Back to Work

Today was the first day back at school after Spring Break (and after pulling nearly 34 hours over 4 days at TreeTop), and it...wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. I got to Chemistry and learned that we weren't going to be doing anything but going over the worksheets that she makes us do. I didn't have the worksheets printed out, so I just scribbled everything down in my notebook, hating my life. (I hate science. Absolutely hate it. I'm rubbish at it, and there are way too many things to memorize.)

Then I went over to Matt's (I have an hour between my two classes, so I usually go and make him coffee and snuggle a bit before we have to go to class) and served him coffee in the new mug that I got him from New Orleans. The outside is plain black and says "New Orleans" on it, but the inside is covered with pictures of masks and instruments and a sign that says "Bourbon Street." I also gave him his sticky pig that I got from TreeTop, as well as the fourteen little puppies I got him as well.

I walked into Spanish and was met with a lady from the office. She told us that our Spanish teacher was delayed in Guatemala, and that our assignment for today was a quiz. Once we finished the quiz, we could leave. I spent about five minutes on the quiz before I gave up. I think I got some right, but I'm not sure.

Since I had about an hour until I had to meet my friends for lunch, I picked up the copy of Watchmen my boyfriend lent me and read on the patio outside the cafeteria. I read for about forty minutes and then went in to grab a table for lunch. Lunch wasn't that great, but dessert was fantastic.

After lunch, I went to my advising session to get my classes all squared away, then I dropped by the Honors house to make sure that things are in proper working order. 

On a whim, I decided to drop by Matt's house (I have a key) and do his dishes and clean his living room. Some of his dishes had been sitting in his sink for over a month. (He NEVER does his dishes, and that's the one point of contention between us, which isn't a bad thing, I suppose. There are worse things to fight over!) I cleaned his dishes, scrubbed his sink, lysoled his stove, wiped down his counters, threw away all his bottles and cans and stuff on the floor, took out the trash, and picked everything off the floor and put them in its proper places. I danced and sang Disney songs while I did it.

Then I went back to my room, where my room mate and I worked on decorating K-9 and Dalek Mycroft for Easter. I made 10 eggs and we decorated them (to put them on Dalek Mycroft), five apiece.

Spent the rest of the day working on my presentation, went to dinner with my roommate and other friends, and then went back to Matt's to hang with him. Then I discovered that the presentation I was so proud of was absolutely wrong, and I had to redo the entire thing. I accomplished it, but I'm still not as happy with it as I was with the first one. But I screwed up.

Tomorrow, I've got to get up earlier than usual (I usually get up at 9:15, but I'm gonna get up at 8:30, so I can shower and get dressed) and go and reserve my room for next semester. We're trying to get a corner room - we're going to stay rooming together, but we want to change rooms. It's going to be difficult! I hope we can get it, otherwise we're going to be a bit disappointed. But the plans we have for next year are going to be awesome!

Anyways, I've got to get to bed now. I'll report on my success or failure at room change tomorrow!

Spring Break 2014: TreeTop

And now we've come full-circle. I hope you've enjoyed my (fairly regular) posts the past few days! As it's been Spring Break, I've had time to sit down and catch up on some blogging. Some of these posts were written in pieces over several days, and by the time I go back to school on Monday, I hope to have a good stack of "Scheduled" posts sitting in my account. It's been far too long since I had a good backlog of posts! I know, I know - it sucks reading pre-written material. Have no fear! I'll still write fresh things when I get around to it. Sometimes, though, I'm not able to get around to it because of...school!

Anyway, now that I'm back in Chelsea, I'm also back to work. My first (full) day at TreeTop, in the midst of the crisis that is Spring Break in Shelby County, went a little like this...

I'm scheduled to show up to work at 9:30 a.m., which doesn't really make sense because the place doesn't open 'til 10:00, and I'm prize center - I'm not doing anything that would require me to be there early. If I were café, Go Karts, or a manager, I'd understand being there early. But just for prize center? I guess I could restock...

