It was my mom’s birthday today. She didn’t really do anything because she had to get Sandy’s husband’s funeral, but tomorrow she’s going to the Big E, a fair in Massachusetts. Or did she say King Richard’s Fair? I can’t remember. So anyway, this is a little tribute blog to her because she’s the most amazing woman I know. She is so generous to people, too generous sometimes, and it’s gotten her into trouble, but it hasn’t changed her. She hasn’t become cynical or pessimistic about life. Her eternal optimism is truly commendable. Her strength, though, is what I admire most. She would do anything for her children and she’s proven it time and again. Some don’t agree with the way she raised us, but she mixed the perfect amount of freedom with the perfect amount of discipline. Sometimes, I don’t understand how she could have allowed us as much freedom as she did; I can’t imagine how terrified she must have felt that we would get hurt. But she realized that sometimes, you have to make mistakes to learn. And she’s passed the knowledge onto me, I know. The best part is, when I realized that I made a mistake, she was there for me with advice to help me correct it. I can’t even explain how much it meant (and means) to me that she was always ready to listen to me and accept me, not judge me. She has always been one of my best friends and I’m so grateful for that.

I wrote her a poem about a year ago that I never did show her. I’m going to put it here:

My grandma’s friend Sandy lost her husband a few days ago. They live in Arizona (I think) and his wife was there in Massachusetts to help their daughter with wedding plans (she’s getting married sometime this year, I think).  They got the call a few days after Sandy had flown to Massachusetts, so he was alone when he died. I really can’t imagine what that would be like, and I hope I don’t have to find out. Not only did she lose her father, but she lost him just a few months before her wedding. She no longer has him to walk her down the aisle. Little girls dream for years about their wedding, and a father to walk her down the aisle is a natural part of that dream. The pain of not being able to see that part of the dream come true would be so hard to bear. My heart goes out to them.

Maybe I’m just weird, but when I get out of the bed in the morning and put weight on my feet, they tingle. Does anyone else’s feet do this? It must be from laying down all night. I don’t think they’ve always done this; I don’t remember them always doing this. It’s such a strange feeling, like they fell asleep, but it only happens for a few seconds. Hmmm……

 Anyway, I’m bored and procrastinating my studying for my entrepreneurship test on Tuesday…which I’m gonna fail. Business is too logical for me. I don’t have a common sense bone in my body. However, Anand and I have had this conversation….he argued that I am logical. He wasn’t winning until I helped him by saying that it takes logic to organize a paper. But still…I can’t wrap my head around business.

 In other news…..Aly’s gone for the weekend! It’s gonna be too quiet without her–I won’t have anyone to laugh at : (   But she went home to visit her familiy for the weekend and I hope she has lots and lots of fun because I know she misses them. She’s like me…she talks to her mom just about every day. Our moms are probably thinking, “Why is this girl calling me now?” But they love us!

Okay, I’m an English major. That means that naturally I have a lot of reading and writing to do. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep up with it all. I always finish my work, but it’s not always the best quality of work that I can do. So I got a paper back today with comments on it. I worked pretty hard and labored strenuously over most of the paper. It was on the concluding paragraph that I worked the least on; I just couldn’t figure out what to write anymore. The professor wrote notes on areas I could improve. Strangely enough, she wrote that my concluding paragraph was excellent. ????? I put almost no effort into that paragraph at all. Why is it the best? This happens to me a lot, to tell the truth, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. I have a hard time with conclusions and end up giving up on them just so I can be done, but this part invariably ends up being the best. I’m always told that I need more of my concluding paragraph in my paper. Is that not weird??

What is art coming to these days? Not just visual art, but poetry, literature, etc. We had a nice discussion in my poetry class about what is considered poetry today, and whether or not it should be considered such. The main question was: How far is too far in poetry? Holly used the example of a poem with one word: Dog. Someone could probably pass that off as a poem. I read a poem that was the same sentence repeated for about 10 lines. To me, that is not poetry. I wondered how it had even made its way into an anthology. It was just a sentence being repeated over and over. I know another recent form of poetry is the prose poetry. Maybe this is just me, but I’ve always perceived a poem as having some kind of structure to it to make it more meaningful. Prose poetry, to me, is just a beautiful piece of prose, nothing more.

 And with art, I use this example all the time: Someone can put a dot on a peice of paper and pass it off as high art. It’s not! It’s a dot on a peice of paper. How can something like that be put into an art show?

 All forms of art have lessened in quality in the past 50 years or so. I don’t think anyone could surpass Shakespeare and da Vinci, but a repeated line? A dot? Is that really necessary?

 Art should be something that takes talent, and not everyone has that talent. That’s not a bad thing, though, don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that you’re talentless if you can’t produce some kind of art. But the quality of art should not be lessened simply so someone can say they’ve created it. It should be meaninful and worthwhile, not a repeated line and not a simple dot.

My life is sad right now. I have no time to read. Okay, so it’s not the crisis of the century, but it’s a big deal for me. I have so many books that I want to read and new books are always being recommended to me. Let’s see, there’s The Boleyn Girl series, Nineteen Minutes, The Memory Keeper’s Daughter, a couple of books I’ve seen in the children’s section at Barnes and Noble, A Thousand Splended Suns, and a million other books that I just want to reread. But I can’t because I have so much homework. I almost had a meltdown yesterday when I realized that I three tests and three papers due next week…by Wednesday.

