Recession and College just don't mix.

Hello lovelies,

I have some devastating news, at least it is to me. I learned yesterday that my family could not afford to send me to college this semester. Needless to say that I cried so hard I had a headache. I called my Big, and she came over to make me feel better but there was not much she could say that would ease the hurt. Joe came over and he kind of treated it like a "Oh well, onto bigger and better things for you!" which only made me sadder. There are so many things I wanted to accomplish this semester too... I had a wonderful independent study already approved and I was going to do my internship at the Women's Center in Lock Haven. I cannot describe how much of a slap in the face it felt to hear that.

But I know that it hurt my parents too, to tell me that. It was not easy for my dad to announce on the phone that it was his fault and he wishes he had more money for me. It was probably even harder hearing my mother weeping in the background either. I've been asked to not mention it to my other siblings because it would probably scare them. Plus they're young enough to believe that our family is a lot more put together financially than it is. One thing is for damn sure, I never want to make that call to my child.

And on a less important note, not going back to school means not being apart of Sigma Sigma Sigma this semester. I didn't think Greek Life would mean that much to me, but I will miss it. My big told me that it wouldn't change a thing and that they would still include me in everything they could. To be a participating sister though you have to be a full time student and I'm not even a student anymore :\

So I continued my job hunt ten times harder than I had before. This time I'm requesting full time positions, which I seem to have more luck in getting responses with. I have an interview at the UrbanOutfitters in State College, PA on monday for a Team Leader full time position (I'm not going to lie, I'm really really REALLY excited for that one). I also have an interview tomorrow morning at a hotel restaurant as a waitress/maid. I have to ride out the lease on my apartment until May and then I'll take it from there.

Maybe I'll be back in the fall semester. Who knows really? Maybe this is just life telling me that I need to go in another direction, that it's okay. Maybe this is a new adventure.

Little Princess.

When I was a little girl I brought my mother the gift of friendship. I changed her life forever. She can thank me all she wants because it's true. My mother met her best friend because of me. Because of cute, curly pigtailed, jelly smeared me. Here's how the story went down in history.

I often ran away as a child. Not out of spite, but out of complete ignorance of never knowing that the world was NOT my playground. Literally. I would get into my neighbors backyards to play on their swing sets and dig holes in their gardens for my grand idea of being able to tunnel underneath the neighborhood to the park. There was definitely nothing wrong with this in my little child mind. Why wasn't I allowed to pick flowers from the neighbors gardens? I was going to give them my beautiful bouquets anyway… well leave it on their doorsteps and run away. And to me, nobody minded a cute little girl doing cute little girl things, so what in the heck was the problem? Years later a next door neighbor would ask my mother what poison she could use on her fertilizer to keep our cats off of her lawn… thank goodness I wasn't my wandering self when we became neighbors.

My favorite thing to do on any average day in our townhouse neighborhood was explore. This often entailed making secret hideouts behind bushes, under decks, in sheds, etc. Never my own of course, that was no fun. Once me and my mother were in a Kmart together at a young enough age that I don't remember this ever happening. My mother strolled me through the isles of the store. I like to think that she was picking out shampoo for me in this story, the kind that has the plastic cartoon character as a top (a very important factor if my mother expected me to use it). She was picking out the different choices, Ariel or Goofy, and turned around to ask me my favorite. She said, "Hon, what do you…" but I was gone. She had never even left me, but I was gone. She looked up and down the isles but I was still nowhere to be found. My mother panicked and found a manager right away. They paged me over the intercom, sent employees looking everywhere, and then finally shut down the entire store so no one could leave with my mothers most precious possession.

When my mother tells this story now, it's with sarcasm and resentment at how I inconvenienced the entire world of Kmart all over the country. As if I remembered or knew that running away was bad at 2 years old. All of a sudden the story takes a twist from kidnapped concern to "BAD girl, BAD!"

As my mother and all fifteen Kmart employees were in a panic trying to find me and debating on calling the police, somebody noticed something. I don't know if it was my mother or a Kmart employee, but I was found by one of them. These are inexistent now, but there used to be a photo filmstrip drop off container in every grocery and convenience store. You could drop off your camera's film and the next day you could pick it up at the counter. Disposable cameras were everybody's actual camera in the 90's. So in a way, my mothers nightmare can never ever be repeated for another parent… because photo drop-off bins don't exist anymore.

