Quick letter

Dear Friend,

Despite the walls you put up, we can see right through you. You live in a bubble, you're either incapable of or scared to fall in love with anyone, and you like safety in your job, your location, and your relationships. You know what you like, and because of this, you will never explore beyond the confines of that bubble unless someone comes along, calls you out on it, and pops it, and I'm not sure that anyone has the heart to do that.

This would all be somewhat fine, if worrisome, except that you're becoming increasingly bitter, disgruntled, and self-righteous. Rather than using those brains of yours to accomplish anything, you're pissing off your friends by questioning everything they believe in. I suspect it's because you're insecure about your own standing in life. While I understand that some people take a long time to figure out what they want to accomplish in their lives, it would be nice if you could kindly refrain from taking out your frustrations on the rest of us. Frankly, you're turning into a miserable human being.

Sincerely, and only because I care,
Me

I leave you with a quote from C.S. Lewis: "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to be sure of keeping it in tact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless- it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable... The only place outside of heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell."

When in DC...

Jesus. Effing. Christ. It's become clear to me that the more people you pack into one area, the higher chance you have of running into assholes--it's a simple matter of proportions, as the world is made up of a certain percentage of assholes.

So yesterday, when 1) the Cherry Blossom Festival was still going on, 2) the White House Easter thing was happening, 3) there was the opening game for the Nats at which President Obama threw the first pitch, 4) People were working because it was a Monday and 5) Lots of tourists were there because it was Easter Monday...the city was a disaster area, and it was the worst at evening rush hour.

Which is when one of the kids on my tour decided to get a flat on his rear wheel. Which I got to change (with the help of another tour member) right in the middle of the very crowded sidewalk on the way back from the Jefferson Memorial. The kid's tire went flat again (a slow leak?) on the 20-minute ride home, and I think that pissed the mother off, because she did not tip me. Even though I spent a solid 10 minutes getting yelled at by pedestrians and bicyclists while sweating my ass off and getting my hands coated in grease. Which would have been OK had either one of them bothered to say thank you.

Then there were the pedestrians who, on the morning tour, told me that we were a "pain in the ass" and bellyached about us stopping on the sidewalk (single file--they had room to walk, and they're shared pathways by law) because a kid fell off of his bike. I had to reel in my desire to call them a bunch of self-righteous douchebags. Instead, I bordered the line between polite and snarky in telling them that 1) it was a shared sidewalk, and 2) a kid fell off of his bike, and what would they like us to do, exactly? After we passed them, one of my group members informed me that they had tried to stand in her way. She accidentally hit one with the side of her handlebars. I told her they deserved it.

I love my job. I love my job. I love my job.

Also, as an aside, I would like to send a shout-out to Peter Barnes, FOX News' Senior Washington Correspondent. You now have a cherry pie, courtesy of Destination DC. Destination DC delivers like...7 gazillion cherry pies to people during the Cherry Blossom Festival. (Which I find amusing, because fruit-bearing cherry trees and the blossom-bearing cherry trees you see around DC are two different species.) I don't really know whay, but if I someday end up with a job where I have people delivering me free baked goods, I will make sure that I come down and thank them personally.

All of this cherry blossom hoopla really gets on my nerves...I hate the damn trees because they're JUST TREES, for god's sake (albeit pretty ones) and they drawn in hordes of obnoxious tourists. And there's an entire committee devoted to them and that damn festival, complete with a President, Vice President, and student "Cultural Ambassadors" who have to wear ugly and hot-looking pink blazers and do Lord only knows what during the festival. I've also seen cherry blossom flavoured soap and lotions and stuff...have you ever smelled a cherry blossom? THEY DON'T SMELL LIKE ANYTHING. Starbucks has cherry blossom donuts...but cherry blossoms don't taste like anything, either. And once again, they don't bear fruit...they're basically nature's equivalent of doilies. Pretty, but annoying, fragile and useless.

Why I hate academics

Good moooooorning, everyone! And by "everyone," I mean all 2 of you who read this.