...If I could even get in the door. When I pull up at 9:20, the whole place is dark, and I can't even get into the parking lot because the gate is locked. No worries; I was going to park in the side lot anyways (because I was in my truck, and I knew we'd get busy and I'd have to just move it over there anyways and yadda yadda yadda...). But now I've got a problem. It's 9:20, I'm supposed to clock in at 9:30, and there's nobody around. Eventually, two other people show up (my coworkers) and they also park in the little lot next to me. At 9:32, a manager pulls up and unlocks the gate. We follow her into the building, and I'm able to clock in at 9:36. 

Okay. I'm clocked in. I head over to the prize center while my coworkers go and do other things. I turn around and find that there's a lady standing at the cash register...twenty minutes before we open. 

"Ma'am, we don't open for another twenty minutes."

"I know. I just want to get this done before y'all do."

I stare at her. "Ma'am, there's no cash drawer. We aren't open. The owner isn't even here yet. The cashier's in the café finishing up her Taco Bell breakfast."

The lady narrows her eyes, and I scamper off in search of the cashier, who gets upset when I tell her that she has to stop eating and go deal with the angry old woman at the register. She basically repeats the same things I said, and the lady leaves, to wait in her car until we do open. The cashier locks the doors behind her. 

I spend the first two hours of my shift basically tidying up and restocking the shelves and the wall, because nobody comes to prize center at all. I get maybe three people in those first three hours, and they're all from the same family. Eventually, I have a posse of about three people around me, and we're able to deal with the crowd once they do come around. We have both cash registers running non-stop at this time, too: the line never gets lower than fifteen people deep until about six o'clock that night.

At around two, I'm able to take my break. I have a quick lunch and get back to the prize, because I don't want to leave the newbies there too long by themselves. They might get eaten.

It sincerely amazes me that people complain about long lines at places like this. I mean, it's SPRING BREAK. Other families want to get out and have fun, too! Heaven forbid you all decide to go to the ONLY ARCADE AROUND during spring break! And then complain about the lines! You're not the only ones that are entitled to get out!

I had to get the manager to do refunds for at least three people today, because people didn't understand the concept of "No refunds," "No substitutions," and/or "The line for [attraction] may be over 40 minutes long. Plan accordingly when buying the hour/two-hour/three-hour unlimited combos!" signs. They also don't listen to the cashiers say, "The Spring Break combo specials expire at the end of the day!" (There's also a note on the advertisements that say this.) People just amaze me.

Anyways, I'm going to quit ranting about the stupidity of humanity now before it threatens to overwhelm me. I've got a ten hour shift tomorrow, and I need to rest up for it so I don't snap and kill somebody. Wish me luck!

Do you work in a retail store during the holidays? Do you work at some sort of arcade, and thus feel my pain? What are your strategies to get through it?

Spring Break 2014: Biloxi

If you remember my post from yesterday, you'll remember how I went to New Orleans and took a lot of pictures, and came away with some cool memories. Today, I'm going to talk about our little mini-trip in Biloxi, Mississippi, where we stayed at the military base so that we could be within an hour of New Orleans. That way, we didn't have to pay the ridiculous hotel rates around New Orleans! And we would be extra-safe on base, and the on-base lodging is actually really comfortable! (It's a suite: mini-kitchen, bathroom, two bedrooms [one master, one with two twin beds], and a living room area all for $60 a night!)

The first day in Biloxi, we were told by friends that we had to try this chicken place called "Raising Cane's." It's just like Zaxby's, only better! Since we love Zaxby's, we decided to try it. It was...meh. The chicken had no spice to it, and the secret Cane's Sauce was bland. It was a meal I could've gotten for much better at my parents' house. But hey - we tried it, so we can talk smack about it, right?

We also went to the BX (the Base Exchange - it seemed much bigger than the PX's I'm used to!) and looked at clothes and shoes and makeup and all sorts of other tax-free goodies. (I love shopping on-base.) I ended up getting a thing of Maybelline BB Cream (that stuff is awesome!) and a new magazine. I found that the BX was also selling Lucky Brand jeans - the very thing that my boyfriend swears by - for about 40% less than the retail Lucky Brand store at the Summit Mall sells them for. I guess that's one perk of being in the military - cheaper-than-retail sales! (Plus, it's tax-free.)

