I beg your pardon, I have an announcement

SCHOOL’S OUT FOREVER*, BITCHES!

I have officially finished school. Feel free to shower me with laud if you’re in the area. I walk on the 17th. 2pm. Come if you’re around. There will be CAKE.

*Technically “forever” = until graduate school, so for ~3 years. I just really love the sound of FOREVER right now.

(NTTAWWT)

They say “assumptions” only do one thing, but screwing with false ones is, on occasion, hilarious.

One that I often hear is that I get my kicks snogging chicks. It’s a pretty common one (no, really. What? Oh.) - so I usually pay no attention. However, the rarer moments of its appearance - the one hit wonders who call for no mercy - are the ones I can stop & appreciate. Those moments are meant to be handled with patience and class. Savored. The bourbons and chocolates of an otherwise mundane world.

One such moment presented itself Friday. A team of knuckle-draggers apparently felt burdened to share their ideas about me with the proverbial class. Let me remind you, there is nothing quite like a good your-mom line (and don’t you dare tell me how old n’ busted they are) - but a perfectly executed your-mom, with just the right touch of elaboration, dead center in a cloud of homophobia, is really a beautiful thing. The instant these rapier wits processed the implications… their reaction can only be described as “completely and utterly squicked-out”.

Savored, I tell you.

I don’t understand American sporting events

[Continuing in the vein of pseudo-counterpatriotic-arrogance…]

I went to a football game this weekend. For those counting, this makes two. It was long. The sky was pretty. I was nearly molested by a bird. Some guy proposed to his girlfriend after it was over. I was able to watch on the 1200² ft.* ubertron I helped pay for.

I think we won, too.

*Yes. A screen with the squarefootage of a two-bedroom-house. That is correct.

I thought about deleting that novel of a paragraph, but changed my mind (and exactly how long can I make this title, anyway?)

I’ve been mopey lately, and I’ve finally decided it’s due to a general feeling of unfulfillment. Tonight I went shopping. (Don’t worry, there’s a connecting thread*.) I don’t go shopping very often, and as a general rule try to avoid the experience all together. But for the past few weeks I’ve been desperately missing my Nalgene, which I accidentally abandoned in my favorite fried-rice hole-in-the-wall sometime in June; yes, that is indeed an item one can “desperately miss”. So tonight I finally bought one, and on the way home started thinking.

Four (holy crap, four?!) months ago, I was wrapping up one season and setting out on another - and was dragging through the same blahs. I was tired of work and class being my only outward evidence of worth, and was finding precious little comfort in the pair. It’s a new season, a new semester, a new month - and the routine of life has dumped me in the same place again. School, Work, Family, Life, all proper nouns which have little significance when I remove myself from their influence, yet which I all too easily allow to become my defining factors. I feel temporary. Regardless of where I live, I live out of a trunk, and allow myself satisfaction through lack of permanence. I miss … something… and for a long time, since the last time around, I’ve thought that something was China.

A few months ago, not long after I got there, I went on a hike. It was not my first hike of the trip, nowhere near my last, and far from the longest. It was really not that strenuous at all, yet my lack of concern (focus, preparation, experience) made it by far the most difficult. We started out on a bus, which in that part of the world means much less than it does here. We fishtailed up mountains for a few hours, before hopping out on the side of the road, in the middle of nowhere, to climb to a vaguely-located village. We found the village rather empty, and my partner decided to hike through the valley, to the next mountain, where there was another village - one we’d visited earlier in the week. It wasn’t that far at all, and a through-hike was better than the up-down-around alternative. But I hadn’t thought ahead. I’d had no breakfast, brought no food, and only one *Nalgene of water. I wasn’t used to the altitude, I hadn’t begun to actually work at this, and I was still woefully out of shape. What should have been a few hours work, four at most, became a six hour slog which brought us barely into the rice fields of the next village. Along the way I managed to dump myself into a creek not once, but three times. We spent a few hours at the village, refilled water bottles, and made the hour-and-change hike up to the Da Lu, big road, where we hitched our way back to town. It was dark when we made it back, and we still had a dinner appointment to make. I was tired, frustrated, and all I wanted was a shower and sleep - yet cultural obligation demanded I sit in a humid, boiling, hotpot restaurant for the next two hours. I get home eventually, where, six flights up, I crash headfirst on the couch. I discover exactly what those creek encounters got me, and my still-damp shoes get tossed to the balcony. All the windows are open, the two balcony doors slid to their widest. The electricity is off, meaning no hot water, but that doesn’t matter. At that moment, as China’s “Windy City” earns its name in grand style, I let the breeze blow the day out of my head. I am aching, I am sore, I am thirsty still. I am dirty and in need of a shower, my feet crack and bleed. I am frustrated at the lack of progress during the day, and the seemingly wasted time. Yet, I slowly realize, I am content. I feel as if the blisters have been earned, and as I remember the encounters of the day - the farmer in his rice field who stopped to help us through to the trail (was he more concerned for us or his field, I wonder?), the traditionally-dressed ladies stopped for lunch under the trees, and the endless glasses of tea at dinner - the day seems long. Unwasted. Fulfilled.

