things you can do in pj's

• read the newspaper
• get temporary tattoos
• put away laundry
• plan epic hangs
• watch marathons of Friday Night Lights
• make photo collages
• research new recipes
• eat lots of cookies
• read Harry Potter
• have photo shoots
• slide down the hallway of Monroe and watch Will Langton almost seriously injure himself, nbd
• order Dominos (but it is a little bit strange paying for it in pj's...but I don't really care)
• cuddle
• dance party (especially to Eenie Meenie...you're welcome, Megan)
• talk about your feelings
• play card games
• go to class (if you're feeling particularly rebellious)
• attend Screen on the Green
• go to Wawa
• play Pokemon
• blog

All of these are trufax, meaning I have done them all (some of them super recently). Things I don't do in my pajamas: go shopping at normal places, go to church, and I am struggling to think of any other situation which requires real clothing. I guess dances? And if you're painting and don't want to get your pajamas painty.

Thus, there is no need for pajama jeans.

(Another true statement: I can't say trufax without saying RPattz in my head.)

lunch dates

I love lunch dates. They increased exponentially in frequency since my graduation from high school for a number of reasons...primarily because I'm not locked in a building during lunch and forced to eat with my friends. I don't know if every campus is like this, but with my friends and especially within the intervarsity community, there is a culture of lunch dates (and coffee dates and dinner dates, though I find it a little bit more awkward to get dinner with someone I don't know very well). Some of them are standing, weekly lunch dates (like with Maggie!) and there are some people that I get lunch with periodically and then there are some people who are way too cool for me to get lunch with, but I don't like to worry myself with popular people.

Lunch dates do exist outside of school, but it is much easier when you're living on a campus and you get free meals at the same places and the only constraint is your class schedule (and the rest of your social calendar, of course). In my opinion coffee dates only exist because some people have too many friends and not enough lunches in one week, but I guess there are merits to getting coffee together (and ok, the Daily Grind has a nice ambiance). Anyway, lunch dates during breaks are nice because I get to have them with friends who don't go to my school, but they are not nice in that I suddenly have to deal with money again (I could probably last an entire semester without spending any real money, since I don't count express as money...this is like the rule that it doesn't count as a real date if you can use your student ID to pay for it). Instead of lunch I might suggest froyo which is cheaper or watching a movie in my basement which is entirely free. But then you do miss out on the lunch date experience.

Ok, why am I obsessed with lunch dates? I thought you'd never ask. Lunch dates are defined as being between two people, and one-on-one interaction is something that can get overlooked when you suddenly have more friends than you know what to do with (ok, I'm not that popular, but I do feel like at college you cultivate new friendships every semester and pretty soon your Christmas list exceeds your expectations [E] because before you counted you thought that you had a reasonable number of people to care about but that turned out to be false. This was also true in high school but I only ever had group lunches which is a point I will get to later). It's cool to hang out with one friend, yeah, but maybe you get tired of them. Perfect, you'll be so busy that you don't see them but in passing, and by the time a week has passed you'll be ready to tell them all sorts of new stories and talk about their life too. Or maybe they're a once-a-month sort of friend, whatever, it doesn't mean you like them any less but maybe they're extraordinarily busy or don't have a meal plan (which is one of the easiest excuses to get out of hanging out with someone, coincidentally).

Also, everyone has to eat. Twamps (typical willam and mary persons) like to pretend that they have no time for social interaction (this is false, they just get their daily quota on facebook), but eating is the one thing that we all have to do and that we can do together. Pairing social interaction/fellowship/friendship/mentorship and eating is one of the best ways to save time. Additionally, there is something especially communal and natural about talking about your life while you eat, whereas normally if you called up a friend to hang out you might be inclined to watch a movie and never talk about anything serious.

Group lunches are entirely different creatures. Whereas lunch dates can be intimate, funny, serious, refreshing...group lunches are wild, unpredictable, outrageous. They can be less awkward or way way way more awkward than lunch dates, depending on how random the assortment of people is. I think it's probably good to get a good two or three group lunches a week, but I am way more in favor of group dinners for a multitude of reasons, not least of which being that you can invite people who don't have the same class schedule as you, which can diffuse some of the awkward created by group lunches comprised of some people who don't know each other at all. Group lunches can be great - see the lunch bunch! - but they come with some serious cautions.

Trios and quartets are also their own monsters in that they can be great, but sometimes people begin to fill prescribed roles and people are generally more guarded, which can be fun and can be a natural way to become closer friends with someone, but without that one-on-one interaction your friendship may never truly get off the ground.

And now I'm looking forward to going back to school just for lunch dates, which is slightly ironic considering how much I wanted to get away from Sadler lunches just...seven weeks ago (maybe I'll develop a fondness for mystery meat and soggy rice in my absence from school?).

why I love minerva mcgonagall

There are lots of things to love about the Harry Potter book series. Obviously, I love these books considering I'm on my fifth read-through. Some things I love:

• The fact that love conquers all!
• Harry's unusual friendships with Dobby, Firenze, Hagrid, Sirius, Hedwig, etc.
• How Ron and Harry make up increasingly ridiculous predictions for Divination
• When Dumbledore apologizes for not making Harry a prefect
• Mr Weasley's fascination with Muggle objects
• How Hermione runs off to check a theory and Ron thinks she's crazy
• How all the professors silently make Umbridge's life miserable
• Everything about Luna Lovegood and Neville Longbottom
• The descriptions of Lupin's clothing/appearance/demeanor
• Dumbledore's style
• Lockhart

And so on. But one of the parts that I'm learning to appreciate way more than ever before is, as you may have guessed by my blog title, the character of Minerva McGonagall, Transfiguration Professor, Deputy Headmistress and general baller. Some prime examples (single quotation marks because I'm reading the British editions lolol):

• She stood up, nostrils wide and mouth very thin, and Harry stood up, too.
  'Have another biscuit,' she said irritably, thrusting the tin at him.
  'No, thanks,' said Harry coldly.
  'Don't be ridiculous,' she snapped.
  He took one.
  'Thanks,' he said grudgingly.
• Harry and Ron got up first from the table and she shrieked loudly.
  'My dears! Which of you left his seat first? Which?'
  'Dunno,' said Ron, looking uneasily at Harry.
  'I doubt it will make much difference,' said Professor McGonagall coldly, 'unless a mad axe-man is waiting outside the doors to slaughter the first into the Entrance Hall.'
• 'JORDAN! ARE YOU BEING PAID TO ADVERTISE FIREBOLTS? GET ON WITH THE COMMENTARY!'
• 'False hope?' repeated Professor McGonagall, still refusing to look round at Professor Umbridge. 'He has achieved high marks in all his Defence Against the Dark Arts tests –'
  'I'm terribly sorry to have to contradict you, Minerva, but as you will see from my not, Harry has been achieving very poor results in his classes with me –'
  'I should have made my meaning plainer,' said Professor McGonagall, turning at last to look at Umbridge directly in the eyes. 'He has achieved high marks in all Defence Against the Dark Arts tests set by a competent teacher.'
• She stopped again, and then said, in a very matter-of-fact tone, 'You look in excellent health to me, Potter, so you will excuse me if I don't let you off homework today. I assure you that if you do die, you need not hand it in.'
• Indeed, a week after Fred and George's departure Harry witnessed Professor McGonagall walking right past Peeves, who was determinedly loosening a crystal chandelier, and could have sworn he heard her tell the poltergeist out of the corner of her mouth, 'It unscrews the other way.'

AND SO ON. (I excluded a lot of good McG moments because these are my absolute favorites, but there are a lot of other great ones.) She is such a baller in basically everything she says and does that I am amazed at how much I overlooked her before this. I mean, I knew she was cool and all but I always thought of her as a strict teacher who made a few exceptions but was nowhere near as awesome as Dumbledore. But although she's slightly less into super amazing advanced magic and evil-wizard-hunting, she stands up for Harry basically all the time and can be so sassy when she does it. A lot of these quotes represent the charm that the books hold but that gets lost in the movies...obviously Peeves, Jordan's silly commentary on Quidditch, some classroom antics, the rest of the staff's disdain for Divination. They're just such a joy to read and there are a lot of really funny parts that get skipped over so that they have room to make Ron sound like an idiot...but that is another topic.

