dear gps

Where do you think we are

Driving 'round in our car

I don't even know where to start

Maybe I'll call OnStar

You're gonna get us lost

As driver I'm the boss

So go recalculate

Where do you think we are?

irene

Good things about a hurricane occurring on the first weekend after classes start:

• I haven't even had to do laundry yet so I got to bring it home and now I won't have to do it for like another two weeks
• I got to bring home some unnecessary things that I had packed/stored in Williamsburg for the summer
• BONDING - excellent car ride music and movie-watching and games and adventures - in general this promises to be a fun break
• So little homework - all classes have only met once so they can't expect us to know anything yet, so it's a four-day weekend with no worries!
• Extra time to buy textbooks and have them shipped to school
• I can buy groceries at home now that I know what I need!
• I can celebrate my mom's birthday with her!
• Getting the extra time to watch The Glee Project and other things that weren't going to happen this weekend otherwise
• Greater ability to watch Pokemon at home
• Possibility of fun power outage adventures

Bad things about a hurricane occurring on the first weekend after classes start:

• We haven't even done enough work to warrant a break...I really just want to be doing work
• There were so many epic things planned for this weekend that are now being canceled/postponed. Convocation, sure; large group, definitely; but mostly...I wanted Screen on the Green!
• Next weekend we will have a ton of make-up work to keep us on schedule, plus everything from this past weekend, plus everything that was already planned for next weekend...TOO MUCH STUFF
• I don't even think we would have been affected by Irene
• Natural disasters/severe weather conditions in general are bad news
• I was just getting used to my room and now I miss it and my roommate and everyone else who didn't come home with me
• There wasn't a whole lot of advance notice so I don't have good plans on how to best spend this time
• Possibility of power outages or other not so fun adventures

first day of school

I am already blogging way more than I thought I would when I got back to school, but I think I'm okay with this.

Mostly I just wanted to express my enthusiasm for the first day of school, and also I don't have anything to do until class (in 34 minutes). [Side note: sometimes I break the rules of grammar ironically and I think it's funny but I recognize that some people are probably annoyed or think that I don't actually understand English. I just like run-on sentences, though not in academic settings.] But I don't think anyone else understands my excitement for classes to start. It's great that everyone's back on campus but really I have just been waiting to meet my professors and figure out my homework schedule and get super organized. It's also the easiest week of college and is my favorite week, followed closely by dress week and finals. Everything else is basically the same, repeated thirteen times.

I don't like to dress too nicely on the first day because I don't want to look like I'm trying too hard (like all those girls wearing dresses today...no offense if you are, but it is not hot enough to persuade me to wear a dress when I have to sit in classrooms today). It's kind of worrisome when I have to decide how many notebook pages I will likely use for a given class and then decide how many subjects I can fit in one notebook (I go from the front for one subject and start from the back for another, if I estimate that I can) - but it's also fun and it's good to just pick and then know, because I need to work on establishing the notebooks in my memory so that I don't bring the wrong one to class.

I also have to think about where I want to sit in a class. Depending on the class I may like the front best...or not. If it's a standard classroom set up I don't want to be behind a tall person and I want to be BFFs with my prof so I sit up front, but in a lecture classroom I want to be able to see all the people in the room so I'll sit in the middle/back but on the side (never the middle of a row) for easy late arrivals and early departures. Basically I just want to sit near the door, because I have a tendency to get to class late (only by like a minute). But if I see someone who I want to sit with then that will override all of my other concerns, at least for the first day. After that I will probably arrive early and sit in the place where I want to sit, because there's no point in being mad at a friend all semester for picking a terrible seat.

Another major source of worry for me (this started five months ago) is the impending task of setting my lunch schedule. As soon as I signed up for classes I started thinking about this. It's my least favorite part of the beginning of the semester, so it's probably fair to say that my feelings toward the first week and the second week are polar opposites (it is a major week for establishing free times). I don't want to commit to eating with someone who I don't like very much or with too many people at once or all of my meals at Sadler, so it's kind of stressful in that I do need to eat but I don't want to make my availability completely open to everyone. This comes back to the point of me being too popular for my own good, though this isn't really true - most of this is probably in my head. But I do try to have more friends than I have time for on a weekly basis so I need to schedule some people into my life but I need to have free time so I can see some people on a monthly (or so) basis but for an extended period of time (like an entire afternoon).

So sometimes I end up skipping a meal or going to Wawa or eating cereal, mostly unintentionally, but sometimes for the express purpose of avoiding making a decision. I'm also on a block meal plan this semester so I need to schedule out my meals fairly carefully and I can't just go to Sadler and see if there's anything edible.

Anyway, I'm still excited for classes and homework and reading so it's probably a good thing that I still have three and a half more first days of college.

target etc.

Target is basically my favorite place in the world. In terms of stores that I go to, it is definitely number one for both frequency and length of visit. In terms of places that make me happy, it is probably third (after my car and Hogwarts)...given the competition, though, it is probably actually the best seeing as I've never been to Hogwarts and the novelty/love for my car diminishes with use.

Actually, I'll just make a list of my favorite places.

1. My car. I love driving...long highway drives, reparking trips, sitting and waiting for the rain to subside...it is wonderful. I have my cd's and my air freshener and my keys and I can go other places but really I would be content, most of the time, to just stay in the car. It's great for being by yourself and for being with limited numbers of people!
2. Hogwarts. But actually.
3. Target. I could talk about Target all day. I couldn't stay there that long, though. It is very easy to navigate and has almost everything you could wish for at a reasonable price and is way classier than Walmart. I love their commercials and I love how clean it is and how convenient it is and how wonderful everything there is.
4. IKEA.
5. Morton Hall...though it is sinking into the ground it continues to make me really happy and I love Mortonfalls and I could probably just live there forever and ever.
6. Monroe!
7. The mailboxes in Sadler Center because they are so organized but still manage to get so messy.
8. My bed.
9. The back room.
10. Leah's attic.
11. That semi-secret bench behind the echo garden (which is also cool but way more touristy).
12. Georgetown Cupcake.
13. Miller (more precisely Boehly Cafe)...I wish I could eat there every day. Actually, I will be looking into the feasibility (and optimality) of this.

Now I am getting hungry and could list like twenty more places where I would like to eat, but those places do not make me as happy as the rest of the list which also just conveniently ended on the 13th place.

