About hair (and then some more blithering about myself)

<girly tangent>

Lily Jo donated her hair to Locks of Love really spontaneously--from what I can tell, she woke up, looked at her hair, thought, "hm," walked to Main Street, and got it cut. She didn't have to pay anything; the nice ladies at Hair Care who want to save the world give Locks of Love donors cuts on the house. It's a great style for Lily, too, really kinda glamorous.

She beat me to it, so to speak; I've been wondering myself, in the back of my head, whether I should do that when it got longer. If the cruddy ruler in my room is correct, I do have ten inches to spare, but that may make the cut rather shorter than I'd like it. If Jeanne (one of said Hair Care ladies) becomes one of APO's advisors, as she might, I'll ask her what she thinks. 'Cause I haven't had hair this long since at least the eleventh grade, probably the fifth; I thought maybe I'd get it cut shoulder-length soon so that it'd be long again by the time summer came around, 'cause my mom kinda likes doing my hair, but now I wonder if instead I should wait until the beginning of the spring semester and then have it chopped, so I'll have all Christmas break to get sick of braids and pigtails and that stuff. The twelfth-grade cut was just plain too short, so I'm a little wary of getting anything done before I feel good and ready.

</girly tangent>
So the service program is picking up some, even though I still don't have an all-enveloping solution for two people's inability to do projects at times convenient for the other fifteen members of the organization. Like, this really is an issue, because everyone has to end up with fifteen hours' worth of stuff, or they can potentially be kicked out of the organization. So I'm working on it. I keep telling myself, and them, that it's only September.

I have successfully gone over to the dark side: I am now consistently drinking straight-up skim milk for the first time in my life. No more shots of 2% in there to make it palatable. This is not to say that I like it better than forms of milk that are not slightly blue (really, look at a glass of skim milk sometime), but I'm not grossed out by the taste anymore. 'Cause you were dying to know, I'm sure.

A girl I've gotten to know better this semester, Liz, has a radio show that just debuted today; she decided to make it a Christian-music one (which's cool, 'cause nobody know the last time the campus had one), and so far it's both fun and wonderful. She asked for music, so I sent her some last night, which was a fun way to become re-excited about all the Christian music I accumulated between eighth and twelfth grade. She played at least two of them today(!), so I got to hear two familiar tracks go across campus--and, for that matter, to Boston, since Chelsea was listening live via the website. :)

Tom's girlfriend Emily is one of the freshman journalists for our school's website, the same way I was my own first year. ...Hers appears to be better than mine already, which is really rather unnerving, considering that I'm the English major, but never mind, it's only a journal.

Okay, time to put my currently-long hair back up and go to Judaism/Islam. The class has been really interesting so far; right now we're doing Hasidic Judaism via a really fascinating and cool book called Holy Days, by Lis Harris.

The side effect of sitting through long classes: I've been going through gum this week the way some people chain-smoke cigarettes. That's kind of a weird thing with me--for a long time I'll lay off all gum, then I'll have this burst of consuming it. At least I had a sensible moment the other day and bought sugar-free stuff. Now all that remains is to stop biting the corners of my mouth by mistake.

-Laurel

About-face

Today was a very nice day. Among other things, I went to the op-shop for the first time ever (it's basically a one-day-a-week thrift store, run in the parish house of the local church) and got myself a pair of $1 jeans, Old Navy and everything. (They're really musty-smelling, though; I'll have to wash them.) Folk dancing was the joy it always is, and I even made applesauce when I got back.

Know what's amazing? The PBS Kids website, if you don't mind some childish fun. The Mr. Rogers page is pretty awesome, dudes. The Arthur and Reading Rainbow ones are cool, too, if you know where to go on them--yay for book lists! And I even swallowed my scorn and got some recipes off the Zoom one.

So it's time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow's going to be quite a bit harder, I'm pretty sure. Maybe I'll finally get myself to Poder Latino, though. We'll see.

-Laurel

-personal statement-

I am cranky. I did not do my laundry, I did not write to Chris, I did not do my homework, and I did not even get to bed. So far, everything I've tried to do in the past however-long to improve myself has failed pretty spectacularly. And I should not try to fish for solace in regards to my apparently-mediocre service program, lest I get a repeat of today, where I told somebody in particular that it sucked, and his idea of reassurance was, "Well, yeah, but it's still better than Mike's."

