Strawberry ice cream

Spring in Boulder always brings with it a certain sense of whimsy-- the sunshine, the bicyclists, the tulips, the quad peppered with shirtless, frizbee-playing boys who all need haircuts and girls tanning (in April? Seriously?). The strict order of the day-to-day that seemed so firmly established before Spring Break crumbles deliciously into the wind at this time of year. Classes get canceled as our teachers scramble to finish dissertations and prepare for concerts, rehearsals get canceled as our accompanists scramble to other rehearsals, homework gets canceled as one of our professors scrambles to recover from a hard-drive crash. These little wrinkles in the fabric of time don't always work out in my favor. But today-- ah, today-- due to one of those lovely little wrinkles, I find myself home before 3, watching cartoons, eating strawberry ice cream, and getting ready for a nap.

Life is good.

Here I am, and here we go.

I'm back. Maybe for good this time. We'll see if it sticks.

It has been one emotional week-- maybe one of the most important weeks of my life. Without going into too much detail, I have finally made the conscious decision to love myself for exactly what and who I am, and have taken steps to manifest that self-conviction in my everyday life.

-I lost one of the most important people in my life to date. Well ok, to say I "lost" him is misleading. Makes him sound like a set of car keys. I didn't exactly misplace him, but he's not my boyfriend anymore, so what do I care where he is?

-I started going to therapy again. I won't be blogging a lot about the progress I make in this area, for (obviously) extremely personal reasons, but I wanted to put it somewhere, because I need practice in the art of asking for help, and this is a good example of that practice. I want to be proud of my decision.

These are both very serious, very emotional decisions for me. At the risk of sounding like a drama queen, I needed to put them somewhere, to tack them to the proverbial Great Online Refrigerator Door, like a report card or an art project, as a reward, as proof that I can --that I do-- love myself.

Appreciating oneself, not for the contribution one makes to other peoples' lives, but solely for the value of one's own life, is a tremendously hard thing to re-learn, and although I do not feel I've lost the skill of loving myself completely, I have some ground to cover.

I've made progress toward existence as an independent woman of conviction this week, however scary and heartbreaking some of it may have been. Right now I feel like I got hit by a bus, but in the week to come I will practice being proud of myself for standing for what I believe in, asking for the respect I deserve, and being unashamed to ask for help.

SUPER. CUTE.

My latest homework avoidal strategy comes in the form of a website. No, folks, we're not talking about Facebook (although that one is another problem. Hmmm...). Tastespotting is a delightful collision of the food and photo-blogging world, where crazy talented-chef people post crazy-beautiful photos of crazy-delicious looking food. Seriously. Check it out. One of my most recent favorites was this-- an Austin showcase featuring some of the most adorable cakes I have ever seen.


Be prepared to spend hours on Tastespotting-- and if you try any of the recipes, let me know! Without a kitchen here, my opportunities are limited, and I would love to live vicariously through the culinary adventures of others.

Good Golly!

It's been such a long time! While I still check most of your blogs almost every week, my own has been woefully neglected. Time to fix that!

Things are different since the days of balding, bad-tempered theatre teachers. Oh, yes, much different. Now it's a balding, bad-tempered French Literature teacher. Music truly has secured itself as my career path-- music people are the happiest, friendliest people on campus that I've encountered so far, and I believe it is a direct result of their chosen profession. There is something about being around music all day that makes you much more emotionally receptive and expressive with the world around you. Societal inhibitions are scattered along the wayside, roadkill on a highway to creative expression. For example: my music theory teacher wore a light up, scrolling LED belt buckle to class today, and at a certain point in the lecture, turned it on to reveal the words:

ROMAN NUMERALS ARE NOT MALLEABLE.

Funniest thing that has ever happened.
I was in tears, the lecture stopped for a full five minutes. This kind of behavior is a trademark of his, and such jovial willingness to make a fool of oneself in front of one's students is common among the teachers in the department. The music school is my favorite place to be.

In other news: I have a place to live next year!!! Kaitlin (my current dorm roommate) and I are such good buddies that we decided to look for a place to rent together, and she came across an ad for a house a few days ago:

Two cellists looking for two female roommates

4bdrm house with 1 dog and 2 cats

A dog????? I instantly loved the idea. I've missed living with a puppy since I moved out of the house. We went over to the house (yes, HOUSE), and met Ali, who is a sweetheart and seems to be a good prospect for a roommate. We also met Ali's dog Luna, the GIGANTIC Great Pyrenees dog. She is also a sweetheart. Pictures of the house and Luna will follow sometime, but for now let me just say that Luna is the cherry on top of an absolute CAKE. Their kitchen is gigantic. They have cable. And my room has a huge closet. SOLD.

