Hot tea decided to liberate itself from unbearable confinement in my cup. Out it flew, onto my hand, fleeing for the floor and not caring if it burned a few square inches of flesh along the way.
But I am an expert warden and a little pain never caused me to forget the big picture: cup remained firmly in hand and what little tea escaped evaporated quickly. The remainder is firmly imprisoned again under a none-too-secure plastic lid which I’m keeping my eye on…
It’s taking over America. The New York Times reports on how hockey is joining baseball, football, and soccer in the schedules and lives of American children.
One woman frankly admits that, “We see these people [other hockey parents] a lot more than we see our other friends.”
First, that makes the hockey people your friends. Those other people, the ones you don’t see anymore because you’re spending all your time buying $300 skates and sticks for your 8-year old? They aren’t really your friends anymore. Sorry.
Second, the hell?
When did organized sports for kids become so…organized? And is this fun for kids anymore? Not long ago, the New York Times published an article about a sports camp-cum-school for young athletes who show promise and need to spend more time practicing and less time hanging out with friends. The big fear? That playing on a school team, or just kicking/hitting a ball around in someone’s backyard might instill bad habits that would have to be trained out. (I.e., an 11-year old is going to develop a bad pitching form unless he has an $80,000/year coach showing him how to do it.)
That article made another point: all the overtraining is taking some of the purity out of a young player’s talent. The spontenaity is gone, and these kids start to look the same—same form, same timing, same, same. And yet, one family profiled in that article had sold their home to move there so their son could train 8 hours a day—and attend the attached school for 5 hours a day.
That’s wrong in one way, and I hope I don’t have to spell it out.
But what I’m really on right now is the overscheduling of kids.
I was involved in afterschool activities when I was a kid—I took ballet and, in high school, was in school plays and my church choir. I was active and had stuff to do—because I wanted stuff to do. It was fun for me. I don’t remember ever having a sense that I had to go to ballet, except during recital rehearsals, because I had committed to being in the performance. Ditto for plays and choir.
I also remember that, on the days I didn’t have ballet, I wanted things to do after school besides do homework and watch TV, so when I got too bored with my brother, I’d go hang out with some of the kids on my street. We’d jump on the trampoline one of them had. Even when I spent much of my afterschool time at the ballet studio, I spent it doing homework and hanging out with the other girls who weren’t in class and we had fun there, too. We were there because we liked dance. Even the most intense dancers would still walk down to the fast-food place and get an apple pie and vanilla shake with the rest of us. It was fun.
My brothers and cousins were all involved in team sports at our school, and they had practices before and after school, but it was always fun for them. When it stopped being fun for my brother, he quit the tennis team and got a job.
All of this is to say that I remember organized sports and afterschool activities being about fun. They were also about learning teamwork, growing as leaders, and all of the things that organized sports have always been about for kids. But they were never about being “the best” or about planning to go pro out of high school. (Sure, we all wanted to be good, and win championships or prizes, but that’s part of any competitive activity.) And certainly certainly, my brothers and cousins did not spend all their time at the school or the gym, practicing, and they definitely didn’t drag their parents and younger siblings around with them.
I see this trend, now, that every second of a child’s life has to be planned, down to the minute, and I wonder what time that leaves for picnics in the backyard and lemonade stands and duels with branches (all things I did as a child, not that long ago). WIth the loss of unscheduled time comes a loss of spontaneity, freedom to imagine, and serendipity. Where is the space for a child to write short stories and poems, or to paint portraits of the family pets?
I hope that when I am a parent, I can remember to leave space for my kids to do nothing, to follow their imaginations, to manage themselves and figure out what makes them tick. And I hope that those times they spend inside themselves will lead them to the passions they’ll feel and follow the rest of their lives. Because what I see is that when organized sports and activities become less about learning and fun and more about competition and perfection, we all lose a little something from the future.
I made a mistake when I titled this post.
So for anyone who got here looking for information on Apple’s newest music player, the small, svelte one that mixes your music up, sorry. Nothing here to help you.
How many years has Seventh Heaven been on? And when will the WB clue into how bad it is? I admit that, several years ago, it was marginally watchable. But when Jessica Biehl had to pose for Maxim to get out of her contract, I knew it was only a matter of time. I think that time is now—or, perhaps, three years ago, before they stooped to cast Ashlee Simpson.
