Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

I'm going to throw away my copy of Crime and Punishment. It's not rage or indignation--some of the the pages from the first half are coming out. I'll probably buy a new copy. But I had to read through this one. Why? I got this book from the box of books outside the door of a professor I'll call, for anonymity's sake, Great Britain. The need to preserve his anonymity stems from the fact that, according to the inside of the cover, Great Britain received this book for Christmas 1981. Also, it's never been read through. That's not to say G.B. hasn't ever read Crime and Punishment or to blame him for that (heaven knows, I've been in that culturally illiterate camp until this last month), but just that this particular book has gone its whole existence with only the pages of the first half being bended and separated. It's like the time I checked out from the library a book that had been published in 1882 and still never had its pages cut. More than a...

1. 28 Dresses Later a high-adrenaline zombie-bridesmaid thriller. When one dress too many turns the minds of the perpetual bridesmaid, they roam post-apocalyptic London, tearing to shreds everyone with well-manicured nails and biting them with their recently-whitened teeth. 2. I wake up, groggy, bed-headed, pajamaed. Lying next to me, fully dressed on top of the bed is Gregory Mankiw, the economist. "You're Greg Mankiw," I intelligently remark. He springs out of bed and stands up. "Would you like to discuss consumer surplus and tariffs?" "Why are you here?" I ask. "Don't you remember the Make-a-Wish Foundation?" 3. I was going to throw my tiara, but it turns out to be made of popcorn. "What a cheap groom I have," I think. He's already changed into jeans by the time his extensive family starts playing a traditional game of "here kitty, kitty," around the equally extensive reception grounds. I have no idea why we...

The official story of our Vegas trip: We did not stay in a smoky casino, featuring a topless vampire review and "American Storm" male strippers. We did not perform clean comedy in the back of a fetish shop. We didn't get excited at seeing a duck on the Strip. It was a great trip.

You may remember him from your Econ 110 textbook.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HYPER! I've been sliding around my kitchen singing along with "Saturday Night Fever" while putting away dishes as a study break while working on aformentioned stress number 1, which got an extension. And I was just talking with Xister about how I should blog more happy so random blog searchers won't contact my health care professional. Wow. Where does this sort of thing come from? Not to answer that question, but in correlation, I got accepted for University of Chicago's masters program. I'll probably still go to BYU, but I'll look into it. Still. It's nice to know that some people you will probably never meet really liked you as represented by a slim packet of letters and writing samples. And a manfriend of mine chose to come up and talk with me and sit right next to me (as opposed to a seat's distance away, as is customary in larger classes) and talk and walk with me after class, which makes me think maybe pigtails are a hot n...

So I presented in aforementioned intimidating class about Edward Taylor (my paper topic, as well) and suddenly--boom! I feel like I'm an expert or something. I'm answering people's questions and talking authoritatively, although its a bit of a pantamine because, of course, I'm not an expert. My teacher, the one sitting eight feet away, is the expert. Duh. The good news is that this takes stresses 4 and 3 off, leaving only 1 and 2 and 1 gets printed in triplicate on cotton paper tomorrow, leaving only gluttony and glowsticks for stress 2 goodness this weekend! P.S. Apologies to everyone I've been blowing off this past week, including my 519 class (for two weeks!)

This class intimidates me: senior capstone class, smart classmates, academic superstar professor. And it freezes me into inaction on any assignment. I vacillate between several different topics, unable to choose and when I get to writing it I wonder if it's any good at all, put it off too late and generally panic. M'Kayla has suggested that part of it is this toxic culture of academic competition. We all want to be top of the class. So why does this class scare me while the honors class where I am as like to hear "What's the difference between a novel and an essay?" as "Didn't some of the Greek comedians like Philemon have a similar telological approach?" drives me to check my email and blog during class? Probably because I have to care about my Senior Capstone Of MY MAJOR BEFORE GRADUATE SCHOOL WHERE I WILL BE TESTED TO THE LIMIT TO SEE IF I HAVE THE ACADEMIC METTLE TO MAKE IT IN THE WORLD OF THE UNIVERSITY AND THE MLA CONFERENCE and not just a civ...

My mom had to teach me how to turn on our new TV. My mom. She's also asking me why I never update my Facebook page. She updates her Facebook page. Six months back from my mission and I feel like I've fallen behind helplessly in figuring out the new technology. That's for the younger hipper kids. Twitter? Texting? What is this madness? I feel like I'm already my grandma. I tried to play the cool new first-person shooter game, but got so nauseated from the graphics that I had to take a break after 15 minutes. Will it ever come back to me? Will I ever be able to reclaim my youthful tech-suavy? Is the TV line-in one, two or three?