on astonishment

Let it never be said that I did not try my hardest to not care what others think of me.

I can talk the talk, of course, and say breezily that I don't care, but my walking of the walk is limited at best.  There are a lot of things that others will say about you that you have to attempt to not care about.  Hair?  Not a problem.  Clothing?  Whatever.  Sense of humor?  Meh.  People can say what they want about those things and it doesn't phase me.  As of today, however, I have discovered a chink in my shield of self-awareness and I'm still reeling from the shock.

I've genuinely been enjoying my job at the bookstore.  Granted, the honeymoon phase of this new job has just recently worn off, but I've still been doing my best despite working 40(+) hours a week. (Did I mention I was only hired to be part-time?)  I mean, it's a bookstore!  The customers are lovely, and the people I work with are great.  I'm significantly younger than most of my co-workers, but whatever, right?  We still get along fine....or so I thought.

One of my managers pulled me aside today and began talking to me in a low voice, which is never a good sign.  "Katie," she began, and my inner organs collapsed.  Did I get here on time this morning?  I thought quickly.  Did I screw up a transaction?

"You have great customer service skills--really.  The only problem is that you don't have the same courtesy for the people inside the store."

What?

"Your co-workers.  I've been getting complaints from members of the staff that you're not treating them very well--you're quite abrasive."

Abrasive?!  I thought, horrified.  Images sprang to my mind of sandpaper, bruises, scrapes, fingernails on a chalkboard.  Abrasive is the opposite of good, the opposite of nice.  Abrasive is mean and rough and annoying and unforgiving.  I kept trying to formulate a verbal response or even other thoughts, but the word kept banging around in my head.  My eyes practically popped out of my face trying to keep it contained.

"You need to stop acting like you're their boss.  You're not their superior.  You can't talk to them the way you do--you need to talk to them the nice way you talk to the customers.  Have you heard the way you talk to other employees?  It comes off pretty nasty."

If my lips hadn't been so tightly pressed together, my jaw would've dropped.  I talk to the customers like I would speak to children!  I wanted to say, but the words got lost.  90% of them are over the age of 60 and have no idea what's going on in this store!  (No offense to anyone reading this that might be over the age of 60.  If you found this blog, you are automatically exempt.)

I don't speak to my co-workers that way because it's condescending.  It's insulting their tenure at the store (everyone besides me has been there for years) to treat them like I'm guiding them around and explaining every little thing.  I was under the impression that I spoke to them like equals--never mind the fact that many of my older co-workers constantly treat me like a child in front of customers, interrupting my sales pitch to point out something I "missed" (hadn't gotten to yet) or to interject comments of their own.

"Do you understand?"

I realized my manager was waiting for a response.  I opened my mouth--no words followed.  I tried again and managed to squeak out "I didn't know they felt that way" before I felt my face turning red in complete humiliation.  How long has this been going on?  How long have my co-workers dreaded working with me?  How long have I been that girl?  I was frantically trying to backpedal through my memories and come up with an example of my supposed abrasiveness.  My train of thought snagged on something from that morning--the phone had been ringing for a good two minutes while I was trying to make a sale, and a co-worker was unoccupied.  I paused to ask her if she could pick up the phone.  Is that considered abrasiveness?!  I was becoming more upset by the second.  At previous jobs, asking a co-worker to answer the phone was letting them know that you wouldn't be able to answer it because you were busy.  That's all.  Suddenly, though, side comments from fellow bookstore employees fell into place in my mental puzzle: A co-worker asking if I was an only child.  A manager asking if my previous job required a lot of interaction with others.  Every thought that my brain formulated buried me deeper in mortification.  What was I doing wrong?

"I don't--" I swallowed hard. "I don't mean to be like that."

I try really hard to be kind to people.  I don't always succeed, of course, but I was completely astonished by the idea that I had failed in my attempts at kindness so consistently and on so many attempts that multiple people had spoken to a manager about my behavior.  By "astonished," of course, I meant "sick to my stomach."  It's rough business discovering that people you thought you got along with actually don't like working with you at all.

