Give Me Fog

If I had to pick a favourite weather-related phenomenon, it would probably be fog. I think it is simply gorgeous. Every time I come across it I feel as if my heart and soul are deeply satisfied. There are very few weather patterns that do this for me. I am not one of those people who always wants sunshine and heat, I only enjoy snow for brief periods of time, biting cold is only okay when I can curl up inside with friends or a book, rain is wonderful until I have to walk a long way...but fog, fog and I are always friends. Sure, it wreaks havoc with my hair, but I love it anyway. I love the mystery of it. I love the comfort of it. I love the staggering beauty of it.

When I left the pub last night the entire town was blanketed in fog. It was beautiful, and I wished with everything in me that I had my camera with me. Since I didn't, I just walked home as slowly as possible, enjoying every second of it.

Creative Deadzone

When I posted today's reading over on She Had Always Wanted Words, I wrote about how I have been in a bit of a creative deadzone lately. It happens every so often. Life just takes over and I find myself filling my time with laundry and grocery shopping and phone calls to the government - not to mention my thesis work and some social activities - and suddenly I just don't have the energy for creativity. It's not a lack of desire. It's more like a physical paralysis. I will sit and think, "I have some time. I should do something creative. Like write. Or paint. Or play piano." But it is as if the message doesn't translate from my brain to my limbs. Or maybe it gets lost, distracted by something shiny along the way. Who knows.

Anyway, the point of this post is not the deadzone itself, but getting out of it. It's been a slow process this time around. An afternoon walking on the beach and hiking in the woods which made me wish I had my camera in hand started it off. Then listening to a lot of Vinyl Cafe podcasts while wrapped in my favourite blankets and drinking peppermint tea. And finally discovering, thanks to said podcasts, the work of Michael Flomen. Stuart tells the story of visiting Michael Flomen's farm and seeing him work. He explains that he was introduced to Michael by a mutual friend who, when recommending Stuart go visit Michael explained, "He takes pictures without a camera...of things we cannot see." And, as Stuart says, "who can pass up something like that?" I certainly couldn't, and subsequently spent a blissful hour exploring some of his astounding images while listening to Katie Melua. And that was it. That was what finally jolted my creative muscles out of their paralysis. It feels good to be back.

Priceless

On Friday, I told you I had a secret...and now I can talk about it online. I flew out to Edmonton this weekend to surprise Gabby. She graduated from her BEd degree, and I wanted to be there to see her walk across the stage. I figured surprising her would be a lot of fun, and boy oh boy was I right. Just the greatest reaction ever. I loved it so much. And as an added bonus I got to see some other lovely people who I haven't seen in a while and who I often miss. So, although flying out here is way more expensive than it should be, today was basically priceless.

The Most Important Things

Yesterday, the lovely A and I were sitting in the coffee shop chatting while we should be working. This is pretty much a daily occurrence for us, and therefore isn't particularly notable (other than the fact that it is a practice I kind of love). But, as is often the case with our conversations, I left mulling over quite a few things. In particular, we have been talking about priorities a lot lately, especially when it comes to people. A's excellent advice: Don't make someone a priority who isn't willing to make you one. There are, she has wisely pointed out to me, times when you have to make someone a priority who isn't making you one right at that moment. We lead busy lives, and in a university town there is always school or work to get in the way and screw up our nicely established priorities. But you should be sure that the person would do the same for you, that when your life gets busy and you drop the ball when it comes to them, allowing them to slide down your priority list, they will keep you high on theirs until you can rebalance your life.


This is the kind of lesson it takes me a long time to learn, although I wish I was a better student.

What the Camera Sees

from "Fontanelles"
Anne Michaels

The chemistry of looking;
to look until the river
swallows us, until the redness
of the stone fills our veins.
To look until we're
seen. But this is only longing.
We leave our heat shadows
in moss shocked with frost.
Even your camera
sees more; the detail you crave.
We strain to see even
what the camera sees,
what the eye can't; and this is as good
as a philosophy. An embrace
of failure, as if
just once, impossibly,
we'll catch the visible reflection
of what's invisible.
Our white breath in the dark.

How to photograph this,
the dark when one has said
too much. The dark of 
sudden feeling. Love's
darkness.


