The Random Sanctuary

the crazy week

2012-02-11T00:43:00.004-06:00

screaming: White Dress - Parachute

Remember how a few weeks ago, back during winter break, I was all, "I can't wait to go back to school; it'll be nice to be busy again!"

Ha.

This week was definitely one of the craziest I've ever had, but the good news (and spoiler alert, I'm afraid): I survived! And now I feel pretty beast having conquered such a chaotic sevenish days. The trick to staying sane (for the most part) through it all was having some solid zumba sessions, Gumby's pizza eating and naps squeezed in between everything to keep refreshed and motivated.

The major reason for the craziness was this great idea I had to attend two concerts within two days of each other. The first, on Tuesday night, was to see The All-American Rejects in Columbia. So fun! I dragged my roommate along with me, and though it was quite miserable walking through the snow-sleet to get downtown that night, the Rejects played a fantastic set, bringing out old hits like "Dirty Little Secret" and "Swing, Swing" alongside their newest (and really rockin') single "Beekeeper's Daughter." The little preteen girl inside of me still swooned when Tyson Ritter took the stage. Here are a few photos I snapped of the evening:

tyson, i still freaking love you.

my interviewee buddy, Mike!

It would have been cool to stay afterwards and get stuff signed by Tyson and Nick, but my roommate wasn't feeling very well, so we trudged home and tried to think healthy thoughts, because Thursday, we road-tripped with one of her friends from home to St. Louis to see Parachute at this nifty little venue called the Firebird. It was such a small, cozy venue that it reminded me of the little grungy ones I used to go to all the time in high school, and definitely brought back some memories. The opening bands for Parachute were pretty typical of a small venue, but it was so cool to see Parachute live. Will, the lead singer, was so charismatic and yet clean-cut, and we ended up meeting him and taking photos with him afterwards. Sure, it sucked to have to drive two hours back home...but it was definitely worth it. Here is a rather sketchy picture I took of Will--pardon the lighting.

Classes, of course, in honor of what my roommate is calling Concertfest 2012 on our part, did not just magically understand. Econ has still been frustrating, but a little less so because I finally sucked up my pride and went in to office hours with the professor, and political science's first exam was rather blown off in the studying department...but I just took the exam yesterday, and I think I did all right on it. I mean, you get the gist that democracy is a good thing after a few weeks in class alone.

In my cross-cultural journalism class, we are starting on these enormous group projects, where we have to work with seven other kids randomly assigned with us on an important issue and do boatloads of research, and I wound up being group leader. Part of me was like, girl are you crazy? You do NOT need more on your plate, but part of me kind of missed stretching the ol' student council muscles, and it was kind of nice to take the reins on something again. I'm excited about my group--they all seem like really cool people, and the topic we're covering the whole Southwest Airlines vs. Leisha Hailey controversy, which is a pretty awesome subject, considering some groups got to plan political campaigns.

Freaking newswriting has been dictating the rest of my life, though. We had to go to a city council meeting on Monday night, and it lasted over three hours. I pretty much rotted in my chair, although in hindsight, I ended up bonding really well with two other kids from my class. We then had to pick some issues from the meeting to write a report on, and so when I wasn't rifling through the AP stylebook trying to figure out if "City Council"should be capitalized on second reference or not, I was calling up city councilmen and other community leaders to get quotes for my article. Talk about stressful. It was a bit discouraging to get my draft back today and see an 86% on it, but hey, it's whatever. I'll work on it.

Somehow over the week, I had time to recover (and rehash) from my first frat party over the weekend, watch a bit of the Superbowl (so, Madonna disappears, and then we world peace? okay...), get a taco stolen from me at Chipotle (Having just come from work where I did hours and hours of research on death row prisoners who killed because they didn't want to be discovered robbing, I was too terrified to say anything to the guy who swiped my taco. The manager gave me a new, free one. Probably because it looked like I was going to cry otherwise), bond with a sophomore reporter about bands and recover from those two concerts. Oh, and I got to enjoy my new Nike kicks for a little bit--aren't they super hip?

You'd think that with that kind of schedule going on during the week, I'd have a level head on and focus on the important things, i.e., surviving. But during a lot of moments like the longest city council meeting known to man and the car rides to St. Louis, I talked a lot more to Roger, reasoning that hey, we've been essentially using each other for conversation whenever we're bored, and it was fine. He's been chatting me up every chance we're both on Facebook together, so it's almost to that point where we've been talking as much as we used to. And it's kind of like the good ol' days, in a way, because I get to be witty (well, I get to try to be witty) and get entertained and feel cool, of course, that I'm talking to him. But we all know I can never keep a level head around attractive boys for very long. It's just a bit frustrating that we've been talking so much, and we haven't actually seen each other since before Thanksgiving.

I'm not really looking for a relationship or anything serious, but it feels like if we spend so much time just talking online or via text, it would only be natural to hang out a bit. I've brought it up a few times and he just kind of doesn't get it, or he pretends to be funny and snarky. And I just want to reach through the depths of Facebook chat, grab him by his shoulders, and shake him down. Come on, bro. Are you just messing with me because you can, or are you really that self-conscious?

Whatever. My friends think I should just ignore him--I've got pa-lenty of things on my plate to keep my busy, but it's kind of sad I just can't shake this kid as easily as I should.

Theme of my life, let's be real. Clay's birthday is today--I think I'll call him and see how he's doing. And maybe that'll remind me to shape up and get real.

weirdest saturday ever

2012-02-05T12:56:00.001-06:00

screaming: All The Pretty Girls - Fun.

Weirdest. Saturday. Ever.

Scratch that. It just might make the list for weirdest day ever.

Originally, the plan for this weekend was to buckle down and get as much homework and studying done as possible, because this coming week, I'm going to see The All-American Rejects on Tuesday night, and then I'm going with Lana and another girl to St. Louis to see Parachute on Thursday. Totally spur of the moment, and totally college-esque of me, no?

Friday night, I was so overwhelmed by all the homework and just plain tired from my ASB trip's failed attempt at canning downtown (where we begged drunk people for money for our trip), and so I just ended up watching Moulin Rouge with some girls and ordered HotBox cookies and chilled. The next morning, on Saturday, Lana left to go see her boyfriend and her high school's show choir who were performing in the next town over in Missouri, so I was left to my own devices and a huge mound of homework.

First, though, I had to ship out the care package that I put together with the help of some people on my floor to my soldier pen-pal from Adopt A U.S. Soldier, except being a total journalistic genius, I never thought about the logistics of heaving a 20-lb box two miles downtown. I ended up borrowing a moving dolly from the front desk of the residence hall and pushed it through the rainy morning all the way to the post office, and it wasn't until I breathlessly (still sore from ballet fit on Thursday) got there when I realized I'd been pushing the dolly in the most incorrect, ineffective way possible. This is why I'm not an engineering major. I had been scared to ship it out because I'd tried the price-estimator on the post office's website and UPS's website, and they had given me a cost range from $100-$300, which kiiinda freaked me out, because there wasn't anything all that valuable in the box besides peanut butter. Luckily, sending the whole box to Afghanistan only ended up costing me $40 (USPS.com, you liar you), and then I just dragged the moving dolly back home (more efficiently this time).

The whole campus was really quiet because we were having the biggest home basketball game ever, and ESPN was even here to cover it, so everyone and their mother was at the basketball arena. This provided the perfect, quiet afternoon to do homework, but once dinnertime hit/I realized just how much I had to do still, I started freaking out a lot and having one of those life evaluations where I was considering burning my econ textbook and just joining the Peace Corps. I ended up calling my mom, bawling my head off about stress and feeling lonely and missing home, and we talked for a couple of hours just about everything, and it definitely made me feel so much better. Man. Those emotional breakdowns are just so fun.

After getting off the phone with my mom, I was decidedly calmer. I've always been so used to being completely on top of school and stuff like that, and now that I'm doing these two jobs and being involved in so much this semester, the feeling of not being totally in control has driven me crazy. But I just need to keep practicing being chill. And going to the gym for kickboxing class, because that helps the whole stress factor like none other.

I did some more homework and was just trying to decide if I should call it a night and Netflix some heartwarming movie when my friend Stella knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to go out with her and some other girls on our floor that night. Stella is one of my closest friends here--she has a heart of gold, and she's just the biggest goofball ever. She likes going to the frat parties because she can dance--and man, is she good at that--but she's so playful and chill about everything, and so she has tried to get me to go out with them a couple of times before. I opened my mouth to say my usual automatic no thanks, but then maybe all the bawling on the phone short-circuited something in my brain, because I ended up deciding completely on whim, well, why not?

Even though everyone out that night was going to still be in their Mizzou garb from the basketball game, I figured that since this was my first frat party, I might as well go big or go home. So out came the black stilettos, black skinny jeans, and filmy blue blouse. Out came the mascara, lipstick, and hairspray. Half of me was nervous and freaking out, screaming at the other half of myself what the hell do you think you're doing, and the other half somehow just didn't seem to care. Life is short. Why not?

At about 11:30, five of us girls began the trek through the misty rain to Greektown, and I started to get really giddy/anxious, but Stella just walked with me and chattered away, making me feel better. The first frat house we stopped at, we knew a guy from our floor who was in it. But it was all just a bunch of guys playing beer pong, so we left after just standing awkwardly around and ventured into a few more houses before finally staying at one called Farm House. The basement we ended up in was dark, loud, and filled with the smell of beer and sweaty people playing beer pong, dancing, and drinking.

I pretty much just stood there thinking, oh my God. What have I gotten myself into.

Some of the girls made a beeline for the drinks, so I stayed with Stella and a few others to dance and talk, but it was so awkward because we didn't know anyone else. Most of the floor was packed with other girls, with the occasional frat guy weaving in and out to grind up against some ladies and spill beer everywhere. The music was awful--not even Top 40. I just kept looking around, thinking, so...this is it? This is what the majority of the Mizzou population lives for?

I guess I'm a little biased. Maybe these things seem a lot more fun when you're intoxicated.

But somehow, as the night wore on, people loosened up and the music got a liiiittle better, and I just threw my jacket down and danced. I figured I had nothing to lose--after that emotional breakdown, I was in this whole free-to-be-me mindset, and besides, in that dark basement, no one would ever see if I looked like I fool dancing, and come tomorrow morning, no one would even remember, anyways. Some frat guys came up to my friends and I and danced around us a bit, and then they would pick one girl to pair up with. I have to admit, some of them were pretty cute, but having seen my fair share of Sydney White and House Bunny, I was too scared to make any moves.

At some point, though, a tall blond guy, beer in hand, came up to me and asked if I wanted to dance, and still in that screw-it-why-not phase, I agreed. It was awkward and clumsy and weird, but in the dark of the basement and the din of the music, no one cared. It was so surreal--I could only imagine what my friends back home would think if they could see me with a frat boy's arm around my waist!

After a few songs, I waited for him to just kind of leave and find another girl to grind up on because that seemed to be the custom, but instead, he hung around and started asking me where I was from, what I was studying, and what kind of music I liked. I found out that he was a freshman, too, and he was a pledge from Farm House (meaning that he was not officially a member, but he was going to be after initiation), and that made me feel better. If he'd been some senior frat star, I would have been pretty sketched out.

Happy just to be talking to someone (read: some boy) new for the first time in a while, we yelled our conversation over the music into each other's ear. He was so freaking tall--even in my four-inch heels, he towered over me. A few times, he had to go get his senior frat members some drinks, but he would always tell me to wait for him on the floor, which provided ample time for me and my friends to gather around and squeal. But it was okay because through Chris Brown's singing that blasted through the house, no one heard us.

When he came back, I introduced him to my friends and we danced a little more, but then he asked if I wanted to go sit on the couches by the stairs. Even though there was a voice in the back of my head that was like omg what if 'sit on the couches' means rape omg omg omg frat danger! my feet were screaming/slightly numb from my heels, so I took him up on the offer, since the couches area was better lit and my sketch radar wasn't going completely berserk.

So we just sat at the side of the room, talking and laughing, for at least an hour. Pledge Boy was also a journalism student, so we had quite a bit to discuss there. He was definitely quite buzzed, but he was able to keep up a coherent conversation, very sweetly asking me about my siblings and what I wanted to be when I grew up, and in turn, telling me about the pledge process and how the frat had made all the pledges run 3 miles naked once. In general, he was just very nice--a little awkward and very freshmanly, but given the events of the day and the fact that he could just as easily be a total creep, I just liked having someone to talk to.

At one point in the conversation, he had this goofy smile one and was like, "Can I kiss you?" And then I was just like......................no. "Not tonight," I managed to say, half-flattered, half-weirded out. Which seemed to be the general theme of the evening.

He ended up giving me his number, since his phone was dead, and made me pinky promise that I'd text him ("I've been waiting to meet a girl like you for a long time."..... "You're so drunk."......."Nuh uhhh....." ..... "yeah...."), and then I was so exhausted that I signalled to my girl friends that I wanted to leave, and we made our way home through the rain again, amped up on the whole evening's events and nearly crying in pain from our high heels.

I got home at 3 a.m.

So, in summary, I trudged through the rain with a giant 20-lb box, had an emotional breakdown, and then went to my first frat party and got hit on by a pledge.

Yeah. Definitely the weirdest Saturday ever.

The All-American Rejects concert preview

2012-02-03T18:11:00.002-06:00

Nine clips in about six months?

Not too bad, journo noob. Not too bad.

http://deliaesthetic.blogspot.com/2012/02/all-american-rejects-concert-preview.html

so help me beyonce

2012-02-02T20:28:00.001-06:00

screaming: Tonight, Tonight - Hot Chelle Rae

Boys. They mess up everything. Or at least, I seem to always want to let them do so, and it's shameless. Some days I'm all yeah! I'm soooo independent and awesome and beautiful and muscular (well, thanks to ballet fit) and intelligent, and I sure as heck do not need a man to remind myself of that! Not when I'm changing the world and stuff! And then some days, I'm just like, screw world peace and social justice, I wannnnnnttttt a boyyyyyyyyfriiiieeennnndddddddddddd.

Like there is this blond Heath Ledger-look-alike that is also going on an Alternative Spring Break trip, but it's not the same as mine. I saw him when we were all at our general ASB retreat, and he was in one of the skits that won the prize. Somehow, being at college has given me a sort of thing for guys with kind of long hair--not the obnoxiously long kind, but the kind that Heath has in 10 Things I Hate About You, as pictured below. Now imagine the blond version of that. Yeah.