Here is the good news: three years of this place has finally taught me how to like both Abby and Dani. I wonder how far I would have gotten with Terra if she hadn't transferred.

-Laurel

"There's a guy who's been awake since the Second World War..."

So I'm really starting to think that I've screwed up my sleep patterns for good and all.

Anyway, tonight, in all the time I've spent not-sleeping, I actually have done my dishes (except for two cups I forgot), taken out my garbage, and brought down my recycling. I have planted the seeds for a service project in November. Less productively, I have checked the heck out of Facebook and away messages.

Okay, time to click-to-donate, brush my teeth, and go the heck to bed. There is stuff to be done tomorrow, stuff in plenty.

-Laurel

It's Dear Diary Day!

Check out this link if you don't believe me.

In fact, let's have a web-watch listing right now:

Essentialist Explanations - Sent to me by Albert, and very much linguistical fun. Don't forget to check out the quotes about Klingon, under "Other Artificial Languages, A-M."

Library Thing - As yoinked from Evelyn's LJ. Talk about your total Brain Takeover Alerts (a term in itself yoinked from Dave Barry); I have been a complete nerd about this one. I'm attempting to use it to set up a campus-wide, underground lending library. So far I have exactly one supporter, Albert, but maybe when everyone stops being so busy it'll catch on. So...over Christmas break. Ah, well; I can dream.

Passing the 4th Grade - Sent to me by Tim. I actually passed it on the first try, for which I credit a lot of Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego? and a lot of reading the accompanying Fodor's USA. But I passed it in the very last seconds allotted, so I still feel more like I got away with it than that I earned it.

Oregon Trail Online - I'm pretty sure nobody put this up on their blog already...

http://www.toothpastefordinner.com/080503/change-for-a-dollar.gif - I meant to put this up for Talk Like a Pirate Day and forgot.

Cows - I have no idea what this was all about, but I have it bookmarked, so here it is, for anything it's worth to anybody. :-P


Okay. So pretty much all of my non-academic goals for this week have gone straight to pot. They were: do my dishes, bring down my recycling, write Chris a letter, and get some sleep. To which I now add: do some laundry.

Maybe I'll do the dishes now, at least, since I have no desire to lose another bowl to icky white mold that I'm too cowardly to try to scrub off (this has only happened once, but it was about two weeks ago).

In closing, hurrah for my going to a school where I can walk alone at night without having to worry about being assaulted. Not every girl can say that. Heck, some guys can't.

-Laurel

Experiment

What I wrote last night was rather melodramatic, but reading it over, it's hard to argue with. Tonight was better, but mostly all of that's still true.

Bible study was even cooler this week than last. Juliane has joined (hurrah!), as has Emily. ...Emily has only been Christian since the 4th of this month. Faith, college, and love have hit all at once. I asked her tonight if it feels like waking up into a different world, with all of that change. She said that sometimes it does.

Anyway, that's not really what I meant to write about.

Tonight I decided to see how much of my iTunes library would remain if I removed (not delete at this point, but simply remove from the library) all songs that I knew to have been gotten illegally. I counted the following as legal: all tracks bought from iTunes via winning bottle caps; everything from legitimate, boughten (or given me for free, as the one I got from school was) CDs or cassette tapes I currently own (even though the tape thing is fuzzy); everything from legitimate CDs my family owns; everything from BemaniStyle.com (since the stepfiles themselves are legal, and by now someone should have put up a fuss if taking the included mp3s wasn't); everything from legal download sites (such as OCRemix.org).

Beginning with, I believe, 663 tracks, I ended up with 395, which is roughly 60%. I may actually have more, since I was inconsistent in the judging of my Beatles songs (some of them we have on CD and some we don't, but I don't know which, and I never did decide whether my parents' cassette tapes were also legal; mostly I think I decided that they weren't, just to even out any questionable counting elsewhere).

That's better than I expected, really. But part of the arguable one is that I removed every last folk dancing song, except "Erev Shel Shoshanim," which I managed to find a copy of (I assume legally) online. That took out like forty songs or something, heh.

I think I'll keep it like this for a few days, just for the effect.

Okay, to bed.

