Did you order a pizza?

Life has been careening through me lately!

There's a variety of things that have kept me from posting the past busy week, and this coming week isn't looking much better.  Mom has informed me that my brother and I are going to stay with them for a week, and they don't have internet.  Gasp!  This means that I'll see what I can do, and maybe I'll be able to throw in a short post here or there, but we can't really count on anything.

In other news, I now have a job!  You're reading this from the new delivery driver for Pizza Hut!  I know it's not glamorous, but I'm thankful to have a job at all.  I've seen firsthand how hard it is to get employed right now, and you pretty much have to have experience already to get hired anywhere.

My first day was Friday.  It was definitely an experience...

• I went to a house that had the same street number as the house that I was supposed to be at, but wasn't the right one.  Tempted the poor guy at the door by bringing him a pizza that wasn't his.  At least, I assume he was tempted. I would be!
• I accidentally forgot a man's cinnamon sticks and left them in the bag thinking they were someone else's order because he had added them on to his ticket after the original order.  Then when I got back in my car and figured it out, I took them back to his door, and when he gave me the extra money and said keep the change I lost my composure and said "really?" in an astounded voice.  I had been accepting tips all day, but for some reason, it surprised me that he gave me a second tip.  And I acted more like an excited kid than a composed delivery girl.  (Is there such thing as a really composed delivery girl...?)
• I did turnabouts so many times that I'm pretty sure I'm the turnabout expert by now.
• I tried to use a GPS app for cell phone and it kept taking me to a factory-looking place with absolutely NO houses and told me that I had reached my destination.
• I was sorely tempted to do an illegal U-turn about three times due directly to the confusion with that GPS thing.
• I ran into an old friend from high school that I had been in the pit (marching band reference) with, and got to chat with him for a minute or two before heading back.
• I had so much trouble finding one woman's house that I had to call her and stay on the phone with her until she had guided me there.  I felt so bad about the time it had taken that I apologized as sincerely and deeply as I know how to, and she apologized for her house being hard to find and still gave me a tip.  Guess she wasn't mad, then!  Thank goodness.
• There was a salad incident that basically made me feel really stupid.  I don't think I'll go into that one, though.  Your imagination should prove to be a lot more interesting than actual events.
• I opened a gate to drive through, found the end of a road in a tobacco field, and walked through a field with cow poop all on the same delivery and I was actually at the wrong house the whole time.
• I almost lost money at the end of the day.  And by "lost" money, I mean literally lose it.  I freaked out trying to find it and was basically thinking "shoot me now" the whole time because it was the end of a stressful day of not being capable enough to find anyone's house and now I had to tell the manager that I came up short and couldn't give back all the money I owed him for the deliveries I had made.  Then I found it under the table I had been sitting at a few minutes before when I pulled out the money to count it.  Epic sigh of relief!

I think I'm going to have a lot of fun.

For the commenters: What was your first job like?  Did you have an embarrassing fail of a first day like I did? Do you enjoy what you're doing now? 

image found using Google

Wondering Again

How many times can you push someone away before they stop coming back?

The Mild-Core Dancing Scene

Went dancing.

I don't know whether to say it's what I expected or not...

We peeked in the bar we had been planning to go to, the one with the younger crowd and modern music.  Remember how I said there was going to be a concrete floor and a band?  Yeah, that one.  Well, there was pretty much NO ONE there.  So we went across the street.

This one was supposed to have a more mixed, mostly older crowd and about half modern, half country music.  (Country! >_<  If you're reading this, Jessi, I don't mean to offend you but this is the one thing that I really have to disagree with you on. :)  Please don't kill me!)  We went in and the guy at the door (with a stern-faced look that made him a little scary, I might add) gave us a hard time for a minute until Michaela played her "my dad is a bartender here" card.  Can't really beat that, huh, can you?  So yeah.