Mmmmm.

Anyways, so I basically stared googly-eyed at this guy during the whole skit (kind of accidentally but not really noting his name tag), and then today when I was at ballet fit at the rec center, he walked in and started stretching because he was the teacher for the cardio class that was going to be in the room next. I was like homggggggg except a combination of being sweaty and exhausted and caught off guard caused my brain to short circuit, so after I was done with the 90283753 push ups we were assigned, I just grabbed my stuff and kind of dodged him. Of course, I couldn't be a normal, semi-outgoing person and just walk up to him and be like, hey! Aren't you in ASB? You had such a fun skit. Etc.

No, instead I went home and gave a sob story to Lana about what happened and how we should definitely sign up for his class next week because I probably just lost the chance of a lifetime, but then one of our other friends, who is a sophomore, came in and overheard the conversation, and it turns out that she actually is friends with Heath, and that she would try to put in a word (as uncreepily as possible) for me.

And then there is the whole Roger thing, of whom I thought I was over with at last, but then as I was sitting bored out of my mind during a grammar review tonight, beating myself for wasting time to come to this optional lecture about compound sentences, who else would start chatting me online than ol' Roger, who I haven't heard from in quite a while?

Plus, our dorm residence, in combination with a few other residence halls, is throwing a big formal dance (aka, the date kind of dance), and girls are already stressin' about dates.

Just as I was starting to spiral into that old familiar path of obsession and boy-chasing, though, I sat down and just kind of calmed myself down with some good old Bible reading and thinking. I don't need to be worrying about boys or boy type things. There will always be beautiful boys in the world everywhere I go, and if I center my world around them, I'll only be let down every single time. If there is meant to be a guy in my life any time soon, it'll happen pretty darn obviously, and I won't have to waste time sprinting after someone who isn't even worth it. Until then, I can have all this deliciously independent time to do the things I want to do. Like change the world ;)

Hit it, B:

busy bee

2012-02-01T21:43:00.001-06:00

screaming: Beekeeper's Daughter - The All-American Rejects

It's only Wednesday, and I can't decide if that is something to celebrate (thank God hump day is nearly over!) or to mourn (oh crap. Hump day is nearly over. That means I probably should have accomplished a whole lot more than I have...). But I would feel bad complaining too much about anything with this crazy sixty degree weather going on in January (well, February too, I guess now) in the Midwest. Sure, this probably means it will blizzard in July, but I am determined to savor it as much as I can with cotton sundresses and the busting out of the longboard again (oh how long it's been. It's safe to say I've even missed grimacing awkwardly when guys see me on it and whistle/stare/laugh).

Good thing about this warmness, too, because otherwise, going canning for my Alternative Spring Break trip tomorrow night would be quite hellish. Canning is when basically we go downtown around all the bars and beg drunk people for money to fund our trip, more or less, and my group wants to go from about 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. It's a good thing I am freaking loving my group for ASB--they're some of the most colorful and funniest kids ever. Our group leaders are comprised of an older advertising major girl who makes the best witticisms and is so goofy, and the other is this shy boy-next-door who is so kind. There's a rather flamboyant male dancer in the group, along with two fine examples of upperclassmen eye candy, a British exchange girl, and some other nice people. Yes, thank goodness for them, because let me tell you, after begging drunks for change all night, 9 a.m. economics is going to so fun come Friday morning.

This week, I just started getting involved with Adopt A U.S. Soldier (adoptaussoldier.org), so I've been emailing my assigned soldier who is in Afghanistan, and I'm also secretly putting together a care package for her and her unit for Valentine's Day. Some people on my floor and from Mizzou have responded to my Facebook pleas for help (aka, I realized shipping a giant box of chips and peanut butter across the world is probably not something easily paid for in stamps), and so I'm really excited about that.

Also, there was this girl from my freshman interest group last semester who I was really intimidated by in class because she just knew so freaking much about journalism and everything, and she wasn't afraid to let you know all about it. So I kind of wrote her off as a big know-it-all out of jealousy, primarily, but we have political science together, and we've been talking a lot. It turns out, she's every bit as ambitious and driven as I like to think I am, and so once I kind of got over myself, I realized that we make pretty good friends. She's super involved in the new chapter of Amnesty International (http://www.amnestyusa.org/) at Mizzou, which is the world's oldest human rights advocacy organization.

Which, given light of recent personal revelations, is unbelievably perfect. So this girl, Annie, told me all about how it's such a small group on campus still, so she invited me to their new semester's meeting, and I'm totally in love with it. We get to do all these campaigns and vigils and write-a-thons for a number of causes, like pro-LGBTQ rights, anti-death row, and free speech. In terms of death row, since I'm working on a project on that at work as a research assistant (although this whole week, I've gotten an easy workload and just basically sat around listening to the professor talk to other students as I munch on apples and work on my blog), I kindasorta flaunted a bit of my knowledge at the meeting. I really really think I'd love to be super involved with this group, but I am kind of afraid I won't have the time, what with my two jobs and ASB already. Not to mention I kind of want to join kayaking club because my friend told me there were hot hipster guys in it.

No judging.

And then there's also newswriting class, which is just killer in its workload but I love it. This is the class that I want to give all I've got because the professor is so experienced and cool, and I really want to learn the craft of newswriting. But it's freaking hard, man. We were assigned to write two leads one night for homework, and it literally took me an hour to write just one. And then today, he gave us a sheet of paper with all this information on it and told us to write an article on it in less than an hour--and halfway through, he simulated a "breaking news" event and handed us a new sheet with pretty much a new story.

I was not amused.

The combination of all this stuff kind of made me go a bit cray-cray yesterday, especially when I had some frustration with econ, so I called my mom and basically whined for a good hour, realized that I do not have to absolutely get A's in class to survive, and then I took a nap, went to zumba class, and felt way, way better.

Yes, I definitely could complain a lot more, but I'll try not to. So what if tonight I'm looking at another solid two hours of homework (after just finishing two hours) in the face? It's beautiful out. I just ate a waffle with Nutella on it. I can feel the effects of ballet fit and zumba all over my arms--I flex a lot in the mirror now. Don't judge. I got to go into editing at the student magazine for my article on The All-American Rejects, and the editor said it was good. After newswriting class, Sam waited for me and we walked back from J2100 together.

It's the little things that count.

Dead Man Walking

2012-01-30T14:18:00.005-06:00

Since our boss/professor didn't come into work today, the grad student and I decided, heck, why not rent Dead Man Walking from the downtown video store and watch it all afternoon? I suppose, officially, we're doing research.

This is the trailer for it. All the background information you really need is the fact that it's based on a true story--and having skimmed through the actual book that the nun Sister Prejean wrote, I'd say it's fairly accurate. Go watch it.

Also: I like to think being able to watch this today was a sort of little cosmic thumbs up with the whole decision thing last weekend.

real life, real thoughts

2012-01-29T23:33:00.004-06:00

screaming: You and Me - Parachute

So you may or may not have read that sort of weird revelation/freak out that I pounded out yesterday...I'm not sure if I'm embarrassed about kind of sorting it all out online for everyone to see, or if I'm really glad about it (thanks for the support, Kelly! Kind people like you are why it's worth it). Sometimes, I do wonder if I ever cross that whole TMI line with this blog. So please, when I start describing with innate detail my granola bar that I had for breakfast, feel free to snooze away.

I try to bring to this blog the authentic voice of an eighteen-year-old who is trying to figure out life and who encounters a lot of weirdness, awkward moments, and some truly spectacular insights along the way. All with a healthy dose of teenage self consciousness, so that we--myself included--are all a little assured that hey, growing up isn't easy for anyone. That things like being obsessed with Nutella and Pinterest and boys is normal, and that we all go through the weirdest phases. You know?

Anyways. So after I thought all those deep thoughts yesterday about trying to link journalism with humanitarianism with my life, I had this delusion that my life, from that moment on, was going to be like, life 2.0. Everything was going to be immensely rose-colored, and the world was going to start changing the minute I stepped out the dorm door. Homeless people would be just conveniently around the corner to save, lives were just waiting down the hall to be changed. I was going to turn society upside down on a Saturday afternoon. Everything would smell like Febreeze, be curiously sunny, and be like a permanent fairy tale.

Obviously, that's not exactly what happened.

This whole weekend has been rather ordinary, actually. I did stupid things like accidentally stalking my newswriting professor on his smoke break (...okay, for the record, I was walking behind him and trying to catch up to him to talk, so I didn't notice we were both just walking towards an empty parking lot as he pulled out a pack of cigs. Suffice it to say I veered away quite sharply so he wouldn't see me. Except I think he did...but it is still worth mentioning that I got an A on my first assignment--the drag show essay--which you can read here at my online portfolio).

Also, The All-American Rejects are coming to Columbia next Tuesday. I got lucky over winter break and found out about this almost like, the very minute that The Blue Note booked them, so I rapid-fire emailed the student magazine editor and scored the chance to run a concert preview on them, so Friday afternoon, I interviewed Mike Kennerty, the guitarist for AAR. I'd say it was my best interview yet, mostly because I wasn't so star-struck that I could barely speak. Also, not going to lie, I did some beast researching about their new album. The interview itself was a bit awkward (I have a feeling they're going to all be awkward for a while. Until I reach Dr. Phil's level of experience) especially since we had a spotty phone connection, but he was courteous and funny and even had to explain a dirty joke to me when I didn't get it.

So that was kind of cool. Not very earth-shattering in terms of human rights, but fun, and I got more experience working with the music industry during the whole process. I spent a good part of the rest of the weekend transcribing and writing the article (which I'll let you guys know about when it goes live!) in between watching Friends With Benefits and The Hurt Locker with my floormates. What excites me a lot about this new semester so far is how much time I've finally gotten to spend with them...last fall, I was so concerned about grades that I never took the time to get to know them and hang out with them, and so I always felt kind of distant from them. But I've been hanging out with them so much, and it feels like a second family. Some of the kids are just so fascinating--like this one guy, Kyle, who has the most intelligent, articulate, mesmerizing personality. We like to talk about writing a lot, and it makes me feel extremely smart. Until he talks about Hemingway and such, and I just think about chick lit novels that I want to read...

There's been the obligatory homework (I feel like such a slack for complaining about it when I'm only doing the minimum courseload), but then today, I went to my Alternative Spring Break retreat, where all the Mizzou college kids who are going on trips to volunteer this spring break met in a huge auditorium, where we did skits and filled out paperwork all afternoon. The more I think about it, the more I'm excited for this trip--not just because going to Alabama to fix up houses means that I won't be stuck in Midwestern snow come March, but also because I don't really know the people I'm going with, and so it'll be such an adventure.

Busy busy busy is the theme of the week...and month...and semester, I imagine. I'm going to my first meeting of Amnesty International on Tuesday, which is this human rights activist organization. Wish me luck at that. And then I'm so excited to get my mail soon forwarded from my mom, because my sponsored child from Uganda, the girl who is seven years old, apparently finally wrote me a letter back, and I can't wait to read it. She can only write a few times a year, and so this is her first time, and after writing her letters every few weeks and sort of feeling silly about it because I have no idea what she's doing, I am so so so so thrilled to finally get some real contact back from her.

Yep. But don't worry, I'm not turning into some crazy bleeding heart holier-than-thou humanitarian just because of that. I mean, I'm still a normal teenager. I still scream at the top of my lungs when my roommate agrees to go see Parachute in concert next week with me.

january 28

2012-01-28T17:15:00.002-06:00

I have a sneaking suspicion that this sort of revelation might not just be the result of watching The Hurt Locker at 2 a.m. last night or rereading The Irresistible Revolution by the activist Shane Claiborne. I mean, on one hand, it very well could be. And there's not that much shame in that, because The Hurt Locker was one fine movie. I'm definitely not saying that it played zero role in my coming to realize these things, because I know it did. I'm just sort of still dizzy from the effects it's had in shaking up some old thoughts.

What I've realized is this: I came to school this past fall picturing myself pretty confidently as the next Anna Wintour. I wanted to be the editor-in-chief of a fashion magazine. And don't get me wrong--I freaking love shopping and fashion still, but I've come to realize that I really don't know all that much about it (skimming Harper's Bazaar doesn't count), and I don't have the interest to do much about that. I mean, I still think I'd like to take a few classes in textiles and apparel management, but still. As the semester wore on, I just couldn't picture myself going to work every single day to talk about clothes and trends and headbands, you know?

So then I started thinking (especially as I began work for MOVE magazine doing those interviews with the bands) maybe I'd just try to get involved in public relation or something in the music industry, because then I could just listen to music all day and get to know some really cool people. But then I sort of realized that half the glamour of the music industry that draws me in is all the gorgeous musicians...and I also had to remember that I'm tone deaf, and that my idea of "quality" music is All Time Low. I love those boys to death, but let's be real...they're not exactly The Beatles, if you know what I mean.

As I began work with Design Bureau, I started thinking well, maybe I'll just do arts and culture magazines. I could see myself as editor of Rolling Stone or SPIN, and I was pretty excited about that, because then I'd get to see sort of all sides of society and make it pretty for a magazine. That was the latest development.

But I think all this time, there has been a creeping truth that I've been trying to ignore, because it's decently easy enough to say that I want to work for an arts magazine and actually do it without any bumps or bruises along the way. But then I picture myself living a life where all I eat, breathe, and sleep is just entertainment and the trifles of society--I love music, fashion, art, and all that stuff so much, but I just don't see it as something that can make a mark in history.

This post is probably only going to get more rambly and philosophical from here, so if you think you're in too deep, feel free to pull out. I'm just getting my thoughts out as I'm contemplating all of this...

So then I did some thinking about what I wanted to be remembered for. I thought about all the tributes and obituaries I've read in magazines and at work, and I thought about all the ways that Mizzou alumni still manage to leave their mark through donations and such on campus. What did I want to be remembered for? When people in one hundred years Google me, will my name even come up?

