Friday, November 30, 2007

Last Blog

Yay! My last blog. I am so glad that this moment has finally arrived. Finding time to blog has been really difficult for me. I usually work on school work till late at night and at that time I am too tired to even think about blogging and I usually don’t feel like I have anything to write 500 words about. I actually enjoyed reading other peoples blogs but I didn’t really have a lot of time to do that either because on the days that I did blog that came first priority and after writing a 500 word blog I was usually half asleep and didn’t feel like I could comment on anyone else’s blog.
I think that I could have enjoyed this blogging assignment more if it was less demanding. When we originally had to blog each day I felt like that was impossible. I really don’t have that many interesting things to say every day and I certaintly don’t think that anything remotely interesting that I could think of deserves 500 words to be written about it. Also, having to write 500 words a day left little time to intelligently comment or even read other people’s blogs. Since I was always trying to make up at least 500 words about something my blogs ended up being kind of crappy. I think that if we had been required to do less words each day or maybe even had less blogs to do, I would have been able to actually write good blogs and to read everyone else’s blogs. The three blogs a week was much more manageable but still that 500 word requirement messed me up. Had less words been required I think that my subject matter and actual quality of writing would have been stronger. As it happened the only thing that I really feel like I can say a lot about is myself so that’s really what I ended up talking about. I think that if we had maybe had a minimum requirement of 200 words per blog but were required to write one 500 word blog that was really good each week then I could have done really well. I could have been thinking about what to do my big blog about during the week and then produced something good near the end of the week.
In spite of my blog problems, I really enjoyed this English class. I feel like I learned a lot about how to approach a text and look for meaning in it. This whole idea of valuing the meaning and focusing on concepts instead of the facts and plot in a story was so different from high school. I am so glad that we didn’t have any quizzes about plotline or the authors. This really helped me to focus on what the author was trying to say instead of being worried about remembering exactly what he said so I could do well on a quiz. While I found the essays we had to write challenging, I actually enjoyed thinking about the things that we had to write about. Anyway, with all that said I think that this was a great class to take during my first semester of college.

me and music

Ok, so heres something weird about me. I don’t like to listen to music. I know, that sounds so strange but since I really cant think of anything else to blog about I am going to go ahead and explain my feelings about music.
First of all, I am not opposed to all music. I actually do enjoy listening to classical music on occasion and I love to listen to Sam play the guitar and sing. I think that I like to listen to classical music because I can really see how that can be a form of art. The way that the instruments go together and the different emotions that can be expressed in the music seem so beautiful to me whereas other kinds of music, pretty much the kinds that have words, doesn’t seem to have as much complexity or just plain beauty involved. I think that I also like to listen to classical music because it doesn’t have words. In most music that has lyrics, your emotions or train of thought is somewhat dictated, and in classical music your mind is free to wander and you can typically find many different emotions expressed in the piece and your own mood can dictate how your feelings compliment the piece. I guess another reason why I find classical music enjoyable to listen to is that I can just have it on in the background while I work or read and it doesn’t really contradict the activities that I am doing. Because there aren’t any lyrics you can listen to classical music either actively or passively and you can easily forget about the music if you get absorbed in something else. The thing that bothers me about music with words is that I am incapable of just not listening to the words, for some reason my brain wont let go of the words or the song if its playing and I end up feeling like I am only half paying attention to whatever it is that I am doing. The only music with words that I really like to listen to is songs that Sam plays and I think that this is probably because I love him so much and almost everything he does seems wonderful to me. I think he has an amazing voice and I just like to watch him playing the guitar and singing.
I know I said at the beginning of this blog that I didn’t like to listen to music and after my description of the value in classical music and in Sam’s music ya’ll are probably thinking that I pretty much lied at the beginning. Well now I'm going to explain that rather strong statement. I don’t really ever think of listening to music on my own. Usually I’ll decide to turn on some classical music if I hear my brother playing his music really loud and I want to drown out the noise, that doesn’t really happen anymore though since I don’t live at home, or if Sam calls and tells me he’s listening to a specific piece that I like or occasionally if I am reading and the words from the page are echoing in my head. I'm not sure how to explain the echo thing but it really annoys me and classical music helps to drown out my brains emphasis on the words and helps me absorb the meaning on the page. The thing is, I don’t listen to music unless I am doing something else and need to listen to something. I don’t know why this is, but I just really don’t enjoy listening to music just to listen to music. I don’t ever listen to the radio while I am driving. I actually enjoy silence. I like to hear myself think and a lot of the time when I am by myself and its quiet, like when I am driving, I talk to God. I feel like when everything is silent I can hear him better and I like the thought that He is with me when I am alone and I like thinking that I am sharing my thoughts with Him. Anyway, that’s my weird thing about music. For the first time in a really long time though I have been able to listen to music just to listen to it when Sam plays for me. Even though I absolutely love when Sam plays, my feelings concerning music in general have not changed at all.

