Thank you GLEE. Now I have the thong song stuck in my head.

For the past couple of days there have been a lot of things going on in my life that 1)you probably wouldn’t care about and 2)I don’t feel like retelling, but let us just say that I, Lauren, for what is probably the first time in my life, hate school. Once you pick your jaws up off the floor, we can continue.

Now, if that last part didn’t make sense I should state that I love school. I have always loved school, ever since I was little. I may have hated the people *in* my school, but I still loved school. Yes, yes it can be annoying at times and no I didn’t want to wake up so early every day, but overall, in general if you will, I love school. I love it so much I am going to be in school for the rest of my life. Granted, I will be the one with the answers (in like, a year! wow!) but I will always have a summer and thanksgiving and spring break until I retire. And I am okay with that, obviously, since I chose that as my career.

But over the past two days things have happened that have made me, at least temporarily, hate school. And I will share one of these things with you because you just won’t even believe it. Okay, you might, but it is insane. So my university uses this online system called Sakai, which is your basic blackboard or whatever the equivalent to that is at your school. For those of you who don’t know what Sakai or blackboard is, basically it is this online thing, through the university, that lists your classes, and your grades and professors can post announcements, etc. Well a lot of my professors have us submit our papers and such on Sakai because our university is paperless this semester. (Which is nice I suppose, yay going green! Except that it is a bother sometimes.) Anyway, my psychology of education and adolescent development class took a vote, and we had our midterm online. Now I like this, don’t get me wrong, because we were able to use our notes which proved very helpful in getting me a good grade. But here is the thing.

Okay. My midterm for that class is made of two parts. Part one- 11 multiple choice questions and one short essay worth 9 points. Part two- a very long paper. Both of these parts were due on MONDAY at 11:55pm. So I do the questions and the short essay and submit it on SUNDAY at 11:30am. Okay, everyone with me? Everyone see that I submitted it super early? Okay. When I went to submit part one the page refreshed, all on its own. So I went back to the test and quizzes section, saw that it had not submitted, went back to it, and redid all my answers and copy/pasted my essay. Then I clicked submit and got the confirmation email.

When you submit a multiple choice test, the computer automatically grades it. HOWEVER, I figured that she (that is, my professor) would have to grade it herself because of the essay. So naturally I didn’t panic when I saw my grade was 0/20. I did my thing, spent four and a half hours on the freaking paper (insanity) and submitted that on time. No problem, no worries.

Except I went back to check my grade because some of the other people in my class had gotten their grades, so I was curious. I saw that my exam was available for me to look at. (It only becomes available with the corrected answers when your professor is done grading it, which meant she graded my essay.)

It was still 0/20. “That is odd.” I thought to myself. So I clicked on my exam.

BLANK.

“What the [explicative]?”

STILL BLANK.

So I emailed my professor asking if she received my exam blank, or if Sakai was screwing with me (though I didn’t use those *exact* words). She said she received it blank. Now, here is my thought. You are a professor. You have set your due date for MONDAY at 11:55 PM. You have a student submit his/her exam on SUNDAY at 11:30 AM, way, way, way before the due date. And it is blank. Does that not raise any flags? I mean, if I wasn’t going to put time and effort into the exam, or do it at all, I wouldn’t have taken the time to submit a blank exam.

Well, I was FREAKING OUT. I mean this midterm was like… 15% of my grade? Something like that, so I called and made an appointment with her for the following morning. She emailed me and said we would talk about it in the meeting and I should be prepared to take a re-test IF NECESSARY. As in, I don’t know if I quite believe you.

PANIC.

So I get to her office and she is all “how are you Lauren?” and I am all, “Oh I’ve been better!” And then apparently my situation got her thinking because this happened to three other students.

RELIEF.

So she let me retake the SAME! exam and since I was smart and brought a printed copy of my essay, I didn’t have to rewrite it. Yay!

And that, my dear readers, is just a tiny slice of why I haven’t been blogging lately. I miss you Internet, and I will return full force very soon.