And so I realized a few things. I don't want to be remembered for wearing pretty clothes. I don't want to be remembered for getting really good grades. I don't want to be remembered for marrying a hot musician, or a hot athlete, or really, getting married at all. I don't want to be remembered as just another magazine editor who might be revered in the journalism field, but is nameless anywhere else. I wanted to be remembered for changing things--for making a mark on society, but not through cool magazine spreads or style. I want to be remembered for making a difference--as in, that whole hippie liberal Mother Teresa kind of difference.

My faith definitely plays a huge part in this. I've never thought much about how different my faith journey is from the friends that I know--I literally felt called into the church when I was in grade school, despite having atheist parents. I felt compelled to go to service and youth group when really, it was a hassle for my parents to drive me and to get up in the morning. I didn't think I was holier than anyone. God, no. But I definitely took my faith extremely seriously, even as a kid, and it's always been a really big part of my life. When I get to sit down for a few minutes each day with the Bible or my prayer journal, I feel at peace.

When I would read the parts in the Bible about going out and serving the poor, loving people, and changing the world, I've always been so scared of those passages, because I just couldn't dismiss them as easily as other people I knew could. I would feel so awful as I tried to rationalize to myself that Jesus doesn't really mean that I should do things like that. Jesus would be happy if I were just an average journalist, right?

I wanted so much to be like Shane Claiborne or Bart Campolo or Mother Teresa and do all these crazy acts of love all the time. I tried to do little things--in high school, I'd ask someone sitting alone to sit at my lunch table. I'd watch over some struggling underclassmen. I'd write a card to the girl who had cancer in the hospital. I sponsored a little girl named Annet who lives in Uganda, sending money to Compassion International for her every month. I thought these were little ways of satisfying that weird urge to connect with the world, and if I just did things like that, I could still leave a normal life and be happy, get married, live in the suburbs, and have 2.5 children.

Except, I just don't think it's enough. Because I keep getting this sneaking suspicion...and I pray to God I don't sound pompous here, but I think I'm supposed to do something more. With my life.

I just think there's got to be a reason why movies like The Hurt Locker and Blood Diamond and stories about people like Mother Teresa and St. Francis of Assisi stick in me so sharply, and I can't forget about them as easily as I'd like to. There's got to be a reason why I have this crazy weird conscience that makes me unsatisfied with having a normal spring break like a normal college kid and instead, signing up for a week's volunteering with Mizzou. I think I'm supposed to be a humanitarian.

Is that weird? That is so weird to even think aloud. It sounds so awfully arrogant, like, oh look at me, I'm going to save the world. I was reading about Sister Prejean and her work as an anti-death row activist (watch the trailer for the movie Dead Man Walking--Prejean is the real nun that this movie is based off), and I just couldn't help thinking, I want to be like her. I want to find something that is my passion, and I want to work my butt off, and I want to make life better for someone--or someone(s).

God, I definitely don't have it figured out right now, even. I have a lot of things I'd love to learn more about--homelessness, children in Africa, war veterans, poverty, race relations...and I think that secretly, I've wanted to be a journalist all along just so I can learn about these things and then change them by exposing them to society. I can't really see myself as an undercover reporter in Africa like the girl in Blood Diamond, but I know I can't really see myself sitting in an office, looking at high heels and purses all day.

Bottom line, is, I guess, that I think I am going to recenter everything about my career away from those artsy stuff--which is still all really awesome--but realize that my goal in life is not to be the next Anna Wintour or Glenda Bailey. They are wonderful people, I'm sure, and very accomplished, but what have they done for the global society that non-fashion people will remember?

Maybe I will end up in the slums of Calcutta, like Mother Teresa, and report on the conditions there and find human interest stories to print in newspapers. Maybe I'll work at a nonprofit. Maybe I'll write a Pulitzer-worthy book about some social injustice and get it noticed and changed. I have zero idea.

I guess I have to start small. I have to think about what classes I'll want to take--maybe some social justice classes in the sociology department? I have to think about what organizations on campus to get involved in--Amnesty International's new MU chapter is having their first meeting this week. I have to think about what I can do on my own--maybe I'll sign up to adopt a soldier (http://adoptaussoldier.org/) and write them letters so they know they're being appreciated and loved. I'm going to just try as much as I can and see what happens.

I'm really scared of this. This might mean that I have to change my emphasis area in journalism, or even maybe my whole major. Right now, I still feel really called to journalism. I think it's the tool that will get me to where I want to be. But now, I know that where I want to be lies in a place that my parents probably won't approve of, that my friends might not understand, that might be dangerous and uncomfortable, and that might change the world.

"For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’"
-Matthew 25: 35-40

new babe pool

2012-01-26T23:42:00.001-06:00

screaming: We Found Love - Rihanna

After a weekend of drag shows, water pong, and a rather violent game of mafia, I guess Monday's arrival couldn't have been expected to be all that pretty. Having not slept in at all didn't help, either, so I pretty much was a zombie for a good part of the week. But man, I am getting good at the whole napping thing here. There were a few days when I started feeling a bit sick and under the weather, to which I promptly popped about 2938573 Vitamin C pills and napped some more. So far, so good.

One of the biggest things I'm looking forward to this semester is my Alternative Spring Break trip. I'm going to Alabama for my spring break with about ten strangers on this student-organized, student-led initiative to help rebuild houses destroyed from tornados last spring, and the prospect of warmer weather (and being near a beach!) isn't the only thing that's making me excited. The group of people I'm going with is composed of some of the most colorful characters I've ever met (okay, and two of the guys are ultra fine, too...). We've been having weekly meetings just about getting to know each other and the logistics of the trip; this weekend, we're having a retreat where we'll meet the other ASB groups (Lana is going on one to South Dakota, poor soul...she'll be buried in snow) and show off our skits that we've been practicing at our meetings, too.

Funny thing--this whole last week, I've been trying to forget more about Roger. I mean, Clay was pretty easy to not think of anymore since I'm here at Mizzou and nothing reminds me about him, but the first couple of days this semester, I was so jumpy, thinking I'd see Roger around the corner at any moment or in journalism class. Over break, we did text a few times, but since it was always me who started it, I finally just figured that the whole concept of "us" wasn't going anywhere, so I had to just kind of adjust to life at Mizzou without constantly staring at my phone, waiting for his text, or seeing his blue eyes in class. But of course, when I'm finally not even thinking about him, he sends me a text because he was talking to someone about Nutella and it reminded him of me (I'm not going to lie. The connection is quite complimentary.)

So we chatted a bit, and then later in the week when I saw that his roommate posted a status about how their house cat was missing, we chatted a bit again, but I'm pretty confident that this isn't going anywhere, and I don't even need to bother to get my hopes up. Yeah, Roger was the embodiment of the "cool college boy" that I thought I'd meet and marry right off the bat (well, sort of), but there are so many of those kinds of boys out there, and I had a pretty good time at it last fall, anyways. New semester, new babe pool, yes?

Of course, now that I'm far from my home friends and my family, there are definitely a lot of points in the day when I'm just like, man, I could use a boyfriend/someone who will just ask me about my day, but then I go to zumba and grocery shopping with Lana, and we laugh ourselves hysterical at my awful dance moves, and I don't really care so much. :)

News that may or may not be relevant at this point -- in my newswriting class, there are about twenty people, so it's relatively small. But I know two girls from my floor, and two guys that were in my freshman interest group last semester--the sort of bumbling, adorable boy-next-door type of guys that you befriended simply because they were hilarious and because you were freshmen together. I sit by these guys because I don't know anyone else in that class all that well, and so we always talk about how things were like last semester, about journalism, and such like that. The one out of the pair that I know better is named Sam, mostly because he's super friendly and half Taiwanese, so we have that sort of Asian connection going on.

Simply because we're both in this rather hellishly demanding newswriting class together, we've already bonded a lot and talked a lot, and so the night before my drag show assignment was due, he came up to my room, and we edited each other's papers. Lana gave me a quizzical look--she knows Sam, but she thought there was something going on between us, and I was like bahaha no...I never ever thought of Sam that way at all, and plus, he has a girlfriend from back home in Texas.

The next day in newswriting, Sam asked me if I'd go downtown with him to pick up some stuff, and I said sure, even though I thought it was kind of weird that he didn't ask his guy friend who was sitting right next to him. Even though it was pouring rain when we left class, I decided to be a brave girl and just zipped up my hood, and so we ventured downtown into a brew shop, of all things. Sam taught me a little about brewing--aka, how to make wine out of a bottle of apple juice--and the sales guys there were super chatty and pretty much gave us a lesson on how to brew. I don't know anything about alcohol, at all, so it was quite educational, and while Sam and one of the guys were chatting away about yeast and sanitization, I ended up getting some contact information from the guys' manager in case I ever wanted to do a journalism story (read: newswriting assignment) on their shop and brewing.

Score one for the journo girl.

Sam and I stopped at a few other shops for errands and then hiked the mile back home to the dorm (he lives on the floor above me), just making pretty decent conversation the whole time. My friends gave me more flack about it later, especially when today, I was standing out in the hallway when the elevator opened to let some girls off on the 7th floor, and Sam, standing in the back of the elevator, hollered hello. I don't really get what they see going on, because I'm just kind of enjoying getting to know someone. Just because it's a guy doesn't mean anything.

Wow. I can't believe I just said that...

ain't nothing gumby's pizza can't fix

2012-01-26T23:22:00.000-06:00

screaming: Home - Holiday Parade

The rest of my first week back at school passed stunningly fast--being powered again by Chipotle and Gumby's pizza, though, definitely helped. Man have I missed cheap, college-kid-friendly Columbia food...and the beautiful rec center only ten minutes away. Be proud of me--I tentatively broke out of my treadmill-only rut and allowed some friends to persuade me to go to some of the exercise classes they have at the rec center, like this kickboxing session. Now, I'm addicted--zumba! Ballet fit! Yoga! I want to try it all. Even though I know I look like a fool in the workouts among all the other much, much more fit girls in there, I feel awesome afterwards. It is a zillion times more interesting to shake my booty to Shakira than to heave it on the treadmill for half an hour. Especially since, with the new year and all, the lines for the treadmills (and just the whole friggin' rec center in general) have quintupled.

I ended up buying a membership to access all these classes downstairs in the rec center, and I felt so cool and athletic for doing so, until I swaggered out of the office and then tripped on a curb.

#can'tcatchabreak.

Besides catching up with last fall's friends and obsessively reading newspapers now (a requirement in my newswriting class, so now I'm kind of becoming a die-hard worshipper of The New York Times, not going to lie), I also went back to work for the journalism professor that I'm doing research for some more. Dr. H is still just as quirky and slightly awkward as before, but I was so glad to see my fellow research assistant, the grad student, at the office again. We spent a good amount on Monday swapping break stories (his mostly about being a new father, mine mostly about, uh, napping...), and I am helping him make a database for a research project based on Texas death row's executions (so cheery), but then Dr. H, who I love because he is such a dreamer, decided he wanted to feature a tribute to this famous visual arts professor who passed away last year in the magazine that Dr. H is editor of, and so I got charged with the task of finding a photograph of this dead guy and get the photo credits to him by Monday.

Googling the man's picture is one thing. Getting the rights to reprint it in a legit publication is another. I waved good-bye to more than two hours of my life trying to get on the phone with the university this guy worked at, basically stalking his colleagues to no end. In the end, I actually found a Slovenian photographer who had taken a portrait of the guy just a few months before he died, and so I freaking jumped on it. Thank goodness working for Design Bureau has ingrained in me the finer aspects of begging someone for their photographs. By Monday, I sent the image and credits to Dr. H and pretty much felt like I had conquered the world. Miranda Priestly, come at me.

All the times in between class and work(s), I just spent enjoying being a college kid--getting dinner with the floormates, doing laundry like a pro because I finally realize which washers are the ones that are scamming me with still soaking clothes, and being a lot more productive than I had been during those luxurious first weeks of fall semester because now I've finally got a better idea of how to manage my time (i.e. by not getting on Fox's website and watching New Girl over and over).

The weekend was one of the most awesome ones I've ever had--Friday night, after a good unwinding from yoga, Lana and I spent major quality time with our floormates, playing mafia, "most likely," and all those sorts of crazy group games until we were nearly splitting our sides on the ground laughing at each other and our zany antics. Then Saturday, I did some more zumba and then went to a drag show, nbd.

Oh yes. It was for my newswriting assignment--we were given the task to go somewhere that was "out of our comfort zones" and sit there for an hour or so and write about it. Originally, I was going to go to the local Planned Parenthood (that awkward moment when you ask your friend with a car to take you to Planned Parenthood without providing context...), but when I very dismissively mentioned the drag show at the Columbia gay bar in town to Lana, she was all over it. We ended up getting a big group of our friends from the floor to go. I was half horrified and scared of what a gay bar was like--heck, I haven't even been to a straight bar before, but the other half of me was kind of excited.

And, okay, I was thrilled to have a reason to dress up, too. Since we were going to carpool there, us ladies broke out the high heels, skinny black jeans, and lacy tops, and we all piled into the gay bar at 10 p.m. that night, totally looking like noobs there, but it didn't matter. And it was so cool! I didn't know anything about drag culture going in, but watching the drag queens dance and lip-sync to Britney Spears and Nicki Minaj was quite possibly the most fabulous thing I've ever seen. Obviously, it wasn't the dancing or lip-syncing that was awesome, but just how the drag queens managed to make their "femininity" so convincing at times. Definitely an eye-opening experience (especially when the quiet kid of our group dared to go tip the drag queen as she was mid-cartwheel on stage), though I'm not sure I'm about to make the drag show a regular thing on my personal calendar...

I hope to post the short essay I wrote about it on my online portfolio soon, so when I do, I'll let you know. Not going to lie--I sortofakinda think it's a boss piece of writing. And of course, I hope my newswriting professor agrees.

After the drag show, we stormed Steak 'N' Shake like typical college students do, and a couple of us girls entertained the idea of going to my friend Cary's friend's party (which would have made it my first college house party!), but it ended up not working out. While I was kind of pumped from the whole evening's events (and my rockin' outfit) to try out a party for the first time, I was secretly glad because the minute we hit our dorm, I almost collapsed out of exhaustion. But not before one very drunk guy friend told me that I should go out more often, because I looked "goooooooooood."

Glad I make an impression to the inebriated.

