized, and after my many attempts to catch her in the joke, still denies that she had any control over herself. I'm a skeptic, of course, but at the same time? Katie's quite the giggler, and her lips didn't even perk up while she threw her hands in the air and "rode a roller coaster," and she seemed genuinely like she was sleepwalking while she waltzed with the girl next to her. I guess the mystery of the legitimacy of hypnotism is another case that remains, presently, unsolved.

After the show, the boys left, and the girls-- including Erin this time-- saw Paranormal Activity together. Heather and I drove the other viewers crazy by analyzing the movie's cinematography, pointing out the inconsistencies in the plot, and making fun of the whole mockumentary style in general. "Oh my gosh, we're all gonna die? Oh no! Just let me adjust the lighting and sound on this camera and haul it on my shoulder as we run away!"

While I'm not going to tell you that it was terrible, since most of the other girls were scared at least once, the whole thing just felt like a halfhearted flop onto the lonelygirl15 bandwagon. The film's entire appeal is in the fact that it feels "real," and I think youtube ruined that for me. I may not know a whole lot about professional screen-acting, but I consider myself an expert on how real people act in front of portable video cameras. And sorry, guys, but Paranormal Activity doesn't really get it. Besides, startles and white noise don't creep me out, and every jabbing attempt at a scary plot was short-lived and unresolved. Booo-ring.

So that's all I've really got for you tonight. I hate to be that blogger who constantly apologizes for a lack of updates but makes little effort to solve the problem, but I mean it when I say I'm going to stop taking off more than one day in a row. It may get harder as NaNoWriMo takes off, but I will prevail. Because I'm Hayley G. Hoover. Bitch.

Sexy: Microwaved cookie dough. I don't care if you think it's gross-- it's better than cookies and raw dough combined. My domestic side comes out whenever the population of our dorm room exceeds its usual four people, and so the other day, I entertained a large group with tea mugs full of dough, and we sat around, eating it with spoons. This is college.

Unsexy: The fact that our ceiling light keeps flashing and refuses to stay on. We've tried over and over again, and we've spoken encouraging, soothing words to our ghost, whom Katie named Night Hawk, urging him to stop playing around. "No luck so far," Hayley said, as she blogged by lamplight and wished she could see past her laptop screen.

Chipotle burritos this year: 33

Bagel Street visits this school year: 4

Subscribers: 21,195

Bye, guys! Hopefully I'll see you tomorrow. <3