sometimes brilliant, busted thoughts

hello internets.

Still no job, but some VERY exciting prospects I'm waiting to hear back about. I don't want to talk about it too much lest I jinx it. If I believed in anything, I'd be praying to it right now.

Andrew and I went to Boston for the holiday weekend, which turned out to be lovely. Nice weather, and Boston is totally adorable, plus I saw no less than 25 people dressed in colonial clothing, which only confirms all of my New England-related stereotypes. We also actually saw the fireworks, thanks to a lovely couple who offered us a section of their blanket, plus a guy bought us some fried dough. There was also a patriotic sing-a-long before the show started. We saw the Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese show at the MFA (brillz.), Harvard, a bunch of old cemeteries, and several historic landmarks along the Freedom Trail. All in all a successful weekend.

The rest of July is looking pretty dull and empty. I should probably resume work on the thesis, but can't even bring myself to open it up and read it. I want to go to New Haven at some point and continue my Ivy League tour of the northeast with the purchase of a Yale sweatshirt for good luck on my application.

Hello friends.

It's getting really dull at work, so I suppose I'll release some frustrations via LJ.

First of all, does anyone want to give me a job, or know anyone who might possibly want to give me a job? I've almost gotten 2, but not quite. I was #2 or #3 in both instances and it's getting frustrating. I'm expanding my search into other industries, and may have to revive my ultimate dream of being a CIA agent. Or at least complete the CIA agent job application online and see if they call me. If they did, I would put "got called to interview with the CIA" on my CV.

In superficial news, I'm trying to figure out something new to do to my hair, as always. I'm torn between keeping it (cheap) simple and just doing brown, and something (expensive) complicated like blond or brown with blond-ish highlights. I'm not allowed to buy anything I can't eat until I get a job anyway, so it's all on hold anyway.

Had a fantastic weekend though, saw The Taking of Pelham 123 (cheesy and FANTASTIC.) and Night at the Museum 2 (cheesy and FANTASTIC), ate some food, and went to the Bronx randomly. Other than being stressed about not having a job, life is pretty empty at the moment. I even had to freeze my gym membership for July, on account of me having no money. Going to Philadelphia next weekend to help Andrew's mom out with her dance studio's recital, and planning tentative trips to other possible centers of PhD-related learning. I also have to finish my thesis someday. Ahaaa. Rough draft #1 is written, but I can't even bring myself to look at it for a little.

Started studying for my last GRE EVER last night. Got analogies down pretty well. Dreading the math section. Math makes me feel like such an idiot. I can barely even add without the aid of my cell phone anymore.

Also, open question: What is Twitter good for? I'm usually cool with new technologies, but I'm having trouble figuring out why Twitter even exists, and why it is a "phenomenon" now. Help!

Do dooo....I'm a lj slacker.

I'll spare you from a detailed account of the last couple of months, suffice to say they have been somewhat busy, and I was in Australia for 2 weeks.

It's almost the end of the [my last real one as an MA student] semester, so I'm finishing up a paper on medieval feminism. My topics keep getting weirder the less applicable the class is to medieval things. I'm also trying to meet a self-imposed thesis deadline of having 1 complete draft done by the end of the semester. I just went to see the manuscript I'm working on for the first time in person, and I think I've made some good observations on which to base my last chapter. It feels like it will never be done, but I suppose I'm making progress.

The latest news is that I've been offered the opportunity to move to Paris for 3-4 months next year to do an internship with a medieval manuscript gallery there, and I have to say I'm completely enchanted with the idea. I'm still working on a way to make it financially feasible, but I think that it has to happen. It's just too good not to take it. So hopefully by this time next year "I'm poor but at least I live in Manhattan," will become "I'm really poor but at least I live in Paris."

Also finalizing a list of doctoral programs I'm applying to. I should start contacting professors soon and doing campus visits, taking the GRE, and start my actual application materials. Very exciting, I have to say. Anyway, things are happening and yay. Life feels very medieval lately, but in the good way, not in the plague-y sort of way.

