Things we said today

I realized something the other day.

( I have a type, and it looks like this. )

I'M ON BREAK :D And it feels so good. I just slept for 13 hours. It was amazing.

Erick (mine brother) is coming home tonight! For the whole week! I am so happy. It's gonna be a really nice relaxed Thanksgiving week, and I SOOO need that right now.

( question meme fun! )

I tag: semiprosaic, carriekate, auddiegirl7, captainxamanda, sothestory_goes, aliciamichelle, albion_lass, ctballer

So, I met Dhani Harrison Friday night.

( Warning: this is a Dhani/Thenewno2 post. )
OK I was gonna talk about hanging out with Greg, and then spending the night/morning with the cousins, but this became VERY LONG, so I'll do that in another post. :)

I love this video, and I just found it the other week.



That's Skye Humphries and Frida Segerdahl, and they are two of the best Lindy Hoppers in the world. Frida runs the Herräng Dance camp, the biggest swing dance camp/meeting place in the world, held every year in Herräng, Sweden. And, they just - I mean look at them! They rock really hard, and they're famous in the Lindy world.

I'm showing them to you because Sky and Frida are teaching a workshop in CHICAGO this weekend, two hours away from me, and I couldn't go because of school work and being exhausted and not having the money. :(

This makes me REALLY QUITE SAD. I wanted to share with you all.

Let's watch another video!


Also, I realized the other day.... if you want to find nice (straight) guys who like to dance, swing dancing is a great thing to get into. Just saying.

This is how I felt this morning when I woke up and remembered that I don't have anything planned today, and I can spend the while day into the night working on schoolwork:



But now it's 1pm, and I haven't gotten anything done... and I need to eat, and get dressed. After that, I'm working on getting the FRAKKING footage that WILL NOT come off the memory card OFF ALREADY. (Please God let it work.) And then I get to watercolor my comic that's due Tuesday, yaay. I'm actually really excited to do this, and have been looking forward to having time to do it all week!


To my Beatles stan friends: what album (LP) is "This Boy" on? urrgh, I must own it. It's one of the Capitol ones, I think? I can't figure it out, and decided it'd be faster to just ask y'all. :)

I love this adorable outtake version. "Thas Boy..."

So...

( I figured out why there were a ton of fruit files upstairs all of a sudden... )

Also, CHECK OUT MY NEW MOOD THEME. Ain't it grand? :D

So... I need to post more. What to write about?

This week has been up and down. Some classes have been great (Image Making, surprisingly for this week), some have been really frustrating (Composing + Cinema, not surprisingly), and some have been in between (Typography today - cool, but hard work).

Actually, I have a paper due tomorrow that is almost nothing at the moment, so I think I'm gonna log off, go home, and come back to this later, when I need something to procrastinate with. :D

ps. Like my new icon? I LOVE IT.

This is partly in honor of Geoff and Amanda's wedding the other week; and partly because I've been wanting to share these awesome soundbites for a while.

( quotes from work that make me LOL )

I will update this post, if I hear any new awesome ones. :)

I think we can all agree I suck at keeping this journal up, though I'm doing better this year. Heh.

I just found this entry that I wrote a while ago, and I think I'll go ahead and post it reeeally late... I believe it's from February of this year. It was certainly at the beginning of my last semester, some time when I was way into the BBC's Robin Hood... So, I will post it now, even though it's waaaay out of date!

( Read more... )

I'm working on a post about fashion and style... it will be cool, but it's not quite ready yet.

I just felt like blabbing for a while, so I'm not going to wait to post that^ one to talk randomly about stuff.

( Read more... )

And now I am going to go to bed. Goodnight!

Today was a good day!

Got things done in the morning, made it to class on time, had fun in drawing class (Molly brought her son and their dog, and pet rat, and pet corn snake to class! we drew them, and learned about gesture drawing). I made some drawings that I really liked, saw melissa, talked to friends... Then work was good, and dinner with Emily and Jenica was wonderful! Lindy class was fabulous, followed by a really fun weekly dance; I got to dance with a bunch of people, some I hadn't danced with before, and felt like I was getting to know other people better, got to dance balboa again... and felt like I generally danced well, and learned stuff. Now I'm home, about to watch a little tv and eat pizza, before going to bed at a reasonable time. And nothing is due tomorrow.

Thursdays are good days. :)

...and it was AWESOME! Seriously, we were cracking up almost the entire time. I mean, I really do like it and respect it kind of, but it's just so perfect... so ludicrously, unabashedly, cheesy (and yet delightful).

I'm glad they decided to put this one in the real theater – experiencing it with other people was priceless! Having a theater full of people all laughing at the inanities together was fun, and hearing the kids reactions/silliness was definitely amusing.

Best moment of the night:

[It's quiet in the theater, we're all watching...]
[On screen: Troy Bolton strips his shirt off...]
Girl in audience: "Gasp!!"
*beat*
[Almost everyone in the place starts laughing at the awesomeness/absurdity of this combination...]
"SHHH!1!" says the woman (yes, woman – a mother of uncertain age) sitting in front of us. As if to say: "I'm watching a SERIOUS movie here; STOP MAKING NOISE."
After she so rudely interrupts our glee, I realize Troy has started singing without me noticing, and now has a shirt on. Then follows a pretty kick-butt singing/dancing solo.

Favorite song: that one Troy does about being angsty and not knowing what to do with his life. With sexy jeans.
Favorite dance number: "The Boys are Back", seriously awesome (and manly) dance routine in a junkyard.
Favorite song line: Troy: "I'll take the lead...you don't have to be afraid of falling..." or something like that. Was cute.

It's so funny, Zac Efron is grown up now! He totally has man hands/forearms. He *is* pretty dishy; I'm looking forward to that 'Big in reverse' movie of his. Should be funny!

