pahkthecah

08:40 pm: The Albums that got me Through 08
These were my absolute favorite albums of 2008 (in no order):

1. Jack's Mannequin - The Glass Passenger
Jack's Mannequin's first album, Everything in Transit, is my favorite album of all time and I knew it would be tough to follow. However, the Glass Passenger is hauntingly amazing, and starts off poppy and light, and then dives deep down where Andrew sings about his battle with cancer. It gives me chills, I can't believe it's just as amazing as the first album
Standout tracks:
Crashin', Spinning, Hammers and Strings (A Lullaby), Caves
2. Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
I stalk Vampire Weekend. Seriously. I check about every 2 weeks to see if they have any new singles that have leaked on to the internet and then download and listen to them on repeat. This album is so fun and light and reminds me of summer. I don't think I could ever get sick of it.
Standout tracks:
Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa, M79, Oxford Comma, A-Punk
3. Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
Girl Talk is now the only thing I listen to when I run. This album gets me PUMPED UP like no other. It also keeps me occupied while I'm running trying to figure out what songs he's sampled in each mix. AMAZING.
Standout tracks:
Just listen to the whole thing
4. Conor Oberst - Conor Oberst
Sausalito was the soundtrack to my summer. I found out he was playing in Northampton one night and managed to get tickets half an hour before the show started. Conor's lyrics are simply amazing and I'm digging this whole folk music thing right now.
Standout tracks:
Sausalito, Danny Callahan, Moab, I Don't Wanna Die in a Hospital
5. The Killers - Day and Age
This album got a lot of criticism from...critics but I absolutely LOVE it. Amazing amazing reminds me why I love the Killers so much. This is the kind of album you need to blast in your car and sing along to, because it's just that good.
Standout tracks:
Human, Spaceman, This is Your Life, Dustland Fairytale

Honorable Mentions:
MGMT - Oracular Spectacular, Black Kids - Partie Traumatic, Kings of Leon - Only the Night, Okkervil River - The Stand Ins, Tokyo Police Club - Elephant Shell, Lykke Li - Youth Novels

09:39 pm: If I had the choice again, would I work 40 hrs over my October Break? Absolutely.

Am I doing it again over Thanksgiving Break? Absolutely.

07:49 pm: Today I ATE SO MUCH I can't even believe it.

Apparently, I was starving because yesterday I worked from 4am-4pm, and though I had a few Swiss pastries along the way, it was not enough to fill me up. I was so tired that by the time I got home, I just went straight to bed and didn't eat anything. Today I woke up and worked 5-8am still eating nothing and dying of starvation all morning.

Today was my little cousin's baptism and after there was a huuuge catered party. In the span of 3 hours, I ate:

2 hot dogs
1 bag of chips
1 roll
1 lobster
1 grilled chicken breast
2 cookies
1 piece of cake
ice cream

I wasn't even disgustingly full. Just satisfied.
Goodbye all the weight that I've worked so hard to lose this summer.
It was almost worth it.

06:49 am: I feel like a deadbeat dad right now.

I got tickets to Futures at Fenway for my birthday and I just found out I can't go because I have a 12 hour work day to fill in for everyone that's on vacation and I can't miss it.

Ughhhh

06:47 pm: They are going to teach me how to bake this winter and I am ridiculously excited.

06:52 am: I have to get up at 2:30am to be outta here by 3:30am tomorrow for work.

Most people my age are out partying till then.

I am crying just thinking about it.

I'm supposed to go watch the Red Sox/Yankees game at the Woburn Showcase Cinema today and you know that's not going to get out until around midnight.

And then tomorrow I have to work from 4am-4pm (COME TO THE ANDOVER FARMER'S MARKET AT 97 MAIN ST FROM 12:30 TO 3:30 AND VISIT ME!).

Maybe I should go by some Red Bull. I'm not sure what to do.

02:56 pm: Boys on the Docks
It's so hard being a girl, and it has never been more apparent to me than when I'm making deliveries at Whole Foods. The loading docks at Whole Foods are, sadly, no place for young women. When I'm there making deliveries, I get ignored, berated, belittled, and talked to like I'm 5 years old.
The one good part is that if I smile and bat my eyelashes a little bit, the guys there will pretty much do anything for me: carry boxes to my car, open doors, do the deliveries FOR me, etc.