I'm having one of those days where I feel like I want to throw my computer monitor across the office, yell "I quit!" and storm out for good. Not because I'm having a particularly busy or bad day at work. In fact, quite the opposite. I have zero, ZERO things to accomplish, and what I do get from time to time is "here, scan this." or "here, type this 3-line email." I have become relatively accustomed to this sort of mind-numbing boredom, almost to the point where I don't care anymore, but it's silent as the grave in here and my boss keeps surreptitiously passing by me and leaning over, as if she even understands what she's looking at.

The good news is, I'm waiting for my dad to call me back, at which point I will purchase tickets to Australia. We're going in April during my [extended] spring break to see my little sister and take in the sights of Sydney and then heading north to Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. I'm excited, though it requires me purchasing and then wearing a bathing suit, something I've not done since I was about 15. There's also the small matter of two 22-hour+ flights in 12 days.

Also exciting news, Andrew and I booked a trip to Rome for 6 days over [another extended] Memorial Day weekend. It's definitely something to look forward to and gives me some time to brush up on/remember Italian.

Not exciting: I have to, someday, somehow, write a thesis. My goal is to have a rough draft by the end of the semester, but somehow it's almost already March. wtf? Thesis-writing is a very, very slow process. As Jenn and I have agreed, short bursts of productivity split by longer periods of desperation and hopelessness.


In other news, I'm thoroughly enjoying my feminism class, though it's making me much more cynical about gender roles, gender inequality, and society's attitudes towards such things. I find myself getting rather emotional about the patriarchy and "the system" into which we, as Western-type people, are inadvertently thrust. It's frustrating to have acknowledged inequalities like this and still nothing has changed. I blame Cosmo, at least a little bit. Also, down with the patriarchy.

I've only wasted like 15 minutes writing this. I wish I had some chocolate (I spent $25 the other day on chocolate bars at the Lindt store on 5th ave. and none of it is here with me. Why?). Fail.

I have a new blog!

It's about art, big surprise. Go read it and make interesting/funny comments!

http://artifice-art.blogspot.com

The Catholic Church is bringing the practice of plenary indulgences back.

Yeah, that's right.

Indulgences, the proverbial "get out of Purgatory free" cards (well, or just reduce your Purgatorial sentence by a couple years out of thousands), are back with a vengeance in 2009. 2009, folks, and you can now get your very own indulgence as a reward for going to confession, charitable donations, and a good deed here and there.

The Church only officially outlawed the direct sale of indulgences in 1857. (Makes me wonder if one were to make a charitable contribution to the Church and get an indulgence for it, isn't that the same thing?) I am so tickled with glee about this, I could just giggle. The idea is utterly preposterous. Medieval, some (I) might say. The Church says it wants to "reintroduce the idea of personal sin into the equation," and somehow bribing them into coming to confession with a piece of paper that says "Indulgence" on it is going to do that.

Uh-huh, sure.

I sort of want to go to confession and see if I can get one for my damned, heathen soul.

Here's the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/10/nyregion/10indulgence.html?hp

That's a quote from The Core, just FYI.

I never write in here anymore. I brought my real journal back home with me so I could write angstily over break, and I was reading some of the older entries. I used to be hilarious. I wonder if not writing very much except academic papers is making me less funny.

Anyway, break was eh, mostly due to lots of funeral-related activities and spontaneously bursting into tears at relatively unremarkable times. I did a reading at the mass, which went actually much better than I expected it to. It might be that I'm getting better at public speaking, but I actually think its whenever I have a microphone, I do better. Not sure why, but it seems to be a pattern. I got some nice presents (like my new, fabulous, fantastic, AND awesome risTouch 3000, which to everyone else would be a new ipod) and saw some movies, etc.

Which brings me to my next point. I'm compiling a list of end-of-the-world media that I'm going to use to create some sort of a "Everything I Need to Know to Survive the Endtimes I Learned from Movies" book/something I will never finish or do anything with, but what I do finish of it will hopefully be hilarious and awesome. I figure it could be one of those books that sits on the "Weird Stuff" tables on the way to the checkout at Barnes and Noble, akin to "Zombies 101," "The History of Salt," and other relatively pointless reference books. Anyway, I'm dealing with books and movies of the following categories: Horrible Humanity-Ending Infectious Illnesses, Alien Invasions, Natural Disasters and Space-Related Destruction, Humanity-Induced Destruction (nuclear war, etc.), Plague of Preternatural Creatures (Including but not limited to vampires, zombies, zombie-like vampires, etc.), Some Combination of the Aforementioned Occurrences.