useless stuff

My room is filled with meaningless stuff. I am looking around me and I have realized that I can do without most of the things in my room. I have tons of stuff covering almost every surface of my room and it seems ridiculous. I don’t know why I felt like I had to buy all of these things. I have 3 different glass candy dishes that have snowflakes and Christmas trees and stuff like that on them so I can only use them in the winter. I also have a couple of non-seasonally decorated candy dishes that I can use year round so I really don’t see why I felt the need to buy these other candy dishes a while back. This is a pretty good example of all the stuff that is cluttering my room right now. Most of it is Christmas themed and I just recently put these little dishes and figurines and things out to replace the all year ones that I usually have cluttering my room. I seriously think that I have a problem about buying stuff. I go shopping a lot and I am usually pretty reasonable about purchasing clothes or food or toiletries. I tend to look for bargains and cut coupons, anything to save money, but when it comes to useless decorating things I go overboard. I have like thirty miniature ceramic shoes that I have purchased over the years and I have no use for them. Right now they are just sitting in a bowl on my dresser and I am wondering why on earth I spent so much money on them in the first place. I guess I thought they were really cute and I am obsessed with shoes but that still doesn’t explain why I had the strong urge to buy them. In general I am not very focused on material things, I tend to value experiences over stuff but I my discretion seems to disappear whenever I see a cute unnecessary item. I have twenty to thirty little pads of paper that are decorated with random things ranging from jewelry to birds. Why do I buy these things? What is wrong with me? I have never used these pads of paper and most of the decorating items that I buy just look stupid when I bring them home.
I honestly don’t value these things that I buy so I don’t know why I derive so much pleasure from purchasing them. I had the sudden urge to go shopping today and since I really have no money right now I decided that I would be safest going to Old Time Pottery, one of the cheapest home decorating stores ever, in hopes that I either wouldn’t find anything worth spending money on or that I whatever I became attached to wouldn’t cost very much money. For some reason, I really have no idea why right now, I fell in love with these cute little ornate nutcrackers. They were short and looked fat but they had beautiful clothes and didn’t look like the normal soldier nutcrackers. Somehow I managed to resist my impulse and I made it home without spending any money but even right now I am really wishing that I had purchased at least one of the nutcrackers. I can see that this idea is crazy. First of all where would I put it, it doesn’t exactly match my satiny and pink floral décor, and secondly its just a nutcracker, after I buy it I am going to forget about it and move on to something else. Still, even though I realize all of this, I want it.

Thursday, November 29, 2007

lots of stress

Right now Sam is snoring loudly in the chair next to me. We have a big calculus exam tomorrow and he fell asleep while he was studying. He was so tired today, I was really worried about him. He stayed up all night last night working on rewriting his synthesis essay which was originally really bad but after he rewrote it I think it sounds great. At least his all nighter proved fruitful. Anyway, Sam was so exhausted today that he could barely form complete sentences by the afternoon. His eyes were so blood shot that they looked almost completely red and he could barely even move. I really don’t see how Sam and I are going to make it through three more years of this without seriously crashing. We are working so hard to complete everything and we are so stressed about maintaining our scholarships that hardly ever do anything fun anymore. I know that this next semester will be even more challenging because Sam is going to be either interning at a small accounting firm or at first tenessee bank so that is going to require a lot of his time. I plan on working with this lady that I know who makes wedding cakes so I really shouldn’t be very stressed but its going to be hard for me just trying to help sam out with his work and still get my stuff done in time. I really think that something is going to have to change in order for us to get through this next semester. Either we are going to have to get a lot faster in completing our work or we are going to have to learn to care less about the grades that we make.

