New Song Obsession

The first time I heard "Fireflies" by Owl City, I could have sworn Death Cab for Cutie had come out with a new song. This guy sounds so insanely close to their sound that it's craziness. Fortunately, I love the face off of Death Cab, so I guess it was inevitable that I would fall for Owl City as well. I'm crushing not only this song, but the video that goes along with it (below). It's just cool. The song combines so many things that make me swoon in alternative music--electronic/video game sounds, great lyrics, and best of all, stringed instruments in the background. When the strings come in at around 1:10, it just makes me gush inside I love it so much. I haven't bought an entire album in really long time, but I may have to relent on this one.

A Sweet Newly-Groomed Girl

The Mighty Mississippi

Every time I drive over the Mississippi river on my way to or from St. Louis, I can't help but think of the scene in Huckleberry Finn where Huck and Jim are on the raft on the river at night and they see slave catchers on the other side of the river and get down low in the hopes that the slave catchers won't see them. When I read that book back in high school, I wondered how you could possibly NOT see someone that was just across the river. Then I saw the river. It's enormous. And even though I know it's just a story, it makes me feel good to know that Jim and Huck would still be safe.

The Nicholas: An Update

I went to St. Louis for part of spring break this week, and I was amazed at how different my cousin Dana's baby, Nicholas, looked! He's doubled his weight, apparently, and he is so adorable. We went for dinner at a nice restaurant to celebrate my birthday (early) and Dana dressed him up in dress pants, dress socks, and a nice shirt and he looked so cute I wanted to eat him instead of my spaghetti with seafood. And that's saying something. ;)

Road Trip of Giant Things

How Does This Happen?!

You guys, I am the world champion of losing socks in the laundry. WORLD CHAMPION. I don't just lose one or two socks every time I decide to do a few loads of wash, I lose A DOZEN. I don't...I just... How is this physically possible?! I mean, they have to be SOMEwhere!! They can't just vanish into thin air! A dozen socks?! And they're not just sports socks either--some of these are kind of expensive nice dress socks.

Universe, why do you toy with me like this? Is this some sort of twisted payback for not recycling enough? Accidentally running over that turtle when I was learning to drive? Developing a tendency to use at least three curse words per sentence on the rare occasions that I'm drunk? I'm sorry for those things. I need my socks. CUT IT OUT.

Mash Up

Check out this awesome video from DJ Earworm. It's a mash up of the top 25 Billboard Hits of 2009. Oh so cool. And definitely leaves me longing for "Glee" to return to its rightful place on my TV screen.

Little guy

I've been hearing a lot of chirping coming from outside my living room window in the mornings. I can also see lots of fluttering and hopping going on next to the window unit air conditioner. This morning I peeked through the window and was able to snap this pic before he flew away. He's not the only one who's been hanging around, but darn if he isn't one of the cutest.

Spring

Shake off the steely thoughts of days

Of snow and sleet and ice

A warm sun comes and fly the jays

And tiny buds entice

Sweet air the smell of cut grass fills

Be gone my scarf and coat

For Spring has come, at last I hear

The Robin's charming note

~E.E. Schramm, 2010

The Digger

There is a beloved restaurant in Urbana called the Courier Cafe. A history of the building/restaurant reveals that the land where the cafe now stands used to belong to Alvin T. Burrows, owner of the Courier Newspaper. Burrows bought the land in 1916 and ran the newspaper out of the two-room log cabin that had been built there in 1837. In the 1950s, the building was almost lost to a fire but it was saved and rebuilt. According to the website, there are places where charred timbers are still visible. In 1979, having been plagued with problems for years, the Courier Newspaper closed up shop. On July 7, 1980 new owners took over the building and began remodeling it, taking care to preserve as many of the original characteristics as possible. On November 10, 1980, the building opened up again as the Courier Cafe.

