Snobisme

The Old Library II
Originally uploaded by (Erik)

Sometimes I wonder where human beings get off critiquing the value of what other human beings do or create. Honestly, what right do we think we have to say that something is "good" or "bad" or "right" or "wrong" based on our own insignificant judgments of quality? How dare we think we can decide the value of something belonging to someone else - especially their thoughts?

I'm getting really fed up with arrogance lately, and surprisingly, it's not solely because of any personal injustice that I feel. It's just something I'm observing more and more of in this academic community, and online as well. I would like to think it exists to a less outrageous extent in other sectors of the world and life, but I'll be honest - I can't know that. I'm stuck in this little bubble of bullshit for the next year and a half, and there's not a whole lot I can do about it while I'm under the control of tests, papers, self-righteous professors and university administration. I'm just glad I'm in this situation at the same time that I'm in a place like New York, where it's relatively easy to "get away" from it all.

Dear members of my Education class group,

Freedom
Originally uploaded by Em.A~

Dear members of my Education class group,

You all are so fucking irresponsible. You are supposed to be teachers-in-training, but you aren't even disciplined enough to do ten minutes' worth of measly research on the educational system in England? I hand-fed you instructions on what to research and what to send me, and I sent out a million e-mail reminders and tried to make shit easy for you. I know that maybe the million e-mails was too much, but is it really my fault in the end, when none of you even had the balls to stand up and take responsibility for this project, for the constant e-mailing that it required? I'm looking at the syllabus and this is one of the main components going into our grade.


I sincerely hope that that ambiguous line in the syllabus about "class members grading each other" means that our group gets to grade each of its members, because I'm going to give all of you very honest grades that reflect your amount of effort in this ridiculous dance of not e-mailing me back/being late for meetings/refusing to offer suggestions/utter laziness.

I can understand that, because we are future teachers, we are all busy. We are busier than anyone else could ever comprehend. I am not even a future teacher and I'm busy. But none of you are busier than me, and none of you should have ever gotten it into your head that my assuming the responsibility meant that I had to do all the work myself.

I'm sure I'm overreacting. In fact, I'm about 90% sure that this project is going to go down really well and be pretty well-received, because of our combined efforts. I am just extremely bitter and extremely pissed that I had to be the one constantly worrying about all our asses in this course that no one cares about, despite it being one of the most relevant and useful classes we will ever take. I don't judge any of you for not thinking it's valuable as a class, but I really wish you could see that everything you do has value, and everything you do affects other people.

In fact, that is what this class is about: EDUCATION AS A SOCIAL INSTITUTION, bitches. Education is a social monster, life is a social monster, and you are all failing at it because all you're concerned with is managing your own lives instead of trying to interact with the people who have stumbled into it and are thus A PART OF IT, however minuscule and worthless, according to you.

Sincerely,
Bitter, Self-Designated Group Leader

It's all been said before

Magnificient
Originally uploaded by Puss.In.The.Hood

I decided a moment ago that I wanted to post something, but I realized that there was a slight flaw in my plan, because I didn't have anything to say.

Now, this isn't entirely true, because I have lots of things to say; there is a lot floating around the caverns of my mind, but none of it is focused, none of it is meaningful enough to share. And that is what we do here, on the Internet, we share. Often we share ad nauseam, and I really think that cheapens the experience sometimes. If you just shell out every last token of thought that zooms around your head, how do I know what I should take seriously?

In an ideal world, everything everyone says should be worthy of my attention, because individuals are unique and important. But however true that might be about individuals in principle, the reality is that I cannot know the worth behind what you say unless I know you as a person. Lately I'm learning that all my perfect, self-righteous idealistic theories are naive bubbles waiting to be popped by the society that says "ideal isn't real," the mantra I have ignored all my life because people said it too much. You see my problem?

I suppose now is as good a time as any to learn that the cliches and dead metaphors of life may have been used in earnest by past generations trying to show new generations their own lives' beauty and strife, but that no matter how many words you throw at me, I won't learn to see unless I open my own eyes.

Incidentally, this reminds me of a hilarious quote, heard at the movie theater in 2002, where a British child watching the spider scene in Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets wailed, "Mummy, close my eyes, I'm scared!" Oh the ignorance of youth.

