Nice weather makes me happy

My blogs have been mopey again. They have a tendency to do that. It’s not a fair reflection on me. When I’m in a good mood, I go out and do stuff. When I’m in a bad mood, I sit at a computer and write. Naturally, the bad moods are dominant in my writing. I’ll try to throw a little sunshine your way.

God realized that he gave us an absolutely miserable October. He decided to make up for it by blessing us with a truly lovely first week of November. I hope he keeps it up with the nice weather. I’m pretty sure I have Seasonal Affective Disorder (cleverly acronymed SAD). Only instead of seasonal, mine is more up and down. I have Weather Affective Disorder, which I just made up. When the weather is bad, I am unhappy even if things are going well for me. When the weather is nice, I’m downright giddy, even if things are otherwise going poorly. I should move to Hawaii and live my days in bliss. Hawaii has everything: mountains, ocean, forests and warm weather. It rains for five minutes every day, but the sun keeps shining. There are lots of rainbows. Trust me, I’ve been there. I’d kill myself within a month in Seattle. All that rain. Just dreary. Thank God Missouri has everything. It keeps you on your toes. The bad days remind you to appreciate the good ones.

I haven’t talked about anything but the weather so far. This is why I don’t write when I’m happy. I have other things I could be doing. I’m going outside now for a bike ride, or perhaps to Capen for a hike. Enough of this computer screen.

Dear Google,

There’s no denying that my generation has developed an unprecedented dependency on the internet. But just how far does that dependency go? Can Google give us everything we need?

WordPress Dashboard shows me what people typed into their searches that brought up my blog. One of the recent searches was “im a student what should i do if”…

I’m sure there was more, but I guess WordPress has a limit to how many words of a search it will show me. The ambiguity intrigues me. I very much want to finish the sentence. I see this search as a desperate cry to the internet to answer some burning question, seek some sage advice. Dear Google, help! I don’t know where else to turn. Let’s brainstorm.

I’m a student. What should I do if…

• I have swine flu
• I don’t know what I want out of life
• I’m failing
• I’m pregnant
• I want to ask him/her out
• There’s a rabid squirrel in my room

OK, so those are just a few possibilities. What should this person do? We know it’s a student. We know the student doesn’t know what to do. We know they turned to the internet for answers and we know that their search yielded my blog as a result.

I have this sinking feeling that I didn’t help the searching student. How could I? Can the internet really do for us what we’re now turning to it for? I’m sure I’m blowing this out of proportion, but the wording of it just made it feel like the beginning of a Dear Abby letter to me. Maybe this is the new technological progression of the Dear Abby column. What does it mean? We can’t go to our own friends and family for advice. We feel isolated and alone. We want someone to talk to, but who can we trust, if not those closest to us? At least Abby had a real person, albeit a stranger, writing back to us on the other end. What does the internet give us? Automatically generated electronic results from a multitude of known and unknown sources. Cold, impersonal, computerized suggestions that may or may not apply to our question.

I know I’m not the first to say this, but I do believe that the more technologically “connected” we become, the more disconnected we become in our personal lives outside the computer screen. Why call when you could text? Why text when you could Facebook? Why ask a real person when you could get a million more answers from a search engine? I hope we never lose our personal connections– it would be a steep, steep price to pay for progress.

Days go by

“Days go by, I can feel them flying like a hand out the window in the wind. The cars go by, yeah it’s all we’ve been given so you’d better start living right now… We talk about tomorrow, then it slips away.”  -Keith Urban, Days Go By

Today I registered for the final semester of my senior year of college. I might not ever register for classes again. I’ve been in school since I was 3 years old. Finishing college might be a big deal. I’m only 3 classes away from fulfilling all my requirements, so I get to pick a totally random fourth class just for the sake of maintaining my full-time status and keeping my scholarships. I’m looking at a scuba class, but it’s really too expensive.

