December 2011
2 posts
for anyone still reading, come visit new blog...
http://oldgirlsmallcity.tumblr.com/
June 2011
3 posts
Interesting things regarding the Wicked tour
-everyone on cast is highly unionized and of the 28 ish people, they all make near six figure salaries
-there are about 70 people in the cast and crew
-the company gives each cast member a really generous ($800 a week) living stipend plus a per diem in each city. They can either opt to live in a hotel together or use the money to find housing on their own
-Mondays are blackout days for most shows,...
After accidentally going on a date with a Portuguese reality TV show star who is one hundred percent insane and frightening, I think I am going to focus on my career for a while, and bask in the work life balance imbalance.
July 2010
1 post
The Skokie Swift kind of sucks
Journey: thoroughly experience the yellow line, everything along the way, and get to Skokie.
Reflection: Very, very boring. Got off the train, walked around for less than an hour, got on the train back to Howard, took the purple line to Davis and spent the day reading at Northwestern, trying to glean a feeling of intelligence through osmosis from all the other studious college kids. For the time...
June 2010
1 post
Come visit me
http://sheecago.tumblr.com/
May 2010
1 post
April 2010
4 posts
Sheecagoh
In thirteen days, I’m moving to Chicago. I have an apartment, an invitation to be a crew member on a Sydney 41 and an unpaid internship at an organization that holds summer-long cooking classes for inner-city kids. If I had a source of income, my life’d be perfect.
Region Specific Education
One of the suggested classes for the Tulane Teacher Certification Program is PSYC 461: Black Youth.
Jumping In
I like to listen to Such Great Heights by the Postal Service when I start writing papers. There’s something outstanding about the beat and the build up and the crescendos and all that. There’s something that pushes you along in a way that almost forces artistic creativity. There’s something that induces that acute — albeit crucial — instant of academic internalization...
Thank the Lord for good medical insurance
I would have much, much more preferred an Easter Egg hunt to spending the day and night in the Emergency Room yesterday. But sometimes you don’t always get what you want. Or you don’t always get to feel how you want to feel.
The only redeeming quality of last night was when a chubby prostitute broke out of her stretcher and skipped-galloped down the hallway shouting things no one...
March 2010
8 posts
Something experiences
My new favorite activity is playing late night Apples to Apples in the park during rainstorms with homemade pralines and salad while sipping on white wine.
My new least favorite activity is Univariate Statistics.
Words
Yesterday at Holy Name, a first grader said “Throw me something, Mister” as his teacher was handing out Rice Krispie Treat snacks. And I started thinking about all of the things people say here that have no meaning everywhere else. All cities have them, of course; there are little linguistic delicacies pertaining to particular locations anywhere you go. There are sayings that outsiders...
Growing up
Today Emma was using a mechanical pencil for the first time in her life. She called it a shooter and called the lead needles. She put a ponytail on her wrist, scooted it up to her elbow; she found her biggest vein and proceeded to pretend inject herself with what she called “magic pencil potion.” And then later I noticed, as I read her a story about dancing teddy bears learning about...
Things learned after a weekend away
-we have the capacity to operate on a lot less sleep than we tend to think -however, it’s a bad academic decision to get zero hours of sleep before a morning class, having not really touched school work over the weekend -at the Iron Skillet they do, in fact, serve all food in real iron skillets -the St. Louis Arch is really majestic, even from the freeway -stereotypes and generalizations...
Orthodontia Introspection
The feeling of coming back to real life after a vacation away is redolent of the sensation of trying to click back into your retainers after having not worn them for a few days. You can feel that things have shifted uncomfortably, as reinforced by the mold of reality. But you know that after a few days back, things will get back to normal.
Rainy Day Lament
One of the worst feelings you can feel when you’re in college is total loss of control. To feel stuck; to feel static; to feel that, while in this big world of academia, things are moving around you glacially, nondescript and out of your orbit. What feels the worst when you’re trying to discover yourself is when you realize that the world doesn’t really need you.