Society and Brunhilde's Seriousness

take [10]
Originally uploaded by KarensJilly

Lately I've been noticing a lot that people take themselves very seriously. Either that, or they realize that taking yourself seriously is kind of pointless (because people tend to judge you more on the external result: how you interact with others, than your own internal self-concept, which they obviously can't see) and resort to outwardly belittling the mere idea of taking themselves seriously.

Example, because I clearly cannot express myself properly:

Person X: let's call her Brunhilde because I love that name and it is the only one that doesn't really connote anyone I know who might be offended by this. Brunhilde thinks very seriously about life, which is awesome and definitely ideal. Thumbs up for Brunhilde. But Brunhilde knows that in Society Y (let's just call it Society for the sake of simplicity and truth), most people don't convey her ease for critical thought and heavy reflection.

It is certainly true that in Society, other people have Brunhilde's internal seriousness, but for whatever reason, in Society it is not so acceptable to just come out and say your honest thoughts about your serious views, at least in casual conversation. So, Brunhilde is considering the two routes most people in Society tend to take at this junction.

1. Accept that all is lost and that no one will ever appreciate your unique serious thoughts, so you turn to the totally un-serious side of life and get by on humor, drunkenness and superficiality. It works for some people, and they still have these serious, thoughtful thoughts, but they keep them to themselves or maybe one good friend.
2. Realize that Society will never change its narrow-minded ways but say "fuck them all" and just express every single serious thought without any regard for the ridiculous conventions of Society's non-serious ways.

However, both of these routes have their flaws. In 1 it's obvious: you keep yourself bottled up. In 2 you seem to be more liberated by expressing your serious thoughts, but then Brunhilde wonders: don't people just end up taking their own serious thoughts too seriously? And get boring? Just being serious all the time and having no fun with it?

What's a good compromise? Is there a way to balance Society's intolerance for uninhibited expression of critical thought without becoming serious to the extreme? I'm sure there is - countless renowned authors/artists/etc. have found it.

Am I making a huge, gross generalization? Probably. Prove me right or wrong. Bring me stories and advice, I know you have them. Then again, you may not want to share, because you take yourself too seriously. ?

Edit 7:53 p.m.: When I first wrote this, it was generally just a thoughtful, curious glob of snot dripping down my metaphoric nose. But actually there is serious mucous there and I'm realizing that people who take themselves too seriously actually really block up my sinuses.

Oh, the scattered contents of a college kid's brain

lapalomafuelaquesecruzó
Originally uploaded by suprises

Lately I have been essentially consumed with two very different thoughts, and they alternate. One is a general sense of awe and overwhelmption (sure, why not) about the essence of life and how the main themes in my academic life are all colliding and exciting and blah blah blah. It's getting a little too pretentious even for me, I can tell you, so I can't imagine how annoyed the rest of the world is with me.

The other thought is a general, fretful feeling about how loud my CPU fan is on my laptop. :( I have this computer, a Vaio VGN SZ270P, to be exact. I even bought a can of pressurized air so that I could be all macho-nerdy and unscrew the back of my laptop and blow that canned air through the provided straw into my stupid fan. Anyway, I decided that when this computer completely dies, I would like the latest Macbook as a replacement. I'm sure there'll be a newer, more expensive version out by that time, but my point is that the Apple kingdom is really winning me over.

Anyway, I also wanted to share a lovely link with you fine people. It is called SelfAbsorbed.me and has provided me with many minutes of entertaining reading about real life written funnier. Also one of the writers apparently went to NYU, because I found the site by Googling the 11-person suite at the dorm I want to live at next year. Read the article in question here.

Late nights

I can't sleep, because my sleep schedule is messed up, but also because tonight my roommate and I hosted a beautifully successful dinner party where the people didn't really know each other but clicked wonderfully. We had great food (lasagna by my roommate, cheese sticks by my good friend A, garlicky broccoli and vegan brownies by me, and numerous desserts brought by our friends) and, more importantly, great conversation. I love the human mind and the discussion of life and society and humor and old stuff and new stuff and... I like it all but it tires me out.

I wish my exhaustion could lead me to sleep, but I'm kept up by a racing mind and this song.

Shark Tank

On a pleasant misty morning,
Originally uploaded by *~\[ Yuga ☼ Sunshine ]/~*

While walking to an NYU dorm in the West Village last night, I was making my way down Morton Street when a bluish light from overhead in one of the apartments stopped me. I peered up at the third-floor loft with its huge windows and I could vaguely make out a large cube shape full of water. The blue light was bathing the inhabitants of this cube - nothing less than actual, live SHARKS. They were little ones, kind of like this...

