The illusion of time

Just an hour ago I had stats homework due tonight, a pscyh of personality exam, spanish essay, and spanish homework due in a two hour time period tomorrow morning (none of which I have started or studied for...I am an idiot). My stats homework was pushed back 24 hours so I feel like I'm walking on time...which may in fact be true, but my destination is looking a little too similar to a big heaping pile of failure.

Pictures

Spring Break pictures are up on "My Pictures" link. Hopefully I will be putting more up soon.

I have no idea

The day was going splendidly until I returned home to find email upon email stating all the things I need to do for my studying abroad. I am now increasingly reconsidering studying in Spain second semester next year. Maybe it would be better to study abroad next summer if I can do that...or do up a traineeship. I don't know, maybe I'm just feeling homesick and culture shock already. Spring break was kind of a scary thing because it was kind of like a baby abroad by myself experience. Anyway...Tons to do with school this semester, let alone preparations for school next semester, thinking about making it more difficult the semester after that?...getting harder and harder for me to do. I am tired.

I found out last night that one of my best friends got engaged last week. Apparently he and his girlfriend were skiing, he stopped her mid-slope, got down on one knee and proposed, which I think is incredibly sweet-original but not over-the-top. The funny thing is, marriage to me right now is like a four letter word-if it were directed at me. (Are you crazy?! I'm 20!) But it's not that strange when it comes to my friend because it's just...him...kind of expected. If it were anyone else, it would make me feel really old. But him, I'm just ecstatic for him...although it's still a teensy bit weird that he's going to be someone's husband soon.

SB '05

Too tired to write anything substantial so I'm going to go with 2 items: I had a fantastic time. I think that spring break is pretty detrimental to Mexican-United States relations.

SB '05

In 24 hours I will be on my way to the airport in order to fly to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico! I am super-excited, especially after the snowstorm we had last night. What was up with that anyway? Anywho, I leave this afternoon to go spend the night in Milwaukee, where we're flying out of. Incredible! I still need to pack and get rid of this sickness...blowing your nose every two minutes does not make it attractive.

My two friends are doing better which makes me very very happy. The girl is also. I think I would have lost 10 lbs this weekend alone if it weren't for the fact that the only thing that looked appetizing to me were cookies and cereal.

Ok, off to tredge through the slush to Spanish class and then Spring Break 2005-HERE I COME!

Moody Pants

For some reason I had on my crabby pants when I walked into the AIESEC meeting tonight. Sorry about that guys...don't know what happened.

I just suddenly realized how completely disorganized my room is. How do I live like this? Notice that I DID NOT say dirty. But I just have stuff everywhere. Sometimes I wonder what I would have turned out like with different parents. I mean, both of my parents are neat and orderly. Punctual. They were never open with their "wild times" when I was growing up. Sometimes I think that if I had been raised by different parents, I would be completely disorganized, waitressing in my hometown for lack of motivation to go to school, and living a much wilder life than I currently lead. I think these are my natural tendencies but my family reigned me in so well that I am now a closet clutter case, scooting by in school with whatever I deem as acceptable grades without a plan for the future except knowing what tatoo I would get where, but also knowing I will probably never get it...

I think I just ate a margarita flavored jelly bean.

Epiphany

I am in the "AIESEC" office right now and it is completely empty except for me...kind of nice. Maybe I'll get some work done if I ever get off the computer.

Have you ever denied something for a really really long time and suddenly realized how true it was and how foolish you had been? Or you didn't take advantage of something when it was right in front of your face and only when it was gone did you realize how much you wanted it? I've had that the past few days and let me tell you, I am quite a fool.

My camera should be coming in any day now. Wooowhooo...

ahhh @

Leave it to AIESECers and an ICX meeting to make me feel normal for a bit...still very stressed but getting better.

Stress

I went to go see one of my friends again yesterday. I left feeling better than the time before. He was actually sitting up and was allowed to eat and was moving one of his hands/arms and didn't repeat barely anything...much different from the time before. Even though I'm feeling better about it I think the stress is taking its toll on my body. I am currently feeling nauseous about 95% of the time and the headaches are really starting to get to me...oh well. I am excited to go to Mexico in a few days. I just need to remember to breathe until then. I'm afraid that the integrated sales training session I'm facilitating tonight might suck because I had a hard enough time getting homework done this weekend. I'll work on it some more after my classes and possibly another round of hospital visits.

Two friends of mine were hit by a car early this morning...
I can't believe this. Apparently they were hit while crossing a busy intersection, using the cross-walk. It's probable that they weren't paying enough attention, but they weren't really intoxicated or anything. It seems the driver may have been...or at least had some level of alcohol in her system.