I've been called a lot of things, but it's been a long time since I was accused of rudeness, or meanness, and I've certainly never been called nasty.  This was the mirror that I had been missing.  Am I really that way?  Do people see me that way and say nothing out of politeness?  How have I managed to work effectively in previous jobs without ever having this kind of discussion?

I didn't say anything else to my manager.  I should've, but I couldn't...or wouldn't, I'm not sure.  I had to bury myself in the empty children's section for a few minutes before I could face the shame of talking to my co-workers.

If some (or all) of this post seems whiny, it's probably because it is.  I'm still upset about the whole thing.

on my wariness of graduate courses

After my...disappointing...class choices last semester, I definitely went into the spring semester holding my breath.

The Class: History of the English Language (Dr. Busbee put a sign on the door that said "Welcome to HEL."  Yeah, us English-types are pretty clever.)
The First Day: We spent 60% of our first class on phonics, staring at the mouth shapes of the people across the table and collectively sounding an awful lot like Professor Higgins' record player from My Fair Lady.  The other 40% was spent listening to our professor lecture on important dates that changed the English language forever and speaking to us in Old English.
The Initial Verdict: AWESOME.  Seriously, have you ever heard Old English?  It's pretty legit.  Also, it's hysterical listening to a group of 15 postgrads sound out letters like preschoolers.  There's no term paper, but we have short etymology papers, a 45-minute presentation (Who's presenting on the Norman conquest?  This girl!), and recitations in Old, Middle, and Modern English--in addition to the midterm and final, of course.  There's a lot of emphasis on lingual structure, which I am totally pumped about. 

The Class: Writing Pedagogy (or something like that)
The First Day: We did some teacher/undergraduate student role-play (the course is specifically designed for those who want to teach high school- and college-level writing courses), sat through a lot of explanation that I thought wasn't very necessary, and spent the rest of the time signing up for multiple presentation dates, syllabus projects, and when to bring snacks.  (It's a three-hour evening class--snacks are 100% necessary.)
The Initial Verdict: Undecided.  I was hoping it would be more of a grammar-based course, but it seems to be leaning more toward the psychology of writing--why students are good/bad at it, communication issues, expression, etc. etc.  Hopefully another class will be more telling.  There aren't any tests for the course, but it feels like I signed up for about a dozen presentations, so I'm assuming those are going to make up the difference. 

Sometimes I feel like an imposter in my English programs because I really don't enjoy writing 95% of papers.  I much prefer tests and presentations.  Papers are graded so arbitrarily--it's especially difficult when you have a new professor and you're not sure how they grade.  Plus, I remember details about the topic longer and more accurately when it's in presentation format.  One of the reasons I balk at the idea of teaching as a ranked professor (Assistant, Associate, or Full) is because of the professional development required of most schools, which requires you to write a certain number of publications and submit papers to a certain number of conferences and yada yada.  It's a mess.  Why do college professors get paid so little to do so much? 


In other news, I bought a 7-inch, touch screen, digital picture frame today for $25.  This is how low the price gets (down from $110!) when a store stocks things no one would actually buy there.  (Who goes to Borders for a digital picture frame?  Zero people.)  I didn't particularly need a digital picture frame, but all my rich and fancy customers wave their iPads in my face all day and I wanted some sort of gadgety upgrade that I could afford to feel hip for the new decade.  Maybe.  Or maybe I just want my wedding pictures to play on a loop in my living room all day, every day.

on...well, everything

Remember that time I was doing really well with keeping my blog updated and I felt like a total blogging rockstar?  If you don't, it's because it's been three whole months since my last post and by now my blog link has fallen to the very bottom of your sidebar and you probably didn't even remember it existed. 