(Seeing double x marks on people's hands kept reminding me of Sora!  Because his gloves have a criss-crossy bit on the back.  You know.  And that observation makes me totally cool and NOT a dork at all that I was thinking of video games at the bar scene.)

Let's just say that I don't know why the chicken crossed the road, but it wasn't to find a better crowd!  (Oh my gosh.  Please excuse that ridiculously lame joke.  I don't usually blog midday and I think it's doing things to me.)  Unfortunately, there were just as few people at the wooden-floored, no band bar we crossed the street for as there were at the first one we went to.

We decided to drive around for a bit and get some rolled-down-windows night air while we waited for the bar to fill up.

But when we came back, there still weren't that many people, even though I had been warned that this particular weekend there would be more bodies in there than dead fish in the oil spill.

(I'm sorry, was that inappropriate?  It's this daylight, I swear...)

Ironically, despite the small number of people I swear I saw a woman in there from my summer class in May! And there were only six people in that class, so this is saying something.  I get the feeling it's something about the correlation between college and responsibility, but I can't be sure...

Anyway.  My official experience was interesting.  And by "interesting", I mean that old guys kept asking me to dance.  And out of the four of us there they kept picking me to ask first.  And one of them came back to ask my name.  Yikes!  My friends laughed at me when I just looked down and shook my head and refused to say anything.  I mean, how do you say nicely to someone "there's no chance I'm telling you my name or anything about me when I don't even know you or how much you've had to drink so leave me the heck alone to dance with my friends even though there aren't enough people on the dance floor for us to emerge from our corner yet"?

Michaela saved me by saying "she's with me" and wrapping her arm around me and kissing me on the cheek and letting the man come to his own conclusions.

They all left us alone after that. :)

Michaela, this is totally us. :)

We fooled around and danced for a minute or two on and off, but around the time we were talking about leaving, another one of my friends said that she wanted to actually dance before we left and next thing I knew, she and I were out on the floor.

We spent the rest of the night doing whatever our version of dancing is.  And laughing at all the crazy people around us.  This one couple was basically humping each other or something, and looking at them made me feel like I was watching some sort of mild, clothed porn!  Plus, she was wearing heels and I have no idea how she wasn't limping by the end of it all.  They were sort of mesmerizing.  Add the crazy drunk guy in the green shirt doing something like the robot and the crazy single woman about to bust out of her shirt and trying to look sexy, and I did end up having some fun!

Everyone insists that the bar is never that empty.  I think I'm probably bad luck.

But I suppose it'll be worth trying again one day!

P.S.  There were a couple of flashy lights!

image found with Google

Not A Bad Kitteh

The post creator-page-thingy is back up!

Yay and noodles!

Why?

Because I like noodles.

Anyway.  Today's post is in two parts, one more deep and thoughtful than the other.  Let's do that one first.

Part I
(because Ethan, one of my most frequent commenters, has tried to teach me the awesomeness of Roman Numerals so be impressed or something.)


Forgiveness is never deserved.

To forgive is to do something that sometimes seems beyond the scope of human ability.

It goes beyond what some people think humanity is about.  It goes beyond selfishness and self-preservation.  It demonstrates an amazing strength of character.

Someone who receives forgiveness has experienced something so special that it cannot be put into words.

When someone has been forgiven, the gratefulness and relief that floods through them is an almost magical feeling.

It can change your life.

I think that some of the people God put in this world show us the wonder of His gifts by helping us experience them in a way that's so close and direct that we can't miss it the way we do sometimes when it's coming straight from Him.

I'm unbelievably lucky to have people like that in my life.

Part II
I'm going dancing tonight.

How weird.  It's weird just to say that!

First point: I can't dance.  I have to address that first because you might remember me telling you that so many times before and your first thought when you read it was probably "but Deidra, you can't dance!"

Right?

Well, I'll pretend it was.  Humor me.

I've been told that not being able to dance isn't a problem.

Point two: I've never been in this situation before.  Going to a club?  A bar?  Whatever you want to call it, although I'd guess the word here would be either "bar" or "wreck" because it's not exactly a classy joint in the high class part of town.