I went to the hospitals this afternoon. It was so hard to see them. I dated one of the guys for over a year and the other was a good friend. To see these strong athletic guys like that in hospital beds, to try to have conversations with them, to hear that a girl that was with them is on a ventilator right now and could have fluid in the brain...and that could have been them...and there's nothing I can do...


All I can say is:
Don't Drink and Drive...and when I say drink, I mean even a little bit.
Watch where you walk. As college students we can sometimes assume that cars will stop for us or that we have control over the street...even if it is the drivers fault, the car will still win when it hits you.
BE CAREFUL. One second, one accident, can chnge your life...and I don't want to visit anyone else in hospitals.
If you have to be in a hospital in Madison, get into UW, NOT Merriter.

All the details

I feel like writing A LOT. Just got done eating breakfast with my fam. It was simply fantastic. This weekend has been busy as expected so far. Last night was my roomie's birthday so we went out to eat, pre-partied here, then went to a party that was being thrown for her and another friend of ours. She bailed at about 12 without telling me and so our paths separated at that point. I stayed and hung out, helped break a door, listened to some of my friends play guitar and sing, started falling asleep so I decided to go home around 2:30. As I stepped out the door I received THE phone call from Williams at AIESEC house, telling me to come to the dance party where "10 people" were and I had to be. I hesitated, and said I would let them know. They apparently know what hesitation means from me and the weakness to peer pressure I have, so when I hung up I was promptly called back by the lovely Katie V. By this time I was at my own apartment, but, of course, I trekked half-way across town to @ house where I opened the door to a stunning representation of 4. That's right, 4. After smacking Williams around a bit for being a dirty liar, it was quite fun, except for the part where Williams spilt a drink all over me, him, and the floor...I hate wet socks. I finally made it back to my place around 7 this morning, fantastic. Took a shower, climbed into bed and awaited my sister's call. We went to this great restaurant around the capitol where I had cornmeal and black currant pancakes...yum yum. In a few hours I am meeting up with some friends including one in from Miami of Ohio to catch up and tonight possible party at @ house. Homework what? In talking to my parents I have realized that my weekends are pretty packed from now until school ends. Next weekend I leave for Spring Break- Puerto Vallarta! the weekend after that I will be living in the library because of my exam schedule, then my family has tickets to The Nylons, whom I love and grew up with so don't make fun of me, then I'm going home because it's my mom's birthday, after that is either Mifflin Street block party or the weekend of rest and seeing friends, after that is weekend before finals...ridiculous. I need a nap just thinking about it...or could it be the lack of sleep? Either way...

I HAVE A PLAN!

Well, if anyone's going to be in South America from July to December of 2005, let me know. I just got accepted into the study abroad program in Santiago, Chile! YES!! Feels good to have some sort of plan.

I see the sun behind the clouds even if no one else can

Receiving notice on Monday that you will find out by the end of the week if your plan for the next year of your life is consistent and acceptable to that of the university is exciting. Still not hearing from them midway through Friday is torture.

I have an Earth's Water midterm in 1.3 hours...I should probably go study for it.

Digital Camera

Well I just caved. My new digital camera should be arriving early next week. I'm scared. hahaa. I really do not like spending that much money in a swift kick and certainly not over the internet. I also bought a memory card so I can take lots of pics since mine comes with a measly 16 MB...Both shouldarrive just in time for spring break so I can take tons of without carting a bunch of film around...hopefully I have it figured out by then.

Integrated Sales

Alright, last time I got results when I said I was having @ troubles so here goes again. I'm doing a training session on integrated sales geared towards ICXers...which maybe doesn't make sense to gear it, but whatever. FLEX apparently likes to hide things from me so does anybody have any materials already set up? blegh.

Parenting tips oh my

I am constantly reminded of how awesome my family is. Today I went on a sales call with a financial commpany called Primerica. The company is not really right for @ but it was a good sales call and the woman was very nice. A lot of what Primerica does is like refinancing, consolidating debts, redistributing money by investing etc and educating their customers. In talking to this woman I realized what a huge gift my parents gave me when I was younger in how they taught me about money and budgeting. I believe that I received an allowance for 3 years maximum and got about $2 a week, maybe three by the end of the 3 years. For some reason that actually seems like a lot to me. Anyway, I think that I started to receive an allowance when I was in about 3rd grade, so I was 9 or so. There were several stipulations to my allowance though:
1) I had to do all of my weekly chores or I did not get any of my allowance...and they had to be done well.
2) In 3rd grade, before I was paid one cent, I had to write out a budget for my $2. I needed to write how much I would put into the following categories: long term savings, short term savings, spending money, and charity (my mom set a $.50 minimum on that one). And we had cans on top of the fridge for each category. Once we had accumulated a certain amount we would put the long term money into our savings accounts...that was my favorite part.
3) I had to write out what my long term savings and short term savings were for...I remember short term was a boombox...oh yeah.