Anyway, she's great at transfiguration, obviously, and is super loyal to Dumbledore and isn't all scared of Voldemort all the time like you would expect. But mostly I love her sass. She has something of a temper but only becomes irritable, not losing her cool (except when she yells at Jordan...or about the Dementors...but even then she's just exerting authority). Whatever, when she has to she keeps her temper in line and then just uses some awesome tone and biting words to dominate an argument. What a role model.

nbd

My main motivation in life is to be different, which is weird because so many people just try to fit in and, being a quieter/ish person you would think that I would also like this. False. It can be a bad thing to be different in an abnormal way...you know, like hearing voices or something (hearing voices no one else can hear isn't a good sign, even in the wizarding world). But being unique is something that everyone wants in some form - it makes you special, irreplaceable, intriguing. Most importantly, it makes you somewhat mysterious, which is something I am all about.

It seems strange that I'm telling you that I like to be mysterious...doesn't that take the mystery out of my motivations? You might think so, but since even I don't understand myself I think that this is fine. It's no secret that I like being mysterious (Mysterious Marisa = my go-to alliterative adjective) but you will never be able to predict what I'm about to do or what I'm thinking. Why? As soon as I get comfortable with something I tend to change my mind about it. Mostly I just don't like easy things. Some examples:

• Justin Bieber. It was so easy to hate him that I just had to start liking him! After seeing Never Say Never I had absolutely no excuse not to love him. He's an inspiration. Yeah, I might take my obsession a little bit far, but it's mostly in jest (though really, his music is addicting/infectious/amazing, just like his smile).
• English. This used to be my favorite subject, and obviously I still like writing since I'm blogging every day, but it is way too easy. I would much rather take a math class and fail (or you know, get a B) than get an A in an English class which I didn't even have to read the books for because it was so easy to make stuff up. On one quiz in AP Lit, I literally made up every answer even though I had read the book and I got every question right. WHAT. I said a character represented the Virgin Mary, half-jokingly and hoping for like half credit for my creativity (this was how I answered all the questions because it was a really random quiz)...but this was somehow correct? It was at this point that I decided that I was not being challenged enough and moved my attentions to math.
• Being the quiet person. Sometimes I am totally ok with this but sometimes I will be intentioanlly talkative just to not be the quiet person. It just depends on my mood...but usually if I'm chatty it's either really late or I'm trying to disprove my stereotype.

That's plenty of example (singular noun intentional, I'm not sure why though) to convey my point. Anyway, along with my Night Marisa Theory I have developed another theory which seems to make sense in explaining why I am so weird. It doesn't have a nifty name but it is essentially a Theory of Opposite Emotion. This just means that I like to express the opposite emotion of everyone else. Wait a minute, you are thinking, Marisa doesn't have emotions! Well, just remember that sometimes apathy is the greatest opposite of all. Let's look at some case studies.

• Excitement Over Mundane Things. This is one of my favorite activities. I just love getting excited about...well, anything that seems boring! Doing laundry? That's my favorite! Staplers? Oh man, they are so cool and useful too! Room temperature water...really, this is the most delicious kind of water of all, and it feels more replenishing than cold water too! And sitting and waiting with nothing to do...oh man, that just gives me time to think! Perfect!
• NBD. Things that are actually worth getting excited about I tend to, well, not get excited about. I add to my apathy by saying nbd or for those of you old readers, no big deal. Like...oh, I'm going to Florida next week, nbd. Done with my exams, nbd. One day my status on facebook will read: getting married today, nbd.
• Normal emotions during emotion-inducing movies. I am not going to cry while watching Titanic and in fact I will get mad at the hype over movies like that. Ok, cool, great love story...but really, I have mentioned this before on my blog, I hate that their romance is (for lack of better word) so romanticized and idolized because they knew each other for like a week, and yeah it's sad that they didn't get to live happily ever after but if she is dreaming about him every night there is something wrong with her. Eventually you should let go of that fling. It's especially weird to me because she gets married and everything but still thinks that Jack was The One or whatever. Now, if this were not a hugely popular and beloved film, I would have probably enjoyed it more. I just can't love movies everyone else loves. It's too...ordinary. Also, scary scenes...I do get a little bit nervous but I do my best to completely mask this because I don't want to scream in a movie theater like a normal person.

But here's the important part, and if it were in another bullet my guess is you would just skip it. I really like to show love to people in unique ways. I like to go out of my comfort zone to show that I care - and obviously this can be painful when I'm forced to be brave or talk in public or something dreadful like that. But I think that the desire to be unique can be really good. If it takes categorizing it as "being different" for it to be a motivation, then fine, but being kind and striving to be a servant are definitely good results of this desire. Christ was all about being different from the norms of humanity - selfish inclinations, pride, following a strict hierarchy and subscribing to stereotypes. Instead he defied all expectations of how a king should act and he didn't do this just to shock people or to stand out, though he definitely did catch some attention doing it. He also showed us how wrong some of our natural tendencies are and that it is possible to look past our expectations and love our neighbors even when they seem downright Dursleyish. So maybe being different shouldn't be my main motivation in life, but since following Christ means that I get to act and be different from everyone else I would say it's probably a good thing that I actually embrace being seen as weird.

graduation thoughts

My sister graduated from high school this week, and I find this very strange. First of all, she has way more free time to hang out with me (by hang out I mean watch tv and play Nancy Drew computer games and make lists of our favorite things and so on...typical summer days starting at 1 pm when we wake up, you know). But secondly, it reminds me of when she started high school, when I finished/started high school and when our older brother finished/started high school, and all of the awkward stages that I went through in the past eight years. (I imagine it would be weirder for people who went to public school all the way through starting with elementary school.)

I find it really strange that to high school teachers this was just another year of work culminating in a night of beach balls and cords, but for our family it was the last celebration of AP classes and pep rallies and morning announcements. I literally am only friends with one person who I knew in high school who will be returning next year (she'll finally be a senior...she used to be so little!). Not that I ever knew that many people (it's huge!), but it's so strange that the same walls we used to inhabit are now being embraced/defamed by complete strangers.

It's also strange that my little sister is going to college, because I feel like I just went to college and this means that I'm already halfway done. As much as I say this doesn't bother me, it's pretty terrifying. I've been thinking a lot about adulthood again (this was my summer research project last year), and it is very scary and hard to define and I think I'll keep it on hold until at least my next graduation.

But seriously. Basically every song and show and book that isn't about romance or crime is about growing up because it is such a difficult and confusing time, possibly more than adolescence because there are so many options and so much struggle between independence and responsibility. Is an adult someone who's finished high school? A college graduate? A parent? What happens when I graduate and still feel like a kid...or do, as I suspect, most adults still feel like kids, lost, unprepared for compromises and commitments? Maybe it's a good thing to feel like a kid sometimes because, after all, there are authorities for us to submit to and our plans won't always work out - just so long as we are able to take responsibility for mistakes and endeavor to learn from them.

I think I'm ok with where I am as long as I can put on a temporary tattoo of Dugtrio and feel cool about it - something that younger Marisa would have felt pretty awkward about, and older Marisa might find inappropriate for work, but that for now is just awesome.

tabs

There are two kinds of tabs that I care about, and neither have anything to do with music. (I could now go off on etymology and homonyms, but that's another topic.) The first is the ones I am collecting for service hours for APO. I still don't understand why this counts as service, but for every 100 tabs I turn in I get an hour (of the 25 I need to do each semester to stay an active brother), so I'm not complaining. I have friends who are super good at collecting tabs, but since I don't drink a lot of soda I am pretty terrible at it. Since the last time I turned them in I've only collected about 70, but I consider this a good start, and since I don't really struggle to get service hours I'm not deterred by my small number.

The second kind of tab that I care about are the tabs in my current browser. I used to be in love with mozilla firefox like nobody's business, and I had this colored tab extension that created different pastel shades for every new tab. I had a different color picked for each of my regularly-visited sites (like yahoo mail, wikipedia, different forums) and when I didn't get the right color I would keep adding new tabs until the right one came up. Then I discovered google chrome (which, by the way, the majority of my readers use - A+!). I am in love with this browser - it is super fast and really clean and user friendly, and I can't recommend it enough. But I do not have colored tabs...which is probably a good thing since it gives me one less thing to worry about every day. Still, I use way too many tabs. I currently have 16 open and this is not the record by any means. All of them are important and I know I'll come back to them at some point, but I really need to learn to close them when I'm not currently using them because it does get difficult to recognize a tab by its tiny icon and only the first two letters. But seriously, every time I close google calender I just need to open it again! And when I close blogspot I completely forget that I own a blog, so I obviously need to keep my stats page open to at the very least keep me invested in writing interesting posts (an interesting incentives problem).

Seriously, I need to let go of google maps and weather.com when I know I'm home for the night - it's not like they're hard urls to remember. But I will never close facebook...how else would I know what everyone was doing all the time?!

counting compulsion

One thing that is very very strange about me is my tendency to count things. And by things, I mean everything. I think that this started with me counting the number of mini marshmallows in my hot chocolate, which my mom thought was cute. I just liked to have a prime number of marshmallows, so sue me! If I had seven to start with, I couldn't add just one or two more, I had to add four to get it to a nice (even?) eleven. It was just a little bit of fun, and a little puzzle to keep me entertained as I kept myself warm on a snow day.