Here's where the new blog name comes from. It's no secret that I seriously love Anne Michaels' work. She's one of the authors I am dealing with in my thesis. If I take a PhD, she will be one of the authors I deal with in my dissertation. So, it seems appropriate to select a phrase from one of her poems to define this blog. The ache, the longing, contained in this passage are the perfect description of how I feel about photography.

Branded

You might have noticed that last night I quietly changed the name of my blog and made a few little adjustments to fonts and colours. I've been wanting to do a total rebranding for a while, but since I have neither the time to make massive changes myself or the money to pay someone else, the changes are relatively minor aside from the name. So, why change the name of the blog? Basically, it's just time for something new. "Shape of Your Looking Glass" served me well for almost two years, but for several reasons it hasn't been sitting quite right with me for a while. Yes, there were reasons I picked it that night I decided starting a blog was a good idea. However, I also decided to start this whole thing on a whim and the name was picked late at night while sitting in the apartment living room surrounded by books about Sylvia Plath, and so the significance of those reasons was relatively minimal. Also, the song that "Shape of Your Looking Glass" came from seemed to be part of a very particular chapter in my life. I loved it the first time I heard it. I still love it. But for a while it seemed to be a song of longing for me. I spent this period of time constantly talking about heading east. Toronto. Nova Scotia. Europe. This summer I moved across the country and literally was eastern bound. It's like the song saw me through a particular chapter in my life, and nicely closed it off for me. It was sometime in the midst of moving, of drastically changing my life, that I started to feel like I wanted to change the blog's name. My approach to photography has changed a lot in the last two years as well. I'm more serious about it now. I think about it more. I've invested a lot more time and money into it. But I'm also having more fun with it. It has become one of the things which allows me to balance my life and ground myself. Basically, the place photography has in my life has changed dramatically and my understanding of it has changed dramatically as well. "Shape of Your Looking Glass" began to feel too simplistic. It was unable to capture this new significance and meaning. This new name has a lot more significance for me, a lot more thought put into it. Tomorrow I'll let you know why. So, until then, thank you to those of you who have been on this journey with me. Welcome to those of you who have only recently joined me. I hope many of you stick around for what's still to come.

Can't Go Back Now

Can't Go Back Now
The Weepies

Yesterday when you were young
Everything you needed done was done for you
Now you do it on your own
But you find you're all alone, what can you do?

You, and me, walk on, walk on, walk on
'Cause you can't go back now

You know there will be days
When you're so tired that you can't take another step
The night will have no stars
And you will think you've gone as far as you will ever get

You, and me, walk on, walk on, walk on
'Cause you can't go back now

Yeah, yeah
Go where you want to go
Yeah, yeah
Be what you want to be
If you ever turn around
You'll see me

I can't really say
Why everybody wishes they were somewhere else
But in the end the only steps that matter
Are the ones you take all by yourself

And you, and me, walk on, walk on, walk on
Yeah, you, and me, walk on, walk on, walk on
'Cause you can't go back now

Walk on, walk on, walk on
You can' go back now


I think if I had to pick a theme song for 2012, it would probably be this one.

Reasons why being sick is worse when you live by yourself

I just spent 60 hours in bed because I was rugby tackled by the flu. Today I managed to drag myself out of bed, shower, put on clothes and go to the drug store. Just so you know, the drug store is basically right outside my door. It takes about 30 seconds to get there. That's how sick I was. I couldn't imagine making a 30 second walk to get medicine. Being sick isn't fun at the best of times, but it's so much worse when you live by yourself. See, when I'm at home, I have my parents. My mom is awesome at taking care of me when I'm sick. She makes sure I do things like drink water. And my dad is always willing to run out to get me medicine or food. And for the past 4 years I've been living with roommates who were absolute god-sends when I got sick. They would write me little get well notes, make me soup and tea, and ignore the fact that I was supposed to be quarantined in order to come read me Dr. Seuss. I missed that a lot. Instead, I was the one who had to get any food or water I needed. I had to make sure I actually hydrated myself. I didn't have anyone to send on a drugstore run, so I just suffered without medicine. It was not fun. I'm still nowhere near 100% but the fact that I showered and got dressed is a good sign. Baby steps, people, baby steps.

Nights of Rain and Stars

I am naturally a night owl. I enjoy the middle of the night immensely. This is a good thing since I've become well acquainted with it in the recent past (not that we ever really lost touch, just that we were seeing less of each other than usual). So despite the fact that I've been swamped with and sleep deprivation is much harder to deal with when you can't have caffeine, sugar, or apples to help you stay awake, here are a few things I've been loving about these late nights.