The woman at Primerica was saying that they are now giving speeches to high schools and other groups trying to educate people on how to deal with money. I guess I never thought about people not having the kind of role model I did growing up. I mean, in high school one of the things I took pride in was that never asked my parents for spending money and never withdrew money from my savings...I'm still pretty proud of that. Wow I am a huge nerd. If only I liked numbers I could probably be a finance wiz. since I've been writing about them so much...here, again, are my parents during a vacation we took last winter.
Funny tidbit, when I was little I told my dad that I was never going to get a loan because I never wanted to buy something that I couldn't pay for right away, to which he replied, "you keep thinking that way."

Priorities

I knew I should have gone to the library to get my stats homework done. It is due by 5. Instead, I went to the "@ office" and got distracted by the HR meeting. I helped decide on a t-shirt design though so that's fun. Now I will definitely not get full points on my homework though since I have a sales call in an hour. OH well...a few weeks ago I sent an email to my family saying how stressed I was and how I was working on AIESEC stuff a lot and loving it. My dad emailed me back saying he was glad I like Aisec (they still do not spell it correctly after having had at least one daughter in it for over 2 years) but if it was taking up a lot of my time perhaps I should rethink my membership. As I said to one of my roomies "Drop AIESEC?!? AIESEC gives me half the pleasure I currently get out of life!" She asked me what the other half of pleasure came from and saying with a wink, "me?"...after thinking for a bit I replied "food."-Sorry Amy! Anyway...crazy parents. I should go get ready for my sales call now. Wow, we are really trucking!...business cards, t-shirts, multiple sales calls every single week, the dominating of nomad...I love me some Madtown!

Our culture...a girly post

Kristi's recent post definitely brought some things up for me. People can feel free to disagree with me...I have not done experiments or research on this topic and am speaking only from my own experiences and in talking to other women I know. The article Kristi linked says that peer influence is now thought to be the main reason for body dissatisfaction in 5-7 year olds, and that low self-esteem is a major contributory factor.
Most women that I have talked to who have poor body images have revealed that their moms or other guardian were on diets or were in some way concerned about their bodies, or these women were told they were too fat, too thin, too something during their lives, usually by someone of relevance like a parent. I simply do not believe that a little girl goes to kindergarten and thinks she's fat because other girls do. And if that does happen, where did that other girl learn to think she was fat? I think it all stems back to mothers (and fathers). I think it's about time we start loving our bodies. Women are forced to believe that thin is beautiful, big boobs, nice butt, tiny waist. It's ridiculous and we do it to ourselves for the most part.
My mom was fantastic at being a body image role model for my sister and I. I have never known her to be on a diet more than giving up chocolate for Lent. The only scale that was ever in my home was for measuring ingredients. My family LOVES food and we eat a ton of it, but there was always a priority in eating good balanced meals and staying active in order to be healthy, not attractive. I am not saying that I have never had body issues because I think that in our society, you will have body issues at some point. But at the end of the day, I love my body. I think it's sad that as women we are almost made to feel bad about saying that. It's ok to say, "I hate my thighs, look at this gut..." or other complaints but if you say you love your body you're suddenly full of yourself. My mom likes to say that at 20, she wanted her teen body, at 30, she wanted her 20's body, finally, in her 40's she decided to love her body now because it only gets worse. So I think I'll love my body now, and not care if that makes me full of myself...I already have too many things to waste my time on--worrying about how flat my stomach is should not be one of them.

Sometimes you're just in a Neil Diamond kind of mood

I'm pretty proud of myself for smashing together templates to form this. Although really I just figured out colors. Yippee. I'm still proud.

My parents are coming down to Madison on Friday. That's pretty exciting since I haven't seen them since January 1st. Compared to my roomies, that is forever, compared to others it is a short stint. It's just about right for me. It is one of my roomies B-days on Friday though so that will be interesting.

I have a schedule today that I will hopefully stick to. I've very fond of writing up uber-detailed (somebody hates using the word uber...heroofthelight? hahaha! I can't remember...kittens!) schedule and then hoping I stick to it. Usually a nap or a snack ruins my good intentions. It mostly likely will again today. We'll see.

HTMLwhat?

Ok I just spent forever trying to get a different template up in here from a different site but my blog was having none of it. then I tried to mesh one of blogger's templates with the one I wanted but I couldn't get the picture to go behind the text...Computer jargon is very confusing to me. So I'm going with this until I feel like wasting some more time.