We got into Biloxi on Sunday afternoon, and spent the rest of Sunday relaxing in the hotel room and running around base. On Monday, we left on the short just-over-an-hour trip to New Orleans, and spent the day running around that city. We came back to our hotel room at the end of the day, exhausted, and planning out what to do on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, we ended up going to the Jefferson Davis Home that is in Biloxi: Beauvoir. The outbuildings and the outside of the house were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, but the porches have been rebuilt and the little houses reconstructed all according to detail and to scale. Even Varina's rose garden (Davis's wife) has been reconstructed to scale. It'll probably be beautiful in about five years or so.

 To the left, you'll see Jefferson Davis's bedroom. See the little metal tub in the middle of the picture? Somehow, the six-foot-plus man folded himself up in there to take a bath. I can't even imagine that. Of course, Davis's wife slept in the bedroom next to his, because men and women didn't sleep in the same room because men had to sleep sitting up or something along those lines.

 This is the view from the front porch of Beauvoir. Did you know that the beach wasn't there when the house was built? It was added in the 1950s! After they built the sea wall, the extra sand was sucked up and put into a beach on the edge of the water, according to our tour guide. That's something I can't even begin to imagine! Just...wow!

 After the tour, we were free to wander about the property, so we went and visited the cemetery. I enjoy looking at old graves (is that really morbid?), and there are supposedly something like 790 or so on the property. The gravestones are all so small. Some are bigger than others, some are cracked, some are faded, and some are missing "death dates." Some are just blank.

Some have even become embedded in the trees that have grown up in the graveyard, like the one that you see to the right. There were several that were near trees, but this is the only one that was actually in a tree.

I've been to a lot of military cemeteries, but I don't think I've been to one that seems so...lonely. It's alone. Almost would be abandoned in the middle of the city, if it wasn't for Beauvoir.

After we visited the cemetery, we went up and viewed the library, and my dad talked to someone there about his great-great grandfather, Josiah Roland, who fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. Then we swung through the gift shop, and I bought a little "Confederate States of America" pin. I'll probably put it on one of my denim jackets somewhere. I wanted a confederate flag (the Beauregard Battle Flag, to be exact, not to be confused with the Stars & Bars), but they didn't have one in the size I wanted in a price that I could afford. It's okay, though. I'll get my confederate flag some day. (And best of all, my boyfriend's perfectly okay with me getting one! That's why he's a keeper.)

I know that some people who are reading this are probably thinking, "Why would such a smart and educated young college girl want a confederate flag? They were traitors!"

Well, it's part of my heritage. I had a great-great-great grandfather who fought for the Confederates. We have a Civil War cannonball sitting in our house. (I'll have to get a picture of it later - I'm not sure where it is at the moment!) We always sit on the Southern side when we go to the Dixie Stampede. I'm not ashamed of my past. We shouldn't be ashamed of our heritage. It makes us who we are. I don't know if any of my ancestors owned slaves, but if they had, that doesn't make it right. Slavery was wrong. I'm not one of those "The South was Right" people, but I do think that, in a way, they were justified for what they did. The South thought they were wronged, and they attempted to fix it. They just did it in a rather bad way.

Not everyone who flies a Confederate flag is a redneck, yankee-hating hick. Just remember that.

Spring Break 2014: New Orleans

Yesterday was just absolutely perfect. We went to New Orleans for a day trip for Spring Break. We got there around 11:00, and so we walked around. And we walked, and we walked, and we walked. There was a little French Market in the French Quarter, where nearly everybody was selling the same things. We did a loop around that, and then continued through the streets.

I wish I could've gone and taken better pictures, but alas, I was equipped only with the phone on my camera.

Not bad, actually, as it has more megapixels in that little camera than my own personal digital camera. Then again, my digital camera's like six years old, so it's getting on up there in technology years. 

It was an overcast day, which made taking pictures a little better, because I didn't have to fight with the sun to get pictures, and nothing was washed out. At the same time, we got to enjoy the city without being murdered by the hot temperatures. That's a great thing, because the last time I came to New Orleans (for a little four-hour or so trip with my youth group, about three years ago), we all sweltered from the heat and just about gave up on seeing most of the city because we wanted to stay in the air conditioning all day.