I don't believe in making New Year's resolutions, but I do believe in eventually setting goals to get things done at some point, so maybe now I'll be better about keeping you up-to-the-minute updated on the goings-on in my life.  If not, there's always Facebook, right? 

My last post was about that horrible gospel music class--the sight of which, now that I think about it, may be why I stopped visiting my own blog.  You'll be happy to know that I wound up with an A- in the class, which is pretty laugh-out-loud ridiculous, because I don't feel like I learned much in that class at all.  At the end of the day/semester, all I cared about was not getting a D, so I'd say my mischief is managed pretty nicely.

Did I mention that I'm now working at Borders?  I don't think so.  Allow me to quote from a blog post back in August: "Further decorating will come when I find a job, hopefully at a Books-A-Million or Barnes and Noble or Borders or something equally up my ally, and have a little extra money."  Did I also mention that I can see the future?

I love, love, love having a job at a bookstore, even a big corporate one, because I get to talk about books with EVERYONE.  Customers love books.  Co-workers love books.  People love my book recommendations.  People BUY the books I recommend!  It's like my college degree was made specifically for me to be really, really awesome at getting people to buy books.  I'm especially awesome in the kids' section, where every customer is a huge game of 20 questions.

"Boy or girl?"
"Boy."
"Age?"
"Uh...first grade." (People almost always give me the age in school-year format.  It's funny.)
"Any special interests?"
"He really likes zombies."
"Ok!  Let's look at a few My Weird School options."

The moral of the story is that Borders is amazing, even for retail.  And, for those you who are tempted to ask, "But isn't Borders going out of business?" like every other customer, please read this Wall Street Journal article.

The only time Borders isn't amazing is when customers are complete fools, like the lady who tried to pay with a gift card balance receipt ("But it says $4.65 right there!  What do you mean, 'Where's the gift card?'  I don't know where the card is!  I probably threw it away!"), or the other lady who started yelling at me because I wouldn't accept her Barnes and Noble teacher discount card ("I've never been asked for teacher identification before!  This is ridiculous!  Barnes and Noble didn't need any!" "Well, why didn't you just go to Barnes and Noble?"), or the man who ranted for five minutes about how someone "who knows" told him that Borders sells the Kindle (we don't) and it should absolutely be there and "you don't know what you're talking about, young lady," or the man who bought a Blu-Ray movie, took it home, realized he didn't have a Blu-Ray player, opened it anyway, and then brought it back because it didn't play on his DVD player.  (We have a no-return-for-opened-movies policy.)  On the other hand, these loonies make for great story material--obviously. 

In other news:

I went to Charleston for the wedding of two amazing friends of mine and it was the most fantastic thing since my own wedding. 

Zelda is getting a little bit chunky and I love it.  It makes her that much more adorable.

Ricky and I spent Christmas with my parents and grandparents in Miami.  It was 75 degrees.  Be jealous.

I bought "Inception" the day it was released on DVD.  It's still great.

My (real) Christmas tree is still up.

Notice the lack of ornamentation on the lower half of the tree.  This is Zelda's fault.  Also, our stockings are obscured by the angle, but you can see Ricky's peeking out of the right side of the tree.

Here's a close-up of the tree topper because I'm really proud of finding it buried behind other baubles at T.J. Maxx.  I had two strangers come up to me on the way up to the check-out line and compliment me on it.

Again, the angle makes it look funny, but it's a 12-point, three-dimensional star.  It's lovely.  Also, our white pine tree has lost approximately five needles up to this point, and it's been in our living room for three weeks.  I've never had a white pine before, but they're a lot cheaper than the blue spruces ($80 for five feet?!  No thanks!) down here in FL, and I like them a lot more now that I know how well they hold up!  You go, often-overlooked breed of tree.

Ricky and I also started our very first Christmas tradition!  Mount Vernon, where we had our wedding reception, designs and sells a new Christmas ornament every year.  We thought it would be neat to collect each one, starting with the year we got married, so we had my mom send one down to us!  (You can have them shipped from Mount Vernon itself, but we didn't know that yet.) 