1. Stars. You can actually see stars here, people. It's a crazy concept, I know, but so delightful.

2. Walking. I am really enjoying living somewhere that I can walk at midnight without fear of being stabbed or raped.

3. Rain. It's been rainy lately, and while this has its downsides, it means that the air is crisp and fresh when I'm wandering around at night.

4. An office. Or, rather, an office I can be in past 11. The building at King's closes at 11 and so you had to be out of the publications office by then. This was annoying. I now have a key card for the arts building and therefore have 24 hour access to my office. This rocks.

5. A library. Or, rather, a library open past 9. The King's library is great, but there is no way around the fact that it is a library at a small institution. It closes at 9. Not convenient for serious late-night work. The library here closes at 1 in the morning. This means that if I suddenly need a source from them, I can just pop on over at midnight. This also rocks.

6. Timezones. Most of my friends are still back in Alberta, which is three hours behind Nova Scotia. This means that even if I am awake at 3 in the morning, it is highly likely that someone back home will still be up and willing to chat. I always feel less desperate if I'm talking to someone while burning the midnight oil.

Contradictory Phenomena

If you've been following me for a while you might remember that back in September I shared a sepia version of this photo. It's from an afternoon I spent on my roommate's family farm in Lacombe. And I couldn't resist sharing the colour version with you as part of this Iconic Alberta series I've been doing for the last couple of days. Here's why: the sky. I know I've been talking about blue skies and white clouds, but there is this thing that the sky does here that I haven't experienced anywhere else I've travelled and this picture captures it perfectly. It can be completely cloudy out and yet it is so bright out that you feel the need to wear sunglasses. Perhaps this happens elsewhere and I just haven't been around at the right times, I don't know. But I always think of this as a curiously Albertan phenomenon. It's right up there with sun showers. The joke here often goes, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. Because it will change. And with no warning. And as a result we get these strange contradictory phenomena existing at the same time. Rain and sun, or, in this case, sunlight and clouds. It's kind of cool.

Mission Packing: Phase 1

Your mission, if you should choose to accept it, is to take everything you own and put it into boxes. Don't forget to retain clothing, towels, toiletries, and anything else you may desire in the next two to three weeks.

So, packing, not so much fun. I've never enjoyed it, but every time I have to do it I am just reminded all over again how completely un-fun it is. It's time consuming and exhausting and inevitably give me a headache and insomnia. Today, thanks to some help from my mother and Sally, I managed to pack all of my kitchen stuff, all of my books (which, let me tell you, is no small feat), all of my movies, frame and pack my new art, and start on my clothes and shoes. Tomorrow is phase II: clothes and shoes. Wish me luck.

We could all use a little change

I am a rather odd creature. By and large, I'm a creature of habit. I tend to eat the same things, wear the same colours and style, and go to the same coffee shops. I like routine and knowing where I'm going next. And I get attached to things. Usually for aesthetic reasons; if I like how something looks a certain way then I am unlikely to change it. Once I get an outfit a way I really like I don't tend to change things up too much. Once I find a wall colour I like, I want every wall to be that colour. Once I find a meal I love, I eat it all the time. But there are some things that I get bored by easily. I think it's particularly true of things that don't please me visually. My hair is often the victim of this boredom. This blog seems to be another. I just haven't found a really awesome design for it yet, so I keep changing it. Ah well. At least it is more easily fixed than my hair if it turns out horribly. And sometimes a little change is good.

Little Obsessions

I'm one of those people that kind of becomes obsessed with things. When I find a song I love, I play it over and over and over. When I find a food I enjoy, I eat it way more often than I should. When I find a book I love, I will often read it twice in a row. When I am enchanted by a film, I'll watch it more than once in a two week span. It's just how I roll. I think this is okay though as long as whatever I'm obsessed with isn't injurious to my person. It's all part of my commitment to surrounding myself with beauty. I find these small things that make me happy, so why not spread them throughout my life liberally. So, despite the fact that last week was a bizarre roller coaster of emotions, here are a few of my newest little obsessions.

