Back in the Day

I journeyed home to Vermont this weekend. Vermont is a gloriously beautiful place. Maybe I'm just biased because I grew up here, but even the cows are cute. Although technically cows look the same anywhere...but still. It's beautiful here. Speaking of growing up, I decided to look through old photo albums. As a result, you get to look at old pictures.

I was born in New York, actually. (Before you get nervous, I can assure you that I support the Red Sox, not the Yankees.) But then I moved to Williston, VT when I looked like this:


We spent a little while there, and I gained a love for overalls.


Based on the evidence, I'd say that I had a good time at age 2 and a half. I don't actually know, because I don't remember.


Then we moved to Jericho, where the lawn was bigger and the tutus were more available.


Sooner or later, a brother or two appeared on the scene.



(I tried to get Christopher to like music too. I guess it didn't work out.)

1999 (I was 10) was a big year for me.

I built snowmen on the lawn:


I went to the King's College Chapel in Cambridge:


Aaaaaaaaand...I, uh, met Howard Dean.


Weird, huh?

Maybe this type of thing doesn't interest you at all. But I love, love, love looking at old pictures and remembering all the things that would remain forgotten if I didn't. They're not the best quality pictures, they're not brilliantly composed, and you'd never find them in a magazine, but they do tell stories, and they're important because of that.

Especially now that we're slightly older, and the days of playing in the sandbox are over.

SUMMER.

Sooo...I'm sorry, world, for bein' all weepy and everything the past few days. I promise to get back to life as normal in the near future while the world proceeds to shift a little under my feet. (I thought that was figurative, but given the recent natural disasters...maybe it was literal. Heck, VT just had a tornado warning.) Life has to get back to normal, because it's officially summer now and that means it's time to do sweet summer things, including but not limited to the following:

-Going to the beach (aka "Avoiding Sunburn 101")
I'm Irish-Norwegian. This is no small feat.

-Eating ice cream
Although who says you can't eat it all year round?

-Getting outside work done
One summer, I painted a house. What should I do this year...?

-Voyaging
At some point in the next three months, a reunion is a must.

-Wearing summer clothes
Remember the green shorts? They're going to appear soon.

-Increasing photo quality
Summer goal: take sweeter pictures, maybe update camera once job is in place.

-Eat grilled food...no sub-point necessary.

-Oh yeah. And find a real job. That's part of the list too.

Last summer was good fun, even though I was mostly cleaning Gordon. We even went to DC, which was definitely part of the top 5 highlights of the season. I expect this summer to be equally as great. I mean, how could it be any less - the last installment of Harry Potter is hitting movie theaters in July!

Minor Changes

Since Saturday, I have packed all of my stuff in my car not quite single-handedly, unpacked about half of it, moved into another building sans kitchen, private bathroom, and apartmentmates (except for Lauren - I'm glad she's here!), and went back to eating cafeteria food. This is a weird feeling. One day I will move to actual housing....I hope....

Now on to finding a real job. If anyone - A-N-Y-O-N-E - knows of a job for an entry-level music teacher, office person, or anything else, I'd love to talk to said anyone. This is stressful.

On a lighter note, I now have time to practice again. This is a good thing, because I need to keep up my skillz. Now I just need motivation.

Reflection

Graduation has a funny way of making you feel oddly sentimental at strange times. Particularly when you're exhausted due to the fact that you're trying so hard to hold on to all the moments that would be lost if you actually went to sleep. It's happy, to be sure - I mean, why wouldn't you celebrate completing four years of hard work? (Yes, I realize that "hard" is a very relative term. I fully expect further schooling to be increasingly difficult.)

But somewhere, deep down, there's a very real sorrow that goes along with it. Something continually crying, Don't let this be the end...please...I don't know what comes next. I don't want to let this time go yet. I'm not ready. I don't want to separate from the dear friends that have become as tightly knit as a little family.

It's weird; it's a goal you work toward for more than 16 years of your life. And all of a sudden, it's all over. You don't have the familiarity of academia to look forward to after a three-month break. It's not scary; we serve a God bigger than uncertainty. But it is heart-wrenching, and leads to occasional unexpected tears.

