Hahahahahha

Ooops. Got of schedule again... so I'm going to do a really quick summary of things to get back on track.

1) Finished reading The Enchantress of Florence last week. It was delightful to read solely in terms of language, but I take issue with some significant anti-feminist elements of the story... I intend to write a short essay on this sometime very soon. But we all know how well I actually do the things I intend to do, so... we'll see.

2) Started reading Atlas Shrugged; I'm now 125 pages in and... wow, I thought Rushdie was antifeminist. Otherwise, I'm still really confused about the book's philosophy. I've read about objectivism and I feel like I know what Ayn Rand thinks, but... to me it doesn't really seem to be advocating any particular viewpoint at all - except that indifference is plaguing the modern world and, like, destroying EVERYTHING. More forthcoming on this as well.

3) In order to better facilitate drabble-writing, I started a scraps file in notepad so that I'm not looking at a blank page every time I try to write anything. Writer's block has not wholly been defeated, but it is slightly mitigated. It's something. I'm stuck on this one image and I'm trying to figure out how to make a whole decent story out of it. I'll get there.

4) This has absolutely nothing at all to do with knitting, but it is creativity and therefore is marginally pertinent: I've sewn my first throw pillow with piping! I put in for 15 yards of saree fabric (in three patterns of five yards each) on ebay, and I won, and I paid, and according to the seller in India, they've shipped... and it's been ten days. Four more and I'm filing a complaint. This is getting absurd... I'm trying to start an Etsy shop here! No, really, apparently there's a large market for throw pillow covers, and I like sewing and I spend a lot of time watching TV - I figure I can at least try and capitalize on that a little bit. My camera battery's low so it's taking really crap pictures indoors right now, all grainy and stuff, so I'm not going to post one of the pillow just this second - but it's beautiful and you have to look really closely to see where I messed up, and I'm really proud of it. So take my word for it. You have to. It's my blog.

5) Speaking of pictures, I'm putting up four SPTs to cover from... I guess February 16th was the last time I posted? Oh well. See below the cut. I'll take one tomorrow for this week. (Hint: most of the SPTs are actually taken on the weekend.)

6) Music rerating is going well. I took a cue from my dad and decided to play my whole library in reverse alphabetical order, from $$$$ to A.O.K. This helps songs stand out a bit more since I'm ripping them out of the context of their albums, but has the major drawback in that I sometimes hear up to four versions of the same song in a row. (I'm lookin' at you, 405.) The one thing I can tell you I've discovered is that I really don't care at all about 98% of the Smashing Pumpkins' discography. Don't ask why I have it, I won't for very much longer.

7) Speaking of music, I have a couple new artists that I like that I plan on reviewing shortly. Preview: Yeasayer; Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros; and MGMT. Yeah, I know I'm late to the party on that last one, but I was purposefully avoiding them because of all the hype and I feel it's now sufficiently passed that it's once again uncool (and therefore legitimate) to listen and be into them.

8) Speaking of MGMT, I updated my resume this week to start preparing for a northward move. This has nothing to do whatsoever with my goal list, but moving to New York has been my number one goal since before graduation, so it merits an update.

9) Daily Show! April 5th, 2010 - Chelsea and I were the first to show up at 1:15, but the third, fourth, and fifth people arrived within the next twenty minutes - so I feel it was completely justified. Um, yeah... they start don't even set up the lines until 2:30, and they don't open the doors till after 4, seat you till after 5, or start filming until 6. But SO WORTH IT. Picture proof below the cut.

10) Ten is a lot. I'm done for tonight. To the pictures!

March 11, 2010 - Absolutely nothing remarkable about this. It is already well-documented that I'm infatuated with my Christmas lights and amateurishly adjusting the aperture settings on my camera.

March 18, 2010 - Yeah, nothing exciting here, either. I... I bought this shirt while Ali was visiting that week? ...Woo.

April 1, 2010 - On the first night of my trip, my friend Katy happened to be in town as well from Chicago, and our friend Mollie was about to be going out of town on Spring Break, so we threw a party. This picture was probably taken shortly after midnight... because I had woken up at 5:30 that morning to catch my flight. Yeah, I was in New York by lunch time. I RULE. Things I missed while passed out: chat roulette, Mollie's ever-entertaining rendition of Soulja Boy, and a 1:30am run to Best Buy. Yeah. That tired.

April 8 - So, basically, the Kate Spade store down in Soho was doing this window display with pinwheels, and since many of them were within reach of street level, and the pinwheels were on the exterior of the windows instead of the interior, people had swiped them - which was probably what they were supposed to do anyway. So Chelsea wanted one, and I wanted to steal one, so I climbed up on the ledge and tried to push it up out of its holder inconspicuously. Surprisingly, they didn't just pop out, they literally had to be lifted up and out, and in this shot, you can sort of see that I've got the green one up to the very bottom of the stick... I couldn't reach any higher while sitting. Clearly, this was hilarious, and Chelsea took my picture. Shortly thereafter, I just stood up and pulled it out, and we lived happily ever after with our lime green pinwheel yay.