Horrible Humanity-Ending Infectious Illnesses (often cross-referenced with Plague of Preternatural Creatures):
I Am Legend (book and movie)
World War Z (book)
28 Days Later
28 Weeks Later
Omega Man
The Andromeda Strain (also sort of alien?) (book and movie)
Blindness (book and movie)
The Stand (book, Stephen King)
The Last Man (book,Mary Shelley, 1826)
Earth Abides (book, George Stewart, 1949)
Emergence (book, David Palmer)
Oryx and Crake (book, Margaret Atwood, cr: post-apocalyptic plague scenario)
Outbreak

Alien Invasions:
Independence Day
Day the Earth Stood Still
When Worlds Collide
War of the Worlds (book and movie versions)
Day of the Triffids (also a book, but the movie's better)
Invasion of the Body-Snatchers

Natural Disasters and Non-Alien Space-Related Destruction:
The Day After Tomorrow
The Core
Deep Impact
Armageddon
Lucifer's Hammer (book, Larry Niven)
2012 (upcoming)
Dante's Peak
Asteroid

Humanity-Induced Destruction (often categorized as "Post-Apocalyptic" and including dystopic situations):
The Road (book and upcoming movie)
The Pesthouse (book, Jim Crace)
Planet of the Apes
Mad Max (Mad Max 2: Road Warrior, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome)
Reign of Fire
Children of Men
12 Monkeys
Soylent Green (overpopulation)
A Boy and His Dog (book and movie)
The Postman
On the Beach
A Canticle for Leibowitz (book, Walter Miller)
After London (book, Richard Jefferies, 1885)
Star Mans Son (book, Andre Norton, 1952)
Waterworld
Dr. Strangelove
Delicatessen (post-apocalyptic cannibalism, sort of)
Escape from New York
The Quiet Earth
Red Dawn


Plague of Preternatural Creatures:
The Birds (I'm a little unsure of where to put this one, actually)
Night of the Living Dead
Living Dead (book, Stephen King)
Day of the Dead
Dawn of the Dead
The Matrix Trilogy (are machines creatures? cr: post-apocalyptic)
Cloverfield (only 1 creature, cr: alien invasions)
Cell (book, Stephen King)
Shaun of the Dead


I'm a little torn on whether to include stuff like Resident Evil or Terminator. And there's a LOT of bad apocalypse/infection fiction out there that maybe should be left out, and overtly religious stuff like the Left Behind books (and movie), even though the Book of Revelation is awesome and will be included as literature somewhere along the way. Anyway, this is just what I've seen/read and could think of, so please SUGGEST MORE END OF THE WORLD STUFF FOR ME TO READ/WATCH. Oh, and for those of you who intend on being prepared for the apocalypse, http://survivetheapocalypse.wordpress.com/ is pretty great.

ALSO, it's Armageddon Week on the History Channel starting today until the 11th. Stuff about 2012 predictions and other such prophetic business. http://www.history.com/content/armageddon

ALMOST DONE.

I have to give a presentation (bleh.) about a BS subject (strictly aesthetic color use in medieval manuscripts) that I sort of made up tomorrow. I think it should go over fairly well, if I don't bore everyone to death in the process. I forget sometimes that not everyone lurves medieval things as much as I do, especially modernist abstract expression-ey MFA students. I also have to take a final, but it's about medieval things and doesn't require public speaking, so it should be OK. Then I'm done with school for the semester (and in turn required to begin Serious Work on my thesis).

I'm taking one more class while thesis-ing in the spring semester, it's called Feminists and Feminism in Art and Art History. I've heard good things about the prof, and will hopefully be less lecture and more discussion. It's actually the last content course I have to do for my MA, so theoretically I'll be totally done with everything by this time next year. Whoa.