The passage of time has forced me into decision-making, something I generally put off as long as humanly possible. I finally decided last  week to apply for Advanced Writing as my primary capstone choice and for Magazine Staff as my secondary choice. I got my first choice, so that means I’m a writer and not an editor. I rode the fence between the two for at least a year. Editing seemed like less legwork. I’m decent at it, perhaps even good. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t get past the thought that I would truly miss writing if I wasn’t doing it, despite all the stress and work of reporting. It may be the first time in a very long time that I chose the path that seemed more difficult. I feel pretty good about it. More work and less money– I must be pursuing my passion.

That being said, I still have no idea what I want to do when I graduate in seven months.

Pandora Radio

Pandora online radio is totally brilliant. If you spend time on the internet when you can be listening to music and you’re not using Pandora, check it out right now. It’s like iTunes Genius except you don’t have to own any of the music. You create your own stations by selecting either a song or an artist. For example, I have a Beatles-inspired station and an “Accidentally in Love” (Counting Crows) inspired station. Then Pandora plays songs that have a similar style to your selection. You can pause a song or skip a song.

You can give each song a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. It will never play something you’ve given the thumbs-down to. The site uses your approvals and rejections to further hone in on exactly what you’re looking for. To further customize, you can add variety by selecting secondary artists or songs for each station. Pandora remembers you every time you come back and you can save and edit as many stations as your little heart desires.

The website will give you all kinds of information about the bands and songs you’re listening to.

Random reflections while sitting on a rock

“The richness I achieve comes from Nature, the source of my inspiration.” –Claude Monet

Capen-

I love it here when the leaves are changing. There are no real reds or pinks, mostly burnt orange and browning yellow – true autumnal colors. I only wish the cliff faced the west as the sun sinks behind a veil of trees at my back. But the sunset is still gently pinking the underbellies of clouds before me as they stretch out across the sky like cool-whip. It’s so quiet here, except for the undertones of crickets and the overtones of the creek below. The wind whispers coyly to the drying leaves and they purr their best response. The rock has a personality, though I can’t tell what it is. It is always here for me, ready to calm me, ready to coax me from whatever facade I am in back to myself for a while.

Even now, I don’t really know what it means to be myself. But at the moment I don’t mind the ambiguity. I breathe in air and I see and feel and hear and know this place and myself for whatever we are. Whatever we are, it is beautiful. I let myself forget that I am sometimes. My heart knows it’s true, but my mind tells me otherwise.

I wish I could find a job where they’d pay me to write about myself. Not in a self-serving way, but in a self-searching way. Maybe if people read it they would learn something about themselves as well. I could spend a lifetime on sabbatical searching myself and maybe before I died I would discover something to write on a resume cover letter. Me, I am intangible. The tangible part is just a package that holds it all together so that you can look at me and judge what you see and totally misunderstand the deeper meaning.

I suspect that God makes us too complex to grasp.

Thwarted

“The best laid schemes of mice and men go often askew…” -Robert Burns, To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest, with a Plough

This weekend, most of my schemes have fallen apart, but it’s been nice anyway. Phi Lamb’s Active Retreat was Friday night til Saturday morning. After this, I planned to head to Rolla to spend the rest of the weekend with Michael. But at the last minute, we decided he was too busy with projects and I had a lot to get done here, so we stayed in our respective towns. I ended up cleaning my whole house, which gives me a great sense of satisfaction whenever I look at it. I also got to have a lovely movie night with my friend Ashley…girls nights are few and far between, so I’m really glad we got to do it. Today, a friend from home and her boyfriend came to church with me. Well, they brought themselves but came at my invitation.

Seeing as it was so nice outside, I got the harebrained idea that Michael and I should each drive halfway to each other and meet in the middle for a hike/picnic. I discovered Painted Rock Conservation Area, 7 miles southwest of Westphalia, exactly halfway between Rolla and Columbia. Sure, it’d be almost an hour drive for each of us and we’d have very little time together. Michael had to be back in Rolla at 6 for a project meeting. But we were undaunted. Plans were made and off we went.

I never made it Westphalia.

Kicking the cold, reflecting on reading

I’m slightly less sick now. Thanks to all of you faithful blog followers who have been diligently bringing up this site, waiting to see if I’ve turned into a swine. I don’t want to disappoint any gamblers who might have been betting against me, but I’m still just a short caucasian girl with a runny nose. I blow things out of proportion sometimes. However, I still think Meredith might die. She rides her bike to school in the rain, so she hasn’t gotten better yet.