Confession: I don’t miss China. I mean, well, of course I miss China, but it’s a longing for no more or less than the sum total of people, places, and experiences “China” denotes. What I miss most is something that could, in theory, be found here, yet I’m not even sure what it is. What I am sure of is that, whatever that nameless elusive was, I went half-way around the world to find it. I have no doubt I’ll find it again… I just wish I knew what I was looking for now.

Google ate my brain, and I’m ok with that

(But I think I already said that a few years ago. In the first of tonight’s “other news”-es, that really was a few years ago. Snap.)

Finally re-acquired my photos (yay!) yesterday, so tonight I loaded the least-crappy ones onto Picasa. I had no idea that, since I last checked, Google’s web album service had gained the things I asked for (tagging, video support, & easier organization). Granted, it’s been like… a year… since I thought about it. So that’s nifty.

Three albums cover the summer; at the moment they’re not public so just bookmark or some such.

• Month the First: Yunnan Province
• Hong Kong & Shanghai
• English Camp

Eventually I will get around to georeferencing* locations, tagging things and writing captions - really.
*I’m a geography major, I can actually use that word legally.

Side note: has the horizontal rule (<hr> tag) been deprecated, or is my current code just wonky? I’m curious, yet too lazy to find out.

As promised, in other news: for the non-Auburn characters, work & class started back this week. Work went well; we have a new guy who seems like he’ll make it on our little funny farm. I don’t think I actually got to sit in the office for more than 5 minutes Thursday, and I ran around not one, but two, buildings - yay first week goodness. I’m fairly ambivalent over class. I think I have finally, finally reached acceptance of the fact that ‘holy crap, this is my last semester here’. The heavens opened, rain fell, thunder shouted it’s approval.

And finally, in other, other news: Ryan North has an awesome hat, but really needs a tan. For serious.

Housekeeping

It’s funny how things get lost in our closets; how our stuff keeps on piling up, until it obscures all the other stuff that makes up our past.

It’s also funny how this very same thing can (will, does) occur digitally. The computer I use right now is old, ugly, and clunky — but thanks to spare-part-gankage, still does what I need her to do. Back in the day I paid for a machine with Windows 98 installed and a “free upgrade to XP in the fall,” which gives you an idea of age. At the moment she’s running Ubuntu 7.04 + Windows XP, but the drives currently inside have been wiped clean time and time again. Nothing much stays the same, and I’m constantly redecorating. I don’t even bother with fullscale backup anymore, as the only files deemed important already exist in multiple forms (papers/projects/photographs all twice-and-thrice recorded). So over the years I’ve completely forgotten about a box in my closet partition on a secondary drive that holds all sorts of old junk.

Holy crap. The dates start around 2001. I found essays that were written when I was a painfully young high schooler; I find myself going “dude. I wrote that?”, in more tones than one. I found pictures I’ve forgotten I’d taken of people I’ve forgotten I’d known. And I found a folder (”websites-old”) that actually made me laugh.

So much of that folder is “wow-that’s-so-1990s”, but there’s still a lot that surprises me. Back in the day I kept various blogs, and I’d never heard of wordpress. MovableType was still some vague, nebulous unheard-of. Greymatter was new but too much to wrap my brain around. So I did everything by hand. A lot of my laughs and groans this afternoon come from looking at that code (proof that homeschoolers really DO have too much time on their hands?), but some of it’s pretty good. A lot of the css+gimp creativity makes me happy - not zengarden worthy by any standards, but better than I could do now.

Old closets are funny, but bittersweet. College has killed whatever writing talents I used to possess. Lack of necessity, and maybe desire too, has stifled whatever creativity I used to employ. Things I used to care about have been shoved to the side, and anything left has been flattened. Oh, there’s plenty in the dust that I’m glad to have abandoned — but a lot that I kind of miss.

