i heart summer

I was sitting out on the porch today watching a little league game and I finally realized that in the past week, all of a sudden, I've been able to do all the fun stuff I missed out on during school (i.e. relaxing, lazing about, being a sloth, puttering, sitting around, etc.) I went to the state forest and took pictures of caterpillars, played my poor neglected guitar, cooked delicious food, took a nap in the middle of the day, went on a road trip, knitted, and completely ignored my desk, which is obscured by an ever-growing pile of papers that I will never look at again. It would be fun to have a symbolic bonfire with them like we used to do in college, but I feel too guilty about that kind of thing now, so I'll probably just recycle them... Either way I don't have to read them, and that is why summer is f-ing super.

it's all over

Thank GOD. School has officially stopped torturing me for the year. I know I've said it a million times, but WHAT posessed me to go back to school? I sucked at school before, I suck at school now. I will continue to suck at school until I finally convince myself that perhaps school is not my life's calling. So far, however, waitressing is the only thing I've found that I don't suck at, and I refuse to accept that waitressing is my life's calling. I have way too much in green cleaning at this point to end it all before I change the world (i.e. before I convince at least 12 million people to drop their Windex.)

So I've been told that Bullet Points "really get the point across." This is convenient because I don't have the energy to get creative and write "paragraphs" right now. I haven't blogged much since the last disaster (thesis proposal rejection,) so here's what has happened since I last blogged, in Bullet Points:

-I rewrite my proposal and never hear whether it's OK or not
-I worry, but I have bigger fish to fry
-My love for baking soda gets increasingly obsessive
-Some jerkwad in my group decides to plagiarize her section of my final project
-I have an ethical dilemma
-I have a nervous breakdown
-My professors take pity on me, one gives me an extension
-Mother Nature takes pity on me and sends a flood
-I feel bad for all the people who lost their cars and houses in the flood, but I'm secretly psyched because school is closed on the day my finals are due
-I still somehow manage to get all behind and don't sleep for a week
-I am cracked out to the extreme
-I pull a few more all-nighters, try my best to deal with the jerkwad's section
-I give up on the project
-I take that bitch to Staples, bind it, and get it out of my life
-I have another nervous breakdown, pull another all-nighter, and pour every fiber of my being into writing about green cleaning
-I email that bitch to the professor and drive to Boston for Alexis' graduation
-I miss the graduation itself but am just in time for a delicious Bloody Mary
-I proceed to the RESD party and drink some more, make pleasant conversation with the plagiarist, who I admit is actually a nice person
-There are balloon animals
-I go to Kelly's baby shower, give her some pesticide-free organic cotton baby clothes
-Amanda and I drive to Braintree to get a thing so we can play our Ipods in the car
-The Ipod thing attacks us viciously
-We make our way towards the sweet sunny South
-There is a rainstorm
-There is traffic
-There is a hailstorm
-There is a plague of locusts and I see the seven horsemen of the Apocalypse riding beside us on 95
-We stop at an unsavory location in New Jersey which is both a bar AND a package store, buy some wine, anticipating that we will REALLY need a drink when we get to DC
-We get to DC, drive past our hotel, and proceed to get lost in DC for an hour while trying to call the hotel
-No one picks up the phone at the hotel
-We finally get there at 4:30 in the morning, the little birdies are tweeting
-The desk clerk is "auditing the system" so we can't check in
-We do not even think about opening the wine... We sleep
-We go to some Smithsonians, see some cool insects and the Hope Diamond
-I have my picture taken with the Swedish Chef, my favorite Muppet
-We eat a ridiculous amount of food
-We smoke cigarettes at the bar
-We eat more food
-We suffer food comas and can't seem to motivate ourselves to go back out
-We watch some show about this crazy person who wants a room in her house to look like Hilary Duff's sewing room
-Hilary Duff is a stupid human being
-I get to my green cleaning seminar an hour early
-I eat some danish, scope out the scene at the Holiday Inn
-There are no hot building service contractors in the house
-A guy from Norwood tells an extremely tall tale about the flood, I keep my mouth shut
-I "network" with the guy from Norwood, who makes cleaning products that come in a self-contained biobased film
-I forgive him for being a liar because he's so green
-The seminar would be better if I could keep my eyes open
-We get back on the road, I pray
-We get lost in the ghettoes of Maryland for a while
-We play Twenty Questions, coming up with some killers, including: Army, Lighter Fluid, Jack o' Lantern, Johnny Appleseed, and Picture Frame
-We play Trivia towards the end of New Jersey, but years of pot-smoking seem to have destroyed my memory
-We play Categories through Connecticut and Rhode Island
-I get home and sleep like I've never slept before
-I go to work for about an hour, come home, and sleep some more
-I wake up to an email from the jerkwad plagiarist saying she got an A on the project