So, um, today I have to have a tooth out. It’s the last of my wisdom teeth and it’s the one that actually erupted.
My dentist says it really should be removed. I guess I agree—I don’t want it in the back of my mouth, where it’s hard to clean and pushes against my molars.
But I also don’t really want to have another tooth out. Having my wisdom teeth out was no cakewalk—I was drugged up and groggy and in pain for several days. And I won’t even be put under for this extraction! It’ll just be like any other tooth removal—in the office, with novocaine.
Definitely not looking forward to it. Definitely not.
Update: Tooth out. Not a big deal at all. For the squeamish, you might want to stop reading now. The worst part of the ordeal was the pressure of the tools on the back of my mouth and the the pressure of the tools’ handles on the corners of my mouth. There was some scraping, some pulling, and some really awful sounds going on.
And suddenly, he had my tooth in his hand. It was pretty gross.
Anyhoo, I have gauze in my mouth, a bottle of amoxicillin, and a bottle of Aleve. I have no food to eat right now, though. And I’m hungry. Sigh. Where’s Jamba Juice when you need it?
Heard while watching the AKC/Eukanuba National Championship:
“The Bernese Mountain Dog isn’t actually a herder. They’re used for pulling small carts and wagons.”
Damn.
Via Class Maledictorian, a book list. Instructions: Copy this list of 10 authors. Remove the ones not on your bookshelves and replace each of them with ones that are (replaced authors are in bold):
- Jeffrey Eugenides
- Umberto Eco
- A.S. Byatt
- Jane Austen
- John Irving
- Italo Calvino
- Czeslaw Milosz
- Vikram Seth
- Vladimir Nabokov
- William Shakespeare
My list:
Accomplished today:
Lastly, I feel extreme sympathy for all the fans in New England this evening who are stuck in what appears to be a mini-blizzard.
I wish I could post something more about law school, but I haven’t received my admitted students’ packet from Northwestern yet and Georgetown continues to sit on my application. So you get posts about life in the Angst house.
I have a box of hair dye waiting for me upstairs. I’m not entirely certain of the color, but I’m tired of last summer’s grown-out highlights, and I’m tired of my gray.
So later today, I plan to be sporting a new auburn shade. Unless it turns last summer’s grown-out highlights pink. In which case I may have to suck it up and go have a professional fix my hair.
It’s ridiculous that I’m still in my twenties and have as much gray as I do. My grandmother recently made it worse by telling me she was completely gray by 32. I’m doomed.
Gasp! Did I just say that?? I’ll say it again:
I hate shopping.
OK. I spent two hours at the mall today, looking for jeans. Now, I have a hard enough time finding “regular” clothes that fit me—I’m short and curvier than is fashionable. So jeans are just impossible to find.
I tried on $19 jeans. I tried on $80 jeans. I even tried on a pair of $200 (and oh my God how can anyone justify charging that kind of money for denim?) Seven jeans. It’s a racket.
I’d love to give up wearing pants altogether—skirts are so much more flattering on me, not to mention pretty comfy—but there are days when a skirt is inappropriate. Like cold and wet days. And we’ll be moving to a place with a higher number of those later this year. Therefore, I cannot give up pants.
If anyone knows of a brand of jeans or store that sells jeans that are appropriate for a short woman with a .68 waist/hip ratio, I’d love it if you’d share.
I hate shopping.
Someone is reported missing in a Utah avalanche, but the story indicates that,
…the area is “out of bounds” to skiers and snowboarders.
“Those individuals who ventured into this area did so at their own peril,” he said.
“They had gone under the ropes, actually passed numerous signs indicating they were leaving resort property and going into an area where there was no avalanche control.”
I get the rush of fresh, deep powder, and I know that young people everywhere often consider themselves to be invincible, but this was something that could have been avoided.
If the signs say, “NO,” don’t go! In a three week span that has seen the tsunami that claimed 150,000 and California mudlines killing at least a dozen more, don’t you think people would be more aware of their mortality?
Bloglines appears to be having, erm, issues.
First, my own feeds don’t seem to have been collected all day. If you subscribe to one of my feeds and use Bloglines, either reassure me that you are seeing that I’ve posted; or know that Bloglines is funky funky today, and just click through to me directly even though Bloglines won’t tell you I have new stuff. (I tend to have new stuff every day.)