I got distracted by my list-making need, but just remember, Target is awesome and is preferable to any other store unless you want to take me to Ollivander's.

non-secrets

I love PostSecret more than I love a lot of things, but probably less than I love cupcakes and dresses. It's probably right up there with my extremely comfortable bed and organizing my dresses based on their expected number of uses, though.

Anyway, it's a site where people anonymously send in secrets (though some of them aren't really secrets) on postcards and the owner of the site (Frank Warren) sorts through them and puts the best ones online (and even more go in books that you can buy). He came to campus last semester and I went to hear him talk and it was cool and all, but I already knew most of what he had to say because I visit PostSecret every Sunday (that's when new secrets come out) - and I have been doing so for the past four years. So yeah, you could say that I was ahead of that trend.

All that to say, probably my favorite secret of all time was posted today. Okay, that's not really true for two reasons: 1) it's one of those ones that's not really a secret; 2) my favorite is probably the one about the girl who has lied her entire life about being allergic to peanut butter but secretly likes it and eats it. But it's my favorite in a while. Enough with the preamble, here it is!

http://www.postsecret.com/

Okay, but you didn't think I'd let you get away without a postamble, did you? So this postcard and the sermon today at Grace Covenant spoke to me for a lot of reasons. I'm currently stressing out about approximately seven million things (not all of which are problems) even though I really don't have anything stressful going on right now (at least not until next week when classes start!). Mostly, I just want to know if I'm taking the right classes and allocating my time and energy effectively and what I'm doing after graduation and how that should influence what I'm doing now annnnd a bunch of more specific things and more general things and it's just a lot of things that I'm thinking about and wishing I had more definite answers on. But that's silly.

I am where I am and I don't think that's a mistake; I know what I know and I can't do anything about that except educate myself (which is what I'm attempting to do by, you know, going to school); I don't need a road map, I need a navigator - and I need to stop trying to do my life by myself. I'm so focused on my future and trying to plan for it that I'm not content with where I am and I'm definitely not in a mindset to make the most of this semester...so that is something that I will be thinking about and something that I will need to be called out on multiple times because I am very good at thinking about change but not so good at enacting it, and really not so good at being where I am.

Tangent: I also think that this is just part of my personality, which in some ways excuses me from changing but in other ways encourages me to be even more proactive about combating my tendency to not do things (not necessarily in a lazy way, though I am feeling particularly Snorlax-y lately). I really think that the whole INTJ thing is spot-on and the analysis of this personality type is quite good at explaining my weirdness. It also makes me a little bit worried because if approximately 2% of the population is INTJ then there have been, in the past, of the say 100 billion people who lived before 1970, 50 billion women and so around 500 million women who have lived with the same general weirdness (INTJ types being fairly characteristically weird in my opinion) as me but who didn't have very intellectually stimulating professions - so what makes me so lucky to be allowed to have an interesting and important job (okay, I'm being optimistic about real life here but I think it's still an interesting argument) - and what would I think of myself if I didn't pursue that opportunity? So I need to be the most me I can be, which will certainly involve effort and busyness but I think that I can do that in a much better mental state and with a lot more trust and obedience than how I've been doing things.

And that's my mostly non-secretive life.

summer reading, conclusion

What I actually read this summer:

1. I started reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone right after Rockbridge and decided that I would need a very rigorous schedule of reading to complete the series before July 15...
2. so then I read six chapters of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets a day, and did the same with
3. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and
4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Since I did so well, I allowed myself to slow down to five chapters a day for
5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix and
6. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, but I got slowed down severely by my trip to Florida so I had a bit of a mad dash at the end of my time.
7. I literally read over half of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on the day that the movie came out...I had a headache afterwards but I don't think I'd have it any other way.
8. Then I finally finished Out of the Saltshaker and Into the World which I had to keep putting on hold for Harry Potter, though it was very good!
9. My summer being almost over, I still had a lot of reading to do so I pretty quickly blasted through Sense and Sensibility which would usually take me like a month to read (instead I took three days).
10. I read all of Predictably Irrational on the train to Lynchburg (it may have been my favorite read of the summer)
11. then I read Buy-ology and
12. Nine Stories (a very good collection of short stories) and
13. Witch and Wizard while at the beach getting my tan on
14. but I saved The Importance of Being Earnest for the train ride home.
15. Finally, I read The Tempest while packing for school.
16. I read half of Animal Spirits (I plan on finishing it soon)
17. and two thirds of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz randomly at the bookstore...I need to read how it ends because it does have a subplot that got left out of the movie!

So, pretty successful, but kind of disappointing given my ridiculously high standards for summer reading and the fact that I definitely had time to read way more. Oh well - winter break will be here soon enough!

things I don't believe in

• Bobby pins.
• Paying for drinks at restaurants. Just get free water!
• Pokemon past Mew, with the exception of Togepi.
• Digimon.
• Having a twitter (it would be okay if I were a celebrity, I think).
• Google+.
• Reality shows about finding love.
• iPads (and Apple products in general...I begrudgingly own an iPod).
• Throwing or catching things when it would be just as easy to hand them over without the very serious possibility of disaster or the very likely probability of disruption.
• Dyeing my hair (other people's hair is okay to dye - just not mine). I have gorgeous hair! I would be so afraid that I wouldn't be able to get my wonderful blonde back if I ever dyed it.
• Taking pass/fail classes. No, just do the work!
• Manicures. I am actually scared of them. I just don't think nail salons are the most sanitary places.
• Tanning beds slash fake tanning slash Jersey Shore obsessions.