But then it expanded. I had to have five gummy bears in my oatmeal (one of each color except orange, and two of the red ones because they taste the best). More than that would have been too much sugar to the small amount of oatmeal that I eat. I have to count the M&Ms that I eat and I like to have an order for the colors that I eat them in - though I know a lot of people who do this, especially since we played with them in AP Stat, so I guess I'm not that weird.

I also have to count the number of ceiling lights in a room and when it's not prime, I have to reclassify the way that I'm counting them (perhaps that whole chandelier should count as one light?) until I get a number that I like. If it's not prime, then it's better to be even than to be odd. I hate odd yet not prime numbers because they can be so deceiving. One of the weirdest things that I do is count the number of window panes at church that are "solid"...the ones that you can only see the sky through, in other words, which have no hint of plant life edging into them. When this number is not prime I don't worry too much, because I can just sit down and then the number will change! But if this is also not prime I decide not to sit in that seat again.

The last weird thing that I do is count people. I count the people in a scene on a tv show - and if that's not prime, sometimes I count me, and sometimes I count the people in the room with me, to try to get a good number. It's really fun because it's always changing and I can always count in different ways with different meanings to get a number I like. For example, there may be seven people to consider - two in the room with me watching the tv and five on screen, but then only one will flash on screen so then I get to count three people visible to me and seven people on my mind and five on the set and three in my room (two other than me). WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME THIS IS SO MUCH WORK. But I can't stop. It also applies when there are multiple people in different rooms in a house or whatever...I know that there are, say, twelve total people in our group but five are in the room with me, so there must be six people in the other room, but when I walk into that room I have to count to make sure. Maybe part of this is to do with me not wanting to lose track of any particular person? But I just have to know how many people are in any given place. And when I get really bored I start doing the statistics of male to female ratios, different hair color classifications, people older than me and people younger than me...people are so much work to be around. Maybe this is why I'm an introvert.

At least I don't count my steps...usually. It really bothers me when there are different numbers of stairs in each stairway in the same building so I've found it's best just to never count and never get weirded out by it (like in Landrum, or my house where one set has 12 and the other 13...this makes literally no sense to me considering that I assume our ceilings to all be the same height). Like I said, it's best to ignore these things and not find new things to count...

bad dreams

I don't really have good dreams. All of my dreams are on some level terrifying, mostly because they are not realistic. They twist parts of reality into this awful place where time doesn't matter and random people from my past somehow all know each other. The only part I remember from the night before last's 10-hour adventure (well, I'm sure I wasn't dreaming the entire time, but it felt really long) was that I was taking time-series econometrics and I was so confused, but my friends who had just taken mathematical econ said that the stuff we were learning was easy. I was so mad at myself for not taking this other seemingly unnecessary class. It was terrible. (Just like regular econometrics.) This dream was clearly inspired by real-life events, since this week I was thinking about taking another econometrics class (which is like math/statistics/economics) and since my friends are taking math econ together next semester which I'm apparently subconsciously jealous of (except not at all; I'm already taking two math classes and two econ classes).

Since college started I've been remembering a lot more of my dreams. I think that anything that disrupts my pattern of sleep causes me to remember a higher percentage of dreams - and college is nothing but a disruption of sleep! You stay up late because you know you don't have to wake up at 6 am anymore, but then you still have to wake up at 8 or 9 so you're running on maybe four hours of sleep. I pretty consistently got seven hours last semester, which was decent all considered, but not enough. I can clearly function doing that, but I will not be in a good mood about it. So of course after morning class but before mid-morning class I take a nap. And after lunch the best way to spend some free time is napping off that Sadler salad and fries. And I have gotten some crazy dreams during those afternoon naps. One dream last fall was so terrifying that I slept through most of lunch and ran to catch my friends finishing their meal - but it was pretty lolzy, so they forgave me and sat with me.

One of the good things about having a roommate is that when you wake up and want to tell someone your dream before you forget it, they are pretty much stuck there to listen to you. I told Abby about a lot of my weird dreams last year, and this is why I still remember some of them. One was about zombies in a shopping mall/school except it was also a tv show and my aunt was there and Katie was like the zombie expert, but she didn't tell me there were zombies, just that we had to leave before 10:56 (which was when the zombies woke up) but we had to finish hat-shopping and exploring before we could return to safety through a giant iron door. I was so mad at Katie when I woke up, because we just barely escaped being nommed.

This week I had a dream that I was going to some sort of water park and we all had to stand in these long lines, and then all of a sudden I was in a diner talking to a friend who told me she had been lying about her job for years. I didn't remember much of the dream except being upset with her, and I remembered more of it as I got on facebook in the morning and saw people's names who I knew were also at the water park. Facebook is actually a very handy tool for dream-recollection because just seeing a face is all it takes to remember a large portion of a dream. It makes me wonder how many dreams I forget or don't get to recall because I don't have enough contact with the people in them...

Sometimes I do have lucid dreams, and those are the best. They occur when I start to wake up, realize that I've been dreaming, then decide that I need to go back to sleep to finish the dream properly since I'm clearly in the middle of something big. Sometimes this doesn't work and I'm stuck being awake and knowing that a giant flock of butterflies are in the middle of attacking me in some parallel universe, which is the worst, which is why people shouldn't wake other people up (even unintentionally by slamming doors, say). But anyway, sometimes I can be in the middle of a bad dream and then go back into it and make it awesome. It can be really frustrating because the more things I make better, the more things seem to go wrong, and I can't just control every possible outcome - but it's kind of nice to play out what I would like to happen, which is sometimes all that a lucid dream is.

And now for the most interesting part...last night's dream! I made a specific attempt to remember everything about this dream because I wrote most of this yesterday but didn't feel like I had a bad enough dream to write about. My dreams responded by being totally whack, which I greatly appreciated and wasn't scared by at all. Enjoy!

First, somewhere between 2:30 and 8:30 I had some fairly normal dreams. I was first reading/watching Harry Potter and Ron was really mad at Harry for some reason (typical), but he was passing these notes and things to Hermione, which Harry intercepted and they turned out to be a random stack of pictures of Harry (they were the Muggle sort, they didn't move). He found this really strange but he couldn't ask Ron about this because they were fighting. This obviously has direct correlation with my conscious thoughts because I'm in the middle of reading Goblet of Fire, in which Harry and Ron don't speak for like two months.

Then all of a sudden I was watching Friends, which also fits in with my life because when I'm too tired to read I'll just watch Friends (I'm on season 7!). Rachel was sleeping and Phoebe was trying to trick her into telling her how many surgeries she had had while she was still asleep, and when she answered (six), Phoebe was super mad at her. Ross kept lying and saying he only had one surgery, but he had two because he used to have two brains. This was a little bit strange to me since Friends doesn't usually go into the abnormal, but I was ok with it. Then Rachel woke up and apologized to Phoebe and said she didn't want to ruin her engagement because somehow lying about this (she had previously said two) proved that all people lie. Chandler was doing something interesting but I forget it now. Then there was another episode, where we meet Phoebe's fiance who likes to cook naked, except it's a tv show so you don't see anything but his upper half. Rachel lives with Phoebe so she finds this really uncomfortable. Finally she confronts Phoebe and the resolution is that they all agree to wear clothes, but Rachel has to clean up every time he cooks...so he and Phoebe make a salad and then throw all the ingredients everywhere as they're eating it haha. Then there was a third episode about how the fiance somehow sets their apartment on fire, but I didn't find it interesting so I stopped watching slash woke up.

Then there were the interesting dreams between 8:30 and 12. I was lost in the streets and I was trying to find Aromas. I kept walking into random stores and trying to find someone who could give me directions, but everyone said confusion corner was in a different direction than it actually was. I finally found it and then I was there with a bunch of people, but it wasn't the Aromas I know and love...we were in a back room with a giant bunk bed that was super comfy, and it was raining outside so we didn't want to leave. But this girl kept coming up to us from outside and telling us that we had to leave because that was her hang out place. I was not happy with her at all. But we put on our shoes and left, and all split into different groups. Marigene and I were going to the beach but we were wearing normal clothes and we didn't pack anything special because we were planning on going to Jamestown beach just to sit there, but then we decided to go to the ocean, so we kept driving over these bridges and islands. Finally we got there and it was this really fantastic beach with a ton of white sand and people our age. This guy kept wanting to hang out with us, but we were like no thanks. Then Marigene pulled out two towels, but one of them was for her and one of them was our dry towel, so I just sat on a tarp that was underneath both of us. She also had snuck along a bathing suit, and all I had were the clothes I was wearing and a ski suit, so she told me to put on the ski suit so I would wear my dress later. This girl told us to get in the water with her so we did.

