Dear Girls of UVA…

…leggings are not pants. They never have been and never will be. Do not wear them instead of pants.

…it is not necessary to use approximately one fourth of a bottle of perfume before walking out of your room (besides, it’s cheaper to use only 2 squirts instead of 26).

Falltime Schooltime

For about four days, I thought that maybe I wanted to go to law school. I am not exactly sure why I thought this, but I did. I looked at an LSAT book and got excited about learning the best and fastest ways to do logic puzzles, and thought that actually, the analytical section didn’t look too bad, though of course I’m still fairly slow because that part of my brain is out of shape.

For those of you whose eyes glazed over as soon as you saw “LSAT,” I’ll summarize: I am a nerd and I like logic puzzles and I miss school.

So for four days I’ve looked at law programs (well, a cursory look), studied logic problems like they were my job, and actually felt mildly better about my life. (besides, seeing that Yale Law has a very small number of students and they don’t give grades sounds amazing… wait… the rest of the country thinks so too, that’s why it’s at the top. ok it all makes sense now.)

Today I realized that going to law school would mean that I want to be a lawyer. I don’t really know that I want to be a lawyer. I just want to go back to school, and studying very hard and using the analytical part of my brain sounds fun. Yes, you shake your head, but being in an environment where my brain is challenged sounds perfect. Living in a college town makes me realize how much I enjoy learning, and how much I really want to study again.

But what do I want to study? I want to know what I’m going to do after I finish this hypothetical grad program, and that really is the hang-up. Oh, that and getting into a good/decent program, because I haven’t done anything impressive with my life thus far, but I will eventually need some kind of job to pay off the debt that will be up to my eyeballs once I finish.

Pop Culture and Daily Life

I saw a sign today advertising an upcoming neighborhood hike which said something like

Twilight nature hike

This is how I know that pop culture has an effect on me: I immediately thought does the sign refer to the time of day at which the hike will occur or does it refer to a type of hike –one which might involve vampires in the woods?

Family Time

My brother (looking at the row of small scratches on my right arm): What happened to your arm?

Me: The fountain got me while I was trying to assemble it.

My brother: Oh. I thought you got mauled by a hamster.

Ah, family.

Homeschool Moment

Confession: when I arrived at college my freshman year, I did not know what double spacing was, nor that papers were supposed to be double spaced.

My first paper of college was assigned in Freshman Seminar. The professor handed out the assignment, which included specifics of formatting. I do not now remember the topic of that paper, just that the formatting instructions included that it should be 2 pages in length, 12 point Times New Roman or Arial font, and that it should be double spaced.

I stared at the page in front of me. Double spaced? what on earth was that? I looked around the room, and no one seemed to have any problems with the assignment, and I was too embarrassed to ask what double spacing meant.

Later I sat in front of my computer, staring at the blank page in Microsoft Word, wondering how to begin. It was, after all, my first paper of college. I wanted it to be good. I wanted to be (at least somewhat) eloquent. I wanted… I wanted to know how to double space.

I figured out pretty quickly that double spacing meant to leave a line blank in between each line of text, but knew that there had to be an easier way than hitting ‘enter’ after every line. I glanced surreptitiously at a classmate’s computer and saw that she was typing and did not have to hit enter after every line, but Word cleverly left spaces in between the text for her. At least my hunch about leaving a blank line between text was correct! Now to figure out how Word magically does that for you….

It took a good 20-30 minutes to discover the paragraph setting, but at long last, just when I was almost prepared to admit my ignorance and ask for help, I found it! Oh the triumph of that moment. Now it was time to start the paper, after losing half an hour of my life to the formatting search.

Looking back, it is strange to me that I never learned how to double space in high school, but it is one of those funny things that got left out when I was writing papers in high school English as a homeschooler. I suppose of things to be left out of one’s education, it is a mere blip on the radar. Also, it meant that it would be two years of college before I wrote a paper that rivaled the actual length of my longest high school paper.

My senior year of high school, I studied American history, and my final project was to write a research paper on a president — any president. Since I was the oldest, my paper had to be the longest: 10 pages.

Remember please that I was unaware of the joys of double spacing. Yes, my paper was actually around 20 pages long. This is why I picked Franklin D. Roosevelt as my subject. I wish I could go back and read that paper, in all its single spaced glory.

Big News for the Continent

In breaking news today, scientists revealed that the Eastern Seaboard of North America and the tip of Europe (commonly known as the United Kingdom) have switched places in a rare continental shuffle. While residents of U.S. States had suspected it for some time, it was only today that leading geologists and meterologists went public with the information. This explains the cool and unusually rainy spring and summer the eastern United States has experienced this year, but the reasons for the sections of the two continents to exchange places has not yet become clear. It may be the first test of an exchange program between the two continents to experience other weather patterns–top scientists are working even now to discover more details about the fascinating switch. We will update you as soon as we have more news, including the latin scientific name for the continental shuffle which is currently under discussion.