I would say that I am okay with ironically liking these things, but then again I've already shown how easily I slip from ironic to actual obsession, so for now I'm going to go on the safe side and just say that I "don't believe in them" - meaning I don't like/do them but I also don't really care about what other people do regarding these subjects. It's as if they just don't exist.

summer 2011 recap

Things I did this summer, very roughly in chronological order:

• Reunited with Muna and Leah and Melanie after way too long of an absence; got Georgetown Cupcakes
• Rockbridge: reunited with Jenn, taught Melody sass (more to follow in the fall), said goodbye to Benton forever (but got his bed risers - fair trade?)
• Saw Katie (not Komo), Steph, Mrudula
• Acquired and lost a pet bat
• Got SO MUCH FROYO
• Reread all of the Harry Potter books, only cried once
• Caught up on Glee, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, The Office, 30 Rock, Breaking Bad; started watching The Glee Project
• Assembled shelves, sorted books and other things to help my grandma move
• Watched Never Say Never for the second time
• Went to bible study with the Bylers (get some quality Medina/Haset hangs)
• Visited high school; felt old
• Saw Hangover 2, X-Men First Class, Adjustment Bureau, TiMER, Super 8, Captain America, Friends with Benefits, Thor, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
• Visited Williamsburg twice; shopped at Target because it's not like I have two of these at home; got lots of noms; spread the infectious game of Hearts
• Watched Chelsea graduate; felt super old
• Saw Tyler, Jessica, Megan...and of course New Moon?
• Sent extraordinarily long and intimidating peer advising emails
• Isabel/Katie/Jamie/Danyah DC visits (my exercise for the summer)
• Made Megan watch The Two Towers; quoted the entire movie with Jamie
• Drove to Florida with Melanie and went to DISNEY WORLD! And HOGWARTS!!! (and got burned at the beach)
• Harry Potter premiere, bd bd bd
• Watched Never Say Never for the third time
• Visited Katie; went to beach; learned to ride a bike; tried Bojangles
• Read nine and two-half non-Harry Potter books
• Worked on super secret craft projects
• Saw Melodie!!!
• Heard about Leah's Copenhagen life, felt nonproductive
• Visited Muna at Teavana, and generally built up an addiction to breakfast tea over the course of three months
• Fit most of my belongings in the trunk of my car (okay, this does not include any of my clothes or the roughly 2/3 of my stuff that is still in Landrum attic, but no one's counting)
• Blogged so much I sometimes doubt I'll have anything left to say (this is a distinct improbability given the complexities of any given human brain and my particular ability to find boring things incredibly noteworthy...also I still have 21 drafts so if I suddenly lose inspiration I'll have at least three weeks to gain it back)
• Listened to my summer playlist at least seven times
• Discovered Navigation on my phone
• Consistently took vitamins
• Made lots of new and exciting baked goods

Things I wanted to do this summer but didn't accomplish:

• Go to Splash Down (this was so close to being an actuality)
• Finish watching Friends (but now I have something to watch over winter break)
• Watch The Big Bang Theory (saw one episode, didn't like it)
• Watch lots of Toddlers and Tiaras with Taylor
• Watch Bridesmaids and Source Code
• Read The Return of Depression Economics, Jane Eyre, Lord of the Rings and Nudge (but my list was fairly extensive so I'm okay with putting these off)

Okay, so I didn't have a job but I feel like I had a pretty successful three months nevertheless.

last day of summer

Today was everything that a summer day should be, which is perfect because tomorrow is laundry/packing day and Thursday is moving day and after that there's no more room for summer. Allow me to recap:

• Step one: sleep in, wake up at indeterminable hour (11? 1? 9:30?).
• Step two: breakfast, make tea (add almond milk), read newspaper (especially the help columns).
• Step three: business, take care of Facebook notifications and emails from people who wake up before me.
• Step four: shower, but only out of social necessity.
• Step five: Target, even though I didn't need anything.
• Step six: second meal (when it's past 3pm I guess it could just be called a summer lunch).
• Step seven: make cheesecake, nbd.
• Step eight: Shakespeare, finish The Tempest.
• Step nine: adventure with Chelsea, see Muna, drink lots of tea.
• Step ten: sit outside and talk about how awesome summer nights are.
• Step eleven: two buck Tuesday, see Pirates 4 and get popcorn and soda for $6.
• Step twelve: intend to clean bathroom, never even attempt.
• Step thirteen: CRAFT TIME plus food network!
• Step fourteen: blog.

Okay, well, that's not entirely accurate. I actually had a lot of craft time interspersed throughout the day - but the majority of it occurred between 12:45 and 3:30 this morning. I am in the process of finishing all of the crafts that I ambitiously started at the beginning of the summer and never really had time to work on. These are Super Secret crafts and the only person who knows the full extent of them is my mom, who is also my Craft Mentor and Project Manager. She has every possible kind of glue, paper, ink, marker or scissor I could ever imagine needing, and when I can't figure out how to make a project work, she has about five alternate ideas for me. The best thing is that she's working on her own projects (from making me a purse with a magnetic close to designing cards, she perennially has things to craft) - and we can watch tv while we're working.

Without revealing any Super Secret Craft secrets, I can say that I have a new appreciation for Mod Podge. I always thought this stuff was cool, but I have never used more in my life. I think I might develop carpel tunnel syndrome from lathering mod podge. It just makes everything look shiny and wonderful, and I can never put too many coats on. And the reason that craft time takes so much time throughout the day is that I have to wait for mod podge to dry before I can put on another layer. Sometimes there are other things I can work on while I wait for one project, but now that I'm getting down to the end I've found myself just watching tv and waiting for my 15-20 minutes to pass in complete nonproductivity.

On a completely unrelated note, the other reason that my breakdown of today is not entirely accurate is that it conveys the idea that I have been this productive/active every day (by active I still mean mostly sitting, but I did at least travel to different places with my car). The image of me being productive every day this summer is very false. Today was an unusually diverse day - but on an actual typical day of my summer, I wake up, breakfast, Facebook, lunch, Facebook, maybe read, dine on dinner, watch some tv, craft, Facebook, sleep. Or if I do go out, I won't have time to read or I won't craft. Today was quite the exception - it's probably because I've started hearing the clock ticking until I leave and I don't want to leave projects undone or books unread or adventures missed out on. And I guess there's also the fact that at school my down time consists almost entirely of sleeping, so I have to shift myself to an active(ish) lifestyle in the least abrupt way possible. There will be three major changes between now and next week: I will have gone to sleep before 2am, I will not have cheesecake readily available to me and I will not discover mod podge on my forearms when I wake up.

dresses

I love dresses. This is a very recent development in my wardrobe, probably due to watching so much Project Runway (I have seen every episode; we're on season 9). My favorite designs are cute, ready-to-wear dresses that I just want to steal from the work room and wear. I guess a little bit of innovation is okay sometimes, but as one-note as it was I still love Leanne's collection.

I get that the judges like to see different things, but this collection does have a range of styles and fabrics. It just happens to look like basically the same three things over and over again. I wouldn't actually wear any of these dresses - but that is because I already own too many dresses.

