Happy National Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Pizza

Things of note:
  1.  Ham is horrid.  It's a repulsive food in almost every sense.  It tastes awful, it's a sort of imagination-stimulating color (not in a good way), and the texture is all slimy.  Not really, but it's the first passably workable word that came into my head.

  2.  Pineapple is normally very good.

  3.  Reheated pizza is mush.

And yet—because I had a random and inexplicable craving for pizza—I combined all three of those into one triangular piece of edible questionableness, and went at them all in one go.

      I ate reheated pineapple-and-ham pizza.

Unfortunately, the top half of the slice was tragically bereft of cheese.

Conclusions:

  1.  Ham is absolutely just as horrid on pizza as anywhere else.  The slathering of cheese (on the bottom half) did a lot to disguise the color, not much to disguise the texture, and nothing at all to disguise the taste.

  2.  Pineapple, while delicious practically everywhere else, is just weird on pizza.  Do "tomato" and "pineapple" sound like they were meant to go together?  I answer you, no.  I mean, one word is from Middle English and one is from French/Spanish/Porteugese/Nahautl.  And pineapples grow in the Americas, which isn't anywhere near the home of pizza.  i don't really know where tomatoes originated. 

  3.  Leftover Sajo's pizza is, texturally, almost galatically preferable to leftover Little Caesar's pizza.  
...My spell check is telling me that "galactically" is not a word.  I find this absurd.

  4.  My dad is awesome for sacrificing his second-to-last slice of three-day-old Sajo's pizza to his oddness-prone daughter.

  5.  I changed the time zone on my laptop so that I could post this slightly after eleven p.m. on Saturday and not slightly after midnight on Sunday.  

Well, that's not really part of the conclusion; it's just a random fact that's mostly unrelated to the pizza, but I already numbered it and don't feel like changing it back.  (And after all of that, I just previewed the post and it's going to label it as having been posted after midnight on Sunday anyway.  "Stars.  Can't do it.  Not today.")

Memorandum To An Overactive Imagination:

Herself, Inc.

from the desk of

Kiersten M. Lawrence

Senior Manager

   My dear Overactive Imagination,

   Greetings and salutations.

   I see this letter finds you in good health.  On most given days, I would rejoice with you in that, but it also seems you are feeling a bit overzealous at the moment, and in such a state you are being a small — how shall I put this? — distraction to the 95% of the rest of me that would dearly love to get a night's sound sleep.

   It has been brought to my attention that my visual cortex exposed you to five minutes of a slasher movie today in humanities class.  I shall have to have a talk with her about that.  She should know by now that suspenseful, frightening murder scenes make you feverish.  It would seem this was a conspiracy in which my judgment center was also a participant.  Sometimes I think my decision-making center has not quite grasped the fact that there a direct link between your rovings in the world of the creepy and horrible, and the supply lines to the Irrational Fears and Nightmares faction that took up residence in my brain when I was just a little tot, and whom I have not yet been successful in starving out.  A slow learner, my Discerning Judgment-Making Center is.  In future, I advise you not to believe every ridiculous little thing you receive from those greedy sensory stimuli.  Perhaps you should double-check the keywords on your spam filters.  I really don't want to have to start forwarding your mail through the You're-Being-A-Wretched-Idiot fulcrum.  He can be positively merciless.

   When I notice a lack of educated judgment among our members, I view it as my solemn and Rhapsodizian duty to correct it.  To mollify your low attention span, I will try to put this as succinctly as possible:  

  Shut up, darling.

  I just don't think you realize how utterly valueless your rambles through the land of nihilistic speculation are.  You need to understand that while there are many excellent times and places to romp through the universes of the wonderfully preposterous, there are certain times (e.g., the present moment) when it would be beneficial to all members of this body if you would please quiet down and anchor yourself in land of the realistic.  And there are places—the places that seeing images from things like slasher movies make you think you should go—that you should never, never wander into, especially at night.  They provide not only annoyance to me, but actually are capable of causing irrefutable harm.  Please refrain from even dipping your metaphorical toes into vivid speculations of visitations from serial killers or cannibals or psychotic supervillains or showers.  They are decidedly unappreciated.

   I apologize for the relative harshness of my discourse in this letter, but previous "gentle nudges" have not served to get my point across.  I sincerely hope you take my warnings to heart and adjust your behavior accordingly.  It would cause me great grief to be forced to implement more drastic measures.

   Again, I send my fondest felicitations and prayers your way.

   Included in this envelope is a week's supply of Valium.  Yes, that is a hint which I intend you to take.

   I remain, 

  Your loyal friend, willing servant, and tortured owner, etc.,

        

            Kiersten M. Lawrence

Meditation on a fictional dystopia, and Cruella de Vil in punk.