By the way, I think Madison will soon be a blogging super-power. Besides all of the ones that are on nomad right now (I think Mix has a list of them all on his blog somewhere) I know of two other Madisonites that have blogs that they will be getting on nomadlife sooner or later. Fantastic.

I have had a fairly productive weekend. I'm taking baby steps to reading/watching more news and tapering off my vast knowledge of pop culture. As silly as this may seem, I'm pretty proud of it. Today was a gorgeous day. I ran outside with shorts and a long-sleeve T-shirt and I think I could have gone short-sleeved. It was amazing. I cannot wait for nice weather. If I ever transferred from Madison, the weather would be the reason. The winter weather I mean. Thank God for spring break. All of my roomies are going tanning now. I am not because I am extremely anti-fake baking for a few different reasons. I do not care if I am pasty in comparison...although we'll see if some spray can help with that. Either way, no fake baking here. ick.

1234 Come on Baby Say You Love Me

1) I have gotten approximately 10 hours of sleep in the past 3 days...I have AIESEC office hours that are just past half over with no visitors yet...depressing.
2) I have spent the last 45 minutes scouring FLEX for the newest TQ form but all I can find is the one from 2001 or something. I know George said at SSC '04 that a new one was coming out and didn't the price change again since then so shouldn't there be a revision up? FLEX is very frustrating to me.
3) So, as you read in my entries my wallet was stolen or lost over a month ago. I have been waiting for my replacement check card for a month now, so I called for the third time today and really pressed them on it. Turns out my card was never actually cancelled...so I became my mom for five minutes and wrote US Bank a stern email about my concerns over their competency and the security of my money. I am foolish.
4) My second test for whooping cough came back negative. 5 days Quarantined. Antibiotics. Medical face masks.


...negative...

I wish I had more to eat

I only had time to grab a granola bar before heading out this morning at 8:30...and I won't be home until 2:30...ugh.

I raised my hand 5 times during my 50 minute spanish class today...I think my classmates and especially my teacher nearly passed out from surprise. My whole quarantine thing has brought on a new aspect of my student career: professors knowing who I am...by name. I wonder if it's possible for me to get more outgoing in some parts of my life because I am less outgoing in others. I was an opinionated gal in high school, a hand-raising fiend, some teachers loved it...a few did not. I once had an argument with an English teacher about how to pronounce Wagner, the classical composer...he said Wagner, I said Vagner, he told me that we were in America but if I had to be correct he could pronounce it vagner for me...I think he just didn't know any better...and since when do last names change by location? other than ellis island. The teacher also once told a kid that gingham was pronounced gin(as in the alcohol)- jim...ok other people may not think that is funny but I grew up with some fabric savvy female relatives (including my mom) so I thought it was hysterical. When I told my mom, she laughed but I also think she started to worry about the quality of education I was receiving. Anyway, I had a point at one time (I didn't name this blog randomness for nothing)...oh yes...teachers in college are scary...well mostly my current spanish teacher.

sometimes I get tired of my own entry...but I still like my Wagner story so it's staying.
I'm thinking of sneaking my granola bar out of my pocket and into my mouth, which is not allowed in the computer lab. That's right, I am quite the rebel...ok I'm not really going to do it but mostly because I don't want to touch my granola bar before I wash my hands...hello, it's a computer lab keyboard, that's gross. I think this has reached the sufficient point of insanity and my stomach is starting to distract my neighbors.

Writer's Block? How is that translated into Spanish?

So I consider myself a pretty good writer. Ok...that's a lie. I'm decent with a few strokes of awesomeness usually only found in witty emails to my family...which they love but I don't think will get me published anytime soon. In reality, I'm good at grammer, I'm good at spelling, and I can construct a 5 paragraph essay without breaking a sweat...so my high school English teachers thought I was amazing (and we wonder why my study skills suck). My college journalism teacher did not love me as much as my former teachers did...apparently grammer knowledge is not as stunning in college...shoot...but she definitely warmed up in the end and I did well in the class with relatively little work. Now, I am supposed to write an essay, in Spanish, about how Pablo Nerudo incorporates reality into one of his poems. So I chose the poem "Oda a la vida." I like the poem--my teacher did not like my essay...it was bleeding when I got it back...and that was just for the structure and content. I can't think right now. I don't know what she's looking for. I mean...reality incorporated in the poem...is it supposed to be as shallow as "there are people in the poem who have opinions about life and that is also true in reality"? Maybe I'll try swiveling in my chair and repeating "la vida...la realidad...la vida...la realidad" some more...

do not poke or prod the animals

With two assignments being pushed back to at least a week away, my load is lightened for the week. Which is awesome because it was feeling pretty heavy for awhile there.

I currently have too many thoughts so I can't really get anything coherent out. Everything that I start to write is coming out very negative so instead I will write nothing...except what I have already written.