JK. More like this. But still, I was amazed that people were rich enough and pompous enough to get sharks for their apartment. I was about to just walk on by, shaking my head, but I realized that I just wanted to stand there and look at the sharks a little longer.

In life, I don't think we do that enough. We don't stop to take things in. It's been said many times many ways (much like "Merry Christmas," bad joke) but still, people see something crazy as they live out their lives and simply furrow their brow while they walk on by. Sharks, I definitely cannot just walk on by those.

Googlin' Gramercy

Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.
Originally uploaded by Em.A~

So I notice a lot of you are coming here from Googling something along the lines of "Gramercy Green NYU housing pictures show me show me show me." I do not mind so much. In fact, I enjoy seeing that people come here looking for Gramercy but stay a little while longer, presumably to read my rambling would-be existential thoughts. I just think it's funny that my blog is the third link on the Google lists when I only have one post about the search terms in question, and the post isn't even that informative.

Here is what I will say about Gramercy:

- It is luxury. Marble countertops, touch-screen microwaves, dishwashers, enormous fridges, talking elevators, seven or so lounges (2 with TVs) throughout the building, upscale subcellar gym and study lounges, a game room, and a great community.
- It is expensive. At almost $13,000 per school year, we are all paying out the ass for this, and you still have to sign non-NYU people in for a max of 3 consecutive nights.
- It is in a great location. Duane Reade is on our ground floor, we're across the street from Starbucks (doesn't take dining dollars unfortunately), blocks away from Chipotle (#1 priority), the Flatiron building, Madison Square Park, the Blender Theater, the Epiphany branch of the NY Public Library, thrift shops galore, and lots of old people. (Don't worry, Baruch, School of Visual Arts or whatever, and plenty of bars are also nearby. You can solve that equation.) It normally takes fast walkers 20 minutes to get to the NYU campus downtown, and 25 for me cause I never learned to walk good.

- I am leaving it for off-campus housing next year, which terrifies me and really makes me not want to talk about it on this blog, which I like to think I save for thoughts of prettiness and intellectualism. What I like to think and what is actually true, of course, are a bit like gold and silver: very good but also quite different. That was a simile.

I'm done.

Think Me

I wish I weren't already behind in schoolwork, because I find that not being on the same page as the professor hinders my ability to think critically in a progressive manner from day to day. Nevertheless, I am really enjoying the path along which my thoughts have been taking me lately.

Somehow, all my subjects seem to be connected to each other this semester. A class on the French ghetto recalls my Education reading about a Lower East Side school in the projects during the 70s and 80s. The social factors of education wind around each other and into the topic of bilingualism, another class I'm taking. I test and question my own degree of bilingualism in a French translation course while also wondering about the pedagogy and teachability of translation. Then there's my class entitled Metaphors of Modern Theater, where we read and discuss plays of the absurd, which kind of zooms back out onto life in general.

It's kind of silly how it has taken me five semesters already to get into the groove of college, but now because of that, I'm getting scared of releasing the pinched opening of the balloon that is my safe little college life, because that will mean I'm going to get flung out into the real world, zigzagging who knows where with no ideas of my future....alkafdlkjg

Lyrical

I'm lost
Originally uploaded by Puss.In.The.Hood

I never really listen to music lyrics. Well, rarely. When the explosion of my music tastes occurred mid-high school and I bought a lot of CDs, I would make a point of sitting down to listen through the full albums with the jacket lyrics in front of me, so I could more easily memorize the words. But most of the time it became just that - memorization, and I hardly knew the stories and creations I was singing along to.

But lately I've been listening. I notice awe-inspiring metaphors, instead of just aurally pleasing cadences and chords. Don't get me wrong; the music part of music has and always will attract me. But I think I've been sadly blind to the lyrical potential of this beauty.

I am very grateful that Gala once linked these monthly mixes on Livejournal (you have to have an account and join the LJmixtape community to see and download, but it's worth it, if really only for this one girl's mixes). I love grand themes like that, and her musical mélanges are so wonderful. Here are some songs from her and some that, in general, are making me think lately.

Unusual - Stacy Clark
[lyrics]

Wheels - John Mayer
[lyrics]

Black and gold radio1 live lounge - Sam Sparro
[lyrics]

Realities

The magic umbrella
Originally uploaded by KarensJilly

It's funny how every day can have a different character. Sometimes we don't see it, because we let monotony get the best of us, but I think I'm noticing it more now that I don't have many responsibilities to worry about, because of break.