And now, the moment you've all been waiting for...

FIRST IN LINE!

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I'm gonna do my best swan dive...

The following is untitled and will likely permanently remain unfinished. But it's something I wrote a while ago and I'm trying to be courageous and less of a perfectionist, and that means posting something imperfect and letting it just... be. It's a start.

---

So, anyways, that’s all that’s going on here. Miss you, come home soon, write often, all that.

Really, though.
Love,
Me

Elena dabbed at the drop of water bleeding the “M” in “Miss you” into a fuzzy, inky snowball, salvaging the “iss” and the sentiment of her sentence. Before folding up the sheet, she surveyed the letter and its strange geography of similarly blotted characters and entire words interrupted by a sudden upstroke, like an EKG, or a seismograph, detecting strong beats. She considered that if she were sending this to anyone else, she would have been too ashamed and rewritten the entire thing. Her big sister, though, was the one who had always stayed up with her at night when the thunderstorms rolled onshore, telling her stories to distract her from the sharp cracks that still made her jump. She would understand. Elena giggled, figuring her sister would even appreciate the gesture of sending along the evidence of the storm. She slid the letter into its equally rain-spotted envelope, licked and sealed it shut, and glanced up at the clouds as she scrambled, barefoot, down the porch steps and across the lawn to the mailbox.
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So glad I'm not one of those people who made a goal about posting frequency...

So as it turns out, the business of living my life has actually gotten to the point of interfering with my ability to write about said life. Oops. Here's a quick run-down of the last I-don't-know-how-many-weeks.

• Swingset #5 (picture unavailable) - Ponce Inlet lighthouse playground. Swung late at night, and this set is literally right underneath the lighthouse. There's a large oak(?) tree that was filtering the lights overhead (the lens is fractured, and there are two or three strong beams and four or five thinner ones on each rotation) and it was sort of magical except for the strong odor of fish coming in off the docks across the street.



• I started knitting a yellow cardigan (loosely pictured here) while out at the bar with my friends. I have to date completed the back panel, three quarters of one front panel, and have about seven inches or so (of more than 24) on the second front panel. After that, there will just be the arms and the two buttons/collar strips to complete the front, and sewing it all together. Monday will be the end of the third week I've been working on it, so it should hopefully be done by New Year's. I say hopefully both because Florida's cold season is very very short, and because I promised each of the bartenders who initially made fun of me that I'd knit them something, too - fingerless gloves for Pete and a knit replica of his work t-shirt for Jake, complete with the bar's logo on the front and 'CURRENTLY WORKING OFF MY BAR TAB' on the back.



• Knitting is fun, but it isn't actually progress on goal 40. Luckily, I purchased fabric and a pattern to sew a strapless dress, and it really shouldn't take too long to complete once I actually sit down and get to it. Of course, a dress isn't a whole outfit; I am thinking that if I get really ambitious, I might make a lightweight black trench jacket to go with it. My friend Katelyn insists that I also make the, um, unmentionables to be worn with this outfit... this is already a multi-stage project, so why not?



• As a sort of combo step towards achieving both goals 67 and 79, I did in fact purchase a watercolor journal, paints, and brushes. I won't really say any more about it, other than this: "snails."



• There's an SPT of me in a moose hat, an SPT of me trapped on my camera, and 13904810 SPTs from last night of me acting with a questionable amount of class at a semiformal event. These pictures will hopefully be posted shortly.



• Writing is slow and not actually going where I initially thought, but I am making an effort to at least think about it everyday, if not actually putting words together into real sentences. I just feel like I'm not being very... artful, as though four years of essay and technical writing ruined my imagination. But that's what all this practice is for, right? Right.
  
  On the non-fiction front, I am thinking about writing an alternative history book (a la Lies My History Teacher Told Me) aimed at kids. Or, to be more precise, writing a history book whose primary purpose is not the indoctrination of American children into a brouhaha of blind national pride or Eurocentric elitism. As Joel Stein put it, I love America, like an adult loves another adult - I see her flaws and I desperately want to help her overcome them. I believe in being honest about those flaws, not trying to hide them.
  
  This may or may not be inspired by the fact that my little sister and another girl I met separately who happened to be in her high school class don't know who Nelson Mandela is. Worse, they can't even comprehend why that might be a problem.



• Article reading is still going along nicely, although now that I have paper copies of two of the three magazines, posting links and blurbs seems more trouble than it's worth. Now that I'm, uh, caught up, if there's a particularly interesting thing, I will post about it. Swear. No more batch posts, because that's what seems to be slowing me down. If I like it, I'll post it. End of story.



