Graduation

I finally graduated cum laude with a BA in Communications. Boy am I glad! I wrote a lengthy rant the other day, but really it isn’t appropriate to be posted. I try not to be “click-happy”. It’s too easy to write something in a fit of choler, post it, and then regret it five minutes later. The writing of it was cathartic, but the posting of it would be pointless in the main.

In any case, I’m understandably psyched to be finished with my undergraduate career. I have one more year of grad school. I must admit, it is extremely tempting to get a real job, make real money, live in my own real place (i.e. a place without ridiculous roommates), et cetera. But with my degree, there weren’t any jobs available that I really wanted. The economy is bad, too, so it might have been hard to get a real job. Above all, the temptation to return to London was irresistible. It’s only one year, I get to be in London, and at the end I should be looking at a job I can really really enjoy. I will be going for my MA in publishing, with the goal of becoming an acquisitions editor or a literary agent. I will probably at least start out in London, but I do ultimately plan to return to the US. I’ll to work somewhere besides NYC.

In any case, graduation was fun. I told my parents I wanted to go to my graduation ceremonies and they asked, “Why?” and “Do we have to go?” Of course they had to go. The University of Maryland had two ceremonies for each grad, one for the entire university and one for each department/college. I went to both. The big ceremony was very assembly-line. We weren’t given much information at all about what was going on. It was enjoyable anyway. Leon Panetta was out speaker and gave a wonderful address. They called each college to stand to cheer, so we all did. It was just fun to be part of the mass of graduates.

The next morning was the Communications graduation ceremony. It was 9:00, which was pretty dang early. I literally had to Google it to find out when I was meant to show up because, again, we weren’t given much information. It was a lot better-run than the main commencement, however. And it was much smaller. They called each graduate’s name and we all got a poster of images of the campus. Our diplomas are mailed to us later. My parents and one of my brothers came. The weather was gorgeous. All in all, it worked out to be a very successful ceremony.

From there, we went straight to the house I lived in and packed up all my stuff. My parents were moving at warp speed. I was trying to pack up the last few things. They wanted to take out the bed and I had to stop them so I could get off the sheets and blankets! I was like, “Cool it for a minute, guys!” We got everything outta there in record time. I wasn’t sad about that, let me tell you. I was so damn fed up with that place and those roommates. I got a note that morning that my roommate was moving out on Monday (today) and expected a check for the water utility (which he had been paying late, for which we had gotten a shut-off notice). This was Friday, today is Memorial Day. So in other words, I had no chance to mail him the check, since I didn’t have my checkbook with me. That would be his fault. I’ll send the check to the address there, hoping it will get forwarded to him.

Summer is ahead of me. Tomorrow, I really need to start looking for a job. I should be able to get a loan for all I need, but every penny counts. I need to be able to save a couple thousand dollars this summer. That will make me feel much much better. I have no undergrad debt, but I want to be in as little debt as possible, obviously. Debt is huge trouble, as everyone has finally begun to realize as of late.

Ah, well, anyway, I regress. Here are a few lovely photos from graduation.

 

“Kiss and Cry” for Gymnastics

As if we needed more evidence that the FIG is made up of fools.

The FIG [International Gymnastics Federation--it's official title is in French, hence the changing of initials] has decided to add a “kiss and cry” area to gymnastics competitions.

Dear God in heaven, what will these people think of next?

For those of you who may not be familiar with the term “kiss and cry”, it means the place where the athlete goes and sits with a coach in a box-like area with cameras trained on them and advertisements in the background. There, the athlete gets his or her score and either gets a kiss from his or her coach, or cries. Hence “kiss” and “cry”. You might be more familiar with this from ice skating competitions. It’s also used in other disciplines of gymnastics (rhythmic and trampoline, for example). Artistic gymnastics, which is what most people mean when they say gymnastics, has never had anything like this.

The details on the implementation are scarce, but it seems completely impossible. First of all, gymnastics is unlike ice skating or rhythmic gymnastics because there is not one central performance area with one athlete going at a time. Gymnastics is a four ring circus (or six, in the case of MAG, men’s artistic gymnastics); during most competitions, someone is competing on each event at any given time. So how could they possibly stop a competition for each athlete to sit in the kiss and cry to get their score? It’s totally impractical. In team gymnastics, it’s simply impossible. Each team does twelve routines. The competition would take six hours! They’d need to put cots down on the floor so the athletes could get some sleep, because it would be a long competition.

