improvements

Tuesday I interviewed with Fleishman-Hillard, a PR agency based in St. Louis, MO. As I was quickly reading over my writing test (sandwiched between seven interviews!), I fleetingly wondered how much my writing had improved in the past year or so.

An hour later I found myself in the office of the Multicultural Scholarship Coordinator, discussing our mutual feeling of lack of know-how in the computer world. She mentioned blogs which reminded me that this green webpage exists and has been sadly neglected. Somehow tonight, after completely conquering Blackboard statistics homework, I ended up reading old posts. And thus I received an answer to my original query: my writing has vastly improved. I'm ashamed of my childish yapping of yesteryear.

Obviously, however, as evidenced by this rambling, I've a way to go yet. Hopefully I get the opportunity to work on this skill, among others, this summer in St. Louis, or here in West Lafayette at SIA or a newspaper or a magazine. We'll see!

highway robbery

So I went to Follett's with three books to sell back. The Follett's woman sniffed distainfully at one book (which I have been trying to sell back, unsuccessfully, since freshman spring semester, but there is only one professor who requests it), wrinkled said nose at another (which I admit is falling apart, but that's how it was when I bought it) and offered twenty measley dollars for the third. Something in me didn't want to accept $20.00 for a book I spent countless hours studying. So I didn't.

Half an hour later, laden down with heavy textbooks from Follett's as well as the ones they snubbed, I decided to try University on my way home. The dude in there looked like he couldn't sniff distainfully if he tried. He did sort of try on the leftover-from-freshman-year book, but he offered me $32.00 for the one Follett's said $20 for and $34.00 for the ratty, falling apart one! I was shocked and amazed, and I'm never selling books to Follett's again. A $12.00 difference is pretty big for a broke college student.

Getting High

I just finished "Go Ask Alice", a book which is actually the true (and unedited, from what I gather) diary of a girl in the 1960s who accidentally gets high at a party. She's only 15, and from there on her diary is a swirl of running away from home to be high for weeks, returning to stay clean, getting slipped drugs again, giving in, etc. By the end of the diary, she's 16, people at school have stopped pressuring her to be a dealer again, she has a new boyfriend who's never used in his life, and she's determined the drug phase of her life is over. But the final portion of the book, titled "Epilogue" and written by someone else, says that three weeks after the last entry (in which she decided she was too grown up to need a diary any more) she was found dead of drug overdose in her bedroom. No one knows if it was accidental or not, or even how she got the drugs.

I was thinking about this book as I drooled over pictures of a Miata I might (might!!) go look at this weekend. I was thinking about drugs because I think Miatas make me high. Driving one was fabulous, and every time I imagine myself the owner of one of these itty-bitty, nada practicality, adorable Mazdas I get all giddy inside. In case anyone's curious, this one is a black 1993 with a tan interior and recently lowered suspension. It currently resides in Louisville.

One more thing...when I die, please don't publish my diary. Please! Even if it ends up being a perfect chronicle of a 2000s girl's descent into addiction to a very powerful drug, the CAR.

the clock is ticking...

Today I saw a bike that had worse-sounding brakes than mine! My trusty steed and I were coasting to a stop on Grant Street and someone coming from a side street was slowing down to turn. It sounded like this:

My bike: squeeeeeeeeek (in a deep, throaty, kind of German accent)

His bike: squEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAKKKK! (in a fingernails on chalkboard sort of way)

Ha. I win. But who knows for how long...

"Oh my, how ridiculous!"

...was my first reaction to this article about a British teacher in Sudan who is being tried for allowing her class of 7-year-olds to name the class teddy bear "Muhammed." Gillian Gibbons is charged with "inciting religious hatred" and could face 40 lashes and prison time.

My second reaction was just sadness. Muslims are not afraid to make a big public stink about blasphemy and the sacredness of their prophet's name. Why don't Christians stand up and make a stink when our Lord's holy Name is profaned?

(These are actually cookies. Yum!)

Matt 6:34; Jer. 29:11

"Yes. Live today. Not yesterday. Not tomorrow. Just today. Inhabit your moments. Don't rent them out to tomorrow. Do you know what you're doing when you spend a moment wondering how things are going to turn out with Perry?"

"What am I doing?"

"You're cheating yourself out of today. Today is calling to you, trying to get your attention, but you're stuck on tomorrow, and today trickles away like water down a drain. You wake up the next morning and that today that you wasted is gone forever. It's now yesterday. Some of those moments may have had wonderful things in store for you, but now you'll never know." She looked at me. She laughed. "Such a solemn-faced listener you are. If I were a teacher, I'd like to have thirty of you in my class."

(I stole this from a young adult lit book I'm reading in moments, also stolen, between homework... much like I have stolen this moment to bang away on my micro-sized keyboard to produce a blog entry instead of another page of my paper)

(From whom am I stealing moments? Isn't it only my future self that will suffer, on Monday, when three professors demand neatly typed neatly thought-out neatly turned in papers?)

what goes on between your ears

So, what do you think about gun control? Should we have strict rules? Waiting periods? Background checks? Laws on what kind of gun you can purchase? Permits or licenses? Or should we just be like the Australians and make all handguns illegal?

Just wondering. I have a speech on this topic in two days and I have yet to write it. Whoops! Not that I'm asking you to write it for me. It's starting to formulate....slowly....perhaps I will share my opinions once I am done putting them in fancy, COM 314-style rhetoric.