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.