February 2012
2 posts
What happens when Derek is too busy collating to...
I am currently sitting on my couch enjoying a day of shameless self-indulgence. So far the itinerary includes experimenting with brightly colored nail polish, a dozen donut holes from the new donut place in town, and a rented copy of Breaking Dawn Part One.
I’ve been sorta sick this week. Everyone knows nail polish and food and sappy chick flicks are part of the proper recuperation...
“Now a woman’s wrath is a fearful thing, and all men fear it, for according to...”
– The Romance of Tristan and Iseult
January 2012
3 posts
Foreboding
Have you ever had the feeling that something big is coming? That a storm is brewing? The inevitable clash of titans is near?
The thought of the fallout gives me chills.
Food and a Birthday List
For most of my life, my cooking/baking experience has been limited to meals that come in a box. On occasion I’ve had to add an egg or preheat an oven, but that’s been about it.
Until now.
Derek and I have recently begun an adventure in learning how to cook. We both like Italian food (or at least Americanized Italian food), so we figured we’d start there.
We started out...
Back to School
For the first time in my life I’d rather not be starting back to school.
I was always that odd child that counted down the days until the first day of class. I love the smell of new school supplies, the crisp woodiness of unused notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils. I schedule and reschedule and relish in hunting down bargains on used textbooks.
But this semester I’m just not...
December 2011
4 posts
Finals Confession
When I calculated what I needed on my Greek final to keep my “A” and found out it was only a 74, I might have stopped studying and started looking at pictures of toy poodle puppies instead.
“Attaboy” from the Goat Rodeo...
Retirement
For more than half of my college career I’ve served as an officer for ΓΤΩ. I’ve held four different positions and dedicated every Sunday night since back in 2009 to officer meetings. I’ve planned girls’ devos and retreats and banquets and club meetings. I’ve laughed and I’ve argued and I’ve cried.
It’s been one of the most rewarding, educational,...
November 2011
3 posts
Lessons for Today
Blinkers save lives. Use them.
Good customer service makes sales. Be friendly and helpful.
When something’s thrown together last minute, it shows. Plan ahead.
Loving and Losing
It’s homecoming week, and my university has gone positively insane with inter-club rivalry and competition. Now I’m not completely knocking competition (I think it encourages work ethic, ingenuity, and self-improvement), but it seems that more often that not, at least in the context of clubs, it devolves into bad attitudes and bitterness. I’m not calling out any one group,...
I've never been so happy to get a 66 (out of 80)
I just got out of my Western Civ I CLEP test and…. I PASSED! By a very comfortable margin!
Although, let’s be real, if I hadn’t I’m not sure I would have been able to call myself a history major (it supposedly covers the content of a gen ed world history class), but some of those questions are awfully nit-picky. Not to mention that the test covers 4500+ years of...
October 2011
7 posts
Happy Halloween
Two years ago today I was doing the Macarena in a makeshift toga made from sheets while floating on a cruise ship around Greece. We won the costume contests, btw, and the prize was a free drink pass. Virgin margaritas all around!
Last year I skipped on trick-or-treating and snuck off to Chickasaw to look at the stars with Derek. We were so cute and newly in love.
This year I don’t have...
If you give a gal a brown suede skirt...
…she’ll ask for a new blouse.
Knowing that I’d be pretty much broke this semester, I’ve done a pretty good job of not buying clothes this semester. I think my only purchase was a pair of on-sale black pants, which I’d been “needing” for a while and wear at least once a week.
But I’ve desperately needed to restock on a few basics (think boring...
Winter's Coming
Just in time for the weather to turn bitterly cold (and by bitterly cold, this Texas gal means 45 degrees), my beloved but seasonal Peppermint Mocha is back on the menu. For me, that little hint of artificial peppermint syrup is the surest signal of the change of the seasons.
Too bad Sasha told me it was too early to start playing Christmas music in the room.
6 tags
“Post-positivists reject the idea that any individual can see the world perfectly...”
– http://www.socialresearchmethods.net/kb/positvsm.php
Health, Week 3
So, here’s an update to my previous blog about my “New Approach to Health.”
Week 1 (drinking at least 64 oz. water daily) went great. Drinking lots of water is probably the most beneficial thing I’ve ever done. I felt more rested, didn’t have headaches, wasn’t as hungry, and overall just felt better than I have in a while.