This one commemorates the 150th anniversary of the restoration of Mount Vernon--the other side has a painting of the mansion as it was in 1860.  The ornament took a place of honor at the top of our tree, of course, along with another Mount Vernon collectible ornament of George Washington's sixteen-sided barn that my grandparents gave us for Christmas.

In still other news, Ricky and I flew back to Florida yesterday after a week-long adventure in the wild wild West.  We were supposed to fly out last Sunday, but five minutes before take-off the pilot informed us that a part was broken and everyone would have to vacate the plane and find another flight.  I was a little annoyed until I remembered my flight to England in 2008 that was two hours in before they realized they were leaking hydraulic fluid all over the Atlantic and made an emergency landing in Boston...at which point the plane caught fire.  (Sometimes run-on sentences are necessary for dramatic situations.  I hope you feel the drama.)  So, I was grateful they caught the problem before take-off and not after.  Everything into Salt Lake was booked for the rest of the day, so we re-booked the flight for Monday morning and went home for some much-needed sleep.  Other than that blip in the schedule, everything went without a hitch--we caught all of our connections, we didn't die driving in the snow, etc.  We also got to go to the Salt Lake City temple, which I took a picture of and haven't uploaded yet, so too bad for you. 

(We even got a $15 parking ticket because we didn't know the temple validated parking and didn't have enough change for the meter.  That's right--we broke the law to go to the temple.  No Mormons are more hardcore than we are!)

After the brain-freezing temperatures of Salt Lake, Ricky's hometown of Burley, ID seemed a lot nicer.  I got the tour of his childhood home, saw the old pictures, combed through his old room, and laughed over his X-files "Trust No One" doorknob hanger.  We played a lot of his old video games (and brought them back with us, of course) and saw his friends and even went to the DI (Deseret Industries, which is like the Goodwill of Utah/Idaho and run by the LDS church), over which I was way too excited.  We also went to Boise and saw Ricky's sister and her adorable chil'ins, who are still as adorable as they were last year but taller and with better eye-rolling skills. 

The youngest, Bridget (age 5), caught Ricky playing with her Leapfrog hand-held game across the room.

"Ricky," she said sternly.  "Did you ask?"

All the adults, of course, "ooooh"ed like someone in middle school just got called to the principal's office.  We're all really mature.

We also went to Rexburg, which is inhumanely cold and I don't understand why anyone willingly lives there. 

(I bet you'd like pictures of all these things, but I forgot my camera for 99% of these excursions and I don't even feel that bad about it.)

Then we flew back to Florida and I practically kissed the humidity-soaked ground.  My hair and skin still haven't recovered from the moistureless vacuum that is the West, but it was worth it to finally see Ricky's hometown.  He hasn't been there for two years!  If I couldn't see Charleston for two years, I'd be pretty sad.  He's a trooper.

I start classes tomorrow, so watch out for a blog post about either my enjoyment or disdain regarding them.  I'm taking History of the English Language, which has most of you gagging already, and a writing pedagogy course--I'm more excited about H of EL, but the pedagogy class was the closest thing to a grammar course offered for this semester, so there you have it.

Ricky hasn't been given his first semester grades yet, but from the amount of studying he did, I'm expecting a call from the President to tell him he did better than any law student has ever done, ever.  We'll see. :)

Hope all of you had a wonderful Christmas!

on clarification

Ok, so I just re-read my last blog post, and I realized that I left out a REALLY IMPORTANT POINT about my gospel music class and why I don't like it.

My class focuses on white gospel.  You probably have no idea what that is, because I sure didn't, and definitely signed up for the course thinking it was going to be about something different.  Even when I found out it was white gospel, I thought, "Cool!  Like O Brother, Where Art Thou?  Because I seriously love that music."

"No," I wish someone would've said to me, "not like that at all, actually, and you should probably drop this course while you still can because this music is going to be like a cheese grater on your soul for 18 long weeks.  Did I mention you should drop this course?"