Aside from artistic gymnastics being a four ring circus, it is also a heavily mental sport. Along with being physically more demanding than any other sport, it’s also mentally daunting. In between routines, gymnasts need to keep their muscles warm, they need to mentally prepare (perhaps by relaxing for a few minutes with music if need be), and a lot of times they need to gather up their gear and rush to their next event. Now the FIG expects them to interrupt all of that so the gymnasts can sit in front of the camera and wait for their scores.

And lets be honest, that won’t be nearly as interesting as the FIG wants it to be. Gymnasts aren’t a very emotive bunch. It’s kind of a rule to keep things to yourself. Almost every gymnast knows the correct responses to give and the correct emotion to display, if they display any at all. Oooh, it would be hilarious to see the old-school Soviet gymnasts in the kiss and cry. They’d break the camera with their intense stare. And, oooh to see Khorkina in a kiss and cry! That would be gold! But I cringe to think of 14-year old Kerri Strug or someone like Carly Patterson in a kiss and cry–cringe-worthy (because of her shyness) and boring (because of her blandness), respectively.

But I digress.

Apparently the FIG is going to sell ads on the walls of the kiss and cry. There’s a surprise, it’s for money.

I honestly don’t know what these idiots are thinking. I don’t think any governing body of any sport has ever actively tried to ruin their sport, but the FIG is currently doing a wonderful job of just that. This is the latest in a string of horrendous decisions: eliminating compulsories, raising the age limit to 16, ridiculous Codes of Points, stabbing the artistic part of artistic gymnastics in the heart,  getting rid of the 10.0, the tie-breaking rules at the Olympics, and now this. It’s unfathomable. Who the hell are these people? It’s beyond belief how foolish these people are. I wish I knew how they could be removed from their positions, because they’re like cancer eating away at the sport.

Here is what needs to be done:

1. Scrap the current code. Seriously. Reverse it to about 1995-6, when artistry/execution was balanced with difficulty.

2. Lower the age limit back to 15. All that raising the age limit accomplishes is the exclusion of a lot of gymnasts at the peak of their abilities.

3. Tell Bruno Grandi to jump off a bridge.

4. Oh, and someone please get rid of Al Trautwig, who commentates for NBC. Seriously, he’s an idiot.

 

Congrats, Shawn Johnson!

Last night I stayed up until the ungodly hour of 11:00 and watched Shawn Johnson win the mirror ball on Dancing with the Stars. I was so excited for my chica. She kept saying her gymnastics training was an impediment, but I still don’t believe it. She had the advantage of knowing how to move her body. Yes, gymnastics moves are different, but she has experience with making her body do just what she asks of it. Plus she has the flexibility (ironically she was always disliked by some in the gymnastics community because of her lack of flexibility) and the gymnastics skills. Gymnastics helped her in a lot of ways.

Not that she didn’t work hard, improve, and totally deserve to win. Gilles was great, too, and Melissa was very god, but I think Shawn really proved herself in the freestyle. As far as I’m concerned, that separates the girls from the men–or whatever, lol. She proved she had what it takes. She kicked butt.

She was very cute when she won. Of course, she inherently unable to be anything but cute. She and Mark really did believe that Gilles would win. She closed her eyes to steal herself for his name to be announced as winner, and both she and Mark covered their faces with their hands when they won–a sign of surprise and disbelief. Oh, and props to Gilles. He was amazingly gracious to Shawn and I think he was really sincere about loving the experience and being happy for Shawn. Most times when people say that, they seem to feel the exact opposite, but I do Gilles was honest.

I also saw Shawn on the morning talk shows this morning. I’m hoping the experience of winning something again might give Shawn the motivation to go back to gymnastics. Everyone has slowly been coming to the conclusion that she’s done with gymnastics, but I got a good vibe from her. She said she’d go back to the gym. She’s been saying that for a while, but she’s also said she’ll wait to see “if her heart is in it”. She said that again, but it seemed tacked on. Before, it was a way out so she could keep people hanging; now it seemed more like a possibility but not an inevitability that she would be done with gymnastics. I really want her to continue on. She could do so much more, she still has a lot of years in her. And, frankly, she gets a lot of disrespect as a one-hit wonder (which isn’t fair). I’d love to see her prove ‘em wrong.