Some time between when I started watching Project Runway (2008) and today, I discovered that I owned a crazy number of dresses (currently it is 32, though a couple of them are very loosely defined as dresses and are more like cover-ups or really long shirts). I probably had a few before I watched the show - but not many. I only went to one high school dance and we weren't allowed to wear tank tops to school so my main venue for wearing dresses was church. This would have still afforded me plenty of reasons to own lots of dresses (you can't repeat church dresses very often) but my church doesn't require dresses. I would get a new one every spring or summer just to add to my wardrobe of jeans and t-shirts so that I could wash my jeans and shorts less often. But that period of my life was not to last.

When I was younger, I had all kinds of dresses - cute little girl dresses, dress-up dresses, Easter dresses, match-my-sister dresses, match-my-doll dresses. And then I became Too Good For Dresses. I was fine in my shorts, thank you very much. I outgrew my old dresses and didn't bother to replace them. If I had to dress up, I had nice pants and a few emergency dresses. But Project Runway transformed my life. I got a dress for a wedding - a birthday party - then a grad party - then I got a dress for a vacation - graduation - I couldn't be repeating outfits, everyone would know! (This was also the beginning of my use of Facebook, and I contribute my paranoia to the fact that I wasn't actually being paranoid, just aware of my changing society and its expectations.) And then I got to college. I still didn't consider myself a Dress Person - I had about three to choose from for convocation and I was surprised when I learned that I had to use one's first appearance up so soon. That semester, I was kept in check by a lack of access to stores and a wariness of online shopping.

But as soon as I got home, I found that I was in Target withdrawal. The first thing I did, after immediately and completely unpacking, was get Chipotle (of course) and then go to Target and buy a dress. I felt good about this purchase even though it was a summer dress and winter had just started. Another semester passed (I got a dress for King and Queens).

Summer came - but first, Rockbridge. And I had to have a new dress for Rockbridge, for the end of the week photo sesh. None of my current dresses seemed nice or floral enough for such an occasion, and besides, I had worn them all recently. Look at this picture: where would I have been without a floral dress?! Clearly, they would've disowned me. I went and got a dress to avoid this embarrassment.

When I got home from Rockbridge, I had a week and a half to chill at home and watch the finale of Lost. In that time I decided that I was seriously in need of dresses - I considered myself deprived. Where had all of my dresses gone? Had they just disappeared when I left for college? I assumed that I had way more than I did - but I was just looking at my past wardrobe through rose-colored glasses and assuming that I had a proper number of dresses throughout high school. This was false. In any case, I was desperate for a nice dress that I could wear out to lunch or to church, something casual but classy.

I went to JC Penney and came home with four dresses. All of them were fantastic finds, and all of them fulfilled that gap in my wardrobe, but I felt extravagant. I felt like I had truly become a Dress Person. And I embraced it. I met this girl, Taylor, who loved Pokemon and Disney songs and dresses and chemistry (I forgive her) and had a pretty blue car and I decided that we had a lot in common. I had found another Dress Person. Over the summer I got a lot of use of my new dresses, wearing maybe two a week (except some days I just sat in my room and watched videos all day because it was so hot outside...I did not get good use of my dresses or myself on those days).

Now we've arrived at sophomore year. I made my first online clothing purchase. And my second (this one for campus golf). I don't really believe in buying things online because you have to pay for shipping and you can't try it on or even feel it or see its colors in different lights, but sometimes, when you see the perfect dress, you just have to buy it. I still had to talk myself into buying them (with help from my roommate).

And then came Dress Week. Taylor and I realized that we had a ton of dresses. I realized that there was no way I was going to get use out of all of them unless I started wearing multiple dresses a week - I actually had enough that I could go a whole month with nothing but dresses (February, but who's counting?). Of course, a lot of these would be fancy dresses and that would be kind of silly. So a week of dresses sounded like a much better plan. This would also allow people with smaller dress obsessions, and less commitment to crazy ideas despite weather fluctuations, to participate. And being me, I knew that this week wouldn't be any good without photographic evidence of its existence. Hence, Dress Week occurred this April 10-15 (I think I skipped Saturday because I wore two dresses on Friday due to King and Queens and also because I was tired of looking so great and also I had to wear a t-shirt for the activities fair, but I don't really remember which justification I used at the time). We invited lots of friends to participate in a Facebook event (because nothing is official if it's not on Facebook), and lots of pictures were taken and joy was had by all. It actually was super great for several reasons:

1. I got to see Taylor and Katie every single day!
2. I was so popular - everyone was texting me being all like, where u at (this was Katie) so that we could take pictures together.
3. I looked good for a whole week...believe me, that is a real win in the college girl's war with apathy/busyness.
4. I got to see a lot of people who I don't normally see during the week - because everyone has time to take a quick picture outside on a beautiful day!
5. It was a super busy week leading up to an even busier one, and if I did not have dresses and friendship to make me happy I would have been pretty stressed out. Instead, it was just a challenge to get as many pictures as possible!

But there were some parts that made me sad:

1. I didn't get to take my picture with a lot of people who were wearing dresses that week.
2. It was really, really cold on Wednesday so I wore a dress for part of the day but wore a skirt for another part of the day (I don't remember how that worked out - I'm getting old).
3. I didn't wear a dress on Saturday. That would have been nice.
4. I felt like I couldn't wear any of those dresses ever again because there was public documentation of each of them. I didn't repeat any of them that semester (I only had four weeks left). It made it incredibly difficult to pick a dress to bring to Rockbridge. It was like having six Rockbridge photo shoots, except way less intense and all featuring me. So, not really like it at all.

Despite these shortcomings, I anticipate a return of Dress Week, which was essentially the best week of the semester.

This summer I somehow found myself with four new dresses, though I wasn't intending to add any more to my bulging closet. Now I have to choose which ones to take to school and which ones to leave here, and I wrote this blog to help me procrastinate. I love all of my dresses and I wouldn't want to ignore any of them - because if I leave a summer dress here, I won't wear it again until April at the earliest. I have enough dresses for any regular-sized month, but I still don't know how many to bring back to school to avoid over-filling my closet, wasting space in my car and of course getting a dress extra wrinkly for no reason. I am just putting way too much effort into trying to plan all of my outfits for the next four months which is really, really silly. And yet...I still want to make the best decision possible. And I still haven't made up my mind about anything.

I always have the most valid, tragic complaints in my life.

