hello, blog

I'll skip the excuses for being a poor blogger and just get right to business....

1. The United States just elected its first black president, and I feel that I should at least say something about it, so bear with me:

I will not say who I voted for or what I believe, in an attempt to avoid random angry comments from people. I will say, however, that for the first time in a long while, I have hope. I am so tired of hearing how horrible our government is, and hearing that things need to change, and I am just happy to finally hear that change is coming. Even bad change is change, and anything that changes has a chance to make something better. I wish The future President all the best, and I hope that he may be numbered among the great in our History.

2. I have a job. after what seems like ages of joblessness and searching and interviewing, I have landed the perfect job as a Graphic Designer. I am so excited to have finally reached the point in life where I will no longer have to wait on tables or hold temporary jobs just to make money for gas. This job comes with an arsenal of fantastic benefits and perks, and I could not be happier.

3. Troy bought me a flickr pro account today. randomly. So that means that I have something to keep me occupied until I start my new job, and I will be scanning in my moleskine paintings. I also no longer have to delete pictures just to add more. so keep an eye out for flickr updates.

4. Troy and I have been re-thinking the marriage thing. I mean, the marriage is still on, its just the Wedding that is up in the air. There is alot to consider, but I think that, once we make the big decisions (venue, food, day) things will be fun, and much more easy. and, FYI, i do not want to hear wedding horror stories. I wont say that mine will be different, because I know it wont, but I refuse to allow fear to run my wedding.

Now, if I could just afford the dress I want. Believe it or not, it is part of the Disney's Princess collection. It is beautiful, but I am afraid of the price tag.

5. We have begun working on our future home. Its a complicated narrative, so I'll save it for a later day.

6. I have finished my first moleskine book. I'm addicted, and I'm glad. The motivation and creative outlet is good for me.

7. Maryland might get its first snow flurries this weekend. Not sure how I feel about it yet. I'm not really ready for it.

8. "If All Goes Wrong" just came out, and of course Troy bought it that day. If you are a Smashing Pumpkins fan, or just a fan of music and the artistic struggle behind good music, you should see the interview with Pete Townshend and the documentary. Genius. BIlly Corgan always has a way of taking my own personal beliefs and putting them into words.

9. The Pour House closed down. The Pour House is a local coffee shop in my town, and, while it was always packed with obnoxious teens and the prices were pretty high, it was still a local business beloved by the community. I spent the better part of my highschool and early college years there, and now I cannot believe it is gone. I have been going less and less in the past few years, but it felt good to know that the place would be there if ever I needed it. NOt to mention, now, that is one less local business. some person's savings and dreams, devoured by the economy. As much as I love starbucks coffee, I would rather see the local starbcks shut its doors, at least starbucks has a chance to come back. a local business, however, cannot just bounce back, it sucks up every resourse the owner has, and then thats it. I try my best to patronize local business as often as possible because they have more integrity and sincerity toward customers than a giant corporate chain. But, alas, the pour house is no more.

10. Gas is currently 1.97 in my home town. How crazy is that? I do not even know what else to say about it. lets just leave it at this: I hope it stays that way.

11. finally, a word about football: HURRAY RAVENS. lets just keep moving forward and I'll be happy.

thats it for now. good day to you, my random reader.

i feel like i am constantly catching up with my blog...

after years, literally like five years, of searching for my best friend that i lost contact with, I finally found her. thank the internet gods for myspace. i hate myspace, but i must admit that it has its uses every now and again. she called me tonight, and we spoke over the phone until my phone died and shut off!!! and it was just like old times! no strange awkwardness, no stuttering, no problems. awesome!

by the by, it is freezing cold in maryland today. and by freezing cold, i mean that in the middle of august i wore a hoodie at noon today and was still cold. fyi: maryland augusts are usually mid 90s to 100 degrees on average. it reached a high of 61 degrees near my house today. maybe al gore is right. the environment is angry at us. i would like to personally thank the environment for making the day so beautiful. a rare break in summer heat is always welcomed, though i must express my fear of the coming fall and winter...


in other news, I am planning a wedding reception. because my mother has religious views that are not quite my own, troy and I have decided in a not-yet-engaged way to start planning our wedding. we are going to fly to the dominican republic and have a private ceremony on the beach, and then have a reception at home. lots of money. more money than i care to think about. it is turning out to be expensive because, incase you were not aware of it, Maryland is the "richest" state in the country, and therefore our cost of living is outrageous. a wedding venue that would cost 3,000 in, say, tennessee, would cost 7,000 anywhere in maryland. sucks. and since i am having my dream wedding on a beach, i feel the need to cut corners on the reception. and its not like i am an extravagant person. (you, reader, obviously read my blog, you can probably tell how un-extravagant i am) i like simple and elegant, not expensive and over-done.