This isn’t an alarmingly...
February 2010
14 posts
Today
I did terribly on a univariate midterm. But I also got myself an apartment and a grant in Chicago for the summer. And that’s too damn fantastic a feeling to be mitigated by any mathematical mishap.
Absorption
It’s always pleasant when we detect the circumference of our perceptions growing larger as an immediate product of recent experiences, interactions and readings. It’s exciting to catch yourself in the act of knowledge acquisition.
Sensational Things
-clean sheets -chapstick -big words and proper usages -new words -a good breakfast -stretching after exercising -waking up before the rest of the world, or just the world in your proximity -newspaper ink on your fingers -when you’re dancing on that fine line that is the precipice of tipsiness -rowing -bike pedaling backwards -waking up to text messages -caller ID when someone you want to...
Riceaamy
There’s a feeling you get sometimes that’s redolent of what the rice must feel like in a tightly-wrapped Chipotle burrito. It’s neither nesecarily a positive or negative sensation, but more a pressure of substance, of things pressing down on you, making you flat, confining you under their weight.
Think of how the rice must feel all squished in the tortilla wrapping of a burrito:...
Valentines Day...
qts:
Is currently overshadowed by Mardi Gras. I don’t mind.
I don’t mind, either. Because part of Mardi Gras is finding yourself with strangers, unlikely friends, and realizing just how much you can like people who are very much unlike you.
Superbadcuts
I do some girly things like get pedicures and get my eyebrows waxed and my bike is a women’s bike which means, only, that its skeleton of metal is such that it allows girls with skirts to ride without opening their legs too far. My handwriting is kind of lavish, my comforter has flowers on it, I’ve read all of Jodi Picoult’s novels. These things make me a girl, and I state them...
Here we go
The next week is going to be tremendously fun. I cannot even imagine it, really.
The whole Saints thing alone is outrageous. Yesterday morning, I went on a 52 mile bike ride (up the river to towns so nondescript and boring that they didn’t even have names), and on the way back, a half-naked man who I saw peeing along the levee started chasing after me yelling WHO DAT. And it wasn’t...
BAM
My inexplicable fascination with the resources Tulane has for victims of rape and sexual assault FINALLY came in handy. During one part of the RA group interview, we had to act out a scene in which a victim came to her RA needing help and guidance after being sexually abused. The interviewer said I was like a walking brochure of Tulane rape services.
Although we can’t always pick and choose...
Chalk talk
There’s something really empowering about writing on a chalkboard. Something about seeing your letters in front of you at eye level instead of in a binder is exciting. You get a similar feeling on whiteboards, but with chalkboards, it’s even more special. It’s because with chalk, what you write on the board doesn’t belong to you. The awkwardness of chalk sticks distorts...
Paradin' Puppies
This might just be even more fun than the Superbowl.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krewe_of_Barkus
An audience of one
In my fridge right now there is a Nalgene full of vodka, next to the apples and Odwalla. In my purse a bag of cigars. On my desk an empty bottle of champagne that I finished off once.
These are things I would not have possessed last year. Wouldn’t have because I didn’t have any interest in, had some strange moral opposition towards, had an irrational fear of, didn’t understand,...
January 2010
14 posts
Maternal instinct plus nothing to do
Adele and Emma just received their report cards; each girl earned no less than 96% in every single category. This is tremendously exciting and merits, due mostly to a gorgeously sunny day and my classes being canceled today, a bike ride around the city so I can go procure some kind of treat for them. Today, instead of carrying out the lesson we were going to, Emma and I will go sit outside and...
Maybe it's cliched to do this since the Saints...
and we’re supposed to be happy right now.
But today could not have played out anymore wonderfully. In my Early Childhood Education and Development Psych class, which is an eight person seminar at 8 in the mornings on Mondays, I realized how it’s exactly what I’m interested in. The psychology of education. What a beautiful thing. The acquisition of skills, consolidation of...
