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.

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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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St. Patrick's - January 15, 2010

I visited St. Patrick's three weeks ago with my friend Chelsea, approximately two and a half hours after landing at JFK. It was literally that much of a priority for me. Architecture innervates my soul, and, having escaped the suffocating clutches of Daytona for the weekend, it was a delightfully symbolic way to start the trip.

I'd been there once or twice before, years and years and years ago with my family, and when I was twelve, I read this book, a thriller in which a rogue IRA cell takes the cathedral hostage for no apparent reason. Most notable line: the 50/60 something Irish dude tells the young chickadee who seems to be his sidekick, "Girlie, I've been shot at more times than you've had your period." Most notable image: some dude climbs up on of the spires outside, either to light the building on fire, put that fire out, or set up some sort of signal for the cops. It's good times.

Anyways, Chels and I had an excellent time peering at all the saint shrines, conjecturing about why Catholics light candles for them, sneaking glances at people crossing themselves to find out if it's left-to-right or right-to-left, and, you know, just generally being slightly less respectful of the space than we probably should have been. I took quite a few pictures, most of which did not come out quite as well as I'd have liked because I didn't want to use the flash. I've culled the best and dumped them into a new photobucket. I got bored while I was uploading them so I ran the "old photo" script on my favorite; it is now below the cut and is the link to the full album. If you don't want to flip through all the pictures manually, there's a slideshow before the first one. Technology, woo! I also stuck the SPT from that week below the cut here, since it was taken while I was there and everything. The three subsequent SPTs should be posted before it's time for the next one to be taken. Hopefully.

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Historical Documents

Re: active SETI, ie sending messages instead of listening for them:

Instead, Shostak suggests that we just gabble. "My conclusion is that you would just send them the Google servers. That's an enormous amount of information, much of it redundant and pictographic. Much of it is pornographic too, but I expect they could handle that." (Although it raises questions like, can Earth handle a trillion orders for Viagra?)

I give you "Exolanguage: do you speak alien?" It reminds me of that scene in Independence Day when they send up the "welcome wagon" helicopter with all the flashy lights, as though blinding the aliens with high beams (but there's patterns!) isn't going to bug them or anything. The article does raise an interesting theory, that perhaps math is not math to aliens, and that we should not assume that any extraterrestrial civilization advanced enough to hear our broadcasts will understand that 1+1=2. My favorite line is, "Maybe everyone's listening but no one is transmitting. Maybe it takes an audacious young civilisation like ours to do that." Would make sense to send porn out into the universe, then, right? Like some cosmic-scale fart joke? [Aside: holy christ we should from now on send nothing but rickrolls!]

See also: "What's on Earth Tonight?"
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101 is a lot to remember...

So, oops, I totally forgot that one of my actual goals (#9) was to knit a sweater. For some reason, in my head it got folded into #40, Create an entire outfit by hand. This is actually really beneficial that I just remembered, because it means I am on the verge of completing another goal just as one got shot down. Yep, that's right, it's the end of January, and you know what that means, folks - the Foreign Service finally emailed and of course it was a no, because I just graduated and I really don't know anything about anything yet and.

It's still disappointing. It's the only thing that I very clearly know that I want to do as a career, that I can see myself doing for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years. Insofar as I can see myself doing any one thing for approximately the same amount of time I've been a self-aware human being, anyway.

But anyway so as I mentioned in yesterday's post, I'm looking at grad school options, and my top two choices are this program at Columbia, a Masters in International Affairs with a concentration in Social Policy, and this program at NYU, which gives an MA in International Relations and Journalism. I have yet to discern the distinct merits of being a "Master of Field X" versus being a "Master of Arts of Field X," so that is my next task. It looks like they both start accepting applications in August - which for some reason reminds me that I need to sign up IMMEDIATELY for the GRE. Okay, that is my real next task. Stream of consciousness what?

tl;dr: Foreign Service = not this year. Grad school = life plan for 2011. Goal #9 = remembered, almost completed.

Next up: St Paul's Patrick's, Habitat, SPT x2.
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The exact opposite of a picture dump.

Today, instead of figuring out a way to post my St. Paul's pictures all big and pretty, I looked at MA programs in International Relations at Columbia and NYU. I had a very long talk last night with my grandmother about Purpose and Life and what in the world I am going to do since I obviously will not be furnishing her with some great-grandbabies to play with in her twilight years.

That got me thinking (again) about how I've been home for five months, and how this has been going for five months, and what have I really done, both for myself, for my career goals, and to simply get out of here again. I really don't want to get into a huge personal introspection because this isn't the blog for that, but I do want to say that although I haven't been posting quite as much as the first couple months, I am still very much committed to this list and achieving as much of it as I can in the next 2.25 years. Although I've only completed two small goals so far - dancing in the rain and picnicking with a friend + wine - it seems to me like I've done a lot more. And in a way, I think that is objectively true, because I ended up setting a LOT of goals that either have weekly components (most notably the SPT and the articles), or that are more loosely multi-stage ones on which I've already begun progress. Scrolling down the master list, there is a good amount of terra cotta, and I'm pleased about that.

Before I began, one of my brothers pointed out that the list might seem a bit less daunting if I laid out a plan to complete five or six goals each month. While I think I might have a few too many huge goals (read the complete works of Salmon Rushdie, for instance) for that to be 100% feasible, I pretty much have a regular enough schedule that I am going to start setting aside blocks of time to sit down and work on certain projects. One of the major reasons I decided to make this list and put a time line on it was that I didn't want to stagnate while at home and just sit in front of the computer and TV every night, so I find it somewhat ironic that I need to schedule this me time because I'm spending too much time out of the house hanging out with my friends.

So here's the deal. Tonight I'm going to read A LOT, and tomorrow I'm going to open up ye olde google calendar and start blocking off some time for the next two weeks. Agenda: writing time, reading time, sewing time.

/Blogging time.
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Picture Dump

Too tired to narrate. Click for pictures. Soon: SPT 19, Cathedral #1, and, for real, drabbles.


Lost SPT - December 4, 2009

Swingset #6 - Boone Park, Jacksonville, FL

SPT - December 31st

SPT - January 7

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who, me?

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