• Book reading is going okay, too, but I keep getting sidetracked by new books and going out and knitting and... well... I haven't actually finished a book in over a month. I'm about halfway through three, and started two others, if that makes any difference. I really want to finish the Terry Prachett book I'm in the middle of, The Wyrd Sisters, before Christmas. New mini-goal. Woot.

Can't really think of anything else I was in the middle of... Free Rice has sort of faded back into obscurity, it's the wrong season for Walks for the Cure, and Rosetta Stone is still on hold. Oh! I did get an email from Donors Choose, with a follow-up thank you letter and pictures from the teacher of the class I donated the Scholastic Weeklies to a couple months ago. Second graders are ADORABLE and curious and their teacher says they were ecstatic to learn that the magazines are theirs to keep and take home. I'm so glad that they have a new outlet for that inquisitive energy, and hopefully it will inspire them keep researching things they're interested in outside of the classroom. So anyway, that's that. Pictures soon. Articles in the next week, as they become interesting. And, maybe possibly soon I'll finally get the confidence to post my two-month-old drabble.
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ENID: It’s probably the slang.

Still busy busy busy. Last weekend I swung swingset #4, a picture of which should hopefully be uploaded shortly. So too will last week's SPT, after my friend whose camera such a picture should be on uploads them to Facebook. The past two weeks, my drabble has turned into the inkling of a Something, and it's up to about 400 words now. (That doesn't sound too impressive, but keep in mind that a drabble is only supposed to be 100 words and an attempt at a semi-self-contained short story to keep your creative juices going.) It's using the same character as the last Oversized Serious drabble I wrote over a month ago, which I will post tomorrow or Friday, and then after a suitable period of introspective judgment, I'll post this current one, too.

I also began knitting a grocery bag, although I have three sweater patterns that I really want to get to work on. I just needed something a bit more simple to get back into it. I unfortunately did not buy a watercolor journal last week as I said I was going to, because Michael's ended up being on a different (and much further away) street than I thought and I was in a rush to meet a friend for his going away party. I could have bought it by now at Walmart, but I'd prefer not to feed the giant - and, it turns out, there's one even closer than where I was going to go that is legitimately local, Southern Paint and Supply. They supply Actual! watercolor tubes, so I can use something other than a dinky little Crayola tray. Not that I'm knocking my mad elementary school art skillz or anything, but... yeah. I want rich colors, ergo, real paint.

In terms of wine connoisseurship, yesterday I got a call from my mom asking me which I'd prefer to drink with Thanksgiving dinner. When I replied, "Oh, um, well, like, pinot grigio, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon. I can bring my own," she asked, "What brand is that?" Long story short, I popped a quarter mile down the road to the grocery store to help her find something to drink that isn't white zinfandel or blackberry Manischewitz. We got a pinot noir and a beaujolais, and I also picked up two bottles of Spanish wine I had over the weekend for my own nefarious purposes. Mission successful. Sorta.

That's about it. I forgot to keep all the links for articles last week, so below are the four I found most memorable.

"Lunch with M." is purportedly the first-ever meeting between a journalist and a Michelin restaurant "inspector." It really isn't an interview, because the inspector cannot divulge any identifying details - even her parents aren't supposed to know her real occupation, lest they boast to their friends; the New Yorker reporter just sits down with the head of the Michelin guides and a woman who would just like to be called "M." For all that he's not allowed to tell us about their conversation, it is a surprisingly comprehensive exposé of the Michelin organization as a whole and the incredible shroud Kevlar vest of secrecy they've built up to protect it.

As we all know, the shuttle fleet is retiring next year and the new Orion capsules aren't due to come online until the middle of the next decade. At least. "Is this the end for human space flight?" Inquiring minds want to know, so the science editor of The Daily Mail (seriously?) and a science journalist in residence at some college in Canada argue about it. The former says, yes, we're done with space, because no president will take the Kennedyesque step of committing resources to something that may or may not pan out three administrations down the road. The latter says, no-well-maybe; humans are creatures of conquering exploring and inquiring stock, and we really really WANT to see what's out in space. All I have to say about it is this.

"Four ways to feed the world" provides NS readers with a very simple plan for feeding the extra 3 billion or so people who will be on the Earth in the next 15 years, in addition to the 17% of those already here who are chronically starving. It's simple, really; grow more high-yielding crops on the same amount of farmland with less water, and build more roads to move the harvest around. Genius. Why has no one thought of this before??? This is the sort of quality reporting that drew me to NS in the first place.

I don't even know what this is but the best way I can think to describe it is "forcibly stripping the porn out of the porno script" (pun fully intended). It made me giggle, anyway, if mostly in a WTF-am-I-reading way.
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Sicko.