1. Taking the book jackets off of hard covers. I always used to hate buying books in hard cover. Most of this had to do with the dust jacket, which would never stay put while I was reading. Well, I've bought a few different hard cover books this summer and have discovered that if I take the dust jacket off there is a beautiful book waiting underneath (like the one pictured above). I suddenly love hard cover books. They are simple and elegant and make me feel fancy.
2. Hummus on sandwiches. I pretty much can't eat any condiments, nor can I have cheese, and this makes sandwiches pretty much the most boring food around. (With the exception of fried egg sandwiches, which are another one of my obsessions, although much less recent). I love hummus though, and so recently my mother and I decided that it would make an excellent addition to my sandwiches. Let me tell you, it is so delicious that I actually crave sandwiches now.
3. Bio-pic kinds of films. I've been deep in these kinds of films lately. I've always enjoyed them, it's just that I've been watching them all the time lately. Here's a few I would especially recommend: The Young Victoria, Coco Avant Chanel, Julie & Julia, Sylvia, Bright Star, Eat Pray Love. If anyone has any other recommendations, please send them my way.
4. Online magazines. Seriously in love with Matchbook and Kinfolk. So much inspiration for life is found on these (digital) pages.

Does anybody else ever find themselves obsessing over things? What are some things that have been making you happy lately?

Feeling in Colour

Do you ever associate particular colours with particular feelings? I do this all the time. A lot of the time I have no idea how to answer the question "how are you?" because my automatic response is something like "highlighter yellow" or "royal blue", and I feel like that probably is not the kind of response most people are looking for. Well, today was a "light gauzy grey and baby pink" kind of day. I honestly don't know how else to describe it. It wasn't a bad day, it was just a weird day. It was technically the first day of school, but I didn't have any classes.  Everyone around me is excited about being back, and normally I would be there right along with them, but instead I just feel blank. My friends are excited about upcoming weddings, new classes, new adventures, but somewhere in the last couple days it is like all excitement has died in me. It's like I'm removed from everything and everyone. Like I'm one step away from where I should be. I'm perfectly calm. I'm not panicked. All day long though the only really solid thought I could form about how I was feeling was the image of grey and pink. Don't get me wrong, I love grey and pink, they just seem to represent a strange state of mind right now.

Cold and Grey

from The Grey Islands
John Steffler

scoured sky. wind
and open miles.
all morning we climb the bright
hills cresting across our course,
pitching us up, sledding us sideways
down, wallowing, walled in water.
                     quick. near us
and gone,
              slim birds flit low, banking,
twisting, skimming the closing troughs,
and I feel it,
                 know it a laughing
fact: the harder your hungry eyes bite
into the world (the island cliffs pencilled
in blue haze, and there, Nels pointing:
whale spray!
                 huge flukes kicking at the sun), the more
you spread your arm to hug it in,
the less you mind the thought of diving under,

eyes flooded, gulping dark.

...

what can we do in such elements?

rock hills only recently
softened with green, some moss
and boggy hollows

vast migration of cloud

the wind in invisible glacier
wearing the island down

I keep warm burning
bits of a house

the work of people who tried to live here.

...

not man's time here,
sun's time.
rock's time.
I begin to feel it.

days blink by - light
and cold flowing over - tide
breathing smoothly, evenly, I

slip between half-seconds, flash
light-beam pinball-style, do
ten thousand vanishing things
in a breath.

...

jagged island
island of noise.
the sea serious as ever, breaking
all that it touches.
wind tearing itself to pieces
pounces with all its weight, stops, flattens
grass again. tramples the waves.

the mountains cinder grey
cinder jagged
handsome as animals
hunt the passing clouds.
gathering trouble.

...

warm sounds: the gas lamp's
loud hiss

the stove snaps and flutters

outside
the wind
the cold wash of gravel and sea

John Steffler's The Grey Islands is one of my favourite pieces of Canadian literature. It was probably reading excerpts from this work in the second half of my Canadian lit class that sold me on Canadian literature. This is how my Can lit textbook introduces this work: "This mixture of prose and poetry describing a pilgrimage to the islands that lie off the east coast of Newfoundland's norther peninsula is the story of an individual seeking solitude. 'A way to corner myself is what I want,' he explains on the first page; 'Some blunt place I can't go beyond. Where excuses stop.'

I realize that I live in the middle of the prairies and as such am completely landlocked. Despite this I not only love these excerpts because they capture one of the qualities that I love most about the east coast, but because they capture a huge element of the Canadian relationship with landscape and weather. This is something I've been contemplating a lot lately since it is part of what I want to study in grad school. With the arrival of winter this week though (snow yesterday) I've been reminded of it anew.