Edmund Spencer

Sonnet 1

Happy ye leaves when as those lilly hands,
which hold my life in their dead doing might
shall handle you and hold in loves soft bands,
lyke captives trembling at the victors sight.
And happy lines, on which with starry light,
those lamping eyes will deigne sometimes to look
and reade the sorrowes of my dying spright,
written with teares in harts close bleeding book.
And happy rymes bath’d in the sacred brooke,
of Helicon whence she derived is,
when ye behold that Angels blessed looke,
my soules long lacked foode, my heavens blis.
Leaues, lines, and rymes, seeke her to please alone,
whom if ye please, I care for other none.

Victimized.

This is an email I received today from my British Lit professor JAMES DEAN. Now, he may be a terrible grader, and unclear on his assignments, but this email shows the very reason I love this man. The way he phrases things makes class time, and life in general, so very interesting. (All bold has been added by me for extra emphasis.)

Dear Brit Lit I class,

It has come to my attention that some of you were sold the
wrong book for the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.  
The error occurred at Lieberman's book store.  The book is
labeled for 205 classes, but it is a text for the 206 class!  
It contains Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, for example.

If you were victimized in this way, please proceed back to
Lieberman's at your earliest convenience, explain the situation,
and demand that they get you the correct text right away.  The
correct text is THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE,
Vol. B, 8th ed.: The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth
Century.  

Let me know of any other or further difficulties.

Yours,

Jim Dean

Introducing Darth.

So last night was my first night sleeping with my breathing machine. If you want the long, wildly entertaining story go here. If you want the short version- I have sleep apnea, a condition in which I stop breathing roughly 15 times per hour in my sleep. I’ve decided that the picture of me wearing the mask is far, far, far too embarrassing to put on the internet. Although my dear, sweet, darling mother found nothing wrong with texting it to just about everyone in my family. Look! Here is Lauren with her machine! I can, however, pull up  a random picture from the internet and you can imagine what it would look like on me. Just be kind, internet.

So this is the actual machine, with humidifier!

And the sexy face mask:

My mask is a little different on the top, but it still covers my mouth and nose and then there is a long tube that connects the two. Now do you understand why 1) I refuse to show myself wearing such a contraption and 2) why I call it Darth Vader? I sound all raspy and weird when I talk, and don’t even get me started when I start to cough. I mean the whole thing feels as though it is convulsing.

The woman at the machine office (I don’t know what to call it… she wasn’t a doctor or anything) was quite weird. I mean, very helpful and very informative, but very, very weird. She showed me how to tighten the mask and clean it and how to adjust the humidity and settings and other various things. Then she let me go and wished me good luck with my breathing!

So, naturally, last night I used the thing. At first it was okay; it starts off at level 4 of oxygen and within twenty minutes goes up to level 7. Now, that is a lot of oxygen and it felt like a lot of pressure was on my ears. Weird, no? Finally I was able to fall asleep; but woke up quite a few times in the middle of the night convinced that someone was trying to SMOTHER ME. After about a minute or two of thinking someone was covering my mouth, I realized that I could, in fact, breathe. The first time that happens, scary. By the third time I was waking up and clawing at the mask, screaming in my head GET IT OFF GET IT OFF GET IT OFF. But again, I realized what I thought was trying to smother me was actually trying to help me breathe, and was able to count to ten, breathe, and go back to sleep.

All in all it was an interesting night. Around 8am I woke up, alert and ready to go but seeing as it was the first time I was able to sleep in past 9am in a month I was determined to go back to sleep, sans mask. I got up, cleaned it like I am supposed to, and went back to bed. I know it is going to be quite the improvement in the long run, but there are only so many times I can wake up in the middle of the night thinking someone is going to kill me.

I’ll get a picture of the real Darth up soon!

