The other day, I was reading one of the -Ish blogs (won’t name it but uh… you can probably figure it out). A girl was talking about how she had just spent a lot of money at a pretty expensive store on several outfits, some which sounded like she would only wear once or twice. It also sounded like she was also carrying some debt (perhaps credit card) before she went on her shopping spree. After she went on the shopping spree, she realized that she probably needed to return some of the shopping spree purchases in order to pay off her credit card debt so she was asking readers which few items she should return.
I was totally confused by this whole event. Mind you, I’m a person who has never carried credit card debt. I pay off my credit card every month. I live within my means. I’ve paid for grad school myself and by the time I graduate, I will be almost student loan debt free. So with that in mind, the idea that someone would go on a major shopping spree totally miffs me especially if they recognize that they have debt. I don’t get it. At least this girl was realized the issue and was trying to pay off her debt. There’s a lot of people out there who just don’t care about debt so they keep driving it up and up and up. It’s insane. That sort of thing always comes back to bite you. Why even do it in the first place?
I started paying for my very last semester of grad school today and I applied for graduation. It made everything seem really, really final. I can’t believe that the end is so close. By the time everything is said and done, it will have been a three year journey for me (at least for the Masters). I haven’t had a life without school from elementary school all the way to my Masters. While I’ve been working on my Masters, I’ve also been working full time! I’ll have my Masters before I’m 25, which is really cool to me (I don’t turn 25 until October next year).
Our Christmas was really, really busy. We had four different Christmas celebrations to go to over four days but it was all fun. Both the Architect and I really got a lot of nice gifts. It was also nice to spend a little down time with a lot of family that we don’t get to see normally.
New things I did over the holiday: - Had a family gingerbread contest (we had one at the Architect’s family’s house) - Drank Meade (yes, like Beowulf Meade. It was delicious) - Played Wii (A lot of fun) - Found out a lot of the Architect’s family history (very cool even if I didn’t have a good idea about what was being discussed. People are infinitely interesting to me).
We’re leaving tomorrow to make the Christmas rounds. We’ll spend Christmas Eve with my family doing our usually fondue thing (we’ve done fondue every Christmas Eve that I can remember). We’ll go to church with my family on Christmas and then trudge up to PA to spend Christmas with one side of the Architect’s family and a few good family friends. On Saturday, we’ll celebrate Christmas with the other side of the Architect’s family. On Sunday, we’ll spend the morning in PA and then drive back to MD to have dinner with my family plus one of my cousins that is flying in from CO for a long weekend. This is the first time in two years that he has been able to come home for Christmas so it’s really exciting. Hopefully the weather won’t mess with him getting her safe, sound, and on-time.
To all of you that celebrate Christmas, may you have a very merry one!
So I’m not sure if any of you noticed but I haven’t done a lot of blogging on politics for awhile. Frankly, I’ve been pretty turned off by the whole political world lately. I’ve been doing a lot of eye rolling and shoulder shrugging lately. Mostly over the whole health care debate. At this point, I feel like Congress is just pushing through a crap bill just to say that they did something on health care.
I think there is something really messed up when Congress has to push a vote off until 1am on a day before the weekend. I don’t think the fact that the vote was so late means that Congress was taking it’s time or really thinking about what they were voting on. I think there’s also a big problem when polls are coming out saying that most people (you know voters, as in people who voted to put those people into office) are now against what Congress is doing. Call me delusional but I thought the people in Congress were supposed to vote the way that their constituents want them to vote (although that really hasn’t happened for ages).
It’s going to be interesting to see what a mess Congress makes out of this thing… sigh.
Dad returned home the next morning looking exhausted. He had been forcefully questioned all night long until the police finally said that they believed his story about not being involved with Adrienne’s disappearance. Life on Creighton for us only got worse then. We were shunned by our neighbors. A few times we found eggs smashed on our mailbox and toilet paper on all of our trees. We received threatening anonymous notes. We called the police each time but they simply chalked up the vandalism to simple mischief and refused to press the issue anymore. This went on for weeks.
Dad grew more depressed each day. One evening at dinner, he broached the subject of moving back to the main land. I had been waiting for him to finally agree to do that. He knew that Minnow would never let him leave the island on his own so we hatched a plan to leave in a small boat under cover of night. It was clichéd but we couldn’t run the risk of anyone catching us.
We had an old fishing boat that Dad thought he could patch up. It just needed to get us back to Cecil on the mainland. Every night for a week, Dad went out to patch the boat. I busied myself with collecting the most important things that we would need: papers, money, things to start life over. Minnow had involved himself in every aspect of our lives for the past few years. We knew that it would be hard to start over again.
Things continued to grow worse. We finally picked a warm night in May to make our escape. The night was clear and the stars shone brightly in the sky. We had moved the boat down near the water the night before. We watched all of the lights in the houses on our street go out before we crept back behind our house and down to the water’s edge. We pushed off into the water and started the engine. Dad said that using the motor would be risky due to the Creighton water police but we had no choice, we needed to get back to Cecil and away from Minnow’s guards.
I felt freer than I had in years with the water droplets splashing up on me and the wind blowing through my hair. It wasn’t long before we had the spotlights of the Creighton water police’s boats shining on us. As I ran to the front of the boat, my foot caught on a big coil of rope and I hit my head on the side of the boat as I fell overboard. I remember in detail sinking and watching the light from the moon slide further and further away from me for although I had grown up near the shore, I had never learned to swim.
When I was alive, I had never given much thought to what happened after one died. I guess after my mom passed away, it was just too upsetting to think about the end, mortality.
I watched my dad turn off the engine and cry out for me. Some night fisherman heard his call and came to help. I watched the Creighton police turn around and go back to the island. I watched the Coast Guard escort Dad over the choppy water to the small lights of Cecil. He was safe and it was only then that I slowly faded away.