I've never been in a place like that.  Drove by them, sure.  But what's it like in one of those club/bar/wrecks?

My friend Michaela, who's going to be my guardian on this adventure, says they have a concrete floor and a ton of drunk people and maybe a band.

We'll see how this goes.

I've had Michaela assure me that she's not going to drink and she'll keep an eye on me and no one will bother me too much and we can laugh off any drunk people who get a little silly or whatever.  So I agreed to go.

Because I'm not sure if it will be fun or not, this little "girl's night" thing, but it definitely might be.

And to be honest, I want the experience.  Blame it on the writer in me, but I want to know what it's like.

A follow-up post will be absolutely necessary.

This little blogger's growing up!

P.S. I'm not going to drink or anything!  I'm not that type of person, which is why it didn't occur to me to even clarify that until just now because anyone who knows me IRL doesn't have to be told.  But yeah.  I will be absolutely safe and on my utmost behavior!

Wish me luck!

(By the way, I've been told there aren't going to be any strobe lights.  It was almost a deal breaker, but I suppose I'll suck it up and go without.  Or bring my own.)

image found using Google

Technology Fail and Zombies

In the interest of being creative enough not to lose my work again, I'm typing in a document and copy-pasting to my widget when I'm done. Don't ever let it be said that I'm a bad blogger.

Even if I go six days without posting because life does weird things to me.

In my defense, I went out of state with some friends for the weekend after my last post, preventing me from posting for about two and a half days. And then between needing naps, having friend time, and being unsure what to post about this time around, I just couldn't get it going until now.

Yeah, naps. I'm doing another summer course. This time, it's Chemistry at eight in the morning every weekday.

Shoot me now.

Speaking of violence, can you believe that if it weren't for my handy dandy Blogger widget, I wouldn't be able to post at all right now? What is the deal? On the RAINY day post, I had to break through after trying about fifty times to be able to edit (when I decided that it would be better with pictures). Then, when I tried to fix little formatting/spacing issues, I had to go through the process all over again. Click, fail, go back, click again, repeat.

Blogger fail.

It's pure luck that I have the widget at all! Normally, I don't have the foresight to do something like that. But for some reason, a while back, I thought that it would be handy to have in case there ever came a day that I would be unable to use the Blogger site for some inexplicable reason. The blogging powers that be must be grinning in my direction.

Either that, or my subconscious realized that if the zombie apocalypse came soon and the Blogger site was the first casualty, I'd be able to use Google to update you on how long I've been able to stay alive.

(My first accomplishment has been to acquire my neighborhood ice-cream truck to convert to a Zombini. I've had it out for that vehicle ever since it first began waking me up from morning naps with the same incessant song over...and over...and over... As a Zombini, not only will it serve a higher purpose to benefit all that survives of mankind, but I've been able to yank out those circuits and add some more appropriate zombie-killing hardcore music. What now, ice-cream man?)

Fear Me

I'm going to kill Blogger.

It's been screwy lately, and tonight it hasn't been letting me on the "new post" page no matter how many times I try. So I got on my Blogger widget on my personalized Google homepage and was making a post from here...
when the page spontaneously reloaded and erased everything I'd written.

And I had like six or seven paragraphs.

Which, if I had been on Blogger, would have been automatically saved every few seconds.

Violent face.

Bring an umbrella! It's our first RAINY day!

It's a RAINY day!

(That stands for Random Assorted Ideas that were New Yesterday.)

Yes, I just made that up.  Deal with it.  Pretend it's been here all along.

It's time for a RAINY Day because I have an odd accumulation of post ideas and some of them aren't big enough to be posts by themselves.  Others have been sitting to the side and waiting for their moment to shine for so long that their five-o-clock shadows are turning into full-fledged hobo beards.  Believe me, it's time!

