Halloween Creepiness A Few Days Early.

Have you heard of "Take This Lollipop"? Read this article from cnn if you want to find out about it. If you're at all into freaking yourself/others out for Halloween as well as making a point regarding 'beware what you share', this is a pretty good place to start. I used it to see what the creepy guy would find because I feel like my profiles and things are pretty well locked down where Facebook is concerned. It was uncomfortably weird seeing him flip through my vacation photos though. The video definitely made me look like this llama (click the llama! you won't regret it! It's funny.):

The actor is creepy anyway, he played the scary abusive dad in "The Secret Life of Bees" (great movie, by the way...), and just has that creeper kind of look to him, plus the scary basement and crazy-eyes he has. Anyway, if you're looking for a way to be totally creeped out for Halloween or to totally creep others out, "Take This Lollipop" is a pretty good way to do it. And then go immediately check your privacy settings on everything you can think of. Happy Halloween?

Someone is staring at me in the coffee shop and a fly that won't leave me alone.

It's Wednesday already? Or maybe, it's only Wednesday?! Hmm. Glass half full/empty sort of beginning here.

So... Comps is decidedly less enjoyable than perhaps I thought it would be several naive days ago. It's kind of [nearly] impossible to keep focus on four questions for an entire week and write four research papers on said questions. Especially when your baseball team is in the World Series that week. And one of the questions is on Learning Labs. How much can you really say about Learning Labs? I like them. They're cool. Kids seem to enjoy them. Hurrah for having spaces for kids to try out being a radio deejay. I'm for it. But...there's only so much to write about them and to design one? Well...there's only one extremely good example of a successful learning lab right now and I assume all 40 of us are going to base our labs on that one example. How uninteresting it must be to grade these.

You know those images that are floating around the social media sites right now? The kind where it's a jumble of letters a la those word search things? And you're supposed to look at it and the first few words that you happen to decipher in the puzzle are supposed to describe who you are right now? Yeah. I don't know if there's a science behind that; I don't know if someone took that from a psychologist's toolbox or if someone just decided to make a word search seem way more important by pretending it tells you something deep about your personality. BUT. I did one and I got the following words: impatient (check), restless (check), passionate (check) and naive (check). I can pretty well center all four of those words completely on myself right now in terms of job-hunting and moving forward in life.

I've had spotify on random radio things and it seemed to get stuck on Sufjan Stevens and I didn't really pay any attention until just a second ago when I finally registered this annoying noise coming through my earphones and I was suddenly, 'What the hell am I listening to?'. I'm happy to say that now I have Beady Eye playing who are decidedly more funky and more me than Mr. Stevens. Not that Stevens doesn't have a good song or two...but...no. I have a tendency to chair dance when I listen to music and I have a tendency to need to listen to music when I'm writing my papers and I have a tendency to need write papers away from my house.  All this comes together to mean that this week I've had a higher frequency of bursts of public dancing than normal. It's been kind of eye-opening to realize that I am rocking out enough to disturb other booth-sitters in my coffee shop that I tend to use as study ground #1. I tried to branch out to a second study ground at the local university in town, but they have a major parking problem and even though I had a student parking permit at my disposal, there was NO WHERE to park near the library. They have a really nice library and I was hoping to go in and look around for a bit and see what sorts of services they offer their students as a way to help write one of the comps, but that was kind of a bust due to the parking issue. And aside from that, I kept nearly going the wrong way down one-way streets and after two separate attempts to find a parking space on campus (one in am and one in pm), and after several circles around campus, I gave up and returned to study ground #1. Seriously, Lincoln needs a parking garage or something. It's ridiculous over there.

So now I'm trying to study here but it's kind of not working, either.

Attention! Attention!

I can put a good percentage of my hair up into a ponytail.
[For the first time in years.]

That is all.

Mid-comps musings.

I am in the middle of my Master's comprehensive exams right now. Things are going okay. When the questions were released yesterday morning and I saw them, I was pretty happy with them. I feel secure in the knowledge that I can get the needed grade for these questions and graduate. I have two secondary drafts done and a list of sources mostly compiled for the final two. It's not bad. This is exactly what I wanted. I chose this program all those years ago because of the fact that they offered a comp exam option instead of a thesis. I am not a person that enjoys theses. I have a theory that people who choose to get a grad degree fall into either a thesis group or a comp exam group. I am definitely the latter. I think I have some fellow students who fall into the former, based on the panic levels screaming from posts on the online discussion boards for these exams. I understand the feeling though. I had to a thesis for my history undergrad degree and it nearly gave me a panic attack. It wasn't even as rigorous as a graduate level thesis would be and I was exhausted from it. No, no. Give me a test any day instead of a semesters worth of meetings and readings and planning with committees, etc. I pity the fool that has to go the thesis route.

Still. Comps are not all glitter and rainbows. The weather is beautiful right now (70s in late October, areyoukiddingme?) and it's making it rough to focus on comps. I would much rather be doing something like this:

I feel like I'm definitely more of a porch swing sort of human rather than a hammock sort of human. Granted, I haven't had a lot of hammock experience, but the few times I've tried one out, it's been totally uncomfortable. This looks absolutely perfect. I could type my comps and read my books right there. I haven't been to a beach in a long time...I think I've mentioned this in recent months... This just looks so enticing. Maybe a coastal librarian job is what I need?

Tonight it begins!

Go Cardinals!

[I'm really excited.]

Mama said there'd be days like this.

For those days that rough you up.

Mumbling in the late hours of the day.