I'm so thankful for the time I've spent here. I'm thankful for the learning, for the music, for the life lessons, for the joys and the sadness, for shared experiences, for the accomplishments and the failures, and most of all for the relationships. I couldn't have asked for a better college experience, and I have the most wonderful friends I could possibly imagine.


"I thank my God every time I remember you. In all my prayers for all of you, I always pray with joy because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now, being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus...And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and my be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ - to the glory and praise of God."

Caution: blog design is currently being reevaluated. Changes may be imminent.

A Timeline

Since I've been commenting on the horrors of young pop stars and their incompetence in terms of music, I thought we should do a comparison.

Here's Justin Bieber. If you have to listen to it, only listen to a few seconds worth. As long as you listen long enough to note the amount of Autotune employed. (It's disgusting. Almost as bad as Rebecca Black.)



Now, we're going to go back in time to the 90s.



The difference between Autotune and non-Autotune ALMOST makes Aaron Carter sound legit. Almost.

Let's go back even further.



Definitely legit! Are we seeing a trend yet?

And...even further.



This is a pretty simple piece until you realize that Mozart wrote it at age 8.



I think it's safe to say that musical taste has disintegrated over the course of time. If that's not a strong argument for the legitimacy of classical music, I'm not sure what is.

Turkey Burgers of Awesome

Be forewarned: this is not for the faint of heart or the vegetarian, because you have to both eat meat and handle it raw with your hands. However, if you are not a coward and you are an omnivorous antipescetarian like I am, or even if you're just a carnivore, it's well worth the grossness.

I'm going to have to rewind a little bit here. I've babysat for this one family in the area since last summer. (I had some adventures babysitting which have been logged here somewhere. I don't feel like going to find them now, but they're there.) The three kids are really cute - all redheads - and they all really like hamburgers.

I don't really know how to cook hamburgers minus a grill.

So I improvised. I opened the ground beef, shaped it into patties, put some olive oil in a frying pan, and fried the burgers until they were no longer very pink in the middle. They turned out ok, but they were kinda bland. The next time, I put salt and pepper on them, and they were only slightly improved.

This went on for the rest of the year...UNTIL THIS WEEK. I made a discovery. So here you go: how to make awesome turkey burgers (though it would probably work with beef too. We only had turkey this time around.)

-In a bowl, pour in some amount of shredded cheese. I don't use recipes, so I don't have specific amounts. Sorry.

-On top of the cheese, throw in some spices. I used Italian seasoning, garlic salt, thyme, basil, poultry seasoning, salt, and pepper.

-Open your ground meat and dump it in the bowl along with the cheese and spices. Mush it all together with your hands.

-Make patties that look slightly larger than the burgers you want to end up eating, since they shrink in the pan.

-Pour a little olive oil into a frying pan and turn it to medium high heat. Once the oil crackles when sprinkled with water, it's hot enough. Put the burgers in the pan.

-Fry until they look done on one side, then flip them. When they're no longer pink in the middle, they're done.

So they're not traditional burgers, and they're not something you'd find in a restaurant, and I still don't know what the official kosher way to cook a burger is. That's just what I did, and they turned out pretty well. You should try it and report back here to say if they met your expectations or not.

The other day I woke up to my alarm clock radio saying, "Darkening, darkening..."


And immediately, my half-asleep brain added, "YEAH!!!"


Rebecca Black, infiltrating my dreams is just too much. Please remove yourself from them immediately, and while you're at it, please take with you "Friday," which is currently stuck in my head thanks to Glee.




[If you haven't seen this, you may live under a rock. It may be better for your sanity if you stay there.]

Mislead.

Poo.



This evening I spontaneously decided to respond to this job ad where you write for a company that publishes articles online and you - the author - get paid for it. It was advertised as, "Blogger: part time, work from home." Sounds pretty ideal, if you ask me. Who wouldn't like to get paid for writing stuff he or she wanted to write about?

One of the possible topics was "Boston Easy Meals," and I thought to myself, "Behold! Thou dost enjoy feasting upon simple fare. Thou shouldst aspire to such greatness and glory! Thou shouldst put pen to paper and describe such a topic in great detail, as doing so wouldst aid thee in thy future."

Maybe I didn't think in quite such Shakespearian language.

But I would have liked to.

I digress.