Writing today.  I looked at a random panel in a Marvel graphic novel yesterday and it has inspired thirteen pages (thus far) of manic dystopia and forbidden love.  —Haha.—  My two main protagonists are either newlyweds or courting, in a society outlawing male/female interpersonal relationships.  So far it's making for some interesting dynamics.  The family in power doesn't allow the solidification of family units, but operates under forced breeding to control genetics and eliminate different ethnicities.  My dad had some good thoughts to add to my mental stew.  I'm a very detail-oriented person, and am not always that good at looking at the big picture.  Worldbuilding isn't usually my strength in writing, except where specific aspects of a culture directly influence my character interactions.  It's nice to get some wider thoughts.  (So if anyone else wants to proffer ideas—go for it, please!:)  I love it when my brain spins these elaborate premises out of one tiny, completely unrelated thing.  Unfortunately it doesn't happen as often as would be helpful.

I bought Children 18:3's new album yesterday.  (Christian punk band.  They are insane in the most awesome way conceivable.)  Christian, homeschooled siblings who write crazy fast songs.  I love that they write on a wide variety of themes—from Biblical topics (and not always the "obvious" ones, either), to the value of performance vs.the unconditional love of family, to budding boy/girl relationships, to the danger of stereotyping others, to suicide, to uncertainty about the future, to (I think) abortion, to—and this is my favorite—Cruella de Vil.  They just wrote this random song about Cruella de Vil! <—[YouTube link, there.]  One of the lines refers to "the smell of fear and two-toned hair."  How do you not love that?!  Honestly, I thought they were obnoxious when I first heard their debut album about two years ago (and the lead singer looks freaky scary on the jacket cover), but they were so unusual they intrigued me to the point where I listened to them anyway; and now I've actually come to really love their music, and respect them a lot as artists.  I would pay in a heartbeat to see them in concert.

College ~ semaine premier!

So, originally I was going to blog on Tuesday after my first day, but since I didn't get home until ten, I wound up starting a draft and not finishing.  I was then going to blog yesterday after class, so I could blog about my first experience in all my classes at once, but that opportunity was passed up in favor of impending homework due date concerns.  So, I now take this four-and-a-half hour interval to share my observations and escapades of my first week.  
Prepare for an indubitably lengthy post.  I will try to keep my stream-of-consciousness observations to a minimum.  :)

Tuesday:  After being dropped off by my gallant mother (can you use gallant in reference to women?  Hm.  Whatever.) an hour before my first class, I wound my way through throngs of tall people, bulging backpacks, enthusiastic and brightly colored staff, and offerings of free yoga coupons to the bookstore, where I waited in a very long line to buy my math textbook and be disappointed to see no silver Sharpies left for sale (I might go in there today and buy one). I encountered both eldest Demske sisters and their cousin Cassie, which brightened my nervous morning considerably.  (It turns out I actually have one of the same classes at the same time as Leah, though not in the same room.)  First up—Honors English 160, at 12:45 p.m.  (Afternoon classes:  one reason to love college already!)  

This was the class I packed the most stress about beginning, because it looked pretty intense—an intuition confirmed by the 75 pages of reading he assigned us the first day, to be completed two days later.  (As it turned out today, I was one of the only ones who actually did all the reading—and I took notes, which resulted in me having to catapult our small group discussion by reading them aloud.)  Mainly we went over the syllabus and course requirements, and he explained how our research project (or "Literature review":  essentially it will wind up being a giant annotated bibliography of articles on our topic) will be organized, and the types of essays we'll be writing.  It stressed me out at first, but we had the second class today and it was really interesting.  We practiced brainstorming and breaking down topics (my small group broke down the broad topic of "food" into a thesis debating the line between freedom of speech and ethics in advertising to children).  The professor seems really nice and fairly laidback, and he said he's really open to one-on-one discussion and helping us along, although he warned us the coursework would be really intensive.  My classmates are pretty cool, too.  It's awesome being in an environment where people seem to really think for themselves and care about their education (since I got the opposite vibe from most of my fellows in public high school).  I think I'll probably really enjoy this class, though I do foresee a lot of stress coming my way in future.  We also got out twenty minutes early, which was weird.  The teacher instructed us to brainstorm for potential research topics and told us we could "just leave" when we were done.  That will take a little getting used to (but I'm definitely not complaining!).

