It's been a while

Need to write for just a little bit. Is there such thing as writing withdrawal symptoms? The last few posts have been absolute crap. At least everyone likes palindromes, right? Last one. I promise.

Play Latin on Italy Alp

I wish I was clever enough to come up with these myself. This is the last week of summer, and even though I’m glad that it’s ending, it’s sad to have to say goodbye again. I think that every time you have to leave people (that is, for extended periods of time), things change a little the next time you see them. People at home will have changed, people here will have changed when I come back. The optimist in me has time and time again lied to me, saying that even after we all go our separate ways, we’ll always see each other again and things will be exactly the way they were. I’ve probably said this already – in fact, I’m sure that I already have. I certainly hope that I’m wrong, but even after the end of the school year and into the summer, you can see how different some people are. For good or for ill, I don’t know – I certainly hope better. Maybe I’m a different person too.

On another note, the classes that I’m taking are going very well. Today, in writing class, our writing mechanics lesson was about coherence. Making sure your thoughts flow well, so that even if you know what the hell you’re writing about (for me and for most of the people in the class I suspect, that’s a pretty big if), the audience can follow the train of thought. The professor distributed handouts with two samples of papers (one good and one bad) that people in the class. One side of the handout juxtaposed the transitions between paragraphs that the two papers used; the other side showed a full paragraph of the supposedly better paper. Looking at that first side of the paper, gee, one of those two looked awfully familiar. Lo and behold, when I turned to the other side, the writing sample was a pretty sizeable chunk of the essay I submitted last week. Sure, the professor probably has a right to use her students’ papers for her lessons, and I guess I’m happy that mine was the example of good writing (and I use the word “good” very loosely), but I swear my face turned red when I recognized that it was mine. As it is, I’m normally very shy about my own writing – at least for classes – in this case, it didn’t help that the paragraph was of very personal subject matter. The entire paper was fairly personal. My name was not on the paper, so I had some degree of anonymity, yet I can’t shake the feeling that everyone could read through the paper and see that it was mine. I feel exposed. I don’t know what I feel, actually, but if anyone cares, that the professor gave pretty good remarks about the rest of that paper.

Speaking of papers... a disproportionately large number of women have the same birthday as me. I felt compelled to check facebook for some reason, and it's true. Yes, coherence my ass.

I feel so conformist. I’ve been listening pretty much exclusively to whatever people tell me to. That’s not a bad thing though; I’ve come across some very good music. Jason Mraz’s Mr. A-Z (get it? Mr. A-Z  Mraz. Ha. Ha. Ha. Well, movin’ on – now I can’t even finish the sentence that lies outside of this parenthetical note anymore.) has some pretty good songs on it. As always, his nimble lyrics are a bit odd, but you’ve got to be a little odd yourself to understand the music. So many subtle (and not so subtle) double entendres though, it’s great. I think I like the live albums better still, the studio albums tend to be overproduced, if there is such a thing. Mmm, there is. Just take a listen for yourself.

If you like Norah Jones (at least the first album… not that tragically folksy second one), you should listen to Sara Bareilles. She’s got a heavenly voice. And I don’t often use the work heavenly. She’s at the Troubadour in LA this coming Monday, the 8th at the Troubadour. Too bad I’ll be home. Jury duty. Dude, the judicial system is intimidating. I guess if you’re in SF, she’ll be at Café Du Nord on Market. 21 and over though (dammit). Strange coincidence or some other force at work here… there’s a rumor going around that she’s dating Jason Mraz. Like, whoa.

In other news, I have a ucla media email account. How cool is that? In the office, Ellen browsed through the classified ads in the Bruin, and we started to talk about the Egg Donor Wanted ads. Dude, those pay a lot. Makes sense though, I will never know, but I imagine that taking all of those hormones to donate eggs can’t be fun. That’s why there are so many more Eggs Wanted ads than Sperm Wanted. I’m sure that at some point, some girls are so in need of money that they’d donate eggs. If it pays so well, why would anyone resort to prostitution?

Speaking of monetary issues, a million dollars in cash, even in hundreds, would fill about 26 suitcases. That’s 10,000 bills. Each bill is thicker than the normal pages of a book. That’s good to know when you rob the bank and ask for a million dollars in cash. Unmarked and non-sequential. Please.