I'm sleepy but also not quite ready to go to sleep yet. The internet is not that interesting. The book I'm supposed to be reading for the Missouri State Book Review Board can't even hold my interest enough to get through the first five pages...and I have to finish it and write a review for it. Not a good sign that I can't even get through the first chapter.

I messed my whole schedule up for the next three weeks. I don't really know what I was thinking. Maybe it will work out better this way, though. I got the days I'm supposed to work/work/practicum mixed up because someone had a conflict and needed me to alter my schedule. I screwed up the whole week's schedule by telling them I normally work that job on Tuesdays, which is completely wrong. I don't really even know what's going on around me. I'm a bit like a robot just making my commute, parking in the garage, walking to a building, working, walking to lunch, walking to another building, working, walking to the other side of the same building, working, walking back to the garage, driving the return commute, eat dinner, read books, go to sleep, replay. I have such a set schedule and no time for anything but that schedule that I don't even think about it any longer. But when someone needs me to change something, I actually don't have a true idea of what it is I'm doing on any given day any more. I'm just on autopilot. And when forced to come out of autopilot today, my entire system failed and I have managed to screw up the schedule for a few weeks. But maybe that's okay. Next week was going to be messed up anyhow, so a little more screwing with it isn't really going to make it worse.

Iris is cuddly tonight. There were a few claps of thunder earlier and some decent bolts of lightning and she started roaming around the living room doing her high pitched crying like she was worried. So she was pulled up on the couch and is in a little ball sleeping next to me now. The rain is gone, though. But she's definitely a cuddler.

I kind of want things to go by faster. I'm ready for school to be done, but the year's been going by so fast anyway, that I'm also kind of wishing it would slow down a little too. Maybe I would get a handle on things better. Life isn't really boring right now, but it kind of is what with being really busy but busy doing the same things over and over and over every week. No real variety right now. Halloween is in a couple of weeks though. I can't decide whether to buy candy for trick or treaters or not. The doorbell scares the hell out of Iris and it's not really worth the hour and a half of trying to pull the cat from her hiding place to calm her down for just a handful of trick or treaters. Also, I don't get the cute little kids who go as little ninjas or princesses. I get the hoardes of teenage boys that just wear a Star Wars shirt and call it a costume. Lame and unimaginative. I'll keep the sour patch kids candy to myself, thankyouverymuch.

The Cards are in the World Series. Last night was a crazy homerun fest. I don't have anything against Milwaukee. I've been to see them play in Wisconsin before. It wasn't very exciting. Milwaukee as a town wasn't all that impressive. Kind of grungy and sad, actually. St. Louis definitely has the upper hand in the cool town category. Somebody's gotta lose. Brewers fans have less to complain about than Phillies fans, in my opinion. And everyone should be happier than Braves fans. Cardinals fans can be kind of brutal to other teams. Generally they will pick on a player who makes the mistake of opening their mouth to a journalist and letting something stupid come out and it goes through the web like a virus and Redbird Nation gets all up in arms about what some young kid you'd never pay any attention to otherwise said about Albert Pujols or the Cardinals in general. The players and the fans are very loyal and very protective about the Cardinals. I am, too. I have a hard time imagining myself rooting for anybody but the Cards. Still, I don't get into the boo-ing of other teams. I did enjoy when Yadier Molina stood up to Brandon Phillips last season, but that got totally out of hand and we ended up the real losers in the whole mix after our back-up catcher's career was ended in the brawl. It's important to learn from things like that. That stuff can get out of hand really quickly and it's detrimental to your own team. This is all to say that I hope both teams and fans are respectful in the World Series and we don't have any players who start to make stupid remarks to create drama. It will be a tense enough situation without booing or fighting or name-calling. Let's play ball (starting Wednesday)!

Boomin' like an atom bomb.

Happy weekend, everybody. It doesn't necessarily feel like Fall, what with it being 80 degrees outside, but Fall it is and Fall stuff I did do this weekend. Pumpkin patches, mum buying, Autumny porch decorating, post-season baseball tracking, winery visiting, and family seeing were all on the agenda. Plus some homework doing and book reading.

And music discovering! Have you heard of Mayer Hawthorne? I was trolling Spotify and came across his new album and gave him a listen. He's a bit of a throwback artist. You don't hear many falsettos rocking the airwaves nowadays. He mixes it up though too, doing a song with Snoop Dogg on his latest album, "How Do You Do". I would put a youtube video on here, but I get tired of them being dumb and restrictive on which websites they allow things to play. I wish you could just share a song rather than having to share an entire freaking video. But, check out Mayer Hawthorne if you get a chance. Especially if you like modern musicians with a retro sound.

Also, I saw the movie "Coco Before Chanel" this weekend. I loved it. Audrey Tautou is wonderful in it (of course!) and I hadn't ever really learned much about Coco Chanel, but I think we could have been friends. I "get" her. I wouldn't have enjoyed wearing the frou-frou dresses and obnoxious hats that the french ladies in her day were wearing. And corsets? No. She's portrayed as a pretty awesome woman in her early years who was not afraid to strike out on her own and be a little different in her style choices. She was practical in her style, but still very unique and classic in her creations. I liked the movie a lot and I was thinking about it later and I wonder if she and Eva Peron ever met and if they were friends? You know how there's that conversation starter about which people would you invite to a dinner party? I would like to have dinner with Eva Peron and Coco Chanel.

This is my last weekend before comps begin and go through the rest of the month. I'm looking forward to them being over. Turn, turn, turn.