It was super warm and I was in my matching dark blue ski pants and jacket, so I didn't really get wet. The water was like a swimming pool, and the bottom literally looked like a swimming pool, but the girl told us it was the ocean. It was very clear and not salty but I just assumed that the water hadn't gone through enough soil to collect any salt. So then this other smaller girl and I were on the lefthand edge, where the bottom started, and I could see where the bottom of the pool was and I stood on it. She and I walked on a slope until we were past Marigene and the tall girl and then we were in this sunken part where we could stand because the water level also sunk. Then all of us were there and we were exploring. When we wanted to go back, I had to go first, but instead of the inclining ramp to walk up, I had to climb this wall of ice, which was perfect considering I was wearing my ski clothes. But it was difficult, and halfway through climbing it, I was like hey wait a minute guys wasn't this a ramp before? And then it was a ramp again. HOWEVER, it was still made of ice and it was very slippery. It also could disconnect from the bottom, and then it was a ragged ice wall again. So I was about to go up it when a wolfman (I told you it was a weird dream) came down and was like, this is what you get! And he took away the ramp and I ran and grabbed the end of it. But he and I had a history of him threatening my family, and he looked like Kris except he had brown hair and a beard and he was tall and had wolverine claws. And he was like, is this what you want? And so I had to drop the ramp down a ravine and we were stuck in there.

FLASH SIDEWAYS to the spider-man movies, except there are four of them and they are not at all like the spider-man movies. I'm not really in any of them, but I know that this wolfman is which is why I'm watching them - kind of in the exact same moment when I'm deciding to drop the ramp, this is like my thought justification. Also the wolfman has these giant claws, which should be enough reason to do what he says. Whatever. So in these movies, I'm trying to figure out which scene belongs in each movie. I know that the fourth one got bad reviews and it's about to be shown on tv even though it just came out this year, and spider-man is super old in it. His assistant/sidekick is this blonde girl with a ponytail who totes around a little kid, who I assume is going to be the next spider-man's love interest because spidey has a grandson who's totes (haha) going to be the next spider-man. Anyway there are all of these villains and I have to remember which belongs where in the timeline of spider-man so I can figure out why the wolfman is so mad at me (because apparently movie villains are accurately depicted?). There's this giant earthwormy guy in the fourth one who is creepy but spider-man defeats him. The blonde girl gets a phone call and we see a kitchen scene where the cooks have to create non-sushi sushi for the kid's table for one of Peter Parker's special dinners, and I know first of all that this sushi is poisoned and second of all that they used the same set for a hospital scene in another one of the movies but I can't remember which one. There are a bunch of other parts but then I just start watching the last one, with the grandson who's just a baby, and there's all of this disease and mystery and he's going to die, and I don't know who the blonde lady is because she was supposed to be the love interest of Peter Parker except he's like forty years older than her, and I'm wondering why Tobey Maguire isn't here because then it would make sense (except the grandson part), so I'm left to assume that he got hit with some sort of aging potion while his girlfriend stayed frozen in time - but he had to marry someone else because how else would he have a huge estate and family?

By this time I had forgotten about the wolfman, but right before I woke up I remembered him again and there was something about how I had helped him before and now he assumed I would always help him, or else he would just kill me. But since we were stuck in what was now an ice cavern in supposedly the Atlantic ocean, I didn't see how that was not killing me. And then I woke up.

acronyms I have learned from my dad

My dad has taught me a lot of important stuff over the years, like how to be resourceful in finding food in the kitchen without my mom around (no dinner? a spoonful of peanut butter and some string cheese will tide you over until someone can make you a real meal). He basically taught me physics because I wouldn't have understood a single thing in that class without his 1970s textbook recall. As a small child, he taught me not to be afraid of lightning/thunder by explaining what it actually is (and not just angels bowling). And growing up, he has shown how cool it is to have an excellent memory - I am always impressed when he tells me a specific story about his elementary school teacher or tells me about a random science fiction book he read in middle school, but it's also kind of awesome when he randomly quotes Seinfeld or the Simpsons after not watching the shows for like five years. He's also taught me serious stuff, like morals and the importance of hard work and how to approach my faith intellectually. Cool cool, but this post is not about serious stuff...at least not that kind of serious.

Recently, he has decided that I am old enough to talk about very technical things with me. His job title is project manager (I learned this for college applications) but as far as I can tell he is a satellite engineer. Although he has always explained things to me that are far above my comprehension, in the past few years it has become way more complex. Instead of talking about relatively simple stuff like how slide rules really work and what trunking is (like the landline telephone infrastructure along with the whole antitrust lawsuit resulting in so much phone competition), he has gone off into the world of frequencies and bandwidths and other things I couldn't repeat.

A typical conversation will start on a normal subject, like me wondering what 4G really means (what delineates it and 3G) or him commenting on a satellite launch. Ok, these may not be normal conversations with your dad, but they seem innocuous enough to me. He will start to get to the bottom line, but he will say some word and I will nod and then he will note the expression on my face and ask if I actually know what that word/acronym means. Usually it's something that I've heard him say before but that I couldn't use on a fill-in-the-blank test...recently, for example, it's been FFRDC, but he has told me what this stands for about five times now so it's not a great example (because he has talked about it so much I now know it, but most acronyms I forget because there are so many). In the process of explaining this first subject, we will hit another roadblock and he will have to explain another term. These explanations last about ten minutes apiece, so it is best to pay attention so he won't have to explain them again in a week. Finally he will get back to the original answer to my question which can usually be summed up in about one sentence using words that I know...but I suppose it would be like asking for an answer about the economy: there may have an answer to what you're looking for but it will be much longer than you want/need, and when you boil away the econ-speak it is usually, "It depends."

Fyi, 4G has not officially been defined by the Powers That Be, though there should be an agreement on what it exactly entails later this year. Basically, it's just way more advanced than 3G in terms of internet accessibility and capabilities which I could describe a little bit more, but not much.

Anyway, some more cool acronyms to throw around as if you knew what they meant: SIPRnet, DARPA (they created the ARPANET, a prelude to the internet), SHAPE, TEM vs. ICWG (I think?), and obvious ones like the NRO or DISA. Of course, I can only recall these ones because he literally talked about all of them today, and if you accumulated all of our conversations from the past twenty years (I imagine he told me about these things before I could talk...), there would probably be a lexicon of several hundred acronyms and words that only engineers understand. I have heard more about circuits and wave propagation and encryption than I thought was possible or relevant. It seems like the world runs on a lot of very technical things understood by a small number of people, which is cool because email and other things just wouldn't work on their own if we didn't have some really ingenious people to figure out public and private key authentication. So I guess all this is to say that physics does matter more than they say in high school, and my dad is a super genius by all measures that matter to me.

anger

First, I am not angry at anyone right now nor have I been angry recently...this post was prompted by my reading and some random thoughts. It's super long, but there are pictures to make it easier to read!

Sometimes I am very good at not getting angry. If something is annoying or disappointing, I can be very good at brushing it off and looking for silver linings. If all else fails and you can't think of anything good about a situation, at the very least it's teaching you to be a more patient, forgiving, less self-absorbed person. But sometimes I am very very bad at avoiding anger. Sometimes a situation or word or thought will get under my skin and I can't stop myself from rage (not the Pokemon attack, or really any kind of attack, just the emotion). Side note, according to wikipedia where I do all of my research, the anger spectrum goes from annoyance to rage! I am so good at knowing these things before I even look them up. Anyway. Rage is not good. It is not very rational, though it is often rationalized. It usually ends up with me slamming a door on someone or storming away from a situation and I let myself be in a rage for about two minutes before I decide that I'm being stupid and then I have to apologize. (But instead of apologizing I'll just do homework for a while to cool off.)

Gyarados Dragon Raging is almost as terrifying as a velociraptor attack.

So I was thinking, if this is a natural human emotion, is it ok to be angry? Is it worse to experience rage than annoyance? Can you really control these things, and should you aim to minimize them, or should you let them go unchecked, or should you experience them but be hyperaware of your interactions with others? I don't know all of the answers to these questions, but I have some thoughts (surprise!).