"So what is white gospel?", you're wondering.  "And why do I feel uncomfortable reading a term that is so flagrantly non-PC?"

Well, "white gospel" is actually the standard research term, believe it or not.  And this is what it sounds like:



With some slight variation, that is the majority of white gospel that we're studying.  Twangy and repetitive and irritating.  For all I know, that's the majority of ALL white gospel.

What did I expect to be studying?

This:


(jump to :30)

Black.  Gospel.  The origins of Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and the greats.

Same song, completely different style...especially at 1:45, which is my favorite part.  I won't ask if you can feel the difference, because of course you can.  It's not the people singing it, of course--despite what the names would suggest, white and black gospel songs aren't classified by race, but style.  Singers of black gospel sing around the beat, improvise, interject, and almost never sing the same song twice, making it reflect their unique personalities and encouraging the crowd to do the same.  Isn't that what gospel should be?  If you're going to sing about your soul, SING.  White gospel singers (for the most part) keep to the routine, the format, the structure, and they just don't bring their personalities to the table like black gospel singers do.

In the aforementioned class of mine, we've touched briefly on black gospel (mainly the early spirituals), but not as much as it deserves.  Black gospel reaches my soul.  White gospel makes me reach for my mute button.

on lethargy

I'm losing all motivation to do well in my graduate school classes, which is a weird feeling for me.  Especially considering these are literature classes.

Well, sort of.

My "Gospel Music and American Literature" course has turned out to be a pretty thorough waste of my life.  Instead of reading literature and supplementing the course with music, it's a music class cleverly guised under a literature course number.  When we write papers, it's on music.  When we discuss things in class, it's about music.  Never mind the fact that most people in the course don't have the foggiest bit of musical training--we still discuss music, exclusively.  We did read one novel--just one--and when I tried to parallel a certain scene with elements of gospel music, my professor flat out admitted that the novel didn't have much to do with the music at all, and wasn't relevant to the discussion we were having.  (This is where the "waste of my life" part should be repeated.)  I love music as much as the next person--even gospel music, which can gets pretty irritating after listening to 1,000 "different but not really" songs--but honestly, I'm in a literature program, I signed up for a literature course, and I expect you to teach me about literature.  I could care less about the book you're writing, professor, or how you're using our class as test subjects for music analysis.  How about you teach me something that's going to be useful when I'm an English teacher?

As for "Literature, Language, and Society"...it's undergraduate literary theory all over again.  Same readings, same authors, same topics.  I don't look forward to going to class, and I don't enjoy doing the homework, and I don't feel like I'm learning much.  That being said, I know 99% of gaining new insights into things is from taking an active part in the learning role, which I've never struggled with much before, but now I feel like I'm pulling my own teeth out trying to enjoy these classes!  My SVU professors were much better at asking the "right" questions and leading me to understand the broader purpose of what I was learning.

It may just be a matter of adjusting to a new way of doing things.  Maybe next semester I'll have classes that spark more of my interest.  I hate to be such a whiner, but it's just so disappointing!

Now that you're all thoroughly depressed, I have to tell you that life really hasn't been going badly!  I still don't have a job, but it means I get to bum around the house all day and watch The X-files and Doctor Who on Netflix while I wait to get called for interviews.  Ricky and I have almost been married for 8 months, which is incredibly hard to believe, both because it feels like we just got married and because it feels like we've been married forever already...which is a good thing.  Being married has been a huge, enormously delicious piece of cake.  I'm grateful to have a husband who's so easy to get along with and ridiculously fun to be around and supports (most of) my crazy whims.  I know there isn't just one "Mr./Mrs. Right" for each person, and that I could be just as happy married to someone else, but I feel like I would have to work at it so much more than I do with Ricky.  In fact, I hardly have to work at all!  Our lives blended together so nicely when we got married that it felt like Ricky had always been there, living in my apartment and doing the grocery shopping and drinking milk out of the carton.  It's not just easy being happy with the guy, it's easy living with the guy, which seems to be a big hurdle for some relationships.  That isn't to say that those relationships aren't just as awesome, but only to say that I'm really, really grateful for Ricky and everything that he is and how lucky I am to have found him.