Speaking of which - this is my last tangent - it's kind of funny how I've adjusted to a new level of dresses, but it's not that surprising. Today, if I suddenly only had three dresses I would panic - what if I wanted to wear a purple dress? But before I was fine. This also happens with wealth. Just because I have a ton of dresses doesn't mean that I'm satisfied with my dress collection - in fact, it makes me more aware of the dress types that I don't have. Similarly, if I suddenly doubled my income, I would spend a lot of it on things that would slightly improve my standard of living, but I would still see people way richer than me and be unsatisfied. Never mind the fact that I'm richer than my previous neighbors - now, in my bigger house, I have all this extra space so I need a bigger tv and I'd better get a new car because everyone else is getting a new car. This is actually not true - I would know better than to get a bigger house - and my current income is clearly not enough to get me a house (I'm unemployed, so doubling my income would literally not do anything) - but it's something to think about when I really, really want one of those classy dresses I could wear to work, despite the fact that I still don't work.

I have so many first world problems.

ikea

"There are not enough words to describe my love for IKEA" - this would be a perfectly adequate blog post on its own. And yet, though its conciseness would convey my seriousness, I have way more to say on the subject of IKEA!love.

1. First, good font choices on signs etc. - everything is easy to read and friendly. (Somehow I missed the recent controversy - I am a much bigger fan of Futura.)
2. The carts at this store run amazingly smoothly (?). It's like ice-skating on a freshly-Zambonied rink, except way LESS DANGEROUS. It's like the carts pull the customers along on a ride through a land of home goods. If I were to create an amusement park, IKEA would be my favorite attraction.
3. I haven't checked it out, but there's a whole place for kids to go play! And there are really good deals on kid-sized meals and the furniture is so much cuter for kids.
4. I could probably talk about any given room in any section of this store for an hour. I will refrain.
5. The IKEA scene in 500 Days of Summer is one of my favorite parts of any movie.
6. I LOVE that there are maps everywhere and arrows on the floor telling you where to go - but also "shortcuts" to different parts of the store. It is so cute. And so organized.
7. The single word product names (most of which are Swedish) are just so fun - but also really useful, because there's no mistaking similar objects (so long as you get the name right).
8. The restaurant serves delicious desserts and decent entrees! There are some great things in there...I highly recommend stopping to eat on your next IKEA visit.
9. Everything is really well explained. Like, why do I have to clear my own table? How do I find my furniture once I've picked it out? And even, from an otherwise somewhat ambiguous entrance, where do I start shopping?
10. It is impossible to leave without getting something that you hadn't anticipated - but this isn't a bad thing. There will be something that you didn't even know that you needed, but once you see it, you feel somehow...complete. Successful. Happy. Now, I'm not really a shopper, but there is something very satisfying about falling in love with a cute product and then instantly obtaining it (as opposed to online shopping or even going to a cute store and expecting to find something cute and then getting it).
11. It's not just consuming - it is an entirely unique experience, and everything is arranged in a way to make me happy. It's easy to understand, but not boring; I can walk through at my own pace and linger in one room for twenty minutes and then skip three entire sections - but it's just laid out so nice and clear that it is way more fun than a regular store. It's like you're supposed to interact with the furniture, test it out and have fun. It's like they took my ideal furniture store right from my brain and created it in a real warehouse, and everything is the way that I want it to be - except they don't have every possible piece of furniture that I would like to buy (if you're looking for something specific but it's not in their catalog you will not have a fun shopping experience). Otherwise...it's just a fantastic place.

That all said, I think that IKEA would be a terrible place to go with someone who you don't know very well because of the overwhelming possibilities for disagreement, from whether a bookshelf is tasteful or not to how long you really need to spend looking at rugs. It's also a really exhausting store. Thankfully, they have food strategically placed at the end of the top floor and right after you check out on the bottom floor, so you really could spend all day in this wonderful world.

rotten tomatoes

In case you didn't realize it already, I actually have pretty good taste when it comes to movies. I like cinematography, I like witty but realistic conversations, I even seek out indie films sometimes. Though there are a lot of silly movies that I enjoy, generally a movie has to blow me away for me to consider it good...and then I will happily rewatch it several times. You could say I'm a film snob - and I'm sure a lot of my friends will agree with this. There are a lot of movies I have refused to pay money to see even though my friends were going to see them:

• No Strings Attached
• Black Swan (this wasn't about the quality of the movie but about my complete lack of interest)
• Killers
• Love Happens
• All About Steve
• The Covenant
• I Am Legend
• Tropic Thunder (saw it on dvd, thought it was okay)
• Charlie Bartlett
• Eclipse (I admit that I saw the others at my sister's request)

I can't just trust one critic to tell me whether a movie is good or not - I want all of them; I want a consensus; I want Rotten Tomatoes. I can generally tell when a movie is going to be good or not, but there are some movies that I really can't judge from their previews. I could say with 100% conviction that Avatar: The Last Airbender was going to be bad last summer, but I still wanted to see it because I really like Shaymalan movies that other people don't like and because it was midnight and because there's really not much else to do in Williamsburg. I didn't need RT to tell me it was bad - I ignored their words of warning. Ironically I found the opposite true of the consensus on Avatar, the blue-person movie - though it received an 83%, I found the movie incredibly boring, exceedingly long and astoundingly overpraised. In general, though, I take Rotten Tomatoes as a definitive authority on the quality of a movie.

But this maybe isn't the most logical approach. The percentage that RT gives is of the critics who saw the movie who thought it was, in a choice between acceptable and unacceptable, passingly fair. You have to read the reviews to know if they thought it was actually good. PSA: Rotten Tomatoes does not highlight the average rating of a movie, though it does provide this information; it merely highlights the percent of critics who gave it a positive review. And that's the problem - the movies with high percentages appeal to the widest range of critics, so it's kind of like an estimated likelihood that you will find the movie decent. That is simply not good enough for me. I don't want to spend $11 and two hours on something that I have a 30% chance of deeming a total waste. Let's look at what I mean.

So, really, this is saying that 97% of critics liked the movie but that its actual grade is 84%. Similarly, 92% of regular people liked it but its grade from audiences is 88%. (There is also the question of response bias here, in that only people with strong opinions took the time to rate the movie at all...but my feeling here is that you shouldn't go see this movie unless you already like Harry Potter and also won't be surprised if they completely mangle the plot, so really the RT score doesn't matter.)