It's been a long, hard week. I've had trouble sleeping, I've gotten a sore throat, I've gotten a non-fever fever, and a cough of painfully epic proportions. I didn't go to work until noon on Tuesday, and I left at 1:30 on Friday. I have been on the couch or in bed almost all of the rest of the time. Blah.

I did do SPT, and make a little progress on various goals, and I will be posting links to and short blurbs about the articles I've been reading below. I cut because I care :)


First, the picture:

This was taken outside my office building after work, and that redness about the face is the fever. It's definitely not the best picture out there of me, but it's probably not the worst, either.

Next, I checked out the next two Discworld novels from the library when I went to stock up on sicky TV to watch (Stargate SG-1 from the beginning and The Duchess, for those interested in such trivial details). I plan to finish Sourcery tomorrow and get started on Wyrd Sisters shortly thereafter. I want to keep a steady stream of these coming in; they're good bedtime stories.

I've written another Drabble that I'm not yet ready to share. Maybe tomorrow. We'll see.

Adaptation is going slowly, but steadily. Well, more slowly than steadily, to be honest, but I'm blaming the sick. Very soon I'm going to stop blaming, I swear, but I've been making very solid notes and cross-referencing and getting some ideas together about the best way to tell this very long and convoluted story.

I obviously haven't ridden the bike to work this week, since I don't want to go into cardiac arrest from lack of oxygen or anything. But, I did find the handweight that I'd stashed in my room a while back to use while I watch TV, and I started stretching a little bit and doing leg lifts and crunches more regularly. I haven't explicitly tried to do a split since the gym in Portland, but I'm sure I'll actually get to that fairly soon.

I scheduled the Foreign Service Officer Test! It's on Wednesday, October 7th, and I have to drive to Orlando for it but that's okay. Within three weeks of the test, I'll get scores back and find out if I've been invited to write the five "personal narratives" about my life experiences that I feel qualify me to do the work of the State Department. I believe that about three weeks after that, I will find out if I've been invited for an interview, which they call an All Day Oral Assessment. Intimidating, I know. If they decide they like me after that, between two and twenty-four months later I will be offered a position. So. That's the process in a nutshell. Please, please continue to keep your fingers crossed for me!

And, finally, the articles. You'd think that with all this downtime, I'd have done almost nothing else, but my sick is the sick of ache and muscle exhaustion. Half the time I've been watching TV, my computer has been closed. Closed. That is so incredibly weird for me, because usually TV is in no way stimulating enough to occupy my full attention. Anyway, the last two weeks' worth of articles that I have read are:

• "Kennedycare" is a really excellent summary of Ted Kennedy's decades-long fight for better health care and coverage for Americans, Reagan and Nixon's creation of the "socialist Trojan horse" defense, and how all of this history is affecting Obama and how the best legacy he (and Kennedy) can leave is to "shift the trajectory of American politics."



• "The Rubber Room" was another excellently informative article, though this one is about something I'm sure very few of us are aware of: the hundreds of teachers employed by the New York City Schools who are paid for years to sit in these holding tanks called "Rubber Rooms" because they've been accused of misconduct or incompetency in the classroom. The reason the city is forced to continue paying their salaries (including full benefits and pension contributions) is the contract with the Teachers Union - it mandates arbitration to resolve these charges, and it can take years for a particular teacher's turn to come because the hearings for one person can go on for months. The article is fairly long because it details three of these cases, but I really recommend you read it, especially if you're a New Yorker yourself.



• "The Fountain House"I'm reading three articles a week in The New Yorker. You knew one of them was going to be fiction. It had to happen. I can't really say anything about this story that won't give part of it away, but it was just really sweet and it made me smile to read it.



• "The Vote that Changed Japan" is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: a description of the recent election that saw the first solid defeat of the party that had controlled the country since the 60s and what that means for the country's future. If you have no idea what I just said, that's all the more reason for you to check this one out.



• "Pain-free animals?" will tell you everything you need to know about the next possible breakthrough in food production: animals genetically engineered to not feel pain, as such, so that killing them for food will be more humane. This article did more than Fastfood Nation could to make me seriously contemplate the ethics of my carnivorism. In the end, though, I reached the same conclusion I always do: chic-ken gooooood.



• "The Shrinking Archipelago" will remind you about the disproportionately devastating effects global weirding (bonus link yay!) has on developing nations. In the case of Indonesia, climate change will not only cause hundreds of smaller islands to be completely submerged in the next half-century; Indonesia is one of the leaders in deforestation (along with Brazil) because of Western demand for palm oil and other cash crops that Indonesians are increasingly opting to grow.



• "HIV's Weak Spot" summarizes the findings of a new study which shows that the HIV virus literally has a weak spot in its structure - a place where antibodies may actually be able to attach if they're taught to look for it, ie, through vaccination. Read, learn, love.