I have always wanted a huge wedding, ever since i was a little girl (what little girl doesnt?) but now that i am finally at that point in my life, i find that big parties are not my style. i want to make my own invitations from scratch, and have brilliant ideas about centerpieces and flower arrangements. i guess personalization is better than extravagance. stay tuned for the next few months for pictures of my wedding crafts.

in the mean time, i have a job interview next friday. im not gonna say where, but the job, if i get it, will involve just the right amount of money to make this whole wedding thing a bit easier. I am nervous. it is with one of those companies that one cant help but be nervous about. this is the shot, if i dont get this one, i feel like i'll never get a job. but that is negative thinking, so lets move onto something more positive.

i am having a creativity freeze lately. i think wedding research has taken all of my life over. makes me glad i dont have a good job at this point...at least i have lots of free time to do the leg work that i would otherwise have to fit into my day. with all of the time and research and stress and what not that i am putting into my wedding planning, i am getting nowhere with paint or writing. (thus the lack of blogging) so i am going to try to write something later. i did manage a poem a few weeks ago. it isnt the best, and it is only rough draft material right now, but here it is for your reading pleasure. i will leave you with the poem and an empty promise that i will blog again soon.



Sticky, crust-rimmed morning
7/6/08


Fog,
like the Specter of dwindling dreams,
is hovering

just beyond my window.
Every yawn prods it
further and farther
from my reach,
Unrolling fields and trees
and roads and buildings
and cities and oceans and
every mundane chore of the day.

The Illywhacker

I have never been unable to find a textbook in my life. I am usually the person who can find a copy cheaper and earlier than my classmates. I feel as thought the University gods have chosen my number: it is my time to suffer.

I was supposed to have read 33 chapters of this damnable book by tomorrow afternoon. Not going to happen.

The university bookstore informed me that the publisher is out of stock, the UB library has told me that they gave their last copy to a student this morning. Not a single Barnes and Noble in Maryland or Southern Pennsylvania have a copy. Neither Borders nor Greetings and Readings have had a copy in the past two weeks.

Lets not mention Villa Julie, McDaniel, towson, Goucher, St. Marys, all of the community colleges of Marlyland and the University Circuit.

Oh, but they do have a copy in College Park.

Yes, let me drive to college park for a textbook. I'll do it right after I get out of class tonight at 10:45pm.


Well, what can I do? I guess this means I get off easy. Oh happy day.

What the hell is an Illywhacker, anyway?

According to google definitions, an illywhacker is " a novel by Australian writer Peter Carey"

Wikipedia also says it is a novel, but adds that is an australian slang name for "a stick for hitting a child with". aside ending the definition with a preposition, Wikipedia also says an Illywhacker is "not allowed anymore." Now, I ask you, does that mean the word is not allowed "anymore" or the use of a stick to hit a child?

either way, the peer reviewers at Wikipedia have begun to slack and the book has vanished from the face of the earth.

Meanwhile, this computer lab (in the student center) smells like old, greasy popcorn and the keyboard on which I am typing is nasty. I think I shall walk to Starbucks.

Side note: why is Wikipedia not in the dictionary that governs typing online?

no time for losers.

First things first: a lesson.

Cheaters never prosper.

That’s all I want to say about the massive upset tonight. The NY Giants pulled together and beat, nay, destroyed the New England Patriots. I have what I wanted. I am complete. My season has ended perfectly. Bring on the new Ravens coach and next season, I’m ready.

I really couldn’t care who won the Super bowl, as long as the Patriots lost. It could have been the Steelers (and you know how I feel about the Steelers), as long as the Patriots were knocked down from their high horse of false idol-hood.


Now, on to the project. It is getting pretty massive and I am running out of time. I need to pick up the pace. It will be ready before the 13th or I will be upset (and not sleeping on the 12th.)

I love secrets.

first day and beyond

Yesterday was my first day of school. I had a good day, but it was the start of my last semester, and I am nervous.

In spite of being such a good student, inspite of my accomplishments as a student, I have major misgivings about my ability to function outside of the academic world.

I have been a student for as long as I can remember. Like most of my peers, I have never known a world without school. Now, I face having to find and succeed at a job after graduation. Scary.

I watch so many people pick up and move on to the perfect job and I wonder if I can do the same. I have worked so hard for so long to ensure that I can get a job, but I honestly wonder if I ever will.

Employers do not care about my accomplishments as a student. They only want to know if I am qualified for the position. Most employers seem more worried about years of experience in the field than an actual degree. I have no experience.

Times like this I feel the need to override my goals and plans and just jump into Grad school to avoid the struggle of making it in the real world. But that goes against everything I want.

I was looking at Grad School possibilities last night. I am still stuck on Emerson for some reason. They have two parallel programs that look awesome. I love the location. I love the city. I love the idea of going to a school that centers around the arts. I am sick of going to a business and Law school.

