Good land of the living, my blog has not been the most cheerful spot on the planet earth for a while. Granted, being in WV was fun, but I’ve been in a downer mood lately. To help fix that, I’ve compiled a list of some of my favorite things! As you read, try not focus on thoughts such “Wow, she’s a nerd” but instead put on a positive spin like “Wow, she’s one of a kind!” hehe, anything looks more fun with an exclamation point

• Writing nonsensical poems and stories
• Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies. Originals are good too, but if milk isn’t handy, you just can’t beat the chewy ones.
• Daydreaming. It’s a quick fix for anything.
• Iced venti skinny caramel machiatto from Starbucks
• Exploring a new park or hiking a new trail
• Singing in my car. Loudly.
• Going to Renaissance festivals
• Getting dressed up for Renaissance fesitvals
• Getting dressed for midnight movie showings. Except for Star Wars. That’s lame.
• Demetri Martin videos on YouTube
• Flowering trees lining a street in early spring
• Rocking out to angry music and pretending I’m a darkly beautiful rock star
• Giggling when the next song on shuffle is from the Little Mermaid.
• I was going to say facebook, but it’s actually causing more trouble than it’s worth recently.
• Taking pictures
• Standing in line for hours to ride on a roller coaster, getting sunburned and dehydrated, but then screaming your head off during the ride and proclaiming it all worth the wait!
• A barbacoa burrito with black beans, rice, cheese, and a little sour cream…dare I say orgasmic?
• Swing dancing
• Tap dancing
• Well, I guess almost any kind of dancing
• Talking on Skype and thinking I’m futuristically techno-savvy.
• The lazy buzz of an open meadow in late summer.
• Music from The Lion King. So beautiful I usually get a little teary-eyed.
• Watching sappy chick flicks in a room full of girlfriends
• Horseback riding
• Eating brownie batter
• When the first snowfall coincides with my birthday
• Thinking up all the zingers I could say to someone who wronged me, and ignoring the fact that I won’t remember a single one when I’m face to face with them.
• Being so absorbed in a good book that you don’t even notice the world around you
• Seeing a species in the wild for the first time…waiting for my gorillas!
• Connecting with someone who needed a friend
• Getting to my car and not finding a foot of snow to clean off!
• Waking up at 3 am and realizing you can sleep another three hours
• Sleeping in, for that matter
• Going home and being licked to death by my dogs
• Random texts that say “Hope you’re having a great day!” (hint…hint)
• Painting
• Blogging

As my spring break is winding down, I’m in a little tiny smidgey town in West Virgina, visiting my grandparents. They don’t have internet, so I’m on a quick trek to the local library to check e-mail, facebook, and (of course) my blog.

Upon arrival at the library, I had to show ID to front desk to use a computer, since I don’t have a library card; I explained I was just visiting my grandparents. The librarian saw my name on my student ID and instantly knew who my grandparents were, and she also graduated from high school with my dad. I love small towns

Next on my agenda, as a beautiful a day as this is, I’m going to grab and ice cream from the local Dairy Queen and slowly eat it up before I go home and wait for a dinner of my Mama’s absolutely fabulous friend chicken, mashed potatoes, and green beans. It’s good to be almost Southern

 

 

Me

a noun

solitary

Unique

my own

probably taller than you

a medley

of sun, rain, fire, ice

a Garth Brooks fan

Stubborn

cool enough to be a nerd

nerd enough to scare the uber cool

but that’s ok

i don’t want to be them anyway

Fierce

like Sasha

fiercely in love with Him

and someday will be fiercely loyal to another him

and he will be fiercely in love with me

who wouldn’t?

a fan of winking

and tapping drum beats on the steering wheel at red lights

a 15 minute solo conversationalist

yeah, you heard me

or maybe tuned me out

Afraid

of failure

the dark

loneliness

stale cookies

Text messenger extraodinaire

but i can’t do T9

the first to raise my hand if i know the answer

the last in line to the Swedish throne

i mean it when i smile

and i can’t stop tears

so do i attract you or repulse you?

how can I help what you think?

or do you not like Mika?

maybe i do, maybe i don’t

he’s not me

i’m blond

i’m my worst enemy

and my best friend

a riot, a storm

a listening ear

a myth, a classic, a novel

and in a nutshell

I’m Me

a noun

solitary

Unique.