• After reading the previous article, I felt a little behind on the history of the search for an HIV vaccine. Luckily, New Scientist provided a convenient link in the last paragraph of that article, so if you're a clickaholic like me and have already read it, you can skip this one. If not, "Fears over HIV vaccines laid to rest" will tell you briefly about previous efforts to create a vaccine for HIV, why those efforts failed, and why the mere existence of an HIV vaccine was maligned!



• Finally, "Strife in Yemen" is a short piece about latest mid-East hotspot and the civil war currently being waged between the government and a wealthy tribal family and their supporters. Apparently Yemenis really miss monarchy.

For those keeping score, that works out to two in The Economist (first subscription issue should be arriving next week!), three in New Scientist (plus one science article in the Guardian about Alzheimer's and one in the NYT about the food industry battling the health care bill), and four in The New Yorker (subscription starting next week). Behind, yes. But these articles were a great start and I'm really excited to start reading the magazines all the way through. Next week, I hope to have this goal more complete by Friday, so it doesn't get folded into the Weekly Update again.

So that's where I stand right now. I'm still working on cleaning up my room and going through my boxed stuff, but mostly I'm just tired ALL THE TIME. Like now. So I'm going to bed. Goodnight!

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Her name is Bea Arthur.

As of today, I officially have nine goals in progress, but this is a lot harder than I thought it would be, what with all the working full time and the moving in and also, sometimes inertia is just inertia.

What has happened since the last weekly update:

• I got a car! It's an '03 Honda Civic EX with sunroof and power everything and I have named her Bea Arthur. Why, you ask? It's fairly simple. We're in Florida, the car is in her golden years, and, of course, she has silver hair paint. We've been together, oh, about a week, now, and we're very happy. I think we're going to be together for a looooong time :)



• I worked a 41 hour work week for the very first time! It's almost like I'm something vaguely resembling a real adult! Almost. Nothing very exciting to report about the office. It's an office, I file, enter data, and fill out forms and generally just learn things about pensions and 401(k)s and that - get this - they are different things. I'm getting paid; hooray.



• I started "training" for my ten minute real-world mile by riding my bike to work on Tuesday (and home on Friday - rain). It's not, you know, hugely excellent training, but it's a start. Hopefully once "autumn" sets in properly and it stops raining every afternoon, this will be a more regular thing and I'll be able to start jogging at night. I definitely want to head over to the middle school nearby and time myself on the track to set a baseline, so I know just how out of shape I am now and precisely how difficult it will be to get down to a ten minute mile. Let me remind you that I can already do this on a treadmill, but the actual physical forward movement of running in the real world makes me lose my breath and get a stitch in my side much more quickly. I hope to do this in the next few weeks, weather-permitting; I'll next update on this once I do get the baseline time.



• I wrote my first fiction drabble two nights ago but I don't think I'm going to post it. I don't think I'm there yet. It feels a little too melodramatic and I'm not completely sure it satisfies the "quality" aspect of that particular goal, but it's only the first week and I haven't done this in a while. I'm sparing you, I promise.



• I was a little sloppy on my article reading goal. I got three done in The New Yorker and two in the Economist (which I also put in a subscription for (signing bonus woo!)), but didn't, um, make it around to the New Scientist at all. Tomorrow I will finish the reading and post all the links and (a short) reaction to each article. Also of note: I plan on getting a subscription to the New Yorker, too, as soon as I get my first paycheck. It's only $70 for two years! I didn't realize it was so cheap! I will definitely read more as soon as I have the actual magazines, and I'm very much looking forward to that.



• Ashamed as I am to admit it, I was also sloppy on starting up Tennessee Williams, Salman Rushdie, and (I feel the worst about this one) the screenplay. With the books, it's partially because I realized around Tuesday or Wednesday that the books were still packed and I really have a lot more to clean up in my room before I get to unloading those six or seven boxes. With the screenplay, though, it's all me and my. Laziness. There, I said it. I have the post-its out, ready to color-code, ready to coordinate with a OneNote Notebook on my computer. I told myself I was waiting until I had the right mechanical pencils on hand, so I could make notes in the book itself, but I bought those on Thursday and still haven't done anything more than think about beginning to read. I honestly can't understand what happened. I was, and am, so excited at the prospect of this undertaking. Maybe that's the problem - I like the idea of starting remaining on the horizon.
  
  Well. No more. I'm running out of excuses (i.e., things to watch on On Demand that aren't Apocalypse Now, by the way) and tomorrow I have An Agenda. I am going to lunch at noonish with an old friend, and when I get home, I am doing a LOT of laundry, and while I am doing laundry, I am going to keep the TV off and the classical/soundtrack music on and start in on this book. I am going to tackle it head on and I am pretty sure that after it gets rolling, the other half of that law of motion (the part about when objects are in motion) will kick right in and it won't seem quite so possibly impossible anymore.



