Friday, July 31, 2009

well well

It's a rainy Friday afternoon.
I wore my new dress for the first time today. Fun fun.
Atmospheres never fail to capture me. It's been a little rainy and a little cloudy and definitely drippy all week. I work in the main library on campus, and it only has one door that "patrons" are allowed to use. There are a couple service entrances, but basically, if you want to enter, you have to go in through the main door. A semi-enclosed patio runs around the entire back part of the building, and the lack of doors means it's pretty deserted most of the time. It's a very austere sort of place, that patio. It has wooden benches and chairs and tables, all nailed down so that crazy college students don't steal them. The library building is 11 stories tall, and very square, with a protruding roof, the last couple stories of which are supported by big, square columns.
On Wednesday, I went outside to this patio to have lunch. It started to drizzle again, so I took refuge, with my back-pack, under the columns. So I sat there.
The clear gray light, the columns, sitting on pebble-tile, feeling the breeze, and listening to the radio... it was beautiful. Reminded me so much of Europe, and sitting in someone's portal. An atmosphere.
I wonder if, as you grow older, events and people get muddled in your head because every new event, or place, or person, reminds you of one that you've encountered before? And then you have... composite images, composite memories, where stuff overlaps so that you can't quite see the original anymore? It strikes me as a sad process. Never to be able to experience anything crystalline-ly new.
Anyway. It's a rainy Friday, and now I'm sitting in my new dress, thinking thoughts that will blow away in the wind as soon as I step out my door.
Apparently not all gloom is truly gloomy.
E.O.

Monday, July 27, 2009

ursa major or minor?

So I've spent the past hour or so attempting to finally make a decision on my major/minor, just to get that pesky decision out of the way. Needless to say, my head aches with rules and requirements, courses and categories, regulations and pre-requisites.
I took a class in linguistics this summer in order to decide whether or not I want to major in it. The result? Almost certainly, yes. I could easily be happy studying various aspects of "the discipline of linguistics" for the next coupla years. The downside? There is no chemistry minor, and I haven't yet ruled good ol' chem out as a field of interest. See, no one cares what you actually TOOK in college, only that you took something, and that it resulted in you getting a degree. So it's no good me taking a bunch of chem classes because I'm interested in them if I won't get recognition for it later on, especially since chem is generally acknowledged to be more useful than ling.
This is the type of dilemma that has been raging in my head for the past loooong time, causing me to dither, and click, and read, and hope for some sort of clarity.
The thing is, I am trying to fulfill two purposes at once:
1. To enjoy college as much as possible, and take classes that truly interest me (so as not to waste my time being bored and learning virtually nothing because of it)
2. To end up with a degree that will earn me some respect and a Good Job.
Reminds me of that one bible verse about the impossibility of serving two masters. Sigh. The first option is infinitely more attractive to me, but common sense says that that attraction will pass in favor of the second option fairly soon after graduation, if not before. But in considering option 2, I have to wonder, as Imogen Heap asks in some song or other... is this it? I get a job, I work, I get paid, I have a family, end of story? It seems like an anticlimax, the petering out of a momentum I've been gathering my whole life. Isn't there supposed to be a big explosion at the end? A... a launch? Why do I feel like a rock sitting in a slingshot that's been tensed, pulled back, and is about to let go... and then robbed the rock of the upward part of it's flight?
Ok, so that was a pretty sucky and rather confusing metaphor, but sheesh, it's summer, give me credit for at least still putting my brain to use. :P By rights it should be turning to mush and dripping out my ears right now. it's july!
and i haven't seen ursa minor OR major in a long time. I wonder what's going on up there?
over 'n out.
E.O.