You might be wondering (as I am) what the hell I'm doing up at 6:30 in the morning. Well, I'll tell you. I actually got up at 4:30 as part of my attempt to write a "first draft" (due at 7:30 this evening) of this undergrad "thesis" I have due at the beginning of May. If you can't tell how well it's going, here's a hint: I'm writing a blog entry at 6:30 AM and just procrastinated for a good 20 minutes by going through a yoga routine. I'm on my third cup of coffee. You do the math.

"Well," you might say to yourself, "why don't you just stop whining and fucking write your paper already?" Good question! I'll tell you that, too. Because some idiotic part of my brain decided it was interested in studying tourism in Cape Breton, and I'm sitting here surrounded by 21+ sources, most of which I have at least perused if not pored over. And let me tell you something. Tourism studies DO NOT MAKE ANY SENSE. I'm pretty sure a bunch of bored academics got together and went "Hey, let's confuse the hell out of people with theories that run themselves in circles, and let's write articles that decide to take POSTMODERN THEORY and apply it to TOURISTS."

What. The fuck? I'm generally fairly good at understanding fluffy, esoteric ideas that are floating around in the middle of nowhere and bear little to no significance to most people's lives. But read through enough of this stuff, and it's almost a guarantee that you will go brain-dead. The problem is, I know exactly what I want to say about tourism in Cape Breton because I think most of the people who've studied heritage tourism are disgruntled old fogies who hate everything. But trying to couch what I'm saying in terms of what's already been said (which every good aspiring academic is supposed to do) is impossible because I can't understand half of their arguments. Well, it's more like I understand them in the most abstract way possible, but trying to put them into my own words without cherry-picking quotes from every single article is proving impossible.

Why can't people just learn to write in a manner that makes sense? In a way that makes their thinking clear and accessible to everyone? There needs to be reform in academia...because, let's be honest, who's going to bother with most of this stuff? Sure, the theory can be interesting, but if you write about it in a way that's comprehensible to no one except you and your cohorts that are pretending to understand you to avoid looking bad...what's the point?

I don't mean to denounce every scholar who's every published anything. But I do mean to denounce the ivory-towered folks who cater to their own kind and dismiss the rest of the population as plebeians. You know they're out there. And apparently half of them have decided to write articles about tourism.

Wheee....airports.

Once again, I find myself compelled to write about the joys that come from hopping around airports all day. Mostly because I decided to drop $8 on a Boingo session, and now I feel that I ought to use it. Well, Rachel, that was silly, you might be saying to yourself...and you're probably right. But let's face it--I have the attention span of a retarded flea and if you expect me to sit around the Chicago airport for 3 hours without Internet access, you expect far too much of me. I'm also being a bitch and using one of the handicap outlets at the outlet kiosk. I figure I'll limp away if I get yelled at by anyone.

But it was either this or go be enthralled by all of the sparkly stores and restaurants, where I wound spend lots of money I don't have on things I don't need. Like the $7 *cough* Foreign Policy magazine I got at BWI. I have an unfortunate love for that magazine, and when I've got 3 hours (yes, I show up obnoxiously early for flights due to a lifelong fear of missing stuff) to kill...I tend to buy things. Retail shops in airports remain in business because of people like me. In fact, I'm convinced that this whole "show up for your flight 2 hours early" thing is a conspiracy between TSA and retailers. Because if you're in the airport for multiple hours at a time, you're going to buy shit. Lots of shit.

Oh, did I forget to mention where I'm going? I'm flying into Halifax to go up to Cape Breton to "conduct interviews for my undergraduate thesis," as I'm telling curious people. And I'm going on a partial Honors grant. I'm pretty excited, but mostly I'm stressed out at the ridiculous amount of work this means that I have to do before I graduate. But we won't talk about that now.

What we will talk about is the jolly old time I had in security at BWI this morning. The line was really really REALLY long, and in response to people complaining, this dude in front of me started talking to me. I didn't catch all of it, but it was mostly about how he's willing to sacrifice his freedoms for the good of his country, and how it's part of being a member of a free country, and how you surrender your rights once you walk into an aiport, and how he was in law school before 9/11 and got into a big debate with the dean of the law school about this, who eventually apologized for disagreeing with him, and yadda yadda yadda...yawn.

