being sarah marie
They love to plant...
Pull, then Push
Savage Minds
The Trick is to...
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Nathan Englander
Bad Dirt, Annie Proulx
Brown, Richard Rodriguez
Namesake
Rewind to the present
Two long but fascinating articles about China and ...
I wish I knew where to start or how to begin. Ther...
I guess it's time to start coming out of hiberatio...
Privacy and the Net
Blogging and Free Speech
Month of Discontent
Sister Issues/My Hunger Strike
September 29, 2005
Can I Have Your Attention Please?
Excuse me, excuse me. I would like to make an announcement! I just want to say that I've reached that point in the semester where I'm ready to drop all my classes.
Thank you for your attention. :-)
Could you hear the fork clanking against the wine glass right there?
In other news, I'm going to NYC for a family wedding this weekend. I'm really excited! Haven't been to one of those in a lonnnggg time.
And in other news, I'm going back home for fall break the weekend after that. Yay for breaks from school.
What can I say? I'm going to fall behind on school work even more, but when school shits on you, you better make life get its act together.
September 24, 2005
Back on Track, Sort of
Thanks for all your nice comments on my last angry post. It helped calm my rage. I've relegated myself to my old glasses for now. It's not the most comfortable thing, and I can't see the best, but I'm getting by all right. It's a bit freaky though; if these glasses get screwed up I'm really going to be helpless. I think I might try to get new ones when I go to NYC next weekend.
This week was sort of another stressful daze. Nothing too special about it. I have tons of work and it's all piled up and backlogged again. I made a really big effort to finish this one book I had to finish for last Tuesday, and after lots of hours reading yesterday and today I managed to pull it off. Now my brain feels kind of puffy and overloaded though.
Unfortunately, my weekend is being cut short. I have an ALL-DAY field trip tomorrow. We have to leave campus at 8:30 a.m. and we might not be back until as late as 7 p.m. How's that for rough? Not only are they snagging us for the whole day and taking us away from our pre-paid dining hall meals, they're also making us buy our own meals on the way. Since I'm supposed to be saving up a couple hundred $$$s for my glasses I'm in no position to splurge on roadside food, so I used some money from my mealplan tonight to buy snacks for the way: peanuts, three Clifbars, a banana, some cookies, one snickers , and a small pack of nacho cheese Combos. I think I'll pack some homework for the ride. Who knows. I'm almost a bit excited. I just hope it's more driving that studying. Come on! It is a Sunday after all.
Well, enjoy your weekend while it lasts. Mine's just about over...
P.S. I think I'm going to take the advice of the person who left my last comment (thank you!) and change the settings of my comments to something a little more spam-proof. I hope you don't find it annoying. Let me know.
September 19, 2005
I Can't See
It's my fault this time, but that doesn't mean I can't get angry. In fact I'm pissed off, and probably all the more so, because it was all me. I came home after classes and 4 more hours of work and I was exhausted. I sat down on my bed, set my glasses down on the bed beside me, and picked up a book I had to read for class. A page and a half later my eyes were drooping. Oh, I got 7 hours of sleep, and I could really use a nap after such a long day... just a short nap. I put the book beside my bed and cuddled into my sheets, set the alarm clock for 30 minutes later.
20 minutes later I wake up in this hot sweat as if I knew something was wrong. Where are my glasses? It's a habit of mine to put them on once I wake up. Consciously I didn't know, but subconsciously I knew exactly. I reached for something against my thigh and there were my glasses. Bent completely out of shape. I gasped and jerked myself up, oh shit!!!
The lenses were fine, but the frame was broken. Broken, broken, broken. So bent out of shape; I touched one of the twisted ear-rests and it snapped off and broke immediately. It was over. !%# DAMN!!!! Damn, damn, damn!!!! All I wanted was a quick afternoon nap to ward off the burnout. It was supposed to be rejuvenating, not terrorizing!
Afraid I would succumb to a world of fuzziness without my glasses, I ran to my scotch tape and tried to tape them back together. I'd walk around with the tape if that was my only choice to see. I tried, tape, tape, tape, but it was a joke who was I trying to kid? Not only did it look ridiculous it didn't hold up for a second. Frantically, I put the glasses down and yanked at my hair. I violently opened every drawer in my room, searched every bag I had. Did I even bring a spare pair of glasses with me?!?
I finally found my old pair. I put them on and the blurriness cleared up a bit, but not completely. I couldn't bare to look myself in the mirror. They were my old, round, Harry-Potter-looking glasses. They were cute on me in 7th grade, but I didn't want to be seen with them today. Ugh, well at least I could see, so how I looked was the least of my worries.
Someone tell me why crap seems to shit on me from the sky when I'm already trying to deal with other messes?! School and two jobs are enough to keep me miserable. A friend passes away this weekend threw me a curveball I didn't know how to cope with, and now my eyes, my eyes?!?
