So last week was Thanksgiving (in case you were confused). I went home on Tuesday and enjoyed a relaxed, mature evening with my parents. By which I mean my mommy and I saw the American Girl movie on TV, and then I went and dressed my Samantha doll in her Christmas outfit. Then Wednesday I went to see Finding Neverland. As everyone who has recently spoken to my mother for more than a few minutes knows, "it was so good." Thursday was the aforementioned Thanksgiving. There was a lovely dusting of snow on the ground in the morning. I went to my grandmother's and ate food. In continuing my mature pattern of behavior, I also played a rousing game of Battleship, which I lost by one peg. One! It was tragic.

Friday was my brother's seventeenth birthday. He was scheduled to have a small gathering. If you have ever seen a bad teen movie, you will know that this is not how it actually happened. Crowds and crowds of people magically materialized in our basement, along with an amazingly strong stench of alcohol. As a passive observer, I was very much entertained by the evening's events. First there were my parents, staking out the entrances, trying to keep the new people out and the people who shouldn't be driving in. Then there were my brother and his buddy Kevin, repeatedly coming upstairs to talk to my parents far more than common sense would have suggested, apparently in an attempt to make sure they and their guests didn't get in trouble. Their discussion included much advanced logic, such as:

Jake: You know, a lot of people aren't drinking at all. A lot.
Mom: Well then the people who were drinking must have drank quite a lot.
Jake: How do you know that?
Mom: Those big bottles I took away were almost empty.
Jake: But how do you people drank a lot? There are a lot of people here, you know.

And then there was the several bits of relevant information we came to learn about the guests, in what I'm guessing was some sort of attempt to impress my parents(?):

This was repeated a couple of times: "Chris's mom is coming to get him. Chris is going to be our running back next year [insert exaggerated running motions here]. Gotta support our student athletes."

Or, my favorite: "Andy's spending the night. But he hasn't been drinking. And his dad's a heart surgeon."

I also believe that Kevin told my mother that he loved her at some point, but it's been a few days. That's all I can remember.

And now the weekend is over. In three weeks the semester will be over. I am determined that next semester will be glorious, wonderful, everything that a college semester should be, full of sunshine and bunny rabbits. None of this thinking and reading crap.

- posted by Darcey @ 1:18 PM

 
I now intend to graduate. You may have thought I intended this all along, but it was not so until I filled out a form just now. However, I am much less optimistic about having anything to do after fulfilling this intention. In the job search process, I am realizing how very little my ability to do a job or anything on my resume matters at all. The one and only thing that determines whether you get a job is your interviewing skills, a skill at which I fail so completely and utterly that it astounds most people. This in itself is not news to me. In high school in English senior year, we had to do a mock college interview with the teacher. Most people were excited about this because it would count as a big easy A that they had to do absolutely no work for. I got a D, far and away the lowest grade I can recall getting on anything in high school. What I don't understand is why it matters so much - showing off fake enthusiasm and schmoozing and making yourself look better than you are and being able to come up with articulate answers to stupid, stupid, meaningless questions.

Anyway, let's switch the subject. Did you know that "impact" is not supposed to be used as a verb? Apparently, among elite scholars in the English language, this is very wrong and has some sort of connotation with "bureaucratic jargon." This was not the connotation I had of the word at all, and so I used it several times in an English paper writing about how the author's experiences impacted the audience. I really don't know what other word I was supposed to use. "Affect" is the closest synonym the thesaurus could come up with, but that's not exactly what I mean. But anyway, now you know about the misuse of the word impact. Or maybe you already knew, but now I know too.

- posted by Darcey @ 10:46 AM

 
I voted. Voting takes a really long time. I can't tell you who I voted for, because then it wouldn't come true. I can't tell you which St. Louis propositions I voted for, because, um, well, I don't really remember.

Now that we have discussed big political events affecting the fate of the nation, let's focus on me, in thrilling, excruciating detail: I am going to go now to pick up my registration packet for my last semester of college. I enjoy picking out classes. I don't so much enjoy taking these classes, but picking them out is fun. There are so many things I would be interested in learning about, but then they always start telling me to write papers. I seem to bitten off a little more than I can chew this semester. It sure feels like I'm doing more work than usual and not even getting as good of grades. And then I look at the even more work I have at the end of semester - starting about a week and a half from now I seem to average one major project due per day until the end of the semester - and I just don't understand how that's going to happen.

So, anyway, I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen next semester. I want to pick out just the right classes and schedule to get the most out of the rest of college. There are so many things I would like to do, and so little time, but then if I try to do too much all that silly work nonsense gets in the way and none of it ends up being any fun. It seems like as a senior I should have the right to have a schedule something like classes two days a week and only in the afternoon. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be working out, no matter which classes I take. As far as picking out which classes, the really exciting thing is that my minors will be complete, and those are the things that are hard and take up time. I do still have to take a couple of marketing classes for my major, and while those are some of my most boring classes, they certainly are not hard or time-consuming. (Is there something wrong with considering my major to be the most boring classes I have? I could explain the many thoughts I have had about my major vs. other majors, but that's a separate story with its own set of thrilling details that I won't get into now because it obviously doesn't matter at this point anyway.) But I think the marketing classes are all I need to graduate. Maybe I can take them and then audit like four more classes. Can I do that? That would be perfect.

- posted by Darcey @ 1:20 PM

 
It's nearly 2 in the morning and I am sleepy and confused but I think I am finally finished with my English paper and so I print the 4 copies that I need for the workshop tomorrow. I turn off the computer and go to staple the papers when I realize that there aren't enough pages. I look through each copy and finally realize that somehow the first, second, third, and fifth pages have all printed, but not the fourth. So sleepy, so confused.

- posted by Darcey @ 1:46 AM