The other weird thing…and this is…whoa…so weird…is that my Bloglines Notifier (a handy little app that sits in the Dock of my Mac and tells me when I have new feeds to read) is showing many, many unread feeds. But I have no unread feeds.
In fact, the number it displays seems to be an multiplied factor of two (2). An hour ago, I saw that I had 2 feeds, but there were no feeds. Then it was four. Then 8. And now 12. Twelve doesn’t make sense—it should be 16—but I guess that’s immaterial. The fact is, Bloglines is freakin’ out!
Oh, now it is 16! Even weirder: it only changed to 16 when I went and read four posts that were new.
I’m going to give it another day before I start to worry about my feeds not showing up. I’ll give Bloglines a few more than that and hope they fix it soon. But then, then I might cry.
Oh, wait, it’s the weekend tomorrow. I’ll hold off crying till Monday.
Update: OK, Bloglines finally showed me my feeds tonight, several hours after it should have. The notifier, however, is still propagating false feeds—it’s up to 90-something now. I don’t know the actual number, because I deleted it. Really, it’s a huge pain. I’ve installed a notifier to FireFox, which seems to work well, and I’m also using something very neat (if you’re into beta software), NetNewsWire Lite, v. 2.something. (The current release doesn’t do Atom feeds, but the beta does.) It’s working well so far, though, unlike Bloglines, it doesn’t do well with LiveJournal or Xanga sites.
Anyhoo, thanks for those of you who soothed my nerves. I need a weekend away from code.
Tomorrow, I promise: a more light-hearted post.
I received a letter from Tulane today. Tulane is a school I’d have considered applying to, if New Orleans was a geographic possibility. Alas, it is not to be.
At any rate, enclosed with the letter was a small pink slip of paper on which was written,
Last month, we attempted to contact you to encourage you to apply to Tulane Law School. Unfortunately, our first mailing was incorrectly addressed and may not have reached you, or may have included a fee waiver certificate with someone else’s name on it. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused you.
Heck yeah, that would have confused the by gum out of me—and probably ticked me off to boot. I feel really bad for whoever was responsible for that mistake.
I’ve been meaning to review the campuses I visited in December for a while now, and have been sort of lax in getting it done. But it’s never too late to make a good start.
The first campus I’ll review is the first one I visited, Georgetown University Law Center.
First, GULC is not located on the main Georgetown campus. Some/most of you may know that; it took me a little bit of time to figure that out. It’s mentioned on the website, but only in one place. The map of the campus makes it clear it’s not with the rest of the campus, but I wasn’t paying attention to the map until I started planning my transportation to the campus.
Read the rest of this entry »
When I was an undergrad, I spent a semester in New York. I shared an apartment with two other girls (still good friends) and the three of us lived on the serious cheap. We had a sublet that was exorbitantly priced, but there were three of us, so it was manageable.
Anyway, our apartment looked right out onto a fabulous Chinese place.
Well, perhaps “fabulous” is a bit of a stretch. Suffice it to say that I ate their food a lot, and it was cheap, and therefore was fabulous. How about that?
The best thing about that place was that an order of fried rice (any kind except seafood, which I wouldn’t have bought anyway) was about $4.50. And my God, they gave you a giant amount. Practically pounds of the stuff. I lived on fried rice for a few weeks. After all, I’d grown up in a place where Chinese restaurants were never any good (you know, worse than Chinese restaurants are just about anywhere else) and went to college in a place where the closest Chinese restaurant was about 45 miles away, and by God, I was absolutely starved (no pun intended) for respectable fried rice.
Tonight, I had to eat on my own—Mr. Angst being in class and all—and I was craving some sort of Asian food. My favorite Thai place was too far away, being as I was famished and Vietnamese is scarce in my area. So I went Chinese, and ordered shrimp fried rice (I’ll eat seafood here).
I have barely made a dent in the mountain of rice they gave me, and I am stuffed. Happy and stuffed. It was so good, in fact, that I may have to eat the rest of it, just because. It won’t keep, after all.
Yesterday, books appeared on my desk, as if they’d been deposited by a bolt of lightening: The Chicago Manual of Style and Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.
They are nestled now on my bookshelf next to Garner’s Modern American Usage, Strunk and White, and The Careful Writer. They look happy, and at home.
