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.

iceblog

Lots of people tell me, "Marisa, you blog so much." This is true. I do blog a lot. But what you don't realize unless you've already had this conversation with me is that I actually post about half of the blog thoughts that I have, and that now, after two months of training myself to blog every day, my brain works like a blog.

This isn't entirely true. My brain likes to work like I'm a character in a novel - it likes to have rational thoughts, it likes to motivate me in rational ways and it likes for all of my brain processes to be explainable to an invisible audience. I think this is because I am actually really weird (for actuals) and because I like to write so I've kind of always thought like this. But now I have a specific name for it - rather than thinking like a writer or thinking like a character, I'm thinking like a blogger.

Anyway, I have lots of half-written posts, in various stages of production, some of which will never ever be published and some of which may be later combined or finished or deleted. This is because I want to produce the best blog possible and also because I have more than one profound thought each day, so sometimes I start a post and then realize that I have a way better one so I'll save the first as a draft and then write the second awesome one but then realize that I actually like the first one better. Or something like that.

So if the posts that you see comprise the tip of the iceberg of my blog (hereafter known as my iceblog), the submerged part looks something like this:

• evolution and why I think that this is a kind of silly debate
• things that I would tweet if I caved and got a twitter
• how I accidentally became a math major (this one will be written if I ever do declare a math major)
• the statistics of my blog
• best non-titular characters of all time, a list
• why I don't like sarcasm
• coffee thoughts (as suggested by Medina)
• my favorite misheard lyrics

So you can see that these are interesting topics in their own right but I can't blog more than once a day or everyone would be convinced that I don't have a life (you should now be starting to get the idea that my summer actually is comprised of tv, books and blogging and I have not been exaggerating about that). I even have a note on my phone so I can jot down blog ideas and not forget them throughout the course of the day.

My (ice)blog is ever growing. Some people wonder if I will continue blogging once summer ends because I will get super busy, and I don't know, because I have terrible follow-through once I remember how much I love procrastinating before studying, but I do know that even if I'm not posting them my brain will be drafting blog topics for years to come. Or in other words I will continue to have extraordinarily weird and interesting and mundane and slightly irrational thoughts for as long as I possibly can.

my computer

As much as I like the technology of computers, I actually hate using them. My first experience with computers was as a child when I "played" a "game" by which I mean that I played with color levels (rgb) to make cool colors. My favorite to make was lavender because it was so tricky to figure out how to make purple (blue + red) but also make it light (I don't remember how I accomplished this). Then I learned how to type without looking at the keyboard then I got my own computer then I got an email address (apparently I have had one of my yahoo accounts in continuous use for 8 years which is a really long time in my short life). Then I started to hate computers.

One of the first things I learned about computers was how to use Windows Task Manager. I am very good at killing processes that are using extraordinary amounts of CPU. I have dealt with more printer drama than most people see in a lifetime. I am proficient at changing the format of word documents from .odt to .doc (changing their readability from OpenOffice to Microsoft Word, because I grew up without Word). I have dealt numerous times with not being able to open spreadsheets because they were in Excel. I was enabled in all of these instances to figure out computer bugginess both by my own curious nature and my dad's good instructions.

My desktop computer now runs Linux and seems to be moderately reasonable in terms of doing what I want, which is mostly using Google when my two-year-old laptop is incapacitated. Back in the day it would shut down while I was using PaintShop because apparently this was too difficult for it. But this is nothing compared to my laptop. Because for my laptop, iTunes is a stressful application.

I don't know why it is, but if I listen to music for more than an hour and don't use my computer (whose name is the Crimson Dell because it's red and a Dell and it's a play on the Crim Dell) for other purposes, once the screensaver starts I know I'm done for. I can't get my screen to come back for like five minutes and then it will, but iTunes will say that the wrong song is playing and no other application on my computer will respond, so literally my only course of action is to press the power button (I was raised to fear such situations and shy away from damaging my computer by not restarting properly, but sometimes it's necessary).

Whatever. On the bright side of owning a laptop, aside from giving it a great name I have also given it great stickers so that everyone knows what to think of me based on the back of my screen! I'm still in the market for lolzy stickers to fill about a quarter of it, but for now I have plenty of pride in Hufflepuff, Sleeperstar, my ability to vote, thinking green, my support of the milk industry (despite my inability to drink it) and, of course, Justin Bieber.

driving challenges

I really like long drives much in the same way that I like long trips to the rec center: I see them as a challenge to cover as much ground in as little time as possible. I don't mean this in an extremely dangerous way, and I have my limits on both driving and running, but I do mean it in a very literal mathematical way. I spend like 90% of a run calculating how fast I'm going and how far I could go if I just pushed for a given distance by a certain time (like, get to 5 miles in one hour, then subtract the amount of time and distance I've already gone and subdivide my distance so that I know exactly what fraction of a mile I need to run in one minute and further how fast I should be at a 30 second mark...I am crazy). But this is good because I hate running and by thinking about this all the time I'm thinking way less about why I'm actually running and I can feel good about something other than the calories I'm burning (because I know I'm getting a smoothie when I'm done).