That said, RT is a tool that you can use, and it's a very useful one given that it has so many critics' input, but you still have to use your own judgment when deciding what category a movie belongs in: opening night must-see, acceptable diversion of time and money if the opportunity arises, worth the wait for dvd, maybe okay if it's on tv in three years or avoid like the plague. If I want to see a movie based on its previews, it still has to get at least a 75% approval rating before I'll go, with few exceptions. Sometimes RT is most helpful in deciding between similar movies - like Green Lantern vs. Captain America. Obviously if both got great reviews I would have seen them both...and I probably would have seen Captain America anyway given my interest in The Avengers...but I saved myself from disappointment by not seeing Green Lantern, which I had high hopes for before the reviews started coming out.

I've found that it's good to find one or two critics who have a similar sensibility toward movies as yourself and follow their advice, since every person has a different definition of "good movie." I trust Roger Ebert's opinion like no other - I have disagreed with probably three of his reviews ever, though I clearly don't have the time to see all of the movies that he likes. But I respect his opinion a lot and have been glad to see that he takes movies for what they are and judges them based on criteria within their genres: he notes, for example, that a movie targeted toward young adults does a good job of relating to that generation.

Also, sometimes I have found myself forced into seeing a movie with friends. I always stand against what I consider to be a bad movie - but there is also a point where you should just give in and suspend your inner, raging critic for the sake of maintaining a social life and not being a total elitist. And sometimes it's fun to go and see a movie that you haven't read anything about, even though I am usually a fan of reading spoilers and speculations (perhaps why I loved Lost, Harry Potter, etc. as the stories were unfolding. Also, I would really like to know who wins The Glee Project and not have to wait two weeks).

Fun facts to leave you with: instead of going to senior homecoming, I saw Eagle Eye...and instead of going to senior prom I saw Star Trek in IMAX. I maintain that these were much more enjoyable experiences than my alternatives and that I totally optimized my utility. No regrets.

morbid interests

I am finally the owner of a Turbie Twist. I have been intrigued by these since I learned of their existence some 12 years ago, in the days of my long hair. For those of you who didn't know me back then, I grew my hair to the point where I could sit on it if I really tried and then would get it trimmed like two inches and repeat this process ad naseum, or until I was 16. Then I had moderately long hair which I always considered short until this March when I got it cut at a length which I consider extremely short and other people consider normal.

Anyway, this product is magical. It cuts my hair-drying time down significantly which is impressive given that my hair is so short now that it only takes about a half hour to dry (as opposed to 1.5ish hours).

But I realized that I have a lot of morbid interests, which you might also call obsessions. Ok, a morbid interest should relate to death, and I don't really like when other people use this term casually, but I think it's fair. These obsessions start off as pure loathing and as my attention is drawn to them I just want to see more of them so that I can dislike them even more...and eventually I grow to love them.

• Jeggings. I heard this word and thought, that sounds incredibly stupid. There would be no chance of ever seeing me in faux jeans slash leggings (I'm not really sure at what point either one is pretending to be the other - though I prefer jeans that are like leggings to leggings that look like jeans). Because I found them so ridiculous, I had to try them on. And when I did I fell in love. I love jeans like no other person I know (I actually like sleeping in them) so this wasn't super surprising...basically anything jean is fine with me.
• Boston Red Sox. Ok, I'm still on the fence about how much I hate them, but right now it's kind of getting to the point where I want them to win lots so that I can watch them get this close to being World Series champions and then see them lose...but I also wouldn't super mind if they won because I feel like the devoted fans deserve it...but then there are bandwagon jumpers, so, eh. My feelings toward this franchise aren't nearly as strong as my disgust when the Yankees win, but I would still like to see someone else take the AL east - if the Orioles are out of the question, I still dream of seeing the Blue Jays having a stellar season. One day. In maybe twenty years.
• Canada. Ok, you're thinking, Marisa makes no sense. Why value the Toronto Blue Jays? Well, Canada is yet another of my morbid interests. It's so easy to make fun of but also dangerously easy to pity. It seems like a nice enough country without too many scandals or vindictive policies, and everyone knows Canadians are well-intentioned, like Hufflepuffs! But actually, it has been one of my lifelong dreams to travel to Canada. This may seem really silly - I know it's not so different from here - but I want to use Canadian money and buy Canadian coffee and eat Canadian delicacies like poutine. I am a little bit obsessed with their culture and a lot obsessed with using my passport for something.
• Justin Bieber. You may note that the Biebs is a Canadian. I started off kind of grossed out by the fact that I couldn't tell the difference between his voice and female singers and how little girls were fawning over him. So then I started to ironically listen to his music - you know, how people go to see Twilight just to make fun of it (note: I have done this). It started getting stuck in my head but I still brushed it off; catchy as he may be, I was having none of his tomfoolery. But as you all know by now, after watching the inspirational film Never Say Never, I was a converted belieber. I went home and listened to all of his songs approximately twenty times apiece. I told everyone to see this movie. I started bursting out into song (mostly Baby). I now have a JB sticker on the back of my phone. What is this madness?! I've never got caught by the fangirl crazies before in my life (I was/am immune to boy bands, Aaron Carter and Jesse McCartney). All I can say is that I caught Bieber Fever.
• Sporcle. Some people still haven't heard of this amazing procrastination machine - my advice? Stay away. But if you've already built up an interest in ruining your productivity, by all means, read on! I heard about this site during my senior year of high school, and thankfully I found it a little bit boring after doing the states quiz so it didn't pull down my grades and force the rescission of my college admission. But when I got to college, I realized that this was totally a site made for college kids. And now when I have free time and get tired of Facebook, I harmlessly meander over to Sporcle, thinking I'll teach myself something interesting. Seven and a half hours later I will know all the words to all of the Disney songs and will be able to list the most populated cities in the United States in descending order (this is a true story). Unfortunately, this knowledge will not stay with me forever, and I will continue to have the need to find more quizzes so that I can get in the 99th percentile - because to me the best part of taking these quizzes is seeing how well I do against the rest of the world (ie other bored college students). This really does qualify as a morbid interest, I think, because the more time I spend on Sporcle, the less time I have for real life. And yet...I just can't stop.

blue-ish crush

"Pink" was my first word and consequently my favorite color for several years. I mean, what little girl doesn't love this, the most princess-y color of all? Essentially all of my clothes were some form of pink, maybe partially because I had an older brother who couldn't wear any, but I would consider the percentage of pink outfits to be statistically significant, even as I got older and could pick my own clothing. In the photograph to your right, you will see one of my favorite pictures - I was dressing up for my grandparents' visit and super excited and had a little too much matchy-matchy going on. I didn't discriminate against shades, but the brighter, the better.