So, you’ve all at least heard of “The Never Ending Story,” right? Every time the book is read, a new story is unfolding, but always with the same elements: a boy named Bastian is immersed into a world of luck dragons, oracles, rock biters, and a Childlike Empress in an Ivory Tower. In every round of the story, Bastian, with the help of the Fantasian native American (?) Atreyu, has to save this world from some facet of apathy, most notably the modern disinterest in imagination.

Got it? K, cool. Well, I have a similar theme going on. Every time I go to the dentist, a new story is unfolding, except in my case, I get cavities instead of luck dragons and broken enamel instead anything in an ivory tower. The rock biter thing rings a bell, though, back when I used to chew on ice. But there is nothing apathetic about my taking care of my teeth; all 28 of my chompers (no wisdom teeth) get the empress treatment.

So what prompted this dental analogy? (Picture this in the voice of your older, sassy aunt who has a slight southern twang) well, let me tell you!

Last Christmas, I thought I had a cracked tooth. I could see a line across the top of the tooth and it was sensitive pretty often when I would bite down on food. Now that’s a problem; so I go to the dentist, she looks at my teeth and tells me it was probably an inflammation somewhere–take some Motrin, I’d be fine. Erm, au contraire. Last week, I was flossing my teeth, when my floss got stuck between two teeth, one of which was the one that had been bothering me at Christmas. So I give the floss a yank (BAD idead), and I see an old filling pop up. Moment of panic, pain, and a race to find my phone to call Mom. The filling was still somewhat in its place, so I pushed it back down (???good idead???bad idea???yo no se???) I get ahold of my dentist, and she tells me I can come during spring break, and just don’t eat on that side of my mouth. Ugh, annoying.

Fast forward to two nights ago. Again, I’m flossing (a jinxed practice, apparently) and my floss gets stuck on something else, this time on the other side of my mouth and far away from the sensitive tooth. I assume it’s food or something, I pull a little, and chunk of enamel breaks off!!!!!!!!!!! Cue another moment of panic and race to find my phone, although at least it didn’t hurt this time. The next day I get ahold of my dentist, she says she can fix it, but don’t chew on that side of my mouth–which means, if you’re keeping track, that I’m out of sides of my mouth. Meaning no solid food. Good thing I like milkshakes and tomato soup.

So what prompted this broken tooth? I have absolutely no idea. I haven’t been chewing on ice any time recently, I hadn’t noticed any pain whatsoever on that side of my mouth, and it still doesn’t hurt. But now I have an icky space between two teeth…at least it’s not in the front where my old buck-toothed gap was when I was a kid. It’s far enough back that even I can barely see it when I’m awkwardly craning my head in front of the mirror. Blech. It’s my West Virginia roots shining through.

Honestly, though, I have really good dental hygeine. I brush, floss, swish-swish the fluoride, and drink milk like the cow’s are gonna run out. And this is how those little molars thank me? By breaking randomly? By spitting out their fillings? Good land of the living. You know, my 12-year molars came in with cavities. And when I had sealants on my teeth to protect them, I just got cavities underneath them instead.

I can’t win.

I need a luck dragon. Or a pretty horse named Artax. Let’s go with the horse.

 

 

And by the way, I’m going to have to go watch this 80’s phenomenon of a movie now that I’ve trying to remember all the finer details. It won’t be as fun as when I watched it as a kid, though. I was pretty much in love with Atreyu; he was an older man.

A way while back, I wrote a post all about haiku right after I had competed in (and lost) a haiku contest. Though I should be seriously studying for a midterm, I just needed to get these five (albeit poor) haiku out of my head. Enjoy! (Or don’t )

Dead End Streets

Five roads to nowhere,

In Alleman, Iowa.

Get out while you can.

 

Goodbye, Winter

Falling white crystals

Pile into snowbanks and slush

Last snow of the year

 

Writing a Book

Pen strokes make letters

Into a world of their own,

The magic of words.

 

The Diamond Solitaire

Her left hand sparkles,

Catching the light, attention,

And my pretend smile.

 

Not So Far Back

Bike shorts and Barbie,

And Dr. Pepper lip balm,

To be in fourth grade again.

A young woman walks alongside a busy street in Baghdad, Iraq. She is shrouded head to toe in a traditional burqa, blending in to her daily scene perfectly well. Nothing out of the ordinary. Suddenly, just as a car is about go by her, everything explodes! The car, the woman, straggler basket and fruit stands from the market back down the street–everything is lost is fiery blast.