But I want things before Grad school. Things like kids and a job and a house and travel experience.

But I also want the security of having a higher degree than most people in the market. I want to know that I can do whatever I want.

I really just hope I can land a great job. Maybe my first one will suck, but I want a job. Without that, I can kiss Grad school goodbye.

This blog has depressed me. I'm gonna go clean something.


As a side note, I think I am going to use my blog for class assignments. That seems like a good excuse to write.

In other news, I am working on a pretty big project. I hope to finish it in time. In time for what, you ask? just in time is all. It has not left the planning stage, but when all is said and done it will be a compilation of those things I love to do most.

So it goes.

SkiLiberty

After years of seeing Ski Liberty in the distance from the giant hill on 97, I finally got a chance to go there. We (my family, troy, and Aaron) went tubing last night and then stopped at Tony’s in Tawneytown for some pizza. I expected tubing to cost more than $16 per person, but by the end of the night, I changed my tune. 16 is reasonable, but the lines to get up the hill and then back down are so long that you really only have time to go down four times.

On a week night, or any night when it is not so crowded 16 would be reasonable, but the crowds made the lines move so slowly that it really wasn’t worth it.

I find it ironic that on a crowded night, like a weekend night, the cost is $16, but on a weeknight, when you will get more chances to go down the hill and the overall experience will be better, it only cost $12. Makes no sense. In the future, I will want to go on a weeknight.

I loved the snow machines. It was awesome watching them blow snow high into the air, but the snow would hit you in the face on the way down.

It really was not too cold last night, either. I did not start getting cold until the end of the night. Other than my face, I was warm.

I took many pictures with my Lc-a, but I am worried that it was too dark for them to turn out correctly. If I could be sure, I would just double expose the whole roll, but I also took some direct sunlight pictures, and they would white out. I often miss having a display screen to preview my pictures. But I guess that’s part of the game. The nature of the beast, as Troy would say.

Today is my last free day. I plan to do nothing. Nothing. I am going to wear pj’s all day and a hoodie, and my Ugg boots. I plan to not go anywhere and sitting around Troy’s house all night. Maybe watching a movie. Gonna be a good day.

Now, if my parking pass could be here today, that would be great.

Schedule for the semester:
Monday:
Writer As Reader- 5:30-8:00
Archeology Of Language- 8:15-10:45

Tuesday:
Publication and Performance-2:00-4:30
Seminar in Writing: the Modern Tradition- 5:30-8:00

Wednesday:
Work.

Thursday:
Work.

Friday:
Contemporary Literature- 2:00-4:30

the answer to the war against terror.

A friend of mine figured out a way to fix all of the world's problems with the click of a button.

Lately I am upset with the Baltimore City School Board. They have decided to pay students for increasing their individual test scores by 5%. The board is prepared to spend thousands of dollars bribing high school students to work harder to pass state tests.

I attended highschool in Baltimore City for two years. Terrible place to learn. I am living proof that Standardized tests do not prove a student's ability to learn or to think. I failed my Math SAT two times. Not for lack of trying, but because I am not good at taking test. After feeling stupid and inadequate compared to my peers, I gave up on school and my GPA dropped. When I moved to Carroll County, I learned that standardized tests really mean nothing, that they are a way for school systems to compete and earn money.

I began taking classes that focused on thinking and writing, and my GPA jumped to a 4.0, and has not dropped more than .1 since.

Now, while I am one of the top 10% of my University, many of those students who scored well on standardized tests are either college drop outs, did not attend college at all, or gave up their academic life for retail and other minimum-wage jobs. I have nothing against those people, I do not look down on them. I understand that, while they scored well on tests, they were never taught to think or solve problems.

Success in the real world does not depend on answering all of the questions correctly. Success is measured by the ability to solve problems. Not problems given in paragraph form with one variable missing, but real problems scattered haphazardly throughout larger problems.

Even a student who scores well on a math test might not have the skills needed to create and maintain a budget. Students who can find the "main idea" in a paragraph, or the "subject" of a sentence may be incapable of constructing a well-written essay.

There are seniors at my University who cannot construct a paragraph. Many are my age and have completed the same amount of school, yet cannot write a proper sentence. They may understand the definition of a "compound-complex sentence" but cannot create one.

I wish standardized test could be eliminated from the curriculum.

Why does education have to depend so heavily on people who have no idea what makes a child learn. Why will school boards never listen to the teachers who actually interact and care about each child?

Do other countries have this problem? Or is it just this mass of land we mistake for the most powerful and wealthy country in the world?

the winter of my discontent

I have lived in this house since 2001. Seven years. Seven long years without air-condition or heat in my bedroom. I have silently suffered freezing winters beneath multiple layers of down, wool, and fleece blankets, and seven blistering Julys with a small desk-fan to relieve the sultry Maryland summer.