I think what bothers me most is that I seem to have stopped thinking and only continue to exist out of habit.

Do they have a flag?

[[No flag, no planet!]]

Also, plug for True Places. Today’s leading source on all-things-[Sara+China]. Arrangements are going (ever-so-slowly) and I should be leaving in 4 weeks. Whether or not I take a loan out to cover my attention-deficiency remains to be seen. Ya, really.

Along the same lines, I’m still trying to decide what I’m doing after this coming December. Grad school is tempting, and I’ll get there eventually, but I’m not sure I want to immediately. I visited the school I like and the faculty liked me; coupled with a somewhat-uncommon, super-compatible research interest, I’m not seriously worried about landing there. The question is: do I want to do so in 2008, or 2010? When I’ll be… holy shit.

Bloody hell, I’m old.

It’s so easy when you know the rules

At Auburn, they occasionally make you register for random classes-that-aren’t (but may play one on TV). If you study abroad for a semester, you still register a 0 credit class at AU. Same goes for transient enrollment, etc. I got to do that at USA, for study abroad, and later honors, credit. Never got a chance to have a 0-credit class on my schedule since moving back here, though. Until now.

About damn time.

Postponed - in a sense.

It’s That Time Of Year Again (for us poor eternal students, anyhow…). I realized yesterday that it’s a sign of Sara-needs-to-get-the-fark-out-of-school when the department secretary takes an advising block off my account, without asking me whether I had already/will be in the future/would even possibly consider seeing an advisor — no paperwork, no signature, just a general idea of doing everything within her means to get this poor soul out. At this point, everyone and their brother knows that, um, you really don’t want to make Sara jump through one more hoop.

So anyhow. During my day of self-advisory-goodness, I came to a realization (which shan’t be reprinted here, as I apparently have attracted an audience under the age of 18). There is a single, solitary, isolated class required for graduation: which won’t be offered until Fall 2007. Happy. Joy. Yay. Hopes, dashing thereof.

Or… perhaps not. Reasons for all things, and all that — and an unexpectedly free Summer07 is strangely inviting. So for those of you that pray, if you would do so, I would be grateful. Otherwise, please keep me in your thoughts for a while.

Things have changed.

Off the bum-rack, for a while

So I’ve started classes here at Auburn: and if you get text messages in the Auburn area, you’ve probably heard me say YOUR CAMPUS SUXX0RS about three times this week. It still does, for the record. Not a fan, kthxbye. But yeah, taking as many hours as They will allow, in the hopes of leaving ASAP. Don’t ask what my major is. Please, just, um, don’t.

Also keeping occupied with tutoring: I feed that bug via seeing a highschool kid every day for an hour or so — he’s fresh out of Korea, been here about three weeks; I absolutely adore him. And no, I’m not projecting my entire summer class onto him at all, not one bit. And then on Wed. nights I help teach a TOEFL-prep class to a bunch of folks in Auburn, but that just started last night - so we’ll see how it goes.

Ok, but the main news is: SARA GOTS A JORB, YO. Finally. Even though some of the tutoring pays, it’s not much. I needs monay. So now I work here, apparently. Ha ha, look at you try to click ‘here’, yeah right. (what, it’s 6am, I’m easily amused…). But essentially, a company based in Auburn that works with sportsy-folk in the US, and sells them expensive tech stuff. If you are a Power That Be’s with a high school or college sports team around the nation, and you owe moneys, I will be the one calling you to be all, GIMME MONEYS, BIATCH. Yeah. That’s me. 8am. Wake up, pay up.

So yeah: totally not that great, but better than delivery or restaurant work — which apparently is all that hires part-time in Auburn this time of year. Trust me, I looked everywhere this week.

That’s it for this week’s news — those of you who pray; another big change is on the horizon, with any luck (luck?) there’ll be an update on it in a day or two. Keep it in mind.

And yes. I have yet to post any follow-ups about China. I realize this. It’s less a matter of laziness or procrastination, more a matter of… well, procrastination, but in the sense of putting-this-off-because-I’m-not-wanting-to-deal. It’s really, really strange to process and synthesise all of everything, and there’s some part of me that doesn’t want to finalise it by getting it on virtual paper. So there. (However, photos have been flickr’d. Go view to your little heart’s content.)