Who Ya Gonna Call
The National Alliance on Mental Health has a squad of people who serve as Stigma Busters and report instances of hurtful and unfair representations of mental illness. So when McDonalds created an ad that featured someone who said he heard voices in his head telling him to go eat burgers, this bustin’ brigade began a letter writing campaign to the company headquarters*. The goals of the...
Mad that I'm narcissistic enough to write a mad...
I’m mad at my school advisors for giving me false hope about graduating early, about giving me this proposition to internalize and accept and then taking it away because they’re disorganized. I’m mad that they don’t even pretend to support the notion of graduating early. Mad that I’ve been listening to Fuck You by Lilly Allen for the past three days and cannot walk...
You are not my typewriter
Last night, we went to go hear a friend read his poetry at the 1718 Club at the Columns Hotel. And it was everything that a reading inside the parlor in a mansion on St. Charles should be.
We were enclosed in a small room that was long and narrow, framed by perfectly square windows that were hugged loosely by thick, velvet curtains that were stained with antiquity and probably, if you would have...
Grant me the serenity
There are a lot of really satisfying feelings in the world (like New Orleans rain, down comforters and socks on hardwood), but one particularly great one, I’ve discovered this morning, is compiling this glossary of grants for Summer Advantage (http://www.summeradvantage.org), and watching the document turn from a sloppy mosaic of RFPs and numbers and mission statements into a purposeful...
"First" things of second semester
-beer bong (?!) -not minding the taste of beer -learning how to brush teeth while in a lull during a conference call -sending text messages at night that I did not remember sending in the morning -being truly satisfied socially for one of the first times this semester -being on the phone for three hours -writing script for the New Day video -learning education grant-related things like RFP and...
Hanging Over
I think hangovers are the shin splits of drinking. No one can ever diagnose you having one. But good drinkers, real drinkers, just like real, good runners, always bemoan them. You’re supposed to feel it.
What are they really, though? Is it a drinking badge of honor, just like blood-stained socks and chaffing and blisters are for runners? And who’s to say that the dull and bland...
Homeward bound? Homeward found?
Today right now marks the fifteenth time I’ve been to an airport in the last month. That’s a lot. With all the layovers and friend-pick-ups, friend drop-offs and traveling across the world business, it breaks down to an airport visit every other day in the 30 days I’ve been home for break. George Clooney’s infatuation in Up in the Air with the choreography of traveling took on a whole new meaning...
I feel like going home, but at the same time, I...
Having a month away from college presents a weird hiccup in the fluidity of your life. You take finals, say goodbye and then leave. For a month. With no responsibilities or exams, life is put on permanent pause. And you’re kind of stuck in this weird limbo in which you must revive home life and proceed totally independently of the existence you’ve worked to create at school. If you cling on too...
I feel goofy stating a learned lesson after...
Ix-nay on the writing-a-short-story-everyday-for-365-days venture. I got a week behind (due to a week so full and satisfying that it surely could have provided enough fodder to get through to, oh, at least October) and the idea of playing catch up kind of ruins the fun. While it’s absolutely less romantic now that the deadline/daily quota thing is screwed up, it was also probably not...
December 2009
10 posts
Up in the air and across the pond
Traveling is a very curious thing. It’s all pleasantly paradoxical when you think of it terms of your individuality. You travel why? You travel to have new experiences, escape a present situation and live uninhibited by the restraints of home and create a new world in your span of vacation; you travel to diversify your world and your memories, so they are not all localized and small; you travel to...
There are too many puns to include in this title.
The one holiday tradition of the Holiday family (besides going to see the the tacky rendition of our friend’s in the live nativity at their church) is getting “Happy Holidays” themed Christmas presents and pretending that we’re surprised at the ingenuity of the gift giver to recognize that our last name is synonymous with the season.
Looking around the house, from this...