My house is not old—no more than 12 years old—and it has central air. Every room in the house has central air conditioning and heat. Every room except mine. It is miserable.
Summer is not so bad. My room faces the back of the house, and I rarely have direct sunlight. Combined with the constant breeze that flows through the valley below my house, I am comfortable during the summer.

Winter, on the other hand, is miserable. If I am in my bedroom during the cold season (I call it that because winter is not always cold here, as we have already discovered in a previous blog post) I am under a blanket.

The worst part is the draft. My bedroom (the one I picked out of the four possibilities on moving day) is directly under the attic. The attic is pretty open, and wind gets in easy. On particularly windy nights, the plywood that sits over the entrance to the attic will shift in the wind. I also get drafts through my window. I am not sure how. I spent my morning draping a heavy blanket over the window to keep some of the draft out and the heat in. I then stood on my bed with my hand right below the vent in my ceiling (the one that is supposed to deliver the heat) and noticed a slight cool draft coming from there as well. Makes no sense. The rest of the house is toasty, and I have a cold draft.

At least I don’t have to worry about my Macbook overheating. I’ll never die of heat exhaustion. I will be able to survive if the world runs out of heat.

Those are all of the situational pros I can think of. Right now, my cold fingers can only think of cons.

Getting out of the shower is the worst. My bathroom has the best heat in the house. (funny how a house has different heating scenarios in each room, despite the “central” air conditioning.) The bathroom is always perfectly toasty in the winter and refreshingly cool in the summer.

Getting out of a hot shower and walking into a freezing bedroom is unbearable. This morning, the doorknob was even cold to the touch. The way the metal of a seatbelt is when you first get in on a snowy day.

Nothing beats the terrible feeling of being cold and getting under a comforter that is still cold. The minutes of waiting for your body temperature to catch on and kindle the heat trapping properties of said comforter could feel like hours. But once the heat is trapped in, life is good.

Until you have to move your leg and it happens to reach just beyond the warm area and into the uncharted cold desert that is the uninhabited sheets outside of the body-heat zone. Perhaps the leg of your pajama pants becomes stuck around your knee, leaving your whole leg exposed. You might kick and swing your leg in attempt to pull the pant leg back down. A shiver runs from that foot to the very tip of your nose, and you gather the blankets closer to you, tucking them beneath your body to keep the cold out. For that minute, you are an Eskimo, or a biologist studying the snow in Antarctica. The world outside of your comforter is frozen tundra home for all sorts of misery and suffering.

My bedroom is the North Pole.

Maryland, my Maryland

here are some pictures of why I hate where I live.

I took these shortly after getting off work.

My work, like most places in Maryland, does not close for snow. Now, I understand why places like Colorado and Michigan do not shut down for a little bit of snow. Actually, I imagine anyone from a high-snow-content area would laugh at this blog. But the truth is, Marylanders are IDIOTIC when it snows. They have no idea what to do, they all go out to dinner in blizzards and go shopping, and then get into an accident, block up the roads, and killing innocent people who just want to get home.

Not to mention, our plow system has something to be desired. We rarely see plows, and when we do, they are never actually plowing. My road will never be plowed throughout this storm. How do I know? Lets call it experience.


Welcome to this lovely state where you can go swimming one day and sledding the next. I swear, when I buy a home, it will be in a place where I can count on the weather being the same for at least one week at a time.

A few weeks ago, Troy and I played Tennis in tee shirts.

A few days ago, I went for a walk with my dog…in shorts.

It has been early fall weather, not winter weather. But, in true Maryland fashion, the warm, 50degre weather has given way (overnight) to a snowstorm.

We already had one bad storm this year. Early December. And then we had a warm spell right after that, and now, we have a winter storm again.

As if the unpredictable change wasn’t enough, try watching the weather and hearing that the storm will be a light mix of snow and rain, accumulating to no more than 2 or 3 inches. It will taper off by mid afternoon, and tomorrow will be a high of 45.

News flash: It is now 3:28 (I’d call that a little past mid-afternoon) and we have a minimum of 6 inches across Carroll county. YAY! The weatherman caught up. It took a while, but WBAL changed their report to include snow in the forecast until Monday.

So now, the weatherman says it will continue to snow into tomorrow morning, and will accumulate no more than 6 inches. Well, weather man, we already have that. Where are we supposed to put the rest of it?

I know it isn’t the meteorologist’s fault. I blame this God-forsaken state.

Highest murder rate for a major city, extraordinarily high cost of living, worst school systems, lowest-paid teachers, massive debt, high unemployment rate, most cases of aids/hiv, something in the water making all of the sports teams suck lately, and insane weather patterns. I swear. In spite of what the experts say, Maryland, especially the north/western counties, has a microclimate.

And if the northern states dumps any of that lake effect snow on us, I’m gonna hate them too. Packers or not.