Somebody heard me giggling. Somebody was walking by the photo drop-off bin. And somebody noticed that the cabinet was slightly open. Well, whoever it was flew open the cabinet door to reveal a little girl in over alls sitting in the photo drop box. Not only was a sitting there with a big fat smile on my face, but I was in the process of unrolling a film strip. "Hi Mommy!" is apparently what I said. I had caused the entire store to shut down and my mother to cry over her missing daughter because I had wandered off into la la loo la adventure land of mysterious quests… which happened to be the photo drop-box.

To this day my mother uses the same what-if situation, "What if she had been unrolling someones WEDDING PHOTO'S?!?!!?" Well, we contacted the owners of the film and they ended up being good sports about it. No cherished memories had been unrolled. I was probably taken home and punished, but thank goodness I don't remember that part either.

I had many run-away adventures in my youth. I once ran away to the local YMCA, an odd choice but a magical one. I wandered off in Disney World (a story for the books), libraries, parks, and various countless amusement parks. A friend of mine once told me that they were going to probe me and bring a laptop with them so they could locate me at all times because my sense of direction was so terrible. Thank God that the 2000's brought google maps. And my parents gave me a GPS as a graduation present. The point is, I am a lost little girl.

But back to me bettering my mothers life. Not only was a I great at running away and getting lost, I looked just fine in costume. I was decked out entirely in a pink tutu, pink leotard, ballet slippers while also being accessorized with a wand in hand, pink pipe cleaner tiara on my head, and sheer fairy wings on my back with elastic straps under my arm pits at all times. I was princess and that was that. And I loved to tell anybody who would listen.

So I went door to door telling the world of my royalty, singing my made up songs that chorused "I'm a fairy princess! I'm a fairy princess! I'm a FAIRY princess!" all around my neighborhood. The terrifying problem with this was that I often knocked on strangers doors just to tell them that I was a princess and did they have any kids that wanted to play? Well, Newark, Delaware isn't exactly the kind of place that appreciated fairy princesses. It did however appreciate poverty, child molesters, cancer, and inappropriate teacher-students relationships. This is why that knocking on my neighbors doors scared the carp out my parents. While we loved living in Delaware my parents were very aware of it's problems. Hence the move to Unionville, Pennsylvania where small town farm community met Beverly Hills Housewives with subtle BANG.

But, maybe, just this ONE TIME, I can say "you're welcome" to my mother for my philandering. One day, adorned head to toe in princess gear, I knocked on my neighbors door two doors down from my own townhouse. A rather tall woman with thick black hair answered the door and looked all the way down to gaze at my tiara'd head. "Hi, I live down the street at that house" (point to my house) "You have a dog right? Can I pet him?" Well, I don't remember if I got to pet the dog. I do remember being marched right back to my house down the street and my mother answering the door in tears. "You found her?! Oh thank God! I'm sorry, she does this all the time… it's a problem we're going to fix. Where did you say you lived?" And that was how my mother met her best friend, Debra Crossan. That was also how my older sister met her best because Debra had a daughter her age and they got on like peas and carrots. Our families became very close throughout the years. To this day the Crossan's make us cookies on Christmas. Debra started calling me "Lou Lou Belle" because I liked to skip and sing the nursery rhyme down the sidewalk. Lou Lou Belle turned into Lou Belle, which turned into Lou, which now I've decided to adopt the name Belle. My mother stopped calling me any version of the name when a kid at the pool asked what my name was and I honestly said Lou Lou Belle.

Little does my mother realize that the idea of being a "princess" brought her a lifetime of friendship. That my constant demand of always wearing pink made her life full of reward. That princesses made the world a slightly better place to live in. Well, she doesn't see it that way when you account for all the heart-attacks, tears, and frustration over my "episodes."

But I think, deep down, she's glad that she had all those years of rescuing her princess. It was only the beginning of a long life of singing and dancing and skipping to the lou, and who wouldn't love a lifetime of THAT?

New Found Poem.

I found this poem in a quest for another one. I really enjoyed it and I thought I would share :) The theme of this poem applies to my life right now because of finals coming up in a couple of weeks. I hope you all can find some appreciation for it like I did.

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. 

Billy Collins

Sandy.