Yesterday we had a big discussion (at work, among the cubicals) about linguistic relativism. I apparently am unable to defend why I think people should strive for good diction and writing skills. The implication there being that some ways of talking/writing are better than others. This really gets linguists' dander up, incurring lots of anecdotal reasons why that's a terrible way to think.

Perhaps I'm only upset about this because I feel like I "lost" the debate we were having. :) I don't like losing. And John is one of those people who (like me) likes to argue, and just has to win. He didn't get my sympathy or win my respect towards his position, so I felt like fighting, not like listening to what he was saying. (Which, on a side note, is why I want to learn how to not get involved in true debates. I enjoy them while they last, but they never go anywhere; no one is really listening to the other person, we're just trying to shoot down their logic. How is that helpful in the end?)

Back to the topic at hand: I think that proper grammar, good spelling, and good diction are all things to strive for.

A descriptive linguist, though, would say that there is no "better" anything. Language evolves, and the differences we live with now are just different dialects. That what I consider to be good grammar would be atrocious and unreadable to someone from 200 years ago; therefore, language is constantly evolving and we just need to go with the flow. Whether that's the changes that have occurred since Old English, or the current predilection to use Netspeak in all areas of life, it's all equal and should be allowed to happen. If you say that one dialect (standard English over African American vernacular English, for example) is to be worked towards, you're saying one is better than the other, which is wrong. In terms of grammar, there's also the whole "We just stole a bunch of rules from Latin, why should we be using those?" argument.

I basically get the arguments, and I admit that if you don't agree with them you're sort of a horrible person.

But is it so bad to have a standard (within a given country/language) for the common way to use it?

I suppose this comes down, in the end, to my views on democracy. I just don't trust the mob to make good decisions. Or I guess I should say, I don't trust what is *popular* to be right.

One other thing; I dislike that people have such small vocabularies these days. We have so many nice words that will slowly become extinct because people don't know what they mean anymore. Is this just the facts of language shift and I need to accept it? Because I can't help but think that the educated people of the last few centuries were much more educated that our educated people. That is, we don't use our brains as effectively as they did in a lot of ways, and I feel we can only be worse off for that. No wonder our country has such problems...

Basically, I'm more of a prescriptive linguist, who can't defend her stance or feelings against the descriptive camp.

Any thoughts? Rebuttals? Advice?

Today I saw a man with a beard; and he actually looked handsome with this beard. weird times! I usually find beards the opposite of attractive. it might have helped that he was only wearing little running shorts (and was pretty fit) - it seems like the worst part about beards is dressing to go with them. it's harder to make an outfit work with a beard, and most guys who have one aren't really trying to dress well in the first place. that's all about beards for now.

I might post again, starting now. I doubt anyone is reading this anymore, but I'm okay with that.

right now I'm ignoring the fact that i have to get my project done before I go to sleep and I SHOULD be working on it... I think after I post this, I can get it done already.

I went to my NSCS induction ceremony tonight! it was good times. listening to quasi-inspiring speeches, getting my name called and receiving a pin, saying an oath and stuff. I enjoyed it! I also enjoyed the Chick-fil-a run afterwards. :)

My parents spent today in and out of the hospital with my Grandma. The upshot of it all is that she (Gramma) had a not-really-huge stroke a few days ago, and is now being treated with a pretty positive prognosis. But... my Gramma had a stroke!

This is important. I feel like it would be really easy for me to just keep going, not taking this in. But I can't do that, and I don't want to do that. I love my Gramma so much, so very very much, and more than that, I love hanging out with her. She is such a cool person, and I can truly say that she's one of my really good friends.

So I need to stop ignoring it, and accept the fact that she's going to die sometime, and that that time cannot be controlled by us. If I know this, I can spend how ever much (Lord willing, quite a long time) time we have left well and fully.

That's what I intend to do.

Feel better, Gramma.

There are things I haven't posted about. In a long time.

Here is the list I had last time I was going to post (about two months ago):

News:
- I have a new job. :) (Working at the Vineyard, on the Communications team. I'm doing Graphic Design, for GodSearch. woot!)
- (I had a little) wave to my (past History TA) Ian (in the hall one day).
- (it had been) lovely weather.
- condo M&Z (michelle and zach are getting a sweet condo!)
- bad at posting (I am)
- book = awesome (no idea what book I was reading. sounds fun!)
- grades? (still don't know, but it looks better now.)



So many things have happened since then! But I don't have time to post. sigh.

Check out this necklace, by Rene La Lique:



I thought it was very pretty; and then I realized that it is Plique-a-jour. dude!! that is insane! do you know how hard Plique-a-jour is?? Well, lets just say this: my beginning enameling class was so bad at it that our teacher decided to drop that sample and not grade it. Out of kindness. All of us; even the grads. Haha...

Anyway, I really like that piece; and it's amazing.

I was just reading through my LJ post from last year on my birthday. There were so many many things that I have forgotten about since then, just a little over a year ago! I've been struggling internally about how little I've blogged over the last 6 months or so, and that made it even more acute. After reading that, I really have to commit to blogging whenever I can; with whatever is at mind, and not letting the daunting task of catching up what I've not said stop me from saying the things I can say right now. Maybe I'll get to telling about things that happened between then and now sometime soon, but it shouldn't permanently stymie me until I do.

So there's my resolution! Hopefully I'll get an other post out tonight about my recent thoughts and doings.

I am so excited. Looks like it's gonna be awesome! :)


( Video from the set of Prince Caspian )

The stars were lovely tonight... you could see the Milky Way. I think that's one of the things I love most about living out in the country - the amazing clarity and beauty of the stars at night.