First, I think it's ok to be angry. I think it's good. I don't think it's part of the original plan for humans - if we were perfect and hadn't sinned, there wouldn't be a need for anger, would there? There wouldn't be anything to get angry about. But God gets angry, and jealous, and lots of things that we think are bad. The motivation is what matters. Anger exists just like hunger or pain to tell us something is wrong - it can be an indication of social injustice, which is totally acceptable and good to be angry about, or it can show us our own selfishness which is a way less pleasant process to go through (not that fighting injustice is all sunshine and daisies, but it's always a bummer to realize that you aren't that amazing).

As for the annoyance to rage spectrum...obviously rage is way less controlled and a much bigger deal than annoyance. But both of them serve the same purpose. I don't think it's a good thing to ever experience rage, but sometimes it's worth getting upset over a big deal thing. Not everything is nbd, even though I may say it at totally inappropriate times ("but who cares? nbd, I want mooooooore!").


Related side note...hipsters are cool and all, but anger for anger's sake is bad. Angst just to be different is bad and shouldn't be directed at people who do or don't deserve it. Fake angst, however, I find hilarious! Hipster Ariel aside, I think storming out of rooms is probably immature and I should probably just deal with all kinds of anger by addressing the source (or, you know, biting the bullet and finding a silver lining...btw, why Wormtail's silver hand didn't come into play in killing Lupin I still don't get. SO MANY RED HERRINGS.).

More random pop culture/nerdiness aside, my thoughts on anger aren't entirely unfounded and nor is my pondering really that random. I just reread part of Jonah, the guy in the Bible who gets swallowed by a great big fish because he was running away from God's call to preach to the wicked people of Nineveh. After he gets spit up by the whale, he decides to actually listen to God and travels to Nineveh and preaches to them, and then they repent and God has compassion, sparing them from threatened destruction.

But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, "Isn't this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live."

But the Lord replied, "Is it right for you to be angry?" (Jonah 4:1-4, NIV)

There's more to the story, but this is where I got stuck. So God gets angry, but he doesn't rush into it (he doesn't rage). The most important part of this is his love. He is just, that's true, but he gave the Ninevites who were crazy awful a chance to repent, and then he didn't destroy them even though he knew that their change of heart wasn't going to last long. This goes along with the turning the other cheek idea - when someone hurts us, we don't have to make ourselves into victims but we do have the opportunity and responsibility to show them love. Another thing of note which I totally blew past as a child learning this story...Jonah realized that God would forgive the Ninevites. He was afraid that they would repent and they wouldn't get "what they deserved" and that's why he didn't want to go and preach to them. Sometimes I start to feel like this. There are some people, I think, who are so far gone that they can't be saved. Some people are so self-righteous, so self-absorbed, so self-exalting that they can't possibly submit to God, and God would be so dumb to accept their confessions. When I start to think this, it only takes me a minute to realize that I am so self-righteous that God shouldn't love me, and shouldn't give me a second and third and seventy-five thousandth chance. But he does. If he can love me, he can love anyone. And he does.

The main part of this which blows me away is the Lord's question to Jonah. If I were God (this is a common theme for me it seems, but I think about it a lot in terms of how far I fall short of being perfect), I would be focusing on the fact that Jonah, who I just saved from death by storm/drowning/giant fish, who then realized that I was right and followed my command, that same Jonah was saying oh hey you're awesome and all...but I don't like how fair you are, and that unfairness is worse than death. He is so mad that God is merciful that he doesn't even want to live anymore. What. What is wrong with you Jonah? He is so mad that God is showing mercy to people who were wicked...right after God showed him mercy. He doesn't think that life is fair.

Oh man. I always think life is unfair. It's not fair that I can work harder than someone else and get the same grade as them. It's not fair that I can try to serve with as good an attitude as I can muster, and forgive when I don't want to, and love when I certainly could be indifferent, and God loves me no more than any other person. It's not fair that I didn't get a job when I clearly deserved it. It's not fair that my room has the silverfish infestation. Do I have a right to be angry about any of this? No. In fact, it would be way more unfair/uncool if we got grades for effort because then I wouldn't spend time with any of my friends or I would just fail all of my classes. If we were judged on our merit, God couldn't even look at me, much less love me. Even if I still think it's unfair that I have to deal with some more minor annoyances, my life is pretty easy. And if it wasn't, I would have absolutely no right to be angry about it. I might still be. So what should I do? Ask for forgiveness. Unrighteous anger, like anything unrighteous, is sinful: it is wrong, on an absolute scale of morality, and there is no excuse to make it right. There is only confession and repentance. I find this very very very difficult. I do not like it.

Ok, just one last thought, stay with me for a minute and take a look at the second half of this passage.

Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city.Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the vine. But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, "It would be better for me to die than to live."

But God said to Jonah, "Do you have a right to be angry about the vine?"

"I do," he said. "I am angry enough to die."

But the Lord said, "You have been concerned about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?" (Jonah 4:5-10)

It is very easy for me to look at this passage and think Jonah is being foolish. Like, really, he is angry enough to die? He sounds like a fifteen year old. He needs to grow up, like, a LOT. But the vine was a very good way for the Lord to demonstrate his point. We get a lot of blessings that we ignore or take credit for ourselves. And when one minor thing goes wrong, it gets blown out of proportion like crazy (RAGE). When I get a bad grade, it ruins my day. I can't think about anything else and I start reevaluating my life and my worth. I know that this is really really dumb, but I start to wonder what's wrong with me and why I thought I should take that class anyway. Then I get mad at my professor and the other students who are doing well, then I go back to being mad at myself, and it is just awful. But grades are like that vine - nice things, sure, but not necessary for life and definitely something that I can't earn on my own. Wait, Marisa, you're thinking now - you definitely earn grades. Ok, yes, I decide to sit down and study and then I get a grade back after a test, but the fact that I can read and write because I had parents who taught me and the fact that I'm breathing is nothing to do with anything I control. And I have no right to be angry about my bad grades. I need to take a breath, brush them off as annoyances, resolve to study earlier and not let them put me in a bad enough mood to move me into rage.

Especially not a CAPSLOCKE RAGE.

P.S. "Don't tell me what I can't do!"? Locke is sooooo self-centered. His anger could be the subject of an equally long post, which would come to the same conclusion as this one: anger is sometimes good, is a gift to prompt good change, is not appropriate at all times and is only right when it's not unrighteous (? this seems very obvious but it's basically what I argued). And also, Locke makes great angry faces.

summer playlist

I have a problem regarding music...when I pull up iTunes I will listen to music essentially nonstop for as long as I am at my computer, which can be several hours (because I actually do live a sedentary life). But as soon as my computer restarts on its own because it's a dell, I will forget that music exists. This can go for up to five months. It is a huge problem because there is such a contrast in obsessive music consumption and utter silence, and there is no jarring transition between them...I don't even notice it until I've started listening to music again. Generally I will remember that music exists during finals, and I ease into listening to it again by going through all of my Death Cab once or twice. I just find this all very strange and I don't understand myself at all, ever.

Anyway, I'm going to try to listen to some more music this summer. I'm not really looking for new music since I already have a lot that I don't listen to very regularly, but I guess I'll be expanding my iTunes collection as necessary. Here's the beginning of my summer playlist slash my recommendations for your listening pleasure...a lot of them are under-appreciated by me according to my play counts, but they're all solid songs. Also I don't recommend listening to them in alphabetical order, but that's the way that I chose to list them anyway. There is about a 30% chance I will be listening to one of these songs as I write any given blog post this summer.

• Rolling in the Deep by Adele, because there is literally no escaping this song
• Fake Tales of San Francisco by the Arctic Monkeys
• Another Sunny Day and Funny Little Frog by Belle and Sebastian
• Gamble Everything for Love by Ben Lee
• Three Rounds and a Sound by Blind Pilot
• The Boxer and Life Less Ordinary by Carbon Leaf because I listened to so much of them before the concert that I am now officially obsessed
• Show Me What I'm Looking For by Carolina Liar
• Letters From the Sky by Civil Twilight
• Cemeteries of London and Strawberry Swing by Coldplay
• Overkill by Colin Hay
• Dreaming of You by The Coral
• Grapevine Fires, Summer Skin and Stay Young, Go Dancing by Death Cab for Cutie
• My Girl the Horse by Fences
• No Such Thing by John Mayer because I just realized what this song is about even though I heard it a lot during senior year and ironically didn't understand it
• Notion by Kings of Leon
• Speechless by Lady Gaga
• Goodnight Goodnight by Maroon 5
• Daylight by Matt and Kim
• Animal by Miike Snow
• Missed the Boat by Modest Mouse
• Animal by Neon Trees (also, they do a good cover of Justin Bieber's Baby, though the original is also a good addition to any playlist)
• Mercy and All We Are by OneRepublic
• Take Me Away by Plain White T's
• Hero by Regina Spektor
• The Journey by Sleeperstar
• Me and the Moon by Something Corporate (it's kind of strange, maybe go for one of their more popular songs)
• That Dress Looks Nice On You by Sufjan Stevens
• She's So High by Tal Bachman
• Mine by Taylor Swift (of course :))
• California Stars by Wilco

Also, shout out to Muna for some of these awesome recommendations...I'm not nearly as good at finding music as she is!

thunderstorm thoughts

It is thunderstorming and Barky is taking refuge in my window. He is so cute. I don't blame him, but I hope he's not getting too hungry since he also slept all day. I would be so mad that it was raining if I had to wait for the night to eat and then was afraid of my wings getting soaked and weighing me down. I hope it stops raining and he gets some yummy insects.