So when I drive long distances, I do the same thing. I take my arrival time and attempt to shave minutes off of it slowly but surely by driving a little bit faster than the speed limit, but sometimes I also pick an arbitrary goal (like Savannah) and say that I have to be there in 30 minutes which is only possible if I average 70 for the next half hour, and then whenever I get there I calculate what my average actually was (which is kind of difficult because it's not an easy clean number but like 72.83 or something). This will give me math to do for a solid half hour and it's super fun. (Also, I think cruise control is really boring and a cop-out and it would make me way less concentrated on driving and it wouldn't even challenge me to get somewhere at an arbitrary but specific time.)

This summer has given me an intense appreciation of driving by myself for a long time, because I don't have to talk to anyone for several hours and I can entertain myself in a variety of non-reading/watching activities, and thinking about the car in front of me is not very interesting but thinking about my life and identity is what I do when I'm not driving so it can get very tiring to do this all day. As much as I like driving and talking to people, it can get awkward when, after an hour, you've run out of things you want to talk about and then you just listen to music but then you worry that they don't like it or you're really cold but you can tell they're hot or they're distracting you when you need to merge. So for long trips I don't worry about environmental friendliness and I instead think about preserving my sanity. Anyway, thanks to Orlando and Williamsburg, I have some new fun driving habits/games!

• Cloud-gazing. I literally saw like fifteen mice in the clouds as we left Disney World, some of which looked like Mickey and some of which looked like real life mice.
• Counting Waffle House signs. I counted 17 between Florida and Nova but I was asleep for part of the ride. The only light-up sign I saw without burnt-out letters was the one in Fredericksburg.
• Calculating gas mileage. This takes more patience because it's best when you let the tank run all the way down, in my case over 320 miles, but it gives you something fun to do once you stop at the gas station aside from worrying about bathroom cleanliness!
• Listening to CDs. Usually I just listen to the radio, but after hearing The Edge of Glory, TGIF and Rolling in the Deep like fifty thousand times this summer, I have grown grumpy toward all radio stations. I have since discovered that Codes and Keys is perfect for the drive from campus to 295 or vice versa (45 minutes) and that basically any other CD is acceptable for the rest of my drive (though the 500 Days of Summer soundtrack is pretty fun to sing to AND chill to). If I get my timing down to a good science (allowing for some traffic), next time I could figure out a CD of the perfect length for the entirety of 95 or perhaps two CDs with a fun switching point like the James Monroe museum.
• The alphabet game on road signs only, though I gave up after five minutes of looking for a J. Whatever, I'm sure I saw all of the other letters like ten times each.

Also, the drive to Williamsburg is now no longer a long drive. It can still be terrible in traffic, but when I get home it doesn't really feel like I drove all day (since I didn't) so that's a good thing. It's actually really fun to see the same signs and think the same thoughts every time (I counted the number of times I have driven/been driven to the burg and it is now 19). Here is my thought process (shortened for your convenience).

• I have no idea how to get to Williamsburg, what on earth, there are so many highway options, oh no, I'll just take Stringfellow because I don't even count 123 as a highway.
• Fairfax County Parkway connects to 123?! Oh yeah I thought that last time. I still don't know which one is north and which one is south though: I just know that if I turn left I can get to Reston and if I turn right I can get to...the other direction. So I guess I'll skip that shortcut.
• Braddock is always way longer than I remember it being.
• Burke Lake is so pretty, why don't I go there?
• Blu Steel Way...is that the way that Zoolander spells it?
• Lorton...Lorton prison...Lauren Medina lives around here, and she would make a very funny criminal. She would definitely explain her motivations in a monologue if she were a villain.
• Occoquan is so cute, why don't I go there too?
• IKEA - 500 DAYS OF SUMMER - WANT.
• Dumfries is a strange name for a road but I'm ok with it because I've seen it so many times, but Jamie thinks it's really silly. I wonder what else we think is silly just because we're unfamiliar with it (or what we think is normal because we're used to it).
• Quantico...shoot why didn't I start the alphabet game earlier, when else will I see so many choices of Q's?
• THERE'S A JAMES MONROE MUSEUM?
• Carmax - this would be a long way to drive for a car, but it doesn't feel that far away from home.
• Fredericksburg - there is that freaky Waffle House with all of its letters.
• Oh so that's where Lake Anna is!
• Is it Carmel Church, Bowling Green or Carmel Bowling, Church Green?
• I don't know what Stafford is but it seems to be everywhere you could possibly want to exit.
• Bass Pro Shops - this means that I'm getting close to my exit.
• Atlee/Elmont...Clement Attlee much? (British PM nbd)
• Mechanicsville...now I'm picturing Kris Kusnerik conducting a train. I wonder how mechanics advertise there.
• These road signs that say I should drive 65 mph have weird spinny orange things on them...do they move on their own or is it the force of air being moved by a constant stream of cars or what?
• New Kent CH/Providence Forge - this is clearly a sign meant for Kennis Forte, I mean really, they have the first three letters right for both her first and last names!
• Croaker/Norge/Toano - there are too many places with O's in their names.
• Oh my gosh, going 45 is like crawling down the road instead of driving on it.
• Richmond Road has to be safe enough for faster than 35!
• SNO TO GO.
• Nooooo not 25, I'll never be able to drive at a normal speed again!
• WAWA. MONROE. I'M HOME.
• Parking services grump grump grump.

Now my goal is to memorize all of the exits in order and figure out which one is the exact midpoint between my house and my dorm - this should only take a year or so, since I have so many already down. My next goal will be to find someone willing to put in $5 for an investigative tour of this James Monroe Museum.