For example, yesterday I didn't shower and didn't get dressed all day. I was generally feeling like a disgusting, dirty human being because of this and because my friends are all leaving me to go back to school. Not to mention PMS. (Yay TMI!) But the entire quality of my day changed when I looked at my phone around 5:30 - the first time I had bothered to do so all day - and had a text from my friend L (who I had thought was already back at school) asking if I wanted to get Chipotle for dinner. I was elated by a) the idea of getting out of the house and b) the surprise of knowing she was still in town when I thought I was all alone! I called her back and we had a very adventurous dinner time eating our burrito bols up at a makeout point at Tilden Park haha. There was a great view, a wild fox, and some creepy guys smoking pot who tried to get us to roll down the window to talk to them, but we left at that point...

Today has been a pretty relaxed day, in comparison. I've spent some time thinking about how silly it is to separate the ideas of a fun, frivolous life and the mundane parts of life like worrying madly about money (which I am actually doing, unfortunately). "Real life" tends to be what I call that mundane part of my existence, and the fun, introspective side is too often deemed unrealistic. But both are real, sometimes too much so.

For example, I went to my grandfather's house today, where a piano lives, to try my hand at the keys after what is surely years of not playing seriously. I just played. I played arpeggios and old pieces, and my motor memory strained pathetically to re-create the chords and phrases. It was good for me, but very frustrating, very real.

2009

Waiting from RhiannonDaire

As the new year begins and I return from a cozy party with friends, I click through a bunch of blogs. They catalog resolutions, antiestablishmentarian rejection of resolutions, self-help strategies, and a slew of advice that, when taken in all at once, is pretty useless. But through it all, an especially warm-hearted, apparently timeless old sentiment from Neil Gaiman stands out to me:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Blogging

flowers in december by °°k°°.

Blogging, all of a sudden, has as many strange quirks and customs as the real world. There are "right" ways to blog and "wrong" ways, and there even seem to be formulas for how to become rich and successful while blogging. It's kind of silly and kind of maddening. You're supposed to have a theme for your blog if you want to attract more visitors and readers, apparently. You've got to be organized and to only just divulge enough of your life to be enticing but safe.

I guess my problem with blogging "success" (aside from my gratuitous use of unnecessary quotes) is that I always thought of it as a personal journal that happened to be open to the public. That was all. And a personal journal doesn't necessarily have a theme. I mean, perhaps posthumously, with some knowledge about the author, you could summarize the thing sort of generally, like with Anne Frank. She was a girl who matured very quickly during an extremely arduous period both historically and personally. But when I blog or journal, it's generally not with these sort of themes in mind. 13 Years of Clutter was definitely the exception, because I had a specific project to document. But otherwise, my thought process does not work in a way conducive to these themes.

However, I do very much admire people who can channel their intriguing thoughts into this format and garner attention and well-deserved praise for it. With that, here are some of the blogs and sites I have been admiring lately. Some may be repeats, but let's just say it's for the purpose of list-making.

• iCiNG: Inspirational, fashionable and upbeat, Gala Darling's site is everything I could ever want lately. She always links amazing things/people and has a lot of optimism to share.


• Project: Happily Ever After: This lady has decided to create a "project" for the things in her life that cause unhappiness. I like this approach a lot, and the idea that you can consciously change what you don't like about life is appealing to my current mindset.


• Debauchette: NSFW, generally. There is a lot of sex writing in this call-girl/"courtesan"'s blog, but the mystery woman is truly intelligent and sees the world in such an interesting way that I do recommend it, in spite of its inherent controversy. Judge her all you want, judge me for valuing her writing - if you shed your expectations for this blog you may find some really hard-hitting insight about human nature and society.


• Decorating Nature: Less a blog than a quick collection of some amazing, creative photographs. :)


• an aesthetic feast: Fashionable and food-loving, this girl posts such cute things and has a strangely captivating writing voice.


• The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks: Just for fun. :) I love hilarity and irony.

Home again, home again

I'm home for winter break! My break is always unreasonably long (ha ha, I'm not gloating) and my friends usually return to school before me, so I think I may very well be continuing my de-cluttering project over the next month.