I took this picture a couple weeks ago over the Thanksgiving weekend. I like how grey and flat the sky is and how much the red of the berries pops against it. It captures the cold perfectly. My mom looked at it and said it kind of looked like a piece of modern art, and she is right. That's probably part of why I like it as well.   

I've got sunshine on a cloudy day

Or at least I have a sunflower. The sun finally came out in full force today. Even though it was still a bit chilly out, it was a welcome respite from the relentless rain. And it is supposed to be warm and sunny and indian summer-like for the next while. Yay! This picture is appropriate for today for more than just that. Yesterday was rough. Today was also a rather unpleasant day, so by the time I got to work I was grouchy and was worried that work would just make it worse. Instead it actually brightened my day. Now if I have told you work stories or you have worked where I work (not that a lot of my work colleagues read this...or any of them) then you know that this is something akin to a miracle. Normally the office is not the most uplifting of places; it tends to be rather stressful, especially on Thursday nights when I don't start work until 6.30 (3 hours later than a typical weekday shift). Maybe it was just the combination of people who were working tonight, but somehow it wasn't as insane as a typical Thursday and I actually had some fun joking around with some of the guys. So nice after two days of grossness. So there you have it, literal and metaphorical sunshine today.

This is yet another picture from Lacombe (I took a lot). The sunflowers in this garder were ridiculously tall and huge. I have never seen sunflowers like that before. They were really pretty though, with their bright yellow petals standing out against the grey sky. Love it!

La belle dame sans merci

La belle dame sans merci

John Keats

O what can ail thee knight at arms,

  Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake

  And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee knight at arms,

  So haggard and so woe begone?

The squirrel's granary is full

  And the harvest's done.

I see a lilly on thy brow

  With anguish moist and fever dew,

And on they cheeks a fading rose

  Fast Withereth too -

I met a Lady in the Meads

  Full beautiful, a faery's child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light

  And her eyes were wild -

I made a Garland for her head,

  And bracelets too, and fragrant Zone

She look'd at me as she did love

  And made sweat moan -

I set her on my pacing steed

  And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

  A faery's song -

She found me roots of relish sweet

  And honey wild and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said

  I love thee true -

She took me to her elfin grot

  And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

  With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep

  And there I dream'd - Ah! Woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dreamt

  On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and Princes too,

  Pale warriors, death pale were they all;

They cried 'La bell dame sans merci

  Thee hath in thrall.'

I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam

  With horrid warning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here

  On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here

  Alone and palely loitering;

Though the sedge is wither'd from the Lake

  And no birds sing.

Has anyone else seen the movie Bright Star? I absolutely adore it, and have probably mentioned it on here before. The film tells the story of John Keats and Fanny Brawne and is a poignant and beautiful love story. After I first watched it I decided that I could happily fall in love with a poet. Now, I love poetry. There is something wonderful about luxuriating in a wonderful poem. You have to read poetry slowly, at least I find that the poetry I enjoy the most has to be read slowly. You have to drink it in in sips, not gulps. I haven't always loved poetry though. In fact, I almost used transfer credits to allow me to skip out on the second half of intro English (which, at King's, focuses on poetry and drama). However, I decided that I might as well take it just in case I decided to choose English as my major. That class was absolutely wonderful, and it made me truly fall in love with poetry. I wrote my first paper that semester on Walt Whitman's "To a Locomotive in Winter" and Emily Dickinson's "I like to see it lap the miles" and suddenly discovered how much I loved delving into a poem, looking at the words and turns of phrase and poetic devices. I know that not everyone shares this opinion; in fact, most of the people I know are of the "poetry is a waste of time" school of thought. However, thanks to a wonderful professor, who, incidentally, also is the person who convinced me to go into English studies, I have a profound enjoyment of poetry. Despite this love of poetry, I have never really been able to appreciate the Romantics. I don't know what it is. Perhaps it is simply because I have read the same poems over and over and over again and since I didn't love them in the first place they have come to leave a bitter taste in my mouth. So I was quite suprised when I finished watching Bright Star and emerged with a deep desire to read John Keats. Having the incomparable voice of Ben Whishaw reading the poems in the film (since he plays Keats) probably had something to do with it, but it is more than that. I bought the Complete Poems of John Keats and dearly love them. They are fantastical and dream-like, beautiful, thoughtful...in short, they are exactly the kind of poetry that one must drink in ever so slowly. And for that, they are wonderful.