First Drop:

Our culture differentiates between rappers and poets.  Buy why?  They both do the same thing, right?  They put words in rhythm and often rhyme to deliver a point in a flowing kind of way.  Maybe the artists themselves are fueling this distinction?  I've thought about this lately because, as anyone who listens to the radio can tell, music is definitely gravitating toward rap right now.  It's been going in a psuedo-pop-rap kind of thing a lot, but lately, we've actually been going back to real rap a bit with songs like "Airplanes" and Eminem coming back by teaming up with random female pop singers all over the place.  Wait...is that sentence an oxymoron or just ironic?

Second Drop: 

I had lunch with an old friend this week!  I hadn't seen him in a year.  I know that probably doesn't seem like much to some of you, but I'm only in college, so a year can seem like a long time!  The really weird part was that I had expected things to be very different from the way they used to be (since someone had informed me that this guy had changed a lot), but for the most part, hanging out with him felt so natural that it stunned me how easily things felt the same way as they used to.  The bad part of this is that I have a terrible habit of messing with him a little too much, quickly approaching an insensitive level.  Don't worry, readers.  I will definitely work on this!  Anyway, my point with this is that some things never change.  It's interesting to see how people that are familiar to you can be like cuddling with your favorite childhood doll or eating a food that was your staple as a kid.  Familiarity can be amazingly comforting.  (Of course, it can also remind you of a former version of yourself that you'd rather forget, but it's better when you can dredge up mostly fond memories.)

Third Drop: 

If you know that a feeling isn't permanent, does that cheapen it?  Emotions are powerful, and sometimes you can astound yourself with the things you'll do just because you're reacting to the way you feel.  If you know that you're feeling something that you aren't going to feel forever, does that change anything?  Maybe it just causes other people not to take it as seriously as you do.  I find that my emotions are usually just as potent as ever even when I realize that I'll get over them, whether it's lovesickness or happiness or whatever.  How about you?

Fourth Drop:

If cash is made of paper, doesn't that mean that we basically barter for goods and services with trees?  That forests are our currency?  I'm glad we thought to cut them before we started carting around trees to bargain with.  Or maybe that idea came later...can't you just imagine our ancient ancestors hefting uprooted trees around in the hope of getting a sofa or a haircut or maybe some pantaloons?

Fifth Drop:

Don't you hate it when your friend is doing something unhealthy and you can't tell them because not only would they not listen to you because they don't want to be told what to do, but they claim that they already know it's unhealthy but they laugh when they say it and don't seem to care?  You worry for them but can't do anything about it.  You have to stand back and see how it plays out.

Sixth Drop: 

Here's what Jamie (my brother) said to Michaela (my friend) today when we were sitting around her apartment:

"You have sesame seeds on your table.  You can plant them and grow a sesame!"

That's just way too funny not to share.

So there we have it, folks!  The first RAINY day on Lantern of Lightning!

Did you like it?

IQ Scores Are Overrated

How do you know if someone's smart?

I mean, some people seem smart and some don't.

That's the flawed way of thinking that I used to have, but it's slowly metamorphasizing (how the heck do you spell that?  is that even a word?) into a better way of thinking.  And by that, I mean that I realized about thirty minutes ago that I've had it wrong this whole time.  (I actually said it was a process because I think it took some experience to come to that realization.  Plus, that makes me sound more philosophical and deep.)

Why isn't my answer legitimate?  Because I've been going mostly by academic standards to classify someone as "smart".  And that's totally wrong.

I mean, I got a good score on my ACT, so I like to think of myself as smart.  But I know next to nothing about fishing or hunting or hard drives or mathematical theory.  There are some things I'm not very good at learning, like math (because I hate it and it should die a horrible painful death and then we'd never be able to use money again and would have to go back to a barter system but would that really be so bad?  because I think it might be worth it...).  Some things I'm just ignorant of, like the way some plants have water inside them if you cut them open or the way that the temperature of water can change from one spot to another.