Then I realized that there are so many amazing shades of blue, from sky to royal blue, periwinkle to cerulean. I also had an intense love for Cinderella and her blue dress, water Pokemon (their color is obviously blue) and later the Lothlorien elves (their card color is a similar watery-blue). My grandma said that her favorite color was blue and I remember her blue china plates, so now when I think "favorite color: blue," I think of those plates.

I would have another relapse into pure blue, but first...

I made a quilt that was pink, blue and purple (and discovered that purple was the fusion of two of my favorite colors), so I put purple at the top of my list. Pretty soon I got to the stage where I hated red and orange (and still don't really love them). At this point, I adopted green and purple into my revised wheel of acceptable colors. I really liked bright green and purple together, kind of like the Joker? Anyway, then my bedspread was purple, green and blue, and this has characterized my room for a while (between walls, rugs, chairs, blinds, pillows, etc., it's been a veritable explosion of these colors).

Also, note in the above left photo my blue outfit and the blue carabiner watch which I thought was the epitome of cool.

After going to high school and seeing and wearing and designing purple everything (like The Purple Tide), I decided I was just into blue and green, and mostly blue. It was also in high school that I began my obsession with one particular shade - I would call it a medium-dark seafoam green. I really can't describe how much I love this color. It's not quite teal, aqua, aquamarine, mint, turquoise, seafoam, blue or green - but it's kind of all of them. It's...well, it's My Color. When I look at something of this color I just want it to be mine, whether it's a dress or a wall. A wall?! Yes. This was the color of the walls in two of my favorite classrooms - the first, my world history and world religions classroom, whose door could never be opened without creating a wind tunnel (I learned to quickly put away loose papers) and home to many a craft project; the second, the office inside the back room of newspaper, and where I lived for about 50% of senior year. The first was a little bit more green (though she insisted it was blue, I'm pretty sure she just did this to question our sense of reality), and the second was made a little bit darker and adapted to become the theme color for our literary magazine. (The magazine, coincidentally, is gorgeous and probably my favorite design to date.)

And now, my color is "teal." Teal everything. I say teal, but it's really the shade of the magazine that I'm thinking of, and I can't think of a word for it. Basically, though, I have a huge color crush. It's pretty and fun and smart and I can't get enough of it. I like it on the greenish side, not too dark, though sometimes I'll opt for a cyan-ish hue (which is a slightly more blue seafoam). I really just don't like dark teal. It's a fine color, but not my favorite.

I also have a small crush on coral, which has become a very popular color this year, and a kind of rosy pink. I really love this dress by ShopRuche, which tends to have prettier colors than ModCloth - they're more romantic and whimsical, but also tend to be more expensive and have fewer sales. Anyway, the rosy/dusty pink that I like looks best when paired with green and off-white. It's kind of like Sweet Frog colors, but less bright. I guess I like my colors bright but still gentle - like out of a fairy tale.

Since I've already put a lot of work into this post I'm just going to leave you with some photographs of teal-ish things that I love to show you what I mean. You may also consider the background of this blog, which I specifically picked the html hex code for because I love it so much, but I did go for a lighter shade than usual for the purpose of making my blog look inviting.

bike lessons

Until last week, my favorite Never Have I Ever (or I Never if you're playing under a weird name) fact was that I have never ridden a bike without training wheels. This invariably caused 95% of the players to lose a finger. Now I have to come up with a new fact.

I'd like to think that I picked up this skill pretty quickly - last Sunday morning after our church service, Katie took me out and told me to get on a bike and go. After about fifteen minutes of complaining and saying that I was too scared to balance myself and having her hold onto my bike and run beside me, I finally accomplished my goal. We didn't take the scary pathway and I walked my bike through some hills on the first day, but after that I was pretty much set. I didn't get a single scrape or bruise, though I was surprised at how sore one can get. I rode on a couple of different bikes of varying heights and levels of rust/age so I would also assume that my skills are transferable to other times and places. Throughout the rest of the week we rode our bikes to the beach and back, and though I came to a few jarring halts and always dismantled extremely awkwardly and am still not very good at hopping up on curbs without running into things immediately afterward, I would now say that I feel moderately comfortable riding a bike anywhere that is not Williamsburg.

When I was younger I couldn't wait to ride my bike. I had a nice pink one with stickers on it and probably a basket and of course training wheels. I rode it up and down my sidewalk like a champ. I think my brother pretended to be the newspaper boy for a while, which I obviously found super cool. One day, after envying my brother's Older and More Skilled status, I decided I was ready for the training wheels to come off. I attempted to ride my bike again. It did not work. I decided that I would like my training wheels back on. This was not allowed since I myself had decided that I was ready to be a Big Girl. So then I decided that I was perfectly content with my scooter and roller blades and who needs a bike anyway? My sister didn't have one and I knew I could have a lot of fun roller blading with her around the block (since that's as far as we were allowed to go, living on a busy street as we do).

And that is why I never learned how to ride a bike. When I got to college I thought it might be a useful skill since I could get to classes in less time, and I have a tendency to want to wait until the last second to leave Facebook and go to class. But our campus is very scary for bicyclists and even walkers - with so many loose bricks, I trip approximately three times a week. And my schedule is set up so that I have no quick walks anywhere (my only back-to-back classes are in adjacent rooms). And I still don't own a bike. So really, the only tangible effects that this experience has on my life are that now I have to be more inventive while playing Never Have I Ever and I will most likely force my children to learn how to ride bikes (...and teach them the motto never say never?).

changing of the guard

Today I started the process of packing for school, which inevitably leads to nostalgia and a very messy bed. Somehow I always find new things in my room, and this time was no exception: I discovered some old CD's that I had to add to my iTunes and some old chocolates I had to throw away because they tasted funny. I have to start packing way earlier than everyone else because I know that this is a project requiring at least seven full days, between making lists and looking at old notebooks and doing laundry and listening to exorbitant amounts of irrelevant music and wishing I had more time to read and thinking of all the shows I need to watch and debating the number of headbands that I really need at school and trying to predict whether I will want my boots and coats before Thanksgiving.