In non-school news, I've been baking like crazy for Christmas, and I've managed to fill every single tupperware container in the kitchen, and oh no, I'm nowhere NEAR done yet. Flying home to the IL on the evening of the 22nd, and I'm looking forward to seeing home people and eating chain restaurant food. Specifically, as usual, Caribou, Noodles & Co., and Chili's. And Panera. Especially because 2 of those 4 have free wi-fi. ;)

Fantastic Thanksgiving weekend. Good food, sleeping in, shopping at outlet stores, etc. The deal of the weekend was my $1.40 gloves from Wal-Mart. It's no wonder that place is doing well since the economy imploded. 56 cent pot pies and $2.50 contact solution?! We could all live like kings in the suburbs. But then we'd have to live in the suburbs, so I guess that's the trade-off.

Alone at work again today, boring boring boring boring boring.

I have stuff to do after work almost every day this week, which mean gym-time gets cut, which is dumb. I hate to miss my awesome spin class with the fabulously gay instructor. He's big into motivational techniques and "self words" like "amazing, "unstoppable," and "outrageous." I would go to the class just to be entertained by him.

Only 3 weeks until Christmas break now, which is pretty awesome, but I have so much to finish between now and then it still seems pretty far away. Yawn. I want to go home and sleep for like, 4 days.

The days of work leading up to a long weekend or a vacation are the absolute worst. Especially when your boss, who is generally unreasonable anyway, becomes exponentially unreasonable in the days leading up to said vacation.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to Thanksgiving a ton simply because it's 4 days I just don't have to think about anything else except turkey and Black Friday shopping. Yum, on both accounts. I've even gotten myself ahead a little bit in school work to prepare.

I finally finished my thesis abstract and had it approved by my thesis adviser, got all the paperwork signed, and rendered myself in an unbreakable contract to both sign up for and write the thesis within a reasonable period of time. I'm still alternating between trying to work my ass off and finish it by April of this coming semester or wait until next fall to turn it in. Depends on how hard my other (and last official!) class is that I'll be simultaneously taking. Phew. I'm actually sort of almost done with my MA, which is crazy. Mostly because I have to realistically start thinking of applying to PhD programs and meeting with profs and taking another GRE. Bleh.

Other than school, life has been pretty dull. I'm sick of hearing about babies and how awesome/adorable/exhausting/etc. they are. I wouldn't be sad if my life had no involvement with or talk of children (except the ones on TV that are entertaining) at all.

It got really cold last week all of a sudden and I still can't find any of my gloves. I think I just have 1 pair left, and I haven't looked that hard yet either, but we have moved apartments since the last time I wore them, so who knows where that shit is. It's become a serious problem because I now I won't just buy any kind of gloves, oh no, they must be spectacular. I found some awesome leather ones on J.Crew but in the end couldn't justify a $75 glove-purchase.

I'm watching election returns at the moment, and it looks pretty good for Obama.

I have to say, I didn't know I had so many Republican friends on Facebook, judging by the statuses that are coming up so far. I know this is an incredible election in many respects, an inordinately long-fought battle, and has divided a lot of people on a lot of issues, and brought up some really ugly aspects of American demographics.

I also know a lot of jokes have been made at the expense of both sides, and that a lot of those jokes had mean little barbs attached to them. Little barbs that are indicative of a much larger division.

Given all that, if the situation was reversed, of course I would be upset and frustrated, but not because
Obama had lost but because America, after 8 years of obviously shit decisions, would not have self-corrected. It's not about Barack Obama, though he has run an amazing campaign in a lot of respects, but more about doing a complete 180 and citizens having the opportunity to change a government and a party that is driving this country into the ground.

However, the level of Republican and conservative vitriol coming from all sources, from Republican strategists and contributors on CNN to Facebook status updates congratulating Obama "on losing in 4 years, ha!" is kind of incredible. Given the state of the country right now, isn't it just fair to let the other guys have a shot? Are we so ideologically and politically divided that no chances can be given? Partisan cynicism already too ingrained from this long presidential race for any optimism about one's opposite party?