At 7 p.m. I had Mathematical Ideas.  I wasn't sure quite what this one was going to be like, but I'd heard it was pretty easy and focused heavily on applying mathematics and not just working problems.  The first meeting of that class was an interesting experience.  The professor confessed that it was her first time ever teaching a college-level course, and apologized in advance for treating us like teenagers ("I revert to treating high schoolers like elementary students, though, so don't feel too bad", she said, haha).  She's a bit of a goofball.  She split her pants and broke the projector five minutes in, so she walked sideways the entire two hours and scratched out the homework assignment.  So we talked about inductive vs. deductive reasoning and played icebreaker games.  (Apparently we were all enjoying ourselves, because she kept us seven minutes over and nobody noticed!)  The curriculum looks like a lot of review of midlevel algebra and geometry, stuff I learned or started to learn, and there's also a section on economics and finance, and a bit on statistics, which I haven't really done before.  i think it will be a pretty fun environment and pretty easy coursework.  Unfortunately it ends at nine (I'm quickly finding out that evening classes might not have been the great idea I thought they were.  My brain works really well at that time of night, but scheduling doesn't, especially when I don't have my own driver's license yet).

Wednesday:  I had Humanities 101, Modern Culture & the Arts.  I wasn't really sure what to expect from this class, either, but it looks fairly interesting.  Again, the professor seems pretty easygoing and friendly to all the students.  We had a couple of interesting discussions about the definitions of art and popular culture (the girl across the aisle from me stuck up for my grey corduroys, which someone in the back was disparaging [as a fashion item in general; I'm sure she had no idea I was actually wearing a pair]).  It looks like we'll have a fair amount of reading and frequent quizzes [timed, eww], as well as  a major research project early in the semester, but the class environment is interesting.  
We learned about this awesome guy who carves sculptures out of pencil leads.

I still am a little fuzzy on the exact content, but I think the actual class time will be entertaining.  I got some creative writing done (a hobby I have been neglecting sadly the past two weeks) in my hour-and-a-half wait afterwards.

That's my first take on the actual classes.  The KVCC atmosphere in general is really nice.  It's open, comfortable, people are friendly (but not creepy), and not being on strict time constraints the entire time is really nice.  Even though there are a lot of people, it's not really noisy, and I can do homework (and blog!) without being too distracted (though at the moment Oprah is on in the student lounge, which is not conducive to studying Seneca).  (Six people at home make more noise than this:)  The students commons have live trees and hanging plants all over the place, and a glass roof, which is pretty awesome.  The furniture is uber comfy; the rice krispie treats are huge and have chocolate chips.  My biggest complaint thus far is that the plastic silverware is enigmatically hard to find (and sometimes my classes are too, but thankfully I've done enough wandering around campus that my kinesthetic memory is starting to kick in).  It's a really nice environment to just hang out in (which is good, since I'm here from three until six-thirty on Wednesdays and Mondays, and eleven-forty till nine on Tuesdays and Thursdays!).

I also took a city bus today for the very first time (well, my first time alone, awake, and during the day—sorry, there's not as much of a story there as it sounds like there is), and I actually didn't mind it much.  I admit that I love moving vehicles.  There's something really relaxing about them, even as crammed full of bodies and conversations as this one was (and even if I was too short to see out the window).  I actually rather liked the experience, although I'll only get to do it once a day (maybe twice, until it starts getting dark by five in the afternoon, since I don't want to hop buses in downtown Kalamazoo in the dark, alone).  There was a girl on the bus with a sweet hat reading dc Talk's Jesus Freaks anthology (I liked her immediately and I don't even know who she is).  I overheard one woman speculating about whether she could trade in the earrings she'd gotten for her birthday for skis, and whether her niece would be able to play soccer since she'd fallen down a flight of stairs and broken her shoulder.  There was a guy who changed seats three times because he offered his seat to each successive elderly person (and one blind man) who got on the bus. One student downed two full cans of Monster in the latter half of our 25-minute ride (I bet his professors have their hands full with him today).  Three girls in the back carried on a heated...discussion (I'd say it sounded like an argument, except it was punctuated with a lot of giggling) in Spanish.  Overall, I thought it was a rather fascinating ride.  The only downside was there wasn't enough time for me to catch a nap...

Well, with three hours yet to kill before tonight's math class, I plan to go hunting for that plastic silverware and eat my lukewarm key lime yogurt.  And see how much a silver Sharpie costs in the bookstore.  And then maybe nip in my nap.  

              Adieu, inhabitants of the blogosphere...

Bonjour Déraison

Hello Insanity

Wereling:

Long veiled in the guise of opportunity

While opportunity masquerades as you

When did you begin to haunt me?

Dare you come any closer,

Prying into my fevered mind

With grasping, tickling fingertips?

Leaving you behind, I am nothing—

Yet, to embrace you is dereliction?

Prancing, preening, prattling poster

Of my face scrawled in scarlet ink

And “WANTED Dead Or Alive

But Preferably Halfway There”

Branded over my unseeing eyes.