The next morning, Sunday, I somehow couldn't sleep in properly even though I'd been up at a rather personal record of 2 a.m. (don't laugh), so I crept out of Lana's and my room and sat in the floor study room, doing some research on The All-American Rejects, because they're coming into town in a few weeks and guess who's going to write about them?!?!? Definitely can't believe my luck with how easygoing the student magazine's editors are about how I pretty much stalk the Columbia music venue's roster and then email the editors with my pleas to cover the cool ones. So once that article goes up (it'll be a Q & A with Mike Kennerty, the guitarist, fyi), I'll also let y'all know. The catch being, of course, that you have to go to my online portfolio to see it (check it out now at Deliaesthetic.blogspot.com). Heh heh.

After a good amount of homework (and a lot of nerdy chuckling because I'm literally enjoying my newswriting textbook...), Lana and I kicked homework aside because a high school girl from Tennessee who, if she came to Mizzou, would be in the same journalism scholars program that we are in, was on campus for a visit, and we agreed to the journalism associate dean's request that she be able to stay the night in our dorm room. So we showed her around campus and town, got dinner at the dining hall, and got her to play water pong with the rest of our floor in our dorm room until midnight. I felt kind of clumsy talking to her about Mizzou and journalism, simply because all I could think of gushing was I just freaking love it here, but I think she liked it.

I mean, I kind of don't understand who wouldn't...

freshman year take two

2012-01-25T23:35:00.006-06:00

screaming: Holiday - Valencia

I'm alive, I swear! It's made me so antsy in these past two weeks to not be able to sit down and have some good ol' blogging time, believe me. Even during the days before classes that I was on campus, it was a hectic blur of grabbing textbooks from the bookstore, printing off a billion pages of class syllabi (and then nerdily reading through them and getting sufficiently intimidated, especially by my honors newswriting class, which apparently takes off 50% of your grade if you spell a name wrong in an article...ouch!), going to my first big college basketball game (and then sticking out like a sore thumb because I didn't get the "black-out memo" and looked pretty awkward in my orange flannel shirt...), and watching a lot of the Golden Globes and movies like Tangled in my room with some girls on my floor, including a couple of new ones that moved in this semester.

Oh, how I've missed life as a college kid. Especially the food. Oh my goodness. I almost cried tears of joy when I saw the dining hall and its endless buffet of desserts, pizza, burgers, salads--pretty much anything my heart desired. No cooking or microwaving necessary.

Monday, the last day before classes started, it was this ridiculous 60-plus degrees out, and so Lana (when I saw her again, we tackled each other like crazy long-lost lovers. Is that weird?) and some other girls and I suited up in shorts and sandals and just spent the day walking around campus, taking pictures, sitting on the columns in the middle of the quad, and basking in the sun. We also toured downtown a little and even got to eat frozen yogurt outside. In January. No big deal. We also went shopping a little in some of the boutiques we found, and it was just an awesome day to be back with all those ladies again.

Before the homework piled up, I finished applying to another internship with Chicago Magazine (which makes it ten internships total applied to...please, please let me not just rot at home this summer, please...) and wrote a couple of posts for Design Bureau (the two latest can be checked out here and here :). I love working for Design Bureau increasingly as I write and learn about art, and the associate editor just told me that after a few more posts, I can actually start getting paid for them! Imagine that--making money doing journalism. Ha.

Unfortunately, like a form of literal foreshadowing, the weather turned bitterly cold and windy on Tuesday, the first day of class for the spring semester. This semester, I'm doing the bare minimum courseload and just taking four classes--microeconomics, cross-cultural journalism, political science, and newswriting honors. I know, I know. High school me would have been shocked, but I was scared of overloading myself with the whole research assistance thing for Dr. H in addition to free-lancing for Design Bureau.

Plus, okay, I kind of just didn't want to do school as much...

I was going to take this intro to fashion class, but I ended up switching into microecon at the last minute because it was a required class. Boo. I've never taken econ before, so I was kind of nervous when I first went to class, but when the perky young blonde professor was all like, "So, do you guys think I, like, give out grades, or do you think you all like, earn them?" At least I didn't have to worry about it being too awfully difficult.

My political science professor was the complete opposite. He's served on several legislatures and actually worked in Congress for a while, so he knows his stuff, and he's also freaking scary as hell. On our first day of class, he called out kids in a rather scathing way about being on their phones, Facebooking on their laptops, and even yawning. (I've learned quite quickly since then about how to yawn with my mouth closed). Guys like him make me understand how our government got Bin Laden. I'm excited for his class, even though it's in a huge auditorium, because he's still really knowledgeable and pretty funny, even if he swears like a sailor and frightens the daylights out of me.

Cross-cultural journalism is a pretty cut-and-dried reading-based class, but apparently there is this legendary huge project at the end of the semester that I'm sort of nervous about, especially since I'm taking this in combination with newswriting honors, which is the hardest class in the whole journalism school. Basically, it's a class that teaches you how to write a good newspaper article, but it's super demanding. All of my classes are lectures, but this class at least has a discussion group twice a week, and I love the professor I have for it. He's an editor at the city newspaper, and he looks like a skinny Indiana Jones with his brown coat and explorer's hat. Even so, he's already warned us of weekly lecture/current events quizzes, a zillion assignments, and a ruthless grading rubric. But in a sick, geekky way, I'm kind of excited to actually start doing this journalism thing.

let the games begin

2012-01-13T23:37:00.000-06:00

screaming: Something to Believe In - Parachute

Good-bye, insanely chill days of reading Slumdog Millionaire (read it!) and In the Garden of Beasts (don't read it...) and watching Boy Meets World reruns, 90's teen movies (loved "Drive Me Crazy," hated "Never Been Kissed"), and way too much Netflix (omg, "The Last Song"...Miley Cyrus, I don't hate you as much...). Good-bye, crazy fun nights with old friends at the city roller derby, navigating around downtown, watching "Friends" (wow, I watched a lot of TV), and baking billion-calorie scrumptiousness to scarf down whole. Good-bye, somewhat hectic mornings of applying endlessly to what must be at least ten thousand internships for this summer and badgering Mizzou's student magazine editor to let me preview The All-American Rejects' concert next month. I'll miss you.

This last week of winter break seemed to fly by--I think working so much for Design Bureau (check out post #2 here!) helped me feel more productive since most of my friends had already returned to school or were really busy with their work schedules to hang out all that much. The great thing about that, though, was being able to spend so much time with my family as a result. Which sounds bad to say, but hey, it's made me into such a family girl this winter, and I never was anything close to that beforehand. Being able to have superlong lunches with my mom at Olive Garden to chat about everything from possibly moving to NYC for the summer to boys, going snowboarding with my dad and little brother (and severely bruising my tailbone in the process...ow...), checking out Connor's fifth grade basketball game, and even driving my grandmother around town to do errands and see the doctor (although I got us lost and we ended up hiking across the entire hospital campus...it was a mark of true grandmotherly love that she didn't say anything) has made me feel like I'm really part of the family unit again, and it's definitely reminded me how I'm not the independent lone wolf I sometimes pretend I can be (but secretly can't handle) in life. I've got back-up, available 24/7.

On my last day in town on Thursday, we were hit by a huge snowstorm (WTF, give me my 60-degree January back!) and so I stayed in and just worked on more internship applications and shoveling the driveway in my snowboard gear (because I'd packed up everything else). I was supposed to go to a hockey game downtown with Em and some other friends, but the roads were so awful I didn't think I could get out at all and was resigned to one last evening at home.

I'd been pretty un-subtly hinting at Clay that we should hang out before I left, but he's been so passive about it I figured I wouldn't see him again until, who even knows, May? But he came through last night in that sort of way he always does, and so he came with one of his best guy friends and picked me up from my blizzarded house, and the three of us hung out in his house making cookies and eating pizza and playing a lot of Halo and Words with Friends (guess which one I was particularly awful at?). Some other guy game over and joined in, too, but Clay and I stayed at his house after everyone else left for a little while, just talking about the semester and our summer and plans.

He drove me home in the completely whited-out night, and when he dropped me off, I just got out of the car, smiled, and told him not to miss me too much. He shot me a cheeky grin and was all, "okay!"

So it wasn't the dramatic parting I think I might have been expecting. No hug, no kiss, no tears...we never ended up talking about "us" after that first talk, and you know what? I don't really regret that. I know that I wouldn't have been able to concentrate as much on my family or work/internships or other friends if we had tried something, and I don't honestly think he really knew what he was doing when he blurted out that he had feelings for me. In fact, I kind of doubt his "feelings" altogether, because it's easy to confuse missing a friend/attention-giver with other things.

And it's fine. I really don't begrudge him anything, and I'm just so glad we are still amazing friends. This period of time was kind of awkward, and yeah, I'm bummed I didn't get to hang with him as friends or whatever as much as I'd hoped, but I see a lot of wisdom in how we chose to not change anything. I'm not bringing any emotional baggage to Mizzou (literal baggage, though, was a different story altogether), and we're both giving ourselves a fair shot at a second semester apart, knowing that we don't know exactly when we'll see each other again, but when we do, it'll still be the same old, same old, Clay and Delilah.

I find a lot of peace in that, especially now that I'm a couple hundred miles away, sitting in my dorm room. It was tempting to try to fulfill my old fantasy of dating Clay and finally being the girl for him, but I know deep down that it wouldn't work. I know that when I meet someone really worth the emotional commitment and maybe even the word "love," he'll be able to keep up with my sense of ambition, tell me things as they are, and will be as crazy about me as I am about him. Until I meet this guy, I'm happy just being a typical eighteen-year-old girl, who dragged herself out of bed at 7 AM (after going to bed only five hours before) to eat one last breakfast with her little brother, who choked up a bit when she dropped him off at school, who got pwned in Words with Friends, who is a new fan of Taco Johns now that the guys she rode back to school with introduced it to her, who really loves being back at a place she calls home, too.

wisdom

2012-01-09T17:14:00.001-06:00

screaming: Someone Like You - The Summer Set

With four days left until I'm back at Mizzou for freshman year round 2, I spent a few days reading through all the journal posts I had up here from this past fall, and thought I'd make a little compilation of some quotes from old posts that just made me laugh, cry, and roll my eyes at how uber mature I was. Bahaha.

"It's nice to meet someone who doesn't just shovel the food in indiscriminately. As hypocritical as that is to say."

"Um, so next month, Taking Back Sunday and The Maine are coming to Columbia. And the month after that, All Time Low is playing. Here. In Missouri. Within walking distance. Alex Gaskarth. JohnO. Adam Lazzara. Life is beautiful."

"it is too bad that there is no sinus rinsing club, because, not to brag or anything, but I am getting super good at that"

"You should have seen the look on this random kid's face when I tore around the laundry room, squealing that I had lost my clothes and that the washing machine was about to explode."

"There was a lot of hugging from a characteristically non-hugging family, let me tell you."

"I was like, uh no...I've never met ANYONE like that, especially since I come from whitebread, Midwest, where there are very few Asians in the first place to have fetishes for. "

"If I copy a page crookedly, I will lose my entire future in the magazine industry?"

"Do not test the capacity of your dorm washer by stuffing in all your clothes and comforter. It will not wash. It will just swish 50% of your clothes around, and leave you out of quarters to get actually clean clothes."

"Today, I harassed him [my stats TA] for half an hour at his office hours in the student center until he pretty much spelled out for me how to figure out the probability of drawing a full house in a game of poker (like I would ever do that if I were in Vegas/real life)."

"I felt so proud of him [my discussion leader] as he totally beasted all 50 minutes of class with a meteor shower of knowledge upon us. "

"There is a Greek Orthodox church in town, so they had a stand where they sold handmade baklava, which, if you haven't ever had before, you probably have much less clogged arteries, but you haven't lived."

"In high school, teachers spaced out their tests. In college, doing that is a sign of weakness."

"I think he and gorgeous Nat from the dining hall--with whom I made great progress in asking what kind of cheese I should get on my omelet today and realizing we both love swiss--are going to be the only two exceptions to this rule"

"This doesn't mean I'm just going to not talk to boys or look at them at all (please. I'm only human), "

"I mean, no one needs to know that I've never actually written an article on music before..."

"RUN THE MILE IN FOUR MINUTES OR YOU FAIL, AS A STUDENT AND AS A HUMAN!) "

"there was a question on our exam, no lie, that asked "Journalists should be ____ about making corrections." Uh. Diligent? Humble? Good at? Spell check? "

"I got to discuss in a very romantic way with him how tofu and chicken were really good together"

"But, just so you know, telling RA's about your creep problems is kind of good, because they swell up all protectively and pretend to flex their nonexistent RA muscles and tell you that you're in good hands."

"I wanted to just roll over and not be stared at with accusatory you freaking nerd glares."

"Thank God he had his giant hipster headphones in and had no idea what was going on."

"it made me a wee bit nostalgic for my own old marching band days...but only a wee bit."

"I forgot to wear my Tiger's Lair shirt, so they kicked me out. How Mean Girls-esque."

"Sometimes I wonder if blogging helps me with the whole journalism thing, because it sort of does give one a lot of practice in taking a bunch of information/notes from my journal, sifting through and trying to pick out the good stories from the bad, and then compiling it into something that's a weensy bit engaging to present to the public, all within the space of a few hours. Or maybe I am just trying to justify blogging over working on my Spanish essay tonight, which is due in six hours. Shh."

"Is it wrong to run and watch the Food Network on the treadmill's tv screen at the same time? "

"Being sick makes you just not care about a lot of things, such as how utterly lame you probably look when standing in line for the fast Mexican food downstairs, reading your management 1010 textbook and carrying laundry in the other hand "

"it made me kind of sad because I remember being a high school girl with dyed hair and funky Converse shoes and bright band tees, and now I was just the kind of old college girl who was wearing a sweater because it was cold."

"if life were perfect, I would spend my weekends doing extremely crazy, exciting things with crazy, exciting people, and there would be Facebook photos galore, and everything would just be this constant explosion of confetti and epicness because it's college, and all that kind of stuff, but then I stop and get real, because, well, if life really were like that, I would probably have a nervous breakdown."

"And I mean, the hot tattooed guy on the next treadmill over (say heyyyyy) is quite the motivator, too."

