Excitement!

I'm pretty sure that I figured out yesterday which schools I'll be applying to this fall. This is pretty major for me, because up until yesterday I had mostly buried my head around a pillow and thrashed about when I thought about deciding which colleges to apply to (there are so many of them! There are colleges you've never heard of in places you've never heard of! Like Iowa! Any decision you make is ultimately fairly arbitrary!).

Anyway, the list. Organized in terms of how absurd their acceptance rate is.

1. Brown (ha.)
2. Amherst (ditto)
3. Northwestern (Only school I could find with Community Organization, Education, Women's Studies majors and double major and teacher certification options without being in the middle of a cornfield.)
4. Macalester (Because going to college three miles away from my house now would be awesome, right? But Mac is a top liberal arts college, according to people who know these things, like the obsessive forces behind College Confidential.)
5. Sarah Lawrence (Such a tight-sounding school. I can't even say anything cynical and sarcastic here. Open curriculum, writing-focused school, small class sizes, etc. No, hold on, I do have bad things to say. The 70/30 female-male breakdown is pretty daunting. And they're featured on Gawker's list of Most Annoying Liberal Arts Colleges, ha.)
6. Syracuse University (Focus on internships/experiential learning, decently sized city.)
7. U of M-Twin Cities (Because I'm pretty damn sure I'll get in.)

So, there it is. The top seven that beat out the thousands of others for reasons both legitimate and completely absurd.

Time to start applying.

Pillar to Post

This blog entry comes to you from the ninth floor of the Guthrie Theater in downtown Minneapolis. I was hired by a family friend to be a "Personal Care Assistant" for her daughter, who is both in a wheelchair and in a Guthrie production. My job was to make sure anything she needed was available before the show, but now the production has started and my job is basically over. I'm just hanging out in the lobby, enjoying the view and surfing the web (the joys of laptops and WiFi).

I might head back down to the fifth floor Express Cafe in a minute or two-- I realized a few minutes ago that the bean salad I had been happily munching contained huge chunks of sausage. I've been a vegetarian for almost 13 years, so that made the salad a no-go. Eating in the dark is dangerous, I guess.

Here's a question for those of you reading this: If you were an ACT test writer, what would you make the essay question? Be specific! I took the ACT this morning, and was forced to write an essay for half an hour on a truly inane topic (ACT rules prohibit me from disclosing the actual essay prompt, god knows why). Anyway, I don't feel like it should be impossible to think of essay topic that actually inspires some form of opinion in your average 16-18-year-old. Any thoughts?

Minneapolis is beautiful at night.

Baby, You Can Drive My Car

So, I'm not learning how to do that, but I am learning how to drive (equally impressive, amiright?). I'm kind of thinking that driving might be a little easier than winter biking come December. I'm definitely not one of those people who winter bikes because it's "fun" or "exciting". I'm winter bike because I "have no other option". And although you can get a lot of street cred in some circles from biking home in a sleet storm (yes, I have), you also get a lot of sleet in your face.

Hopefully, having a driver's license at some point in the near future will prevent future sleet-in-face problems. My dad has mostly taken charge of driving instruction, as he did with my older sister, but my mom has also, somewhat reluctantly, stepped up to the plate. The car I'm learning on is an old Ford Escort, which starts immediately only sometimes, and frequently refuses to go in reverse altogether. But it goes forward just fine, and that's my number one priority at this point.

Quick hits:
-POS show on Saturday! To buy tickets from TicketMaster, and endure nine million percent service markups on ticket price, ooor to make the long haul to First Ave and buy tickets for their low, low $9 price, but endure an hour-long bus ride both ways?

-Cross Country St. Paul Conference meet was this Tuesday. Conference is a meet that pits all of the Saint Paul public high schools against each other, and it's exciting and fun. Central swept JV and Varsity team championship titles for both genders, and each individual winner was from Central. I won the girls' Varsity race, which was a sweet way to start wrapping up three years of Central CC.

Oh hello.

Back again, blah blah blah. I have a blogging schedule now-- written down in my planner and everything. I've realized that I need to give myself, or things take a while to get done. I also really like arbitrarily assigning due dates (is that what being a teacher is like?). So here we find ourselves.

I've discovered that the Organizing for America internship that I got a couple months ago is more or less useless. Surprising, right? The same people who send you dozens of e-mails on a regular basis aren't pulled-together enough to find something to do for people who said they'd be willing to volunteer up to twelve hours a week. Kind of weird, but whatever. I've moved on to scheming bigger and better things, such as...

Where to go for J-Term! I have a few ideas, and none of them could be described using the words "20 below". Hamline has no classes from December 14th to the beginning of February, which is a fact that I'm going to try my best to exploit. Anyone know someone in South/Central America who'd like some free help for the month of January?