Milestones

Well, one year ago today I was somewhere on the road from Cincinnati to Washington DC in my car, my mom in hers and my dad driving the moving truck hauling all of my worldly possessions. In some ways it has been a spectacularly horrific year. In fact, except for 1995 (the year after I graduated from Oberlin) it has probably been the worst year of my life. But I guess that's the point of the Year of Growth. That it's not an easy and happy smiletime process...there are tears and anger and self-doubt and stress.

I am so sad right now because right when I'd gotten to a place where I didn't feel like urgently dating someone, I met the secret agent choir boy. And I liked him A LOT. And he seemed to feel the same way. And for the first time while I had moments of insecurity and anxiety, they were, like, .00001% of what they usually were. This was someone who didn't make me feel bad about myself, who liked and accepted me as I was. I felt normal and like I had some active role in what happened...I wasn't just rushing into something out of fear of getting dumped if I didn't move at his exact pace.

Of course, having said that and finally starting to relax and being all happy that a month of this had come along and while nobody was going crazy and declaring love, plans and assumptions were being made that we would be together for at least a little bit...it ended on Thursday night/yesterday morning. And while I rationally know it was for the best and can forsee a time when I will be philosophical/positive about the experience (because for the first time ever I stuck to my guns and said what he was wanting was not going to make ME happy, so nevermind)...right now all I can do is miss him. And cry, and sleep, and feel like throwing up and not eating...all the normal stuff I guess. But I hate the normal stuff!

Changing and becoming a stronger and better version of yourself is a messy process. There are ups and downs. This year there have been so many of them, from moving to a new (old) city to finding a new job to trying to make new friends to doing the dating thing in earnest. It sucks that even four days ago I was thinking about writing a one-year anniversary entry about how it was a hard year, but it's evolved into a great year. But of course that's not what wound up happening. And I guess I should be happy that even as I am sitting around being sad, it's a different, less horrible sad than earlier this year. There's no "this is evidence of how I really really suck" going on. But sad is sad, you know? There's nothing I can do but ride it out.

Summertime TV RULES

I LOVE this new (okay, not that new) trend of basically having new shows year-round. And I ESPECIALLY love just how very trashy the summertime shows are. Take Big Brother, for example. As soon as September rolls around my interest in watching a thrice-weekly show plummets big-time, but for now? I'm counting down the days until July 5, baby. I cannot wait to see what morons show up and what insane trashy things Big Brother will have them do. I also love obsessively reading online to find out what's going on, courtesy of live feeds. I'm not so far gone that I will actually WATCH the live feeds, but god bless those crazy kids who will obsessively detail every minute and then thoughtfully provide you tube links for the highlights. I STILL have the clip from BB6 when Howie went off on April, big-time. I can't express how sad I am that I will miss a week of live feed updates while I am in Scotland...I haven't yet decided if I'm bringing my laptop (pros: stay connected to the world, email, being able to charge my ipod so I can listen to it for longer than the flight over, etc...cons: dragging my laptop all over the country and dealing with the hassle of getting special adaptors, etc). Anyway, the point is, July 5 means nothing but smiletimes, my friends.

And then we have Age of Love, which even *I* am not watching, but makes me laugh hysterically nonetheless. One, what does it say for regular folks that a fucking Grand Slam tennis player has to do a television dating show to find a girlfriend? Of course, it IS Mark "Frankenstein" Phillippoussis, whom I have never found attractive (I am all about Patrick Rafter, baby...and yes that's a player from 10 years ago, who cares, he was Australian and played serve and volley. Whoo boy), so I suppose it makes more sense. But what makes it even funnier is the fact it couldn't just be a regular Bachelor-type show...it's one involving the slang term that sends me into giggles even just THINKING it--COUGARS. Older women "preying" on younger men, that is. Yeah it's sexist as hell, but it's funnier than it is offensive. At least to me. So Mark gets thrown however many cougars to go along with however many "kittens" (lame!) , and he has to then go through the regular courtship rituals...at least as they apply to reality dating shows. But really. Who the hell thinks this show is remotely real? Cause it's so obviously stacked for the cougars it's not even funny. One, they all seem to have had a lot of plastic surgery so they don't actually look their (alleged) ages. Two, the kittens are morons. Unless Mark has NO savvy whatsoever, he's obviously supposed to prove he can look past such "superficialities" as age differences. Of course, I suppose I can hope he IS a total moron...cause that would be pretty fricking funny.

And finally, every time you think the Isaiah Washington/Grey's Anatomy controversy is going to go away, good old Isaiah has to come out and poke the crazy a little more. I don't actually watch Grey's, because I find everything about it so very nauseating (that's another entry for another day...), but I can't stop reading about this story. It started off as an innocent little tale of homophobia and has now become a story of how T.R. Knight is actually a PR/spin genius. I don't know if it's true, but I love every update that comes my way. And really, if it IS....the White House might want to think about hiring on TR Knight. Because if he really IS a complete asshole using this to get more publicity so that his character will get more airtime? Damn TR, that's genius.