Also, I had to drive home in the rain tonight. It didn't rain all day and then it started lightning-ing while I was like twenty three minutes away from home at bible study. It at first seemed like heat lightning, but by the time I got on the highway it was pouring in sheets/buckets/all over a huge amount of water. It was almost impossible to see and I was behind a big truck for a while, but when the lane next to me cleared up I risked a merge and then I could see a little bit better. But still, I was going like 35 on 66 which is approximately 32 miles less than I am used to (unless it's in the afternoon, in which case it's about 18 miles faster!).

barky the bat

Yesterday I posted a photo on facebook of a bat that I found in my window. Little did you know that I spent the rest of the afternoon keeping an eye on him (and reading in between taking pictures of him). He is very small and according to my family he looks an awful lot like the same bat that was spotted in my other window about a month ago. Once night fell, they closed the second glass window and he didn't return, but they didn't close all of the second glass windows (there are three windows in my room). I wasn't that freaked out to see him yesterday, mostly because I knew he couldn't get inside my room, and also because I had been curious about having a bat in my window ever since my family had told me the story of the first one. I have decided that bats are basically flying mice and are equivalently cute (they are just about the same size!). If you tap on the glass he'll wiggle his ears.

Anyway, I wanted to name him Batty but my sister said that was a fairly predictable name, and liking to be contrarian I settled on Barky. Barky has made literally no noises that my ears can detect. He flew away to stalk night insects sometime after 10:30 pm when I left my room to watch some tv and he was safely there, but before 1:30 am when I went to sleep. Amazingly I have found a creature which sleeps more than me, because I didn't get a chance to close the window while he was away. When I went to sleep last night I didn't have enough energy to deal with closing a window - especially because this would make my room vulnerable to an infiltration of bugs, which I just didn't want. My brother was in the basement so if I happened to get a bunch of bugs or even Barky in my room, I wouldn't have had a place of refuge. So when I woke up this morning (I use that word loosely, since it really was 11:30), I wasn't that surprised to see that Barky had returned. I snapped some more pictures. Now I have to wait until the middle of the night again to close him out. It will be a little bit sad, since he would make a pretty cute and harmless pet behind glass, but I recognize that, as Hagrid once rather ironically said, people can be stupid about their pets. I don't want to be stupid. I just want Barky to have a nice insect-eating life.

Since I took 71 pictures of Barky (how on earth did that happen why do I take so many pictures I don't even), here are some of my favorites!

He is so cute.

Obviously he stayed through sunset, but surprisingly he stuck around until well after that too - until after 10:30! What a champ.

He is kind of like a vampire.

A very, very small vampire.

categorizing crushes

Let's face it, girls have lots of crushes. We also have lots of names for different types of crushes depending on the intensity of our liking and on the actual nature of the crush. Aside from little crushes, major crushes, temporary crushes and perennial crushes, we can also have nonromantic crushes. A typical example of this is the friend crush. This isn't anything complicated as urban dictionary might have you believe: it is wanting to be friends with someone who you aren't friends with yet (as opposed to a normal crush where you want something more out of whatever kind of relationship you have, whether you're friends or he doesn't know you exist...). I have all kinds of friend crushes all the time and they generally produce great friendships, though I wouldn't recommend being the first one to mention directly to a person that you have a friend crush on them...if the person is real awk, they won't appreciate this (in my opinion this indicates that they wouldn't be a good friend, but that's because I'm a twamp and I embrace my awkwardness for everything it's worth).

Anyway, friend crushes are kind of fun and way less pressure than real crushes, and you can have lots at once without feeling like you have to make up your mind about who you like the most. The real trouble comes when you can't figure out if your feelings of awe at the coolness of a new acquaintance of the opposite gender are due to a friend crush or a real crush. Sometimes this takes an embarrassingly long amount of time to figure out. I used to hold the belief that you should minimize any emotions you felt unless you were going through a grieving process, but I would venture to say that that's probably slightly unhealthy. So I would say you should probably just let this process run out on its own, and don't be afraid to talk it through with a friend who you trust. I like knowing how I feel and why I feel that way, so when I eventually realize that something is just a friend crush it is a nice relief and I know exactly what I have to do: confront my fear and attempt to become actual friends. This is more difficult than it sounds.

But there are way more kinds of crushes. There are teacher/professor crushes, and I'm not talking the illegal kind. These are like friend crushes except there is very little confusion regarding romance. It's generally a line between wanting to be their friend because they are so awesome and wanting them to respect you because they're so smart, and their esteem would mean a lot. There are obviously celebrity crushes...in my life that doesn't go to the point of stalking or even checking up on them via wikipedia or google news, it just means that I think they are super awesome. I would have to say that my favorite kind of crush is the nerd crush. It's kind of like a friend crush but it's less about how super awesome and funny they are and more about how smart/creative they are. For example, I have never met him and I have had his book sitting on my shelf for almost a year now without reading it, but I have the hugest nerd crush ever on George Akerlof. I first read about him three and a half years ago as a brief segment in my intro to econ textbook and how he had written something about the market for lemons (which I first assumed meant the fruit...false, it is about old cars). I ran across his name again when I was doing all kinds of random economics research for Fed Challenge and I was super nerded out to find that he was married to Janet Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (the twelfth district nbd). Of course I was excited to read his book Animal Spirits, but then it was not required reading for class so I decided I would just read it over winter break, but that obviously didn't happen. On Saturday, Greg Mankiw posted a link to a profile of him. I seriously have the biggest nerd crush ever on him, perhaps only eclipsed by my love for Greg Mankiw's blog. I should make a distinction here...I don't have actual real love for George Akerlof because I don't know a lot about him, which makes the term nerd crush appropriate. I really just want to be able to think like him. I mean, he co-wrote a book called "Identity Economics." This sounds like the book that I would write in twenty five years if it hadn't already been written (if when I finish Animal Spirits I'll have to pick up this book).

Also, I now have to figure out if I'm more of a conceptualist or experimentalist in order to set a realistic age goal for my major career work (experimentalists get better over time and make important findings when they're older, but conceptual creators tend to make more brilliant strides when they're younger). Somehow figuring things out about myself only seems to give me more figuring out to do.

why I love card games

I am not going to lie: this is a pretty straightforward post about why I love card games.

1. Nature. My grandfather was super great at all kinds of card games, and my mom and her sisters (and all of my cousins in turn) inherited not only these skills, but also a great appreciation for the games. At family gatherings, Spades, 7 Up, more Hearts, and Michigan Rummy are all staple games. We take them pretty seriously, though at the end the winner as well as the losers all get to eat dessert so there's not much at stake aside from bragging rights.
2. Nurture. I was raised to play card games, especially late at night and most especially in the summer. I was never super into Go Fish past the age of like eight, but my family played Hearts hundreds of times. Since my dad went to bed at normal times, it worked out pretty well for my mom and siblings and I (pass to the left, pass to the right, pass across, keep). We also played Euchre and Rummy 500 as we developed more strategical skills.
3. I love winning. Specifically, I love winning games that aren't just based on luck. Card games are a good balance of luck (the deal) and strategy, because sometimes it's nice to blame losing on the cards you were dealt (which is sometimes completely legitimate and sometimes because you made the wrong call re:your spades/hearts, but nbd).
4. They are universal. Ok, maybe if I went to Neptune I would not find it easy to play a card game there, but for the most part you can play with anyone and everyone should be able to agree on common rules (see BS or ERS for all kinds of crazy variations that make no sense unless you've always played with marriage sandwiches). It's just a great way to spend time with friends and family and strangers, too!
5. Convenience and multiple possibilities all in one box! It is so easy to store and transport cards, especially when you consider traveling and dorms and picnics and everything. And even then you're not locked into one game or even a family of games...there are probably a thousand games you can play with one deck of cards (ok, some of them may require multiple decks).
6. Collectible cards. There are so many cool decks of cards you can get. Some of them teach you things, like famous writers or inventors (yes we have these decks) and some of them are just commemorative, like the APO deck. I personally have like five decks of Coca-Cola cards because I am super into commercialism...but actually they have really good graphic designers. Anyway, different decks make all kinds of games more fun. I really like a deck my family has of Looney Tunes characters, just because they're so cute and have individual pictures for each face of the card.