Antiques abound in the cafe, and the back of the menu has little snippets about each of them. My favorite is the one you see here: The Digger. It's an antique gumball machine. You insert a quarter, and the scoop moves down and "digs" into the gumballs. With any luck, it will pull one out and drop it down the shoot for you. But not always. The Digger is pretty ornate, and you can tell it's old--the menu snippet says it's from 1925. I like to think that machines like it could be found at the the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the menu confirms that world's fairs did have machines like The Digger on display. I wish I could have been around to see them in their glory days, but for now I'll just have to settle for this little piece of history.

Day Job

It's hard work color coordinating with the rug all day. Must be why she's so exhausted.

Champaign Public Library

This is the Champaign Public Library, where I volunteer every Monday morning at O Baby (baby storytime) and where I'll also be doing a practicum (unpaid internship) this summer in the children's department. All of the children's librarians are really nice and helpful and I'm looking forward to spending a lot more time here as I get to know the world of public librarianism. The building is SUPER nice--it was remodeled around 2008. It's very open with lots of windows, a cafe, and a little used bookstore. The children's department is great and seems to get a lot of use. And best of all, it's located on Clara Lane! The Beara was happy to hear it.

:)

In a place where I've known no one longer than two months, it was hugely fun and exciting to have people I've been friends with for over ten years come down and visit. Old friends are the best. I love and miss these girls!

Old School TV

Being a grad student immediately turned me into a night owl. So much so that I find it nearly impossible to fall asleep before 2 am these days, regardless of whether or not I actually have studying to do. Consequently, I've been using the restless wee hours of the night to catch up on one of the best shows of all time, "Freaks and Geeks." The show is set in the 80s in a middle class suburban high school and it focuses on Sam Weir (a geek) and his older sister Lindsay (who hangs out with the alternative hippie kids--a "freak") and how they navigate high school, their parents, and their friends. It is absolutely brilliant, hilarious, and awesome. Not to mention, it launched the careers of a ridiculous number of actors and actresses including James Franco, Seth Rogan, Linda Cardellini, and Jason Segel. The only problem is it was cancelled after the one and only season that it aired, in 1999. How does it happen that "A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila" and "The Surreal Life" (both about D-list has beens) manage to stay on TV for multiple seasons, but a creative, realistic, and hysterical portrayal of teenage America by some of the country's best young actors gets canned after one year? Sometimes I hate you, TV decision-makers.

Frontin'

I recently received an offer to try a couple of magazine subscriptions for three months for free. Being the total magazine addict that I am (and because I have SO MUCH TIME to be reading for fun these days...), I took advantage. I decided I needed to know more about politics and what was going on in the world, but I also wanted something light to relax with after all the heavy reading I'm doing for class. Now look what's piling up on my end table in the living room and what is immediately read in bed the day I receive it. Do I know what the Taliban is currently up to? Nope. Am I up to speed on the social life of Kim Kardashian? You better believe it.

Best. Drink. Ever.

I'm not a beer-drinker, as many of you know. I wish I was--I feel like there's this whole world of stouts and ales and lagers that I'm missing out on. It would be nice to be laid-back and order a three-dollar pint instead of the hoity-toity drinks I usually end up with, but I just never liked the taste. I like to eat my bread, not drink it. However, in a magical time and place a long long time ago, I was introduced to Frambois. It's fizzy, sweet, raspberry-flavored, and it doesn't taste like beer. But best of all, it says "beer" on the label. So it counts!! I can say I going to "have a beer" just like everyone else at the table! I had a bit of a hard time finding it in Chicago (granted, I didn't frequent tons of bars in my time there, but the ones I did go to usually didn't stock it), but it seems to be EVERYWHERE here. One place even has it on tap! Yes, you read that correctly. My totally-not-a-beer beer is ON TAP just like the cool beers! Woo!! Just another reason I'm liking my new digs.

Champaign=Aesthetically Pleasing

Though I've only been here a short while, I've noticed something very cool about the buildings in Champaign--an inordinate number of them have decorative tin ceilings. Clearly a lot of the buildings are quite old (well, in American terms that is--things that are 300 years old here can be considered brand-spankin' new compared to places in the rest of the world), and it's awesome how residents have taken the time and money to care for them and restore them to their original states. Here are a couple that are particularly pretty, which I took photos of this weekend. See, Champaign may not get picked first for the kickball team like Chicago would, but it can be cool if it's given a chance.

