Easter and a Birthday

Photos for your viewing pleasure:

When your little sister's birthday falls on Easter and she asks you to take a sister photoshoot, what can you do?

Okay, just for fun, let's compare that picture to Easter 2007:

Gotta love Texas . . .

Look how grown up she is now.  Crazy!

Okay, aside from the hair-in-the-wind beard/mustache, I really like that one.

And then the wind picked up.

Love that last one . . . It's like Cousin It.

I definitely prefer being behind the camera to being in front of the lens.

I was so frustrated because I couldn't get my camera to focus on this little red berry, even with manual focus.  (I'm still in the learning phase.) But this still looks cool focused on the green leaf.

Then we found this ripe berry!

And baby proceeded to eat it.

Almost as good as birthday cake.

A Critiquer

Yep, that's what I am.  I just recently realized that I critique things all day.  ALL DAY!

At Career Services, I critique resumes.

In between classes I critique my classmates' creative works because that's what we do.  We workshop.

I am one of the poetry editors for my school's literary journal (okay, so maybe that's not critiquing, but I decide if things are worth putting in or not).

At the Writing Center, I critique papers.

I am a critiquing machine.
Okay.  That's all I really had to say.
But isn't it a little weird that I do the same basic thing all day in several different capacities?

Executive Decisions

I hate making them.
I don't know if this is a product of my raisin' or what.  I don't feel like I was raised to doubt myself.  But somehow I did end up with practically an inability to make a decision about anything.  This may partly be a self-defense mechanism.  I've never been known for my wonderful common sense . . .

*Even more of a side-note:  It's always been one of my greatest fears that my one-day children will inherit my complete lack of common sense.  That would be bad for the world.*

Okay, back to what I was saying before.  I absolutely hate making decisions about anything.  I will always ask for other people's opinions before making a decision.  Provided there are other people around, that is.

You can imagine how I felt about being the only lifeguard at camp last weekend.  Yep.  This little non-decision-maker watched over a pool which had anywhere from two to probably 60something people in it at any given moment.
At one point, I told one particular young gentleman that he couldn't have a tube in the shallow end, that all the tubes had to be in the lazy river even though he was one of the two people in the shallow end at the time.  Actually, it probably went a little more like I didn't know that he was about to be using the tube and I asked him if he could please toss it over into the lazy river for me and he said "What? we're not allowed to have tubes in the shallow end?"  I looked at him sadly and shook my head and immediately began pondering why "we're not allowed to have tubes in the shallow end."  It's a rule from the summer that I was just blindly following even though there really wasn't any justification for applying it at that particular point.
So, I made a quick decision that I would only enforce rules that were directly related to actually keeping the patrons safe.  (Yeah, things like the always-beloved "Walk, please!")
Immediately after I'd made that decision and was feeling foolishly proud of myself for having made a decision of my own, the self-same young gentleman and his chronies took up the ever-popular and forbidden-in-the-summer game of throw-the-football-from-the-shallow-end-to-your-friend-on-the-diving-board.  I watched them for two seconds and decided that it was okay because there were no small children around in danger of getting hit in the back of the head by the football.
THEN, the young gentleman noticed me watching them and said to me "What?  You're gonna tell me that I can do this, but I can't have a tube in the shallow end?"

I just can't win with this decision-making business, can I?

A Confession

BackGround Info:  For years (possibly forever, in fact), I've claimed to dislike gold.  Almost all of my jewelry has been silver and I felt kind of sad about even wearing necklaces with thin gold chains.  In my senior year of high school I discovered white gold and got excited about it, so I had to narrow my claim to not liking yellow gold.
My "class ring" for high school was not traditional.  My parents told me to pick out any kind of ring I liked and they would buy it for me.  I chose a pretty fairy-ish ring with a white gold band and a flower made of diamonds with an emerald center.  The only thing that clouded my joy about this choice was the fact that there was a tiny yellow gold twist underneath the flower (presumably the vine the flower grew on).  It took me several weeks after I got it to wear this ring for the first time, all because of that gold vine.
I know, I know.  I am slightly too obsessive about things sometimes, but I just really didn't like it.

When it came time for me to get my college ring, I knew I was going to get a traditional ring since I hadn't gotten one in high school.  I'd also decided, way back when I got my high school ring, that I wanted a silver or white gold college ring.  Of course.
However, when it came down to the actual moment of buying the ring, I caved at the advice of a friend and bought yellow gold for really only one reason: it looks more professional.  This is a very logical reason, but I have no clue why, after years and years of defiance against yellow gold, I made one of the biggest purchases I've ever made in yellow gold.

So now, we come to today.  I've been wearing my ring every day I possibly could since I bought it.  No weeks waiting to wear this one because I feel truly proud of the accomplishment it represents (after all, I've persevered through this thing called secondary education for almost five and a half years) . . . and because I spent so much money on the ridiculous thing!
Today I happened to glance down at my right hand in the golden midmorning light and I suddenly realized something.  Yellow gold actually looks really good with my skin tone.  And even more shocking:
Yellow gold is beautiful.
Did you catch that?  I like yellow gold.

Confession:  I've been lying all these years.
I'm sorry to have deceived you all for so long.

Little tid-bit of information:  "Golden" has always been one of my favorite words.  It's just taken me a long time to discover that I actually love what it's derived from as well.

Here's the Latest

I bought a camera!  A real camera!  A Nikon D3000!

It's actually the camera that I used at camp last year.

(In case you're not aware, I was a media intern at Camp Tejas for the last two summers, which is a fancy way of saying I took as many pictures of kids and campy things as I could every day.)

Anyway, this camera was brand new last summer and I was really the only one who used it, so the guy that I talked to about it was like "Well, it's really like it's your camera already."  So true!

And now I sort of regret not cleaning it better at the end of every day . . .

But when you're standing in the mud taking pictures like this

all the time, it's hard to stay motivated to keep your camera clean.

But it's really in very good condition and I'm super excited about it!

And just because I like pictures (and am a little vain about some of mine) and can't think of anything else to say, here's a sample of what might be showing up on my blog more often when I actually get this camera in my hands:

The only sad thing is that I won't have it in time for our trip to the Farmer's Market on Saturday, another thing I'm super excited about.  Oh well, you can't have everything.

I feel like I'm getting pretty close right now, though.

An Event

On Friday I gave a public reading!  Okay, okay, so it was me and 18 other people, but still.

There's an event at my school every year called Pen and Pigment which is a collaboration between the Creative Writing and Art departments.  Basically, we poets write a poem and the artists create a work of art and then we trade our pieces and write another piece based on the other's work.

This year, the art was typography, so all of the pieces had letters or numbers incorporated in them.  When I received my piece to write on, I couldn't believe my luck.  You see, ever since I wrote that poem about Grandma and Grandpa in my National Red and Pink Day post, I've wanted to write about Pop, my grandpa on Mom's side who died when I was thirteen, but I have such limited memories of him.  The piece of typography that I had been given was a number 4 turned into a sailboat and my Pop had a sailboat named Escape IV (after the first three Escapes of course).  I was thrilled.  And, since I wanted my poem to have lots of details about the same thing, I decided to use the Sestina form.  many poets consider the sestina a very frustrating form, but I love it.  To me, writing a sestina feels like solving a puzzle.  A sestina is a seven stanza poem in which you use the same end-words in every stanza, but in a different order.  The last stanza is called the envoy and traditionally houses the "turn" of the poem.  Sestinas were originally in iambic pentameter (ten syllables per line with an unstressed, stressed, unstressed, stressed rhythm).  However, over the years, they evolved and now they are permitted to have more or less syllables per line.  I love writing them with traditional rhythm (more puzzle fun), but had too much to say this time to restrict myself to that.  So, since you missed my fabulous reading at which I was literally shaking and sounded slightly like I was about to cry the entire time, here is (one of) my (favorite) poem(s that I've written so far):

Latitude

I’m never sure how much I actually remember

and how much I’ve learned from the pictures we

pull out now, almost every time we get together.

I know I remember the smell of cigarette smoke

and the feel of the stubble on his chin when he hugged me.

And I remember standing on the prickly grass, anxious to get on his sailboat.