That all said, if I lose a card game to you, you'd better have a way to get my mind off of it real fast or else I'm going to be a grump. I may or may not have a grudge against both of the people I played Hearts with last night.

my favorite spreadsheet

I am obsessed with organization. In seventh grade I spent the time to write out my schedule down to fifteen-minute increments...which is really weird because I was homeschooled and literally had no external pressure to adhere to a regular schedule (as long as I got it done, I was good). I also predicted at the beginning of the year that I would be capable of waking up at 7:00 every morning which was a very inaccurate belief, as I regularly woke up around 11 regardless of my schedule.

The trend of me making schedules, lists and other charts with no real interest or motivation in sticking to them has continued from that early age. Sometimes I make them with every intention of using them, though. For National Novel Writing Month, my favorite part of the process is not writing or planning or even commiserating with other novelists about how terrible my writing is and how much homework is weighing me down. My favorite part is calculating how many words I have left to write per day to keep on track and how my hourly pace is comparing to my total words per hour average. I have an excellent spreadsheet which enables this, and I probably spend a quarter of my writing time fiddling with it (I can make my word counts red if I've yet to reach my daily goal!).

But others I have abandoned within mere hours. I have tried numerous times to create a budget spreadsheet that works for me, but since I don't really have strict ideas of what I should spend and not spend (owing to the fact that if I don't need something, I won't buy it, and I already feel guilty enough every time I pay to see a movie), I have no incentive to keep up with a budget. It's easy enough for me to figure out how much money I have so there's really no point in this extra work. This doesn't stop me from longing for an interactive and useful spreadsheet to manage my money, but I'll just have to wait until the day when I actually have bills to keep up with and budgeting to do.

My favorite spreadsheet is a true work of art. It is my schedule. I'm not just talking about when I have my classes. I'm talking seven-sheet, color-coded, gpa-calculating all out what-if analysis of my college career. I know exactly which courses I would take if I were to, on a whim, decide to change my major with not one, not two, but four alternatives (and five minor options), all of which work together to create a unified study plan. I know how many A's I need to get in order to compensate for any number of lower grades and maintain the gpa that I think I should have. I know what classes I would take if I decided to drop math but still have 12 credits every semester in order to remain a full-time student. It has seen many changes throughout the past two years but it has become essentially an extension of my brain, enabling me to process multiple bits of information at once. This is why technology is so awesome. This is also probably why course registration is both very easy and very stressful to me...I know exactly what I would like to take about a year in advance, and I also know several alternate courses which would also be useful. On the bright side, when I don't get the classes I want, I get to adjust my schedule, which is like a really fun and important puzzle.

I also enjoy checklists, and I approach my homework much like this. At the beginning of a semester I compile all of my syllabuses (I actually think this is correct, instead of syllabi) into one spreadsheet so that I know all of my due dates and test dates right off the bat. I make tests and hard due dates red, while readings and other unessential items remain black. In class tests are also highlighted. Then, as I complete an assignment, I change the text to a calming blue. If all of my work for a certain subject for a certain week is complete, then that row gets to be blue! Similarly, if all of my work for a given day is done, then the column turns blue! And if a whole week is blue, then I put it into a second sheet which contains an archive of all of my assignments in case I want them for reference, and then the next week moves to the top of the first sheet. It is beautiful. This is also helpful because I know from day one how my final exam schedule is and how likely it will be for me to have free time on a given weekend considering my test schedule.

My most recent spreadsheet is one for my summer goals. I'm using it to track my progress in rereading Harry Potter, planning my summer trips and doing all of my Super Top Secret Craft Projects. Though not my favorite, I like that it has general goals and also daily goals (in different sheets for June and July and eventually August). It is super motivating.

summer reading

What I read last semester:

• Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
• a lot of the Bible
• literally nothing else

What I'm reading right now:

• Harry Potter, for the 5th time. I know I read them in 8th grade and then again before the 4th movie came out and again before the 5th movie/7th book and then before the 6th movie (but mostly because I wanted to read them that summer) and now must be the 5th time (but only the third for the seventh book, the main reason I wanted to reread the series). I'm on a strict regiment of 5 chapters a day, except I get two free days so that I can catch up (or just skip...erm). I am finding so many things I forgot that I loved, like the centaurs and Peeves! And also they are still so entertaining. And Ron is way funnier in the books than in the movies where they give all the smart lines to Hermione.
• Out of the Salt Shaker & Into the World, an IVP book about evangelism with a lot of examples from college life/ministry but with a focus on examining the life of Jesus as Christians so that evangelism isn't a chore but a natural result of our faith (and not an uncomfortable, oblivious sermon, either). I need to finish it soon but I am getting distracted with all of my Harry Potter.
• Readings from Unquestionable Stewardship, a devotion/bible study thing through YouVersion which means that I can read them on my phone! It is super cool and I can't wait to find a new study plan when this one's over.

What I want to will be reading after July 15:

• Predictably Irrational
• Animal Spirits
• Buy-ology
• The Gospel According to Starbucks
• The Return of Depression Economics
• Nudge
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (I've read three of them)
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• The Tempest
• Sense and Sensibility
• Hunger Games, but only if I feel like succumbing to mass pressure and only if I finish everything else first

Yes. I am a super econ nerd and need to catch up on some classic literature. You can see why I decided to reread Harry Potter...I need to give myself a break once in a while.

perfection

I am always trying to be perfect. I think that this is ingrained in me not by my parents or society but as a deeper part of my core being. I would just like for everyone to have a job that they like and for everyone else to respect that; I would like for everyone to have food and a family and for jealousy and gossip to be unheard of.

I would also like everyone to think like me. I would like everyone to spend some time with other people and some time with themselves, and I wouldn't dictate an exact percentage here but I would like everyone to spend healthy amounts doing each. I would like everyone to care about learning and safety. I would like everyone to appreciate Pushing Daisies and stop fawning over Mad Men. I would like it if everyone drank Coke so we didn't need Pepsi or even Diet Coke because everyone would be happy with the way that they looked and could enjoy an occasional 90 calorie drink. I would like it if they stopped casting 25 year olds to play teenagers on tv.

When I picture heaven, I still see clouds and white robes. Now, there aren't any ferocious angels in this mental image, but everyone is happy and I mostly focus on a blond family who sits down to dinner except they don't have a table or chairs or food, and all they do is smile at each other. They are so happy to be with each other and in the presence of God that nothing else matters. I don't know if this is a realistic image or not (though certainly there are other cultures and ethnicities unrepresented in my mind which at least slightly invalidates my model), but I know that my imagination of perfection on earth is never going to be the case.

Why? If perfect were based off of what I wanted, everything would be terrible. There would be very little free choice. The free market system would fail because everyone would want identical products, so there wouldn't be many opportunities for manufacturers or actors or even creative innovation, because unless your product expedited a process I was already a fan of (like making bacon cook faster or making color-changing post-it notes), no one would spend any money on it. Also, money would be a problem...because though I said that everyone would have a job that they liked, really they would have a job that I liked because everyone would have the same tastes as me (otherwise the whole lack of competition thing would be oppressive and cruel). So then there would be no one to raise the pigs for my bacon consumption, and so on. (According to Jack's Mannequin, "sometimes perfection can be perfect hell." True that.)

So what would perfection actually look like here on earth? Well, it wouldn't be what I would choose on my own. I would selfishly want everyone to be like me. But I would recognize and choose it, knowing that it would actually be great - and here's what it is. Jesus prayed a few times throughout the gospels, but the most cited and most recognized is important for a reason. The Lord's Prayer tells us how God himself would have us pray...here are two translations.

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one. (Matthew 6:9-13, NIV)

Our Father in heaven,

Reveal who you are.

Set the world right;

Do what's best— as above, so below.

Keep us alive with three square meals.

Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.

Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.

You're in charge!

You can do anything you want!

You're ablaze in beauty!

Yes. Yes. Yes.

(Matthew 6:9-13, The Message)

God knows what's best. Only by asking him for what's best can we actually get what we need and want - only he can fill that ache inside of me. That's why I have a desire for perfection. It's not really perfect grades that will complete me, but a perfect world.