Also, it's his birthday tomorrow!  Hence the long, totally not-interesting-to-you monologue about how cool he his.  He's going to be 25, which I'm fairly envious of, because I feel like age 25 is probably around the time when society stops telling you you're too young to be married.  Shove off, society!

I hope you all are doing fantastically well, wherever you are.  And update your blogs, dang it!

on my potential as the carrier of the plague

I think that if biomedical warfare ever needed to be started, I would be a good candidate for the initial carrier of the disease.  Why?  Because my immune system is perhaps the wimpiest part of my body and I'm 99% guaranteed to catch it, and catch it good.  Or bad, depending on how you're looking at it.

My immune system used to be a champ!  I would stay up all night, wake up early, eat nothing but ravioli out of a can, and never take vitamins.  Good old IS didn't even bat an eye.  Every fall and spring, he would remind me that he and Allergies were still in cahoots, leaving me with the equivalent of whooping cough for about a month.  About once an academic year I would catch a virus from a roommate, what I always took as routine exercise for my faithful IS.  I didn't mind it so much because he had kept me out of the hospital my entire life.  I hadn't even thrown up since age 12!  If there was an award for solid, reliable immune systems, mine would definitely be a candidate.

Until 2009.

You'd think that three years in college, with roommates continually in close proximity and late nights a routine, would have been the worst time for my immune system.  It wasn't.  In fact, looking back, I'm pretty sure IS was feeding off the antibodies produced by said roommates and maybe even classmates, because as soon as I graduated and spent a summer away from classes, he started sleeping on the job. 

"Pneumonia?!" I exclaimed--or I would've if I hadn't been a dishtowel lying pathetically on the couch for days on end.  "Who gets pneumonia in the summer?!"  (Which is also the question that everyone else posed, as if I had chosen a really bizarre time to have my lungs fill with fluid.)  For the first time in my life, I was in the hospital for myself.  My deathly fear of needles drew a few tears when they put in the IV--I had never had one before--but I was so desperate to feel better that they probably could've cut off a finger with no complaints from me (and at Stonewall Jackson Hospital, I wouldn't have put it past them).  A few hours later, I was back home, too weak to sit up long enough to change my clothes.  Obviously, it all ended well (thanks to Sam, Kirsten, and Ashley, who bought my groceries and made me soup), and I even made it to Robin's wedding that weekend, even though I did feel a bit like Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory after he hasn't set foot outside the bed in years.

That was my immune system's first treachery.  I made it through the fall without major incident, leading me into a false sense of security, and then a few days before my wedding in January I started feeling weird.  Naturally, I wrote it off as stress, and even a definite fever in the hotel room the night before didn't tip me off to what was coming.  My wedding day went without a hitch (thankfully--can you imagine a feverish bride in the middle of January?) and I had about five days of Costa Rican awesomeness before my appetite disappeared.  I would feel ravenously hungry, and then take two bites of food before feeling full to the point of discomfort.  (Ricky wound up eating double for a few days!)  I attributed it to sun poisoning, and stayed off the beach for a while.  Long story short (most of you already read the honeymoon story), I wound up having mono.  And strep.  And an excruciatingly long, painful flight back to America, where it took me a week to feel strong enough to open a wedding present and another week before I could stand up long enough to make a sandwich.

That was the second blow.