I only remember going out on his boat

a few times.  I don’t really remember

the feel of the tiller, but I know he let me

steer it from his lap on those days when we

sailed it far from the flames and smoke

of the refineries.  I remember when we were all together,

even though I know we weren’t always together.

There were times when he went out on his boat,

or went to the Yale Street Pharmacy to smoke

and have coffee with his friends, but I only remember

the long lazy days at the house when we

gathered around to eat seafood.  He instilled in me

a taste for good food which makes me

wish I knew how to throw ingredients together

and make something delicious like he did every time we

visited.  He was always in the kitchen or on the boat.

As hard as I try, I can never remember

him being anywhere else—except on the patio where he smoked

his Camels.  I still recognize that smoke,

the Camel kind.  The scent of it takes me

back to when I was seven.  When I smell it, I remember

the times when we were all together

though now I know his mind was probably on his boat.

while his feet were on the table. We knew we had his love, but we

also knew he loved the bay and Escape IV more than we

ever could imagine.  I think if the house had gone up in smoke,

he would have been thrilled to live on his boat,

a lifestyle that wouldn’t have fit me

then.  Now I wish we’d gone out on his boat together

more often.  The last time I remember

being on the bay was in a different boat.  I watched the shore until we

left it behind.  I remember wishing I could ask why he ever decided to smoke

as the wind blew his ashes back around me.  We were on the bay, but not together. 

Hmmmm. Suspicious. And Other Random Events.

So, someone just called me.
My phone rang and told me "No Name" was calling.  But it was my area code, and I make it a policy to always answer unknown callers with my area code just in case it's something important.  So, after I answered, the male voice on the other end said "Hey Ebony."
(Now, in case you're unaware, Ebony is not my name.)
Immediately after that, I heard a female voice talking in the background, who I'm almost sure was saying my name, and I thought, oh, that must be Ebony.  So I said "Hello" again in order to get the conversation off on the right foot.  The male voice on the other end immediately said "Oh, hi Leslie."
(Now, in case you're not aware, Leslie is not my name either.)
Hmmmm.  Suspicious.
"I'm afraid you must have the wrong number."
"Oh, but this is (here he quoted my phone number, the same number I've had for five years), right?"
I told him yes and he said he guessed it had changed.
I must admit that, under normal circumstances, I would have probed a bit and tried to find out who this person was just in case it was something important.  (It's still bothering me a little.)
But today of all days, I decided to come and sit in the "quiet zone" of the library where phone conversations are in very ill-favor.  As in, it's absolutely silent up here and the whole time I was half-whispering to this srtrange person on the "other end of the line" I felt every pair of eyes on the floor boaring into my back.
So I hung up.

Now, at this point, I feel like about half of the posts I've ever made on this blog are about weird phone conversations.  But this kind of stuff just happens to me all the time.  I have no idea why.

Okay, on to other things of note:
I almost ran over my own dog the other day.  That was not fun.  In her six years of life, I have never been successful in teaching her not to chase cars.  And mine is the worst.  I guess it represents the park and other cool places to her.  So yesterday when I was coming home, she practically dove under the rear tires.
Talk about a near heart attack.  I was already braking super fast,though, so she was fine and just ran across to the passenger side.
Now, as part of my trying to teach her not to chase cars, I've never let her get in the car unless it is off.  But yesterday was the exception to the rule.  I let her hop in and she was soooo calm the rest of the way to the house.  Okay, she still climbed all over the back seat before she finally settled on stretching between it and the console, so she was her own version of calm which might not seem calm to anyone else, but was, in fact, amazing.
So now I have dirty pawprints all over my backseat, but a live dog in my backyard.
I feel like it's a fairly good compromise.

I recently read Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, a collection of short stories all about Bengali people who lived in America or Europe.  Nearly every story in it talked about drinking Darjeeling tea, so, the other day when I was at the store and saw Darjeeling tea, I picked it up, to see if it was really that great.  It was.  I'm considering replacing coffee with it for a while.  Coming from me, that says a whole lot.
Also, there was a character in that book who signed any missive he ever wrote with "Be Happy".
I think that is so wonderful.

So, without further ado, I'm headed straight into the open arms of the weekend (with a little bit of work and a meeting beforehand, but still).  I hope you're doing the same.
Be happy!