Holiday cheer?

     Whew! We're finally winding down the end of the year, and it's to sit back and consider the extremely different attitudes that people hold towards the holidays. I have a fairly relaxed view of most of the world (except when I'm driving, but that's a different story!), and when I see people rushing around, either trying to get everything done just right, or angry at the world for everything going on around them, it baffles me a bit. So to that end, here is my list of the different attitudes that people take towards the holidays:

1) Keeping up with the idea of the Jonses: Even if this person is the only one in the neighborhood to decorate, they will be the one with a display you can see from outer space. Every single thing that "should" be done around the holidays is meticulously done. Their place looks amazing, but you could use their nerves as violin strings, because they can't relax, there's just too much to be done!

Reading and languages

     When I was young, I devoured books. Put a book in front of me, and as long as I could get into the author's style of writing, the rest of the world would vanish until I finished the book. Stopping for things like eating or sleeping was just such a hassle, and I'm sure I got into trouble numerous times for staying up too late with a book under the covers. At the time, I could not understand people who didn't get into reading- I was sure something must have been direly wrong with them in order to pass up such a great experience and a chance to explore both the real world and new ones.

     Fast forward a number of years, and I start to understand those people. The first revelation that lessened my desire to read was that there are only so many ways to tell a story. I look for patterns in everything, and eventually I realized that most books can be ultimately broken down into:

• character development,
• conflict,
• solution,
• happy ending.

Happy day after....

     Being as that I have just come home from spending the day with family, and spending six hours on Saturday drawing Christmas cards,  I am going to simply give you this:

     There will be a full-length post on Wednesday to replace today's, and then the usual post schedule will resume on Friday. Hopefully by then the holiday chaos will have passed (I don't really do New Year's celebrations), and things will calm down a bit. Right before school starts up again, yay!

     Happy Holidays to you and yours. Cheers!

Faith in humanity

     As a general rule, I try to believe in the overall decency of humanity. It's not always the easiest thing to do, especially when the news is consistently full of hatred and violence, while "human interest" stories get only a brief nod on some back page, but it is possible. Most of the time it involves paying attention to the world around you, willfully looking for the little good deeds that are done, even if it's just a smile on the street or a word of encouragement to someone who's trying as hard as they can. But every now and then, the world seems to realize you need more than that, and it blindsides you with a really memorable occurrence.

     A number of months ago, Elf, a very close friend of mine, contacted me for help writing up a resumé for one of her friends who had recently lost his job. I am frequently called upon for help with writing and editing (I guess being a Linguist comes in handy sometimes, eh?), so I gave the go-ahead to send it over. In the course

Coincidence or foresight?

     This story takes place during Thanksgiving week. I was out shopping with my mom, and she needed to grab some spice for the turkey, so we pulled in to a Whole Foods somewhere in Maryland (I wasn't really paying attention to the particulars, so that's as close as you get to an accurate description). Now, the Whole Foods stores in Colorado are, for some reason, relatively small- certainly no larger than your average grocery store, and in some cases, about the size of those tiny ethnic food stores. The one in Maryland that we went to, on the other hand, you could easily clear the aisles and hold car races inside. Short ones, but still car races. The parking lot is underneath the store, and once you climb the stairs (or ride the escalator, but that seems counter-productive to me), there's a Mecca of healthy food and organic stuff laid out before you.

     The one down side to this is that if you don't know where what you're looking for is, good luck finding it. We were after juniper berries, and while it's possible that they would be in the spices aisle, we didn't see anything that clearly looked like or said "spices." I did, however, see an employee helping someone else at the end of

Time for some reconsideration.

     As a general rule, I tend to avoid talking politics. To be perfectly honest, I haven't really felt, in the past, that I was sufficiently aware of the situation to make an educated statement, so I simply listened and changed the subject. However, as I was listening to a parody of "God Bless the USA" by Lee Greenwood today, it got me to thinking. Back a couple years ago, when that version of the song came out, I liked it. It was singable, it had a good message, and quite frankly, I was relatively proud of being American. Not enough to get me kicked out of other countries for being obnoxious, but I felt that the US was in decent shape.

     Can you see where this is going? Yeah, I don't really feel that way anymore. Perhaps it was my being educated on the circumstances that exist in other countries (did you know in France, you are required to take 30 days- a month- of vacation per year? When's the last time you heard of anyone taking even close to that in

Summary of Finals weekend

     AKA: why there are no sketches today. I know, I know, it's been a couple weeks since I've actually drawn something- my fingers are going to atrophy and fall off! However, I would like to submit to you my schedule for this weekend as a valid reason why I have not been drawing. Comprehension will be facilitated by pictures, I promise!

Saturday:

• 8:00 am Wake up, bring in the paper before the neighbors steal it, lay down on the floor to read it. Fall asleep on the paper.
• 9:00 Wake up again and panic, thinking I've missed the final. Realize I have three more hours to study; try to brush up on everything at once.
• 12:00pm Have lunch in an increasingly panicked state, head to Russian final. 

Surfing and skydiving

     Oh, look, another blank page. Having spent the last week staring at an unfinished, 10-page literature paper that is due tomorrow, I hope you'll forgive me for being slightly unenthused about looking up to see another unfilled document. Fortuitously, however, this one requires neither citations, nor research, nor reading yet another dry, morbid, depressed critique on yet another societal injustice. Instead, let us consider surfing and skydiving. Random, I know, but roll with it for a moment...

     Back in 2008, my life was pretty decent. I had a solid (I thought) job, that I didn't utterly hate and allowed me to put money in the bank to save for those rainy days that came sooner than planned. I had no real ties or commitments to anything, no real debts, and few hassles. As such, I felt that there was no better time than the present to try out a few things that had been on my unwritten bucket list. During the summer, I tried out surfing at a camp in California. While I made a very good friend there, I was still pasty white girl, and the very first day saw me with severe enough sunburn that I was limping the entire week, and decided that surfing was not for me.

This, but all over. 

Papers and finals.

     It's that time of year again, when students everywhere are catapulted out of the happy complacency of knowing their daily routine, into the stark cruel reality of facing down exams and final papers. Coming back from a delightful week off, after 14 weeks of the same thing, we all realize that there are only two weeks until finals. And unfortunately, by the time you realize that, one of those weeks is gone.
 
     As someone very wise once said to me, however, college is not so much about learning things, but rather about learning how you learn things. And I know that the best way for me to get something done is to let it ferment in the back of my head. So while it may not seem like I've been doing much this week to prepare for finals, I've actually been archiving, cross-referencing, making connections, and hoarding away everything I could for the upcoming ordeal. Once the weekend hit, that's when it was time to get everything down on paper.

     So the last two days have primarily been spent trying to force three-dimensional thought patterns onto two-dimensional paper, a process I've discussed and ranted about many times before. What's more, this particular

Back into the swing of things

     When I was a teenager, I remember looking at the world and being offended at how most adults were such creatures of habit. Day in and day out, they had their routine and stuck to it, rarely changing anything or looking around at the amazing world around them (at least, from my perspective, that was the case). It looked like such a dreary, boring, grey life, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

Monday (that's me in the middle, watching)