Note to Self: I am no longer in college

Things Not To Do On A First Date

You:

1. Ask me how much my rent is
2. Tell me how much money you're saving by living with your parents
3. Be visibly strung out
4. Abruptly announce on a coffee date that you think we should "call it," but then immediately ask me out to dinner for the same night
5. Add me on Snapchat
6. Repeatedly talk about our "second date" and then never contact me again
7. Assume that all I can talk about is art because I work in the arts
7a. Tell me that you think all art is pointless except for the time you "got super high in Amsterdam and went to go see the Van Gogh museum and all the colors swirled around and shit."
8. Quiz me about a museum exhibition when I obviously (accidentally) lied about having seen it
9. Pitch me your startup
10. Act super weird when college comes up and you find out I went to Stanford


Me:

1. Lie about going to exhibits I haven't seen
2. Say "God, no." when the waiter asks if we want a second round
3. Spitefully announce that I never learned how to ride a bike when my date tells me he owns 6 bikes and that 2 only go downhill (ed note: Physics, I know, downhill-only bikes remain a mystery for the ages)
4. Bring up my parents
5. Seem way too into Katy Perry when I like exactly two of her songs
6. Call my date "dude" a lot
7. Be really obvious about my disdain for startups while out with a startup founder
7a. Make it worse by backtracking ("Oh no, but yours sounds really different and important. This is the kind of good more startups should be doing!")
8. Say, "I don't know, normal stuff," when asked what I like to do on the weekends / what my hobbies are
9. Talk about the time I hallucinated that I was in an Ashlee Simpson music video (it was 2004, what can I say...)
10. Check the weather on my phone in order to make conversation

Being an adult

Means having a craving for cereal and milk and then going to the 24-hr Safeway to fulfill this small dream after having the larger dream of long-term human connection slightly crushed by the free screening of Her you just saw at the college campus where you both 100% belong and 100% don't belong.

In defense of Miley Cyrus.

On books and reading and (mild) hoarding

This was supposed to be a post about how amazing and wonderful and heart-wrenching and funny and happy and sad Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is. It is all of those things and I highly recommend it.  I just finished the book a few days ago and I will probably read it again real soon. To be honest, I held off on reading this book for a while, even though I thought Eleanor & Park was great. I'd heard that Fangirl was about freshman year of college and first love there and all that jazz and I thought it would be too painful. That it would make my already a little too-keen nostalgia for that time explode. That I would miss my ex-boyfriend, who was my first boyfriend, my college boyfriend, the boyfriend with whom I had a Hollywood-caliber meet-cute at our admit weekend and was placed in the same dorm with the following fall, too much. Or, at least, that it would make me miss that time too much (because truthfully, I don't really miss the boy very much. At least, I don't miss who he is now. Or, was when I broke it off. We're too different now and isn't that a different type of sadness). And, it did. I missed the sweetness and the nervousness and the awkwardness and the excitement of first-time real romance and the discovery of someone new. But, it wasn't unbearable and I ended up loving the book more than I ever expected. I recognized a lot of my freshman-year self in Cath and, of course, fell a little bit in love with Levi, because he's a YA boy and because I am extraordinarily prone to crushes on fictional characters. Nerd alert.

I'm not sure if I will re-read it obsessively like I did with the Princess Diaries series when I was a youth, but I don't know if I'm really capable of re-reads in general any more. That used to be one of my defining characteristics as a reader (at least in my own head) and yet now, after four years of college which felt like a single, inconsequential drop in the sea of knowledge, it feels like there are too many books and too many worlds to explore to keep revisiting the same ones. And yet, isn't re-reading the way you really become a part of those worlds? On a second read, characters are familiar, you know what is coming in the plot, so you can analyze the lead-up more and think more deeply about what they are feeling and going through and what may lead to their eventual action. You are already a part of their world and they feel like familiar friends instead of friendly acquaintances. If it's a good book, you pick up new things that you didn't notice the last time because you were caught up in some other element-- be it crazy-fast plot, beautiful language, or realistic dialogue.

I think this combination of feeling a deep, personal connection with books and also feeling that there is no end to the depth of information and experiences in books leads me to have a slight book hoarding problem. I buy books all the time. ALL the time. At a much faster rate than I read them. It's a problem. I keep telling myself after I buy a couple new books, "This is IT. I will ONLY read books I already own for the next several months." And then I go on a book buying binge on Amazon. Okay, the book buying binge only really happened once (today), but it's fresh so it seems worse. They were all YA books so I guess I'm going to chalk it up to grad school research. God, I am still so indecisive about what grad program I want to do. What do people do when they are faced with two choices that they would like entirely differently, but equally? Also one of the fucked up things about my decision is that I think perceived status is playing a role, instead of just going with my gut and what I am most passionate about. Sigh. I need to figure my shit out.

I'm going to try to write every single day to practice. Maybe I should have more focus in my entries, though. I anticipate this blog being shitty for at least a few months, but probably longer. Damn.

I'll try to make it good.

On why my job is cool, part 1

Today I am too tired to write an actual entry. I will say that it was awesome because I listened to the student pitches for a grant I thought of a few months ago. My little work baby from start to finish. I feel grateful that my employers are encouraging of my crazy ideas. Maybe one day soon I will talk about my unofficial, informal arts manifesto so that I can talk a little more about the thinking that went behind this grant.

It's always so hard rejecting people, though, which is inherent in the process of administering grants. I also hate it when I'm reading applications for internships. I think I'm still too close to the fresh wounds of last year and being rejected all.the.time for jobs, internships, etc. and knowing how much it absolutely sucked.

Tomorrow my work will take me to SF, where I will be in charge of a group of students and responsible for making sure they don't die. Should be fun. I'll take some pics.

On happy small discoveries, part 1

About a month ago I signed up for the Penguin First to Read program and then promptly forgot about it. But today I got an email to sign up for the new drawings and I clicked around on my profile and discovered that I actually got selected for one of the books in the last drawing cycle! Getting a free book and getting said book before the general reading populace is basically the best thing ever.

I just downloaded the book, Jen Doll's Save the Date, and am excited to read it / am maybe about to peer into my future of copious wedding attendance. Actually, that's probably not even true because the friends I have who are in relationships either a) are DEFINITELY not going to marry their current significant other or b) don't believe in marriage. And then the rest are single.

Last June, like two days before graduation, two people from my freshman dorm got married but I was not invited to the wedding, even though like literally everyone else from these dorms was. My secret theory is that they thought I was still together with my ex, who can be as boring as plain toast and also kind of an oblivious white mofo, and then didn't invite me because they thought I was still an "us." Or, they just forgot. I mean, it's hard to keep track of all those evites. No, I'm not bitter...