-Laurel

X&Y

Thoughts on today:

It was weirdly solemn. Part of that was running the pledge ritual for the APO newbs (as opposed to n00bs, heh), part of that was learning a bit ago that tonight St. Jude's dedicated their evening mass to Heather, and almost all of us in APO missed it; we didn't know. Chris and Jamie made it. That was good.

You'd think that, considering the funeral, the thing we held at the McFaddens', the ceremony we're running for school, the grievance ritual we're doing again privately sometime, and our plans to visit the gravesite, missing one "Heather thing" would be almost a relief. You'd think Tim, Evan, Allison, and Lydia would've taken their memorials for her out of their profiles. It's been over three months (only that long?).

You'd be wrong. It feels important to say as many goodbyes as we can...there are still some days when it hits me that she's actually dead. It doesn't seem real. I mean, Evan and I were joking tonight at dinner (it felt audacious) that Evan and Heather had faked her death and she was actually living in Evan's closet. (It's a long story, and not as disturbing as it sounds.)

There's an odd bit of solemnity, too, in watching Tom and Emily together. ...Yes, for the first time in all the time I've known him, my boyfriend's twin has received his heart's desire. He's got a girl. They don't do anything, not even hold hands, but Emily talks to me about it, so massively infatuated, and Tom hasn't breathed a word about it, but he's looked so softly happy, even before I knew for certain...it's so strange, because it's not at all as I expected it to be. They're pasted to each other, but they're not obvious about it, and so far I'm much more ambivalent about it than I expected; goodness knows that for Tom I can usually come up with concrete emotion. There's some solemnity there, oddly mixed with things like curiosity and wariness and awe and sadness and and and. You know what it feels a little like? Being at Tim's house for the first time, waking up there for the APO thing. It was the most striking moment, like I had and had not come home.

Things are better, but I still feel like everyone I know here is spiraling out of my understanding. And I've tried to explain that to someone, but have found myself almost totally at a loss for words because nothing I think I feel is certain enough to state. It's very inconvenient, not to mention melodramatic.

I didn't get any homework done this weekend, minus about one chapter of Moby-Dick. That was the ironic moment of the night: so careful I've been to not find out the ending of that story, since I didn't know it, and tonight it comes up in a bonus question for Quiz Bowl. I couldn't avoid it.

Here's what I really wish: that I wasn't so painfully self-conscious. That's been much more of a problem in all of college than it ever was in high school...but for some reason, since the summer and into this semester, it's been worse than ever. I'm so self-preoccupied, second-guessing and rehearsing and guilt-tripping, and I don't know where that came from.

Every night I promise myself that I'm going to get more sleep, and every night I find or choose some way to fail. Tim's like that, too, and sometimes I feel like each of us is dealing with a completely different person.

Goodness knows what I'm going to do; every day but Friday of this school week I've got an assessment of some sort, and I'm in no way prepared for most of them.

-Laurel

Just in time for tomorrow's International Talk Like a Pirate Day...

...comes this quiz. Take it yerself. Arrr.

My pirate name is:

Captain Bess Cash

Even though there's no legal rank on a pirate ship, everyone recognizes you're the one in charge. You're musical, and you've got a certain style if not flair. You'll do just fine. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Update, update! From this catchy site, rather more amusing and certainly quicker, I got "Second Mate Esmerelda the Blue Toe," which's even better.


Things are getting better some.

-Laurel

needing to sleep

I guess I miss high school. But so much is different now that there's really no going back. I mean, Matt and Kathy are here. And that's completely different than I expected, too.

Glenn doesn't appear to have changed a bit, and that makes me miss him especially. It's nice not to be so worried about him, though the real question is whether he's still anything but lonely. He says there's a common geekdom at RPI, and he feels accepted there, but he also points out that so far he's one of the only ones not drinking. I feel like I should call him, but a) that's still a little weird, and b) I don't know his number at school anyway.

It's junior year for me, and circumstances are easier than last year, and all things are such that this semester should be happy, that everyone should be. But in a way it's not, we're not. I mean, there are hours of joy, but they're not happening here in the dorm, nor in APO. Hawthorne/Melville is a class to actually look forward to, and folkdancing is the delight it was last semester, and Bible study is a literal godsend...but those're really it, and that's so different from what I'm used to. Slogged through the summer to get back to my friends, but it's not the people I came back for that're providing most of the warmth. And, perhaps predictably, love and lack thereof are complicating everything, especially in APO.