I got almost all the way through the (fairly simple - why am I complaining?) application process until it asked for a writing sample. That seemed easy enough. I opened up a Word document, wrote approximately 200 - 300 words to meet the requirement, and went to go post it only to find the following directions:

"Please submit a writing sample here. No more than 300 words. No use of first person."

[Stunned (keyboard) silence here. My entire article is solidly in first person.]




So much for that. I thought it was pretty decent writing, too.

LA FIN.

WHOOOOOOA Blogger died yesterday. Not cool. Mostly because it took with it all the most recent posts from all the blogs I read via Google Reader (that thing is the bomb, you know...) and has been slowly replacing them all day today. Thus, every time I check Google Reader - a pretty frequent occurrence - I am misled to believe that I have a whole bunch of new things to read, and really, I have none. How am I supposed to keep up on the blogging world?!?

[Overreacting a bit there, don't you think? Oh well. Life must go on.]

So I'm done with student teaching now. Done DONE DONE! The elementary kids are so cute. One girl gave me a super cool homemade card and hugged me a total of four times.


The rest of them signed a big card, and a lot of them wrote funny things...



(Names have been removed to preserve anonymity. You know. Because the school might come and assassinate me.)

I felt so loved.

After school, I went to the mall with The Apartmentmates to celebrate and get some new summer clothes. I decided that having had all my current clothes for several years, it's probably time to update and upgrade the wardrobe. I got a skirt, a hat, a shirt, a dress, and a necklace or two.


Here is my shameless plug for my new favorite store. I used to think that Forever 21 was totally overwhelming, but I recently discovered that it's more like a slightly-more-organized T.J. Maxx or Marshalls or something. In short, if you have the time to go digging, you'll probably end up in the dressing room with a few rounds ("No more than six, PLEASE!") of articles of clothing to try on. As stated above: new. favorite. store. Moral: go shop there, and if you're willing to sift, it'll be well worth the time, provided you want vintage-y clothes.

Now I'm sitting here on my bed with my bowl of dip and a bag of carrots...


...feeling (almost) awfully footloose and fancy free, wearing a lacy dress, and blogging in between bouts of playing(?) clarinet...


...amidst the disaster zone that I currently call my room.


By this time next week, it'll all have to be packed up. But for right now, I'm going to enjoy the freedom of no more paperwork while I block out the fact that I'm going to miss those little buggers.

Final things

Today is my last - repeat, LAST - day of student teaching in the middle/high school. Here is where you say, WHAT?!? Jillian, you only started student teaching 5 minutes ago! How can you be done already?!?

Ok, I get it...so maybe you're not saying that. But I am. How does stuff like this go by so fast? And I'm not just talking a period of 15 weeks or so, people. I'm talking about bigger things, like all of college. I feel like it started last year, and all of a sudden I'm almost done. Looking back on it all, I wish I had savored more of what I'm sure I then considered boring and mundane. Certain things stick out in my memory, to be sure: music major parties, late night impromptu hymn-sings in practice rooms (don't judge, now...), various trips to Boston, orchestra concerts, glorious summers filled with ice cream and adventures, that one time we got stranded at the T station because someone's car battery died and then we got lost on the way home...

I've always thought of myself as someone who is good with change. Not much phases me, and I'm usually pretty happy no matter where I am or who I'm surrounded by. But somehow this is different, bigger than other changes. Leaving college isn't like leaving home at the end of high school; nothing is going to remain the same after we're all gone, because, well, we're all gone. We have to pretend to be grown up and responsible, and the constant peer support system won't be quite so tangible anymore. Maybe I'm overanalyzing. It's not like I'm going to become some new and improved version of myself simply by walking across a platform and getting handed an empty folder by some guy with a lot of academic power. But maybe I'm not. I feel rather naive and unprepared for life post-academia. I've been a student for 16 years straight, and anything before that surpasses my memory span.

I'm not sure what my point is here. Maybe it's just that I'm finding out - like everyone does - that we can't live like Peter Pan forever, much as some of us might like. I'm not scared. I guess this is it: life is going to get a lot...bigger in the next few weeks, and that expansion process comes with some odd mix of joy, apprehension, and excitement, and will be, above all else, seriously bittersweet.

Paperwork!

I finished my secondary evidence binder today. My cooperating teacher decided to take a picture.

I should have posted this long ago, but I forgot. I successfully beat the chapel requirement system.



[insert evil laugh here.]