I want to scream out: JUST BECAUSE I'M A GIRL DOESN'T MEAN I'M WEAK AND PITIFUL!!!

05:20 pm: Iced Coffee
Today I had iced coffee for the first time.
I did not like it.

08:43 am: Even Spammers Need a Day Off
One night, toward the end of Spring Break in March, I started to get a few dozen emails from Mailer-Daemon telling me that my message to wherever had failed. I never sent these messages and freaked out. I changed my password immediately and emailed the web admin at Mt. Holyoke to ask what was wrong. He wrote back and told me that someone was forging my email address to send out spam, and there was nothing I could do about it until he got caught.

The spammer picked up momentum and I started getting upwards of 8000 of these messages a day. This is when I found my spam filter and made over 20 new "rules" to automatically delete anything that came from Mailer Daemon, Postmaster, Web Delivery System, etc. Right now they're set pretty high, but I still get probably 50 emails a day of just plain gibberish and things I wouldn't be able to filter out. I researched this phenomenon online and found out it happened to a whole bunch of people, and usually only lasted a week or so until the spammer moved on to different email addresses, or was caught.

Three months later, this is still happening to me. The part I find funniest is that I NEVER get any of these emails on Sunday! Does the spammer need to take the day off and go to church? I always get excited and think that the spamming is finally over, but then he goes into overtime on Monday morning.

09:45 pm: Sure Thang
I made myself a list of all the mistakes I made in my job search this summer, just to keep for myself for future reference. This was my favorite one:

1. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Seriously. Just because you worked somewhere last summer and your cousin was the boss and told you at Thanksgiving that you had a 99% chance of coming back, doesn’t mean you should count out that 1%. Even if it does sound like a sure thang, apply to other places anyway. Especially when you’re an economics major and wrote two papers about the downturn of the business cycle, got A’s on both of them, and then thought that nothing you wrote about applied to you.

09:01 pm: Fate?
Today I went to Fabric Place to pick the fabric for the border on my housewife quilt/wall hanging. When I first started to embroider these ladies in black on pure white muslin, I always imagined having a black and white polka dot border to go around it.
When I walked into the store, literally the first piece of fabric I saw was the black and white polka dot pattern that I have been thinking about for weeks! My mother, who was with me at the time, was shocked that I had found what I was looking for so quickly, especially in a place with SO. MUCH. FABRIC.
The best part though, was when I turned around, I was faced with a huge poster announcing a BLACK AND WHITE CONTEST! It encouraged customers to create something, anything using only black and white! My housewives are absolutely perfect for this contest! Although my quilt/wall hanging will never be done in time for the July 1st deadline, I think I'm going to trace my favorite lady (baking cookies!) and make that into a quick and simple pillow. First prize is a sewing machine, and the 2 runners up both receive gift cards to Fabric Place! I am SUPER EXCITED about this.

08:51 pm: Clearly I Watch Too Much Flavor Flav...
My grandmother is old and sick, and no longer has a car (since it's mine), so someone usually does her grocery shopping for her. Today, she asked my dad and I to do it. We were handed a list of extremely specific items (Orange Juice with no acid, chicken legs--not by Purdue, low sodium soup, green bananas, 1/2 pound seafood salad etc.) and were sent to a random Stop-and-Shop in Peabody that neither of us had ever been to. Immediately, it reminded me of a reality TV show game, in which we were given a list with crazy items on it, sent to a random store, and had to rush around and get the food as fast as possible to beat the other teams and win the challenge. My dad thought that was hilarious and I genuinely had fun grocery shopping for the first time in my life. I think we won the challenge, my grandmother had no complaints about the food we brought back to her! :-)

07:15 am: Smart Dream
I had a dream last night that I was getting married. I knew the guy in the dream, but I have no idea who he was when I woke up. Anyway, it was really weird. There were a bunch of people our age who wanted to get married and we met at Beebe School and some teacher took us to the place. It was weird because it was just like a photography place where we were going to get our pictures taken and then get married like it was no big deal. Anyway, while my husband-to-be was in getting his solo photos taken, I was sitting there and trying to think of what the heck love was. I had absolutely no idea and that's how I knew that I wasn't ready to be married.
I don't know what happened next because I woke up, but man, what a smart dream!