To me, as one of those atheist, country-hating, abortion-loving, socialist-leaning, fake Americans a lot of Republicans have been talking about lately, I shudder to think of what it would have meant for this country to elect someone as religiously motivated as Sarah Palin. John McCain was, somewhat sadly, transformed by his own party into some sort of standard Republican-party robot which seemed pretty far away from his actual character. He said all the right things and played it how he should have, but seemed relatively innocuous. Sarah was/is dangerous. On a myriad of issues, you know, like making it federally possible to imprison women for having abortions by appointing one or more conservative Supreme Court judge. I actually regained some of my faith in the American electorate when polls started coming back identifying Palin as a drag on the Republican ticket, and ultimately, when she was not elected into the White House.

I hope Barack Obama does well as a president and makes everything out of this opportunity as he can. Maybe he won't be the best president ever, but undoubtedly he'll be an improvement over the worst president ever. I also hope, maybe completely in vain, that the other side can at least try their hardest to give this guy a shot. The worst that can happen is that things stay exactly the way they are right now.

I think I already know how most of you lean politically, but what do you think?


And to end on a weird note, what sort of mother names their son "Saxby Chambliss"?

So, wow, it's been a while since I've updated. It's because I'm supposed to be studying for a medieval midterm, but don't really want to start yet.

So I went to Germany like 2 weeks ago, and the conference went smashingly. I feel legitimized as a scholar with interesting things to say. It was definitely the largest group I've ever publicly spoken to, and I didn't even faint or run away from the podium in tears. Perhaps I'm making progress, though I think it helped that I didn't look up too much. I know that's bad form, but you gotta do what you gotta do. As for being in Germany, that was pretty cool. I ate about a ton of Pfannkuchen, strudel, and various types of sausage and potato dishes (there was an incident where I had to send my "Saxon potato soup with small sausages" back at a restaurant because the "small sausages" was actually a "cut-up hot dog" in my soup). Spoke some German, bought like a thousand Kinder bars, and watched some crazy German game shows on my hotel TV. All in all a good trip.

Now it's back to real life and zomg it's midterm time already. I feel like I haven't done anything so far this semester, probably because I really haven't done much. I'm trying to get my ass in gear on a thesis abstract and oh yeah, I have to present paper material in 2 weeks which I haven't done any work for yet. Bleh. Grad school is too hard sometimes. It's frustrating that I have to spend several hours a week cutting up colored pieces of paper and gluing them in crazy arrangements in my sketchbook for my color class. A bad decision, that class. There's talk of MA students having to do a research paper instead of a studio-based final, which I am not happy about. A research paper on color theory is about the last thing I care to do.

What else? Not much going on now except that it got freezing all of a sudden. I figured out how to make coffee drinks that rival those from my local Starbucks with the espresso machine and a secret combination of milk and flavored Coffeemate. Pretty much all I do day to day is read every piece of political news on the internet. I sort of can't wait until the election is over, but I don't know what I'll do with myself after that. On the other hand, I hope I never have to see a Sarah Palin again.

First day of fall today. Feels very nice to wear scarves and boots again, the weather is sunny and in the 60s and generally perfect.

Highly enjoyable weekend that started with French food, pumpkin spice lattes, and The Duchess and included the Kirchner exhibit at MoMA, shopping at Williams-Sonoma for autumn-themed items, and ended with a newly cleaned and exquisitely organized apartment, and some new shelves for our room. I even got some homework done. Fall makes me feel much more productive than summer. Which is good because all of a sudden there's a lot of work to be done. Even an assignment for the Color Seminar, which includes trying to match tonal values of color samples. Riveting.

Going to Germany in (omg) 2 weeks. Getting more nervous about actually giving a speech to strangers by the second. Exponentially. I really hate talking to people in general, I've decided. This fact has been continually illuminated by my current job, which requires me to make small talk with rich people about rich people things and sell them overpriced antiques they don't need. Suffice to say I would really love for my next job to be in an office where they only communication I have to do is with co-workers and where I never have to answer the phone.

Has Sarah Palin done anything really dumb lately? Haven't watched much CNN lately, so I'm not sure. She's meeting with the president of Afghanistan sometime this week, which I hope is televised because it should be hilarious. And horrifying.


What else? I've been taking a lot of Pilates classes at the gym, and it is way harder than you think. It's like yoga without all the spiritual centering BS and more ass-kicking. But not too much, like the strength classes that are taught by heavily-muscled dudes in those obnoxious muscle-showing tank tops that like to yell about "not quitting" and "exercise goals." It's scary because it's like they really believe it, and weirdly think that there's little in life beyond the gym. Scary like Sarah Palin.

So I went to the Met yesterday to wander around a bit before meeting the rest of my class. I spent some time sitting in the courtyard of the Greek and Roman galleries, which is at once relaxing and meditative and also hilarious. Almost as much as I enjoy looking at art myself do I enjoy watching other people look at art.

I watched two frumpy chunky middle-aged women make their way through the courtyard, taking pictures of each other in front of EVERY single statue. One said, with a gleam in her eye "Don't worry! I've got 500 more shots!" and the other said, while posing in front of a 9-foot tall sculpture of Hercules: "Try not to get the penis in!" Then came a family with two youngish boys, both highly entertained at the profusion of classically perfect naked bodies scattered about, and their dad, who kept shushing them but looked like he wanted to snicker along with them. Why can't we move past the fact that a lot of Greek statues are nude to some sort of valid, perhaps higher intellectual level of understanding them?
Then there are the confused-looking people with their audio guides, skipping over everything that's not on the tour, the people who wear their backpacks in the front (BTW, if you ever WANT to look like a tourist, that's a surefire method), people who have 3 different cameras as if taking pictures of the stuff in the museum is the actual point of visiting a museum instead of say, reading and learning about them.

The things you overhear at a museum are especially entertaining:
"So this is marble? It looks like stone."
"He doesn't look like that in the movie." (regarding Hercules)
"Why didn't they make it with a nose?"

It's actually kind of horrifying. This is why the labels are there, folks. Read them. Learn. Though I guess if everyone were having educated conversations about art, people-watching in the Met wouldn't be nearly as entertaining.

Hmmmm...Sarah Palin's still a nutball, if anyone's keeping track. Now she's a nutball who wants to get into a war with Russia and who's only "foreign policy" experience is having visited Canada and Mexico, because meeting world leaders and having some experience dealing with foreign countries is clearly a bad thing. Definitely not something we want a vice president to have.

I haven't posted in a million years.

What breaks my radio silence? The VMAs. Russell Brand was pretty much the best host ever, and Britney Spears "won" 3 awards for her song that no one's ever heard, thus making her "comeback" complete. Lolz. Also, the Jonas Brothers sort of freak me out.

In other, actually important news, I'm sort of horrified by the possibility that Americans could feasibly elect John McCain and Sarah Palin to run this country. However, the Daily Show has been pretty hilarious lately, especially the ones where they ask Republicans to define "small-town values" and totally fail. As someone who's actually from a small town, let me say that such "values" are complete bullshit.

What else? Started classes, and I have to figure out how to write a thesis abstract for a yet-unknown specific thesis topic. I bought a ton of art supplies for my color class yesterday, but so far the class itself is mostly underwhelming. We've learned a lot so far about wavelengths and the eye-brain system. Yawn. Early Medieval is better, but also a little underwhelming because it inevitably starts with Roman stuff, which is dull. I'm going to try to do my paper on something insular, maybe early Christian Celtic crosses or manuscripts.

I'm going to Germany in a month and here's how prepared I am: .

Oh, and it was my birthday on Saturday. Pretty much everyone forgot (not that I don't appreciate facebook posts, but I don't think it really counts as "remembering"), but Andrew took me out to dinner in the middle of Tropical Storm Hanna, so that was an adventure. I'm 24 now, which doesn't seem quite right.

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost



I am so horribly consumed by the world of young adult vampire fiction. I can't help myself. Edward makes me want to read every book Anne Rice has ever written (for the 2nd, 3rd, or 8th time, depending on the book) again.

Jenn and I are putting Maureen Dowd on notice. For this: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/opinion/03dowd.html

Ugh. Jane Austen has been massacred enough by high school English students already...now this? Bleh.

Anyway. This is my last week of Latin. Thank Deus. I feel smarter, I think I actually did learn something, but probably not enough to equip me for the actual task of translating whole sections of medieval manuscripts. I will try though, and valiantly.