• Attentive readers may have noticed that in the previous post, Sundries - Part 3, one goal had been moved into the "In Progress" category: number 90, Intentionally go out in the pouring rain and soak through. Seems a bit of a one-time thing, doesn't it? Either you've stood out and soaked or you haven't. Not so. Twice in the last two days (that is, last night and this morning) it sounded, in the house, like it was a torrential downpour outside. This morning, it was actually loud enough that it woke me up, and I checked out the window before changing into rain-appropriate attire (that is, not my velvet pajama pants) to ensure that this time, it really was a good solid rain. Literally by the time I was out the door, it still sounded slightly ferocious, kind of like a lion cub on the verge of lion puberty trying out an intimidating roar, and by the time I was across the yard and into the street, the rain felt nice, but I could tell it was definitely not of the "soak through" sort. By the time I was back inside, changing back into my cozy pjs, the rain had slowed to a trickle. The real measure? My shirt was completely dry within five minutes.
  
  Therefore, goal number 90 is in progress because I continue to be vigilant in my search for a proper hard rain and. Seriously. The next time there is one, rain-appropriate attire be damned. I will own that rain, even if it means I have to be ridiculously uncomfortable doing it.
  
  Probably.



• I hit submit. I sort of have a phobia about that, finalizing things that I sometimes don't have complete control over: airplane reservations online, intrawebal submissions of papers, and hitting "send" on just about anything that isn't a casual email. I have a tremendous fear about not being able to take things back. One day I might tell you about the realization of this fear in a funny little story I like to call "Half an hour of tears and screeching with the Virgin Atlantic call center in India." Yeah. It's a good one.
  
  So, what did I submit? The registration packet for the Foreign Service Officer Test. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the entire application, though it did ask for basic resume stuff. I feel like the real application should have essay questions about why I want to be a part of the Foreign Service. I should probably work on preparing those answers, anyway. Yeah. Anyway. The test window is sometime in October, so I should be receiving my invitation to register for a seat sometime in the next week. I'm hoping. Fingers crossed. You should, too.



• Finally, Selfportrait Thursday, goal 37, is underway. You can see it three posts back from here; I will not be mentioning that I have done SPT again in the weekly update unless I'm feeling particularly down about my goal progress that week. It'll sort of be our secret code; you'll know I'm really mad at myself for not getting anything done because I'll bring it up. Know that I am chastising myself quite enough even now, for this grave, underperforming transgression.

So, there it is, the week in review. Now that all the goal detail posts are done, I won't have them as an excuse to delay doing actual goal-related activities, and the posts in the coming week will be far more substantive. I'm going to really get started, I swear!
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Creativity Goals

1. Participate in NaNoWriMo.
8. Plant things. Make them grow and stuff.
9. Learn to properly knit a human-sized sweater.
18. Write at least one quality drabble weekly.
20. Learn at least thirty ethnic food recipes. Prepare each satisfactorily.
22. Learn to play June on the West Coast on guitar.
25. Adapt a favorite novel into a screenplay.
35. Participate in the 24 pictures/24 hours at least 3 times.
36. Reupholster something successfully.
37. Selfportrait Thursday.
40. Create an entire outfit by hand.
50. Sell baked goods at a farmer's market.
66. Collect 101 new characters.
67. Fill a watercolor journal.
79. Write a children's story and find someone to illustrate it.
83. Handmake and send 10 no-occasion cards to friends and family.
97. Make a baby onesie out of a Stewart/Colbert '08 shirt.

Details

1. Participate in NaNoWriMo

My reason for wanting to do NaNoWriMo is simple: ever since I learned of it six (seven? eight?) years ago, I've never been able to work up the nerve to actually do it.

One of my major problems when it comes to writing fiction is that I get so paralyzed that I'm going to do a bad job that I don't even start. The point of NaNoWriMo is not to produce the next great American novel (or that of whatever nationality/ethnicity you may be). It is to produce, plain and simple. The point is to spit words out.

I don't anticipate being able to participate in NaNoWriMo 2009, for the simple fact that I'll be too wrapped up in adapting a screenplay at the time. But I hope that by November 2010 I'll finally be able to join in contribute my word vomit to the pile. I'll go sci-fi/fantasy on this if I need to.

8. Plant things. Make them grow and stuff.

Another rather self-explanatory goal; I've always thought it would be neat to have a proper garden instead of an aging bamboo plant on my bathroom windowsill. The closest I've yet come is the plant I (with a lot of help from my grandmother, I'll be the first to admit) kept alive in the dorms all through college (except for junior year when I wasn't there; see above).