Sometimes, I worry. Here's to a second semester of equally insightful thoughts?

week 3

2012-01-07T15:25:00.001-06:00

screaming: La La - The Cab

And so now with winter break winding down, I'm eyeballing the last five days of being at home for quite some time. On one hand, I'm like noooo I don't want to look at textbooks again, but on the other hand, I'm extremely eager to see all of my Mizzou friends and get back into the swing of things on campus. Most of my friends from home returned to their colleges this week, but I was glad to get the chance to catch up with at various breakfasts and Starbucks meetings and Ten Things I Hate About You viewings, and it was so exciting to see everyone again. Yet another friend is planning to be engaged this year, and so I'm definitely going to be having a wedding attendance mania, which is perfectly fine with me and my dress-up-loving self. But after a few weeks of just nonstop hanging out and chilling in this sort of time warp where everything is exactly the same but still different, I do also feel ready to get back to Mizzou and hang out with those people and meet new ones again, too.

One of my favorite parts of winter break is that I've finally been able to spend a ton of time with my family, and I feel like I'm just now starting to fully appreciate them. It's just so nice to have the luxury to go watch Inception with my parents, or take my brother Connor bowling (and get pwned by him along the process), get lunch for a few hours with my mom, and hang out at Connor's basketball practice and realize how much he's grown up. Leaving them for nearly four months will be tough, since I'm not coming home for spring break, and if I'm gone all summer at an internship, then I won't be able to spend time with them like this for another whole year.

And still no dice on the whole Clay thing, and I'm thinking there will be no dice. Yeah, I'm still attracted to him, but as I've discovered over the past couple of days, it's definitely not the same as it used to be when I'd jump off a building for him. We went to see a little pop punk show the other night, and everyone thought we were together, and I just fell for him a little all over again every time he busted a move in the middle of the dance floor, but I know that a relationship would never work when we rarely have the time to see each other during winter break, alone. I don't think he really likes me so much as he just missed the idea of me when I was gone, because I've been trying to reach out and hang out more, but he's just got a lot of other things on his plate. Which is fine--we've both got pretty different lives now, so it's amazing that we even connect at all when we do get a chance to be together. But I know now that it's not worth trying to make this into anything it shouldn't be, and I'm determined to just enjoy this last week at home, Clay or no Clay.

So, I'm feeling pretty ready to go back. Jack's Mannequin and the All American Rejects are coming into Columbia/near Columbia, and so I've already got tickets for Lana and I to go see them. The thought of all the fun, crazy things to do at Mizzou that definitely aren't here is exciting to think about, as well as just reflecting on how in a few months this past semester, I changed from a high school girl who didn't know much about life to a pretty beastly independent college student who learned how to lease an apartment, write articles, get a job, and understand everything so much better. Where will I be in another few months?

do work all day err day

2012-01-07T15:24:00.001-06:00

screaming: She Doesn't Get It - The Format

If I didn't know this weather over here any better, I'd say it was about mid-March, and that spring is just around the corner. Old man winter, where did you go? I kind of want to get a few more snowboarding trips in before you leave so soon. Or maybe you're just holding out on us, and you're going to unleash your fury in a few weeks. Of course, you'd time it so that all us poor college kids have to trek across campus in blizzards instead of being able to safely drive around in cars right now. Whatever. Be that way.

Man, that stomach flu last week really floored me for a while, but this week I've been trying to be super productive! If you read my most recent post (and followed the link hehe) you'll know that I've begun my work with this gorgeous little hipster magazine called Design Bureau. They're from Chicago, and I've been kind of keeping everything under wraps mostly because it's been happening so fast! Officially, I am just an unpaid, free-lance contributor, right now just pitching, researching, and writing posts for their daily blog (WeAreDesignBureau.com). Later, I'll be working on their newsletter, and if all goes well, maybe I'll get to intern them this summer for their magazine! That was the original plan--but since they haven't started the process for looking at interns yet, they offered me this position for this semester. Hopefully, if I do a good job, they'll look me up come May?

So far, I have that one post up, but plenty more are on their way! If you like artsy kinds of things, you'd love them. They're dedicated to exposing really up-and-coming indie artists and designers, and everything they feature is so eye-candy-esque. It's barely been a week, but I adore working for them already--everyone I have been able to talk to on the phone is super nice and hip, and I definitely feel like the kind of voice I like to write in fits in there.

The first day I began, the associate editor essentially told me to just jump in and start pitching things--luckily, I got to sit and talk to her on the phone about all the background stuff I had to know before the day was up, too, because I had no clue what was going on. Because they're operating with a pretty small staff, I wrote up a sort of compilation of all the orientation stuff she informally told me and sent it to her, so now they have a sort of training manual for contributors in the future. It's not just that I'm trying to get in good with the editors so I can have a job this summer (which, okay, is a pretty compelling reason too), but the more I work with DB, the more I really love what they're doing.

The plan is to be able to send her a couple of posts every week, and so if one of them gets published, then I'll have a nice couple of clips come summer, which is useful for any journalism student to have, even if it's an unpaid gig. It's a lot of work, but trust me, I do not mind scrolling through art blogs and corresponding with designers for hours--much, much more exciting than composing lit reviews for my professor at school under my research fellowship. So I guess I'll be holding down two jobs this semester, and so I think I am going to drop a class and just do the minimum 12 credit hours, and pretty much eat, breathe, and live journalism (since half of my classes are also journalism). Wish me luck?

I sent in my application for an internship to Alternative Press, too, although I had this awful moment when I realized that the formatting I used for my resume just got all messed up, so I had to embarrassedly email in a second, revised one.

Most excitingly, though, is this: having been inspired by being able to work with All Time Low and Taking Back Sunday this past fall, I figured hey, why not try out that music industry pipe dream? I've always wanted to go on tour with a band or music festival and do some blog or merch or promotions work, and so I figured the best way to do that was to apply at music labels for an internship. So as I was making a list of labels earlier, I knew I just had to add this one music label to it, because it's thanks to them that Paramore, A Rocket to the Moon, Fall Out Boy, and Fun. are in my life, to name a few. Tuesday, I sent off my job application to them, but I wasn't really thinking anything would come out of it--I had just wanted to sort of humor myself and know that at least I'd tried, and I wouldn't spend the rest of my life wondering if I would have made a good music industry kid anyways.

Surprises of surprises, barely an hour after I had submitted my resume, a cover letter, references, and my clips on ATL and TBS, one of their staff members emailed me back and asked to talk on the phone on Friday! So yesterday, after googling "Phone Interview Tips" for a few hours, I dressed up all professionally (and even popped a mint...despite it being over the phone...) and chatted for about fifteen minutes on the phone with this music label about my possibly going to New York City to intern for them this summer.

What label is this, exactly?

Ohmigosh. I know.

I am so excited about this--I mean, even if I don't go on tour or even travel, how amazing would it be to work for one of the coolest music labels ever, in one of the coolest cities ever? I mean, as long as we're dreaming big here, who is to say that I won't meet Nick Santino, convince him that we're meant to be, and become the wife of a rockstar within a few years?

Mmm. Nick.

The interview was short and sweet, and I felt so overtalkative on it because I'd wanted to show off how much I'd prepared for the phone call, but the guy on the other end was super nice and we actually ended up talking about music for a while instead of the typical interview stuff I was preparing. But cross cross cross your fingers for me! I can't even begin to think how freaking mindblowing it would be to work for FBR.

It's things like being to pull something like this off--to go from dreaming about working somewhere to actually getting off the phone with a rep from the company--that just astounds me about this past year. Being a college student freaking rocks, man.

exciting exciting

2012-01-05T10:15:00.001-06:00

Awesome, amazing, freaking cool news :) But you have to go here on my writing portfolio to see. Because I'm shamelessly learning the art of promotion, too.

He, he. Let me know what you think.

week 2 of winter break

2012-01-01T22:50:00.000-06:00

screaming: Midnight City - M83

So, I'm really really hoping this summer internship in Chicago works out, because going up there with my family last week for a few days made me remember how much I love that city. Maybe it's just the combined effects of Columbia, which still is, really, a kind of small-town sort of city, and being at home surrounded by cornfields that makes me pine for the ability to have the Cheesecake Factory and malls galore and Urban Outfitters only a short drive away, but how fun would a summer in Chicago be? And (especially compared with the drive to Mizzou), it's close enough to make a day trip out of seeing family and friends. I begged my parents to let me drive up there so I could get a "feel" for the road, if I was going to be making the trip a couple of times pretty soon.

Along the way, I talked to my mom about Clay and relationships in general, and how I was still pretty torn between trying to see if Clay and I should make a relationship try to work, or if I should just play it cool and just stay where we were, which seemed far more rational, but I just didn't know. We helped ourselves to the distractions of Chicago--i.e., watching Pirates of the Caribbean in the hotel room, hanging out in Chinatown trying to blend in (semi-successfully), and making a venture to an Apple retail store to fix my laptop. Oh man. Don't ever go inside an Apple store on the days post-Christmas (or even pre-Christmas, probably). It was like a mad riot in there, with people grabbing iPads and iThingies left and right. The poor customer service people looked like they wanted to kill themselves.

With my laptop in their hands, I couldn't really do much for the rest of the week in terms of applying for internships or much writing (or so I told myself, hehe) so I spent some time just doing errands, picking up and trying to work my new phone (and feeling quite, quite classy talking to Siri and having her awfully misinterpret me), hanging out with Dianna and her sisters-in-law (and finding out that Dianna may be engaged within a matter of months! Geez! And I thought I had life issues at stake with my summer internship...). With all this marriage talk--I know for a fact at least three of my friends will be getting married this summer, and at least two others will be engaged, I feel pretty old, but also kind of wildly excited to get dolled up and go to weddings. Is that bad of me? Ever since I saw Wedding Crashers for the first time last summer, I've been thrilled to start going because the weddings I went to as a kid, I just don't remember and wasn't old enough to have fun at.

Thursday night, one of Mickey's and my mutual friends from high school was throwing a party, and so I was really worried Mickey would be there. So, well, I dressed to kill and it ended up that Mickey didn't even go, so that was a short term relief. I've never gone this long avoiding someone...part of me kind of wanted to see him, I guess (and make it clear that I am doing so well without him) and just to clear up the air, but the other part of me was childishly like nahhhh we can just pretend the other doesn't exist.

For New Years, my friend Meg and I toyed around with the idea of going to Chicago to see a concert, though I didn't think my parents would be a fan of us tramping around the city late at night, but it was all for naught anyways. Maybe there was something funky at the party or it was this weird 50-degree December weather, but I ended up getting really sick towards the end of this last week, and so I stayed in bed and didn't even venture out to ring in the new year except to get lunch with Clay (let's just say that sushi mid stomach flu was the most awful idea ever). It was horrible, but I am so glad that at least I was sick at home, and it wasn't at school. As much as I love Lana and she loves me, I don't think she would bring me gatorade and ginger ale to my bedside every few hours.

With all this sort of being cooped up at home (especially when the company my parents asked to do the recarpeting in our house was Ty's (an old flame) dad, I've been going a little cabin fever crazy, especially without my laptop to do some work on, so Friday, I just drove to Panera (on an empty gas tank, through sleeting rain--I was really determined to get some alone time) and spent an afternoon reading and writing. I am seriously turning into such a party animal with all of this in addition to nonstop Netflix-watching and room-cleaning...

Yesterday was the first day I felt better. You know that deliriously happy feeling when you're just getting over being sick, and pretty much everything in life is great? It was one of those days. My brother and dad and I went to go see Sherlock Holmes (which, to be honest, none of us really understood all that well) and got food at a sports bar for dinner, and then I just spent the night doing some writing and chatting with Roger, actually. It was the second time we've talked all break, which is more than I thought would happen. We didn't talk about that weird way he sort of bailed on me during finals week, mostly because now I've realized I don't really care.

Yeah, Roger is super fine and he would have been some nice arm candy to bring home to show everyone, but we wouldn't have been a realistic couple anyways--he wants someone to party with and do upperclassmanly sorts of things with, I imagine, and really, I just want someone to hang out with every few days. But it seems we both still enjoy talking to each other, so we chatted for about an hour about our breaks so far. He still makes me crack up laughing like none other with is witticisms and quips, and it's easy to get hopeful when he's like "hey i'm about to head to a party, text me?" with a smiley face at the end (the tease), but in the end I know that he just likes having someone interesting to talk to, as do I. So no harm done. Maybe we'll hang out a bunch next semester, maybe we won't. But either way, we make fine casual friends.

And the deal with Clay? No dice yet. Our sushi lunch was super normal and almost ultra platonic, and it didn't last very long, so we just talked about typical things and avoided the whole topic of our "feelings," which I think is a bit of a heady topic to discuss over lunch, anyways. Maybe if we hang out later this week, I'll bring it up...I'm just not sure. I know last week I was super gung-ho about trying to start a relationship or something with him, but realistically, I just don't think that would make either one of us happy, because he's never been mister commitment, and I'm just not looking for a long-distance obligation to anchor me home, anyways. I know he'll always be a phone call away if I really need to hear his voice and get some laughs, so why make things weird with a tangly relationship?

That said, though, if we're watching a movie under the same blanket, I'm not saying I won't try to make a move ;) Is it so wrong that I don't want a fulfilling relationship so much as just to kiss this kid a few times?

2011, you've been good to me

2011-12-31T20:36:00.000-06:00

screaming: Live Like We're Dying - Kris Allen

Maybe I'm just saying this because, well, memories past the 365.25-day mark just aren't all that sharp, but this has been the most crazy, life-changing year ever. I graduated from high school as valedictorian. I traveled across the globe to see a world I always tried to ignore but was and will always run through my very veins. I moved out to a different state to go to college with about 20,000+ strangers. I had my heart broken. I liked someone who liked me back, and I watched it blow up in my face. I had my first fight with a boy. I dated a musician (I mean, one date still counts, right?). I rode a motorcycle. I learned to move on from my first love, or did I? I learned to snowboard. I got a job. I recreated myself. I made new friends. I finished my first semester at college with a 4.0 GPA and more than 50 credit hours.

I did a lot.