Returning home has already been somewhat stressful. Even aside from all the traveling (I was en route for almost 12 hours yesterday, which doesn't sound bad, but it was real bad), I came home to find that my mother needs $1,000 from me to pay off her old University of Phoenix debts or something. It really depresses me and troubles me that my mother needs so much financial help to me, even though I'm only twenty years old and don't even have my own stable source of income besides the work study that I do to support my educational finances.

Discovering that she needed to borrow from me today put me in quite a bad mood, but then I spent some time with my best friends here at home and had such a good time that it relieved some stress. They are the one constant that I can rely on for smiles and good memories - the real reason I come home, honestly. I would say that I come home to see my family, but actually my family stresses me out. I think this is true for a lot of people. (Is it?)

So in order to avoid family woes as much as possible, I am planning on devoting my time to things that make me happy over this break:

• De-cluttering. The house looks rather worse than I think I left it, despite my mother's claims that it is better. But de-cluttering always gives me a strong sense of satisfaction that I intend to re-invoke while I'm back.


• Reading. A new guy friend of mine has inspired me to be more thoughtful. I have been a fan of the library since the end of high school (it sounds weird to say that - maybe I'm a late library-bloomer?), and I'm thinking of getting some Umberto Eco and perhaps Oscar Wilde to curl up with.


• Being creative. The same friend has inspired me to be more creative with my time. All of my past breaks from school have involved relaxing via mind-numbing intake of non-enriching media. But I do love music, and I love the prospect of writing (the act itself is a slightly different story). There are several projects in these arenas that I want to throw myself back into.


• Spending time with my friends. Friendship is one of the most beautiful things I have right now, and that may sound cliched, but only because the truth about friendship has already been discovered millions of times over. I love my friends.

TiLT

Things i Love Today:

- the guy who brushed his fingertips along the Christmas trees lining Astor Place between Lafayette and Broadway, smiling to himself
- fallen leaves on the ground that look like paper stars when the light catches them and I see them out of the corner of my eye
- hearing two guys singing this song in unison as I walked down Washington Place
- getting an 88 on the Human Development test I thought I failed and then getting it raised to a 92
- when my entire German class exclaims in upset unison about getting a recent test back. Those kids are too much haha.

"Rabbit rabbit"

Happy December! I have not been posting much, not for lack of exciting material. Thanksgiving was a really great break for me. I went to D.C. and had a very cathartic, enlightening conversation with my good friend S on the bus back to New York at 10 p.m. Saturday. The two of us discovered, among other things, that the present does not exist - only the past and future - and felt very wise/deep.

But the most valuable thing I took away from the conversation was something S imparted to me while we were discussing our respective, overwhelming levels of stress. She said, and it is so simple: Thinking about the things that stress you out is not going to help you. I told you, simple! But it's something that has helped me immensely in the past few days to control my stress level. For the first time, I am really taking things one step at a time. This morning, I woke up with that familiarly vague sense of panic that my day ahead was going to bring chaos and stress, but I murmured, "First things first. Get up and eat breakfast." And it soothed me.

It remains to be seen whether this attitude is a false sense of security about all the stressful things I still have to accomplish. But whatever it is, it's a quick fix that seems to be working.

Anyway, here is a really cool song that LJ user binsybaby, a very talented artist, posted today. It's a 8-bit Nintendo version of You Can't Hurry Love. !! I loved that song already, but this makes it even more awesome.

Looking back, as usual

I am such a sucker for nostalgia. It amazes me in a lot of ways. Mainly in the way that, as I am making all these memories, I think nothing of them. But then, when I get in that mood - that warm, excited mood that comes with reliving the good parts of my past - they all flood back in a kind of sepia-tinted rush. Memories and colors fill my head andI feel a very particular sensation of good old times.

I was looking through my folder of saved e-mail correspondences, and I found one I kept in 2004 with a guy who read my blog. I was taking Latin over the summer at Berkeley, and I think I linked to his site, having followed the bread crumbs of other ATDP (Berkeley's Academic Talent Development Program) blogs to find it. He was very encouraging, complimenting me on my maturity and writing style, which sounds so child molesty and suspicious, but it was completely harmless. We definitely had similar ways of thinking, and it interests me so much to look back at the person I was when writing those e-mails back and forth, and to think about how much he has probably changed too. (I don't read his members-only blog anymore, for fear of finding a less idealized version of him than the one I knew back then through our e-mails. Silly, I know.)