What's different now? Suddenly everyone's so tense and serious.

And the ridiculous thing is, so many of us cut back our schedules. And we don't seem to be any happier than everyone who didn't.

So I'm going to bed.

-Laurel

"Boy, what a week I've had..."

So. In the time since my last post, I...

...was unwitting witness (in the sense of hearing, not seeing; it turns out that there is no alterate word for that) to a brief scene of domestic violence. The girl next door apparently got punched by her boyfriend. The wall connecting our rooms is very thin. I was awake and heard several quick thuds against it and her crying and accusing him of punching her. I got the RA, who took care of it, I guess. Nothing else happened, in the sense that there was no more violence, and in the sense that they didn't break up (I mean, heck, I don't think he ever left the room; I could hear him coughing at intervals for the rest of the night), and in the sense that they didn't hate me for ratting them out to the RA, or at least she didn't, since I got a brief, not exactly warm (she didn't leave her name, she just signed it "neighbor" and drew an arrow), but grateful message on my whiteboard from her the next day, and he did not come and kick my sorry tattling butt.

I didn't sleep the rest of that night, 'cause I was thoroughly freaked out, and one thing I actually did was write an entry here that got saved as a draft 'cause I didn't want to worry anyone before I could post an epilogue of it all turning out okay.

Another thing was...lessee, a bunch of milkshake-making for APO on very little sleep. That was fun. Um...in fact, a fair amount of random APOness. I feel like there was more, but I can't think of it.

Saturday night I screwed up my internet connection trying to delete the Spyware of Doom. Hence my being offline until late this morning.

A girl I know left school to check into a clinic for anorexics. This is a good, if sad, thing. That happened today.

And, between enviro-sci, Big Questions with Moby-Dick, two hours of advanced Catholic theology and mysticism for my class on medieval women writers, and the night's Bible study, last night I came to the conclusion, once again, that it's a big darn world, and I don't know how I'm ever going to be a functional adult.

Tonight was a walk to the president's house for the OG picnic, and lots of talk about Judaism in Judaism/Islam, and lots and lots of running around in folkdancing.

And I'm done. There's your overview. More later.

-Laurel

Now I remember why when someone goes "en garde!", my mom goes, "Thanks for the warning."

APO managed to put on Robin Hood: Men in Tights tonight as a public showing. One of my English profs gave a lecture on it, sort of (history of the Robin Hood myth, etc., apparently 10 minutes or less--she's a medievalist, it works), and that made it educational, so we didn't have to pay royalties. Score.

I got there late, 'cause I had class, but holy cow!!! we got 30 or 40 people to come!!! we put on an event that didn't massively flop!!! we win!!!

Only now Gabe and Evan are totally going to learn nothing from the utter lack of organization in their rush plan. ::laughs:: But they earned this one. Putting on that movie was a stroke of genius. Not to mention that it attracted a mostly-male audience, which's different from many events we put on.

Totally the best moment of the night, from my standpoint: toward the end, everything's getting wrapped up, Robin and Marian are about to get married, and King Richard, played by Patrick Stewart, suddenly appears. The Merry Men go, "It's King Richard! Back from the Crusades!", there's this pause for effect--

--and Tim's Rescue Squad tones go off. He bolts from the theater. ...He hasn't come back yet; hope everything's going well. Oh well, when he gets back, I owe him some cheese for his Ritz crackers anyway, so that'll be fine.

Oh, he's back, but now he's gone again to get his backpack out of the campus center.

In other news, I spent some time tonight on the National Sleep Foundation website, and I decided to set up my pillows on the other side of my bed, such that it looks a little funny from the door, perhaps, but keeps my eyes out of the light coming through the window every morning (apparently it doesn't have to face east to be bright enough to wake me and keep me so). We'll see if this helps me sleep in, since goodness knows going to bed earlier is patchy at best.

'sall for now.

-Laurel

but...

Hawthorne/Melville. It's so nice to have a class I truly enjoy. That didn't really happen last semester. Last semester had moments of brilliance, but H/M so far is 4 hours a week of literary happiness.

I think more English classes should run in fifty-minute blocks. That makes it easier, too.