Since mono/strep ended in March, I've had a hospitalizing kidney infection (delirium at 104 degrees, anyone?) and a UTI.  Ricky caught a virus recently, and it took me a whopping three whole days to catch it, and catch it better (worse?) than he did, leaving me powerless against the productivity of normal life and schoolwork.  I think my white blood cells have just started throwing down their arms at the first sign of illness.  "We surrender!" they cry pathetically. "Take the red cells!  The red ones!"  If I could shrink down to cell size and enter my own body (a la Magic School Bus), I would definitely give them a good talking-to.  Maybe even some well-placed punches.  Maybe then Immune System will straighten up and remember who's boss.  (Me.)


As a side note, I feel the need to say that I'm very fortunate to have avoided life-threatening illness, unlike so many friends and family members.  I'm not trying to demean their sicknesses in any way.  Instead, I'm just making myself feel better about my own by adding some cool mental images of me punching blood cells like a beast.

on lots of things

When I have a lot on my mind and need to organize it, I would like to say that I refer back to one of those handy Venn diagrams and/or flow charts that I spent countless hours of my grade school life trying to understand.  As we all know, they actually have some use in 1% of real-life situations, none of which I have ever found myself in, so I resort to something that is obviously much more primitive and appeals to most species of mammals...specifically, a list.  So this is what you get, all you mammals out there.

1. Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally

If there's one thing that irks me more than radical liberals, it's the banking-so-hard-to-the-right-you're-going-in-circles conservatives.  And circles, quite honestly, are what I feel like a good number of conservatives have been going in.  I hear a lot of griping and not a lot of game-planning.  Yes, from everything I've seen, the country has taken a conservative turn since the Obama administration, but that doesn't mean the Republican party can just point fingers and dump figurative tea all over the place without giving me some answers.  Saying "Obama hates God and once he's gone the country will be better" is not enough.  Also, while you're on the subject of actually coming up with solutions, can you please remove Sarah Palin from your agenda?  I've heard her speak a few times before, but this rally was the last straw.  She said zero useful or pertinent things--which doesn't surprise me, because I don't think I've ever heard her say anything useful or pertinent--and is about as motivational as late-night infomercials.  Hillary Clinton may not be someone I want to eat at my dinner table--EVER--but I at least have confidence in her ability to get things done.  I barely have confidence in Sarah Palin to tie her shoes.  Ok, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but can you imagine if the president died and SHE were our first female president?  I would probably die from shame.

Also, Glenn Beck, I pretty much rank you with Stephanie Meyer.  By that, I mean that when people say, "Oh, you're Mormon!  Like Glenn Beck, right?" as if you are part of our theological canon, I grit my teeth a little and say something like, "Yes, I am...and no, I'm not like Glenn Beck.  No, I do not like Twilight.  No, I do not support Mitt Romney solely because he is a Mormon.  But thank you for asking."  Don't get me wrong--I agree that our country would benefit from tapping further into its religious roots.  This is, after all, a country founded by (and majorly occupied by) a God-fearing people.  However, I feel that holding your rally on the day of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s march was wholly distasteful and inappropriate.  I also feel that giving your remarks on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, on the site of "I Have a Dream," was conceited and, again, inappropriate.  I listened to you speak, desperately trying to find out what the heck "Restoring Honor" even means, and all I got from you was a call to pray more fervently.  I probably don't need to remind you that faith without works is dead, and that God expects us to act on our prayers; however, I didn't hear much advice on what those actions are supposed to be.  We have brains and bodies for a reason.  Another reminder: the Founding Fathers were pretty set on separation of church and state...obviously.  So what exactly are you trying to restore America TO?

If this was all about the fact that Obama pulled troops out of Iraq just days later, save your breath.  That was long overdue.  And for the record, Ricky and I just registered as Independents in Florida.  No, seriously.