And sometimes, being smart isn't about learning at all.  It's about the fact that perspective changes with every mind.  I could analyze something from every angle I know how to look from, and then someone else can come along and effortlessly point out something that I'd never seen before.

By talking to people in their unique way of seeing things, I can learn about everything from relationships to constellations.  I can see a different person behind every familiar smile.  I can see a new night sky the millionth time I look up at it.

I'm really not that smart at all.

image found using Google

How To Deal?

Have you noticed that it's only when you really love someone that you point out all of their flaws?

I mean, I guess this doesn't apply if you're a really confrontational, assertive kind of person.  Which I'm not. 

For me, it feels safest to keep quiet about a person's shortcomings even if those things bother me.  If I ever get annoyed at a person, I take it out by journaling or thinking it through in some other way or by talking to someone about it.

That changes if I really know you!  If you're one of my closest friends, you can expect me to tell you what bothers me about you, and usually with a laugh.  It's less painful and more fun for everyone involved if I make it a well-meaning, this-bothers-me-but-I-love-you-so-much-that-I-won't-even-bother-making-a-big-deal-out-of-it-because-I-see-past-it-to-the-REAL-you-inside-that's-so-beautiful-that-it-totally-eclipses-anything-that-could-possibly-be-bad-about-you...well, now I've lost track of this sentence, but you get my point.

Maybe I figure that if I don't spend a lot of time with a person, it isn't worth pointing out something like that to them?  I'm not sure.  But I do wonder if this is just me or if everyone is kind of like this, so leave a comment and tell me how you deal with the faults of your friends!

I think I'll leave you with another list today.  Please enjoy the sacrifice I make in writing up things like these lists, because it's purely for my enjoyment your reading pleasure!  No...no, I am not winking!

10 Childhood Activities That You Should Try Again Soon
1. blowing bubbles
2. coloring
3. finger painting
4. climbing all over the playground
5. playing dress-up with someone else's clothes
6. breaking out all the toys
7. watching Winnie-the-Pooh
8. chasing the opposite sex around the playground
9. hanging your best work on the refrigerator
10. bed-time stories

Ten Years Is Actually A Really Long Time

AHH!  I won an award!

It's my first blog award ever!  Apparently, I'm supposed to say where I expect to be ten years from now and then pass on the badge.

Like I have any idea where or what I'm going to be around age 30!

I'd like to say that by then I'll have a fairly steady job.  A career would be nice, but I don't know if it's really that necessary or not.  I also like the idea of having a boyfriend/fiancée/husband, but we'll see if that works out.  And kids?  Heck, maybe!

I don't think I'm really mature enough to seriously contemplate these things yet.

Let's try something more like this: in ten years, I'd like to be really good at blogging (making people think, and making them laugh).  

I hope to know pretty well who I am at that point, because now that I've done some changing over the past year I don't even know if I know myself well or not and if I'll change very drastically again.  

I hope to be better at writing, mainly coming up with plots and basic ideas.  

I expect that I won't really be any better at drawing than I am now.  Looks like I'll have to give up that dream of becoming a painter for a living!  Pssh.

I still won't be able to dance for anything.  I'm pretty sure you can't learn how to move the way some people can.

I'll still have an overwhelming fondness for things like fantasy stories, really good quotes, honest talks, rain, and candles.

I won't understand everything about anything, but I'll know more about the most important things and will be able to let go of some of the things I won't ever really get.

I will have lost many people I don't know very well, and probably one or two that I feel close to.

I'll have a few people that I always love spending time with and will be really close with.  Whether they'll be the same people as now is anyone's guess, but I wholeheartedly hope that my current best friends will be included in that list.

Well, crap.  I was going for something a little more lighthearted, but all this thinking about the future makes me  get a little heavy whether I want to or not.  It's all that award's fault.

So, who's up next for the You're Going Places Award?

I think I'll choose you, Joann Mannix at Laundry Hurts My Feelings!

Please don't think this is too awkward.  Most of the bloggers I know better have already been tagged.  :awkward smile: