A catch-me-up... for you-who-care

So I was trying to figure how to make this short, sweet and painless... this blog isn't really about my life - at least, I try to keep it that way - but I feel like I owe an apology to those who have suffered almost an entire year without my adorably snarky and amazingly deep blog posts. So. Don't take this as an excuse, 'cause it's not - I haven't been so very busy as to not even post once a month; I have no excuse. This is my way of making it up in some very tiny smallish way to you, my awesome readers.

(to mix this up, I will not be numbering my list. try to figure out the thought process that went into these symbols, and enter the jumbled mess that is my mind-in-progress.)

! (not.) Work continues as usual. This June I will be celebrating three years at my current job, though there is a potential major career change currently in the works. You may or may not get to hear about when/if that does/does not work out.

@Camp Iroquoina: for the first time in several years I was able to travel with the greater portion of my family to pretty much my favorite place on earth. A whole week of drinking in nature, getting to hang out with my best PA friend, helping out - or getting in way, depending on your perspective - in the kitchen (hello first ever mass-produced dish that I made all by meself)... truly the vacation I needed.

#lastsemesterEVER hopefully. I rounded out my school career with journeys in Algerian Literature, Utopias and Dystopias, Technology in Society and Culture, Insects and People, archery, fitness walking (never again), social dance. Utopias was probably the class where I learned the most, and social dance and archery tied for first place in the 'best class ever' category.

'$' stands for the money I will soon owe the government for funding my college career, since I graduated magna cum laude with my B.A. in English from North Carolina State University on December 15, 2012. *commence belated confetti tossing* That was an amazing weekend as well, since I got to meet a pen pal - and not just any pen pal, but the one I've have the longest - when she came up from Texas especially for the graduation.

[90]% = the time I have spend sleeping and working since my aforementioned graduation. Job-hunting, helping out in various and sundry ways at home, getting into contra dancing and other random activities have taken up the last 10%.

^_^ contra dancing deserves its own mention here, since it's one of my new dancing obsessions. Ballroom dancing is a little hard to come by when it's not in a controlled PE environment, but contra dancing - which doesn't require you dragging a partner along - is great fun, a good way to hang out with friends and get some awesome exercise at the same time... in a nutshell, most diverting. You should go check it out now. go, shoo! this post will be here when you get back.

& last but not least, a relationship update: I'm not going to gush about all the 'God moments' I've had, because that's not what I do - here or anywhere. It's still a journey of seeking, finding (mostly still seeking) and soul searching, and I'm not anywhere near where I want to be. But I'm okay with being a work-in-progress, because God is definitely at work here.

We Wear the Mask - Paul Laurence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes--

This debt we pay to human guile;

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile

And mouth with myriad subtleties,

Why should the world be over-wise,

In counting all our tears and sighs?

Nay, let them only see us, while

We wear the mask.

We smile, but oh great Christ, our cries

To Thee from tortured souls arise.

We sing, but oh the clay is vile

Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

But let the world dream otherwise,

We wear the mask!

I might be back... after this brief message

Murphy's Laws on Applied Terror

1. When reviewing your notes before an exam, the most important ones will be illegible.

2.The more studying you did for the exam, the less certain you are as to which answer they want.

3. Eighty percent of the final exam will be based on the one lecture you missed and the one book you didn't read.

4. The night before the history midterm, your biology instructor will assign two hundred pages on Plenarian.
Corollary: Every instructor assumes that you have nothing else to do except study for that instructor's course.

5. If you are given an open-book exam, you will forget your book.
Corollary: If you are given a take-home exam, you will forget where you live.

6. At the end of the semester, you will recall having enrolled in a course at the beginning of the semester - and never attending.

7. Law of Universal Intelligence: the most ill-behaved student in every teacher's class is always one of the brightest ones he can't flunk.

p.s. yes, I am procrastinating on studying for finals =)

My life in a nutshell

"80% of the final exam will be based on the one lecture you missed and the one book you didn’t read."

"College professor–someone who talks in other people’s sleep." ~ W. H. Auden

"Instead of giving money to found colleges to promote learning, why don't they pass a constitutional amendment prohibiting anybody from learning anything? If it works as good as the Prohibition one did, why, in five years we would have the smartest race of people on earth." ~ Will Rogers

"Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates." 

~ A. Lawrence Lowell

"The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense." 

~ Tom Clancy

"The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together." ~ Erma Bombeck

"Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"I'm not asleep... but that doesn't mean I'm awake."

"A day without a nap is like a cupcake without frosting." ~ Terri Guillemets

"Inside some of us is a thin person struggling to get out, but they can usually be sedated with a few pieces of chocolate cake."

“But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” ~ Joshua 24:15