I cut him off and asked where he went to law school. He said Texas. A Texan and a lawyer. Based on those two character traits alone, I decided that he was the most obnoxious fuckwad I'd ever met. This was confirmed when he asked me where I went to school, I responded, and he said, "Ah, American! A liberal hippie then. I had a friend at AU--she hated it there. She was a military person, really cool, but man, she hated hippies. Where are your Birkenstocks?"

Rather than ripping into him for typecasting and being a conservative prick, as I should have done and was dying to do, I decided not to pick a fight in security and instead said something about the militaristically liberal contingent of students and how most of us aren't like that...then said that I find Birkenstocks to be uncomfortable, thank you. Not a terribly biting retort.

I always come up with great responses for these situations well after the fact (don't we all), but I've taken to retorting with large words in large sentences that usually shut the other person up. Fortunately, in this case, I had to step through the metal detector and leave him behind.

Then, my metronome in my violin case decided to turn on right as I put the case on the conveyor belt. I almost had a heart attack, but fortunately, it was too noisy for any of the TSA agents to hear the steady ticking noise...and I did manage to turn it off in time.

And now, suddenly, I'm thinking about all the crap I have to do in order to graduate in less than 2 months, and I really want a beer.

All right. Enough whining for now. Peace out, homekids.

Random thoughts

1) My thin wallet, fat stomach, and college student mentality have teamed up to discover my new favorite food. Betty Crocker's Instant Sour Cream and Cheddar mashed potatoes? SO GOOD. For 50 cents on the sale rack at Giant? Even better! With sriracha? Orgasm in my mouth. I'm going back tonight and praying they have more.

2) I had a photo published in Bicycle Times! Specifically, this photo:

I realized shortly after I sent it that I had sent the wrong one, but I guess they liked it. I imagine they cut it down, but I wouldn't know because it was the ONE bike mag Barnes and Noble didn't have. Grump.

3) Today was the first evening I've worn a light jacket outside and didn't really need it--and it was almost shorts weather today. Weird having that with piles of snow still on the ground, but who's complaining? And after my second bike tour today, my cheeks are actually a little sunburned. If I were born into another time culture, I would probably be a sun worshipper.

4) The above feeling is slightly dampened when you remember that your boyfriend is on a cruise in the Caribbean and soaking up more than his fair share of sun. But it comes back when you see your first daffodils of the spring.

5) It's a good day when your parents surprise you with 2 boxes of Samoas (or Caramel Delights, depending on which region you're from) in the mail.

6) It's also a good day when you can make a Canadian journalist and her son really, really happy on a private bike tour--especially when she (1) will be publishing a piece that mentions you and (2) has contacts at UBC, where you might potentially want to apply for grad school...

7) Hipster douchebags annoy the ever-loving shit out of me. While I myself make a habit of riding no-handed (it requires less effort in certain situations and is very easy with a road bike), I don't do it while making loud comments about how cool I am and wearing one of those stupid cycling caps. While riding a fixie. In brand new skinny jeans. With one of those bike messenger bags (which, while really cool and useful, are something I wouldn't be caught dead with). Like...could you try and fit the stereotype any more?

8) In real life, when random men in stores hold open doors for me and ask if I'm taken, I can't help (against my will) but be flattered and say "yes" while trying not to smile. Especially when they follow up with, "He's a lucky man." But both times this has happened, it's been followed up on the same night by nightmares about running into creepy men in dark places and nearly getting raped. I can't figure this one out.

9) It's a good night when you see a fox crossing the road, it doesn't get squished, and you can excitedly text your roommate (who is coming home tonight! Which, after being stuck here for 2 nights by myself, will be a welcome change) about it.

10) You know you're a giant IR nerd when you get excited about finding articles that connect the "tourist gaze" with Nova Scotia. And get to read them with a mug of tea. After taking a shower, of course.

A sense of humo(u)r

Discovery of the week: When it comes to people mocking Canada...I don't have one. In the wake of the US loss to the Canadians for the gold in men's hockey, I've overheard and read more Canadian-bashing than usual. Most of the time, people have no idea what they're talking about, and the complete and utter lack of respect really annoys me.