I guess I'm going to have to find time in my impossible schedule to hunt out a lenscrafters in this tiny town. Blow more homework time, blow more work time, maybe miss the only annual career fair we ever have. Man what an ordeal. I just replaced my lenses this summer and blew $300 on them much to my dismay. Do I have another $400 to blow on new frames and new lenses!?! Two months worth of my salary?!? GOD!!!!!!
September 18, 2005
Rest in Peace
It was one of those moments you hear creepy stories about, but I never expected it to happen to me, or for it to hit so close to home. I was just logging on to see if anyone left me a message, or if there was anyone I could say goodnight to. That's all I wanted. I was ready to end my day, and I wanted it to go smoothly. Besides I have to wake up at 8am to teach my rowdy 7th graders.
There was one message waiting, but nothing I ever expected nor hoped to receive. It said he was killed. Sent to Katrina to help in the relief efforts, to provide medical assistance to those in need, and he was killed. Killed in a car accident in New Orleans.
I couldn't believe it. I blinked, I stared at the screen for a few moments. Was it just a joke?! No, no, no, not a joke. He's dead, and his parents felt I needed to know... the message concluded.
I hardly knew him, but we talked a couple times and he seemed nice. I have good memories, I thought I'd get to talk to him again. Online some people come and go, but I never thought it would ever come to such a tragic conclusion.
Somehow I finally realized that it was true and that it was final. Life in it's fleeting fickleness came to and end in such snap moment. And I get a message online letting me know that I won't ever get to talk to him again.
Confused, shocked, I suddenly started to cry uncontrollably. What do you mean I'll never get to talk to him again, never get to say goodbye? Maybe you're smiling down upon me benevolently now telling me that somehow you're OK, and we'll all be OK?
Rest in peace, friend. Rest in peace. We will miss you.
September 16, 2005
Delicious Dinners
I don't think I've had dinner alone even once since I moved back in to the dorms. That might be business as usual for some people, but considering last year you could probably find me eating alone at least 4 nights a week, this is pretty impressive. I suppose it's just one of the benefits of having blocked with a bunch of really cool people mixed in with some luck of having a floor of pretty nice people, too.
Dinners for us are quite an occasion. See, although we're a bunch of pretty good friends, we're all so different, and no two people epitomize our differences like Alice and Mark. She loves to party, get high, go crazy and get drunk. He love math homework so much he'll wake up at 8:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning after a 4 hours of sleep so as not to waste any minute he could be sinking his eyes into a juicy linear algebra textbook. They both love to have fun but in the most polar opposite ways possible.
They're both outrageous, too. Alice is outrageous because she's loud and ridiculously funny and that's who she is. Mark is outrageous because he goes to such great lengths to preserve some sort of internal purity. He refuses to do as much as kiss or hug a girl until he gets married!!! NO HUGS TILL MARRIAGE?! Dang, I must say I haven't heard that one before.
And yet, our dinners are so great precisely because Alice, Mark and everyone else somewhere in between these two polarities manage to sit down together almost every night for dinner. Most of the time Alice and Mark just make fun of each other, or perhaps to be more correct Alice makes fun of Mark and he fires back about her loose morals and how she's part of the "aggressive subset" of females. The rest of us just sit there and laugh and feed off of the energy. What makes it so great is that no one takes any of the teasing too seriously, it's all in good humor. Even Mark gets a good laugh... and I think he's really getting his first shot at being social in his life.
Bon appetite, y'all.
September 12, 2005
Semester Madness Rolls In...
I'm still coming to grips with my complete shock over a 5 page paper I have due this Thursday! What?!? Didn't I just move back here? Didn't classes just begin a few days ago? A five page paper due already?!? What?!?!? I'm still in complete disbelief as you can tell, and I'm a bit afraid that I will only come to accept the true beginning of the semester deluge at like uhmm 2 a.m. the very day the paper's due. That would leave me 8 hours to write it, which I suppose isn't bad! Lol.
When it rains it pours, though. I think that's one trend I've noticed in my last few years of blogging. I'm still uncertain about my courses, and now it's mostly just an administrative hold-up. Time isn't waiting for me though, classes marched forward and the work started piling on despite the fact that I don't even feel settled in and ready to begin. I have about 500 pages of reading to get through by week's end (uhm, not gonna happen), the paper, a few other small writing assignments, and work.
Speaking of work. I'm heading into my third year tutoring kids after school and on Sunday mornings. I had a fabulous group of kids for the past two years, and when I was hating my life here on the hill, working with those kids was the one thing I could say I enjoyed about this place. Unfortunately, all good things come to an end. The principal decided to sever my connection with that group of kids and stick me with the 7th graders this year.
Does anyone remember 7th grade? I do, it wasn't all that long ago for me, and I remember hating it. Not ironically, so many of my bad memories of kids and the way they behave at that age were validated for me today at my first day back at work tutoring. There are a few gems in the class, but the vast majority are just fast-taking, antsy, and fresh. They try to throw me off topic in the middle of my discussion and when I'm too boring they start their own conversations on the side. They throw stuff across the room in the middle of class, and oh lordy. It might be a long year with them. Do I even need to tell you how impossible it was to convey the notion of "respect" to them as we went over the class rules? Ugh.