A Post Secret Inspired Project

For those of you who are new to my site (perhaps this is your first visit) I say WELCOME! About a year ago (so, so very long ago) I spent three or so months living in beautiful, rainy England. While there I did many amazing things (read all about them here) and I also took a few classes. My favorite was most definitely my photography class. For this class we used old 35mm cameras, you know the kind where you load film (for those of you unfamiliar with film it is this shiny little papery type thing that magically captures the images you take) and you have to manually focus by matching the aperture with the lighting and whatnot… really complicated stuff to be quite honest. WELL, in my class we learned how to do such a thing and then we learned how to develop our film, then make a contact sheet, then select individual frames then enlarge them into photos, them mount them onto poster board. This stuff is NOT easy Internet. I would spend anywhere from 20-40 minutes enlarging ONE picture. I can’t tell you how many nights I spent at least four or so hours in the dark room only to emerge tired, sleepy, and half way finished. But boy oh boy was it fun.

For our final instead of taking some sort of silly exam testing us on distances and apertures and things of the technical nature, we had to come up with a creative project. We were tested on developing the film, making a contact sheet, choosing the best pictures, enlarging them, and finally mounting them. My final project was one of the most fun things I have ever done in my academic life. I chose to look to Post Secret for inspiration. For anyone who might not know about this amazing site, I will tell you a bit about it. Frank Warren runs this site where people send in anonymous postcards with secrets on them. Some are funny, some are sweet, some are sad, some are scandalous, but they are all (that we know of) true. I really encourage you to check out the website if you have not. You can find it here!

So what I did was take five of my friends and have them write out a true secret and then we shot almost a role of film for each. I’m posting about this now, more than a year later, because I was home earlier today looking for my photography notes because I’m planning a photo shoot with a friend soon, and I found all my old photography things. I should also mention this was a black and white photography course, so all of these are B&W.  So I scanned them into my computer and thought I would share them with you! Please keep in mind these have been transported across the pond and have been moved and bothered, so there are a few scratches (from people who don’t really know how to handle photographs) and of course I did my best to get all the dust off but dust is… everywhere.

Step One! Contact sheets! Here are the three contact sheets from the shoot.

Step 2! Choosing the right picture! Here are the five individual pictures I chose.

Step Three! Final picture! Well, you can’t really tell but the final pictures were mounted on a piece of thick poster board. Here are how they turned out!

So there you have it! Let me know what you think; I had a lot of fun shooting the girls (with my camera, mind you) and I got an A on the project (from a professor who rarely hands out A’s because “there is always room for improvement”).

One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.

GUESS WHAT TODAY IS?! NATIONAL POETRY DAY!

Sorry to shout, but I had to get your attention Internet! Today is national poetry day and in honor of that I have posted two videos below of my two favorite poems. One is just a reading, the other is a really cool video someone made to go along with the reading! Enjoy!

“As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden:

“Annabelle Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe

I’m sleeping with Darth Vader! It’s the scandal of the year.

“You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.” - John Green, Looking for Alaska

So it is that time of the year again. I tend to do something one year and love it so much I find myself doing it the next year and the next year. The only problem is that list continues to increase while my free time continues to decrease. It is that time of the year to reread Looking for Alaska. If you have never read this book before, let me begin by saying you have no idea what you are missing. This book seriously changed me and my outlook on life. I am really not exaggerating when I say I look at people, situations, anything and everything differently because of the message of this book. In fact, it touched me so much that I find myself writing differently. John Green is an amazing writer and the imagery he creates has the power to make you weep from laughter and ten words later make you weep because WOAH! you didn’t see that event coming and you are quite sad. Don’t let the fact that this book is listed under “young adult” because that is not the case. I really, really hope I teach at a school where they allow me to teach this book to my students. It is very powerful, eloquent and very beautiful.