Head Colds and Gilmore Girls

Having a cold in the summer is no fun. Colds at any time are no fun, but a cold in the summer is almost offensive. In the winter I expect to get sick a time or two, but summertime is not for illness, especially one that sounds like it came straight from January — what else would be the point of calling it a “cold”?

So I have an unseasonal illness, and with that comes many hours of sitting on the sofa, hoping that my body will fight off the germs soon and go back to normal. While I’ve been reclining on our gold sofa (I don’t think one can call a gold piece of furniture a couch), I’ve been watching episodes of Gilmore Girls. I have decided that the show may actually be some form of drug, because it is addicting. It is so easy to stick in a DVD, push play, and watch for hours. My brain will probably rot and fall out any moment. Why are tv shows so addicting? It’s so easy to slide into the world of witty dialogue innumerable pop culture references and shake my head at the train-wreck decisions the characters make of their lives….

Surely that 1000 mg of vitamin C will make a difference in the duration of this atrocious head cold? Maybe that, the fluids I’ve been constantly consuming, and the many hours of sleep I hope to get tonight will work their magic by 9.00am tomorrow. We shall see.

This Week’s Lessons

1. Bath & Body Works’ “Cotton Blossom” hand soap leaves your hands smelling like dryer sheets. Mmmm.
I hope someone writes me a love poem someday mentioning the fact that I washed my hands with Cotton Blossom soap and now smell delicious, like freshly washed socks and towels. How romantic. And could you put that in iambic pentameter? Thanks.

2. I don’t deal well with stress. (This is actually not a new lesson, but a reminder of an old lesson that I forget often, unfortunately.)
My body holds up ok until I get through whatever it is I have to get through (a test, a big event, etc.), and then it quits. “Quits” is maybe a little too strong–I’m still alive, after all–but I always either get sick or have other physiological symptoms. It’s my body telling me I can’t ignore it any more, that I need to stop for a few moments and breathe and take care of it a little bit. I guess that’s what comes of being both a body and a mind (or is it a body and a soul? or just a body with consciousness? what is consciousness anyway? …why am I talking about metaphysics right now??).
Anyway, this week’s symptoms have been exhaustion and dizziness. How fun.

I think I need to learn how to play as well as work. I suppose I take life too seriously sometimes.

The Horrors of Indecision

My computer is slowly dying. Slowly is the key word here, because it seems that every day it gets just a little bit slower and it functions a little bit less well. I suppose for a laptop to last 6 years (I’ve only had to replace the hard drive once) is fairly impressive.

It just takes a lot of patience to do anything on the slow machine. I press the power button to turn it on and I might as well go do some other short task while it boots up…. Then I come back and double-click the firefox shortcut, and it will be another few minutes for my computer to decide to pull up my email. So I return and enter my password, and glance away for another minute…you get the idea. Checking my email is a time investment. And then a 3 1/2 minute youtube video is about all the video card can take before getting choppy and impossible to watch.

So I think it’s about time to retire the Dell dinosaur and get something a bit newer (don’t worry, I’ve backed up my files just in case I should be visited by the blue screen of death).

But what should I get? A desktop? I’m not in school anymore, so it isn’t as crucial to have a laptop, but it’s so nice to have the mobility a laptop brings. Then there’s the question of what kind of capabilities I want my computer to have. And I live in Charlottesville, where it’s trendy to have Apple computers (which makes me not really want to get one because of that very fact). But I must admit they are prety sleek. Also, am I cool enough for an Apple? I feel like the computer might out-cool me, and who wants that?

Laptop? Desktop? Windows? Apple? Specs? Options?How much money do I want to spend?

So for the time being, I am trapped in indecision, dreaming of a computer with which checking my email isn’t a 15-minute time commitment (and I’m not even counting the time it takes to actually read and respond to email, this is strictly time getting to my gmail screen and being able to open up the first message).

Life Skills 101

Things I wish elementary school aged kids were taught:

• How to identify local trees
• How to identify local birds
• How to identify local wildflowers
  (basically, observe the world around you and become familiar with it)
• Stories –more stories

Things I wish middle schools/ high school kids were taught:

• How to do taxes
• How to make (and stick to) a budget; responsible money management
• Basic auto maintenance
• General household maintenance
• How to write a resume
• Grocery shopping/ simple cooking
• Introduction to Economics
  (…and other practical life skills)

While I think that it is important for children to be taught many of the subjects they are currently taught in schools, I think there is a large practical portion missing from our education. Parents are probably the best people to teach these skills, but not all parents do, so maybe they could be picked up by schools (especially things like budgets and economics).

You may think that there isn’t enough time to teach students to do things like checking the oil in their cars when they have so many other classes to attend, but when schools have time to teach teenagers how to put condoms on bananas, I think they could probably spare a few minutes to teach them some practical life skills.