And I Thought I Was a Fast Reader.

Wow, it's been an abysmal couple of months for blogging, folks. I do have things to say and to show you (mind OUT of the gutter, thankyouverymuch), but I've been slightly busy with this stack of books which, mind you, are all for ONE class:

I read ahead of the class over Christmas break and was doing pretty well, but then the books started catching up with me and now I'm dead even. I didn't even have time to finish one of the three novels due last week. D'oh! I have three other classes on top of that one, and while there isn't the quantity of reading that there is for that first class, what I do have to read is infinitely more difficult to obsorb. I present to you Exhibit A, from a journal article I read a few days ago:

"The notion of social responsibility has long been at the center of the professional ideology that grounds thought and justifies practice in librarianship. And it is an essentially contested concept. Its meaning is central to professional identity, yet that meaning is historically and politically contingent, like the notion of professionalism itself. During times of 'normal practice', professional ideology can remain peacefully embedded within practice, going unrevealed and unexamined. However, given librarianship's close ties with the terms of discourse that generally articulate the legitimacy of American democratic culture, when the latter experiences a crisis of meaning, so does the former."

Say what?? This article went on for TWENTY-FOUR SINGLE-SPACED PAGES. And considering I have to read every sentence approximately forty-seven times to understand what it's saying, it takes a fair chunk of my time to make my way through my weekly reading. Fortunately, the kinds of classes that present sweeping overviews of the profession and all the philosophy and ideology inherent within should be finished by the end of the summer. At that point I'll be delving into the youth services classes that I'm really looking forward to.

I do have two classes that I really enjoy this semester. The first is my Storytelling class. Now if you're anything like I was, you probably think I'm taking a class on how to read story books to little kids. I'm not. The class I'm taking centers around storytelling as an art form for all ages. My professor has been a professional storytelling for 37 years, traveling all over the world for various festivals, conventions, and to tell at schools, libraries, and performing arts venues. He has a revolving repetoir of around 400 stories and 150 folk ballads at any given time. He is fascinating. A good number of the stories he tells are actually for adults and would be completely inappropriate for children in that the concepts in the stories are too sophisticated, confusing, or scary for that audience. Think of taking a whole class about "The Moth" and "This American Life"--that's what this class is like. I love love love it. And I'm going to be telling a story in public this April at U of I's Storytelling Festival as part of the requirements of the class. Should be interesting! I know some people are deathly afraid of public speaking, but while it does make me a bit nervous, I'm actually pretty ok with it.

The other class I really enjoy this semester is my Young Adult Literature and Resources class. That would be the class requiring me to read the 35 novels in sixteen weeks, i.e. the photo above. Though the reading often takes awhile just because of the sheer volume of it, it's almost all enjoyable and interesting. I've always loved YA literature. The themes present in those books: identity, intelligence, intimacy, independence, and integrity (also known as The Five "I"s of YA Lit) are themes that are present in much great adult literature as well, but they are placed in an often drama-filled context in YA lit that rarely fails to suck me in. The class is basically run like a big book club and we've taken a look at some interesting teen films as well, the latest being the documentary "Dogtown and Z-Boys" which is about how the skateboard culture rose up in the 70s and 80s. I highly recommend it. If you still have any doubts about the merit of YA books to adults, I would suggest checking out the "Hunger Games" series by Suzanne Collins. So far only the first two books of the trilogy have been released (the third is coming out this summer) and they are some of the best books I've read in years. They take place in the future and have a sort-of "1984" feel to them, and they are the kind of books that you literally cannot put down until you have read them cover to cover. The first one took me about eight hours. The second around ten hours. I loved every minute.

So, I apologize for being m.i.a. as of late, but I'm going to make a concerted effort to keep this blog in shape. Check back soon for more updates. Later, dudes.