This summer, I witnessed the amazing effect a city-wide effort to plant beautiful and useful flora can have on a population. Portland is full of roses, sure, but many, many people grows herbs and spices themselves, and almost as many have at least tried to cultivate their own fruits and veggies with varying degrees of success. I want to be a part of that, even if it isn't in Portland.

I foresee this goal being somewhat difficult to quantify as finished, owing to the fact that I may be moving around a lot, at least in the next year. Therefore, if I cannot obtain a personal gardening space, if I will consider this completed if I participate in every stage of a community gardening effort, from tilling to harvest. And if I can sneak a few jasmine plants in, all the better :)

9. Learn to properly knit a human-sized sweater.

Since learning to knit in high school, I have produced yards and yards of scarves. I am an excellent knitter - of straight lines. My non-scarf projects to date have included:

• Winter cap - Begun on five double-pointed bamboo needles; abandoned shortly after it came time to begin decreasing stitches to finish.


• Patterned Scarf - I wasn't really sure what I was thinking when I began this project, adapted from an afghan pattern, except that I was really excited to try my first Complicated Lace Pattern. I only had four skeins of dollar store baby-soft yarn, but by God, I was going to get somewhere with it, two feet wide or not. It turns out that I really don't understand certain stitch notations, as I began to add stitches when I mistakenly thought that I had inadvertently been decreasing by - get this - not understanding certain stitch notations. Turns out I've been knitting by luck this whole time, I guess. Anyways, this semi-cape-like object has become a very useful winter blanket for one of my stuffed animals. There are pictures; it is adorable.


• Bear Sweater - What originally started as another attempt to knit with circular needles and following (though reducing) a pattern ended up being me devising my own pattern for straight needles. It's a hoodie, and right now I have 90% of the pieces knitted. I'll let you know how it turns out after I get someone to teach me to knit itty-bitty in-the-round (anyone know how to do glove fingers?) for the sleeves.

So, as you can see, my knitting history has been a somewhat sordid one. Essentially, this goal is the culmination of two knitting mini-goals: to be able to knit to a pattern, and to be able to knit in the round. As such, I will occasionally be making posts related to this goal in those veins - I imagine I'll probably try knitting a sort of hobo-bag on big rounds, and give another straight pattern a go before I attempt The Latvian Sweater, or, as I call it, The Mother of All Knitting Projects. It's going to be intense. There will be pictures; you may feel free to point and laugh at any time.

18. Write at least one quality drabble weekly.

This goal is fairly straightforward as well: once a week, to keep my creative juices flowing, I will write at least 100 words in response to one of the many, many prompts I see on my dreamwidth journal. All drabbles will be cross-posted here and tagged both "Creativity" and "Drabble" - I figure that since there are going to be (if all goes well) 156 of them, they deserve to have their own tag. In order to be lenient with myself, in case I forget, or am busy traveling, once a month I may take a week off, though the next week I must make up the missed drabble as well as complete the current one.

20. Learn at least thirty ethnic food recipes. Prepare each satisfactorily.

Exactly what it sounds like. Americanized versions of anything will not count - screw you, lasagna, I already know how to make you, anyway. First up on the list is Beef Rendang, followed by Bengali Payesh (the only rice pudding I've ever liked!), followed by... who knows what. Suggestions are welcome in the comment thread. Obviously, each stage of progress for this goal will be tagged both with "Creativity" and "Adventures in Cookery," a tag which will also come into play for goals #50, 53, and 63 (Sell baked goods at a farmer's market, and learn about wine and cheese).

22. Learn to play June on the West Coast on guitar.

This is one of my all-time favorite Bright Eyes songs, which I "tried" to learn to play in high school. No more fooling around. It's a four(ish?) chord song and I WILL learn how to play it. While this is primarily a creativity goal, any posts relating to its progress will also receive a "Music" tag, for obvious reasons.

25. Adapt a favorite novel into a screenplay.

As I said above, this is my One Big First Project of this entire mission. This is a goal I am extremely excited about tackling, especially because it will force me to reverse my standard style of writing. I'm a narration girl at heart, and a screenplay will (duh) necessarily force me to shift the focus to dialogue to convey the story. Because I think that in 95% of movies it is a cop-out, I will not be using voice-over in this effort. Seriously. That's cheating. I won't say any more on this right now, because I anticipate that the bulk of my posts for the next few months will be about my progress on this goal, and more detailed reflections on the reasons for it and How I am Growing as a Writer and all that. Its secondary tag will be "Adaptation." With the period.

35. Participate in the 24 pictures/24 hours thing at least 3 times.

On days 93, 307, and 986 (Nov. 29, 2009, July 1, 2010, and May 10, 2012) of the mission, I will take one picture of myself/my surroundings/my actions/my whatever to illustrate Where I Am In Life. I think it's like doing a 24 hour comic, but with less effort and a lot less pressure to be funny. For those who are into that sort of thing, it may have started here, but unless you can read Swedish, it probably won't be very useful for you to click that. Anyway. I will post these when I do them.... Probably sometime the days after, because I will be AWAKE FOR 24 HOURS (although I suppose power-napping in between hours is allowed). They will be tagged "Creativity" as well as "pix or it didn't happen." I'm betting that will still be funny in three years. But not money.