It is also that time of the year to make my way through the Lord of the Rings movies. These movies hold a very special place in my heart because it brought together all of my cousins and siblings and for once there was no screaming or yelling or fighting of any kind. We talked endlessly about the plot, who got to be who (I’m Sam which gives me reason to randomly shout “SHAAAARE THE LOAD!”) and we even dressed up for fun. (We had cloaks. Jealous? You should be.) Now, I am a bit apprehensive to start the movies because I am currently (although very, very slowly) making my way through the books. I feel as though I need to read these before going to New Zealand, because we will be going on a LOTR tour and even though the movies were filmed there and I’ve already been to the pub in which it was partly written/discussed, I still think I should read them. They are classics for a reason.

And of course it is time to go to NYC (although, when is it not?). So listen up mother! I want to go to central park and have tea at the Plaza just like Eloise. Oh how I love Eloise.

In other news, I get my sleep mask next Friday. (If you have no idea what I’m talking about, check out the thrilling story here.) I haven’t decided if I am going to post a picture of it on here when I get it; depends on the level of embarrassment I feel at the time. I do know that I have named it Darth Vader because, well, when wearing it I feel like ol’ Darth. Plus I can now (or at least next Friday) say “I’m totally sleeping with Darth Vader.” Can you imagine! Me! Sleeping with Darth Vader! The scandal! The shock! The horror! I know, I know. It is going to be totally awesome. Also if people want to come to visit it, and I’ve already had a few friends say they wanted to, the only requirement is that they bring a sticker to decorate it with. (This reminds me of the rule JD and Turk have… that you have to bring your own roll of toilet paper if you stay with them… no? anyone? just me?)

And lastly, I will answer this question that I was asked today by me lovely sister.

“If you were a boy for one day, what would you do?”

Hmmm, a very interesting question. I think whatever I did I would do it shirtless, because it is really unfair boys don’t have to wear shirts all the time. Then I think I would go to an old barber (like the kind with the red and white swirly thing in the front) because boys can just do that. They don’t have to entrust a random person with their precious hair and expect them to cut it EXACTLY like the picture looks. I would also burp a lot, because boys don’t (usually) get nasty looks when they burp. I would go to a sporting event and actually know what is going on (I’m assuming if there is magic for me to become a boy, there is magic for me to become a boy with a decent knowledge of sports). Oh then I would go smell a bunch of cologne because it all (mostly) smells so so good. And that would be my (somewhat boring) day as a boy.

Some Observations about University Life.

This morning I had a hair appointment with my amazing hair stylist Jamie. She dyed my hair blue again, blah blah you don’t care about the details. I then proceeded to the grocery store to get the ingredients to make one of my father’s favorite sandwiches because the AUBURN! game is on and heaven forbid if anything bad happen the day of the AUBURN! game then someone somewhere will surely die. Then I came home, spent a large portion of the afternoon with my brother watching The Big Bang Theory (an amazing show, but that is another post for another time). Later I headed back to campus, and as I turned onto the street before the street on which my parking garage sits, I passed a bunch of houses students rent out for the year. There were large groups of people walking here and there and I noticed the majority of girls in black shirts, jeans, and black boots. I thought nothing of it really; these bimbos don’t hold my attention for long. However, as I pulled into the parking garage I noticed quite a few more girls all wearing black shirts, jeans, and black boots. And that got me thinking. Is there some sort of event held where you had to wear a black shirt, jeans and black boots?

And THAT got me thinking about all of the random things that run through my mind on a typical basis. My university is quite peculiar, whether it be the signs posted everywhere for the appropriately named WOODY’S bar that is only open for men of the homosexual nature to signs saying “how do you know it was a good night if you can’t remember?” So here are some random observations about my university.

First let’s start off with the freshman. The freshman (girls mainly) do what we like to call “instabond.” The know each other for five seconds and are already best friends FOR LIFE. Give them to the end of the semester and I guarantee they will be exchanging measurements because, duh! They are going to be bridesmaids in each others weddings! You didn’t get the memo? After they have a few heart to hearts in class they will slowly drift apart and split up into smaller groups who are suddenly FURIOUS with the other group. Eventually they all hate each other and the next semester they do it all over again. It is a tragic tale that I am currently observing every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in my French class. If you care to know the status, they just split into two smaller groups. Let the entertainment begin.