A lot of it, I'm really proud of. I am so proud of myself, for one thing, for not letting the whole fiasco with Clay ruin our iron-tough friendship, or my focus on academics at school, or my plans for college. I am proud of all of my accomplishments as a graduating senior, with a good GPA, Lincoln Senior Award, presidency of student council and National Honor Society, a post as assistant layout editor on yearbook, a place in the "cool" kids' FCCLA prom fashion show. I threw a successful birthday party where my closest friends came, and an even more successful graduation party to see everyone I had needed and loved over the past years. I am proud of doing well academically in college since, and making good relationships with my professors, getting through the first months of the strangest job I've had so far, of having chosen to go to a school that has a zillion opportunities to do what I love to do--which is to write. I am proud of realizing that in writing lies my greatest strength--my ability to communicate in words, to sift through the enormous tangly web of thoughts and observations to put down tangible ideas that people understand and maybe even enjoy. To make something beautiful in the form of words.

I am proud of staying healthy and motivating myself to live healthily and to remember to make time for the things I love to do. I am not entirely there yet, but I am proud of seeing myself grow and mature into someone who is much more comfortable with who she is: a girl who is intelligent, beautiful, who needs her alone time and her space, who is a dreamer and an idealist, but who has the determination of steel and a heart that desperately wants to be in the right place. She tries to be organized and on task but is slowly (but surely) realizing that there is always room for a little mess and a nap.

Of course, there are regrets. But not as many of them as there could have been--which I am proud of. I don't regret, for example, any of what happened between Clay and me. I gave it my all and learned tons in return about him, myself, and relationships in general. I do regret trying so hard to make up for the whole unrequited feelings thing by sort of taking it out on Mickey and Guitar Guy. I should remember that attraction is something that is undeniable, that if you like a guy, you definitely will know. If you're waffling so much about it, it should be a sign that it isn't right. I know now that attraction should be instant, at least in my case, and I am such an obsessive person that I should know it for sure before I make any moves. And if I'm not sure, I shouldn't pretend it is and string that person along for my own sense of pride. It is not fair.

I am proud of how I have been able to leap far more daringly into serious, heart to heart conversations,but I also need to remember that being honest is not the same as blabbing away my feelings of the moment on whim.

I regret slips of the tongue and judgments I have made in meeting people at Mizzou---some of whom I know I have really hurt by accident. I know I have tried my best to make up for it, though, and so I know that these things happen and are inevitable consequence of growing up and finding myself.

I regret not being open and as easygoing as I could have been in my first weeks of school--I feel as though I missed out on a large part of the freshman process of making friends, though I know my heart was fearfully first and foremost in my schoolwork. I regret that I didn't branch out more or speak more to the kids living on my floor and in my building, but I am still so supremely proud of the relationships I have built with people like the grad student I work with, my friend from Spanish class, Roger from journalism, Mary from across the hall, and most importantly, with Lana, my roommate.

Of all the new people who have come into my life, Lana is the most significant. She is the sister I never had, a happy opposite of me and thus the yin to my yang, the nutella to my waffle, and as our inside joke goes: the le to my grand. I love this girl so much--she takes care of me and listens to me no matter what trivial things I have to say. She makes me cry laughing and sometimes the other way around. She helps me make decisions and we motivate each other to seriously go for our dreams all the while living up life and its wonders while we are at it. She makes me so happy with the person I am while still inspiring me to be continuously better. She is all I would ever have wanted in a roommate and a best friend. I have no trouble picturing us at each others' weddings and growing old together. I am so lucky to know her and have her as my roommate this year and next year and beyond,because this girl makes me the best me.

Roger comes to mind when I think of the people who have impacted me this year, but mostly because he has made me proud of who I have become in comparison with the crazy stalker fan girl I used to be. He showed me that I most definitely can go after an older guy I see in lecture, to ask for his number, to text him first, to ask him out to hang out first, and to hold my own in his witty, upperclassmen quips. Because of him, I know that I have come a long way from the girl in middle school who was too scared to look at her crush in the face, to this girl who hasn't had to compromise her values, goals, or self-worth to earn the trust and confidence of a really uber-cool, uber-hot guy. Now, that's no small feat. I know I am still not exactly Miss Congeniality when it comes to him and that there is a 99% chance we will not even hang out again, but he is a delightful foreshadow of guys to come and versions of myself to come, I must say.

Those are the two stand outs I can think of for the Mizzou people I have met. I haven't gotten too close with all that many people, and I hope to change that this next year, but all of the ones I have met have influenced me into thinking about who I want to be and who I do not want to be. I am excited to see who else will be in my life in but a few months! I feel like I have already a bit of a family here, with older brothers in my research partner and PAs, parents in my professors, and sisters in my roommate and future apartment roommates for next year.

This year was also my first year away from home, and boy, I loved most of it. But if I have learned anything, it is that life is not about me. I am here at college and at this point in my life to help people and their lives, and that begins with my family. My mother is the whole reason I am here and any where near who I am. and even though I am annoyed by a lot of things about her, I can never deny that she is the single most important person in my life, and it is now my turn to start taking care of her. I have to be more patient and loving as the years go on, but I know I am everything to her, and her love for me alone has made me who I am. I will always be indebted to her.

And my dad -- we've grown so close over this year in the strange, wordless way of ours, and I only want in the year to come to continue building the relationship we never really had when I was a kid because I was always so insanely close to my mom. I think the world of him and all of the sacrifices he made and is making ot keep my family happy, safe, and healthy. I do not know a harder working person or anyone else who tries so hard to do things to appease people,and I hope I can be half the man he is (is that weird to say?) I am so lucky to have him in my life, and I know that his presence and the parallels I find every day in our personalities are very much a part of me.

Connor, my brother, of course, is my number one bro, forever. He is a part of me as much as my arms are. though we are permanently on separate courses in life, with his being in 5th grade and my collegeness, I hope i can still be a role model and an influence to him. When I am with him, I know I am the coolest person in the world, and well, everyone needs their own personal cheerleader, eh? He is annoying and sassy as hell sometimes, but I know he is a gift from God, and we will always be as close as I want us to be. This has been a tough year for him, and I hope I have been available to him. I want to try to be more so next year--to email him once a week on top of Skyping with the whole family.

People come and go in life, and of course for this year, this included a lot of my high school friends. While Facebook and cell phones have helped to keep in touch with many of them, I know that after this crucible of a first semester, some friends are going to be around for a long time to come--Dianna, Em, Jenn, Meg, and of course, that rascal Clay. I hope to keep up good relations with each of these people, knowing that we have weathered so much together and still have come out strong as a result.

Twelve months of the most earth-shaking events of my life yet, and where do I think I find myself? I am pleased that I still freaking rock at writing (excuse my arrogance), and being diligent in school, and that I still have an aptitude for stories and fashion. There are tons of changes--I am more easygoing than I was before, but I am also a little mor pretentious bout, well, being a scholar in the journalism school with my mac and iPhone. I hope I can keep that in check and remember where I came from--just because I have been blessed with a world o f privileges does not mean I am better than anyone else. We all have our own battles.

I have been more trusting about my future to God after the whole college admissions and college semester ordeal, and so I know God definitely has the best intentions for me. I am more lax and I know if I don't check my homework for the millionth time, I will still be fine--the world won't end. I am more outgoing and yet shy at the same time--thanks to the (sometimes really awesome anonymity) afforded by a big state school. I've dared to longboard on campus, approach strange slackliners in the park, and oh,c hatted on the phone with some internationally beloved musicians, no big deal. And yet, I am still fearful to strike up conversations in the laundry room and to bust out of my bubble.

But, I think, out of all these changes, its' the constants that count: my straightedge values, my work ethic, my faith--these have not only stayed in shape over the year, but have crystallized. These are the things that make me who I am, and so I have to recognize that I will have a different college experience and point of view on life as a result. It doesn't mean I will have a worse or more boring life, but that I will have a different one. So what is the use of lamenting a Friday night in when I know that I would be hating frat parties anyways? I need to always remember who I am.

Goals for 2012? Some are practical. I want to find a job, keep the freshman 15 from becoming the freshman 500. I want to keep my grades at 3.5 and above, to stay healthy, to stay in touch with my friends. Some goals are less practical. I want to be more open, more daring, more confident in the person God has mad me. I want to stay true to myself and love the same things, but I want to discover new world and be independent, polite, and good to everyone I meet. I want to be grateful and patient and kind, and not just smart or talented, but also wise and mature, who knows what the important things in life are, and has fun on the side.

I know it's a tall order, but hey. I've got a whole year ahead.

iron and salt

2011-12-27T00:47:00.003-06:00

screaming: Light a Roman Candle With Me - Fun.

Well, irony of ironies.

When I pulled up to Clay's house tonight, I did not know what to expect, at all, or really what I wanted to expect. He called me on my phone to make sure I was coming, and there were quite a few awkward milliseconds when he opened the door for me to come inside as he proudly sported his new leather jacket that his parents had gotten him for Christmas. We'd decided to go get some frozen yogurt as the sort of alias for our get-together, though we both knew that we were going to have yet another heart to heart (I feel like it's our millionth one yet...you'd think these sorts of things would get easier as time went on?). I was betting that he'd put it off until the end of the night, but within the first five minutes in his car, he struck up oh-so-casually that that had been one weird text I'd accidentally sent him.

I was really embarrassed about that first and foremost, and so I apologized over and over for lying to him, which I've never done, saying that I was so nervous about messing up our friendship, having been in such a good state after we went snowboarding together, but he shrugged it off and said it was fine, that he totally understood. And then he turned to me and said it was good we were finally talking about "us" because it had been like an elephant in the room. Which, to be honest, made relieved to know at least I wasn't just being the weird paranoid one.

"I just don't know what to do about these feelings," he literally said, and I was like:

OMGAPOSIDGJAL;SDKFJLW;HWHHHHHAAT.

Feelings?!?

He then went on talking about how he had been really excited for me to come home all fall, and then he changed gears and talked about a girl that he'd been hanging out with a lot, but who had just recently confessed to him that she liked him, and he was like all "I didn't know what to think about that, because what about freaking you?"

And I was like, uh yeah, what ABOUT freaking me?!?

At this point, I'm boring laser beams of death into his head with the intensity of my stare, because I couldn't believe this was actually happening, that these words were coming out of his mouth.

He went on to talk about how he had thought about "us" a lot, and that he had really missed me, and well, what did I think of the whole situation? Did I imagine we would make a good couple?

Still kind of fuzzy as to what exactly was going on, I tried to be all mature and foresighted and said that logically, it wouldn't work out because of the distance and the fact that I would only be in the state for a few more weeks, and that I wasn't going to be home for spring break and even possibly the summer, and that we both weren't much of long-distance relationship people, but the more I talked, the more I realized that the part of my brain that is still head over heels for Clay was busting out and shrieking in denial. I wanted this.

I tried to backtrack and be objective and say that, well, on the other hand, we could give it a shot and see what happens and not regret anything, but I was so timid about all of this because I still didn't understand fully what was going on. Things got tense, and so he changed the topic and asked me if there were any guys at Mizzou that had caught my eye, and I told him briefly about Nick and Roger, but that, honestly, nothing was going anywhere with those two. And then I looked at him and said that no matter what, I still hadn't met anyone who was like him, who I felt as connected with when I was with them, and that I still cared way too much about him. And that in terms of personality and maturity and the fact that we could freaking talk about things like this would make us a great couple.

Aurgha;sdklj.

We had our frozen yogurt and some more small talk, and then he drove us back to his house, apologizing that he had to cut our night short, but that he'd had other obligations that night. Rolling my eyes at how typically Clay-like he was being, I let him walk me to my car (in the sleeting rain), and finally, I wheeled around and was like, so...you just want to be friends?

He nodded, and (feeling my heart sink a little), I asked the big question hanging in the air for clarification: so. Do you like me?

As seventh-grade-esque as it sounds, I just needed to know. Even if it was for the selfish reason of feeling vindicated after nearly two years of freaking adoring this guy.

Clay squirmed a bit and stuttered a bit, and finally he was just like: Yes.

I would be lying if I didn't say that I felt the tiniest bit of satisfaction from that, but it still didn't change the fact that he wanted to just be friends because he didn't know what to do, and I think he is still a bit torn about the other girl, the one who goes to community college here with him, who is much more conveniently accessible than I will be within a few weeks.

But for that moment, it didn't matter.

Later, as I sort of kind of bawled my eyes out to my girl friends about how Clay's timing freaking sucks, he texted me an apology for making our evening awkward, but saying that he hoped we could still be as good of friends as we have been. But I'd realized by then that, after talking to my girl friends, I wasn't so sure I could just be so easily satisfied with that now that I knew we were both on the same page.

Tomorrow, I'm leaving with my family to go out of town to go furniture shopping for a few days, and when I get back, I think I'm going to tell him that, if it were up to me, we'd give it a shot. And maybe it will only last a week, but even so, maybe it will be an amazing week. I am still wrestling with the chance that I'll regret such emotional investment at a precarious time--who wants to go back to college for a whole semester with their heart at home? But on the other side is the regret that I didn't try, and that I didn't give it all that I had.

If he still isn't sure, or if he decidedly wants to be friends, then that's fine. Nothing will have changed--I'm confident our friendship can make it through even this. I'll go to school in a few weeks none the worse for the wear, because I'll know I tried everything.

And if he agrees, well...

"At least we would know that the sparks didn't glow
But we owe it to ourselves to try
So we aim and ignite!"

merrymaking

2011-12-26T19:07:00.003-06:00

screaming: When I'm Home - The Maine

Merry Christmas! Albeit, I'm a little belated, but I hope you all had a lovely holiday, especially if you were able to be somewhere warm! Not that I'm complaining--we've had so little (knock on wood) snow up in the Midwest so far this year that being able to go snowboarding in Wisconsin with my family was actually pretty nice. All soreness aside (I still feel like someone slammed me into a cement wall...and, also, I didn't know bruises could turn so many interesting colors...), I was so glad to spend the past weekend carving up and down the slopes. I even taught my little brother how to make it down the bunny hill decently! He's going to be such a stud when he gets older, what with his snowboarding and longboarding and skater-tude sass.

Being up in the mountains, trying to hold my own against the real legit snowboarders out (and, in chatting up some Madison boys on one lift ride, sort of succeeding?) and then spending the rest of the time blogging, watching Netflix (finally got Dirty Dancing and Pay It Forward off the queue...how in the world did I live beforehand?) and playing laser tag/mini-golf/other touristy Wisconsin types of things with my family definitely helped take my mind off of Clay for the most part...we ended up talking a little bit just about how the slopes were, but it made me so relieved that at least he didn't hate my guts after all that had happened. Is it sad to say that if Clay wasn't my friend, I don't know what I would do?

