Guapa Caitlyn

Halfway into the year, I am now realizing most of you don’t really know any of the other people I mention in my blog apart from perhaps the occasional “Hillary and I did this” or “Caitlyn went to the store and ate all the All Bran she could find.” Seeing as I am all the way caught up with my travel updates and don’t have more travel plans for awhile, I think I will start profiling each of the important players of my study abroad experience. Without further ado, I present you with: Santander’s Most Wanted.

CAITLYN DEWITT

My first installment was spurred by some comments left on Facebook by Caitlyn DeWitt. As we are apt to do, we exchanged some put downs and empty physical threats. In the end, I declared I would write my next blog entry Caitlyn is a dumb whore because… Now don’t get me wrong, we all like each other (mostly) and we get along very well. All of our put downs are in jest and form an integral part of our peculiar group dynamic. At the end of it all, Caitlyn being a dumb whore and I having no social skills are as serious as a very large bruise, it looks brutal from the outside, but look at it from the inside and there is no internal bleeding.

My first encounter with Caitlyn was brief. People we meet traveling or through Erasmus will sometimes ask us if we knew each other before coming. Typically we say no. This isn’t really the case. I met Caitlyn at a meeting for this program probably a few months before actually coming to Spain. What I remember is shaking her hand upon introducing myself. If any of you watch 30 Rock, you may recall from a very recent episode that a handshake conveys a lot of information about the other person. Caitlyn, whether she remembers or not, gave me a dead fish hand shake. It left me disappointed. In the end, I wrote her up to a dead fish.

Later a few of my friends (actually, Audrey is the worst, not really someone I want to call my friend) told me that Caitlyn and I were doing the same program and that they knew her from being her sorority sister or such and such. Great! I thought. I love sorority girls. (To be fair, I know many sorority girls and they are all very cool, although, for some reason, I assume all of the ones I don’t know to have come straight out of The House Bunny or The Girls Next Door.)

Well, I would say Caitlyn and my first meeting (that counted) was here in Santander. The three other Cornell kids met me on my first night in Santander and we went out to some bars and clubs for a little bit of welcome fun. I don’t recall anything that stuck out about our first encounter, but a week later I started going over to her and Hillary’s apartment. What did we do? Well, they subjected me to watching Desperate Housewives, but also fed me.

Pretty soon after I found myself at their apartment pretty much every day or every other day. Not having any other friends forced me to make the most out of these ones. Well, I found out quickly that Caitlyn had the same humor as me. We found ourselves muttering the same things at the same time after which I would shout at her, “ GET OUT OF MY HEAD!” We went out partying together, and one of the first weeks of class we met up with the Spanish kids. I promptly told them, “Ella es facil, sabes?” Despite my knowledge that she is indeed not (wholly) a whore, this idea permeated our friendship.

Hopefully you are starting to get the idea of what kind of friendship this is.

But enough about our friendship, what you should really know is how she acts. Caitlyn, for one, is very easily entertained. She will say a joke (usually aloud, but really only she cares), she will be the only one who finds it funny, she will continue to laugh (hard) at her own joke until she realizes she is the only one laughing. She then finds this hilarious and proceeds to laugh harder. A typical joke of hers is the “That’s what she said.” In high school this was a favorite. I repeat, in high school. Now, I am always a fan of a creative and very filthy That’s what she said, but that being said, Caitlyn goes for the easy ones.

“This is so hard.”

“That’s what she said.”

“I’m coming.”

“THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID!”

She says it so quickly, as if she is afraid somebody is going to steal this joke from her. We will even phrase things as a set up for her, and not realizing, she jumps at the easy bait we set for her.

In addition to her love of that’s what she said jokes, she is also a fan of most things that can be taken sexual. She has a filthy mind to match her filthy mouth. We all agree (including her) that she is not a lady.

She drinks like it’s her job (well, she is a sorority sister…), she sleeps twice a day, and every day eats enough All Bran cereal to feed a small (pygmy) family for a week. When the grocery store is out of All Bran, she spirals into a hole of depression and disorientation. Her biggest fear is not that the world will run out of All Bran, but rather that we pour it all out the window in front of her. When planning trips, she takes the back seat. She will complain when something is not to her liking, but usually will not do anything about it.

She has some good qualities (I am sure of it). We are just trying to make a list. What we have determined is that she is fantastic for schadenfreude, her missteps are our little pleasures. She is our social chair (yes, because she can’t leave all of her sorority tendencies behind) and plans events to get us friends and ultimately out of the house. She can make a mean chicken parm and loves the Godfather.

And that is it.

Oh, she likes to make up nick names for people, too. The usually end in bunny. Like smart bunny. Or cooking bunny. Or hungry bunny.