Four weeks of silence = graduation with my Master’s. Regular scheduled programming to resume shortly.
I have to let go of the phrase “linguistic glockenspiel” out of my portfolio’s introduction for a completely valid reason.
Damn. I loved that phrase. Just say it - linguistic glockenspiel - it’s amazing.
*sigh* For another time then.
Half written sentences have been the mainstay of my mental life lately. The severe apathy is welling up in several parts of my life, with a backlog of stress surrounding everything else with its halo. I had someone ask me once how emotion and apathy actually function together…well, that, baby, would be my life. I was not given a manual. Logic is not my foundation, and within the stream, I actually could not be happier for it.
I’m starting to get to the end of grad school, ever so slowly and ever so fast. I need to work on finalizing my portfolio and then stress about getting my committee together for my oral exams. A week ago I was told that a member of my committee did not have specially endowed graduate faculty powers. The documentation I handed in to them in December? I guess they hadn’t checked it that carefully enough, but the paper scheduling my exam at the end of April - oh yeah, that they checked.
Then on Thursday, two days after handing in the memos I had scrambled for to imbue my committee member with these X-Men-esque powers, my ueber boss tells me that the grad school called for me asking for transcripts. He shrugged and gave me their number.
“Hello, returning your call.”
“Why?”
“…You called my boss asking for transcripts.”
I hear the shuffling of papers, “Are you applying for a scholarship?”
“That would be a no.”
“Hmm, that’s strange.” More shuffling, “Oh here you are! Oh…you’re applying for graduate status for a commitee member?”
“That would be a yes.”
“Your papers were in the scholarship pile.”
Mentally sighing, “Am I in the right pile now?”
“Sure!”
Right.
As I bent to wash my hands in the sink at work the other day, I looked at the soap dispenser and thought that as a kid I probably used to be one of janitors worst nightmares in the restroom. I found, when I was about 9 or 10 and having delusions of grandeur regarding my epic rise as an ice skating star, that one of the best things to do in the restroom was to pump as much liquid soap on the floor as possible. Then you’d hang on the sides of two sinks and maniacally swish your legs in the goo and slide and slide and slide.
I think I had a good go at it then…and it’s a good thing too because thinking that I did makes me much less inclined to want to relive my youth when I eye the soap dispensers in the library restroom.
Mother of Mambo! Look at it in here - all smooth white and with a rather zen masthead.
I’ve been psyching myself up for a blog template change for a while since I noted that it seems that they’ve retired my old blog template to wherever it is old blog templates go to die. Thus, a changed in template was do or die; there was no return. And since I’ve been wanted to buff up my CSS and Photoshop skills/z (I’ve had custom CSS on my blog for a year), I figured I’d use my usual methodology for this - impulsive action.
[Cripes, a year. Sheesh.]
I like it. Kinda. Everything still feels a bit garish and misplaced to me, but I also finally feel that I’ve gotten out of the obviously templated (not a word Google condones I see) blog action and moved toward the clearer, visually succinct blogs that I like so much.
[AKA A Big Girl Blog.]
But I don’t like my widgets on the left *breath* and there is a horrible lack of green tones *breath, breath* and it’s all funny strange *breath* and yet, bemusing *breath* like being backed up against a car for a kiss you’re unprepared for. *hyperventilates*
[Not that that's happen. *cough*]
I might have a slight twang of buyer’s remorse for template changing. On the positive flip side, this just means I’m now able to break the ties of The Past… at least in my blog layouts.
[Read: custom mastheads! Oooh, tingly.]
I guess I sat around looking a little too forlorn. The great big Bloggers got wind of this and instead of beating me for my lunch money, they took me under their wing. I got a comment from Neil, whose project this actually is at Citizen of the Month, informing me that since my original interviewer didn’t come through for me, they had some overachievers wandering around wringing their hands raw and wanting to do my interviews. I have few of these in my classes and since the best way to placate them is to give them more things to do, so I thought I’d oblige.
I was told to write Pam of Nerd’s Eye View. She totally has my life. She’s a freelance tech writer and travels and writes and travels and writes…then she does NPR gigs and writes about travel at Blogher. Plus she’s got an Austrian husband and has jammies with garden gnomes. I’m tre jealous.
[And here's where you get a small blogging world story: I had actually sat with her in the same small session on podcasting at the Blogher conference.]
Pam did a great job, doing a couple of volleys of e-mails, whereas I wrote out ten direct questions to my interviewee and said, “Answer this.” I think her method was better.
The interview is here and after the jump.
She had to be in the ballpark of about fifteen to seventeen. Bleached hair and a nose piercing, she had a good lathering of foundation to give her a bland hue only contrasted by the vibrant eyeshadow that shouldn’t see the light of day outside of a rave.
I handed her my ticket. She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, “Enjoy your meal today, Ma’am?”
It wasn’t the good Ma’am, the respectful salutation of status; no, it was the cold hard edge of ‘You’re old and I cannot relate to you’ Ma’am.
I gulped. “Fine.”
I remember the first time I called ma’am by an officious ID checker at the base commissary when I was about fourteen or fifteen. I knew that it was just a somewhat belittling, a mockry, but in the moment - in the moment - I felt it was right.
‘That’s darn right,’ I thought. ’Ma’am! The glory that awaits, the pooooower.’ I was then asked by Mom to grab a shopping cart.
As I slunk out with my ticket and followed J to his car, I mumbled to him, “Am I that old?”
He whipped out the standard answer of, “You’re fiiiine.”
“But…but…Ma’am… Ma’am is my mother.”
I own a few shirts of my father. Some were hand-me-downs, some were intentionally kept and tossed my way, and some were stolen.
One of my favorite shirts is one that I never can remember him actually wearing. I can’t know quite remember how I came by it - maybe I found in the back of the closet as a rummaged around in early high school, maybe my Mom pawned it off on my to clear space. Either way, as I pounced and slipped it on, hopping around giddily in front of my Dad, he just scrunched his face and said, “Oh, that one.”
It’s like gauze, soft with age, striped in pastels, and has a collar and a pocket. Everything a girl, in my mind, needs. It’s perfect for hot summer days, enough to wear with a tank top, but enough to afford me a flowing shield against the contours of my body. I have dozens of pictures of myself wearing it through the years.