We are planning right now on getting married after our sophomore year so I really don’t know if that will make things easier or harder. Most of the adults that I know have been telling us that getting married will make things a lot harder but then again we have talked to some younger couples who say that they are really happy they decided to get married in college. I think that at least when we are married we will live together and share our finances and stuff like that so the difficulty in living separately and still spending all of our time together will disappear and we can start buying groceries and car insurance and stuff like that together instead of having separate bills for everything. I like to think that even though things will be difficult when we get married at least we’ll be a lot happier and have each other to share the burden with and talk to before we go to sleep about all the crappy stuff that’s going on. That really doesn’t fix our issues right now though so I don’t even know why I was thinking about that. Right now sam and I are so burnt out that I don’t even know how we are still functioning. Every weekend we make plans to go out and end up canceling them because we are too tired and simply want to relax and watch a movie. Typically we don’t even see the movie because we both fall asleep about ten minutes into it. I haven’t seen a movie all the way through in a really long time. Anyway, we are both really looking forward to this break and are hoping to come up with some ideas on how to get our work done faster so we can avoid being so exhausted and stressed next semester.

Cravings

I tend to get really really obsessed with things. For some reason I get these urgent cravings for very specific foods and they last for weeks. Right now I’m experiencing my apple cider and hot chocolate cravings. I’m not craving apple cider mixed with hot chocolate but whats been happening is that I’ll drink some hot chocolate almost constantly for a couple of days and then I’ll suddenly hot chocolate and desperately want hot apple cider with wassail spices mixed into it. This is so weird. I really have no idea why I get into these phases and I think that this current one that I am in right now is probably one of my stranger cravings. I actually craved apple cider so badly last night that I ran out to the Kroger at 1 in the morning to buy some. I absolutely had to do this because I really felt like I wouldn’t be able to study anymore if I didn’t get any apple cider. Sam and I had to stay up all night last night working on some papers and other things so it was necessary that I be able to concentrate. Surprisingly enough after I drank the apple cider I was able to focus and I just blew through the rest of my work.

I had this same thing happen to me a while back with chocolate covered strawberries so I’m actually starting to think that there may be something wrong with me. I don’t know if it’s a mental thing or maybe I have some sort of deficiency that makes me get such strong cravings. I usually crave some thing with chocolate in it. I really only eat dark chocolate and I am actually so addicted to dark chocolate that I carry emergency chocolate around with me in my purse so that I wont ever have to suffer when I get those sudden cravings. I was at the Godiva store the other day and they have this new thing out that is a cute little tin that looks like it has mints in it but it is actually filled with little pearls of dark chocolate that you can pop into your mouth whenever you need to. So Ive actually been able to focus a lot better in class because of my new tin of dark chocolate pearls and this kind of scares me.

It seems really wrong that food should have such a big impact on how I perform academically. As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I felt like I couldn’t do my work until I had the apple cider that I was craving and a lot of times when I am in class I will really feel like I cant take any more notes unless I have some chocolate or something. I think this is probably going to cause problems for me in the future so I guess I should try to take control of my cravings and not let them influence me so much. Im not really sure how to do that though. Now that I think about it, there really is no reason why I cant eat exactly what I want all the time. Sam says he likes to run out to the store at weird times to get me the food that I am craving so I guess if I can always get the food that I need then I am never going to have any major problems. Wow, I sound really spoiled maybe I need to seriously think about this craving thing, its making me very demanding.

thanksgiving eve

I really cant think of anything else to blog about so I am going to write about the horrible day that sam and I had the Wednesday before thanksgiving. Ok, so we had arrived at my grandparents house in Hendersonville North Carolina at 9:00 Tuesday night with the idea that we would just stay up that night and finish up our synthesis essays. Well when we got there my grandmother had gone all out preparing this amazing dinner for us so we of course had to eat that and then my grandparents wanted to talk to us about school and our trip and our future plans over some tea and an incredible cake which my grandmother had made specifically for us. By the time we finished all that it was about 10:30 and since Sam and I had been driving all day and eaten a huge meal after already getting dinner on the road we were exhausted and couldn’t really even think straight. So after making plans to get up early the next morning and finish our papers by that afternoon, I made my way to my perfectly prepared bedroom and Sam was left to fend for himself with a bunch of sheets and a deflated air mattress in the basement.