But he wanted to talk it over when I got home, but since that wasn't for a couple of days, it was a little agonizing to wonder just where our friendship was going to go. Oi. There is just so much drama within the span of our acquaintance. It's like a freaking saga, as my friend Jenn calls it.

Christmas day was actually spent home. We drove back on Christmas Eve, and I was so relieved to be in my own room again and be able to wrap myself up in solitude and books--going from being a full time college student on my own to being on vacation with my family for a couple of days straight doesn't sound like it should be that big of a transition, but it really was. We all spent Saturday night watching Sound of Music and unpacking. Big party animals, my family is. Christmas day itself was also low-key; we opened presents, I worked on my blog, my brother and I made cookies. My favorite part, actually, was going to see Mission Impossible 4 with my dad and my mom--my brother wanted to stay home, and since my grandma is living with us now, he was able to. So I got to just hang out with my parents on my own fir the first time in like, a decade, which was a luxury I never knew I had missed out on. So we got to watch a big bad PG13 movie and sort of all be adults about Tom Cruise shooting things up left and right.

It's weird to think my winter break is only 1/4 in, and I'm already settled into a sort of routine of finally getting to read up on my magazines, this book called In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson, the dude who wrote Devil in the White City, and even working on my summer plans. This morning, I sent off my job application to be an intern at Alternative Press--cross your fingers for me!

And even more so, I'm about to leave to go meet with Clay. Definitely cross those fingers.

loudmouth

2011-12-21T21:22:00.001-06:00

screaming: Such Small Dreams - La Dispute

Whoops.

It's times like these when I wish I could sell Verizon my soul in exchange for their deleting incriminating texts off of other people's phones. Or just, you know, go back in time. Whichever is easiest.

Prepare yourself to witness one of the top moments of 2011 on this end:

So yesterday, I got myself up at the lovely hour of 6 AM to go snowboarding with Clay--not to Colorado, thank goodness, because I can't imagine how early I would have had to get up for that, but just to a ski resort a few hours away. When we had been planning this trip on Sunday night, one of Clay's guy friends had wanted to come with us and Clay had been nice and said sure, but later he told me that he secretly wanted it to just be the two of us. Which, let's just be honest, is a really sweet sentiment to be told by anyone, am I right?

It was sleeting when I got to Clay's house, and he had left the door open because he was in the shower still, so I just sat in his kitchen eating the yogurt I brought with me, feeling sort of like a creep in the dark house but kind of not at the same time because it was Clay's house. When he bounded down the steps with his hair all wet to put on water to make tea, we were like oh hey man, and it felt so normal.

At the ski resort, I got real nervous about not having hit the slopes since last February, so even though I had my new board and was decked out in an appropriate amount of Burton and Volcom to pass for a pretty legit snowboarder, I begged Clay to let me do the bunny hill a few times first to get back into the swing of things. The first run was absolutely awful--you could have mistaken me for a tree strapped to a sled and it would have had the same effect. But after a few tries, it started coming back to me, and I felt brave enough over the course of the day to pwn a few intermediate slopes and even hit a box or two at the terrain park.

That said, it all came at a cost, of course. Clay was extremely sweet and would wait for me every time I fell (which was often), but eventually I was just like dude, go ahead, secretly wanting him to leave to find some jumps to work on so I could have more time lying in the snow, babying my horrifically bruised knees and the chronic whiplash.

We took a lunch break and found a spot in the corner of the pretty empty cafeteria to take off all of our gear. You would have laughed; I kept my snow pants on but undid them and tried to swagger around in them like all the hardcore older guys there were doing, but they fell down on me mid-line. Awkward. After lunch, we hit the runs for a couple more hours and went our different paths for a little bit, and by the time Clay found me out by the easier runs again, I was so exhausted and was nursing a huge headache from the whiplash, and so we called it a day and headed home.

All physical pain aside, it was such an awesome day. There are very few people I feel like I can get along with so well for twelve hours straight, but as much as I like to complain about Clay, I know I can't tire of him any time soon. However, just some little things from Sunday night stayed on the edge of my mind--like how he'd pretty much set up the perfect situation to snuggle in his basement while watching that movie, and how he'd been really gung ho about us going snowboarding alone together for the longest time, and that sort of stuff. Part of me wondered if he was going to do anything about it during our day together because it would have been the perfect time to do it, you know? So I was a little bit on edge to see if he was going to do anything out of the ordinary anyways. So humor my neurotic, over-observant self and tell me if I'm just crazy:

When we were on the lifts, there was this moment when I was talking about how we should take some pictures, and he offered to take one of us sitting there, so we scooted closer together to get in on the frame, and he put his arm around my shoulders on the lift, without actually touching my shoulders because I was leaning forward, but when he was done with the picture and gave me my camera back, he kept his arm there for the rest of the ride. I didn't know whether I should have leaned back and pretended everything was fine, or what, so I ended up just sitting there not addressing it, though sortof secretly liking how we probably looked like the cutest couple ever, sitting on the lift together with all of our snowboard gear.

And then you know how a couple of weeks ago, I'd had this dream about him? I told him (an edited version) about it just out of fun, not exactly meaning to mean anything by it, but Clay suddenly sat up and was like, what do you think it means? Do you think your dream means anything? And I was so confused, wondering if he saw something in the subtext of me having a dream where we ended up on a boat together and if I should say something about it, but I got nervous and was just like oh, haha, maybe it means we both like boats?

The ride back home was long, but still fun. One big thing I love about Clay and I is that our moods seem to always be on the same wavelength--we can go from periods of just quiet in the car as we're listening to music and staring out the windows in thought to blasting old Taking Back Sunday and music from the concerts we went to together and singing at the top of our lungs down the interstate, no sweat. When we stopped for dinner at tiny family restaurant off the highway, both of us wearing flannel shirts and beanies by accident, I'm sure we looked quite the sight, especially considering our general state of exhaustion/dishevelment from the day. After the dinner, which Clay kept trying to pay for, I wanted to fall asleep so badly in the car, but he wouldn't let me out of the fear that he'd fall asleep too, so we kept each other up until we got back home.

Today, I had to drive up to Wisconsin with my family to go snowboarding with them, which looking back on, may have been a reason to board with Clay earlier, because when I rolled out of bed today, I felt like someone had taken my body and slammed me repeatedly into a cement wall. Ohmigosh. Sometimes I think I'll know no greater pain than the post-snowboard daze, when every single muscle on my body is bawling its eyes out.

On our way up here, I talked to my mom a little bit and the subject of Clay came up, and how her friends always think that he's my boyfriend, and I confessed that, especially in light of how we've gotten along so well this break so far, I just really hoped I would one day meet someone else like him to be with seriously, because as hot as Roger or any other college guy here is, there is just something about Clay that I haven't been able to find in anyone else. It's that thing that makes me not embarrassed about bashing my face into the snow repeatedly in front of him, and the thing that makes me so content to just sit in a dark car listening to weird music for hours, and the thing that makes me just smile when we stop at a gas station for snacks, and he plops a Zebra Cake onto the counter like a total four-year-old.

And now the plot thickens:

Here at the hotel, I've been spending most of my day watching Inception and hanging out with my mom, and then my parents wanted to eat dinner together, so my brother and I went downstairs to eat a buffet all by ourselves. Along the way, I've been texting my friend Em just about the snowboard trip with Clay, and I pointed out some of the sort of weird things that Clay has been doing, saying in one text that it was almost like he was trying to pull some moves, but I couldn't tell if he was "just being Clay." Because it's true--Clay's dated plenty of girls, and so he knows how everything works. If it was any other guy besides him, I would have thought he was interested, but with Clay, you just never know.

I finished dinner with my brother and checked my phone to see if Em texted back, and she hadn't, so I thought that was weird considering we had been chatting a lot today, and then I saw that I had sent that text to Clay.

Oh. Yes.

I went from zero to completely mortified in two seconds flat.

Immediately, I called Em and another friend up in a panic, not having a clue how to deal with this because I'd never ever ever done anything like this before, and ohmigosh what do I do?!?! They advised me to play it off like I was talking about a different guy, so I tried to be cool and be like oh, sorry, wrong text about a different dude, man, but Clay saw right through it and texted me back an hour later saying that we needed to talk things through when I got back from Wisconsin, and not to be embarrassed about what was happening.

Easy for him to say. I wanted to crawl in a hole and just tear my hair out. And my fingers, so I could never text again.

As much as I wanted to just keep pretending that I hadn't been talking about him, I knew I couldn't A) lie to him more or B) even pull it off, because he knew I was an awful liar, and so after some emergency skyping with Lana (who proclaims that my life would be such a great reality show), I ended up being reconciled to the fact that, here we go, Clay and I would be having another interesting winter break.

In the end, I finally replied saying that yeah, it would be a good idea, that I was just being a girl and noticing some things that were out of the ordinary between us, hoping to sound as blasé and nonchalant as I could, but inside I wanted to just scream my head off.

I guess it could be a lot worse. At least he doesn't technically know how I feel about it--he doesn't know if I want to get with him again, or if I'm just weirded out by it since we are supposed to be in the friend zone. So I will just play it by ear, and when we meet up and talk, I'll just see whatever tack he wants to take, and go with it. Because really, what matters most to me is our friendship--my worst fear is that he thinks I can't handle being friends without overreacting to every brush of the hand and he decides we shouldn't ever talk or hang out again. Which is certainly possible, but with happy-go-lucky Clay (and the context of everything we've been through already and yet conquered), I don't see that as a big possibility. The other two options would be A) talking things through and re-establishing our friendship--at the cost of a little awkwardness but since it's us, it wouldn't last all that long, and then enjoying the rest of our break with a little more wariness (and caution on the texting impulse on my part) for everyone involved.

And then, of course, there is the possibility B) that maybe Clay really is feeling something, at last. And well, I don't know quite if I even want to/am able to think about that.

Ugh.

Welcome to my life, everyone.

like the winter and a sweater

2011-12-19T11:40:00.002-06:00

screaming: Ho Ho Hopefully - The Maine

Aaahhhh. There is nothing like the feeling of coming home. Leaving Mizzou was tough--there was so much hugging going on amidst the packing and last-minute learning of how to play Risk (I conquered Asia, no big deal), but when the two guys from my high school who I was carpooling with to go home showed up in my hall, I was like I'm outta here.

On our way back home, the three of us decided to make a pit stop in St. Louis because the guy who was driving had never been to the arch before, and he was really pumped to make use of the bright, sunny Friday that it was to do so. A rather motley trio, we navigated our way through "the Lou" and ventured inside the arch, although I almost got kicked out by security for forgetting that my mom had made me stuff pepper spray into my purse last August before I'd left for Mizzou, and I'd forgotten all about it until the security held up the huge sign that banned pepper spray and mace inside the arch. Just in case, I don't know, I was some pepper-spraying terrorist who wanted to bring down America, one spray at a time.

Even though I never hung out with these two guys much in high school, we managed to have a pretty good time, especially since this was our third ride together between our home and Mizzou, so we have a weird little caravan bond going on now, which is good! I always get the back seat, which means I can fall asleep and zone out of their more pot-centric conversations and wind up refreshed and ready to go to Golden Corral with my family when we hit home.

So my first night home was spent just prattling on and on to my family about everything that's been going on in the past three weeks (mostly because I've been getting really bad about calling more than once a week home), so there was so much to talk about. I gave my Mom advice on how to deal with my little brother's pre-teen sauciness and then hung out with him in my room, unpacking and unwrapping the snowboard my parents got me for Christmas (because I needed to get it mounted and waxed, and okay, because I am an eager beaver). Then it was just some good ol' Netflix quality time in bed, and then the sweet slumber of someone who doesn't have to climb to the top bunk and has no obligations in the world (for a month).

Most of this past weekend was spent torturously running on our old treadmill (I'm so spoiled by our rec center ones) to try to lose some of this freshman fifteen, working a bit on my resumes to send out just in case that deal with Design Bureau doesn't work out, getting to do some reading on my own (oh! the luxury!), getting pizza with old girl friends, and doing some mad Christmas shopping. Also, you would be happy to know that while at the mall, I was at Aerie (that American Eagle-esque bra store) and needed to pick up a black number for a dress I had, and I needed to check what size I was. I told the girl in the fitting room that I wasn't sure about my size, meaning that I wanted to go into a room to check my tags, but instead, she busted out the measuring tape and thought I wanted her to measure me. I couldn't think of a not awkward way to clarify, and so by happy accident I found out that I moved up two sizes.

So, basically, it was the happiest day of my life. Training bras, forever begone! (Not literally. Except maybe.)

I also dropped off my new snowboard at this sporting good shop and managed to convince them to let me pick it up a day early, because Clay wanted to go snowboarding tomorrow. And then my dad and I spent a good afternoon together going electronics shopping, which is sort of like a past time for us because it's one of the few things we both sort of know the same amount about. He ended up getting an iPhone, and so it was a riot trying to show him how to use it and gauging his utterly delighted reaction with the simplest things, like the concept of a touch screen. We ordered one for myself, too, because I am planning to go to London in the summer of 2013, so we needed a global device, and because, to be super honest, one of the most important things I learned this semester was that a smartphone is a journalist's best friend.

Which I know, sounds super snobby and uppity. I never ever thought I would be an iPhone type of girl, especially not with the rate that I always drop/step on/sit on my phone now. I know that with the African famine and a billion other things going on in the world, it really is not a matter of life or death to be able to play Angry Birds upon whim, and so I totally concede right now that any attempt to justify this when children are starving in this world is totally pointless. But I will point out that, especially with the Design Bureau thing coming up, and a newswriting class where I will have to produce articles every few days, having access to email for communicating with/hunting down sources, recording interviews, and doing other journalistic type tasks like even just keeping up with everything--is extremely simplified with a smartphone. So, that's my reasoning. It's shoddy, but it's there.

