Super Amy

He finally gets it.

For five years, I’ve been doing this, and he finally gets it.

After introducing dad to myspace.com, he really took a liking to it. He’s really into doing his own songs and recording them and fiddling around with them, and hadn’t realized that there were millions of other people doing the same thing that he could easily network with. The details and features of having an account, however, are still a little new, and he’s having to play around with everything to figure out the differences between posts and comments and messages and invites and bulletins and whatnot.

“I guess I’m going to go post a… blog,” he told me finally, tonight. His account had just the one blog entry he’d posted right after he joined. “I don’t guess anybody cares, though, since I’m the only one posting.” So dejected. I explained to him the difference between blogs and comments and messages, and the fact that only he is allowed to post to his blog. He’d been confused by the “subscribe to blog” link. Slowly, the realization dawned on him.

“Wait… so I get to say whatever I want?” I confirmed this. “I can make enemies en masse, instead of just one at a time! I can be all kinds of politically incorrect! I can spout out anything I want to, and nobody can stop me! Wow! This blogging thing is pretty cool!”

So kids, if you ever sometimes wonder if your parents pay any attention at all to what you do on the internet, the answer is no.

song of the moment: Chin Up Chin Up – Virginia Don’t Drown
The title of this album is “We Should Have Never Lived Like We Were Skyscrapers.” Forgive me for picking on such a great album name, but you english people – isn’t that a split infinitive?

You’re what happens when two substances collide, and by all accounts you really should have died.

Update time! Can we just pretend I apologized and whatnot, and move on? I think I would like that.

The past month has been pleasantly busy with work. Once I managed to finish up the June onslaught of trips and missions work and general stress, summer turned out to be faithfully steady and mostly predictable. “Work”, on the other hand, was very enjoyably random. I got to paint buildings and numbers and calculators and stars and all sorts of things on walls and cabinets, hot-glue rope to ceilings, sort books meticulously, hang lots of wallpaper, tile tabletops, and play video games with the coolest kids ever.*

The fall semester is coming up so quickly, and it’s a little scary. I’m slotted to take CIS 235 (not really sure what that is…), ENGL 214 (”Literature and Madness”), MATH 211 (Statistics), and CIS 231 (C++, pt. 2) all in a row on M-W-F mornings, and ART 105 (with Sarah, Mandy, and Tota) on Tuesday and Thursday mornings. Simple enough. The afternoons will be spent at Hopewood, teaching Spanish to the high schoolers. Wow.

I’m really, really excited, and really, really nervous… I mean, it’s very typical for me to get bogged down in classwork in general, but I really want to put the time and effort into lesson plans for Spanish. I’m pretty confident that everything will work out, though, since I won’t have any spare time at Lander to be pulled in different directions. All of Hopewood could use your prayers, though, as we start a new year in a new building.

The quote at the top of this post is from “A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left,” one brilliant song by one brilliant Andrew Bird. Don’t think, buy it now, and remember to thank Sarah. I’ve also recently purchased the new Coldplay cd, the new Sufjan Stevens cd, and the not-so-new but nonetheless incredible “Carney” by Leon Russell. I don’t know how I’m supposed to pay my traffic ticket** now, but then I suppose the responsible thing to have done would have been to think about that before cd-shopping.

I’m going to get things organized before classes start, and I’m going to stop eating so much junk food, spending so much money, sleeping so late, and getting distracted by trivial things. Is it weird that I’m almost always about eight months late (four months early?) with my new year’s resolutions?

song of the moment: Leon Russell and Joe Cocker – Girl From the North Country

* If you’re a Gravley, I promise I was working the whole time and not at all playing video games with your children/grandchildren.
** “Careless driving.” It’s a pretty amusing story, really, but will likely only continue to be until the woman sues me.