Knowing this fixation on my own pathetic autobiography is so present worries me a little. Maybe I'm too stuck in the past. The present certainly never seems like much while I'm living it.

...Well, that's not entirely what I mean.

What I mean is that, while I'm in the present, I feel like I'm not accomplishing anything. And that is a very pessimistic, very me way of seeing things. Because surely I am accomplishing things all the time. I won't try to instill this reflection with any silly, self-comforting pride, but things do happen in my life, and whether they are huge, impressive awards or epiphanies or not, they are part of my progressing life. I don't need to feel held back or unaccomplished just because I am not making the great strides that others take pride in.

This may be turning into a grand glorification of laziness.

I guess the thing that this all relates to is Paris, Je T'Aime. I watched it for the first time today, and I felt a strange connection with the woman in the short film about falling in love with Paris. She speaks French with sort of an endearingly terrible accent and is quite a simple person, all things said and done. And all she wants is someone to share things with, someone to share Paris with. She doesn't find someone in the five minutes of the film; it's not really that kind of optimism. The optimism of the short film though, comes at the end, when she realizes, sitting alone on a bench eating a sandwich in a comfortably busy park, that she and Paris are falling in love. That's the kind of person I think I am.

I Am Angel Deverell...

So yesterday I went to see Angel, and it was kind of good that I didn't make it into a date of any kind, but I liked it. The over-the-top satirical romance was a little aggravating at times, but what I really enjoyed about the movie were the assorted moments where color, music and mood rushed together to create beautiful, comfortably almost-nostalgic images for my romantic appreciation. I'm not sure how to better describe them, but they took me back to more innocent days of idealized love that I'd created in my head, in settings built solely for the depiction of that dream. I suppose I really need an escape, lately, and Angel was good for that.

Now, however, I am back to procrastinating work and waking up guilty and stressed about my mess of a life.

Early Christmas Spirit

This weekend, I successfully got myself in over my head with Christmas mood preparyness. My friend C and I ate her homemade (vegan!) apple-peach pie, soy chocolate ice cream, warm apple cider with a hint of cinnamon, and delighted in the Christmas joy that is Love Actually. Can I just say that that movie brings out the romantic in me? It does. Not only because Karl is immeasurably beautiful, but because the stories are all around pretty romantic and sweet. Except the ones that are heartbreaking. But you know.

I have been singing "All I Want For Christmas Is You" like a broken record, and it is finally getting pretty cold outside, so guess what guys! CHRISTMAS IS COMING!! But don't tell that to my pessimistic friend from Human Development class, who insists that this crazy thing called Thanksgiving has to come first. WHATEVER, Thanksgiving. I mock you and your birds and your corn and your thanks. Christmas will not be defeated.

This weekend, a friend from home is coming to visit, and I am planning to drag her out to Brooklyn so we can see Angel, an allegedly riotously sappy, romantic movie. There is snow in the poster photo, and that makes me happy. I just wish I had someone romantical to go with me to see it on a date. Yes a date. I have never dated in my life. But that would be a cute date and I would get us lost in deep dark Brooklyn but we would find a cozy little cafe with hardwood floors and crimson couches and smile at each other a lot, and kisses would probably be involved.

Sites I Like #8: Des meubles de cuisine à petits prix

Something I've noticed since spending lots of time in my new dream dorm is that, no matter how pretty and clean a place is when it's brand new, it takes a certain amount of effort to keep it looking nice and comfortable. Our kitchen is one place where our filthiness likes to manifest itself. Neither my roommate nor I do the dishes on a regular basis. Unless you could call "whenever we run out of dishes and decide to do them all in one fell swoop" regular. I'm kind of a hypocrite, because of my history with de-cluttering and my manic need for things to be organized in my California home but not in New York. But I feel like I'm allowed to be messy since I'm in college.

Whatever my excuse, our kitchen gets dirty. It's still pretty, but if you actually look at the floors and run a hand along the granite counter top, you might just recoil in disgust. And, instead of cleaning or doing the reading I need to do for Francophone Literature (in which I have an impossible-sounding midterm on Wednesday), I thought I would present you with this wonderful link to pictures of Low-Cost Kitchen Furniture. Enjoy! It's in French, but I mean... all you really need are the pictures. Maybe someday I will translate the blurbs as an exercise for myself, since I'm taking Translation now, but for now... I don't wanna learn. I do what I want! A lot like Mindy Kaling and Cartman.