Anyway, here are Shawn’s last two dances, one from Monday, one from last night’s finale.

 

Ahead By an Ear

So I’ve been wasting my time drawing again when I “should” be studying for finals (don’t worry–I’ll be fine, I’m still in good shape with all my finals and classes). I was getting a little frustrated with the following picture becasue something just didn’t seem right. It looked like her face was scrunched up somehow. So I broke out the ruler and figured, finally, that her ears and the top of her head were off. The ears were in the wrong place and the head wasn’t wide enough. And all this after I had shaded the entire thing, including the hair! I had to do a lot of erasing of what I’d already done in order to fix it. Once I fixed it, I was amazed at what a difference the ears can make. In my experience, eyebrows and ears are two of the most critical parts of a face, pieces that people often don’t think about. She still needs a tad bit of work to clean her up here and there, but I fixed her right up and am pretty pleased with the results.

 

Can You Spell “Vindicated”?

…I can.

Just because I am sure that the general public cares, I’m writing because I’ve been vindicated. I am correct, I was correct, I have been correct all along. My landlord and landlady are still not entirely up to the point of admitting that, but it’s true. Last  night, my roommate, whose room is right next to mine in the basement, found that his mattress and some of the carpet was wet. Here’s the kicker: it was in the middle of his room, nowhere near the damned window and damned drain they keep blaming. They think their problem is effing leaves, when I see absolutely no evidence that it was the leaves. I do live here, and I haven’t seen that drain back up at all for almost a year, before they did work on that drain. The water never filled the window well outside our windows. But the basement leaked, no only right there by the window, but also ten feet away from that same window. Still, they keep saying that since we didn’t clean out the leaves (like it’s out job to do that), the drain failed, and the basement flooded. The causality just isn’t there. There were leaves, but not that many. I see no evidence that the water backed up in the well around the drain. Instead, it seems the water seeped through the wall underneath–not really related to the drain at all. And there was leaking in another area of the basement, too, which also seems to be completely unrelated to the drain.

And they’re going to try to hold me to my lease? Ha.

I tried to look a little aggrieved, but I couldn’t help a slight wry smile from time to time and a harsh chuckle when they left.

 

Oh, and I have two finals down, two to go.

 

Cum Laude

SO, I’m graduating from college in about a week and a half (I think I hear Handel’s Messiah), and I am graduating cum laude. That means that I was in the top x% of my college as far as GPA goes. Which is great, but naturally I’m a little irritated that I’m not summa cum laude–because I don’t think I really deserved any of the B’s I got, except maybe in statistics. Other than that, the B’s I got were bogus. But anyway.

I’m pretty proud of myself. I get a red tassle and they will announce me as graduating cum laude–with honors. I’m pretty pleased with myself. All of my very hard work for the last four years has gotten me something if it got me nothing else: a pretty red tassle.

 

It’s Like Noah and the Flood!

You know, when I was thinking to myself about this, my initial thought was “It’s like *MOSES* and the Flood!” And then I realized . . . wait. That was Noah. Not Moses.

The other day, I was calmly walking over to the window ledge in my basement room when I noticed that my foot went “squish” on the carpet. Oh, I knew that sound and feeling alright. When I first moved into the room in August of last year, the first thing I noticed was wet carpet. They had to take out the carpet, dry it out, and replace the carpet and padding. Luckily, it was summertime, I was away for the weekend, and I didn’t have a lot of really pressing matters there in College Park.

Fast forward almost a year. There hasn’t been any further flooding, but there really hadn’t been any heavy rain since then. The corner of my room was pretty wet. I e-mailed my landlady and she had ServPro come while I was at class and work (she was there to meet them). They set up two very large industrial fans, pushed my bed aside so that you can’t walk around the tiny room, and took out a piece of the wall. Basically, the room is not liveable. I decided to hell with it; I’m going home for the weekend. So I packed up and brought home a load of stuff since I’m moving back home for the summer once I graduate in two weeks. This brings up a whole new realm of aggravation that I don’t need. I’m hoping it can all work out for the best.