Last time, I went down Bourbon Street after dark. This time, it was fully-light when my family wandered down the Street of Debauchery. I even came across Jester's, which is where my boyfriend got his favorite drink the last time he was in New Orleans. (Note: I do not condone drinking, but if you spend enough time with HIS family, you're gonna want to start!)

As we were walking to the restaurant where we were going to have lunch (Deanie's Seafood, where my sister and I went to last time we were in the city and wanted to go to again, because their shrimp was delicious and it was relatively affordable, unlike some other sit-down, inside restaurants), we came across a building that had an angel behind a steel fence.

Of course, being a Doctor Who fan, I had to snap a picture. I then freaked my sister out by whispering, "Don't Blink" at her. (She's never fully recovered from the Blink episode that I showed her...last January.)

It does make you wonder, though: why put the angel behind a fence? I suppose it's to stop the tourists from destroying it, but why not just remove the angel entirely, or put it on the inside of the building? Just something for the architects of the city to think about.

Speaking of architects, I've fallen in love with the buildings in this city. None are the same, and they're all gorgeous and detailed and seem to tower above you, no matter which way you turn. Although the streets are a little too narrow for my liking, and some of the people are really rude, I think I'd love to look at all of the buildings in the French Quarter. They're stunning.

After lunch, we hit a couple of shops in order to claim our souvenirs for the day. My sister managed to find a mug exactly like the one I broke three years ago (the day after she got it). It wasn't my fault - my mom had placed the thing on top of a box, wrapped in brown paper, and I accidentally knocked it off. I thought my sister was going to kill me, but everything was made right today.

After a quick stop at Café du Monde (and some serious wondering at how the staff keeps their heads, when they're non-stop busy all day long), we walked back to the market. My sister wanted to get a bag that she'd seen earlier, but I think my mom talked her out of it (it wasn't really of much use as a purse, because it was nothing but one big compartment, which means that anything put inside of it would be sucked into the Black Hole of Nothingness that I'm sure all females are familiar with).

As we were heading back towards the Café and, ultimately, our car, I came across this little sticky note stuck on the back of a street light control box. It says "The Stars Are Up #Alive." I thought it was a really cool little note. And it has to be fairly fresh, too - the flowers that are attached to it are still newly-picked, and haven't begun to wilt at all.

Just something to make you stop and think on a street corner.

So what did I end up getting from the French Market, on this overcast and gloomy day in New Orleans?

I bought myself a ring as my last purchase of the day (let's start at the bottom and work our way up, shall we?). I was agonizing over three different choices: a Celtic double-knot, a Celtic trinity, and this little carved band. I wanted a band that looked a bit like a choker necklace, but it was a little too small for my fingers.

I spent probably five minutes trying on the three different rings before deciding that the trinity was too big for my finger. It then took another further two to decide whether I'd get the Celtic ring or the band. My mom finally pushed my decision (because she was getting tired and irritated), and I bought the cheaper of the two rings. I'm really happy with my new ring, though - it's gorgeous!

Before I got the ring, I stopped at a little stall that had carved animals. I guess I lingered a bit too long, looking at them, because the owner came up to me. 

"What your favorite animal?"

When I replied, "A cat," he picked up a small cat and shoved it in my hands. 

We went back and forth about price before he lowered it from $22 (which I never would've paid for a little thing like this!) to $10, because it was closing time and he wanted to make one last sale of the day.

I like the little cat. It's hand-carved from, supposedly, tiger's eye jade, and took about five hours to make. I probably shouldn't have bought it, but he guilted me into it. Sorta.

Before buying either of those two things, though, I bought a mug for my boyfriend, Matt. I had wanted to get him a little string voodoo doll, but my mother vetoed that (even though he would've found it awesome), and since I couldn't get away from her long enough to purchase one, I just got him a mug.

It's a plain black mug with "New Orleans" on the outside, but the inside has paintings of masks and street names and landmarks from New Orleans. I think it looks really cool.

But back before Café du Monde, we went into a little shop that had posters and t-shirts and other various little souvenir-y things in it so that I could get a souvenir that my mother would pay for. I ended up getting two prints from the same series. Essentially, I guess they depict the same black-and-white tabby cat in famous New Orleans scenes. I thought they were adorable, and my mom said two would be better than one. 

So who am I to argue with her? I picked up my two favorite cat scenes: the "Cat du Monde" and the "Streetcat named Desire" and let my mom pay for them. 

So while two of my technically four souvenirs don't have anything specifically related to New Orleans on them, I'll still think of the city whenever I look at them. I'll be wearing the ring often (because it's pretty and I really like it), and the cat's going on my shelf of cat figurines. I really need to start collecting those again. As for the cat prints? I'll probably find a way to frame them and place them with my cat collection as well. (Have I mentioned that I have a cat figurine collection? I really need to dust them and organize them again. I need to start collecting frequently as well.)

All in all, it was a wonderful day trip to the city. Come back tomorrow to see what I did on Day 2 of Spring Break 2014!

One Year

One year ago, I was sobbing into my pillow as my then-boyfriend readied himself to go to Basic Combat Training (BCT). We Skyped one last time, ironically on the date of our one-year anniversary. It was a long-distance relationship, and I thought it had been going rather well.

I received a phone call from him every single night he was in reception, and he even Facebooked me when he had internet access. I wrote him three letters a week and sent them. And then I waited.

And I waited.

I wrote him over 400 pages of love letters, three per week, wasted at least two stamps per letter, and what did I get back? Six pages.

Four pages of "updates" in the first two letters he sent. That was the first two weeks he was in Basic. And then the last two pages were in the break-up letter. 

Yes, that's right. The dirtbag broke up with me through a letter.

If you're looking up stuff on Specialist Charles James William Smith, an Army Bandsman, then I'm happy to tell you that he is a manipulator, a liar, emotionally and psychologically abusive, and enjoys controlling people around him. I didn't even realize it while we were dating, but the more I talk about my relationship, the more I realize just how horrible of a person he was to me. He hit me once. I was trying to get him out of a shop in the mall, and he turned around and punched me in the leg. I had a bruise for about two weeks, but nobody ever saw it.

He kept me from going out and being myself. 

"You want to dye your hair? Why? Want to look like a freak?"
"You cut your hair above your shoulders? ... At least it'll grow out."
"You didn't seriously wear that today, did you?"

He only cared about what I looked like on camera, and only then if I was wearing as little clothing as possible. He wouldn't look me in the eyes at times. He cared more about himself in the relationship than he cared about us in the relationship. He didn't put any time into it for me. I was there to please him, and if I didn't, then he got fussy and cranky, just like a spoiled child.

I'm so glad I'm no longer with him. Even though the break-up was emotionally devastating to me, what with the emotional trauma and the psychological issues I had to go through (the waking up and screaming in the middle of the night because I didn't believe I was good enough, that I was an absolutely worthless piece of dunderheaded fluff, certainly didn't help my psyche at all), I'm so glad I moved on.

It's been one year since my ex left me, although he didn't officially end things until May 28 (one week before we were supposed to be reunited). The coward kept me pining after him, in heartache and confusion, for nearly two months while he sat back and laughed at my letters.

It's been almost five months since I started dating my boyfriend, Matt. The difference between Matthew and Charles is that Charles is a psychologically abusive control freak and Matthew is caring and understanding.

I wish I'd been able to see it sooner. I could've saved myself a ton of heartache and drama if I'd just given up on him when he stopped writing back.

At the same time, though, I now actually have a future to look forward to. Going into the military life again? How on earth could I have thought that'd be the way that I wanted to finish out my life? Moving time after time after time, again and again, just like I had during my childhood? What was I thinking? (I am in no way knocking military life, by the way. That was my childhood, and made me who I am today. I'm just not cut out for it any more. I want to settle down, have a house that I can customize to my heart's content.) 

I have someone who loves me, and I have someone (who was also emotionally and psychologically abused) who knows how not to do relationships at my side. We're in this to win this. I'm only sorry that it took me so long to figure it out. I'm not looking for the brave, macho person; I'm looking for the kind and caring person that actually wants to hold me and be close without needing a "reason" to do so.

So for those of you out there, don't you dare settle. I thought that, since I was seventeen, I was too "old" to find someone out there who would want me. I was willing to settle for the first person who looked my way. That turned into the worst decision of my life. Because I chose to settle, I lost who I really was, and it took me a long time to bounce back from a year of psychological abuse.

It's going to be okay. And if you want to talk, I'm here to talk. I don't want to see others make my mistake. For the time being, though, I'm going to go and find something to take my pills with. I'll see if I can post something later this week...if I'm conscious enough after vacation and long shifts at TreeTop!

Radical Feminism

I do apologize for not having posted recently, but I've been so busy with school and other things that I haven't had time to just sit down and WRITE for my blog. And as we all know, school comes first, because otherwise I won't have food to eat if I graduate.

I'm taking a class this semester called "History & Critical Public Address/U.S. Criticism," which is essentially a historical rhetoric class. What we do is, we read speeches and look at the rhetoric included in them. We dig into the audience and discover why they listened to the rhetor in the first place. 

We've read things by Black Hawk, Angelina Grimké (I even did a presentation on her), Harriet Tubman, etc. We've covered things from Native American Rights, to Women's Rights, to Abolition, to the Civil Rights Movement, and now we're moving into Second Wave Feminism. 

Ah, Second Wave Feminism. 

My second presentation for this class is on Valerie Solanas. You probably haven't heard of her. Which is, actually, a very, very good thing.

Valerie Solanas is the author of the SCUM Manifesto. The acronym is supposed to stand for "Society for Cutting Up Men."

Yep, you read that right.

Ms. Solanas wanted to rid the world of the male gender, because she saw no reason for men to exist. They were "glorified, walking dildos" to her, and since women can reproduce because of science, men aren't needed any more. 

Men are also responsible for:

• War (because this is the only way he can prove that he's a "man")
• Niceness, Politeness, & Dignity (a social code that ensures perfect blandness)
• Money, Marriage and Prostitution, Work and Prevention of an Automated Society (apparently, money is the root of all things evil and it's why leisure time terrifies men)
• Fatherhood and Mental Illness [fear, cowardice, timidity, humility, insecurity, passivity] (because Daddy doesn't love his children, and Daddy can only be respected if he remains aloof)
• Suppression of Individuality, Animalism [domesticity and motherhood], and Functionalism (females are reduced to animals because that's the only way men feels safe around them)
• Prevention of Privacy (because men want to be women, they create a society based upon the family)
• Isolation, Suburbs, and Prevention of Community (men cannot cooperate to achieve a common end, because men swing back and forth between isolation and gang-banging, and there is no middle ground)
• Conformity (men are scared of anything that makes them different than others, so he clearly defines genders)
• Authority and Government (men created authorities, then wanted to usurp the females and become Woman, so now all authorities are male)
• Philosophy, Religion, and Morality Based on Sex (men cannot relate to anybody, so he invented philosophy and religion so that he can find something to save himself)
• Prejudice [racial, ethnic, religious, etc.] (because men need scapegoats)
• Competition, Prestige, Status, Formal Education, Ignorance and Social and Economic Classes (the purpose of higher education is not to educate but to exclude as many as possible from the various professions)
• Prevention of Conversation (men cannot talk about anything other than themselves, and when they try, they end up droning on because it is a strained, compulsive attempt to impress the female)
• Prevention of Friendship [love] (men have contempt for htemselves and for all other men and for all women who respect and pander to them. So love can't exist between two people of either gender, because only two secure, free-wheeling, independent groovy female females can have love)

Oh, but don't worry. Men have given us these things instead:

• Great Art and Culture (a highly artificial world in which the male is heroized by displaying female traits, and the female is reduced to highly limited, insipid, subordinate roles/to being male)
• Sexuality (sex is not part of a relationship. Females can easily condition away their sex drive so they can be free to pursue truly worthy relationships but men only throw them into sex bags)
• Boredom ("Life in a society made by and for creatures who, when they are not grim and depressing are utter bores, can only be, when not grim and depressing, an utter bore.")
• Secrecy, Censorship, Suppression of Knowledge and Ideas, and Exposes (in order to prevent the exposure of the male sex as a whole and to maintain his unnatural dominant position in society, this is what a male resorts to)
• Distrust (males cannot empathize or feel affection or loyalty)
• Ugliness (men are incapable of cerebral or aesthetic responses and are totally materialistic and greedy)
• Hatred and Violence (they must prove they are a man in order to have an outlet for their hate)
• Disease and Death (everything is curable, and we could actually live forever, if men weren't so afraid of exposing themselves as incomplete, disfigured females and stopped researching "manly" war and death programs)

So what are we supposed to do? 

Obviously, we need to eliminate all males on the planet. Once we stop kowtowing to their male-dominated leadership, their entire society will crumble. Solanas even says that everyone needs to "f--- up their jobs" until they are fired, then go on to another place and mess up that job as well. Eventually, everything will collapse and when it does, the women will end up on top because we aren't as weak and narrow-minded as the men are.

You'd think this would be satire. "Something this crazy can't actually be REAL, can it?" you cry in amazement as you read through my list.

Oh, but it is. She is actually 100% serious. 

I encourage you to do a bit of research on Valerie Sonalas and just see how crazy she actually is. (You can just look at her picture and SEE the crazy.) She is absolutely insane. (She even went and shot Andy Warhol because he refused to produce or publish her play, because he thought it was dirty.)

And that is what I've been working on instead of blogging. 

Maybe next week, I'll run a little piece on Angelina Grimké. I thought she was actually really cool, and I would've loved to have met her.

See y'all later - I'm on vacation right now and I've been blogging this while I should've been working on my presentation for Solanas. Oops.

We've Got to Stay Away from Construction Paper

My roommate and I have a serious problem. We love dressing up the life-sized K-9 and Dalek (whom we've named Mycroft) that we put outside our dorm room door last October. It was originally for the Halloween Door Decorating Contest; however, it's stayed up because we didn't have the heart to take it down. We've dressed them up for Christmas and Valentine's Day, and now we've done the same for St. Patrick's Day.

We bought this GIANT thing of construction paper at Target waaaay back in October, and we STILL haven't used it all up! (Although we are running low on red, because, I mean, DID YOU SEE THE SIX-FOOT-TALL DALEK WE MADE?!) So we used a lot of green and yellow this time around, because both K-9 and Mycroft got a hat and a chain, along with some shamrocks. In fact, the only thing NOT made of construction paper is the leprechaun on K-9's tail!

And then I figured out a way to make a rainbow to put above our TARDIS door. It's a bit off-center, I think, and a bit squarish, but it still gets the job done. You can tell it's a rainbow, and it really goes with the St. Patrick's Day (and Ireland) theme that we've got going on. We might could've done another beam, but we have time to figure that out if we need another foot of rainbow on each side of the door.

If I'm being perfectly honest, I never thought about dressing up K-9 and Mycroft throughout the year. I didn't think that this whole thing would get so huge. We hadn't planned on putting a K-9 or a Dalek up; they just kinda happened. And we never planned on putting them life-sized, but we found the blueprints, and it just kinda...happened.

But I'm glad it's happened. We've had a lot of fun. We've spent hours upon hours crouched on the tile floor in our dorm room, measuring and drawing and cutting and taping. (Yep, everything's TO-SCALE, with proper measurements and everything. They might look a little funky, but that's because they're a 2D representation of something that's usually shown in 3D.) Everything's done by hand. Construction paper. Scotch tape. Some painter's tape. A pair of scissors. It's taken probably twenty or more hours to put all this stuff together, and we're hoping to keep K-9 and the Dalek and put them up next year (because we're rooming together again!).

I hope I was able to put a little smile on your face today :) We've put a lot of work into our dorm room, and I love having these pictures out there. The ONLY thing that's not hand-measured and designed? The little leprechaun on K-9's tail (close-up to the left). 

Have a great day, y'all!