(21.A story from Greek or Nordic mythology rewritten and set in small town, modern day- Mode of creation fairly open- ( 8 pts))
So we moved. Minnow put us up in a small house right next to his wife, Pasha. His daughter, Adrienne, also lived with Pasha while Minnow did whatever it was that he did to make money on the mainland. Adjusting to life on Creighton was difficult. I missed the house I grew up in and I missed my friends. Dad still missed Mom and spent a lot of time puttering in the garage, anything to get his mind off of losing Mom. Meanwhile, Adrienne and I became close friends.
We were both 16 and dreaming of when we would be able to get away from parents and go to college. Two years seemed like a long time. It must have seemed a little longer to Adrienne. Somehow she was able to sneak off the island and get back to the mainland. I was worried for her. She had hinted that she wanted to leave but I never knew she was serious until she left.
She found ways to get word to me that she was alright. She wrote thinly veiled anonymous letters. She sent a new letter every few weeks, never giving me the address of her new location. Dad and I watched Pasha grow gray with worry over her daughter. Minnow simply grew more and more angry. Both Dad and I knew that we would be in trouble if anyone knew that we had any sort of communication with Adrienne, no matter how one-sided it was.
The letters continued to come. Adrienne began writing about how delusional her dad was. She wrote us about how he had started appearing in a few of the local mainland papers trying to get more residents to come to Creighton to live. She wrote about the long editorials he wrote about the beliefs of Creighton, the first utopian society in this area. She wrote about how she feared that he was turning a little scarier than any of us thought that he could be. She also asked for us to send her necklace that she had made out of thread. She had always worn it when she lived on Creighton, it was something that her grandmother had given her. She finally gave us an address. It was the address to her boyfriend’s apartment just in the town over from where we lived on the mainland.
The next day, I went over to Pasha’s house under the guise of getting back a book that I had let Adrienne borrow. Pasha sent me upstairs alone saying that it was still too hard for her to look at Adrienne’s things. I found the necklace right away and slipped it in my pocket. I grabbed a random book off of Adrienne’s shelf and went back to my house.
Dad figured that it would be safer for him to address the letter with the necklace in it himself. He mailed the letter that afternoon.
At about 8 pm, there was a knock on the door. It was the local Creighton police asking for my dad. They wanted to take him into the small police station for questioning. He was being questioned about the disappearance of Adrienne Minopoulas.
(21.A story from Greek or Nordic mythology rewritten and set in small town, modern day- Mode of creation fairly open- ( 8 pts))
Creighton felt like a prison. They all had come there by choice but some had become so fully intertwined in the politics of the place that it felt like they were being jailed. Creighton was a small island off the coast, which only added to the feeling of exile and desolation. Looking back, it’s very apparent that Creighton was a cult. Once a person committed to living in Creighton, they could not leave. There was no real need to leave as long as you were happy living on an island so small that you could see from one end to the other while standing in the same spot. All of Creighton was ruled by our fearless leader, Troy Minopoulas or Minnow as he preferred to be called. He was the father of our utopia, the one that we must bow down to.
Minnow promised us salvation. He promised us a place to live, a place where we could be free, a place where no one would bother us. I remember moving from the outside to Creighton. I was young. Mom had already passed away and I know that had she been around, she would have done everything in her power to keep us from moving to Creighton. She had always been suspicious of Minnow and would have kept us from ever leaving the mainland. We would have never been in the kind of trouble that we were in now if she had been around to lend a voice of reason.
Minnow had Dad work on a few projects for him in the past. Minnow was one of those men who seemed to be able to live like a king with no real career to speak of. We all suspected some sort of mafia ties but none of us could be sure. When we lived on the mainland, Dad had even built a maze out of hedgerows to keep Minnow’s nosy neighbor from looking in at Minnow in all of his splendor.
Dad was brilliant and his intelligence seemed to get us in trouble wherever he went. Had he been born a century or so ago, he would have been considered an inventor. Now he was simply considered an eccentric man and that did not go over to well in today’s world. After Mom died, Dad quit his job and he picked up a few odd jobs to make a living and once I was old enough, I began doing some odd jobs as well in order to add to our meager salary. It never seemed to be enough though. The house was too expensive. Minnow heard of our plight and began coming over each night to tell Dad about his ideas for Creighton, a place where all people would be able to simply pay a flat fee to live there and in exchange for a little work here and there, Minnow would foot the bill. It sounded good, really good. Whenever something sounds that good, it’s better to just run away.
(21.A story from Greek or Nordic mythology rewritten and set in small town, modern day- Mode of creation fairly open- ( 8 pts))
Well, we ended up getting about two feet of snow. For the DMV area, this is a lot of snow. Frankly 4-5 inches is considered to be a lot of snow around here so two feet seems gargantuan. We spent the day inside. I wrote my Christmas cards finally. Now to get them in the mail (currently surrounded by about two feet of snow and unreachable). Hrm, that might have to happen on Tuesday.
This weekend, the Architect and I started reading a book that our minister recommended we work through together. It’s called Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. We’re going to read a chapter a week and work through some of the exercises together. Reading the book got me to thinking a little bit which brings me to a question for all of you.
What relationship/marriage advice would you all give to a couple getting ready to get married (you don’t have to be married yourself to answer this question)?
I. I sit here next to you Frost like spider webs across the window The snow falls silently outside Ashes still glow in the fireplace We are the only two on the planet
II. I rake my fingers through my long hair Catching my earring Making it fall You pick it up Long fingers brushing gently Against the apple of my cheek We are the only two on the planet
(4.A love poem incorporating the following words: spider, rake, snow, ashes, earring, apple, planet -(6pts))
