On Becoming a Person

While keeping my office hours at school, I was feeling so unmotivated to finish any work that I decided it might be fun to take pictures (on my cell phone; poor, poor quality) of some of the random crap in my office. Then I thought it would be fun to post the pictures. I’m sorry if this is too much awesomeness for you to handle all at once.

 
Mocha, mocha, mocha… a must!

Bunny Amanda gave me since I can’t have a real pet at home

Mary Oliver poem on my bulletin board

Flowers from Christina S.’s bridal shower

Mary Oliver quote… can’t get enough M.O.!

LGBTQI ally badge

My officemate Elena’s desk. Nothing good to photograph there.

Crappy books, especially that yellow one. Super crappy.

My personalized business cards! (NO, the university did not provide these to us, I made them myself)

The end!

I totally forgot about posting this, but I had planned on it a while ago. I went ahead and made myself a Flickr account. Finally. It sucked at first because you could only upload so many photos per month, but now I am to the point where I really don’t have anything else to upload yet since I have been too busy to take any pictures.

Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/45788697@N06/

Let me know what you think -- you can view the photos all at once in the photostream or click on a specific album at the right.

Since it is migraine season (read: end of the semester) and I have been feeling poopy and exhausted for the last two weeks plus, I decided it would be quite therapeutic to make a list of the things I like more than all other things (let me repeat myself—things, not people).

To accompany the list, I will provide you with the best image that comes up on Google image search’s first page when I type it in.

Cats  

Ice Cream

Children

Coffee   (with lots of crap in it)  

Flowers

Eggplant Parmesan

Poetry

Sunshine

Photography

Snuggling

Fun Books
(Dear whoever wrote this book—it really is not.)

Singing

Hip-Hop Music

Dancing
(Preferably to the above)

Laughing until I cry

Oh, that’s probably plenty. Feel free to oblige me with any of the above at any time :-P !

John just transferred my blog over to a new hosting system that will allow me to have more control over the crappy spam comments that I keep getting. It has some kind of filter that we still have to set up but hopefully that will make this better! Unfortunately, a couple of actual comments were lost in the process. Sorry if they were yours. I do like it when people leave me comments :).

Oh my goodness, I am so glad Great Lakes is over and so happy it happened at the same time. I presented two posters on Friday and Saturday—one that I made by myself under the direction of Dr. Levant (about male gender role discrepancy strain… whaaaat) and one that Nick and I did together (internet applications for counseling psychology).

I feel totally bad about this, but I was putting both of them together the night before and the morning of. I constructed my entire poster for Dr. Levant starting at like 6:30pm the night before and actually finished it up at like 6:30am the morning of (proof below, check the PJs!)

Friday was a hard day because I had to run between seeing clients and events for the conference during the day and then present the poster in the early evening. Then I was at the conference all day on Saturday too and then went to see my not-so-little brother for his 19th birthday. All in all it was a fun weekend, but I was so exhausted on Saturday night that I couldn’t keep my eyes open at my parents’ house. John drove me home wrapped up in his coat (which I barely remember), and we ended up leaving my car on campus at Akron all night and for half of Sunday because I was too tired to drive it home.

So I am supposed to be finishing the poster I am presenting at the Great Lakes conference tomorrow, but instead my mind is frolicking in thoughts about poetry and the outdoors and Mary Oliver. I just had a neat conversation about it with Natalie, when she reminded me of a status update I posted on Facebook once, about a butterfly brushing up against my cheek (which really did happen). She said that was a fantastic poem in itself. Oh, the simple things.

We went to see Mary Oliver perform on Tuesday night. She is just as fantastic in real life as she is on paper. She’s so humble and confident and soothing. She gave an excellent piece of advice—if you want to be a good writer, you have to experience things. Get out, touch things, smell things, taste things. Today on the way home from school I thought about going out in the backyard and rolling in the grass, but then I got too distracted with this stupid poster.

This is Mary Oliver when she was young—writing, writing, writing :-)

(Photo by Academy of American Poets)

(Photo by ImageMD)

Work, Sometimes

I was sad all day, and why not.  There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.

The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.

What are we sure of?  Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing.  Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.

Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.

You have had days like this, no doubt.  And wasn’t it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room?  Ah, what a
moment!

As for myself, I swung the door open.  And there was
the wordless, singing world.  And I ran for my life.
--Mary Oliver

So I woke up this morning (like many mornings really) with a serious migraine headache and was all nauseous and crap. I have to teach at 7:45am. I was really kind of afraid that I would puke in my car, so I drove to campus with a Victoria’s Secret bag in the front seat just in case. You know, because the VS bag has a nice shiny lining so I wouldn’t have to worry about anything soaking through. The inside rim of the bag says “Give Me Sexy,” on it, and it made me giggle a lot to imagine myself vomiting on that.

Thankfully, it didn’t happen, though I taught about Ivan Pavlov and classical conditioning and dog salivation and that did not help the nausea.

I had a dream last night that Betsy and I were in Africa walking down some path trying to trade goods with the natives. I got a headscarf, but it actually was an old sock that Betsy and I cut open to make it bigger. In the dream I wrapped it around my head and said, “Oh good, now I have something to catch all the sweat.” Yikes.

I realize I am quite racist in my dreams. And I also realize that my mind believes a gym sock is much bigger than it actually is in real life.

P.S. -- I realized I might have accidentally deleted someone's actual comments on my allergies post... I was in a rampage deleting spam and might not have looked closely before clicking the button. Sorry!

Dear People From Random Websites,

PLEASE STOP SPAMMING MY BLOG COMMENTS. I will never believe that your vague, generalized comments are authentic or have any sort of meaning whatsoever.  And I will never, ever, click on the links to any of your websites. Neither will my readers.  So you might as well save yourselves some time and give it up already. You are just a tad bit ridiculous.

Sincerely,
Me

All in all, I’d say it was a fabulous Easter.

I lost my cell phone in the woods while on a family hike on one of Katie’s horse trails. I guess it must have fallen out of my pocket. Katie was willing enough to re-trace our steps with Andrew, who called it over and over until they heard it ringing. They found it under a pile of leaves. Thank goodness. Clearly, I can’t even take a hike without my phone—I can’t even imagine being without it for days at a time :-P