It is exhausting, but it is also one of my favorite things in the world, because it also means cleaning and getting rid of old things! I love going through all of my possessions and getting rid of some of them because I feel so much lighter afterwards. I get the fun part of reminiscing but then the awesome part of letting go, and it's great! I have always loved cleaning, probably psychologically because it gives me control of my surroundings. I like everything to have a home and I like everything to be in its home when it's not in use. If someone else's dishes are in the sink my natural instinct is to clean them and put them away and the fact that I'm doing it doesn't bother me, though I may be a little bit peeved that the other person thought it was appropriate to leave them to stink. I may be a somewhat slothful person when it comes to my sleeping habits and my lack of athletic interest, but nothing short of a disaster could keep me from putting away laundry or anything else that isn't in its usual resting place.

A few examples:

• When I was young, one day we all went to the dentist. Of course we brushed our teeth before getting in the car since you don't want to go to the dentist with lunch in your mouth. After my sister brushed her teeth, I brushed mine, and then I noticed that my teeth were not the only things in need of cleaning. My family all sat waiting in the van for me and eventually came up to find that I was scrubbing the toilet because it was filthy and needed to be cleaned right then before I forgot about it.
• It took me four different arrangements to get my Shakespeare plays in the proper order. At first I thought I wanted them alphabetical, and then in order of publication, and then by genre. Right now I am very happy with the way they are lined up - the order that I read the ones that I read and then in order of the urgency of my reading them as determined by my interest and their cultural importance. But once I've read them all maybe I'll want them arranged by color - just so long as there is some determinable reason for them being placed where they are on my shelf. Maybe I secretly fear that someone will accuse me of having no order.
• Last night, I brought my laundry upstairs having already folded it. But disaster got in the way - there were two houseflies buzzing around my closet and a few more in my bathroom. I don't know what interest they had in the rooms conjoined to my sleeping chamber, but I was very distraught and had my mom come up and deal with them (I had contemplated just not brushing my teeth but I felt that would be a bad decision). Finally, I was free to clean my teeth without fearing a fly getting in my toothpaste. But there was still one in my closet, and it being late at night (the fly extermination took a while), I decided that I was ok with my laundry waiting a couple of hours to be put away. When I woke up I was very distraught about the wrinkly nature of some of my dresses, but I considered it worth it.

One of the things that I found in my room this afternoon was my collection of calculator covers. Yes. That is correct. When I got my TI-83 Plus: Silver Edition graphing calculator, my dad also bestowed on me a choice of several different colors of translucent covers. I knew that I had these and I knew where they were, but I had completely forgotten about them over the past year, since my purple cover has become so natural-looking on my calculator. But now that we have a new school year and a lot of math coming my way, I figured it was time to change. I tried on blue, but it looked too normal. I like to pick the color that looks the weirdest and go with that one until I have become so used to it that all of the other colors look strange, like they're somebody else's calculator cover. At that point I can switch again. So now I'm going with black/gray. Although it's not very fun, I don't think I've ever used it so I feel sorry for its neglect. I think I'll be ready to switch it out over Thanksgiving break though.

coffee

Medina thought I should blog about coffee so I am, but lest you think that just anybody can boss me around I will state that I mulled about this topic for quite a while and decided that it would be a worthy post after last week's experiences.

Coffee. It is so addicting. But actually, if I grab coffee on Sunday after slash before slash during church I am guaranteeing that I will also order a coffee from the Grind on Monday afternoon, I will crave it on Tuesday and cave and consume espresso beans, I will drink it on a random Wednesday grind date, I will drink it on Thursday and I will crave it but be strong and resist on Friday because otherwise I won't be able to function without coffee on Saturday morning from Sadler which is decent but by no means a good decision.

I drink coffee not by the cup but by the week. Last week I drank coffee almost every morning (the one I didn't, I went for a sun run and then went to bed super early and got like 11 hours of sleep). If I start I just can't stop myself - it's actually a drug and I actually get withdrawal symptoms if I start and then suddenly stop. These are mostly in the forms of headaches and shaking hands but I imagine that I also become irritable (it's ok, I pass it off as sass).

Sometimes I refrain, thinking I'll be healthy and not addicted to caffeine (this is something I started to do when college started, along with my heroic efforts to go to bed at reasonable times which I think I have done a very admirable job at considering that my body always tells me to stay awake until the sun rises). But once I cave - for whatever reason, be it an upcoming exam that I need all night to study for (by which I mean until 2 because all-nighters for exams are just dumb), or an awkward time before church, or social pressure by meeting people at the Daily Grind - there is a long process during which I struggle to free myself from my subservience to the aromatic delicacy and general college student staple that is coffee.

I drink it with a lot of cream and sugar because growing up I was given a choice between black, bitter Dad-coffee and sweet, milky and slightly cold Mom-coffee. Obviously Mom-coffee won. Once I had to drink black coffee because there was no cream and it was really cold outside and I was volunteering on election day and I ended up drinking seven little styrofoam cups full and my hands shook so hard that I doubt, in retrospect, that I was fit to drive. So you could say that I am now scared of black coffee - but at the time I half-convinced myself that I could get used to drinking it like a man. Considering my inclination for excessively sweet foods (see Cadbury cream eggs, anything with marshmallows, all of my baked goods, real soda, and so on), the fact that I generally use two creamers and at least two packets of sugar should not be a surprise to anyone. This is probably extremely bad for me, so sometimes I'll just get an Italian roast and not add any sugar. Anyway, sometimes I like my coffee cold, but usually only if it was once warm and still has the tiniest bit of residual heat. Iced coffee just loses all of the coffee charm to me. A frappuccino or similar icy blended coffee is ok, but at that point I would just prefer straight-up chocolate because the real appeal of coffee is in its smell. Therefore I only drink iced coffee when I am in serious need of a coffee fix and yet the weather refuses to bend to my whims and cool down into fall already.

And I am very excited for fall because it means that I get to wear jeans again. As much as I love dresses...jeans are where it's at. Jeans and scarves and cardigans and coffee at an appropriate temperature - these are a few of the many, many things coming up so so soon. And it's ok for me to say fall is approaching because now it's August and so we're practically there, never mind the next month and a half.