This scene was played on the news last night. After the video was taken, somehow it was learned that the woman was a suicide bomber, coerced into her final role because women are typically not searched by the police and can thus carry out such a task undetected until ther last obvious moment. The purpose of the segment was to show that this doesn’t happen as often anymore and to show how much better life has gotten for Iraqi women in the past few years. Non-Muslim women are not forced to dress in burqas and many more women are taking up careers, learning how to drive cars, getting better educations. Along with that, fewer women are kidnapped and/or forced into suicide bombing.

I know the point of the segment was to highlight this progress, but I could barely pay attention after the image of the blast. That clip showed on national tv had just shown a woman dying. Her last few seconds walking down the street, the abrupt end to her life, the blast debris falling around where she had just stood. I’m not sure what happened, but after that segment, I stared blankly at the screen for a few moments. And then I cried; but I didn’t just cry, I was beyond crying. I couldn’t stop! Who was she? Did she have a family? Did her parents know what happened to her? Did she volunteer or did someone make her do it?

I know we see people “die” in movies all the time; we’ve gotten pretty desensitized to anything horrific we might see on tv because we see even more disturbing images from Hollywood. But this woman wasn’t an actress. No director will yell “Cut!” and she’ll magically pop up and go back to her starting place to try it again. I don’t know what bothered me more, the fact that this really happened or that so many people just watched those few seconds, blinked or shook their heads, and then kept on eating tv dinners.

Good heavens, I don’t even know when that video was filmed, and I was thousands of miles away whenever it happened. But still, 24 hours later, I can’t get the images out of my head. Am I freaked out because it showed a person dying? Is it the fear for other women, probably in my age bracket? What if she had been someone like me? 23 years old and the potential for a long life ahead until someone forced her to give all that up. But, then again, maybe that’s what she didn’t have. Maybe she couldn’t see her potential and thought the only way to make a difference was this final and radical act. Or maybe she was doing it because someone told her that her God/Allah needed this sacrifice from her. I don’t know those details, and I never will. I wish I had never seen those few seconds; that’s all it was, a few seconds. But maybe I needed to have my safe little American bubble prodded. The product of Cornfields and Suburbia, USA, I could never fully understand what that woman faced; but that’s no excuse to be ignorant of what is happening in the world around me.

I guess I don’t know what grand point I was trying to make with this post. Something about the fragility of life, the immunity of our emotions, or the gift of never having been faced with whatever decision was in front of her. So if I can’t bring about a brilliantly philosophical ending, you do it. What do you think about this situation?

Oscar time!!!!!

Ok, so I will probably never be famous, and I’m going to act on a wild hunch and say I will never be an actress…so why do I get so excited about the Oscars when I haven’t even seen half of the movies?

Yeah, I don’t know either. But I love watching them every year!

This past fall, I entered the contest to try to win bleacher seats for the red carpet. Can you imagine?! I would be within spitball distance of every actor or actress who has done anything! (Not that I would do spitballs, btw, but you have to be reasonably close to someone, or have a superior pulmonary power, to get them with one. So that means I’d be uber close. And anyway, I only do spitballs at Fudruckers in Hilton Head.) However, if you hadn’t noticed, I am nowhere near the Kodak Theater right now, so I won’t be red-carpetting any time soon. Balderdash. Oh well, I can eat popcorn and watch it from home.

But anyway, for those of you out there who also enjoy the Oscars, what do you like best about these Olympics of the cinematic world? I personally enjoy the dresses, the hot actors, and imagining myself on stage accepting my little golden man–fighting back tears and thanking my mom.

Well, two people had a 200th birthday on this past February 12th. One was the greatest president this country has ever had, and the other came up with the same hypotheses as his contemporaries but beat them to publication (poor Alfred Wallace.) The way I figure, we’ve already been ignoring Lincoln so much, I might as well continue the trend and instead extol some of the great sayings of the Charles Darwin.

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.”

I love the irony of this statement considering how confident he was in the assertion, cuz now we all know where confidence comes from! Maybe it was too early in history for him to realize that science has done its fair share of screwing us over too. The atom bomb, literal tons of our garbage floating around in space, the infamous Tuskegee study–yeah, we scientists got it all figured out.

“The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an agnostic.”

To each his own.

 ”A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life.”

So wait, where did life gets it meaning if there is nothing else out there?

“The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

Man, makes me happy life has so much value. I better not waste another hour of blind, pitiless indifference.

“A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives – of approving of some and disapproving of others.”

Wait…didn’t he just say there was no evil and no good? Why’d he go drag morals into it?

“It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in man: but some, at least, of these faculties are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a pas.”

In his defense, feminism really hadn’t happened yet.

“A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, – a mere heart of stone.”