That's the more exciting bit of what I've been up to recently... There's too much to recap all the way from October, but I hope to be in touch much more often. I do love to read everyone else's goings on though-- they're so much more interesting than mine, and it makes me feel not quite so far away from friendly and familiar faces. Hope to hear from all of you soon.

In closing...

That is all.

Success!

I retract my previous statement about my theater teacher.

After my SECOND C+ on a paper for Theatre class, I decided I'd had enough. I emailed him, politely demanded a minute of his time, and met with him today after class. And it turns out, he didn't grade either of my papers. His overworked TA did, But only after grading a succession of papers written by the 80 percent of the class that doesn't enjoy paying attention.

While I sympathize with her plight, I don't believe it's too much to ask for her to avoid taking it out on my paper.

My teacher, formerly believed to be the culprit, regraded my latest paper and gave me an A-! Alas, the statute of limitations has passed on the first paper. Oh well; bygones. I was planning on doing an extra credit project anyway.

For the past few days, I've been wondering what to be for Halloween. Campus, not surprisingly, is currently overrun with a bevvy of slutty police-women, slutty fire-women, slutty French maids, and even a slutty Statue of Liberty. Not joking. Wish I was. So I contemplated a little irony-- dressing up as a plain old prostitute. No one would think to guess that one! You know, shake it up a little.

There was no way I could carry it off. I, thankfully, am simply not prostitute material. I am now the Wolf, after eating Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood. I have a giant fat belly and am carrying a red coat. I have hired a large, burly friend of mine to chase after me for a portion of the evening with a large axe.

Haha. Just kidding about the axe. But seriously, wouldn't that be hilarious?

Honestly, I haven't decided yet. It's a toss up between 1. The wolf idea (sans lumberjack), 2. Just plain old Little Red Riding Hood, and 3. Betty Boop. Ideas?

What's your costume?

Chocolate Cake

On an ordinary Sunday night, my good friend Quanta and I decided to get together to do some baking. Originally we had the famous Wood donuts in mind, but realized (at about 3 that afternoon) that we wouldn't have time to let the dough rise. So instead, we decided to make a chocolate cake the likes of which are seldom seen.



These are the chronicles of our quest. Please to enjoy.


Our first stop, after finding a recipe, was to go to King Soopers to buy chocolate chips. At the Self-Checkout, I was informed by my counterpart that we would be paying entirely in change (mostly pennies), since she needed to get rid of all her U.S currency before moving. We spent the next 2 minutes or so hastily shoving as much change at a time as we could manage into the tiny little coin slot. We ended just ONE PENNY short of our total, but the cashier let us go anyway! The long and short of it: we paid for $5.42 worth of baking supplies with $5.41 worth of change. Which, as Quanta pointed out, is basically like getting it for free!

Once at my house, the baking commenced. Despite a small fiasco with an egg shell that was recovered later in the baking process, cake making went off without a hitch and for the next 30 minutes we retired from the kitchen for a photo shoot, as is customary with most professional bakers.

After taking it out of the oven...

We tried our best to stave off impatience and impending starvation while the layers cooled. You can see the yummy homemade frosting sitting on the burner behind the cake. It still amazes me that everything was from scratch.

Finally, it was done! The picture of the entire thing is lost, somehow, but let me tell you-- it was a thing to behold. We frosted between the layers and everything. I'm tearing up just thinking about how beautiful it was...

And how delicious...

Such is the legend of two cakebakers and a dog named Gus.

High Five!

The End.

Getting ready for the day

How quickly blog addiction takes hold of a young, fickle mind. This morning I got up and immediately felt the urge to blog.

Quanta and I had a momentous evening, and later today there will be pictures and stories to follow. But I want to write about something else just now. I didn't feel I could confidently go on with my morning without the catharsis, however trivial, of thinking out loud.

You were born to be one specific person. You were created in a specific way and certain things were put into your path so that your subsequent reaction would make you who you are today. It is inconvenient, at the very least, to ignore the person that has been created by your years of experience on this planet in order to spare yourself the pain of growing up a little. College has made this deliberate ignorance difficult if not impossible for me, as I believe it was supposed to. But it's still scary to grow sometimes, and often it seems easier to pretend that you're still too young to have to worry about profound personal growth, and to simply continue to coast along until you find yourself behind the curve and in more pain than you would be if you had confronted yourself honestly in the first place. I am ashamed to say that my experience with this little charade has cost me already in this journey away from high school and the familiar.

But God is talking. When you listen, he talks, and he has smart things to say. The pain of growing up is nothing compared to the pain of staying inside a self that is too small for you.

Christ looks after us at every instant. The small price we pay in return is to trust that he will not let us fail.

Sorry if this is a little disjointed-- I've been thinking about this for a long time, and I still haven't quite found the right words. Maybe this is just a draft.