Sadly, they are not mine. When I leave, they stay. My reference manuals will probably miss their new friends.
Welcome to the new divine angst!
I’m pretty excited to be here, and I’ve been working hard to get things nicely set up so everything will still work here.
Update your links and enjoy the new place!
Also, big thanks to blawgcoop for hosting my new home.
Update: Until I work out some import difficulties, you can access my old posts via the old blog address, divineangst.blogspot.com.
Update 2: The redirect is working again, but I turned off masking. In any case, bookmarking “http://divineangst.com” will bring you here every time.
Update 3: Archives imported! Yes, yes, there will be a few formatting issues, and I’ll be working on fixing links, but that’s an ongoing project. And I might continue playing with the template. If it looks weird, wait a few minutes and try again! (Can you tell I’m excited about this? I am giddy over the new site!)
Via Will at Crescat, the list of the week: what is your music player giving you? I set my iPod to shuffle from my whole collection, and here’s what I got:
Round 2:
Oddly, I don’t have that much Pink Floyd on my iPod. I’m a little surprised to get two Floyd songs in both samples. Hm. What is my iPod trying to tell me?
about: I currently work for a large, educational institution somewhere in the US, as a Web Writer. I am in my mid-to-late twenties, married, and have no children or pets. I do have some plants that I haven’t killed yet, which is exciting, since I have a black thumb.
more: I began the process of applying to law school in the summer of 2004. Law school was never in the master plan, so the whole process has been new, nerve-racking, and very exciting.
As I write this, I’ve been accepted to law school(s) but haven’t decided where I’ll attend yet. My husband (Mr. Angst) is also applying to graduate school, so we’ll make a decision that’s partially based on where I want to go and partially based on where he wants to go—and partially based on where we both get in, obviously.
divine angst? It’s unique, interesting, and has a good visual balance. I’m an angsty individual but I also crave the divine (in the sense of godly and the sense of sublime).
also: A few more things about me:
email: divineangst@gmail.com
Welcome to divine angst!
I started divine angst when decided to go to law school. I was in a muddle over LSATs, applications, school locations, and even the general desire to study law. (It descended upon me like the Holy Spirit, and, probably much like the characters in that Biblical story, really freaked me out.) I needed an outlet, so I began a special blog just about law school.
First I talked about why I wanted to go to law school, then about prepping for the evil standardized test. I wrote about choosing the schools I’d apply to. I agonized over my personal statement and who to ask for letters of recommendation. Then I talked about taking the LSAT, submitting my apps, and the dread waiting game.
And that brings us to the present. I’ve been accepted to law schools and I’m turning my mental energies away from the speculative (where will I get in?) towards the concrete. For a while, this blog is going to be about financial aid, housing, and other student-type administrative details (the paper torture) as well as our logistical nightmares—moving, selling our house and car(s), and becoming students after being in the workforce for so long. After that, it will be about my student experience.
Oh yes, I should mention that I’m not alone in this odyssey. Mr. Angst, my lovely husband, is beside me always, and he is also going to be a student—though, thankfully, not a law student. We will be poor but, hopefully, happy. (Mr. Angst does not blog.)
So with all the change, it seemed a good time to make a bloggy change as well—a new host, a new address, and a new look. With it, too, comes a newish philosophy. I’m going to be quite careful to avoid naming too many names, as it were. Others have said it better than I: feel free to speculate but try to keep quiet—Google is listening.
Enjoy!
I seem to have forgotten to post today!
So I give you this:
One of the things I do in my job is deal with online classes. I am currently working on a class titled Human Sexuality.
Now, I am not a prude, not one bit, but in the course of my editing, I keep having to load one particular page, on which is an assignment that involves labeling parts of the anatomy. The parts belong to the female of the human species, and they are presented from an external view. (How’s that for vague? I don’t need those kinds of Google searches bringing people here.)
At any rate, every time I scroll past this image—which is GIANT—I blush. How can I help it? I feel like I’m violating this poor drawing. There she is, all by herself, without even the comfort of a torso or the portion of the legs below the hips. She doesn’t even really have a bottom. She’s just all [blank].
God, I’m blushing now. It’s awful.
Fitz-Hume at BTQ has a post about aggregators. I started to reply in comments, but my reply got really long. So here it is.
I use an aggregator; it’s great. It keeps my blogreading streamlined and I don’t comment frivolously.