So that's my story. It's been a crazy few weeks, and I wish I could express more eloquently how ridiculously happy I am that it's all over. Suffice it to say this is going to be the goddamned best summer of my entire life. Even if I wake up tomorrow and I have no feet, I will be happy. If you'll excuse me, I have to whip up a baking soda paste for the dishes.

a piss-poor day on the farm

This blog entry is really only of interest to true Anne Devotees. It's not going to be creative, it's not going to be funny, so if you're just being Anne-curious, look elsewhere because you're about to be bored out of your skull. Unless, of course, you have a passion for epic tales of woe that have nothing to do with love or human relationships, but rather focus on qualitative research methods. If that does describe you, you're weird.

Thesis proposal
Torn to little tiny shreds
One more albatross


For those of you who haven't already heard the three-hour psychotic tirade behind that haiku: today I was supposed to defend my reserach design proposal for my thesis... It didn't go quite as well as I had anticipated. I seriously thought my design was bulletproof and impervious to criticism, yet like I insinuated, it was torn apart. My professor found holes in my research question big enough to walk through. And of course the rest of the design, having been based on that central question, was totally invalidated. Phrases like "totally not feasible," "you're not an epidemiologist," "this is not a RESD thesis," and "you just can't really do this" were tossed around the room like so many spiny wiffle balls. It was not a good scene. I didn't know whether I wanted to cry or throw up or just scream "BUT WE DISCUSSED THIS!!! BUT I'VE BEEN WORKING WITH THE SAME RESEARCH QUESTION ALL SEMESTER AND ONLY NOW YOU'RE TELLING ME EXACTLY HOW BAD IT IS?"

Jesus Christ on a bike. I just couldn't help feeling like it was somehow personal. I feel like I got punched in the stomach repeatedly for an hour... I just f-ing HATE actually putting effort into things and having them suck. It just goes to show that my traditional formula of not putting any effort into schoolwork is actually the most effective.

I also f-ing hate the fact that I drank 3 cups of coffee at like midnight because I got a new coffeemaker and I just haaaad to try it out. This combination of seething anger, the resulting adrenaline, and being physically wired is just not helping me get to sleep. I have more pointless phone interviews to conduct tomorrow. Perhaps I should tell my interviewee, "Hey, its really nice of you to agree to talk to me, but unfortunately my research design is so lame that it's really useless for me to ask you any questions. Yeah, my whole thesis topic has ebola. Apparently. Thanks for your time!"

Why did I come to grad school? What in the good green earth was I thinking? I sucked at school before; I had no logical reason to believe that three years of waitressing would have given me that unstoppable impetus to learn that I had been lacking when I was in college...

I heard this amazingly beautiful John Lennon song today that I had never heard before, "Working Class Hero." According to John, "a working class hero is something to be." Please indulge my crisis of self/purpose in life and consider how this leads me to two possibilities:
1. I should go to New England Tractor Trailer School, get a real job, and get over myself.
-OR-
2. I am doing this for all the wrong reasons. I read a study or something that argues that people who go into social work, non-profits, social justice work, etc., do so out of a subconscious need to be taken care of themselves. That is, anyone who does something nice for someone else (but NOT as a means to an end - rather because they think they are just being nice and "caretaker-y") is actually hoping that someone will take care of them in return. I don't really know what to do with that theory, I just thought it was interesting to consider that maybe I don't actually want to help people - in which case I REALLY ought to just go to NETTS...

By way of ending
I know I'm totally nuts
It's something to be

a haiku for roo-roo

After all this time I just realized that was a haiku! Well here's one right back at you, outlining in a simple zen-like form why I haven't blogged lately:

Data collection
Satan invented grad school
I'll sleep when I'm dead

Paper-writing hell
Power Point Purgatory
Alliteration

I got a little carried away on that last one. Those were the days, though, writing haikus about thrust and fuselage in engineering class. Oh Joe Palladino, you made drag coeffiecients sound so HOT...

Back to my research design. This is officially Dark Night of My Soul Number One of the semester.