Hello Insanity

Obdurate stalker,

Domestic partner to insomnia:

The floor is freshly waxed.

Shall we dance?

written 11 June 2010

Day of nothing in between two great somethings.

Thirty-six hours.  Hello.  Tomorrow (or today, rather, since it's eight minutes past midnight and that makes it Monday) is going to be a trail of the unknown.   It will be another dimension, the tipping point between the end of summer and my debut into the whirlwind.

We had the amazing Demske family over today (Sunday, rather).  The twelve of us had a bonfire, watched Rachel D.'s leap for mankind in the art of roasting Jet-Puff marshmallows, watched goofy YouTube videos and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.  It was a bodacious end-of-summer bonanza.  My friend Hannah left for college this afternoon, and this fall is going to be so crazy I feel as if I'm leaving, too, even though my home is moving nowhere.  

Monday will be a day of cleaning and organizing and finding lost things, accompanied by the 1.19 gigabytes of music I've added to my iTunes library in the last week, thanks to mix CDs.  (I could have just lounged around and done some heavy-duty praying, if I'd cleaned my room Saturday like I meant to.  I suppose that's why this Monday is called Labor Day?)

Last Friday I went to KVCC and wandered around the halls with a map and my mother and found where my classes are supposed to be, and bought half of my books, after which I am astonishingly less nervous.  I think the fact that my classes don't start until the afternoon, so I will have some mental and emotional preparation time and a chance for more sleep in the morning, will be something to fall on my knees in gratitude for come Tuesday.

Now, I post a poem as a second blog post, retreat into my 59 new Glowfriends songs and sleep, and brace myself for a week like a March hare.  

Party on, dudes.

Five days, nineteen hours, twenty-seven minutes.

I start college in five days, nineteen hours, and twenty-seven minutes.

That's when I start my first class, anyway.  I feel like college actually began months ago, with orientation, registration counseling, financial aid stuff, tests, interviews...I admit, this looming future scares me.  A lot.  I've been in a state vacillating between panicky avoidance and mild terror about it all summer.    There are some days I feel almost sick to my stomach thinking about it.  I feel massively unprepared—emotionally and practically.  I feel fairly confident I'm capable of the academia; it's everything else involved that worries me.  I can't shake off the compulsion to brood over everything that could go wrong (and I am not usually a pessimistic person).  My high school career was a train wreck for a while due to the chronic procrastination that I sometimes feel has me in a stranglehold; and I'm sure a lot of people who know me could tell you how much I despise schedules and time management.  There is so much I could do wrong, so many abd habits I could regress back into at the drop of a hat.  I'm not expecting to be perfect, but I don't want to walk around with a lit bundle of dynamite in my shoes.

I went to God today via my Bible, and found Philippians 4:6-7:  "Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (NIV).  

The Amplified Bible says "[peace] shall garrison and mount guard over your hearts and minds".  I like that—it conjures an image of a miniature army, sentient, with a careful strategy to vanquish whatever might come against it, from any angle.  God's peace isn't only a shield; it's a living thing there to protect me.

I've heard that verse I don't even know how many times.  It's one of the not-very-many I actually have memorized—but today i noticed the "with thanksgiving" line.  Of course I've seen that before, too—but somehow, when i'm trying to apply this verse to my own life, that line always gets omitted.  I have the prayer and petition down pat—not so well the thanksgiving.  Thus, I thought today when I took note of this, what am I thankful for in this uber-stressful future?

1. It's an entire galaxy of opportunity on so many levels:

2. I can meet new people and maybe have the chance to bend my lopsided/nonexistent social skills into shape.

3. I really like learning.  I want to better myself as a writer.  Where better to do that than college?

4. I have some solid incentive to beat down my obnoxious, horrible, late-blooming adolescent rebellious-and-irresponsible alter ego.

5. I get to get out of the house.

6. I'll be in an environment where people will no longer automatically assume the short person can still order off the kids' menu.

7. Maybe I will garner a sense of long-term purpose.

8. It's an adventure I haven't tried yet that probably isn't life-threatening.

9. I could use a lesson is dependency on God...yet again.

Yes.  I'm freaked out—really, really freaked out—by this prospect of being an honest-to-goodness college student.  For my entire high school career, I looked at college students with something like actual awe.  It's hard to believe I am one now.  Yes, I have practical things I need to do, things to which I need to apply myself and on which I need to take initiative—but I'm not all by myself in trying to buffet back stress.  God knows what He's doing.  I can actually get excited about some of this.  I can be thankful that it's not just a massive, dreaded chore.  

And, even though it's hard to believe sometimes because everyone looks like they have it all together, I have a lot of friends going through this exact phase right now, feeling similar fears—

We can do this.