Next we have our bikers. No, I don’t mean the cool motorcycle bikers. I mean people who ride bikes from one end of the campus to the opposite end of the campus in a desperate attempt to make it to class on time while the rest of us only have fifteen minutes to get from Memorial Hall to Willard Hall and since we have shorter legs we practically have to run to make it to our psychology of education class. Or you know, something along those lines. Well these bikers are MEAN. They are so mean, that I don’t really think you can call them mean until you have been hit by one, but don’t worry! That should happen any day now. Obviously since I made up that rule, you can gather (correctly) that I have, in fact, been hit by a bike. His handlebar WHACKED my elbow while I was walking to class. And then there was that one time where I was walking in a perfectly straight line to class and this bike, coming from the opposite direction, just sort of decided he wanted to go where I was walking, even though he had enough room on the walk way, so he starts veering directly in front of me and I have to dash out of his way to avoid having a collision. Stupid bike people.

While the bikers are mean, they are nothing, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING compared to our gems in student health. I think the term “mean as snakes” is too nice, and for once I am not exaggerating. The receptionists, nurses, doctors- all of them! Mean, mean, mean ladies. I try to avoid this building as much as possible, but sometimes I have to go and it makes me die a little inside. It is like they don’t want you there but they can’t really do anything about that because if we weren’t there they would be out of a job so they go out of their way to make us miserable, which isn’t really all that nice seeing as we are in student health because we already are miserable from being so sick. I went because I had to get a TB test in order to observe at a high school and I was really sick (going on two weeks) so I told the nurse and she was all YOU! YOU NEED TO SEE A DOCTOR NOW! (Okay even I have to admit this was the nicest lady I’ve ever encountered there.) She completely disregarded the rules and got me an appointment with the doctor that day. Then I had to spend the next hour listening to every stinking nurse and receptionist and doctor tell me “DO NOT EXPECT THIS NEXT TIME. IT IS VERY RARE THAT YOU GOT TO SEE THE DOCTOR TODAY. IN FACT, THAT NURSE USED AN APPOINTMENT TIME SHE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO. DO NOT EXPECT THIS EVER AGAIN.” After the eighth or so time of hearing this I was growing irate. (I was already extremely angry at the mean ladies, so irate is the next step in Lauren Land.) The doctor then said it for what would be her third time, and I could no longer hold back the irateness. I looked at her and said, “Oh don’t worry I don’t plan on coming back here. I have a normal doctor in town but I couldn’t get an appointment with her until next week and this has been going on for two weeks now so this was a last resort.” After that, she was quite decent.

Next we come to what I like to call the “Gap Ad Effect.” This happens during the start of school as well as the end when the weather is nice enough for the girls to hike up the shorts and wear as little clothing as possible. My university holds preview days for a few weeks and people from all over come to visit the campus and go on guided tours and watch us walk by and gawk at real college kids! During this extended period of time students crawl out of their hiding places and sit on the grass outside, strumming guitars, holding hands, gazing at the sky, playing frisbee, playing football, all in crisp clean (at least I hope) clothes. I kid you not when I say during these weeks my campus looks like a non-stop gap ad. It is hilarious.

Lastly we have the frisbee lovers. Now, I don’t know what it is about this place, but these kids sure do go crazy for a game of frisbee. I mean you can’t walk from one side of the campus to the next without seeing at least five different games going on (it is a very long campus). And these people take this stuff very, very seriously. There is a girl in my grammar class who is on the ultimate frisbee team, and you would think that this is some government operated mission that they are sent on. I can’t even begin to imagine the rules of ultimate frisbee. Are there any rules? I mean, how much harder can you make throwing a frisbee to a member on your team? I don’t particularly care for frisbees, in fact I sort of have a fear of them because at the end of senior year three of my classmates and I were in our school’s lunchroom and we were bored (my computer teacher let us out of class to go empty our lockers) and so we decided to play frisbee with Evan’s plastic tupperware container lid thing, and then Neil hit me with it STRAIGHT in my chest and it really hurt and he was really embarrassed but I was more hurt than embarrassed so now I have a genuine fear of them. And I was walking to class one day and these northerners are playing frisbee outside IN THE MIDDLE OF THE WALKWAY and there is no way on earth I can avoid walking past them because I chose to go left that day instead of going right and I’m forced to walk in the middle of their game and this huge white frisbee almost hits me in the head. Terrifying stuff I tell you.