-Laurel

Utter crankiness

I am sick today. It does not appear to be the same sickness Tim had last week. So there. ...I guess this means it didn't take me long to skip out of enviro-sci, which doesn't require attendance anyway.

APO is stupid again. I guess that didn't take long, either.

-Laurel

Wiley chayote (you know this has to have been a headline in some food magazine somewhere)

When I was buying food last week, I came across this stuff called chayote in the produce section, and because I want more vegetables in my life anyway (I think that the school food has improved markedly under the new company in every area except produce, which appears to be semi-neglected in terms of presence and mediocre in terms of quality), I ended up buying two of them.

Chayote (pronounced chy-OH-tay) goes by a couple of different names, but it tastes a little like cucumber and is used a little like squash (scroll down this page a little for a basic description). Since most chayote recipes appear to be a) a little out of my league, especially in terms of what ingredients I have around my room, and b) calling for more chayotes than I had in my fridge, I decided to go more basic than the online suggestions. So, drawing on the way my mom uses squash a lot during the summer, this morning I took one of them and peeled it, sliced it, dredged it (that is, I dipped it in flour, in this case with a lot of salt and pepper mixed in, 'cause the flavor strength is about on the level of a cucumber), and fried it.

It came out well, tasted a lot like fried zucchini, but better. The stuff has a good flavor, if weak. I was a little worried that the breading would cancel it out, but I sliced it thickly enough that mostly it didn't. (The thinner slices were my favorites, but I don't remember whether they had as much chayote flavor.) I regretted when I was dredging that I didn't have any spices more interesting than salt and pepper around (I don't know, I would've liked to try garlic salt or onion salt or paprika or something), but in the end I think the simplicity was best, especially for the first try. Maybe some other time I'll add another flavor like that. I've still got one in my fridge, so I can either try it again or try to find something else to do with it.

The thing that the CDC website didn't tell me (and it's the Center for Disease Control, come on!) is that the sap under chayote skin (which gets all over while you're peeling and feels like the aloe you get straight out of an aloe plant) can irritate or numb your skin. I found this out the hard way, actually, and am still waiting for some of my thumb skin to come fully back to life from its torpid state (I only peeled them about 90 minutes ago, so don't worry). Other internet sites do warn about this and suggest either wearing something over your hands (heh, maybe I'll call Chris and borrow some of his surgical gloves, the nitrile ones) or peeling the things under running water. Live and learn, I guess.

Okay, thus endeth the culinary lesson for today. I've got to have lunch and do some APO stuff. Oh, but first I ought to do my dishes.

-Laurel

Jeesh, but it's hard to regulate the temperature in this room.

There seem to be more drunks than usual this first weekend after classes. It sounds as though they're all outside my window around midnight, but I know that's not true because we never get any Rescue Squad calls, and Chris, Allison, and Gabe (all EMTs) have been hopping since the first-years got here, and now appear to be busier than ever. Tim got his first Squad call the other night, too, though he didn't end up having to do anything, since the victim's roommate was a certified lifeguard and was already doing most of what Squad would've done. The nonresponsive kid in question was, of course, intoxicated.

...I totally have Rescue-Squad-membership-envy, but I keep telling myself that those with emetophobia (however less severe than when I was younger) and several other clubs to be in really should not indulge their superhero complexes, no matter how amazing it would feel to be a direct and important piece of help to somebody. I get little enough sleep already. Besides, my Judaism/Islam class (which's pretty interesting so far) runs into the first fifteen minutes of the Squad meeting.

Also: never walk into the local calzone place at midnight on a Friday. Tim, Gabe, Kristin, Tara, and I did that the night before last, and that was also Drunkard Central. I've never walked down the street and seen so many people before that I was certain were toasted. What is the deal?

Classes are okay. Everyone is spazzing already, though, even with lower-credit schedules, so it looks like we're going to be our moody selves a whole lot again, though we're getting better at just hanging out sometimes.

Kristin is here and things have been happy. And my parents came, bringing two things I forgot and taking one thing they needed, not to mention my extra fold-out table, which doesn't fit now that my room is Reduced Fat compared to last year's (as in, like, 1/3 less width). They also brought me vanilla chai mix, which I've never owned and which delights me with its sweetly spiced goodness. Tim had some last night and said it tasted like Christmas. I wholeheartedly concur.

Okay, I so was going to be in the shower by now.

-Laurel