Oh, why... hello.
Are you still here?!
Are you still reading this?
I'm not... not really. This place is a fond memory. Things have changed a lot since my last post.
I'm not engaged to Chris anymore; in fact, we barely know each other now... which is mainly my fault.
I left here because of some drama that happened with a girl way back... more than two years ago. But Blogger was my first blogging love. I do miss it, but LiveJournal has provided me with a lot more options as I'm more of a social blogger than anything else. But so much has changed, and if you're reading this...
I have a wonderful life now. I graduated with a Bachelor's of Arts in Government from NMSU. I received a graduate assistantship in the government department at NMSU, and also work at Pier 1 Imports. I've met someone amazing, and his name is Joe. I am much more pleased to announce this time that I'm getting married... as you'll notice, last time I was engaged it was a footnote. I'm going to China in November for Model UN. And, though my cat has always been a brat, she's one of the loves of my life.
Overall... things are absolutely wonderful.
This is how I feel about God and what He says in the Bible.
Lame update
I'm going to introduce you all... to my fabulous kitten, Rory! (Or Rory Dory, short for Aurora Fedora.)
And in other news- and I really ought to have posted this a while ago, but I'm a bum- Chris and I are now engaged! This happened April 21. Yay us!
Extremely Photo-Intensive NYC Post: Part 1!
Soooo, I am shame-faced. All you poor, poor semi-loyal blog readers have been left in the dark for the last two to three weeks of my awesome trip and a couple of the things that have happened after it. So, I'll give you a photo account of what happened in NYC! And if I can remember stuff that happened in between, I'll let you know. =D
Alright, so, we had an easy flight or two. We had our flights during normal times, and had an opportunity to sit wherever we wanted on one of the planes. On the second plane (from Atlanta to JFK), we got in trouble because SOMEONE (Lauren, whom I was sitting next to) was talking so loudly. ;) Anyway, a couple pictures from that...
Dave and Mohammad reading on the airplane.
NO SMOKING! (That means YOU.)
So, we got to JFK, which seemed really small. We had to wait forever for our luggage (typical!). Then we took this crazy Super Shuttle to our hotel. It was slightly scary because we were in a very shady-looking neighborhood in Brooklyn. However, our hotel was actually pretty nice once we got inside. Here's us while we were waiting to get checked in:
(Notice me with my yellow wallet in hand? Yeah, I paid for one room. That was friggin' expensive.)
We stayed up quite late that night watching TV, settling in, and going to McDonald's for some extremely late-night dinner. The next day, we got up and decided to go to the aquarium, see Coney Island, and go to an AWESOME poetry slam. So, let's see here...
This is down in our first subway station (at least as a team). We spent much time trying to figure out where the hell we were going. First impression of the subway: dirty, gross, and why would anyone want to take them? My final impression was that they were still dirty and gross, but I decided they were pretty convenient.
We had one car all to ourselves by the time we were nearing Coney Island, where the Aquarium was. Turns out that Coney Island is the end of the line for the N train. (We learned this very well by the end of the night.)
Right outside of the Aquarium. Dave was being a very brave street-crosser this day. This is only a moment before he stepped out onto the street when we didn't have the go-ahead from the signal.
This is a very cool picture from the jellyfish exhibit that Lauren took. I believe it's Jen, Dave, and Chris.
So after we were done at the Aquarium (Lauren took like a million pictures, but I'm not posting them), we went outside, and lo and behold, there was the beach! With a boardwalk and everything. We got this lovely retired-looking couple to take pictures of us. They thought we were a high school group! Aww, how cute.
Here's the team! Not very close-in, so I won't bother telling you who's who just yet. But just look at where we were! That's the OCEAN behind us!
It was beautiful. A bit cold, but beautiful nonetheless. Tried calling friends and family to gloat. "I'm at the ocean. Wish you were here! Well, maybe not! Hah!" But no one was answering.
Dave was brave out on the rocks.
Quite a good picture of Jen, if I do say so myself!
Sooo, after a long metro ride back to the hotel, we hung out for a while until the others got back (we had stopped at Nathan's, the Home of the International Hot Dog Eating Contest, and they were still there, but Mohammad had to get back to pray before sundown). Then came time to go to Manhattan (ee!) for a poetry slam. I had my doubts at first- I'm not really into poetry. Well, not mostly. And it also took us a really long time to walk there. The people who had done this before kind of forgot where we were going. I honestly couldn't take you there myself if I tried- we went through what felt like a labyrinth of streets, all over Manhattan. Anyway, we finally got there...
The sign over the tiny door. As you can tell, it was named the "Nuyorican".
We sat in the balcony and were lords over all. There was some pretty awesome lighting (you can't see any of the actual fixtures here, but it would have made any of you theatre tech geeks go crazy). The place was jam-packed, and the poets were set to match- all were really awesome. My favorite was
this guy named Chad. Very awesome. We had a cool time up in the loft area, too. Now, since I know my Mom and her friends are reading this now, and they've likely read my earlier posts, I hope this won't be too much of a surprise. But I'm just saying, now it's out in the open, so let's not kid ourselves- I drink. The older people went to the bar and offered to get us each some drinks. So I got what is called "Red Stripe," which is a Jamaican beer. I generally don't like beer, but this was some pretty nice stuff. Anyway, by the end of the slam, this poet named "Shadowcat" won. We left the Nuyorican in high spirits (not because of the alcohol, but because of the inspiring poetry). We went out and got some "Hal-al" pizza, which was interesting. From this, we got Chris's fabulous quote of, "I don't think I've ever seen falafel quite this green before."
On our way home, we mistakenly took the N train, which was completely wrong. We ended up out on Coney Island, where as I said earlier, is the end of the line. We had to wait half an hour for them to clean the cars and such. All in all, it took us an hour and a half to get back to our hotel. Here's my favorite picture of that adventure:
Daniel fell asleep. =D
SoooOOOOoooo...
The next day we went to TIMES SQUARE! It was sooo awesome. Here's my first picture of the place:
I could give you a blow-by-blow of all the things we saw and walked by, but it's really not enough to worry about posting. We got bargain tickets for the Comic Strip LIVE!, which is apparently where Jerry Seinfeld got his start. More about that momentarily. We spent a lot of that day just walking all over the area south of Central Park, and some of us ended up at the mall at the southwest corner of Central Square for some shopping, while others went to a sushi place. We went into Hugo Boss and saw thousand-dollar t-shirts. It was insane!! I was in the market for something to wear out to a club that night. We ended up at J.Crew, which actually had a fairly nice halter-top thing, so I got that.
Then we rushed out and walked past Central Square and the Plaza Hotel (there were a bunch of limosines in front!) to get to the metro so we could go to the comedy club. We later found out that the rest of our group was going to be a little late, which was kind of frustrating, so we went and got some food (which wasn't very good!). Juliana, Lauren, Amanda, and I made it to the Comic Strip by ourselves, though. Thinking back on it, I'm actually pretty astonished we were able to trek all that way by ourselves! A bunch of NYC newbies! And then we got there...
Recognize that brick wall!?!?! You bet you do! That's the wall from Seinfeld. The Comic Strip is where he got his start. We had some fun there- there were some people from Santa Fe up in the front, and it was pretty cool to be able to tell them that we were also from New Mexico. The comics were pretty good, but none stood out that night.
The rest of the night was also pretty exciting. We found our way down to the NYU area, which was pretty bohemian-chic. I changed into different clothing because we were trying to find a club to go dancing at. Long story short, we ended up at this hookah bar. It was very, very interesting. I'd never smoked hookah before, I'd never had Grey Goose vodka before, and I'd never been out dancing in public- not like that. Welllll, yeah, like I said. I tried all this new stuff, and I actually had a fabulous time dancing and laughing with all my friends. This guy came up to me and danced with me and kissed me... and I really didn't like that. It kind of tarnished the rest of my night. But I still managed to have some fun. Daniel was, well, pretty drunk. (Not that I was completely sober myself...) I guess I can't go into details here because it just wouldn't be kosher. But it was hilarious!! Great times!
Jen, Marcia, Daniel, Lauren, me, and Chris S.
The whole deal with that guy kissing me at the hookah bar bothered me quite a bit, and I tried calling Chris several times when we got back to the hotel. He didn't answer, so I decided to call him in the morning... which was rough on my nerves all night. I wasn't sure how to tell him, and I'd have to seriously worry about it in the morning. When I did talk to him Sunday morning... he was fine with it. In fact, he tried cheering me up. He told me it didn't bother him one bit, because he knew it meant nothing. And that's completely right. I didn't know that guy at all, and he meant nothing to me.
So on Sunday, we went to Times Square again. First we went to Little Italy and got some Italian food for lunch. This was alright, I guess. Not actually the best Italian I've ever had. Eventually, we ended up at Madame Toussaud's, which was great fun. We took pictures with tons of cool actors and historical figures... here are a few of my favorite:
Me having a laugh with Louis Armstrong.
The Dalai Lama is such a sweet guy.
AHHHH!! THE BEATLES!!! Okay, so only Paul really looked like Paul. The rest were pretty bad. But I was excited nonetheless.
So we made our way to see an Off-Broadway show, "Family Secrets". We had tried to avoid one-woman shows, so we chose this one... and then we found out it was a one-woman show. It didn't turn out to be that bad, though! She was quite funny and had some great jokes about Jewish culture (which Mohammad didn't see as satire- he only saw it as out of taste). And I surprised myself with how much I knew of the song, "Hava Nagila". After we finished there, we headed to this Pakistani restaurant that Mohammad had been eyeing. I had NO IDEA what I was ordering, and the guy there wasn't trying to tell me. So I had some sort of meat patty thing on top of some weird kind of rice. And it tasted... well, awful. I didn't enjoy it that much. I ended up burping it for the next two days, which was not pleasant.
That night a bunch of us congregated in Chris, Daniel, Marcia, and Jen's room to play "Presidents and Assholes". I can't really explain the specifics of this game to you, as I seriously don't remember them. All you need to know is that it's a drinking game with a deck of cards, where the worse cards you have, the more you end up drinking. And my cards sucked the big one. I luckily was not feeling exactly outgoing or party-ish that night, so I was able to just enjoy the antics of those around me. We all decided to sleep in the same room that night, and I was on the same bed as Chris, Lauren, and Dave. Not much happened, except Lauren and Dave gave me reason to go ahead and leave. So after all that, I ended up sleeping in my own room.
The next day we all had to pack up and move out. After a bunch of hassle dealing with trying to get cabs, we were finally on our way out to Manhattan! The cabs we took were pretty darn nice, and the place we ended up at? Whoamygosh. So nice. We were staying in the Marriott Marquis Times Square. After spending an hour getting our bags checked in, we decided to go get some lunch. We ended up getting some Thai, which was soooo much better than I thought it would be. After that, we headed on over to the American Natural History Museum, in Central Park. It was really nice! I spent most of the time with Chris and Marcia, although I was only kind of
near them most of the time- not always with them. I got to see some pretty awesome ancient stuff. When it was time to leave, we realized we'd lost Tony! We spent 45 minutes waiting around and looking for him. He was fine, though. Here's some pictures outside of the museum...
Amanda and Lauren...
Juliana laughing!
Marcia being contemplative.
I'd like to gloat here and say that this picture of Chris was probably the best I took the entire trip.
That night, some of us went out to the Hard Rock Cafe. Not much to say there, except that I GOT TO SEE PAUL MCCARTNEY'S GUITAR AND THE FAB FOUR'S SUITS. Wow. Okay, look:
The BASS!!!
The suits! Wow!!
And the next day, we began our Conference. Thus ends Part 1!
Holy shit!
Guess where I am. This is crazy.
I am in the
United Nations Great General Assembly Hall!!
I'm not kidding. For some reason, the UNHCR (UN High Commission on Refugees) has a WiFi spot here and it's free.
As for the amazing weekend, I have been keeping track of everything, but had no time to update my blog. I've taken a lot of photos, and for those of you on Facebook, I've uploaded most of the good ones. I will try later today, if at all possible. Anyway, I miss you all and will be in touch later on!
OMG, Leaving for the big trip to NYC!
Alright, I'm going to be gone to NYC for the National Model UN Conference starting tomorrow through Sunday, April 16. I'm quite excited, as you'll understand... the biggest, most important city I've been to so far is Washington, D.C., which is of course no small potatoes. But I'm really excited for this NYC trip, because for a small-town girl from po-dunk New Mexico, New York is like the Mecca of everything foreign. For the first part, we're going to be staying in Brooklyn. Of this, I'm supposed to be kind of scared. I'm not, considering I'll be spending most of my time in a very large group of people. And for the other part, I'll be staying at the NYC Marriot in Times Square. TIMES SQUARE.
Anyway, I'm fairly nervous about some parts, as usual before a trip. Like anyone, I have my doubts about air travel, although it is my favorite method of travel. What if my luggage gets lost? What if the landing gear is broken? But as that Patrick Swayze says in
Donnie Darko, you've got to live your life without fear! I'm also going to miss everyone here. Especially Chris. I would have liked to see him tonight, but he went to Arizona to see the grad school he's intereste in and Raytheon, two of his post-graduation prospects. I'm also going to miss my friends here at the apartment. Seems like there's always some new inside joke, and I'm sure to miss it! But oh well. ;)
As for what's happening while I'm there, I honestly can't say I know. Possible Mets game (I want to go just to see Shea Stadium), possible musical?, and the Conference. But I imagine a lot of the trip is just going to be plan-as-we-go, which ought to be more fun anyway. My gastroenterologist told me I ought to "get used to going like
this" (and then he craned his neck back and looked straight up). I don't know about
that, but we'll see. I'm obviously also nervous about the Conference. I'm not feeling specific about any issues or feeling particularly inspired to make any grand resolutions. The fact that we're serving as an IGO complicates matters quite a bit, and how that'll go is anyone's guess.
Anyway, wish me luck. Pray. Send me good juju or whatever. :)
(OH, and I'll definitely be blogging as much as I can while I'm there. I've been told I've got a captive audience.)
Take on me. Take me on.
So, today was pretty interesting too. I really wish I was out at some awesome spring break location partying it up. I mean, that particular scene has never been that appealing to me, but I can't help but get a little jealous when I look at other people's awesome photos on the Facebook.
But yeah, today was cool. I got up fairly late (after being awakened five times by various phone calls for my parents), and when I got up I played piano for about an hour. That tends to soothe me when I'm here at home. Got some good Beatles and Pocahontas in. Chris called from Wal-Mart and told me he was getting his tires rotated, which we all know tends to take forever. I picked him up, and we went and had a very lovely little lunch at Brown Bag Deli. We then went to Hastings and read up on Beagles! (Eeeee! I want, I want!) This is when Brittani called and said she was just about in town! So I told her to meet us at McDonalds, and we'd show her around town a little bit. Chris's car was done too, so I took him back to Wal-Mart, and Brittani and I headed off for the White Sands Mall, or as we in Alamogordo like to call it, "The Hall". It's about, oh, two football fields, maybe three, long, and you can see one end from the other. We wanted Brittani to really
grasp the lameness of Alamogordo. ;)
Then, after a long chain of events, we ended up at the IMAX watching "Magnificent Desolation," a movie about Lunar exploration, which is narrated (mostly) and produced by Tom Hanks. It was very entertaining, and I enjoyed it a lot. But I'll enjoy almost anything that has to do with space exploration. I went back home, and Mandy and Brittani went to Mike's house to see him. I kind of wasn't invited, and that's alright... Mike and I have obviously not been on the best terms lately. (I made a private post about this on my LiveJournal. All you need to know is that despite my trying to be nice to him even though he was continually rude while he was living with us, he doesn't like me. He flat out told me that he doesn't like me, which he didn't really even explain to me.)
I hung out at my house, and then Brittani came back and we ate dinner with my family. Then we tried to play some video games, but that sucked, because the game kind of sucked. Mike and Mandy called and invited us out to Denny's with them and Paul (Foree). I invited Chris, and it ended up being the six of us, in the beginning. It was fun, I guess, but then Mike made some comments that were fairly snide. The thing is, he may be joking around, but it's difficult to tell. I've seen him make seemingly joking comments to Nikki and LJ, and known that he was completely serious, but they were taken as jokes. It was not a secret to me that he was being serious with them. So when he did it to me tonight, that was obviously upsetting. While he was away, I told Mandy that it kind of bothered me. Then when I was away, she told him that it bothered me. He got upset because he was supposedly joking and I took it too seriously. He went off and pouted outside for like 15 minutes. He wouldn't come in when Mandy went and talked to him, and then it took Paul to get him to come inside.
From there, it was fairly awkward. Then Charlie and.. Jason? showed up- two more of Mike's friends. He went and sat with them in the booth right next to us. They acted fairly immaturely, and the waiter there was obviously fed up with their antics early on. He was trying to kick them out, which subsequently made me extremely uncomfortable. This whole time, Mandy was getting upset, and Mike was not being very attentive to that. Paul looked like he was trying to help a bit, but it wasn't working. I got really uncomfortable with what was going on between the waiter and Mike's friends, who were basically goading the waiter on, so I got Chris and Brittani to leave with me. I tried to get Mandy to too, but she obviously had to stay with Mike. We waited out in the car for Mandy and Mike to come out. When they did, Paul was with them, and Brittani and I ended up going with him to do karaoke!
The karaoke was fun. I got perfect points (it was a Playstation2 game) on a song I barely knew, but sucked the big one on songs I've been singing all my life. Paul was extremely good at it, but I pretty much expected that. And Brittani was pretty darn good too. They kicked my ass! We were there for maybe an hour or two, and Mandy and Mike never showed up (Mike and Paul live together). We left at 1AM and now here I am.
I meant to go to sleep about two hours ago, but managed to find interesting (enough) things to post about on the JC and then decided to make a post here.. gah. By the way, I finished my expedition on the Oregon Trail. Chris died of Typhoid and I made it the rest of the way with Brittani and Mandy, who were in fair health when we arrived at the Willamette Valley!
Spring Break... so far.
Ugghh, could my sister have chosen a more annoying science project? She has chosen to play different kinds of music at growing bean seeds for four hours a night, between 5pm and 9pm. The one that I am closest to, which is probably the most annoying, is ska. I can take a little bit of ska. But really? Not a big fan. And she's not even around for all of it. She finds excuses to be out of the house when this experiment is gong on. I'm not sure if that's on purpose. But anyway, it's really grating on my nerves!
I saw V for Vendetta on Friday night, and I watched it again today. I get pretty excited by it. There's a lot of political theory there to gobble up, and I ate it all. Not to mention all the sweet violence. Obviously, I'm not typically a huge fan of violence, unless it's done really cool-like. And it was. There's this part where V slams a hand down on the side of this guy's face from above, and the guy falls on the ground unconscious (and likely dead). And there was this awesome sound his knives made and then the blood would fly and splatter and make another cool noise. OOH, and the explosions were cool. But yeah, I get pretty moved by what V stands for, and the way he goes about things. I've found that most say that V is an anarchist. While that may be true in the original story, there's one line that V says that makes me think he's got more trust in
proper government. He says,
"People should not be afraid of their government; the government should be afraid of the people." Which is, of course, a basic tenant of legitimacy. So perhaps movie-V is more interested in legitimate governments than anarchy? Gregg and I had an interesting discussion about the fact that Evey is really kind of the middle-ground figure because of gender roles; neither the government nor V is right, and as a woman, she's more willing to compromise in the interests of those lives that may be affected by such violent actions.
That's about it. Chris and I watched
Good Night, and Good Luck. last night. I enjoyed watching McCarthy get bitched. Chris was bored by it, of course, but we still had a fun time hanging out together. :)
Disturbed.
Today I saw a woman begging for money. But this was not just any homeless hag like the ones you see in movies. This woman looked vaguely similar to my piano teacher that I grew up with. Or even like a heavy-set version of one of my grandmas. Her sign read, "DISABLED - HOMELESS - PLEASE HELP - THANK YOU". This whole thing seriously disturbed me. I had just left the bank where I'd deposited a birthdy check from my Grandma Ellen, and took out a $20.
The fact that this woman looked so very familiar to people I've known, and also that she had the characteristic limp of many old people with rheumatoid arthritis bothered me. She was very clean-looking, with white hair and decent clothes. She even had one of those three-pronged canes that work at different angles. I guess it's just the familiarity with people like her that disturbed me so deeply. How easy is it for our elderly to fall into a situation where they have to beg on street corners outside of Starbucks and Target?
I was also very angry with myself and extremely torn. I wanted to help her like I've never wanted to help anyone in my life. All I had was a $20, and all I had left in my account afterwards was $50, which I do not have the privelege of spending on anything but necessities. I overdrafted fairly recently and have to be quite careful not to do it again. So there I am with my $20 bill, and no change to speak of, save for a few nickels and pennies in my wallet. How is it that this woman, who at some point in her life had respect and dignity, got stuck out there?
I didn't give her any money. I didn't even look her in the eye, because I simply didn't have the gumption to do so. How could I not give her the money? I should have given her the $20. I should have given it all to her. She certainly didn't look anything like the type to go spend it on drugs or alcohol. No; my guess is that costs for prescriptions got higher and higher, and then a serious turn of events left her without a home.
Ugh. I am just so disturbed by this. I keep telling myself that she looked way too well-kempt to be truly in need, but I'm really only reassuring myself that it's okay to not have given her the money. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I keep saying, "Well maybe they're doing a study on who is more likely to get money: scruffy guys or well-kempt women, or something like that." But we all know that that's really probably bullshit. Maybe after I go to dinner, I'll have some change and stop by there again. I hope she's still there.
Actually, no, I don't hope she's there. I hope she's out somewhere getting a meal or paying for something she needs, rather than standing on a corner begging for it.
I hate Tuesday. I hate Tuesday.
Well, it's about that time- time for a new blog layout for Andrea. I just got kind of inspired tonight. Not sure what everyone else will think, but I was needing a departure from the header image + two boxes below. Not that this is that different... but yeah. :) I need you all to tell me if the font looks too big. I have it set on my computer to automatically override font sizes and faces to what I want.
Have I mentioned lately that I hate Tuesdays? Because I really do, with a passion. I go all day without any break. I had a giant headache today, though, so I skipped out on Civil Liberties. Although I slightly regret it now, I know that it was for the best. I needed that nap. Now I done stayed up too late working on this layout. Gah! Inspiration always strikes at the worst times for me.
I'm actually somewhat looking forward to my German oral exam tomorrow (except for the fact that I have to get up earlier than usual for it). Mandy and I based our skit on the excitingness that was this Saturday. =P
