My inspiration

I’m pretty tired and it’s just Monday. I’m sad because I had to make the adult-like decision to not go to London. And I just found out that not actually studying for my Greek test did not produce as successful as a result as I had hoped it would.

You might be asking, how will she make it through the week? What’s going to keep her moving? Mountain Dew? Patty Griffin? Ball games? Philippians 4:13?
No, my friends. None of the above. I’ll tell you what keeps me a goin’ when the goin’ get tough. It’s called opening my laptop, and seeing this beauty’s face smiling back at me.

Oh, how he makes me wish I had cable so I could see his cuteness scamper about the courts in Europe. In one of the James Blake pictures I have set as my background, he is pointing in a very confident, yet mischievous way. I think he’s pointing at me, telling me I can do it. Yes, yes. James Blake is cheering me on.

This guy’s kids are going to have issues…

The dude that wrote this op-ed for the NY Times is a looney-tune in my opinion. He is making a state case about the kids having snacks after ball games. Umm…hello…every team at every level from pee-wee’s to NCAA DI has parents who bring treats for the kids. It’s part of athletics in America. It’s not bad. It’s nice. Eating a rice krispie treat and drinking a Capri Sun is not going to kill your child or make him fat. Hello, he just played a soccer game. Duh.

Unless his kid is really bad and never plays. Then maybe it’s a problem. But even then, the least this dad could do is let the poor kid enjoy the brownies they get afterwards.

My guess is that this dad is skinny, super-smart, arrogant, in-secure and wealthy. In addition to bitching about the treats, I bet he’s one of those helicopter parents that tells the coach how to coach and never thinks his kid is playing enough. I bet the coach and all the other parents hate him.

It makes me really love my parents. They never complained about anything to my coaches and they let me eat all the after-game treats I wanted. They even supplied the Gatorade for the whole volleyball team during high school. I wonder if Mr. Undies-in-a-Bundle is okay with Gatorade. That stuff is loaded with calories. Hmm…

If Your Life was a Movie, What Would Your Soundtrack Be?

Christin had this meme up and it looked like a good way to spend my time during my wonderfully dull shift in the library today. I’ve been known to make life soundtracks for myself and others, however I’ve somewhat shied away from that practice since being informed that making other people CD’s is a sign of emotional dependency. Whatever. Anyway, I thought it would be fun (and possibly embarrassing) to see what my soundtrack would be if I let iTunes come up with it.

If anyone wants to follow suit, here’s the rules:

1. Open your library (iTunes, Winamp, Media Player, iPod, etc)
2. Put it on shuffle
3. Press play
4. For every question, type the song that’s playing
5. When you go to a new question, press the next button
6. Don’t lie and try to pretend you’re cool…

Here we goes nothing!

• Opening Credits: Zombie – The Cranberries
• Waking Up: Rusty Old American Dream – David Wilcox
• First Day At School: Trade My Love – Sandra McCracken
• Falling In Love: These Days - Rascal Flatts
• Breaking Up: Dischotheque – U2
• Prom: Come to Jesus – Mindy Smith
• Life’s OK: I’ll Cover You– Rent
• Mental Breakdown: Johnny 99 – Bruce Springsteen
• Driving: Love of a Jealous Kind– Jars of Clay
• Flashback: Live 4 Today – Natalie Grant
• Getting Back Together: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy – Sarah McLachlan
• Wedding: Split Screen Sadness – John Mayer
• Birth of Child: Days – Train
• Final Battle: Wiggley Fingers - Patty Griffin
• Death Scene: Judas Kiss - Sandra McCracken
• Funeral Song: Winter - Eastmountainsouth
• End Credits: Enemy Fire – Ryan Adams

Well that definitely causes me to raise an eyebrow!

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

I’ve been trying to plan my Thanksgiving break, but have had zero luck.

Here’s your escape route if you’d prefer to skip my verbal processing and get on to my more or less pointless conclusion.

What I’d really like to do is go to my friend’s wedding in London. However, I just can’t justify spending so much on a ticket to more or less go to London for the weekend.

I also can’t justify driving 10 hours to spend two days with my family. (I’ve recently discovered I have a whole week off, but everyone involved knows I don’t need to be spending a week at my parents’ house.)

I’ve looked for plane tickets to go home, but to be affordable I’d have to drive to Chicago at some ungodly hour and I am very much against driving very far to go to the airport.

Once I realized I had an entire week off, I thought maybe I would go to London after all. So I’ve been wasting my evening away looking for plane tickets. At one point, though I decided it would still look pretty bad to the family and to everyone else to whom I say I am poor if I were to fly to London.

My brilliant plan was then to figure out a way to go to Seattle to see one of my best pals for part of the week and then fly to Minneapolis to be with fam and then back to the big mitten. That brilliant plan was going to run me around $850.

Then I gave up being social and decided to just look for a way to afford-ably and sanely get home. Amtrak would cost not quite as much as a plane ticket from Chicago, would leave and depart minutes from my door and take about the same amount of time as driving. A lovely alternative - if you like Hell - would have been Greyhound. But the 23 hours on a bus from the mitten to Minnesota did not sound like a good time. And it wasn’t any cheaper than anything else. Seriously, how does it take that long? The buses in Bosnia moved faster than that.

I just want to tell you that it only costs $80 more to take a 7ish hour flight to London than it takes to spend 23 hours riding a nasty bus from Michigan to Minnesota.