Zumba, Yoga, Zumba

Hello all. Guess what? I've exercised three days in a row. I know, I know. Impressive for me.  It's not even a New Years Resolution of mine to get fit (If you were wondering, I didn't make any resolutions), I just have to get two PE credits finished before I graduate. I was only going to take one P.E. class this semester, but I realized that exercise like Zumba and Yoga are fun and pretty easy, so why not just exercise every day and get all my requirements filled? It's only an hour of my day. And it's pretty much in replacement of going on Tumblr, so I see it as an improvement of my time allocation. 
We'll see how long I last before I drop one. WE'LL SEE.

I have finally found a way to make parties a bit more fun for me. As much as I love dancing around, often times it gets a bit tiring when it's the only form of entertainment other than talking to other people whose interests include drinking games and drinking. So what do I do? I bring a camera. I, of course, only post the appropriate ones online, but the best ones are often the ones I cannot share. Which is why I am quite excited to order prints of my favorite photos once I come home from my internship early July (i.e. July 1st). Life becomes quite interesting when you're behind the lens, trying to frame moving life into a small static space and yet still capture the mood of the event. Of course, my photography skills are still extremely lacking, but I hope I can learn how to utilize all the fancy bits of my camera to make visuals worth viewing. Some of the pictures are on Facebook if you care to see (suck it up, Derek. Not like you'd care anyways), and most of them lame, but I just love taking pictures of people. Humans are so beautiful and interesting.


Speaking of the parties I went to on Saturday, one was a "Spirit Animal" party in the Art House where you would take a quiz ( http://www.jerismithready.com/quiz/) and then dress up like your spirit animal. I mean, you didn't have to dress up as the animal you got on the quiz, and could decide what animal you felt you were yourself, but I decided to dress up as my quiz result, which was a Crow. That same night I was also going to a “Classy” Debate Party, so I had to dress classy as well. Two parties to attend? What a socialite I have become! Anyways, since I had to dress up as both a crow and a classy lady,  I had to find a costume I could easily take off to party classy-style as well. The solution was a glorious home-made mask. Combine the two together and you get a…Classy Crow? 

My high school winter formal date (Rachael)
might notice I'm re-wearing the dress the magical night
where we got caught fake grinding on the dance floor
 (see picture below) 

 





Anyways, I was a super fancy crow, and I'm not going to lie, I really dug the outfit I wore. I also wore a super light trench-coat with pockets (Advice from Alanna: the best dresses and clothing has pockets. It never steers you wrong.) which added to the look quite a bit. But enough about my outfit, said the girl who had reached a vapidity level of over 9000. My classes so far have been excellent. I need to get some reading done tonight, but nothing is too stressful and I have been enjoying all of the texts I have had assigned for reading. They have even started inspiring me with ideas about what I'll be writing my Senior Theses on (One will be a creative writing thesis for English, and another a thesis for Environmental Studies about something to do with the Environment [surprise!] and Human Culture [or maybe something a bit less tied to human culture if my counselor lets me. Technically most things about Environmental Issues revolve around the culture we live in, so I'm pretty sure the restrictions of what to write for my thesis will be very minimal when it comes to topic selection].)  But yes, I have a vague idea of what I want to do with both. One revolving around Fairy Tale characters/princesses and a change in story so that they're 21st century, active, feminist actors in their stories instead of passive damsels in distress. The idea for my ES thesis will revolve around waste management and human tendencies/trends/habits of some sort. I've always been abnormally interested in solid municipal waste and whatnot, so hopefully I'll get to study it more. It's all very wonderful.

This week is Bate's Winter Carnival week where a bundle of extremely fun winter events go down. I have yet to really attend any yet except for the inflatable fun/bouncy house/popcorn/cottoncandy/dessert extravaganza tonight. Really the only reason I went was because there were no desserts in Commons since they moved them to the room with the inflatable games. I am sort of a loser. But I've been busy with classes, and my poetry workshop is at night which means I missed out on some of the events just because I had a class then. I like poetry better than Bingo, anyways. I'll invest some time attending one of the events soon, I promise. But not tonight. I'm already in my pajamas, I have reading to do, and I have been staying up late recently because I am a college student and it's sort of expected of me (i.e. either doing homework, talking to people or wasting time). 

Okay, I need to do some reading for my environmental ethics class (which is fantastic. I wish I could take more philosophy classes. And I want to take a Women and Genders Studies class. Maybe I'll audit one next year since I don't have time to actually take one of those classes due to my schedule. But luckily, my ES and English Major requirements often are interdisciplinary, so I get the best of all the academic worlds). 

Okay, back to the world of academics.

- Nicole