Fitz seems to like aggregators, too, but he mentions the possible drawbacks:
…a couple of other issues came to mind as I tried to imagine BTQ as a RSS-only experience. The first is that some bloggers rely on in-text links to convey humor or even information - think of them as sorta like the prop-comics of the blogosphere. However, RSS feeds do not always display in-text links….Without links let’s face it - SMP? is not that great (see here for example). It’s like taking away Gallagher’s hammers and watermelons - it’s just not funny. With links, however, SMP? kills. Kills, Jerry! Until aggregators successfully display in-text links, I think this factor will inhibit a RSS-only evolution of blogs.
The same is true for images. Feed aggregators don’t display images. We don’t post images as often as some people, but we post pictures often enough that our posts would suffer from a RSS-only environment. We might survive, but some blogs rely on images as heavily as others rely on in-text links. Can you imagine Go Fug Yourself without images? Neither can I.
OK, so first I want to say that some feeds show links and some don’t, and that’s primarily due to competing protocols for feeds. Most blogger or blogspot blogs use atom, a protocol that generally does display a more rich content, including links and images. For example, I generally have no problem seeing the images on Go Fug Yourself via Bloglines—likely because Heather and Jessica are using Blogger with a default atom feed.
No, I think the bigger issue with RSS feeds and aggregators isn’t what content is viewable—the protocols will start coverging rapidly and they’ll all be about the same soon—it’s what actual content is available on a feed.
Some bloggers choose not to include entire posts in their feed. This can have the effect of drawing a reader to the actual site (thereby increasing page views) but only if—and this is a big if—the title or the blurb that is available is sufficiently interesting. As a reader, though, sometimes I’m not hooked enough to visit—and maybe I miss out on something interesting. Some of the blogs I read truncate in their feeds and I’m torn on whether or not I care for it. Quite frankly, it can be highly annoying if I’m short on time and don’t want to click through to read the rest of the post. Of course, if the tag is good, it serves the purpose of keeping me from wasting time on a post I’m not interested in. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
Conversely, the teaser model makes sense for news sites—they operate on ad revenue, and news content isn’t always appropriate for an aggregator. I’m thinking particularly of The New York Times Magazine—often the articles in the Magazine are so lengthy that reading them in an aggregator would be more difficult, rather than less. Also, I think (for the most part) journalists are used to writing to the headline-reader: lots of people won’t bother picking up a paper at 40¢ unless the headline catches their eye. That’s not to say every headline in the NYT is great—they’re not—but at least they are informative and I know what I’ll be getting if I click through. And I don’t spend so much time clicking around news sites to see where the good stories are.
Look, I used to spend hours each day, interrupting my workflow to click through my blogroll and visit all my news bookmarks, hoping for new content. It was a major time suck. I won’t say my aggregator keeps me from wasting time reading blogs—God knows it doesn’t!—but it keeps me from idly wasting my time. I know when there’s new stuff for me to read and I can read it at my leisure.
Classes have started again for Mr. Angst—he’s taking some math classes that are prereqs for graduate school—which means two nights a week I am left to my own devices. Much the same as last semester.
I’ll repeat it—I think it’s great that he’s taking classes and working full time and doing well (all A’s so far). But I miss our regular schedule. I miss knowing that he’ll be home for dinner; I miss menu planning for two people. It’s a bad spiral, because now I’ll start eating out, eating junk, or just not eating. That’s bad for my health.
And I’ll also end up sitting on the couch like a complete waste, just waiting for him to get home so I can have someone to talk to.
Wow. This post makes me sound like a totally pathetic loser! I’m not—I promise! I’ve just gotten used to life with Mr. Angst. I guess last semester should have prepared me, but it didn’t. (It doesn’t help that, the entire semester, I sat around thinking, But there are only x more weeks of school, and then things will be back to normal! Hah!)
At any rate, if anyone has suggestions of things I can do to keep busy—that don’t include cleaning house—I’m all ears. I have some books to read, but when I read at home, sometimes I get distracted by the computer, the TV, or the refrigerator.
I have evolved. I am now a Slithering Reptile.
Mr. Angst won’t like that—he hates snakes.
I’m working on some bloggy-type stuff, so posting may be light this week while I figure a few things out.
Until then, anything you want me to tell you about? I guess this is my own version of an all-request week.
