hey i am older today than i was yesterday

And the day before! I am now officially 26, and I feel much older. Suddenly I have an opinion about whether or not people should be on my lawn.

Here is a cheese plate! Nathan made it at about 1am on the morning of my birthday, because I was bummed that no one wanted to go out to the bar for birthday drinks. He also poured some 2 buck chuck for me and our house guests. It was awesome, as was the rest of my birthday.

update

So. I leave for Buenos Aires in less than 24 hours. Actually, I leave for Houston and a 6.5 hour layover in 24 hours, but after that, it's on to Argentina! I'm bringing my computer (obviously), so there's a chance I'll update from Buenos Aires (BA, as the cool kids say). If nothing else, I will be updating my Flickr on a regular basis.

My grandparents are selling their house. Jeb pretty much said everything I would've said. I'm really not okay with the whole thing, and I can't believe they'll have moved out by the time I get back to Wisconsin.

This is a little late, but I'm thankful that my friends and family weren't driving on 35W last Wednesday. I don't know what else to write that would be appropriate or fitting to this kind of tragedy. But really, how does a bridge just collapse? I still don't understand.

I sent in the last parts of my UWM application. The deadline isn't until September 1; I'm going to call and check that everything arrived when I'm back from Argentina, but I'm basically done. Three weeks before the deadline; this is a first for me. I really hope that they'll accept me; I think this program would be really perfect for me, and it would make this whole "moving to Milwaukee" thing a lot less frivolous.

I decided that I'm going to Prague in January. I'm pretty sure I'll be able to save enough money by then, and I bet my parents will help me pay for the plane ticket for my Christmas present.

I didn't pack as much as I wanted to, and I'm not going to have time to mail anything to my new apartment before I leave. Still, I got a lot done, stuff that I won't have to do when I get back. I was able to throw away a lot of old papers, and I packed up almost all of my books. They only filled three smallish boxes; I feel very inadequate.

But I did finish my UWM application, finally, so I guess that makes up for it. The past month has been fairly... tumultuous. I can't really believe I'll be in the Southern Hemisphere tomorrow. I get to go to Argentina for almost two weeks. I get to move to a brand new city that's within driving distance of home. My cousin is visiting me in New York before I move; one of my favorite people is coming to New York for a few days before taking the train back to Wisconsin with me. I'm pretty lucky.

Oh god, this is getting cheesy, time to stop.

goodbye NYU

[Edited many months later: Who are all of you people that are searching for the NYU Bobcat? Do you just want to see what it looks like? Are you using this photo for something? I'm totally okay with that, though I'd prefer you told me about what you're using it for and didn't use it for anything commercial without my permission. Are you applying to NYU and looking to see what you're getting into? Tell me! Leave a comment or email me! This post is responsible for half the traffic to my site; I am so curious about why.]

This is the NYU bobcat. Ridiculous, right? Half of our sports teams (possibly the club teams?) are still the Fighting (Fightin'?) Violets, but for some reason, the other half call themselves the Bobcats (possibly the DIII teams?). According to Wikipedia, our school mascot is "Violet D. Bobcat," which sounds just about right. The best part? The school named the new mascot after the library's search engine, which is called Bobcat (for 'Bobst Catalogue'?), but sadly not "Violet D. Bobcat."

Funny, this is all coming together now. The ridiculousness, the library connection, my soon-to-be outdated use of the possessive 'our' when referring to NYU. Today is my last day of work, which is also my last day at NYU, and so far, I find it to be a little anti-climactic. I've spent five years as part of this "community," which is a loaded word at NYU for reasons too boring to expand upon, and I'm not really sure how I feel about leaving it. I'm going to miss a lot of individual parts of NYU, but on the whole, I really dislike NYU for a lot of reasons, most of which are more than tangentially related to my six-figure student loan debt. However, and beware because this is going to be a little cheesy, I've changed a lot in the past five years, almost entirely for the better (I hope). NYU is the place where I became an adult, the place where I became a person that I actually like, and the place where I met most of the important people in my life. So much as I am ambivalent towards the institution, I'm still sad to leave it.

At the same time, I can still honestly say that most NYU students are complete morons, and I'm really ready to not dodge tourists and film crews on my way to work anymore. I've spent the past five years walking around the same streets, which I've watched become increasingly generic and gentrified, and I'm ready to move on. Sometimes I feel like I haven't really graduated (surprising, right? Since I'm working at my undergraduate school, in the same job that I had for two years as a student), and I think it's time to move on and do something new.

Which doesn't change the fact that I've been sitting in Bobst for the past two hours, because the library is the only place that I'll actually physically miss. Which really shouldn't surprise you since my new life goal is to get paid to hang out in libraries. And that life goal is going to be a lot harder if I don't get into library school, so I'm going to go work on my UWM application.

exceptionalism is bad!

I've been listening to PJ Harvey today, which I should really do more often. "The Desperate Kingdom of Love" is such a perfect melancholy song; you should go listen to it right now.

I started reading a book on the subway today, and by the end of the introduction, I knew that it was going to change my life. It's called A Nation Among Nations: America's Place in World History, and I think it's going to be the book around which I organize my academic career. Thomas Bender is a fucking genius.

(nerdy!)

I was on the subway heading towards the Cloisters, which is still my favorite place in New York. The Treasury has finally been reopened; I saw it for the first time today. I know it's cheesy or whatever, but whenever I go to the Cloisters and Fort Tryon Park, I feel like I can breathe, like I can think clearly. For some reason, maybe because the park reminds me strongly of Prague, it's so easy to think about what I want to do with my life, where I want to go from here.

(cheesy!)

In conclusion, there was a homeless dude smoking a blunt on the subway a few nights ago. I have never seen someone enjoy smoking that much. He was smoking for at least five or six stops, he was laying back, smiling and laughing, and when he got up to move to a different car, he stopped on the platform between cars, and holding the door open, he sang-screamed "I feel good! I knew that I would!" and you guys? I believed him.

panic!

How to write about snow in New York without sounding cheesy?

(a) All of these fuckers are scared of a little snow; last I heard, this "snowstorm" was going to leave six inches of snow. Six inches is nothing! In Wisconsin, we don't notice anything under a foot. Fucking pussies.

(b) I'm pretty sure I'm going to slip and fall on my ass at some point, maybe even while sober!

(c) I wonder if this means I don't have to go to my internship tomorrow morning?

(d) Tonight, on my break, I walked around for half an hour in the snow, and I felt calmer and happier than I have in days.

Woops, that last one was cheesy! Kill me now!

rainbows everywhere

It was snowing when I got out of work tonight and still snowing when I got out of the subway 45 minutes later. New York in a snowstorm is beautiful, peaceful. I walked up the hill to our building slowly, surreptitiously catching snowflakes on my tongue. I stood outside the building for awhile, watching the snow lit up by streetlights. Everything was quiet; the street was still. I looked up, let the snow fall on my face. I stood and watched and heard myself think.