WHEEEEEHOOOOOOO

If there's one phrase that absolutely does not apply to my life right now, it's "The semester is really winding down."

DON'T LIE.

The past few weeks--and particularly the last 48 hours--have been an absolute whirlwind of setbacks and obstacles and problems and injuries (literally--my knee looks like I was attacked by a cannibal) and piles and piles of work.

But that's okay! You know why?

BECAUSE I JUST TURNED IN TWO DIFFERENT PROJECTS AND THEY'RE BOTH AWESOME!

Okay, that's not entirely true. One of them was a video project (all of my worst enemies are video projects) that is mediocre at best, but to me the very fact that it exists on YouTube at all is a massive success! (I'm not going to provide you with the link because, frankly, I don't want people  to know that I produced that particular lame video.)

But my other project--my technical writing project--is simply BEAUTIFUL! Here's a sample:

I know it looks boring and lame and pointless to all of you (and pretty much everyone else that ever existed), but to me it's awesome and fantastic and the result of hours and hours of labor. It's a PDF document and if you click on a name it will link you to another part of the document! You can actively fill out forms! There's a new cover page and logo for the poor Haslet Library! And that line length! The chunking! The running heads! 

Ah, it's lovely. I'm proud of it (even though I just noticed a problem in the screenshot above...but shhhhh...I'm trying to forget about it). 

I think I care a little bit too much about school. Seriously, though. I am so irrationally happy right now, just because I turned in a project a day early and I'm proud of it and my professor told me she loved it. I tend to put a lot of emotional energy into my work, and right now is when that starts paying off, I guess, as I start being able to turn in these stupid projects that I've been struggling with for a semester. 

Also, my technical writing professor told me that she thinks I should consider changing my major to Technical Communication, or at least minoring in it... and though my professor last semester told me the same thing and I kind of dismissed it, now I really thing she might be on to something. Technical writing is something that I have been doing pretty much my whole life--creating greeting cards for my family, making magazine covers for fun, designing posters and CD covers and promotional images for The Lead Pipes, creating ads in Commercial Photography. These are all things that I'm good at, that I love doing, but that English Literature as a major doesn't even come close to covering. 

I don't want to work at a manufacturer writing manuals on how to operate a backhoe, or a computer engineering company writing proposals, or a Big Business responding to customer service complaints. I don't want to do the things that the average technical writer does--but I think developing my skills as a technical writer and designer and communicator would round out my education. It would give me modern, industrial, adaptable skills that my very traditional English Lit education ignores, and that I think would be invaluable as a publisher and probably give me opportunities to do more things in that industry that I don't even know exist yet--or perhaps don't exist yet, and are just waiting for me to come make them exist. 

And I like it. I really, really like it.

I'm kind of halfway convincing myself to do this. Just ignore me. 

But that's my life right now--crazy, confused, overwhelming, stressed. But essentially productive, I guess. Which is important, because college. 

ONLY TWO AND A HALF MORE WEEKS UNTIL BREAK!!!!!!!!

So.

I haven't posted in a long, long time. I promise I'll post more soon. 

This semester has been seriously testing my ability to deal with bullshit. I've felt like a racing dog stuck in the mud--running too fast too hard and getting nowhere.  

I've felt, in fact, like this lovely gentleman found on the wall of J&J's basement. 

Because I take way too many photos of graffiti.

It has kind of sucked, I'm not going to lie. It's been one of the longest, hardest months of my life, and I don't mean academically. (Although that six-and-a-half hour test probably didn't help.)

But you know what? 

It's getting better. It really is. 

I'm working less, doing more. Breathing more. Making more friends. Talking more, I hope.

I may not post a lot here. But I'll be just fine. 

New Orleans, LA: City of Jazz

Day 1: 

I arrived in New Orleans on Thursday afternoon. After picking me up from the airport, my family and I went to check out the Destrehan Plantation, one of the most well-preserved plantations in Louisiana. 

It was interesting to see how the plantations were run and what the quality of life was like (for plantation owners as well as slaves). All the employees were dressed up in historical costume, which was adorable, especially if you were our guide, an old lady who seemed half-bored by her presentation but knew an inordinate amount of information about anything and everything related to the house.

 

According to her, there will be a movie coming out called Twelve Years a Slave (also a book!) that was shot on the plantation. So that's cool.

 There were also chickens, which was unreasonably exciting. 

We may or may not have gotten beignets Thursday night at Café du Monde. Maybe it was Friday. Either way we got beignets and they were delicious and messy and delicious.

Side note: One of the great things about Louisiana for a (semi) French speaker is that everyone kind of almost speaks French. This means that in words like "café," companies and people actually understand where to put the accent and what an accent even is. Pro-tip: If you want to NOT look like an idiot, don't use an apostrophe like an accent ( cafe' or Renee' ). Better just to exclude the accent altogether. But if you want to actually do it right, here are the rules: In English (or words English stole from French), the accent is probably an accent ague, or forward slash, above an E, not beside it. If there are two Es, it goes above the first E. Renée. Café. Probably the only time you will use the accent grave, or backwards slash, in English is in Shakespearean poetry, when you pronounce the -ed at the end of words to add a syllable, as in "slashèd" (pronounced SLASH-ehd as opposed to one syllable SLASH'd). Got it? Good. Just a little lesson for you.

Sorry, I am both an English and a French major, so these things are real problems in my life. 

Moving on. Heh.


Day 2:

On Friday we woke up and hopped on the Natchez Riverboat, a windy Mississippi lunch cruise aboard an old-style steam-powered (or something?) boat (think Mark Twain).

It was quite neat (and windy). We ate soul food and learned some things about the Mississippi and its banks, such as that every one second, the river deposits one million gallons of water into the Gulf. That's a big freaking river.