Hey,

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone. My town was not really in the path of destruction, just some heavy rain and a lot of trees stand without leaves. However, New Jersey is basically underwater,  New York subways are completely flooded in, Ocean City is covered in 6 feet of sand, and Chincoteague Island is basically no more. Seaside (where they happen to shoot 'the Jersey Shore' series) has floated out to the ocean-- it really looks devastating. I hope that if you are on the east coast that you are safe.

We had two days off of school because of the state of emergency. Me and my roommate went to wal-mart to prepare for Sandy, but all of the water, chips, milk, candles, and bread were gone. We tried to get beer (idk, my roommate insisted that beer is helpful in natural disasters but I really didn't think it would go there) but all of the liquor stores were closed. People were in a rush to get inside, banging on the glass windows, so me and Erin decided to avoid that situation. With all this preparation and frantically running around town for supplies, we barely got any of the storm. Basically just hard rain. Didn't even lose power.

Today I got my first bill for verizon internet. It was $150, I nearly fainted. I couldn't believe all of the charges that they had on the bill, things I didn't even remember talking about. There was thirty dollars for this, and an extra 40 for that, and menial charges of 10 dollars. Me and my roommate were on the phone with verizon for two hours trying to figure out what the hell happened. We ended up getting the bill down to $86, but I'm still dissatisfied. So I'm taking the bill to my boyfriends mother where apparently she's great at getting verizon to do whatever she wants. She once got 4 plane tickets to Germany for $20. I just want to warn everybody that verizon is terrible. If you have any suggestions for other internet services, please tell me and tell me soon.

Back to school tomorrow. Please be safe wherever you are.

-Lou

Blog Video

The dreaded article here and all the nasty comments :(

After you click on that, find the article entitled "Where's the Community?"

Busy B.

Hey,

I've been really busy but I definitely want to update my blog. It's very therapeutic for me to write everything out.

So pledging is going ok. Not good, but not bad. One girl already quit because somebody in our pledge class called her the N word... I know, charming right? It makes me nervous too. And also, a lot of us are butting heads a lot and different decisions we have to make as a group. There's definitely a power struggle and I feel like I'm playing mediator most of the time. We're supposed to make a scrapbook,  interview all of the sisters at their home, create a plaque with all these different insignias on it, and on top of all that we have to memorize every sisters big and their animal family... by saturday. As if that's not enough add all of my homework and work.

But I'm enjoying it anyway. I wish that our pledge class was more cohesive but that's ok. We haven't got our Bigs yet but I'm eagerly awaiting mine. We got clues from our bigs as to who they are, but I'm still in the dark about it. I think I'm in the giraffe family but really it's all up in the air.

That's about it for now. Will ensue with pictures at another time!

-Love,

Lou

A short update.

Hey,

So I've decided to use Daisy from the Great Gatsby for my paper (shout out to Janiebug for the idea and possibly the only one who might read my blog anyway!). So crisis averted... for now.

I decided to join Tri Sigma. I'm already loving it and I'm not even a full sister. I have never had so many people sincerely interested in my well being at one time. The other day they all gathered in my apartment and decorated my door for bid day! I got a purple rush tshirt and 28 personal hand made cards from each girl. Each card said a little about themselves and had their phone numbers in them. It was so entirely sweet! Unfortunately it's a hundred dollars to be in it officially on sunday... so that sucks. But I like feeling involved in something again, like being apart of something bigger than myself.

These are all the cards and stuff they gave me taped to my door.

Isn't it nice? Notice the streamer and the balloon on the other side too.

I've had a revelation about what I want to do with my future career. I do like English and I love kids. But I realized that I don't want to teach English to kids, that I love them separately. The only reason I want to teach is to be around children and influence their lives for the better... not necessarily spread my love for reading and writing. I discovered that I really just want to study kids. That I want to get to know them on a personal level, I want to teach them about themselves.

So I'm thinking about child psychology for a masters degree. I want to hold focus groups for all sorts of girls and maybe even boys. I want to find out what motivates girls to act the way they do. What makes a bully into a cyber bully when they're philanthropists in school? Why do some girls click while others never will. What family issues shape their lives? How can I help? I want to motivate them. I really want to work with self-confidence and teach girls to notice their surroundings.

So child psychology may be the place to start. I'm having a meeting with my advisor on monday to see where this can take me.

-Love,

Lou