08:23 pm: Amazing Dinner
Tonight I made myself the best all American dinner!

I had a grilled cheese sandwich (with extra cheese), 2 pickles, a handful of tortilla chips (I really would have liked Fritos but all we had was tortilla chips), and to top it off, a V8 to drink. It was SO delicious.

I also made myself such a good salad the past two days: extremely simple with that pre cut lettuce with carrots and radishes in it, a handful of grape tomatoes, a sprinkling of cheddar cheese, Ranch dressing, and topping it off with a shake or two of bacon bits.

College makes you eat all sorts of gross crap that you would never eat in any other circumstances, I decided. The unripe fruits (esp. the bananas), the potatoes and eggs from a box, the dry chicken, the coconut covered turkey (blahh), and I think that once you get away from that, EVERYTHING tastes extra delicious.

Anyway this whole eating good food and working out at the gym is going real good for me.

08:29 am: Million Dollar Idea
Someone needs to design a "library book queue" like the kind of queue there is for Netflix. You could log into your library account, browse the card catalog, and then when you see a book you like, you add it to your "queue". When your book is scanned in to be checked out, it is automatically deleted from your list. The list could be really easy to print out and already contain all the book call numbers so you don't have to search around for those little scrap pieces of paper and golf pencils to write them down.

This way, if you hear about a book you want to read, you can go and add it to your queue and not have to stand inside the library for 20 min trying to think of the name of that book that you wanted to read.

09:49 pm: End of the Year....
I don't know what it is, but in spite of this amazing 80 degree weather we've been having, I've put myself in homework overdrive.
Last weekend my roommate was in Boston and I managed to crank out a 6 page German paper on the Inflation of 1923.
This weekend I finally finished my 8 page (1.5 spaced, 1 inch margins! That's more like 10 pages!!) economics research paper on the effects of globalization in India. I still managed to have a super fun weekend. On Friday night, one of my friends here performed on my radio show! It was a little stressful getting all the in studio equipment set up, and we couldn't get it loud enough so a ton of people were calling in and complaining. It was my first experience interviewing someone on air and it was hard to think up questions on the spot, but I think it went really well and she was an amazing performer as well as interviewee! I think our show had record listening attendence...nerve wracking!!
On Saturday, my friends and I went to this place called the Sugar Shack in North Hadley. It was amazing! It was a little farm and there was this log cabin place where you could go to eat. I got two huge pancakes, two scrambled eggs straight out of the backyard, and 2 thickkk slices of bacon for only $6! Most delicious meal of my life. We came back, did hardcore work all day, and then last night went to our favorite ice cream stand. It's just on the side of the road on Rt. 47 and run by this adorable old couple. They serve classic Soft Serve ice cream with unlimited free toppings. After that, we went to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall at the movie theater across the street.
With those two huge papers out of the way and such an awesome weekend, I feel so much better about the end of school. My last day of classes is on May 6th. Until then all I have left to do is a 40 minute German presentation on the University of Freiburg with two girls who are in German 101 (kill me now please), a take home economics final, and general class assigned reading. Then I have two finals (calc and macrotheory...oh my god) and I'm outta here Saturday May 10. To really make my life complete, all I need now is a job!!

Also I'm turning 20 on Wednesday--AHHH!!

10:31 am: How Elvis Got Me Through Spring Semester
Elvis Presley got me through the spring semester. A lot of people might laugh, but it's true. It all started over Christmas break, when I got bored and started watching YouTube videos. I came across Return to Sender by Elvis Presley. I was totally shocked at how much fun the song was, how full of life he was, and how good he looked! I saw it came from the movie "Girls! Girls! Girls!" which I added to my Netflix queue and quickly forget about.