Week 2 (Week 1 + some form of...
Glam
Painted nails = quick/cheap glamour when it’s just been one of those “yegh” days.
Thank you, new bottle of Plaza Plumberry.
And on another note, who gets to come up with these crazy polish names and where can I apply?
September 2011
6 posts
A New Approach to Health
If you’ve followed this blog for any amount of time you know that I struggle with eating right and exercising regularly. Every so often I’ll blog excitedly about a new eating plan or exercise routine, but pretty soon it’s been forgotten.
I can make a lot of excuses: I’m a busy college student, I don’t have access to a lot of fitness equipment, I have knee pain...
Harry Potter (or, The End of My Childhood)
Note: This is abysmally late. It got saved in my “drafts” folder and was never published, but since I’ve already spent the time on it, I might as well publish it, right? It’s never too late for a little Potter-Mania…
It’s a good thing I really love my job at MSYC, because it kept me from the midnight premiere Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.
...
Woes of a Senior Undergrad
I realized today that the Dean of the graduate school at the university I REALLY want to go to is a leading Josephus scholar. He even wrote a nice little (and by little I mean 500 page) book called Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts, and Apologetic Historiography.
No biggie, right? Except I’m writing focusing my Honors Thesis on Josephus and his historiography. And...
Classes
How many undergrads can truly say that they love each and every class they are taking? I mean, I stressed out when I accidentally slept through a class a couple weeks ago not because I thought I’d get in trouble or was missing a test or anything - I just hated not being there and not getting to learn.
I am so blessed to be at a fantastic school surrounded by wonderful people where I can...
August 2011
5 posts
Yay for Today!
Today rocked. For about 20 million different reasons, but I’m only going to mention four.
I got to catch up with my old friend Bethany in the library.
I called 5 prospective students, and none of them hung up on me! That’s a big deal. But really, these girls I called were awesome. They’re all from Colorado and super sweet and full of personality, and I chatted for about...
6 tags
In the Words of Mark
This semester I’m serving as Women’s Chaplain for my social club (for an idea of what social clubs are, think a coed sorority, but conservative Christian school style). My primary responsibilities for the semester are to organize weekly girls’ devotionals and plan a weekend retreat.
I’ve thought all summer about what the theme for this semester’s devotionals would...
Workin' Woman
I have a real job now. A real job with real hours and real responsibilities and decent pay. It’s only part-time, but it’s still probably the most grown-up job I’ve ever had.
This year I’ll be serving as the Admissions Intern over the Southwestern US (give or take a couple states).
That means that if you’re a senior in high school and a resident of California,...
Big 12 vs. SEC
Since I’ve moved to Tennessee I’ve hated on the SEC, especially in football. I felt it was my Texan/Big 12 duty to stand up against the obnoxious Alabama, Auburn, and UT (Tennessee, to clarify for all my Longhorns fans) supporters around me. They’ve even turned me obnoxious - I’ve developed the habit of yelling Roll Tide! or War Eagle! or singing “Rocky Top”...
July 2011
7 posts
Weeks 6 & 7
There’s only one week of MSYC left. I’ve been trying not to think about it too much or I’m afraid I’ll start crying.
Week 6 I had a mixture of girls ages 9-14 in my cabin. They were all from the same youth group, but other than that there was hardly a similarity between them. Some were neat freaks (a couple girls went around and straightened up the other girls’...
21
Today was one of those landmark birthdays. But instead of celebrating with my first beer (I don’t drink) or handgun carry permit (I’m not really into guns), I rode in the front seat of a car with a 15-year-old driver. You see, at age 21 I am now legally qualified to supervise a kid with a learner’s permit.
Other than this important rite of passage, I celebrated my birthday...
Week 5
It’s been hot. Ridiculously hot. I’m from Texas, so I’m used to the heat and humidity, but being out here by the lake in all this rainy, swampy grossness totally sapped my energy during Week 5. Luckily, my cabin was only half full, and my girls were marvelously well-behaved, so even though I was feeling tired and apathetic and half-wishing that I’d picked a job with some...
GRE Revisited
So… remember that one time I blogged about how I’d done well on the GRE? Well, turns out you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. I did well on the quantitative and verbal sections of the test and I got my scores immediately for them. I didn’t get my score for the writing section until yesterday, and it’s lower than I’d expected. Significantly...
