And now for something completely different:

Clearly I stopped posting here, but now I have a new blog, and it’s way more awesome because 1, I will update it; 2, it is a real website; and 3, it’s for my photography! Check it:

End of semester stress

The last 3 weeks of the semester are always completely insane. Last week I had a ridiculous amount of things due; this week is full of trying to cram in as many last minute things as possible, and then finals week is pretty self-explanatory.
And on top of that, I also have to figure out how to deal with Logan & Tom leaving. That’s going to be hard.

Palin’s Alaska

The pitch and timbre of her voice, the rhythms of her speech, her syntax, and the way she coats acid and incoherence with cheery musical inflections join together in a sickening synergy that distresses the listener, triggering a fight-or-flight reaction. When Palin talks, my whole being wails, like Nancy Kerrigan after Tonya Harding’s ex-husband kneecapped her: “Why? Why? Why?”

Read more here

“If she has her finger on the pulse of fashion, fashion is a corpse.”

I’m sure most of you don’t give a crap about Project Runway, but it draws me in. I’m a mediocre reality television junky. As opposed to, you know, shitty reality television: Jersey Shore? No thank you, I’ll take America’s Next Top Model & Project Runway instead.
Last night’s finale? Disgusting. First of all, how does it take you a whole hour of a 2 hour show to get to the runway? Ugh.
And the winner? Don’t even get me started. This comment, posted on some blog somewhere, is currently making its rounds, because it is so accurate:
“Nina: While you put Gretchen in Marie Claire, Anna Wintour will have Mondo in Vogue.”

Accentuate

This time of the semester is always hard, but I feel like “this time of the semester” has come much, much earlier than it normally does. I am tired. The workload is finally starting to pick up, and at the exact same time I have decided that I don’t care about any of it. It just all feels very pointless in so many ways. Getting a piano performance degree is difficult when you aren’t planning on being a performer. For a while, at least I was thinking about staying in piano; now I don’t know what I want to do, but I think that if it does involve piano, it will be as a teacher. It makes it really difficult to care about memorizing all the keys of all the Bach keyboard works (or, at least, all of those in the partitas, french suites, english suites, the toccatas, & the inventions/sinfonias) and all of the minutia of academia. Maybe it’s just really bad senioritis, or maybe I am just so excited by where I will be in a year (that is, married to the love of my life) that I just want to jump straight ahead to then, but whatever it is, it’s making me really hard for me to care about school.
At the same time, I don’t know what in the world I want to do after graduation, so while on one hand I want really badly to get out of here, on the other hand I am incredibly frightened of what happens after I do. If nothing else, I teach 25 kids at the studio and get a part time job for a year until we move out of Lawrence. In an ideal world, Ryan gets an incredibly fantastically high paying job so I can just be a housewife. Who doesn’t want to just hang out at home, keeping things clean & cooking in a really cute apron & heels? Sounds pretty much perfect to me.

Fiance/e

It is officially on the internet: Ryan and I are engaged! We actually have been for a couple months, but we’ve been slow about telling the people that we truly love & didn’t want them all to find out online.

So here is some information!

• We are getting married July 31, 2011
• At The Eldridge Hotel
• My ring is absolutely beyond gorgeous
• I asked my bridal party this week; I have 4 lovely ladies to stand up with me
• I think I have decided what I want the bridesmaids dresses to be

We want to do our engagement photos in the next couple weeks. We have a tasting to do in the next few months, and once it’s December-ish we can start making appointments to do some cake tastings. It’s all so incredibly exciting!

Meta-tastic

I love recursive things.

“The World’s Smallest Version of the World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things.”

Base not-10

I am doing math problems for the first time in almost 5 years. It is surprisingly difficult to subtract when it’s not in base-10. It is so so so so counterintuitive to say that 12-6=4 (in base 8). It’s very strange, but it’s sort of fun. I like how logical (lower-level) math is.

Negative Nancy

A few things that make me very upset:

• alarm clocks
• people who drive 10mph under the speed limit
• trying to get 15 students’ schedules to all line up
• forgetting my headphones at home
• watching a light count down to change 3 times without it ever changing

Happiness is…

Relaxing in the pool on a sunny summer day; throwback Mountain Dew; an afternoon on Mass Street accompanied by fantastic conversation; mornings in bed under the blankets with a good book; texts full of love and laughter; sparkly things; looking forward to the rest of my life.