36. Reupholster something successfully.

This goal is very near and dear to me for two reasons. First, I began a reupholstering project last fall and was heavily discouraged from getting beyond the first seat cushion due to insinuations that I would not actually be able to keep the couch I was so lovingly restoring. I have about 10 yards of very good quality, very pretty, sage-striped fabric left, and I'm aching to not let that money go to waste.

Secondly, when I was very young, my family had one of those floral living room sets. Very comfy seating, very dated fabric. My mom has had them slip-covered for years. Luckily, last year or so, our dog sort of tore open the back cushion of the armchair, which was, by all accounts, my chair from about the age of two and a half upwards. Memories. So, since I'm moving home, and I have all this fabric, and my favorite piece of childhood furniture is in desperate need of some attention, everything is coming together like Stillwater and Sabbath. It's all happening!

37. Selfportrait Thursday

If you haven't heard of this, the best and most well-known example is here. Except that he did it everyday. For six years. And I'm going to smile. These posts will also receive the "pix" tag in addition to, like every other goal on this page, "Creativity."

40. Create an entire outfit by hand.

Again with the sewing, I know. I've always been fascinated by the pattern books at the fabric stores, though, and I feel like I'm pretty handy with pins and lining things up and my sewing machine, so I'm looking forward to this one. It will probably happen a bit later on, because I want to do the reupholstering while I'm still at home. There are only two more things to add about this goal right now: Halloween costumes do not count, and this goal and #51, Make a real green dress, cannot be combined.

50. Sell baked goods at a farmer's market.

I like to bake. From scratch. I like to tweak recipes. I especially like to add peanut butter or Nutella whenever possible. I think I'm pretty good at it. Other people sell things at farmer's markets; other bakers have gained their local following at them and earned enough to open a proper shop for their delicious baked wares. I have no such ambitions at this time, but this is definitely something I would like to try at least once. After I do a bit more research and find out about any licenses or fees or anything I might need, I might decide to do this for a while. We'll see where it goes. It is definitely NOT going to go off the list, and any updates will be under both the standard "Creativity" tag as well as "Adventures in Cookery." Without a period.

66. Collect 101 new characters.

This might sound a little odd, but I swear it isn't anything serial-killery. As almost everyone in the universe knows, people-watching is an excellent pastime. If you have your computer or a notepad with you, it's even better. And remember, kids, it doesn't count as stalking if they're talking loud enough for everyone to hear ;) These posts will have an additional tag of "Characters," and the first two will be posted shortly.

67. Fill a watercolor journal.

I am atrocious at the visual arts. I can't draw anything but abstract models for clothing, architectural perspective pencil drawings with a ruler, and... well, no, those two are pretty much it. I can't even draw a circle without erasing at least half of it first and my smiley faces have never been as bouncy and happy-looking as the other girls'. But in high school art class, I really loved doing watercolors, and a wash is pretty easy. I want to work my way up into loose watercolor landscapes (think Lilo and Stitch) and a representation of The Galaxy. Every ten pages I will post scans of what I've done, tagged "Art Journal." Please note that if the mood overtakes me to use some medium other than watercolor, I will be most pleased at this willingness to experiment and take full advantage of it. You have been warned.

79. Write a children's story and find someone to illustrate it.

Every once in a while, I get an idea for a modern children's book, but I never actually sit down and do anything about it. Since all my attention as a writer is on material for people my age or older, I feel like it will be very refreshing to completely shift gears and write for a younger audience. My influences are Maurice Sendak, Eric Carle, and Leo Lionni, and if this watercoloring thing works out, I may even do the illustrations myself. Woo!

83. Handmake and send 10 no-occasion cards to friends and family.

Because everybody likes construction paper and glue. And everybody likes to get stuff in the mail. And... do I really need to keep explaining this one?

97. Make a baby onesie out of a Stewart/Colbert '08 shirt.

Not gonna lie, a little inspired by the Gilmore Girls on this one. I figure it's better to do this sooner rather than later, though, as by the time I actually have a kid these shirts should probably be pretty hard to come by. I have already started collecting weird, quirky early childhood books that I'm going to want my future offspring to be able to read, in case they're out of print, so this is not totally out of character for me, either. Jon Stewart for President!

So there you have it, folks, my Creativity goals for this mission. It's one of the most populous categories so far, although I do have about 35 more goals I need to add between now and next week. I don't think I can handle any more huge projects like these, though, without marrying rich and giving up all my, you know, career goals (see #61). We'll see.

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