All righty, I better get to bed before I start whining about how I don't get enough sleep either, LOL. But before I do that, I need to give a warm shout-out to one of my most loyal blog-readers: Kristin! She's trekking her way across the globe in these very days. I hope you have a great semester in Russia! Stay warm and keep us posted!
September 06, 2005
It's Official.
That time in the semester has arrived. I'm officially behind schedule on my school work. It's all thanks to anthropology this time around. I'm taking this ridiculous course, partly because it fits in my schedule (that was a big issue this semester), partly because it offers a juicy 4 credits, but mostly because it sounded really interesting.
Anyway, the woman assigned 11 books for the whole semester. Considering that the semester is like 15 weeks long, and shaving off a few weeks for finals (no new readings), Thanksgiving, Fall Break, and the fact that she's canceling the last week of class, that comes out to a whopping one serious book per week!
For Tuesday we had to read all of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. I can't say it's the most captivating read I've done recently, and man, after having read some of those Harry Potter books it's really got some serious competition. Well, as if a book about heavy topic that was written in arcane 100+ year-old English wasn't enough, she seasoned the reading with about an extra 100 pages from one (of our three) coursepackets.
I tried, friends. I tried really hard! I spent all of Saturday reading that one book, and dabbled in it on Sunday, and I even managed to finish it today. But after wrestling that book for three days, I'm just not up to tackle another 100 pages for tomorrow! So yes, I resign myself to the harsh reality that I'm officially behind schedule. Hmph.
On the bright side though, this is quite an improvement over last semester. I held out an amazing 10 days before falling behind. Last semester it only took a whole three days. Well, tomorrow's a doozy--class and work straight through 4:30 p.m... and I now need to find some time in my nutty schedule to start playing catch up.
September 02, 2005
It's Time
What is it time for? A reality check to remind me that sometimes my most stressful problems of the hour can be so insignificant compared to what befalls other people. Tucked away in collegeland with no TV and a really static-y alarmclock radio, it's easy for me to overindulge in my own problems (as big or small as they may be) and forget about what's going on in the rest of the world. Katrina and a movie I saw tonight burst my bubble.
Reality Check #1:
A few days before Katrina made landfall, my neighbor, a meteorology major, posted a satellite picture of Katrina on her door. She giddily encaptioned it with, "Category 5! It's going to DESTROY New Orleans!" Katrina, or what was left of it, rolled into upstate New York rather uneventfully a few days ago. First came the clouds, and then two days of rain helped relieve this part of the country which apparently suffered from a pretty bad drought this summer. (Although, considering this is one of the cloudiest/rainiest parts of the country, a drought might have not been such a bad thing...) That was just about all I knew about Katrina at first.
For the next couple days the front headline on Yahoo! News was about Katrina, so I gleaned little bits of information from the panicked articles. Then I took a tour through an online photogallery of the mess Katrina left behind, and I was shocked to see something like Venice, Italy in New Orleans: water, instead of asphalt roads, checker-boxed the city! I also read Yolanda's accounts of the disaster as she tried to make contact with her family, and finally managed to track some of them down and hear first hand what has been going on. I've been trying to picture a metropolis of millions and countless small towns in the area as flooded ghosttowns mixed with some wild-west lawlessness, but for me it's been a fickle fleeting image that I just can't seem to comprehend.
Reality Check #2:
I saw the movie Crash tonight. Wow. Easily one of the most intense movies, especially impressive considering it was not made as a horror or thriller intended to spook people out. The movie is a chilling account of racial tensions in today's Los Angeles. It shows how stereotypes get confirmed and disconfirmed in our daily lives and how our impatient intolerance can sometimes be disastrous. Whew, it was an intense one, people.
After these reality checks, I was surprised to learn that my university was doing something quite considerate. My school's motto is the Big Red, and it only took a few days into my freshman orientation to convince me it should really be the Big Red Tape. I haven't been too proud or impressed of this ivy league institution in my two years here, but perhaps for the first time my university's giving me something to take pride in. Despite the fact that classes started a week and a half ago, we're opening our doors to Tulane University students and faculty and even offering financial aid. Given the administrative nightmare it is to process even enrolled students, this quick turnaround and acceptance is pretty admirable.
Although it's great that some Tulane students and faculty will be able to continue their work and study this year, I don't envy those who will be making the transition to another school. It's not easy to adjust, and it's especially not easy to adjust to a new school environment after classes have started, over 1000 miles away, perhaps without any friends or acquaintances, and after knowing that your school if not home has been severely impacted in a hurricane.
So I contacted my Dean of Students and told her that I'd be happy to show some new students around campus, take them out to dinner and introduce them to my friends. It's the least that I can do.