And those, my dear readers, are some observations about my university.

Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.

- Walt Whitman

So I have this Professor

named James Dean. And he is just a teeny tiny, HUGE BALL OF INSANITY. And I mean insanity in the weird sense, not the crazy sense. Par exemple, that means for example to all of you non French speaking people, he will just sort of space out in class. We don’t really know what he is thinking, but a good 30 seconds of silence goes by before he resumes his thought. The girl who sits next to me seems to be the only other one who finds him absolutely hysterical, even though he isn’t trying to be. I mean, we generally spend 3/4 of the class laughing at him (in kindness, mind you) and 1/4 the class learning. He just has a unique way of phrasing things that can either sound really absurd or really inappropriate.

He also really, really loves medieval literature. I mean, he teaches an entire class devoted to Chaucer, who we are studying right now. The stories we are reading in class are written in our textbooks as they originally appeared which means original medieval language. We then have to read the story, get online, find the translation he has provided, and sort of try and figure out what the story is about, as the translation isn’t all that translated to begin with. Good times. We just finished the Miller’s Tale from The Canterbury Tales, and I’ve got to say that James Dean mentions the fact that this is “THE MOST BRILLIANT AND WELL WRITTEN STORY IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.” I mean the man only says it every other second. But the thing I like most about this medieval language (which isn’t much) is when James Dean reads it aloud to us.

Now, he is a very white, very old, very American man. But put a page of medieval english in front of him and he becomes this very energetic, very ancient, VERY BRITISH man. It is like this accent takes over his body and you would swear someone else had come into the class to read to us. Knowing this about himself he likes to show off and the other day he decided it was time to show how horrible we were at this. He had us split into groups and pick a few lines from the text and elect one person to read them aloud. He came by each group and helped (as much as he could) with the accents and which letters to pronounce, but it was still a big old mess. The group before us actually chose our lines so we switched lines about ten seconds before we were called on and we only messed up one consonant pronunciation! Huzzah!

Other than that thrilling story my life at University has been quite horrid. While James Dean is a hilarious teacher he isn’t a fantastic grader. And meeting with him during office hours is a whole big awkward situation. I had a group presentation (I hate those so, so much) where we had to teach subject-verb agreement to 19-21 year olds and that was interesting. My group was one of those only communicate by email type groups, so I ended up typing every thing out as far as the lesson plan went and the handout for the class. THEN! The girl in our group who had the game we were going to play in class got extremely sick and wasn’t there on the day of our presentation. And she didn’t email us, so we had to make up a game on the spot BUT we got a good grade because sometimes being a teacher requires you to do things like that.

Also I failed my French quiz (and I don’t mean take pity on me I think I failed, I mean I REALLY failed… we got our grades back today) so that was encouraging. Apparently the section I did the worse on, the majority of the class did terribly on, so he is letting us do a make up quiz for that part. But I do have something good concerning French… today I was at the store and I was looking for a certain type of a hand wipe things. I picked up said item and looked at the package to see if it was what I wanted when I read the description and put it back. Then I sort of did a double take and looked back at the thing, and turns out I was reading the french description! Without realizing it! And I knew what it said! That definitely made up for the quiz.

Well holy frick would you look at the time! I have to get up trés early to go to my field observation. Oh the joys of being an education major.

GOODNIGHT INTERNET.