all in good time.

Always being the short girl has it ups and downs but I really hate the process of taking pants to the tailor to get hemmed. Now I know that I could just do it myself. However, after a very memorable night in Chicago I learned that hemming pants just isn't something I will ever get motivated enough to learn to do well. So off to the tailor I go. The problem is that after I part with some of my hard-earned money to buy something I want to take my something home immediately. I want to play with my new toys, wear new clothes, eat new food, etc. This is why I hate paying for insurance; I don't ever get any new somethings to play with. Right now I feel like my new pants are spending the first week of our relationship with some guy in the mall. But alas on Wednesday we will be reunited and I am sure we will live happily ever after.

I have been spending my vacation in Des Moines and although the whole tailor debacle is a downer it does give me a nice excuse for staying another couple days. I know that few people ever feel ready to go back to work but still. I love my job but I wish it was in this city. If anyone out there is planning on shifting some tectonic plates in the near future might I suggest putting Des Moines, Cedar Falls/Waterloo, and Atlanta all right next to each other? That would be superb.

sans widsom

I will always remember the small sign which was perpetually displayed on my dad's fridge: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." Now, I have that sign which has been permanently stained from spaghetti sauce explosions and sticky fingerprints. Although I struggle with that whole gee-oh-dee thing, I have continually tried to let the serenity prayer guide me, admittedly with more success at some times than others. At some point the wisdom snuck out and doesn't seem to be coming back. (It is entirely possible that while leaving, wisdom held the door open and let in the mouse. The mouse is now missing as well.) It seems like a relatively easy task to deal with an issue once you know whether or not you have any control over it. What then, are we supposed to do when we genuinely have no idea whether or not we have any control at all? Wisdom? Baby? You can come home now.

in. love.

This weekend I went to the Metro Arts Two Rivers Expo and found my new favorite thing. Last week was a little rough so I am quite grateful for those things in which I can find a little joy and peace. An Iowa City artist named Bekah Ash immediately won over my heart. I need to be saving money for a variety of important necessities but it would be SO SO SO much more fun to save money to buy one of her larger pieces. For now I settled for a smaller print but I am completely and totally in love with it. She has bunches of her work on flickr and I have already spent far more time than I should sifting through her work and drooling all over myself. I found the print I bought on her flickr site:


totally. in. love.

love it

reCAPTCHA strikes me as an excellent candidate for my list of the most brilliant things ever made. It is directly below my macbook pro and above the cord connecting my ipod to my car stereo. Unfortunately there is no longer room on that list for sliced bread.

good thinking

As I did my daily perusing of blogs I came across a this video on Boing Boing. As soon as that nice old man started talking I burst into laughter. I cannot be entirely sure why it was so funny to me but for right now I will blame it on the fact that I am so congested I have become delirious. It did inspire me though, so I think I will work on taking more movies. I have recently become a little better at taking more pictures, as evidenced by the fact that iphoto has found a permanent home in my dock. For you non mac lovers, 1. shame on you, 2. that just means I use it a lot.

So I will give this whole movie thing a go and then maybe I will make something fantastic. Maybe. I am still in the process of thinking that thought (One of my favorite people said something like that in a meeting yesterday and I vowed to find some way to use it - success.)

Back to my beloved blogs and blowing my nose.

kesley hair: word ruiner

Usually the closer I get to any sort of intense culmination of work, the more nervous I get. And I don't want to jinx myself into a panic attack tomorrow morning but I am actually feeling okay about tomorrow. I don't know if it was the thai food, under-baked brownie, or the nap but I just feel ready to go rock this thing and be done with it. Yay for late-night confidence boosts!

On a totally unrelated note, I have a new hobby that I am really quite good at. My ears are finely tuned to recognize when people use the words gyped, jipped, gyp, etc. Why do so many professional media outlets insist on saying that? You got "gyped" out of a beer? No! You went to a bar where a bartender gave you a poorly-poured beer. I don't mean to go all lexicographer on you or anything but for the record, the cool kids don't use those words anymore. The cool kids decided genocide wasn't as funny, well, once they realized they were talking about genocide. Don't worry, you are good people, you just need a little vocab update and then you will be as good as new. I have plenty of other words I can ruin for you some other time.

lucky # 10193

Tonight was a fairly low-key Monday evening. Despite having a list of things that I SHOULD have been doing, I opted to do only the things I WANTED to do. I am not sure my should and want lists will ever become the same list, but now I can write them on the same piece of paper and I think that is a sign of real progress.

Something I always WANT to do is read blogs. In case starting a blog of my own didn't immediately make you think "THAT WOMAN IS ADDICTED TO BLOGS NOW," I should probably warn you that I really love blogs. I especially love reading them on my new laptop . One of my favorites, Dooce, is one of the greatest blogs in this whole blog-oh-sphere. If you don't read it you need to start. Not tomorrow, or even after you finish reading this post, right now. Don't even scroll back to find the original link, just click here.

Today on Dooce Heather announced a context for a Wii and Wii Fit. Well I, for one, was pumped for several reasons.

1. Winners are chosen by random which has got to up the odds of a nobody.
2. I really want a Wii so that I can take pictures of people (myself included) looking like an idiot while using it
3. Wii Fit increases the chances of people looking like idiots by a factor of 1 million.
4. My only current game console is Nintendo, yeah, NES. I can play Mario Brothers, Duck Hunt, Jeopardy, or Sesame Street. Moving my gaming up a few decades might be good for my karma.
5. I have grandiose visions of Wii parties where we play Wii Fit and drink to toast Heather every time someone falls.

Moral of the story? I really want a Wii so I posted on her comments to officially get myself in the running.

(click to see all it's glory in full size)

The winners will be selected randomly by their post number, therefore, until this is all over, my lucky number is 10193.

Comedy legend Mitch Hedberg one time explained, "My lucky number is 4 billion, that doesn't come in real handy when your gambling. I'm gonna need some more dice, 4 billion divided by 6, at least."

Well I would be in a similar predicament if it weren't for the fact that I do not roll any dice, let alone enough to ever roll a 10193. No, I don't roll dice, I read blogs. And I think that reading blogs brings me more luck than any pair of dice ever has. It's no wonder I WANT to read blogs. I am not sure any of the things I SHOULD do have ever gotten me even this close to a free Wii. I guess a Wii is the very thing that is preventing my WANTS and SHOULDS lists from coming together to form one, harmonious list. Maybe if I got a free Wii everything would just sorta fall into place.

Come on 10193!

an open letter to all grad students (and my future self)

As the saying goes, sometimes the truth hurts. But I think it hurts the most when it sneaks up on you. So I would like to take this opportunity to give you (and remind the me that will be back in grad school a little over a year from now) the cold hard truth about graduate school. I may not be the ultimate authority on grad school but there are a few things that I am quite certain of and this is one of them:

You are going to hate it. And by hate it I mean you will be convinced you somehow cheated your way in or were admitted out of pure pity. You will think you are mere days away from having everyone find out that you cannot actually cut it. You will tell yourself weekly (if not daily) that you have no hope of ever finishing whatever degree it is you are working on. Some days you will not even know why you decided to get that degree in the first place. Most of all, you will think about how much better your life would have been if you had not gone to grad school.

But know this, if you did not go through that process you would not be doing it right. The fact that you never think you can do it and you still continue to find the guts to come back every day is proof you were meant for this place and that you are just crazy enough to succeed.

***This was on the "old" blog - something I wrote in the middle of the night and we all know night-writing is the most honest. It is at least if you have recently drank a can of Diet Rockstar.