And Jesus also gives us insight into what that perfect world looks like, in case I still had doubts and still thought that my plan was better. He is the most perfect thing that this world has seen. His interactions and relationships are the closest things we have to perfection. If I were God-born-as-man I would be sitting up on some mountain all the time, enjoying the view, having some priests bring me food occasionally, and I'd wait for people to come to me to give them sage advice about their lives. It would require as little effort as possible and everyone would love and respect me. Jesus didn't come to get these things...he gave them away. He valued every person, especially those looked over by society: children, lepers, the blind, the sick, the crippled, foreigners, widows, prostitutes, tax-collectors (who were pretty sneaky...though I recently realized that this is like the first example of a franchise; how cool is it that even back then they recognized the efficiency of this economic model?!). Why? Because these things which society says define us don't really define us. Our social status, jobs or even our physical well-being don't diminish our worth, nor do they enhance it. Every person is a lovely creation of God, and his love can't and won't be denied to anyone who wants it.

So in this perfect world, we all treat each other not as equals but as betters, submitting ourselves to God's will, hiding in Christ, putting on a new self, becoming a servant. Fortunately, we don't have to wait until heaven to do these things: we can start to become perfect right now, just by loving and respecting others. In fact, we should start this now, as this is God's will (according to Matthew 22:37-40, the two core rules to live by, on which the 10 commandments and other laws rely, are to love the Lord and to love your neighbors). This is not exactly what I would choose, if I could pick a way to be perfect: my way would be a test that you pass once and you're done, and there's no daily process of dying to your own desires. But faith is not a decision you make one day only, and my way skips over the need for Christ and his forgiveness in my life and leads only to death.

productive procrastination

I am one of the most ingenious procrastinators you will ever meet. By disguising my distractions as important I can trick even myself into thinking that I am being productive. Here are some of my favorite creative ways to divert my attentions from actual tasks like homework.

1. Cleaning. This can take many forms, from doing laundry to taking out the trash to going through old folders to using cleaning products like Windex or Clorox wipes. There are always things that can be cleaned. I find that I can't do anything until I've cleared off my desk and put away my dishes. I am especially good at cleaning at school, since living with another person makes me feel like I shouldn't leave clothes falling out of my drawers, which I oddly don't mind at home...until I have to do something else.
2. Excessive planning. This can be super fun! If you're not a plotter and you write things without thinking about them ahead of time, I understand where you're coming from...but it is super effective to spend lots of time planning if you don't want to actually write something (this also applies to other life situations, but I prefer talking about writing). For National Novel Writing Month, I don't really plan things before I start writing because I know I will deviate from my plan when I get bored with it on day 3. What I'm talking about is not plot planning, but character planning. I can spend hours looking up name meanings and origins to find the best fitting name for every single character. I will figure out their Myers-Briggs type (you can tell now that I am actually obsessed with this measure...deal with it). I will figure out how many siblings they have and what their relationship with their family is, and I will list about 30 adjectives to describe them (because one will never do). I am super good at writing out a calendar and having a general idea of what happens when, not in terms of chapters or anything (I couldn't keep a pace like that because I get bored and skim over long periods of time, but then since I describe things forever, one scene may go on for like a quarter of the novel)...but in general plot terms. I color code a lot. I know what day of the week every main character was born on. I spend so much time doing this that the novel is almost peripheral.
3. Calculating things. In general, a good way to eat up an afternoon is to pull out your calculator. It can be your gpa conditional on your planned schedule and expected grades. It can be number of words left to write and the expected number of hours to completion. It can be the pace at which you are reading a given book, and how much faster you're going to have to read if you want to finish a whole series before July 15 (I have to read 5.5 more chapters today to stay on pace; if I don't I'll have to recalculate everything). It can be the correlation between the rating you gave a song on iTunes and the number of times it has been played (this is very interesting, but given such a large data set and the fact that it is always changing it is also very time-consuming). Basically, I am a super nerd. Speaking of which...
4. Playing Pokemon. Just kidding, this is an important task!
5. Alphabetizing or other sorting techniques. There are several applications of this - not just sorting books on a shelf. You can also organize on your computer! I make tons of folders so that I can categorize everything easily and find it when I need it. I've also created 20 different lists of friends on Facebook so that I can easily contact someone from a specific organization (or filter to invite friends to an event), and in general it just makes me feel less random in my life. I also really like updating the lists as I see fit. Other ideas: separate your shirts by solid and patterned and then arrange them into a spectrum of colors; make playlists for any number of different occasions; clean out your email inbox until there are no more than 50 (or however many fit on your main page) - archive the rest, but be sure to do so in colored folders/labels; color-code your life on a google calendar; organize books by the same author in not alphabetical but chronological order (obviously your Harry Potter books should already be arranged this way, but be creative...I did this with Shakespeare).
6. Making things! I am already planning my Christmas presents. You can try a new recipe or look up crafty things or make a card for a friend (or just write a letter, no assembly required). Some baking things take a long time and that is great for avoiding work.
7. Blogging. This has a perfectly legitimate justification, right? I want to keep my friends updated on my life and I love talking about me. Perfect. But though productive, it keeps me from doing the writing I would like to find the motivation to do and more importantly it is keeping me from reading Harry Potter.

I think I've made my point.

As you can guess, I am doing a lot of these things this summer. Note that they are mostly free and require no transportation. You can even do them with friends! I literally do not understand people who get bored because there are so many things I don't have time for, even now when I don't have a job or a car. So be creative in your procrastination, now and during school, and I predict you'll enjoy life more than if you just watch tv and stumble across the internet randomly. Though fun, these are not nearly as good at appearing productive as my ideas, and I am all about reducing cognitive dissonance.

night marisa

I have this theory about myself that I developed last year and which I have since shared with multiple people. It goes like this: there are two parts of my personality. Normal Marisa....and Night Marisa. Normal Marisa is normal...but Night Marisa is AWESOME. She likes to go on adventures and philosophize and can write epic stories and be super crafty. She appears almost every night between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., though sometimes I (normal Marisa) get tired and am just useless at night. I think she appears more frequently when I have deviated from my nap schedule, whether that be taking extra naps or falling asleep at like 8 or not getting any naps all day (horror!).

I first noticed this in high school when I realized that my writing was way more natural (and funny and good) at night. For my creative writing class, I would try to write poems or short stories in the afternoons when I got home from school but they were literally the worst things ever. So then I learned to put off all of my assignments until the night before, and I would write them around 1 a.m. and then print them and then go to sleep and wake up like 3 hours later (this led to my nap addiction). Of course, everyone in my class confessed to doing the same thing, leading to my belief that all writers are best at night.

Looking back on my life after I came up with this theory, everything made sense. A lot of my friends noticed that I became super talkative at night. My whole family (minus my dad) stays up late to play games or watch movies (this is fodder for another topic entirely, so I'll leave it for now). It seems to be a learned behavior but also somewhat genetic.

To get into the psychology of it, I (normal Marisa) am an introvert and I strongly subscribe to the theory of Eysenck that introverts experience a higher baseline level of cortical arousal than extroverts. This implies that long, large or new social situations, which raise cortical arousal (ie activate parts of your brain which connect to heart rate, vigilance and other physical things related to alertness and make you read faster, more creative, more focused, etc.), put extroverts at a comfortable level but stress introverts out. Some theorists predict that introverts would be morning people because at that point their cortical arousal hasn't been too elevated so they seek out more interaction in the morning and isolation in the evening. I can see this.

But I am kind of the opposite...when I wake up I want some time to do my own thing and schedule out my day and figure out if my crazy dreams meant anything and figure out when and where I'm eating and catch up on everyone's lives via Facebook. By the time dinner has passed and I've been as productive as I'm going to be, I want one of three things: I want to do my homework for real and if anything gets in my way I will silently fume (or get really mad...this is not a good trait); I want to work on a really tangential and unimportant task with all of my energies, like sorting the Myers-Briggs personality types into the Hogwarts houses then trying to use the percentage of the total population who are supposedly each personality type to figure out if the fact that the students at Hogwarts are evenly divided into the houses means that the wizarding world is significantly different in its personality type makeup than the general population (it is); or I want to have an adventure slash meaningful conversation and I am super spontaneous. All of these are manifestations of Night Marisa.

I think it has to do with my inhibitions being lowered after being up so high all day. I am exhausted by the time 10 rolls around but I do get a second wind, probably because my mom does and makes me do things with her at night (like that time I had to construct bookshelves at 3 a.m....not that I'm complaining; I was raised with this and find it mostly normal).

HOWEVER, I was watching an episode of Seinfeld on Memorial Day because they had like an all day marathon and I was too lazy to get up or find the remote to change the channel, even though I knew what happened in all of the episodes (because I was partly raised on it...yes, this seems strange in retrospect). And one of Jerry's stand up segments was about night guy and morning guy, who gets so mad at night guy for staying up and making him want to sleep in and do poorly at work. And this is when I realized that I am way less insightful than I often claim to be.