Just for fun, here are some pictures of the current state of my room:

 

The Final Countdown

Countdown:

1 group paper, about 10 pages

1 6-7 page paper

1 1/2 novels

1/2 book of poetry

2 discussion sections

4 classes

3 8:00 a.m. finals

1 non-8:00 am final

2 commencement ceremonies

There you have it. The final things that need to be done in my college career.  In fourteen days, I graduate. It’s hard to wrap my head around the idea of being finally done. I’ve had a rather unfortunate antipathy for the place for a while. It would be worse if I didn’t have very concrete, secure, exciting plans for my future. It’s hard to remember that this will be my last few weeks working at the library and at OIT. That in just a few weeks, I won’t have to put up with my disgusting roommates. That soon I won’t have books hanging over my head, tests  lowering in the distance, papers mocking me… There’s so much left to do to finalize all of my plans. Onward and upward, eh? I’m excited for the future, but in a way, I feel a little shocked that it’s taken four years of life to get here. It seems like it took so long, yet it got me nowhere. I can say that the only really truly positive part of my experience here was London. The other parts of my time here were mostly neutral (unoffensive) or utterly galling.

And my life will go on. For now, I’m still stuck on the same note. I have an exam tomorrow that I desperately need to study for–because I desperately need an A, because I desperately want an A in that class, because I desperately want to have a 4.0 this semester, because I’m desperately useless and picky and particular. Such is life.

 

Relatively Speaking: An Old Find

I came home to my parents’ house this weekend because my aunt is visiting. My mom had found a book that she had gotten from her grandmother’s house when her grandmother died. The book was given to Agnes Russell on Christmas Day, 1881. My mother knew there were some papers in the book, so we started to look through. There were some drawings of ladies in robin-breasted dresses and pouffed hair. To us, these are old-fashioned gowns, but the girl who drew them drew them from life. That was how the ladies around her dressed. Someone–probably Agnes–pressed some flowers into the book.

But even more interesting than the drawings, the flowers, and the dedication weren’t all that interesting, compared to a little envelope I found stuck in between the pages. Inside were amazing little cut-outs of women and girls in the dress of the 1880’s. They were very carefully cut out with a lot of skill. From a little slip of paper included in the envelope, it looks like they may have been a reward for being good in Sunday school. The slip is almost certainly from Sunday school.

The most interesting part, however, was a little note that was included in the envelope. Written on it in a young girl’s hand was, “Before I am 22 years old, I will be married. Grandfa. bet $2.00.” And, “I bet I won’t.” It’s dated Dec. 16, 1895. On the front of the envelope, it says “Bet with Grandpa due Dec 26, 1906.”

Edna Russell was my grandmother’s aunt. Edna Russell was a girl in the 1880s when the bet was taken. She never married and lived until 1959. Apparently, she won the bet with her grandfather. I’m utterly fascinated by the bet, the motive behind it, and by the fact that Edna never married. From what my mother’s told me, the family was fairly well-off, though not rich, and Edna was a very pretty young lady. It’s amazing to think of that little piece of paper telling so much and so little.

Here is a photo of Edna from 1909, a few years after the bet was due.

 

 

Whatever Happened to Free Speech?

It’s a little bit disheartening to listen to some of the reactions to the honest answer the Miss California gave to a question about same-sex marriage. She could have articulated herself a little better, but that isn’t what everyone is harping on. It’s the fact that she espoused an opinion that is, to some people, unpopular.

Well, too bad. Is she not allowed to have an opinion that differs? It’s political correctness gone berserk. Since when is it not okay to have an opinion, even an unpopular one. And, as this article points out, it isn’t even an “unpopular” opinion. Proposition 8 was passed in California, meaning that the majority of voters in the state agree with Miss California. Even if they didn’t, why should she be raked over the coals for disagreeing with them?

Not to mention that it was Perez Hilton who gave the question. He was fishing for this kind of response and reaction, which is pretty deplorable. And as the author of the same article as above also says (and I agree): don’t ask a question if you’re afraid of what the answer might be. Only, in this case, I’m pretty sure he had an idea what the answer could be and was quite pleased with himself when he got what he wanted, that is a reason to rant, rave, and make himself seen all over the media for a controversy he drummed up.

At least many people have the decency to recognize that she has a right to her opinions, and that it isn’t “freedom of speech unless you disagree with me”. 

At least someone has the guts to be honest.