Sometime during February, "Girls! Girls! Girls!" arrived in my mailbox and I decided to give it a shot. Quickly, I fell in love with Elvis and the way he was portrayed in his movies, as the absolute figure of masculinity, who always comes out on top, and always gets the girl with a few obstacles along the way. I did some research and found out that Elvis made 31 movies in his lifetime. They started out as serious acting roles based on novels, but when producers saw how much money Elvis was bringing in, they were making as many as 3 per year, in order to make a quick buck. The result is a total mixed bag of films. They range from the absolutely fantastic, like Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii, and GI Blues, to ones people can barely sit through, like Harum Scarum (Elvis is kidnapped by terrorists in Pakistan and can't go back to America unless he assassinates the king, whose daughter he is in love with), and Kissin' Cousins (Elvis plays a dual role as an army solider and his hillbilly lookalike).

It didn't make a difference to me; I added all of these to my Netflix. No matter how tough my work load got, or how much I had to do, knowing that I had an Elvis movie waiting in my mailbox was the ultimate escape. It might sound corny, but it is so much fun to watch teen movies from the 60s and see Elvis sing to pretty girls, fight bad guys, and do absolutely ridiculous things like fly a helicopter, catch a 60 pound marlin, and cure a young girl's autism.

Now there are only 9 more Elvis movies that I haven't seen and it will seriously be so sad when I'm all done.

These films are a great look into the 60s, with all the cute clothes, crazy fads, and utmost chivalry. By watching them, I can totally understand what the whole "Elvis Craze" was about.

RIP Elvis, and thank you for getting me through the spring semester

09:25 pm: Crazy Dream
I had a dream last night that Mt. Holyoke was inside of Melrose High School and I was sitting in my macroeconomics class when I remembered there was an MHS alumni basketball game that I REALLY wanted to go to. It was 1:30 and I was bored in class, so I left. I went to the alumni game and it was soo fun. I saw a million people I hadn't seen in years and we took soo many pictures. I only stayed for 10 minutes and then decided I should get back to class. When I got back, the room was EMPTY. I looked at the clock and it was only 1:40, so I knew that class wasn't over since it goes until 2:30. I called my friend Amber who is in the class and she had a message for me pre-recorded on her voicemail that was like "LIZZZ! THIS IS THE MOST FUN FIELD TRIP EVER! We are at a farm harvesting crops by using old fashioned tools and soon we're going to switch to modern stuff so we can see how an increase in technology increases productivity!!"
I was SO upset that I missed the only field trip ever in economics.



Also, I AM GOING TO OPENING DAY ON TUESDAY AND I AM SO SO SO EXCITED!!!!!!!!!

02:22 pm: I'm sitting here writing an econ paper and I can't write for more than a few minutes without getting ADD and surfing the internet, so I thought I'd post here. It's weird because reading entries from a year ago, all I talked about was how much I HATED economics and now it's my major. Who would have ever thought? I think part of my problem last year was I was taking microeconomics with a bad professor. A year later I have 3 macroeconomics classes under my belt and I love them! What an interesting time it is to learn about the economy when our country is most likely headed into a recession (this is what my paper is about).

Today we chose hall/room choosing lottery numbers for housing next year. I was trying to remember what numbers I had last year (I know they were in the 300s and I ended up in kind of a crappy dorm) and I was mad that I didn't write them down anywhere, just for future reference. I swear to God I chose like the EXACT SAME NUMBERS this year: 342 for hall, 318 for room. I definitely won't get to live on a nice dorm on the green, but hopefully I'll be able to get a single somewhere.

There's a rugby game going on in the field near my dorm and I can hear the screaming out my window which is kinda exciting. I can't believe how freezing it is today (about 20 with wind chill) when the sky is so blue and the sun is so bright. Ok, I probably should get back to this paper now! Only 2 more pages to go, yay.

03:17 pm: Story of My Life
Today I met with the heads of both the German and the Economics department in order to get all my forms signed for study abroad. As with everything, it wasn't easy. I got two different opinions on my life from both of them:

Head of the German Dept: Oh! You're double majoring in German and Economics? What a wonderful combination! There is so much you can do with the two of those combined either in the United States or in Germany! It will be super exciting to be able to study Economics in Germany!

5 minutes later, Head of the Economics Dept: Oh, you're double majoring? What do you want to do with your life? Oh, you want to go into business? You REALLY don't need to double major. What are you thinking? You don't even need Economics OR German to go into business. You really should choose one or the other.