For some reason neither of us thought to set any sort of alarm or anything that would ensure that we would actually get up early the next morning to finish our papers as planned so the next morning I woke up to the sun shining through my windows and some light flurries in the air and panicked. It was 11:30 and I quickly realized that there was no way our papers would be done before dinner now. I quickly trudged down to the freezing basement and woke up sam. In spite of our predicament we were both in a pretty good mood because of the cold snowy weather and the hot breakfast that my grandmother had prepared for us. After breakfast we began to work on our papers and quickly realized that my grandparents house was not the best place to study. Most of my relatives live in Hendersonville and for some reason everyone decided to come over to my grandparents house at the same time and talk like they hadn’t seen each other in years. Also, my grandparents don’t have wireless internet and they internet that they do have very rarely works. So sam and I realized that we wouldn’t get any work done at the house so we decided to go around town and try to find a place that had wireless internet.

Heres the part of the story where things begin to go down hill. Hendersonville is a very small town. Everyone knows each other and the most exciting thing that happened there recently was that some teenage “hoodlums” loosened the screws on some of the street signs on Main street and apparently caused a lot of confusion. So needless to say there really aren’t very many places that would have wireless internet. We found an amazing coffee place that we figured would have internet access but when we went inside they told us that they had turned off the internet because of the Thanksgiving holiday. Finally we were able to get internet in the Hendersonville public library and we spent the whole day there finishing up our papers. I finished mine at 7 when the library was closing but sam still had a lot of work to do so I decided not to put mine in the drop box until he could read over it and make corrections. So we went back to the house and Sam proceeded to work on his paper until 11:30 that night and just as he was finishing we realized that we had a huge problem.

The main problem was that we had no way of getting our papers off of my laptop and on to my grandparent’s computer. No one in the house had a flash drive or anything like that and most of my family was asleep anyway. The next big issue was that there was a huge thunder/hail storm going on outside and the power at my grandparents house began to flicker. I was able to send an e-mail to wendy on my grandparents computer saying that we were trying to find a way to submit our papers but after that the power went out. So at this point Sam and I were pretty much stuck. We didn’t really know how to proceed but we finally decided that we would drive around Main street (it really is the main street in hendersonville) and try to see if we could pick up any signal on my laptop. So we did this for a while in the pouring rain at midnight and after having no luck we decided to try some of the hotels in the area. Ok this is the absolute horrible part. Sam and I were both in our pajamas because we hadn’t thought things through and didn’t think we would have to get out of the car and we realized that we would have to go into these hotels and ask if they had internet because we couldn’t tell if the hotels did or not because the lights on the signs were out because of the storm. I think that the actual hotels must have had like emergency generators or something because they still had power. Anyway, we drove up to one place, parked and both of us ran in. Sam wanted to pull up to the door and let me run in to ask but I didn’t want to do that by myself so we both ended up getting soaked. As we walked into the hotel we must have looked pretty sketchy, especially to the old conservative Hendersonville people running the place. I mean my already somewhat threadbare pajamas were pretty much plastered to my soaking body and it was the middle of the night during a massive thunderstorm so we must have looked really strange. We asked the old lady working there if they had internet access and unfortunately they didn’t so we ran back to the car and drove to another hotel. This time we lucked out and were able to come inside and be stared at by the few hotel employees who happened to be in the lobby while we submitted our essays. Ok, I’d like to mention that at this time the dropbox had already closed and I couldn’t figure out how to submit the essay through ecourseware so I ended up emailing them to Wendy and making some lame sounding excuses about the weather and lack of internet access. Sam and I returned to my grandparents house absolutely soaked and had to stumble through the dark house (the power had finally gone out) and try to find some candles so we could at least see to get to our rooms. We finally did find some light and were able to dry off and go to sleep at last. I actually had an amazing Thanksgiving the next day but I don’t think ill ever forget driving frantically around Hendersonville in the middle of the night during a thunderstorm trying to find internet access.

A is like B

Lip gloss is like crowds because lip gloss is sticky and when there are a bunch of people together, especially in hot weather, it can often seem kind of sticky. Also when you put on lip gloss you are putting on a kind of front, you are hiding your lips behind a shiny coat of gloss, and when people are in a crowd they often are slightly uncomfortable and tend to put up an altered front from their true self.

Hot weather causes shots. This is because there are many diseases that originate in hot climates and there also many diseases that are caused by bugs, like mosquitoes, which live in hot weather. It is in this way that sickness thrives in hot weather and because of this there is often a need for shots either to become immune to those diseases or to recover from those diseases.

My interpretive conclusion based on this list of what I like is that I come across sounding like a very materialistic person who isn’t really interested in anything important. Most of the things that I like can be purchased at the mall. Also, this list makes me sound lazy because aside form stuff I mainly listed things that are relaxing like taking a bubble bath or getting a facial.