One of the reasons I turn to poetry is to recharge my artistic batteries. Whenever I am feeling a bit uninspired or like I might want to take an office job after my undergrad rather than pursuing my masters I automatically turn to music and literature. I soak myself in art, particularly words. Poetry reminds me why I love words so much. This artistic "bath" is always enough for me to kick-start my own creativity. It makes me want to write, or photograph, or draw, or sing, or play piano, anything creative will do. That's one of the reasons I turned to a poem for today's post. Although, I had a lovely weekend filled with birthday celebrations for a dear friend, a lazy, rainy Sunday reading Mansfield Park and The Sound and the Fury while drinking tea, and an evening with my best friend who I haven't seen in ages, the idea of blogging and being creative was almost overwhelming. So, today I resolved to post something. And not just something mediocre, but something that I could feel truly satisfied with. Thus, I turned to poetry and music to inspire me...and voila! a beautiful (if I do say so myself) blog post.

In order to make up for my absence the past few days, I bring you a lovely, long post today. These pictures seem to capture the fantastical, dream-like quality of the poem I've paired them with. First up we have an image from Jasper, the day that my roommates and I drove out there for a picnic (I've posted images from that trip here and here). I did absolutely nothing to this picture editing-wise, that is just how the light was in that little nook of the trail. Absolute perfection. Next is an image from several years ago on a youth retreat at Camp Nakamun. It was early October so the trees were bare and there was just a grey quality to everything. I (obviously) made the image black and white and then I gave it a bit of a "glow" to give it the dream-like quality called for in this set of images. The third image is once again from our Jasper trip. The original image is in color and the blue sky is really intense, but because it was so shady in the forest the trees are all dark and shadowy. I felt like making it black and white gave it an almost eerie quality that was suited to the fantastical nature of this poem. Pretty much the same story goes for the next image as well. Finally, we have an image from a walk I took with a couple friends through the Edmonton River Valley in the fall of 2007. It was a really gorgeous day. This shadowy bit of a creek (no that is not the North Saskatchewan River) seemed perfect for this post. I upped the color saturation a bit just to intensify the dreaminess of it that much more. There you have it, a bona fide photography blog post!

Rain, rain on my face

It has been grey and rainy and rather blah for a few days now. All this would not be such an issue except for the wind. Ah well. Nothing to be done about it. The dreary weather always makes me think about the East Coast and how much I love it there. This picture is from the last time I was in Nova Scotia. Rain on the car window as we drove along the highway. Perhaps if it is still rainy tomorrow I'll have to go out and try and get some good shots to share here.

At least the inclement weather means that I don't want to be outside. I managed to get a good amount of unpacking done today. All of my clothes and shoes now have homes and I have made a good start on the unpacking of books. If you know me then you know that all three of those categories of belongings are not small in my world. I have a lot of shoes. And clothes. But books are my real weakness; I just can't stop buying them. Speaking of which. I just finished Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner. Fantastic read. Very postmodern in the way it is structured and has some major elements of magic realism going on, but compelling and lovely. It kind of reminded me of Green Grass Running Water by Thomas King, which we read in the second half of my Canadian Lit course. Only, I think Nikolski is better. Hopefully tomorrow I can tackle the rest of my books and get a start on the random items I have have. One of the fun things about cleaning my room is finding old cards and letters. I found a couple from when my friend was living in France for a year. And a couple of old birthday cards from my best friend, which made me smile because of how much we have changed and how true her predictions that we would be friends for life are. Even though we have both changed so much, and we have gone through periods of being in ridiculous fights, we're still best friends. It's nice to have someone you can count on for that, someone that you know you can always talk to about anything. I also stumbled across my journals from YLP, which made for a fun trip down memory lane. They also made me terribly glad to not be a teenager anymore. Man was that an awkward phase of my life.

Yesterday was disgusting. On the bright side, I got a fantastic new haircut. On the down side NO ONE is hiring for the summer. I'm waiting to hear back from a couple places, but by and large people wouldn't even take my resume. Gah. Oh well, I'm sure everything will work itself out. The place that I really really really want to work took my resume so I'm hoping for a call from them some time soon.

*Title comes from the lyrics to "Flood" by Jars of Clay