2. Ricky is cheating on me with law school

Ok, ok, I expected him to be studying all day, every day--I really did.  The only problem is that I have about 1/2 a friend here in Florida, if you count Zelda the cat.  I would seek refuge in befriending my grad school classmates, but they all live a good distance away and most of them are older with grown-up jobs and backyards.  All the couples at church have 2+ children and are subsequently never, ever available to do things like jump off a bridge or play Catch Phrase. (We did find one young, married, childless--YMC, for short--couple at church last week who seems hip and cool.  Friendship pending.)  You'd think that being home by yourself all day with no responsibilities would be awesome, and it is...for like, a week.  Then you lose all motivation to do anything and sit around in pajamas all day.  I'm the kind of person who needs structured days to function, because once I start feeling productive (like at school or a job) it's easy to steamroll through all my other tasks and feel super awesome about myself.  If I have nothing to do all day but load the dishwasher, I'm going to waste a lot of time playing Super Smash Bros. on the Wii.  And I do.  Does anyone else feel like that?

3. The cat is still alive

Go me!  I can't grow plants or keep fish alive for longer than a month, but it's been two weeks and I have been a model cat parent.  I even bought her a hugely giant scratching post online because the one we bought her from the pet store was so pathetically short that she had to lie down to use it.  She likes to climb up said giant scratching post and cling to the side, reminding me of King Kong and Ricky of Spiderman.  She doesn't bother with her cat bed (I should've known better than to even buy one) and instead likes to sleep in the bathtub, under the bathroom sink (she opens the cabinets with her head), and in our boxspring.  Yes, IN the boxspring.  Apparently there's a little flap of fabric that opens into it, and once she discovered it she would disappear for hours before we discovered where she was hiding.  Zelda is the weirdest and most awesome cat I've ever met.

4. Rich people in Florida give a lot of practically new things away

If I thought living near W&L was awesome for thrift store shopping, it was because I never dreamed of the extravagance of southern Florida.  Yesterday, I bought Kenneth Cole NY heels for $5.  A few weeks before that, it was a pair of Marinelli heels for $7.  Before that, the 2nd season DVD set of Seinfeld for only a couple dollars.  See what happens when I have nothing to do all day?  I bargain shop.  It's not as expensive as regular shopping, but just as addicting. 

5. THE MOLD IN MY LIVING ROOM IS GONE

We pulled up the carpet, found nothing, sprayed mold killer on every crevice, and steam cleaned the heck out of the corner area of carpet.  After (very) periodic checks, we're still mushroom-free!  Yay!  (Elizabeth, I will grudgingly admit that you were right and I was over-reacting, but I don't care because there was fungus in my house and it was super gross.  So there!)               

6. Grad school is not the same as SVU

And by that, I mean it is not as awesome.  One of my professors is great, but the other one never asks the right questions for discussion and I'm still not sure what I'm supposed to be learning.  Plus, most of my classmates say things like, "I don't think this is right, but..." and "I don't really know, but..." before they answer a question.  It drives me crazy!  You can tell they weren't fostered in a discussion kind of environment, so hopefully they'll grow into it.  In the meantime, I munch forcefully on Cheez-its and try not to lecture anyone on giving assertive answers.  You're all judging me right now for being a huge jerky snob, but I'm not going to pretend like you don't expect a certain degree of classroom elitism from me already, so here it is.  I don't even share my Cheez-its with them or anything.

7. I'm super uncomfortable around extended family that I hardly know

I know this because Ricky and I spent last Friday and Saturday at my grandparent's house in Miami for Labor Day weekend, and there were a lot of people there (whom I did not recognize in the slightest) who kept saying things like "You look the same as you did 12 years ago!" and "You're 21?  You look 17.  You're married?!" and "You have the same hair as your Aunt Rachel."  I know that everyone has these relatives, so if you've come up with an appropriately polite response for these remarks, please--I beg of you--share them.  As it stands, I throw out something like "thank you" with a slight rise in inflection at the end to indicate that I'm straddling the offended fence and flash a smile just genuine enough to appease but not full-blown enough to signify pleasure.

I probably should've warned you that this post would have no pictures and probably nothing to interest you, period, but disclaimers take all the fun out of everything.  Plus, aren't you impressed by my list-making?  It's not a Venn diagram, but maybe next time if you're lucky.