4 tags
Loving Unconditionally
At some point in my childhood, despite countless renditions of “Jesus Loves Me” and reassurances from Sunday school teachers that God loves the whole world, I somehow became convinced that God’s love for me was dependent on my good behavior. Perhaps it was an unintended outgrowth of my deep conviction that salvation is dependent on obedience. Perhaps it was a feeling of utter...
Love and Marriage
This past weekend, the first of my “high school friends” (ie: those who are not members of the church of Christ and/or who did not attend FHU) got married. It wasn’t a shotgun wedding and they’ve both finished college.
That might seem like a small thing, but I’m sitting here hyphenating her name in my phone and feeling like the two worlds in which I live just...
June 2011
7 posts
GRE
Because several people have inquired: yes, I took my GRE, yes, it was difficult and draining, and yes, I did well. Very well, in fact. Not headed to Harvard well, but well enough to feel confident that if I don’t get into a particular program it won’t be because my GRE score wasn’t good enough. And no, I won’t share my score on my blog; I feel like that would be somehow...
Fiction
Fiction is life with the dull bits left out. -Clive James, critic
Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction is truer. -Frederic Raphael, screenwriter and author
To me a story is true not because it happened, but because it happens to make sense. -Unknown
Emotional truths can sometimes be conveyed more effectively, more compellingly, through fiction. -Diana Ossana, author
Fiction is...
Weeks 2 & 3
Since this week is my off week, in a way my time at MSYC is just about halfway over. It’s incredible how time flies.
During Week 2 I had my first campers of my own. In a complete shift from the first week, most of the kids at camp were middle or high school age, so the dynamic was completely different. Rather than worry about keeping kids sunscreened and hydrated, I had to worry about...
Afraid of motherhood… →
Obviously, marriage and the question of becoming a mother are, for me, years away. I’m certainly not saying that I never want to have children, and in all probability, I will have them, but Rachel Held Evans has done a fabulous job of expressing a few of the fears I have about one day becoming a mother while also articulating her concerns over the common belief among Christians that a...
On memory, lifespan, and something of what makes...
andrewbaggott:
Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer I learned to drive. Z happened the first weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life...
Week 1
I can now say that I’ve survived my first week out at Mid-South Youth Camp. In some ways it seems impossible that the first week is already over; in other ways it seems like I’ve been living out here for months instead of a week and a half.
It’s been incredible. I’ve always loved camp, and I’m soooooo excited that I’m getting paid to attend camp and do what I...
May 2011
7 posts
Just a little off the ends...
I seem to make all my major hair decisions rather spontaneously. Last time this happened I dyed my hair (only semi-permanently) red. This time I cut off 10 inches. To make the story short, I went in to get a trim and got a horrible, uneven cut. Exasperated, I decided to visit a new stylist and do something drastically different. I’ve wanted to cut my hair short for a while, but...
Sparkly
Before anybody freaks out, I feel the need to preface this by saying that I am not engaged, nor am I anywhere near getting engaged. Let me repeat, I AM NOT GETTING MARRIED. And no, this is not meant as a hint, so don’t go bugging poor Derek.
But, I do like shiny things. And between a recent bachelorette party for a friend, about half a dozen acquaintances getting engaged this past...
Senior
I’m having a hard time getting used to answering “I’m a senior” when people ask how far along in college I am. A senior? Seniors are getting jobs and having weddings and renting apartments and comparing health insurance policies.
Seniors are OLD. I’m not old.
Welcome to My Summer
This summer I’m going to be working for 8 weeks as a counselor at Mid-South Youth Camp. It’s a nearly round-the-clock job Sunday–Friday and it’s going to be a blast.
I’m also going to taking an independent study course in Latin, which essentially means I’m teaching myself.
Yesterday, I got my grammar (Moreland and Fleischer’s Latin: An Intensive Course),...
Entrance Exam Woes
I thought I had an excellent vocabulary… and then I started reviewing for the GRE.
And let’s not talk about how in the 3 years since I’ve taken a math class I’ve forgotten even basic concepts. You know, like the quadratic equation. After I used to brag about getting a 5 on the AP Calculus exam.
Pathetic.