Workout from Hell

Inspired by an article I read in Shape magazine, I decided to try to take on a new type of run...one that incorporated stairs. This seemed like a good idea for two reasons: one, I don't generally run outside except for with others (in other words, once a week at best, rarely if ever now due to my sister's surgery), so this would be good to get used to hills, and two, when I went on a hike this weekend in Harper's Ferry...there was a lot of uphill climbing. I did fine, but I definitely could feel it.

So this morning I went to the track at my old alma mater high school and proceeded to run a lap, then climb up and down the bleacher stairs seven times before getting back on the track, running again, lather, rinse, repeat. I modified the way the article outlined (it involved sideways bleacher climbing at one point) and thought since I'd made it easier I'd be able to go longer than their prescribed 40 minutes, but nonetheless, when those 40 minutes were up? I was DONE. After the first lap and getting used to the 62% humidity (at 6:30 a.m. no less!) I never had breathing issues, but my legs were just rubbery and rebelling by the end. Whoo boy.

I lost track of how many laps I actually ran, but at best the actual RUNNING part was only 1.25 miles (since I walked the first two as a warm-up and never ran a FULL lap each time, more like 3/4 of one as I approached the bleachers). Still, I don't know if it's because I woke up at 4:30 a.m. unable to fall back asleep, the fact it was a lot more stairclimbing than I'm used to, or some combination of the two...but here it is, 10:20, and I'm ready to go back to bed. Only 10 more hours or so until I can...

Music as poetry

All these things, should make me happy
Make me happy to be home again

Got myself a bottle of red wine
Got a night with nothing else to do
I think I might know what I really want
But is a brighter discontent the best that I can hope to find?

But love is not these belongings that surround you
Though there's meaning in the memories they hold
A breaking heart in an empty apartment
Was the loudest sound I never heard

Brighter Discontent – The Submarines

A rant in which I get a bit political...or something

People think it's funny when I say I cry easily, because they think I'm kidding. I'm not. I almost burst into tears earlier this morning when my ID card wouldn't let me make copies...until I started thinking of calm blue oceans and how I could work around it. So yes, I am a crier, and I own it. What else can I do? I'm 33 years old, and I'm not really going to change at this point, much as it would be nice to.

Anyway, so another near-tears incident just occurred as I was wading through the most tedious project ever--manually checking all 250 of my students' records in the system to see where they are in the process. I know my boss thinks I am insane and making things harder on myself, but as this check is revealing, while those things may be true, they're also necessary. Because easily 50% of my students have already taken the placement tests needed to register for the fall, but only about 12% of them have informed me of this fact. Um, people! I am here to help! I don't have to walk you to the testing center, but at least let me know what's going on! Long-windedly and circumnavigating my way to the point, I'm checking even the ones I KNOW I have registered, just to be thorough, when I looked up the record of one of my favorite students. Yes, he's registered, and yes, not only did he take the placement tests, he kicked some fucking ass in them, scoring between 91 and 99 on all of the math parts, including trig (which, trust me, is a major accomplishment, considering most of my students stall out at the algebra stage).

So why is that cause for tears, you ask? Why, because of his immigration status. You see, while he is here on a legal, valid visa...it's not one that qualifies him for in-state tuition. And that means he has to pay 3 times what others pay to come here. There's no way his family can afford that. In fact, when he emailed me the situation, he said, "So I'm going to have to hold off on registering for awhile." I promptly put him in the classes we'd chosen anyway because payment isn't due until August 3, I'm hoping we can work something out with financials, etc, and would hate to have him lose spots due to classes filling up...but it doesn't look good for my poor surfer student from Bangladesh. And that upsets me tremendously. I HATE that a fucking brilliant student like this guy can't even come to freaking community college because of money issues, that because since he's neither a citizen nor a permanent resident, he isn't going to be eligible for many scholarships/financial aid (which he certainly would get if he COULD, because both his grades and test scores--even ye old standardized ones like SAT--are phenomenal). I hate that undocumented students are financially penalized for choices that their parents made when they were babies. I don't even blame the parents--nobody leaves a happy life full of promise and prosperity in one country to try to eke out an existance in another one where everything, including the language, is foreign. I understand why the parents do it, but I hate that the kids are the ones who have the hardest time of it.

The truth of the matter is that in some ways the college I work for is "progressive." After all, a lot of colleges in VA won't even ADMIT undocumented students. And I understand the logic of WHY these students pay out of state tuition--because their families (theoretically) aren't paying tuition, so it's not "fair" that the VA taxpayers are supporting their education when the families aren't contribution to it. (Except most undocumented students I know DO pay taxes....but that's another thought for another day.) But certainly the students and families don't feel "lucky" when presented with a bill three times what their classmates are paying. What's even more heartbreaking is that they aren't even mad about it. They understand that's how it works, and they accept it, and they sadly tell me that well, they'll just take one class this semester. We don't really say anything when that comes up, we just both imagine precisely how long it's going to take to earn a 60-credit associate's degree when you're taking 3-4 credits at a time.

I don't claim to have any solutions. I can understand why the system works the way it does, even though I hate so many parts of it. But knowing why something is the way it is doesn't stop me from feeling bad for students who are affected by the policies and wishing I could do more than just be upfront with how it's going to be for them, and sympathetic that it has to be that way.

Really deep thoughts for a Friday afternoon, to be sure! Good thing I'm leaving in about 2 hours to visit my convalescing sister.

Okay, there was no review of Pirates of Caribbean 3. There's not much to say about that other than...it was long. Frankly I don't remember much but the theater (Uptown? Upland? Something downtown) was kickass. Balcony, big screen, the whole nine yards. I'm going back there definitely.

Updating a journal is like not emailing your friends for ages. Eventually it's like, wow, so much has happened, where do I start? I guess you can't really do much other than dive in and wade through everything you can think of. To start, two weeks ago today my sister had surgery to remove fibroid tumors from outside of her uterus. (Since she has talked about it over on Tiny Accoutrements I don't think she'd mind me announcing it.) When we first found out we were all kind of nervous about it, just not knowing what was going to happen, etc. And of course, nobody likes the word "tumor," particularly when said near the word "uterus." Thankfully they were just cysts as the doctor had said, and even more thankfully she has really rapidly recovered. She's not ready to go running again or anything (even if the doctor hadn't said she had to wait six weeks), but really, considering they cut into her stomach, I think all is well. I visited her a bunch while she was convalescing and by the end we were walking around her neighborhood for fairly long stretches. So, yay for that.

I also joined a softball team in my continuing quest to develop a life outside of a) three date-long boys and b) people I've known my whole life, which, don't get me wrong, is nice, but I do need to have a wider social network. Unfortunately my softball team is filled with a bunch of drama queens and we devolved from hanging out on weekends for cookouts and karaoke to showing up when the game starts and leaving as soon as it's over. Oh well, I'm playing softball, which...I never thought I would do, ever, so, yay for me.

I went to NYC this past weekend and saw a cool exhibit at the Met and got a fancy pedicure and bought a new skirt and just generally enjoyed being off work. I actually wound up settting up my whole summer so that every two weeks or so I have some sort of vacation to look forward to. While on the bus I read a book that can only be described as "fucking awesome"--Jennifer Belle's Little Stalker. It's quite possibly even more amazing than the last book I so absolutely adored (Patrick Neate's City of Tiny Lights), but honestly it's kind of a close call. Patrick might get the edge, just cause he's so hot. But both really are incredible.

Graduation from the high schools last week, and I am PSYCHED to be able to go to one place--the college I work for--every day rather than a different high school each day. I mean, last Thursday I actually left all of my shit in an office and walked out with just a purse and my lunch bag. It was weird, and wonderful, and crazy all at once. Of course, I now have to get used to working like real people, 8:30-5 and all that...and dealing with the gallons of students who ignored me all school year. Seriously, man--yesterday, ON MY VACATION, I spent awhile dealing with work emails that had come in whilst Gill slept so that I could come back tomorrow not feeling slammed. I enrolled people in classes, changed schedules, etc. And what should happen when I check my email this afternoon back in VA? 17 new messages. Good god.

These things are only the tip of the iceberg of the life of amy these days...but overall it's a good life. More to come, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Pirates of the Caribbean, Part Two: Seven Words are All You Need

Keira Knightley's teeth are jacked up, man.

Coming soon: a review of Pirates of the Caribbean, Part Three!

Another 5K in my Future

Since my poor sister has to have surgery this upcoming Monday and will be out of running commission for at least the next six weeks, we decided to run one more race this weekend as a last hurrah. So the Kelley Cares (thank god they didn't try to get cute and call it the Kelley Kares) Foundation 5K tomorrow it is, 88 degree weather be damned! I'd say it's early enough that the temperature shouldn't matter, but....it was disgustingly humid when I left for work this morning at 8 a.m., so I don't think that matters.

Honestly, wandering off-topic for a moment, I don't know what it is about DC summers that knock me on my ass. I guess it's the fact that the air really is pretty heinous here. I don't know how I didn't notice last summer they had "orange days" and "red days" and other brightly colored days designed to indicate how nasty (or relatively clean) the air was...but I was horrified when I heard such designations existed. Blecch. It just saps all my energy and makes me feel like shite. Even today, walking three blocks from my parked car to the store to register for the race, then walking back...I felt incredibly gross and unhappy. Even more bizarrely, yahoo weather claims it's only 84 today. Who with the huh? They qualify it with "feels like 87," but...yeah, whatever. The point is, I suck in heat.

Anyway, getting back on-topic, when Mrs. P said her goal was to do the 5K in 30 minutes, I flashed back to my painful, painful pre-half-marathon near-barfing 5K run of last month. I am choosing to ignore those terrifying memories though in favor of believing that "I've learned from my mistakes." I will drink tons of water beforehand, I will eat more than a crappy little muffin, and I won't go flying out of the gate. And we WILL be successful!