I’m reading The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon right now. That book is a trip. I think I might understand it better if I were smoking something while I read it. But it’s not a pleasant trip like something you’d get from listening to the Beatles (though it was written in the 60s). It’s a grungy sort of feeling that leaves me wishing the world weren’t so…blech. Maybe I just don’t get it. I’m only on the third chapter, so I can’t fairly jump to any conclusions yet. I just need to get into a Pynchon state of mind (a frightening thought).

My professor talked about how Pynchon is Postmodern. His description of Postmodernism sounded like a mess of sameness, shallowness, flat functionality, and ugly, practical architecture. Me, I’m a fan of Modernism.

Swine Flu

Swine flu. I don’t believe the hype…or do I?

I don’t think I have it, but I feel like death warmed over. I hardly got out of bed today. Class? Forget about it. A brief history: since August I’ve had off and on variations of sore throat, cough, congestion, sneezing, watery eyes, etc. This weekend the sore throat was prominent. Now it’s the congestion. I can’t breath. I’ve blown through a whole roll of toilet paper today, and my nose is ready to fall off. My head is in a vice grip and I’m lightheaded when attempting to walk.

Who should I blame? Nebraska: Surely this is a result of suffering through that miserable football game in the cold and rain. I am suffering from pneumonia and hurt pride. The swine: Surely they have brought this upon me. My friends: Meredith, Aaron, and Jeremy are also sick. Michael and Becca are surviving so far, though she had a sore throat yesterday and he has a headache today. There are people in most of my classes with swine flu, including one of the TAs. There’s at least one girl in my sorority with swine flu. With all of that illness going around, how could I avoid it?

I don’t know who to blame, so what should I do next? Should I go to the Student Health Center? I don’t trust them.

QD

{Another LVR staff blog}

Once upon a time, Steve Johnson wanted to be Quick Draw. It quickly morphed in QD, which is often misheard as “Cutie.” But watch out, ladies, the camp director of LVR is happily married to his wife Angie, aka Bam. They have 3 adorable boys – Sam, Mason, and Joe – who are growing up in the ideal, rambunctious lifestyle of camp kids.

QD is the kind of guy you can’t picture doing anything other than working at LVR. Except for one day a week going into town to play softball, he doesn’t go for civilization that much. If he had to drive into town for errands, he would relieve at least one staff member of their duties if they could be spared so he wouldn’t have to go alone. When I was lucky enough to ride along on an errand run, he bought me and Moptop Sonic drinks, then BBQ for dinner. That, the break from work, and hitting up the outdoor shop and army surplus store made it a pretty sweet trip.

He told us to “go play with kids and talk about Jesus” at the end of staff meeting every day.

My article in Vox

“My experience was not just the homosexual thing, it’s the story of a radically transformed life,” Alan Toigo says. “I am not the same person I was 10 years ago.”

This is the story I sought to capture. A deep struggle, a life lived in confusion and lies and the ultimate peace and comfort that one man found.

A whole year after I first proposed the story to John Fennell, is is finally published in Vox Magazine. I wrote the article for Fennell’s Intermediate Writing class last fall. This semester, he pitched it to Vox and they were interested.

For about a month, I’ve been diligently updating, doing additional reporting and re-writing it as my Vox editors have requested. I wrote seven different versions for Vox, ranging from 3,700 words to 1,500 words. Happily, we settled on an in-between length. I’m quite satisfied with the final product. The pictures look great and the print layout is wonderful.

Unfortunately, I find the online version a little short of an eyesore. The whole article is presented in a long, narrow column that offers little-to-no breaks for the eye. Alas, the online version is the one I’ll be sharing with everyone who doesn’t happen to be in Columbia. So here is the link. If you have the ability to actually get your hands on the print version of Vox, I would highly recommend it.

With no further ado, I give you my most recent publication:

http://www.voxmagazine.com/stories/2009/10/01/sexual-resolution/