Last week I spent away from work and at various libraries around the city doing thesis research and some additional reading for my Dresden conference paper, which now must be revised. I was extremely productive, and came out of the week with a good 20 pages of notes. I guess this means I might actually have to start writing the thing soon, though I'm still not exactly positive what the focus is going to be. I learned a ton about medieval funerary ritual though!

This upcoming Saturday Andrew and I are leaving for our exotic vacay to the IL. I'm excited about not doing anything for a week and just chilling. Chilling at Ren Faire, in Chicago, at home, and various other equally exotic locations.

Then I'm excited to finish up this summer, start wearing all my fall clothes again, and go back to school. Oh, and I should buy that plane ticket to Dresden because I'm going in 2 months...whoooa. I'm also going to be 24 in one month. WHAT?

Jenn and I, in our infinite wisdom, have complied a list of people for whom sterilization will be mandatory under our new world order:

-convicted felons
-people who wear/like Crocs
-Bill O'Reilly fans, the religious right, and conservative crazies (we decided that this includes almost everyone from Texas and the deep South, Republicans, and people who think Barack Obama is actually Muslim)
-NASCAR fans
-overly-enthusiastic fitness instructors
-people who wear socks with sandals
-Rachel Ray
-people who don't read books unless they're on Oprah's Book Club list
-hipsters who take themselves seriously as such
-anyone who has worn, or would consider wearing, a beer hat
-most reality show contestants
-John Mayer
-Scientologists
-grammar-correctors
-most vegans, people who think foods labeled "organic" are healthier than regular food
-people who shop at Sean John, Baby Phat, and/or Juicy Couture
-Dan Brown/people who like Dan Brown (probably also James Patterson and Danielle Steele)
-Self-help book authors
-life coaches/Dr. Phil
-American people who use British words



this is a work in progress, I'm certain.

I'm so mad.

Bon Jovi is giving a free concert in Central Park tomorrow, not that I'm paying attention or anything. But the only way to get tickets was to go to a baseball game in the Bronx at Yankee or in Queens at Shea, or 34th and 12th ave (aka the edge of the world)at 10am where they were giving them out. UGH. Discrimination against working professionals who have to be at an office on Fridays.

He's probably in New York right now somewhere, being awesome. Does he need antiques? Someone convince Jon that he needs some 18th century chairs and that he should come in here. And give me front row tickets to both MSG shows next week, which I also wasn't paying attention to.

Damn it, bonjovi.com, why don't you tell me these things?

I am losing my patience with summer.

No, let me clarify. I am losing my patience with working full time at a business in which nothing happens in the summer.

Also with having to wear sandals everyday. They are not nearly as cool as boots.

Anyway. It was the 4th of July this past weekend, for which we did nothing. Fireworks in NYC are crap because they involve tremendous crowds, pushing and shoving for a good spot, and even then, there's probably a building in the way. So Andrew and I watched movies all day on Friday, we were going to go see a free NY Philharmonic concert on Saturday but that got canceled because of the rain and general weather inclemency. Then we made cupcakes on Sunday. If you live near me and want a delicious cupcake or 3, let me know and you can come get some.

Other news? Latin. Lots and lots of Latin. Actually I've only been to class twice, but in those 6 hours have managed to learn about a million verb conjugations, which I subsequently had to memorize. For the most part though, I sort of love it. It's like figuring out a language Rubik's cube. It [mostly] makes a lot of reasonable sense, and I like that you can know all the words in the sentence, but still have no idea what it says unless you know all the parts of grammar inside and out. I feel like it's a good start, our teacher says these 6 weeks are the equivalent of 2 college semesters, which, if I retain at least some of it, should be helpful.

That said, thesis has sort of been on hold, which I am continuously tormented by. I will theoretically be taking at least a few days off to research coming up, but until then, I feel poo about it because I sort of don't really know how to go about working on it productively.

Good news: Vacay to the IL is planned for the 9th-16th of August, during which there will probably be Renaissance Faire-ing, so tell me if you want to come, either the 10th or the 15th, I think. Other than that, I'm making a mental list of all the chain restaurants I want to eat at that I can't get in New York: Noodles & Co., Panera, Caribou, and Chili's for sure, so far. If you just want to hang out with me because I'm awesome, let me know that too.