You don't have to love it, but you really ought to show it more consideration than that. It is its own country, after all.

It's just been one of those days.

I think AU Admissions accidentally reversed their list this year and accepted all the people who were at the bottom of the pile. This is the only reasonable explanation for half of what I've been hearing come out of students' mouths around campus recently. Or perhaps it's the fact that we've all been cooped up for a week now, and people have all gone crazy. Or perhaps the bright light from being outside in the snow kills off brain cells.

Whichever way, it's annoying as hell. Take, for example, the line of girls who were sitting behind us at the basketball game yesterday (in which we were thoroughly trounced by Bucknell). They killed some of the only interesting plays in the game for me because they were busy flipping around their hair and giggling. I caught part of one conversation, and it went something like this:

Female Clone 1: "I think I'm, like, a make out whore or something."
Female Clone 2: "Whatever. You're allowed to slip up once in awhile."

And so on and so forth. For the ENTIRE SECOND HALF OF THE GAME. I should also mention that they spent whatever minutes they weren't talking about mindless girly shit absolutely trashing the Eagles. Like, OK, we're not great this year, and the play was slightly less than lackluster yesterday...but are you really going to sit there and insult your team during the game? Towards the end of it (with maybe 2 minutes left on the clock--which, yes, in basketball speak, will be longer than 2 actual minutes, but it's not THAT long. Especially when you've been stuck in your dorm for a week.), I heard Female Clone 3: "Ugh, I'm not missing the first few minutes of Grey's to watch us lose by 15 points." And she got up and left.

....what? Then don't bother coming to the fucking game in the first place! What the hell kind of "supporter" just up and gives up on their team towards the very end? She was walking back to her dorm--it's not like she had traffic to sit in.

I should also add that the only thing they took interest in was the dance team. Who, admittedly, are better dancers than I will ever be, but I will never be able to figure out what exactly is accomplished by tiny outfits, hair flipping and synchronized hip thrusting. ...I mean what's accomplished in terms of winning the game, not of giving drunken frat boys boners and making them drool all over the bleachers.

Or, for example, the girl who said to me in the elevator afterwards: "God, I can't believe they lost. Do you know we pay their salaries? They owe it to us to win."

We-hell. If you're going to go to the game with that sort of attitude, of COURSE we're all entitled to a winning team! We're all entitled to everything! You know why? Because we are AMERICAN UNIVERSITY STUDENTS, and we PAY FOR THIS SHIT, DAMMIT.

Apparently AU also accepts all of the people who check off "Yes, I am socially retarded" on their applications. They always say that "AU" stands for "Awkward University," but it's just beginning to sink in with me just how true this actually is.

Take, for example, the several times that I've held open doors for people. They often look at the ground or stare over my shoulder. I've taken to saying "You're welcome," regardless of how they respond. You could argue that means I'm doing it to be thanked and therefore invalidates my politeness, but I'm really just looking for acknowledgment that I'm standing there.

Funny thing is, being socially inept does not always equate to awkwardness. It also includes those people who are just assholes. You could take as an example the idiot who tried to pick up my friends and me in the hallway of the Berks (the apartment complex next to campus) last night. There's a way to do that sort of thing, and it does not involve it (1) being a Thursday night with classes for the first time in a week the next day and (2) doing it in the middle of the hallway next to the vending machines. You blame it on drunkenness, I blame it on social ineptness.

Or...the guy getting a letter copied on official letterhead at the Copy Centre who got snippy with the employees (who apologized thoroughly) when the printer messed up (apparently the letterhead had been hard to come by), filled out a complaint card, complained that it wasn't a "real" complaint card, then accused the employees of not apologizing. When I politely suggested that he could, perhaps make colour copies of the letters that did turn out correctly, he says, "Um..I don't think so." Curious, buddy, because how do you think the department reproduced that letterhead? His wasn't the fancy embossed kind, it was the kind that's reprinted on colour copiers.

Or perhaps when you're kneeling in the front of the SIS building attempting to pick up pins that you've dumped all over the ground, and some well-dressed bitch in heels steps over you to head into the coffee shop.

And so on and so forth.

I'm waxing overly judgmental again. I don't care. I'm annoyed.