Wednesday, July 22, 2009

wine

Well, in order to explain how this post came to be titled "wine," I would have to write an entire essay of an explanation. To make a long story really, really short, I am taking a class in film this summer, concretely photography and film, and we were reproducing a scene from Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona, and I was somehow wrangled into being an actress, a.k.a. Vicky.
(insert rant about how I am in a film class to LEARN ABOUT FILM, not in drama class, and how one of the people who was just taking the class to get 4 credit-hours should have been an actress, since THEY WOULDN'T CARE EITHER WAY)
In this scene, the two girls are at a restaurant, sipping wine, when a suave, arrogant Spanish (Barcelonian, hehe) guy comes to attempt to pick them up. If you are an astute reader, you have spotted the wine. So did my classmates. And of course, as most college students would be, were all for the idea of having an excuse to bring wine to class. Me, I have never had a drink of wine in my life. Not a sip. Not a drop has passed these lips lest it be cooked into a dish I happen to be eating. In fact, I really haven't had any alcohol to speak of, ever. And I was NOT about to try it for the first time in the company of 20 strangers, on set, in class. Somehow I imagine that the outcome of doing so would be embarrassing in several ways.
So, I pretended to sip my wine, and of course, in pretending to do so, got a whiff of it. All my chem lab days came back to me in a flash. Memories of sterilizing instruments, of poisonous and/or organic mixtures, and of dissecting odd creatures came to my mind, along with the thought "people DRINK this? for FUN?" - after which I had to laugh at myself and my naiveté.
Sufficient to say, I did not join in the camaraderie-like drinking afterwards (our professor provided glasses- he's just that type of guy), and resumed my usual place in a group of people, that of being the one going against the grain in some completely odd and most often unnecessary way. Sigh. I had kind of missed it. :P
and thus concludes my post on wine. I hope you've had at least a chuckle at my expense. =)
over 'n out.
E.O.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Goals for this Year

1. Decide on a major
2. Get a better camera
3. Make some decisions about my social life and this whole "my friends live x-thousand miles away" issue.

there. now the blogosphere knows.
keep me accountable, world wide web.
yeah, right.
sigh.

Monday, July 6, 2009

songs

Kingdom, by Bethany Dillon
Thank Goodness, by the cast of Wicked

For some reason, these two songs keep popping up in my head at random, non-associated times.
Do other people wake up singing songs? Or is that just me? It's like there's a minute or so where my brain is in free-fall in-between wake-up mode and then it settles into a groove. A song appears out of the nether.
Also, rather than complete songs, i get fragments:

"I hear her soul/is so unclean/pure water could melt her./melt her!/ please, somebody go and melt her!"
"when you were first summoned/to an audience with oz/and though he would not tell you why initially/ when you bowed before his throne, he decreed you'd hence be known/as glinda the good/ officially./ and with a jealous SCREAM/the wicked witch burst from concealment/where she had been lurking/ surruptitiouly"
~Thank Goodness, or some other Wicked song.
"help me see the light/i'm reaching through the fight/Yaweh, show me the kingdom/ arms open wide, yeah, swallowed up by light/yaweh, show me the kingdom"
"why are some women barren/while the wicked's house is full?"
"teach me how to hum this/'cause i don't know the words yet"
~"Kingdom" by Bethany Dillon

in other thoughts, I REALLY need some new music. like, stuff i can grab hold of. I just realized I've basically had only a few new songs since I was 15. This is SAD. And yesterday I was singing a song I learned in elementary school. It was supposedly in Gallego, but when i sang it for my friend from Galicia a while back, she just gave me this look and said she couldn't tell if it really WAS Gallego, 'cause my accent was so bad. Also, some of those words don't exist in gallego, apparently. So, question:
Why am I still attached to this song, which I'm singing in a language that doesn't exist?
Although I am pretty certain that the language doesn't exist, I know exactly what the words mean when I sing them. How is this possible? Just how bizarre IS that? Linguistically speaking, it's a fascinating idea. It feels exactly like a normal language...
anyway, now I'm getting off-topic and into my class-related ponderings. :P
I hear it's Hannah's half-birthday, so shout-out to her! :D w00t! You made it through another six months of life mostly unscathed! Congrats my friend. You're a lovely part of my life and I have thoroughly enjoyed the past six months of being your friend. ")
but, enough of my mental ramblings. I simply felt like it was time for a new post. :P
over 'n out.
E.O.