After the boat, we chilled, walked around, looked at the farmer's and flea markets and all the shops, and generally explored the city. Everything there is named Jackson, for Andrew Jackson I guess, which made me chuckle.

A little later on we went on a mule-and-carriage tour led by a neat and knowledgeable local lady, who showed us everything from the French Quarter sights to the "ghetto" to Frenchman Street.

We learned that the area is called Dixieland because the original Confederate mint used to be in New Orleans, and the first note they printed was a ten dollar note. Because it was Louisiana, though, they printed the English word Ten as well as the French word Dix on the notes, but the English-speaking Americans pronounced dix phonetically instead of Frenchly, so they started calling them dixies, and Louisiana became Dixieland.

Later on we went down to Frenchman Street, a more local, musicy place (much cooler than Bourbon Street, although with just as many drunk people). We ate dinner at a cool place called Snug Harbor and then went to look at the nighttime art market next door.

 

And I saw this neat sign. 

  

AND I got this amazing poem, written by fellow English major David, one of several Poets for Hire on Frenchman, who would write poems on any subject for whatever price you thought they were worth. 

"The Life of an English Major" 

You will live inside the words of other, rooms without walls, a universe without boundaries, stories that pull around your neck like a scarf on a cold winter's night.

You will be one of a dozen who still appreciates a library.

Books will be your great love, and men will fall short of your romantic expectations.

Grammar mistakes on social media sites will drive you insane.

You will be sensitive to the thoughts of others. 

You will ask a lot of questions and be unsatisfied with most answers. 

Your life will be an endless source of storytelling material.

Then we went to listen to music at The Spotted Cat Music Club, where my Dad (naturally) started talking to these two British guys, a filmmaker and an aspiring chef, who are on a mission to taste food across America so that the chef can open a restaurant back in England. They were funny and interesting guys, and the filmmaker is from Falmouth of all places.Weird coincidences.

Day 3: 

On our last real day in NOLA, we went on an airboat tour of the bayou. We saw lots of marshmallow-eating alligators and even got to hold two-year-old Amy. 

We also learned that Spanish Moss can be processed by boiling it and removing the gray bark. Once removed, the plant looks like strands of horsehair and it quite strong. They used it to stuff furniture and car seats (horsehair furniture). 

I also thought it was interesting that they have managed to garner a population of over a million alligators, who were on the very first endangered species list, by stealing their eggs and hatching them at a specific temperature that allows for the correct proportion of males to females. They then notch their tails to mark when they were born and release around 15% of them back into the swamp, about 1600 gators. The rest of them go towards alligator meat and leather.

After that we took Austin to move into his hotel/home-for-the-summer, dropped off Gena at the airport, and went to see Star Trek Into Darkness, which was awesome. 

And that was it!

DONE.

GOODNESS.


These last few weeks have been a whirlwind.

But I am done! With school, anyway. I've still got work all summer. And a summer class. So really, I'm mostly done. Which is good.

Hm.

But I now have a 3.9 GPA. I made a B in my French class. Sigh. But oh well! I did my best.

In the last couple of weeks I have celebrated my birthday, taken five finals, gone to work, moved home, and hung out with my family (including Austin!).

My birthday was a lot of fun despite all the other nonsense that was happening. It truly was The Birthday of Sloths.

 (this is a sloth.)

First, on Saturday, I went to Benihana with my parents, Jackson, and Tim, Danyel, and Sophia, which was excellent! Oh, hibachi, how I love you.

Then I had this AMAZING sloth cake. Meet Burt, yet another one of my mother's incredible creations.

My parents gave me a Windows Surface tablet, which so far I'm really enjoying. I also outfitted it with endless sloths.

On Sunday, I had the good fortune to get to go to breakfast with my dear Anna, who is back in town from college! And then I went to Time to Kiln (again) with Kelsey and Jenna and painted this gnome! :D

Finally, on Monday (my actual birthday) I took a Management exam! YAY! WOOOOO!

No, but seriously. It was awful.

But then Jenna, Kelsey, and I went to Fera's and ate way too much and got ice cream! So it wasn't a total failure.

Jenna and I also exchanged gifts, because her birthday is on the 14th. Being English majors, we decided to start the best tradition ever: getting each other books for our birthdays. But wait--there's more! The books must be ones that the giver has read but the receiver hasn't, and even if it looks like the worst book ever, the receiver must read it immediately. It's brilliantly fun! I got her The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, and she got me The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield.

I am very excited to start reading, and I'm even going to take a hiatus from the Game of Thrones books to do it! I'm sorry, Book 4. You'll have to wait. But I have ALL SUMMER to read you! :D

Finally, Jackson gave me this miraculous sloth necklace, which was a wonderful end to a sloth-filled birthday.

So yeah. Finals have been going pretty well. Kind of. I was an hour late to my Technical Writing final because I wrote down the time wrong, but that was okay because my teacher's really cool and she likes me. And then today I nearly slept through my English final because my alarm didn't go off. Luckily I woke up on my own at 7:40, then screamed and rolled out of bed and put on pants and ran across campus to make it to my 8:00 test. And then this test took me the full two hours. I wrote ten pages of stuff. Uuuuuuuuuh. It was exhausting. But I did fine on pretty much all of them.

Oh, and because I did this last semester, here are all the notecards I used for studying. There are 468.

Oh yeah! And I forgot to announce that now I'm the Secretary for the College of Arts and Sciences Ambassador Program, because apparently I can't resist doing more things, all the time! But no. It should be fun. And it means I get to go to Summer Orientations! :D Because that was my favorite thing last summer!

Just kidding. :-|

Now I'm just being sassy. Ignore me.

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!