I guess the reason I feel like I need a disclaimer about it is because in a moment of total stupidity, I was telling a friend from home that I felt like a total loser at school without a nice phone because literally, 99% of everyone I know has an iSomething. Which was true, but I totally forgot that wasn't the norm around here at home, and so my friend, being the good friend that she is, was like dude, chill out, normal people don't have iPhones and they are not dying of need. So I guess that journo kid snobbiness that I have been so quick to condemn and laugh at at Mizzou is inadvertently rubbing off on me, and I definitely want to watch that and be careful, because if there's anything I don't want to do, it's to morph into a stereotypical yuppie journo student snot who thinks they're better than everyone else just because they know what The New York Times just tweeted 0.0009 seconds ago.

So, do call me out on those kinds of things if you detect any yuppiness going on. Deal?

I think it's good that I'm aware of this so I can be on the lookout, and it's so good to be back home where I can take a break from the high-pressure world of Mizzou journalism school and be with people who I know I can be the best version of myself with.

Like Clay.

Oh Clay.

Last night, he invited me to go watch this rec league hockey game with him because he knew someone who was playing, so I went over to his house after hitting the mall with Em, and the first thing I saw when I pulled into his neighborhood were all these tea candles set out along the curb, lighting up the whole neighborhood. It's a Christmas tradition for his neighborhood; for one night out of the season, they light candles and let them burn all night. And oh, it brought back so many memories, because exactly one year ago on their candle night last year was the night when I'd told Clay everything and I'd been so pathetically heartsick over him. He gave me a huge hug when he saw me on his porch, and ugh. It was so nice to be back with him, even one year after that fiasco.

After the game, we went to get some coffee, the whole time talking at a million miles an hour, like we hadn't seen each other in three years instead of three weeks, and then later we met up with the old "popular" crew from high school that Clay had sort of been in to go bowling, and it was actually a lot more fun that I expected, because college seemed to definitely make everyone a little less pretentious about dramatic, and it was just the fifteen of us having a good time and swapping stories about college.

Afterwards, Clay and I rented 30 Minutes or Less and went back to his house to watch it, and while we were moving his basement's couches around and finding blankets, we talked about going snowboarding tomorrow and how one of his friends wanted to come up with us, and we both found that we didn't really want him to go because we'd been hoping it was just going to be the two of us. And of course, i'd be lying if I didn't say it wasn't flattering to hear that he had wanted to spend a whole day with just me in the mountains (the Colorado trip was nixed because of his parents, thankfully). It was just because the more we talked, the more we realized that we still fit so well together, and it was freaking amazing. I wished my seventeen-year-old-self last year could have seen us.

Because we're such good friends, right? Friends can just want to be alone, the two of them, when they go snowboarding for a day, and friends can just want to be together for seven-plus hours at a time after not seeing each other for a month, and friends can share one giant blanket and sit on the couch so that our arms and feet are touching, and our hands are only three inches, tops, away from each other.

Right?

Oh, crap.

breakity break

2011-12-15T17:06:00.001-06:00

screaming: 100 Years - Five For Fighting

My bags are packed, my laptop's charged, and my last load of laundry is in the dryer (I am ashamed to say I have succumbed to the lower levels of morality and dumped someone else's laundry out to snatch a free dryer...if I said "everyone else is doing it" would that make it less hypocritical of me to complain when someone dumps my towels out?), and now I'm down to my last night in Columbia for the year. Weird. I feel like this is the only life I've ever known, and to think I'll be away for over a month blows my mind. I'll definitely miss everyone on my floor and all of my Mizzou friends, and especially my professors, to whom I gave thank-you cards (and not just because I'm afraid one day I'll be a broke journalist who needs a new cardboard box to live in...). Pretty much everything is tied up and tucked away and vacuumed.

Even this thing with Roger. Sigh. We never did end up hanging out after Thanksgiving break. Lana ended up giving me this cookbook on how to make alcoholic cupcakes for Christmas (part gag gift, part actually useful because the alcohol cooks out, anyways...right?), and I had told Roger about it in class (after he complimented me on my snowboarding jacket!) trying to hint that we should bake them since he is so obsessed with cupcakes and pretty impartial to alcohol. Class was the only time we ever saw each other, but we still talked a ton over the past weeks, especially in the evening when we were both studied-out. I even convinced him to watch a few episodes of New Girl, which he previously disdained.

Saturday night, he did ask me to come bake cupcakes with him, but I obviously didn't have a means to get across town at 9 PM, and he didn't offer a solution, so I doubt he was too serious about it, so we agreed that we should try to do it after we were both done with exams. After my last finals last night, I texted him to see if we were still on for what would have been hanging out today, but he was at a concert and so we didn't end up setting a concrete time.

Today, I've just been bustling around getting stuff done, selling back my textbooks, and packing up, so I asked him what time he wanted to do it, but it turned out that his roommates wanted to celebrate (i.e. drink a liiiittle) the end of exams tonight. He asked me when I was leaving, to which I had to be like, sorry bro, but I'm peaceing out tomorrow (I swear I didn't actually say it that weirdly), and that was that.

Oh well.

I guess I'm definitely disappointed that we never got to hit it off post-Thanksgiving the way I had really wanted, or even that he assumed after I texted him that I was leaving tomorrow that I would just automatically know all bets were off. Obviously, I don't expect him to discount his friends to hang out with me, even though I'm the one who's leaving for a month tomorrow while they'll be around for a few more days, and I know I'm being a girl about being like all but we were supposed to hang outttttt omgggg, but even a sort of pitiful "Oh sorry, I guess I can't make it today" would have worked.

Freaking boys.

But no worries, I won't let this get me down. It's coming at a good time, now that I think about it, because if we had hung out and I'd let myself be dazzled all over again like I do every time when I'm around him, I would be spending my winter break half hung-up on him and already imaging our wedding together. One month of free time + my overactive imagination does not make for a good combination. But now at least I know that we're just friends, and hey, that's cool. Friends last longer, and they involve much less emotional investment. Who knows what could happen next semester, anyways? Or better yet, who knows who else I could meet next semester?

All things considered, having gone from just staring at this kid in journalism class to really getting to know him, talk to him, and hang out with him a fair amount of times is a pretty darn good run for my first semester of freshman year at college, no?

Besides. I've got more important things on my plate. During finals week, I've also been taking a lot of breaks to work on my cover letter and resume, begging every older person with a shred of journalism experience that I know to read it and give me advice on it (the student career center probably thinks I'm stalking them), and this morning, I had my phone call with the managing editor from Alarm Press's Design Bureau magazine, which is this artsy little bimonthly that talks about fashion, product design, interior design, and pretty much all that is creative, based in Chicago.

The managing editor, a Mizzou alumn, had emailed me and told me this was just an informational phone call, which my mom had told me was a no-stress pre-pre interview, so I needn't get too worried about it, but I ended up googling "phone interview advice" ten minutes before the phone call just in case. And boy. Ten minutes was not enough, because it pretty much did turn out to be a phone interview. The editor apparently even looked up my writing portfolio blog (haha NOT this one) at deliaesthetic.blogspot.com, and she loved it, especially the Native American post. Hehe. So take a gander at that if you'd like--just so you know, if you add yourself as a follower, that does me a huge favor because when future employers like her see it, well, it makes me look pretty awesome. Just a selfish plug there. Now it's over though :)

This is the cover that Design Bureau put out for their first issue last year. How could you not want to work for a publication that covers foreign skater fashion?

The editor said that they don't usually hire summer interns who are undergraduates (much less just freshmen!) but she offered me a position as a free-lance contributor. Not for the actual magazine itself, but for the newsletter/fronter. I was like UM YES NOT A PROBLEM when she offered it to me, because even if it doesn't work out in intern department, I'm stoked just to get some experience writing for a publication, especially one that is not the school magazine. And, she said if I do pretty darn well at this free lance thing, they might consider me seriously for next summer, and that even though I was pretty young, my "sense of dedication showed."

Soo glad I put my 2938573 years served on student council on that resume.

So. I'm coming into Christmas break with some boss grades, no emotional ties to anyone back here, a real journalistic job, and a load of time to simply sleep, read, write, watch movies, and snowboard to my heart's content.

I'm excited.

finals

2011-12-15T14:28:00.000-06:00

screaming: We Are Young - Fun. (featuring Janelle Monáe)

Isurvivedfinalsweek.

To those of you who are still in high school, you probably have finals too, and you probably also have battle scars from the grueling past week. Oi. I thought high school finals were the proving ground for the rest of my life, but now I wish I literally had a badge (to uh, put on my Girl Scouts uniform?) that proclaims, "freshman final survivor."

It's not that college finals are awfully, impossibly you-can't-get-a-good-grade-even-if-you-memorized-the-whole-textbook difficult, but the whole process is definitely just plain different. In some ways, it's better. The thing I despised about finals when I was in high school was how teachers, even in the days up to the semester exams, still wanted to cram down unit tests and last minute information down your throats, and you still had to go to school for eight hours. In college, or at least at Mizzou, you get about a week off from classes. It's actually kind of blissful, because it gives you the opportunity to really buckle down and focus and just get it done.

My typical day during finals week went something like this:

9 AM - After sleeping in (relatively so, considering 8 AM stats class is no more!), I would go to the dining hall to get breakfast because Lana and I ran out of waffles in our room, and we both have enough meal points to feed Somalia to burn.

10 AM - Study study study.

11:30 AM - To the rec center! I actually ended up going for runs much longer than I've taken all semester. It helps when the fancy rec center treadmills' tvs are playing Forrest Gump (a little literal inspiration for running faster? I think so.), although it doesn't help when you get too caught up in Forrest's shrimp-boating and you trip on the treadmill. Awkward...

Then afterwards, I hit the shower and think about how if I'd joined the Peace Corps instead of this whole college business, I wouldn't have to study...ever...but luckily, before I can Google "how to drop out of college," I get too hungry, so then, ratty wet just-showered hair and all, I bound down the stairs to go visit the Mexican fast food joint in our basement.

Over the course of the semester, I have most definitely lost almost all care about physical appearance at times. I now can't really remember a time when I wasn't ashamed to wear my giant fuzzy cheetah-print slippers to the huge dining hall for dinner, which is probably really, really bad. But especially in the spirit of finals week, I figured everyone was too worried about their exams than to scrutinize my outfit, which was once picked out the night before with a meticulous, stylish eye, and now comprised of the first thing I touched when I rifled through my closet in the dark during the morning, while Lana was still asleep.

So Friday, when I was down to get my burrito, I saw that there was no line and pretty much literally skipped up to the cashier because I was so excited, and it didn't register at all what a hot, post-showered mess I probably looked like in my slippers and sweats, and of course, who would be the cashier that day but this sophomore guy from my Spanish class, of whom was of the good-looking persuasion and with whom I'd been caught staring at more than a few times.

We'd never talked before, but he definitely recognized me, so I sort of miserably/embarrassedly began talking to him about the Spanish final, and despite the growing line behind me, we got along pretty darn well if I do say so myself, until, uh, he started getting a bloody nose.

Now, normal people in my situation probably would have said something along the lines of oh my God you're bleeding! or even just bro, you have a uh...issue..., but obviously, I just can't be that quick-thinking or eloquent, so I just...stared. To my credit, I'd never seen anyone get a bloody nose before, so I guess I was not quite sure of what was going on for a few milliseconds there. But I ended up not saying anything until he noticed (which, okay, was only like a few seconds later. It wasn't like blood was gushing down his face while I just ignored it for ten minutes), and then he was like "oh. um. Excuse me." And he ran away to go find a napkin/hide.

I felt so bad, because if the situation was flipped, I would have been absolutely mortified. Especially since I had just stood there and watched, like an idiot, and so I felt really awful and awkward about the whole situation. His friend stepped in to do cashier duties and jokingly asked if I'd punched Spanish Boy in the face or something, and all I could think of doing was to ask if I could have red rice with my burrito.

It's official, ladies and gentlemen: Yours truly is socially awkward.

1 PM - Get burrito, retreat upstairs, lest Spanish Boy returned, because I still hadn't thought of anything to say to him. Watch episodes of New Girl online, possibly illegally. Take a break to tell Lana about the bloody nose Spanish Boy incident and get chastised for being socially awkward in the way only roommates can do.

2 PM - Get back to studying. Ugh. Interspersed with obsessive checking of the Facebook, just in case, I don't know, the apocalypse happened and finals get canceled. Because my first reaction to apocalypse would, of course, be the fear that I overstudied.

4:30 PM - Another New Girl episode for a break. Hey. I deserve it, right?

Here is a 30-second teaser for the Fox show, just in case you haven't heard it. Freaking <3 Zooey Deschanel.

6:30 PM - Dinner with Lana and other floormates, where we griped about our exams and how on earth we would be able to pack all of our stuff into a car ride home for the month-long winter break.

7:30 PM - study study study.

9 PM - Usually at this point, I collapse out of mental exhaustion, and then Lana and I order pizza and watch movies to take away the pain. When we watched Bride Wars the other night, it almost saddened us to have to return to doing "mundane" tasks like preparing for exams instead of, oh I don't know, planning our weddings and our lives.

Midnight - pass out into a deep, deep sleep.

The finals themselves actually went really well--Spanish was first, and it was not so much as hard as it was just torturously long, so when I stumbled back home from it, Lana and I watched The Devil Wears Prada and gorged ourselves on hot chocolate and pumpkin scones I'd picked up from Starbucks, and then we passed out into a sugar coma/nap for a few hours to recharge. Last night, I took my stats and Ancient World final within the same four hours, and afterwards, Lana and I vegged out in front of the tv until 1 AM, just trying to cleanse all of the educational content from our minds.

#the college life.

must be dreaming

2011-12-10T10:16:00.001-06:00

screaming: Some Days - The Maine

So I just woke up from this dream where I was at home, just eating my dinner with my family, when I hear a car door slam and it's Clay outside on my driveway, getting into his car. I go outside to see what's going on, and he's shaking his head, visibly upset saying, "No, no, I shouldn't have come," and so I have to practically grab his arm and be like, "No, tell me what's going on, why are you here?"

Then he just breaks down in front of me and tells me his parents are getting a divorce (Oh my God, why am I such a morbid dreamer????), and literally falls into my arms, and we stand there just holding each other, and I'm just like why does this make me so unnaturally happy?

In the dream, I try to pat him and tell him to feel better, but that my family was going on vacation on a cruise the next day, so I couldn't sit with him and spend time with him, and then when my family actually gets on the cruise ship, Clay is standing there joyfully, waving hello and telling me that he got a last minute ticket for the cruise.

I'm going crazy.