 Plus: Poetry club is having problems with the poetry coffeehouse. Everything is being done late, so everything is naturally going wrong. We couldn’t print the flyers that Jean made for us because one: we have microsoft word; he has vista. We couldn’t open them on our computers. Two: Even if we could print them, it would end up being black and white when we want it to be in color. The coffeehouse is next week, mind you, so we want to get these flyers up, mmmm, I don’t know, yesterday? But it’s just not working for us. It doesn’t help that both Christina and I are swamped with other things to do (Christina’s the president of the poetry club).  

 With any luck, things will slow down, I’ll get a chance to read a book or two, and the poetry coffeehouse on October 2nd will be absolutely amazing. I hope that’s not wishful thinking…..

Oh my god I’m so tired!! Why does everything wake me up?? For the past week, again, I have woken up every day at 7:30. As soon as it happens, I just have to think, I could be sleeping for another hour. What am I going to do with this extra hour?? Every day. I just want to sleep! And you know what’s super sad? I can hear the alarm clock go off in the morning…..next door! I think it must be Bernard’s because he’s the only one crazy enough (besides me) who wakes up at 7:30 in the morning. It happened yesterday morning and I was just like, what is that? When I realized what it was, I though, Are you serious? There’s just something wrong about that. What’s worse, is that it’s the same tone my mom uses, and I would hear that at home and it would wake me up. So it’s just more likely to wake me up now. This does not bode well for my year. What happens if I don’t go to bed til 3 in the morning, but wake up at 7:30? I really do just want to sleep.

This was the most amazing weekend (sarcasm) ever. Well, no, I take it back. Sunday was pretty great. Saturday was long. I worked in the library in the morning, then from 4-11, I worked at Barnes and Noble. By myself. For the first time. Overall, I think I worked 11 hours on Saturday. Let me just say…wow. But it wasn’t really too bad except my feet hurt and I was so tired when I finally got home.

I worked Sunday, too, but only 10-3. I rode my bike for the first time to work. It actually wasn’t that bad. I did learn, however, how embarrassingly out of shape I am. My thighs started burning before I even got off of Military Trail. I’m surprised I’m not sore today. I expected to not be able to walk this morning.

After work, I came home, took a quick shower, and then Anand picked me up. I offered to help him install carpet in his patio. I got to meet Prithee and Kalpana (sp?), his sisters, and his mom. They fed me; the change from cafeteria food (though it’s not bad) was nice. I only ate in the caf once this weekend. But anyway. We installed the carpet until it got too dark to see, then Kalpana showed me a very interesting home video…of Anand…dancing. It was cute. He was embarrassed, naturally, but what else can you expect from a guy’s older sisters? (If it were my brother, it would have been a lot worse.) But his sisters were totally nice, and I didn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable (which is unusual when I meet new people). They’re a close family, and that’s a good thing. It was fun to see them teasing each other; I don’t see a lot of that here. Kinda makes me nostalgiac. I miss my family!

But it was a good weekend. I didn’t see my roomy very much, though. That’s weird because I always see her. I came home last night, and she was completely crazy, so hyper. I hope she got some sleep. She was out of the room before I woke up, though. Maybe I’ll get to see her at some point today……..

My poor roommate had the worst day! When she dropped me off at work today, it was raining sheets. She said it was barely possible to see in front her. Apparently, some idiot in front of her pulled to a complete halt on Glades for no reason. Aly had to slam her breaks and she spun out in the middle of the street. A cop saw the problem and asked if she was alright; he gave the other guy a ticket. So just when she thinks she’s free and clear, she’s driving onto campus and lightning strikes a tree right in front of her. It split one of the branches off, and it landed right in front of her car. She had to slam her breaks again. She said it took three security guards to move the branch out of the road. I was amazed when she told me. I guess if you look at it in an optimistic way, she had a very lucky day.

 For future reference for anyone reading this: Stay alert when it’s raining!!!

I had three different, horrible nightmares last night that were so bad they woke me up in the middle of the night. I haven’t had a nightmare in so long and I didn’t even watch a scary movie or anything. It just happened. I don’t remember one of them, but the other two were about dogs. One was a vicious dog at my house that had……egh….eaten another dog and had almost eaten my dogs. The other one I remember better, and it was much more gruesome. There was a man with his legs and arms tied to little stakes that were hanging in mid-air (which, now that I think about it, is impossible) and the his head was held by something. The rest of his body was hanging. (This is where it starts to get bad.) A dog, with very human like expressions, was going to jump up and down on this guys body until it detached from his head. Like I said, gruesome. I think it was some kind of torture. The worst part was, that this dream was so vivid. I never have vivid dreams; I always forget them.

 I’ve also noticed that most of my nightmares are about dogs (which I love, by the way). The last one I had was about two years ago. There was this evil, little bitty white dog with the most vicious teeth I’ve ever seen. Come to think of it, I think it ate some dogs, too. It had blood all over it’s fur and there was blood everywhere. I woke up so terrified of dogs that I was scared my dog (who was asleep at the end of the bed) was going to attack me if I moved. I actually cried when I woke up because I was so scared.

The bad thing is, these dreams stay in my mind. I constantly think about them. I have to consciously move my mind away from them and think about something else, something really, really good. If I don’t, I’ll never get back to sleep.

 Is it just me, or are there a lot of things disturbing my sleep lately?