So that’s why the polio vaccine was first tested on mentally handicapped orphans! Good to know.

“Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

You know, the Nazis really didn’t have to twist much of what he said to justify the Holocaust.

Well, aren’t you excited about social Darwinism now? Me too! Let’s go party like 1899! I’ll bring the beagles, you bring the finches.

Ok, let me be honest. Darwin was a brilliant man; very intelligent, made very important observations, and did really hone in on natural selection first; and there is no way you can deny that organisms change at least somewhat over time. Deny the full-scale prokaryote-to-humans tree of life all you want (or all I want), but just the yearly changing flu shot ought to point out that life isn’t static. So he was on to something.

But I don’t understand the complete praising of him that is going on this year! There are so many scientists who have made incredible and life-saving discoveries, but do we honor them like this? No. Yes, Darwin “enlightened” but did that really change anything significant other than literature? Would drug companies not be able to make stronger antibiotics without him? They might not understand the full reasoning behind why bacteria became immune, but that wouldn’t stop them from being able to produce new meds. And heck, if we want to praise anyone like this, it should be Gregor Mendel! The whole world of genetics wouldn’t be the same without him! Darwin’s own theories wouldn’t have taken off if it hadn’t been for Mendel’s work. He understood the selection process, but not the inheritance process. Or what about Watson and Crick who even further brought to light how inheritance works!

What is it about Darwin that has stirred up a year-long celebration? Why is he worthy of this honor but not the others on whom his own theores rest? I have my own thoughts on that, but I’ll let you think about it too.

The cool thing about this blog site is that it keeps tabs on which of your posts is getting the most views. When somebody googles a phrase, it can take them directly to a particular post, and my piece of writing that has consistently gotten bewtween 2 and 10 hits from google everyday is “Love Song.” Sure some of my other bits pop up on the “found by a search engine,” but none of them come up every single day. I’m not complaining, it’s probably my favorite one too! It was a post I wrote about my favorite Third Day song (and I actually normally don’t even like Third Day because they have a tendency to sound like Travis Tritt, but I absolutely love this song.)

I wanted to reference back to it today, because every emotion I described, though it was over a year ago, is pretty much the same as today. I still have moments of being madly in love with God, followed by forgetting all about Him. My downfall at its worst; but it helps to be reminded of what I’m doing so that I can minimize those moments of focusing wholely on myself instead of Him.

And by the way, if you’ve never heard “Love Song,” I would encourage you to look it up! It’s an amazing song, and it’s beibng sung just for you, so hop on YouTube or iTunes and find it!

By the way, my referencing back to one of my old posts isn’t an act of narcissism!! My own babbling doesn’t do justice to the message behind “Love Song” and I’m not so over confident as to believe it does. I really do just love the song and think it summarizes God’s love for us in the most beautiful and heartbreaking way possible. But since I’d already written about it, I couldn’t quite do it again.

http://lucidmystery.wordpress.com/2008/01/05/love-song/

Hello everyone! Before I begin my lovely day that will be spent with my number 1 cutie (myself), I thought I would share my plans for this most romantic and charming of days:

• Do laundry
• Vacuum and and sweep apartment floors
• Tidy up my stuff that has arranged itself into piles
• Do the dishes
• Take out the trash and the recycling
• Spritz something that smells pretty in the room
• Watch a depressingly chirpy chick flick while eating ice cream right out of the carton

 

Are you as filled with pity for me as I am for myself yet? 

Ok, so I don’t have the most fun day planned, but the last item on the list probably won’t happen since I am going to hang out with people tonight (thank heavens!) The crazy thing is though, all sarcasm and joking aside, I’m really not that annoyed or blech-feeling today. I don’t really need anyone right now, so today suits me just fine. And I can even get away with wearing more pink than usual! (All you pink-haters, cringe in fear )

Think about it this way First, I’m kind of broke, but I would have had to buy a Valentine’s Day present for somebody. Second, I spend way too much time either in the lab, grading papers, doing homework, etc, so I actually don’t have a lot of time to spare for someone else. Third, and this is an issue, I enjoy catching that good-looking guy’s eye too much  Can’t get away with that so easily if you’re with someone. Finally, I think the big thing is that I don’t particularly want to be just messing around with anyone because I don’t want to set myself up for a depressing few weeks during a break up; and since I’m nowhere near any thought of getting married yet, there really isn’t a point in trying to find “the one.”

So let’s see, I’m saving my money, I can use my time how I want, I can flirt with whomever I want, and no heartbreak involved….so why is Singles’ Awareness Day a bad thing again?