Linger on the sidewalk where the neon signs are pretty

The thing that I never thought could happen on a mac happened. My hard drive crashed and burned! Basically, it started making this very scary whirring noise so I shut the computer down and then it didn't want to restart. After calling my dad and begging him to come pick me up and drive me to the apple store, I talked the apple "genius bar" guy who actually knew exactly what was wrong before I even finished telling him the symptoms but he was super nice and talked me through everything. He ran some tests and then broke the bad news that my hard drive was completely dead. He recommended not sending it to apple because he said that would cost me about $900. He told us how to get a new hard drive and install it ourselves. Apparently, the harddrives of laptops are all the same, you can get a generic "laptop" hard drive and use it in any computer you have. I also learned this is all my fault because I dropped my computer about a year ago and the damage I guess has been affecting the computer all this time. LUCKILY i backed up my entire hard drive at the end of February, so all my design work, documents, pictures, songs up to that point are saved, but I did lose everything that I have done in the last 4 weeks. It's not a whole lot of work, but it is some that I now get to recreate from scratch. My visual effects paper that was supposed to be due today was lost and I have to rewrite 8 pages...but it definitely could be worse. Sooo, long story short I bought a larger hard drive and now my computer is up and running but I still have to find the time to go back and install ALL my programs and move over my files. The lesson of this story is: back up your computer every day or you'll regret it.

I'm rushing to get all my homework out of the way before Wednesday because I'm going to New York to visit Jess and New Haven to visit Lexi this week!! Ahh! It's my first time taking a big trip by myself so I'm a little nervous and also very excited. Here are some things I hope to do there, but I'll update with pictures when I get back to see if I actually squeezed all these things in:

1) go see Avenue Q on Broadway
2) go to MOMA, museum of modern art
3) check out Central Park...I know it's super huge, so I'd probably only see a corner of it
4) have real New York pizza and go to a cafe that the beat writers hung out at in Greenwich Village
5) maybe check out one of those beautiful cathedrals in the city
6) see all the places Jess has been talking about forever: China Beer, Josies, etc. and meet all the NYU friends
7) go to Rice to Riches...a rice pudding place. I dont know why but I really want to go here
8) drive or walk through Times Square
9) buy a tshirt at Yale
10) make an appointment with the art department at Yale and tour (i've always been interested in it for grad school)

Let me know before Thursday if you know of any other places I must see that I'm forgetting

back to school, back to school, to prove to dad that I'm not a fool

Being back at school sucks! Spring break was like being suspended in a nice bubble, where all I had to think about was what kind of cream cheese I wanted to put on my bagel in the morning. But that bubble has definitely been popped. I came back to a monday full of classes and then on my way back from printmaking it started pouring rain and I got completely soaked. I had 2 design critiques since yesterday and I have a large research paper on the ethical issues surrounding pop art, kitsch, and artistic appropriation due tomorrow so I've been researching in the library for the past 3 hours. Oh, and to make it worse, the art library is in a basement and some junior high kids decided it would be hilarious to stand at the glass sunroof, bang on it with their shoe to get my attention (and some other students), and moon all of us!

The good news is that I heard back from one of the places I applied for an internship and the guy wants me to call him to discuss so I am going to call him tomorrow afternoon. I'm very nervous because I hate interviews and I especially hate talking on the phone. The company is called Greenlight Designs, a smaller entertainment design company located in North Hollywood. Hopefully all will go well.

The other good news I discovered as I was preparing for my advisement this week is that I actually will have enough credits to graduate in the spring like everyone else! For the past year I thought I would have to graduate in fall 2007, but I accidentally screwed up and added an extra class I don't need to take, so now I get to graduate on time! It's both great and scary. I was counting on having that extra summer to get things together and maybe travel a little bit, but I guess since a few of my friends are graduating in a matter of months from now, I should just shut up. It's still somewhat scary though.

i have an sorority invite on april 21st. boo for finding a date...again.

Ya'll can't walk no line

Spring is coming to a close, sadly. This week has been a mix of total relaxation and fun day trips. I spent a big chunk of the time sitting around in my pajamas like I wanted to, watching hours upon hours of tv shows like "What Not to Wear." I really want to be on that show. If I got chosen, I would just hid all my nice clothes, let them trash my bad clothes, and then get $5,000 to buy new clothes in new york. People have probably tried that before, they can probably see right through it. Other than watching tv and movies and sleeping a lot, I met up with some friends who were in town. Tasha, Jessica and I met up at Starbucks to "study" and work on homework, but I only got a paragraph written on my paper. I hate how we got assigned homework due right after the break. I thought it wouldn't be a big deal because I wasn't going on any big road trips and I didn't have much planned for the week so I thought it would be no problem to crank out 2 papers and graphic design homework, but I was wrong. Once you slip into the laziness of Spring Break, you really don't want to work...even if you have the time to do it. So now I'll be stuck scrambling to finish everything. I applied to about a billion internships for summer, mainly at entertainment design firms in Hollywood, so I'm just crossing my fingers hoping to hear from at least one of them. I think I could be perfectly happy to just have a fun summer off without working, interning, or studying, but I think at this age I have to get an internship or else fall behind the competitive market. Sigh, growing up sucks.

I went to Carpinteria one afternoon and had pizza at my favorite pizza place and got to hang out at the beach. My favorite time to go to the beach is in the evening around sunset, sometime other than summer when there aren't a lot of people there. I've never actually had a bonfire, but that's something I'd like to do at some point with friends. I'd also like to plan a camping trip at the beach, but I'm not sure who'd be interested in that. I also went to California Adventure and met up with Ashley and Sola and we froze to death because it was so windy, but we did eat caramel apples...my favorite food. I drank the largest margarita I've ever seen at Red Lobster and made lots of espresso drinks with the espresso machine I got for my birthday. I didn't go to a single movie the entire week. I also didn't work on any motion graphics projects that I wanted to start...I suck. I head back to school tomorrow morning, but hopefully I've gotten enough of my sanity back to finish off this semester.

They're calling me 007, aren't they?

I'm back after a pretty lengthy absence from updating this thing. This week is the last week before spring break, but I think the fates are against me. This week is crawling by. I came down with a pretty nasty case of the flu. I really should have gotten a flu shot earlier in the year...it's come back to bite me in the ass. So I couldn't sleep the night before my Visual Effects midterm because I had chills/fever. That went away after a day or so but because I had no appetite yesterday I didn't eat as much as I should have. This morning I actually passed out! And hit my head and megan had to run and get me stuff with sugar in it. So...overall, not so good of a week. On the plus side, I think I aced my midterm and found out that I'm getting an A- in my printmaking class when I thought I was getting a C. And in two days I will be watching movies at home.

I caved in and bought the Grey's Anatomy season 1 dvd and have been watching it non-stop. I actually finished the season in about 3 days. I probably have more productive things I could be doing, but the show is so entertaining. It makes me wish I had gone to med school instead of art school. But I don't like blood and guts and would probably pass out if I had to do surgery.

In a few weeks I'll be in New York and New Haven and seeing Avenue Q on Broadway. I can't wait! I'll be spending spring break planning the other things I want to do there, so if you know of any cool places to check out, let me know.