it's true, it's true...

DON'T SCREW WITH MY CITY.

in other less important news...
Duke let me in. Stanford didn't. Stanford's rejection e-mail contained a spelling mistake, which gives me some bizarre comfort.

the payoff

So I had a POSTITIVELY CRAPTASTIC day yesterday. But if you read through the horrible, there's a great payoff at the end. I promise.

We begin yesterday morning, when I wake up to an email from the LOVELY people at Duke University, saying that they're all set to make decisions, but my transcript is missing, so they can't make a decision about me. This makes me stage a minor freakout in my room, followed by hightailing to the registrar to get another transcript sent.
Turns out it's taking 2-3 days to process transcripts. So I run to the Bursar to pre-pay for a FedEx of my transcript. I then run BACK to the Registrar and beg for my stuff to get sent ASAP.

Then I go to the library. I get all my thesisy goodness spread out, and then I hear my cellphone buzz. It's Thesis Advisor. First thing I think is "SCORE! He's cancelling the meeting!"

Alas, no such luck. He wants to move the meeting up a half hour. At this point, I'm just convinced that there is no good in the world, at least not for me.

Bust through thesis work. Go to meeting.

When I get to my meeting and take off my coat, I discover that SOMEHOW my bra has become unhooked. How this happened I have no idea, but it did. So I'm not only on the hot seat, my bra is undone and I have no subtle way of re-hooking it.

Then I'm on photocopy duty for the class I TA. Aaaaand the copy card dies.

At this point, I'm ready to crawl under a rock and just give up. My head is killing me and I'm getting nothing out of this day. I find The Brad and ultimately end up taking a nap in his floor's lounge and helping him with laundry.

I find K-Fry and we go to buy super secret supplies for super secret things. We have YUMMY dinner at Panera. We come back.

My friend Jacqui had just gotten a job with the Bio department, so I decided to take her out for a beer at MacGregors. Good lord, I needed that like I don't know what. It felt gooooood.

I come home, and I finally check my voice mail. 3 messages--my CA, my hairdresser...

AND WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS TELLING ME I GOT INTO THEIR PH.D PROGRAM!!!!!!

Turns out that I'd been accepted to grad school since 3:30 yesterday. Yeah.
I of course shriek and start running around my suite, calling parents and friends and celebrating. Colin walks into my room with two beers, pops one open for me, and I celebrate. As The Brad said, I beat college.

I'm freaking going to grad school next year. Woot.

Comments recieved on the fact that I am going to grad school next year:
Sona: we got a ph.d in the house
Bits:congrats my coding queen!
Ryan and Jacqui: and she now owes you a drink and french fries

I have the best friends in the world.

yeah. what. it's a monday.

Disjointed day=disjointed post.

If I code another mother-freakin' article, heads. will. roll. Specifically, my head. I've moved on to tabulation, which is more a pain in the arse than anything else, but this is where the goodies are. I'm basically translating the stacks o' articles into nice single page excel spreadsheets. So lovely. Taking my N, divvying it up through public appearances, candidate statements, news analysis, editorials, advertisements, and letters, and then plugging stuff in. It's so hot, really. Though once I get all this crud done, I get to move on to WRITING! and I have theories that I'm working with. Today for the first time in a looooong time my thesis feels kind of manageable. I'm going to crank this week, and then it's time to start churning out the chapters. chapter one is looking like it will be 15-20 pages, or about 1/4 of my final page count. Just 60 more to go!

I have been fighting absolutely awful headaches just about every other day for the past couple days, and it's just no good. Friday night I was so full of pills that if someone had shaken me, I would have rattled. No joke. Today was no better. I popped some sinus medication and ended up feeling wiped out all the way through history of jazz. all I wanted to do was curl up in bed, which was less than possible.

However, I was in fact productive today, going to Sibley to listen to a record and have a tasty caffeinated beverage at java's. I blew off dance, however, to write my history of jazz paper, which is now done! (crosses it off to-do list...whee!)
My article for the women's game program for basketball got re-printed on the Athletics website because the AD really liked it. I find this amusing.

**sounds of frat boys going through stacks makes me go grrrrrrrrrrrrr**

But today was a monday par excellence. I mean it. I woke up this morning, stumbled through my routine mumbling all the while (why am I up? it's so early? grrrr!), and clicked on my e-mail to find a message from my mom with the subject line of "Grampie".

Yeah. can't be good. And it wasn't. It's looking like we're coming down to the last couple weeks, which is good and bad. He's not in pain, which is being managed pretty well, but my mom thinks he has stopped eating--which is usually pretty telltale. So if you saw me today and I looked a little forlorn, well, that's why. I had a teeny-tiny little three-minute crying jag into Brad's shoulder, then I pulled myself together. And I went about my day.

In other, happier news, I had a wonderful time at the Masquerade Ball. It only took me 4 tries, but I finally went, with a date who I am date-ing, who can dance, and who wore a tux. Lots of my friends were there and much silliness ensued. I got to wear my wonderful red dress, and The Brad cleans up quite well. It's hard for a guy to look bad in a tux, though. He just looked...particularly nice. Yeah. The band was alright, nothing to write home about, but they interacted well with the crowd and they sucked a lot less than last year. I also had a lot of fun just dancing. While I love my lindy hop, it's #1 hard to do in a long dress and heels and #2 really annoying to do on a crowded floor with tons of people who don't know what they're doing out there.

I also got good reviews for my feature for the men's basketball program, which I was happy about since I worked really really hard on it.

Admissions sucked less than usual this morning. Though the bad times are a' comin'.

I was sad to find out that Brad can't make it to my play (VAGINA MONOLOGUES! yay) on Friday, which just had all of these horrible, horrible echoes of two years ago to me that I just wanted to shake. Though then I was doing VM as a personal escape and distraction (failed miserably), and now I'm doing it because it's plain fun. And with this it's not as if it's a pattern that I've allowed myself to think of as alright--it's a one-time thing, and while I was upset at first I can understand.

Plus, he bought a "Vaginas Are For Lovers" tee-shirt, and he will wear it on Wednesday because he's that cool. I mean, let's look at things on balance. He wore a tux on Saturday, he purchased a "Vaginas Are For Lovers" tee shirt WITHOUT PROMPTING ("Can I get one?" in a non sarcastic manner. I mean, really.), and he let me cry into his shoulder this morning, kept me company while I was sad this evening, and has just generally been a good person.

I love this man.

random two-liner

This is quite often said by The Brad and I to each other, and he said it was going to go in HIS blog (FYI, for those of you interested you can read it here) but he hasn't put it in there yet, so I'm being pro-active, because I find it amusing:
The Brad: Are there actually people that don't like (insert name of very cool thing here)?
Me: Yes, but they're dumb and we don't hang out with them.

In other news, I should be microfilming right now. Those crazy Oregonians and their direct election mechanisms...

Also, a quote from my dad re: the fact that I have chapter during the Super Bowl:
"What kind of anti-American commies do that?"

Co-ed community service frats, I guess.

ALSO: I HAVE THE AWESOMEST LITTLE EVER. EVER, I tell you!

ok, this made it worth it

Alrighty, so in the midst of yet another morning I really would have preferred to be in bed, I get this quote spewed out during lecture:

"The Federal Government was like a Pygmy".

Yes. The Federal Government of the United States was compared in simile form to a FRIGGING PYGMY.

It made the fact that I was, in fact, awake and functioning a little more tolerable.

WonderJess strikes again!

In response to my previous post:
WonderJess (via IM): bronchitis?!? you mucus-filled fool. haha. this sounds like a VERY good reason to skip wednesday's meeting. I'll even bring you your cookie so you don't miss the good stuff.

You have to love someone who warns you away from nutritional info and offers to bring you cookies. WonderJess, I salute you!

In other news, drugs rock my socks. Zithromax is my new god. I can feel the drugs coursing through my veins, destroying all those little buggers. feel the wrath of biological ingenuity, motherfuckers!

And dancing was good tonight. Swingouts are fun and exciting for the whole family(when executed properly).

Also (though if you're reading this, you probably know this already)--Vagina Monologues, U Rochester. 2/11. Tix are $5 and 90% of the funds raised go to Sojourner House, with the other 10% going to the V-Day Campaign 2005, which is going to assist women in post-war Iraq.

In other words, you should go, because it's going to kick ass. Lots of it.

illness overachiever?

that's what my mom called me. Because I don't just have a cold...no, I have bronchitis! So that whole emotion-manifesting-as-illness thing is bunk; I'm just plain sick. But I will get some drugs tonight and be allllll better soon. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.

Tomorrow marks the first day I can really start worrying about graduate school. Though I'm still worrying now. People are starting to hear from Ph.D programs, though not in my field. I just want to know! This waiting game is less than fun, I must say.

And being sick and unable to sleep as much or as well as I'd like leaves me crabby, cranky, and hypercritical. Which means that people I like generally don't like me very much, and truth be told, I don't like me very much. It's no good. Illness just wears down my defenses and my screens and just drives me into letting loose with impulses I can generally control--impulses about saying things that I know aren't right and that are unneccessary and hurtful, and then if somone has the gall to call me on it, I get defensive and have no sense of humor whatsoever.

Needless to say, working at Admissions this morning may not have been the brightest idea ever. Granted, there are lots of dumb things that Admissions does that screw me over when I'm on phones. Like sending out mass-mailing postcards about people's apps being incomplete when, in fact, their apps ARE complete. Rahr. Cramps my style. And parents just suck. I'm glad my parents weren't that dumb.

Anyhow, despite my altered condition, I still have work to do.

Dammit.