It's been a while--I've had a few but have been too busy to post any, but last night gave me some lovely ones. :)

Going to a social another department held that a friend from my orchestra invited me to, with the aim of meeting new people since I'm a new grad student and don't really know people beyond my own small department, and running into people from my classes who are in this same department.

Meeting a friend of my friend at the social, and hitting it off instantly.

Talking and hanging out for hours, them giving me a tour of their building on campus, me taking them over to my building and showing them around and exploring the upper levels I hadn't yet visited, then realizing we were all hungry and we all lived just a few blocks from each other, so we grabbed dinner near home, then went back to one of their places and just hung out for several more hours.

Being able to talk linguistics, computing, design, literature, music, animation, science fiction and fantasy, and so much more, with comfortable silences now and then.

Hanging out with geek guys again! My department is predominantly female, and while they're wonderful, I miss indulging in Guy Time every so often. Most of my close guy friends back home are geeks as well--my kindred spirits.

Getting texts from two of my wonderful roommates who were concerned that I'd gone out hours earlier with the intent of being home after a couple of hours, and wanted to make sure I was okay. ♥

One of the two guys wishing me a kind, "Be safe," as I left.

Remembering what it was about being in school that I missed so much, and being glad to experience that again yesterday.

It turns out that I have a great affinity for eating Chinese food naked in bed on hungover Saturday mornings.


My first night alone in this house, and while I found it difficult to not only fall asleep but stay asleep, I rather like the quiet and peace right now. Exhausted, but peaceful.


I finally have the heat turned down- the past two nights the two roommates have turned it up to 78 and 76, and it goes directly to my room. And so now I am embracing the cooler air, even naked. It's funny how at home I despise a chill in the air but here I find it welcome.

I GOT IN.

Notes augmented

We've enhanced and de-bugged Notes. If you haven't tried it yet, now's the time! You can create a private note when you ban multiple users. You can also delete multiple notes at once. Lastly, paid users have the option to add a note (visible only to you) whenever you add or remove a friend (guaranteed to avoid embarrassing social mishaps). If you don't currently have a paid account, you can upgrade now! It only takes a few minutes and costs less than a bad shopping mall haircut (plus, it's way more fashionable)!

Product tweaks and bug kill

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New FCK fixes rich text editor!

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LiveJournal Cares

We’re pleased to introduce you to lj_cares, a new LiveJournal community dedicated to raising awareness and funds for U.S. charitable organizations that improve the health and well-being of people around the world. Each month, we’ll spotlight a nonprofit that is making a significant global impact through medical research, public outreach, and/or humanitarian social programs. Charities will be selected in accordance with the U.S. calendar of national health observances based on a high rating (of over 60%) on Charity Navigator and global scope of impact.

In this, our inaugural month of November, we will celebrate national adoption month by offering a charitable virtual gift (priced at $2.99) to support Love Without Boundaries, an organization that saves the lives of orphans with life-threatening diseases and places them in loving homes around the world. LiveJournal will donate 100% of the proceeds from the sale of charitable vgifts (we'll cover the cost of credit card transaction fees). To learn more about Love Without Boundaries, please visit lj_cares and read about how they helped save Baby Kang and the Rainbow Twins from fatal illnesses, who are now thriving in nurturing families. You can purchase your Love Without Boundaries gifts in the Virtual Gift shop.

Papered in postcards

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Please keep the love coming for one more week by writing to Frank the Goat, Esq., c/o LiveJournal, Inc., 539 Bryant Street, Suite 210, San Francisco, CA 94107. Be sure to include your username, since we'll be drawing the names of ten random contributors next Thursday to win paid account credits!

Photos of the week

We have more dazzling images posted by talented LiveJournal photographers from around the world. We're hoping to span the entire globe, so please continue posting and tagging. Of course, you can also sit back and enjoy the view at lj_photophile.

You can see a sample of this week's gorgeous photos and check out spotlight communities and awesome user content after the jump!

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Curtains

We thank you, once again, for joining us. See you next week!

I swear.  I live in a crazy house.


About ten minutes ago I heard all this crashing downstairs (I'm up in bed trying to get sleepy).  Crash.  Couple minutes of silence.  Crash.

I thought (hoped) it was W and E cleaning dishes and putting them away, as they have not been washed in probably two weeks (I refuse to rant online here but seriously?  It is disgusting.)

But the crashes were not really putting-away crashes, it was like, put something away and then drop it on the floor, crashes.


So about two minutes ago there are these light little patter knocks on my door.

"Come in," says I.

And in strides W in a teeny tiny black skirt barely covering it all, an inch of tighty-whities showing below.  He's got his Newports and a lighter in one hand and announces, "I'm skateboarding downstairs."


Aha.  So that would be the crashes.  When he gets closer I can see he's a little wet (from going out in the rain to get said skateboard, with nothing on but this teeny tiny skirt). He sorta stands there for a couple minutes and informs me that he's tipsy (shocking).  I tell him he's got ten more minutes before I try to go to sleep so he's got ten more minutes of loud crashing.  We pound good night, and he turns to leave.



This is the sort of thing that actually happens on a somewhat regular basis.  Last night I got real tight and ended up sitting on the floor listening to Andrew Bird and smoking and calling for W to come over to help me with the beer.  



And all day today was rain and rain and wet shoes and a terrible awful splitting headache and getting splashed as a car drove by me (just as I think I'm adjusting to living in the city and something like that happens) and good conversation over a delicious lunch. 

So, today was exciting because I finally finished a piece of choreography! I haven't successfully completed a piece of choreography since the winter, when I choreographed my piece for the spring dance show. Every now and then, I would start working on something and then it would fizzle out, or I would get a great idea and put it on the back burner because I'm just too busy to give it any time. My "projects" file on my computer grows ever longer because I don't have time to work on anything. So at 9:00pm tonight, when I finally put the pencil down on this piece, it was quite a relief, really, to be creative again after all this time. :-P I can understand why my creativity went down the drain, though--I only had 3 minutes or so left to do on this choreography, and it still took me basically every spare minute of time when I wasn't in work, eating, sleeping, or doing housework things to get it done.

The piece I choreographed is kind of special because I actually started it somewhere around senior year of high school. It's to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring", as sung by Josh Groban (that's how I know I started it senior year--right at the peak of my Josh Groban obsession). I choreographed a little of it, then my inspiration fizzled out and I set it aside, not to look at it again for another couple of years. At some point in college, I choreographed another few seconds of it, which was not really as great as the beginning part. Then, this past weekend, I was listening to it and looking at my previous choreography, and I knew I had to finish it. It was problematic for a couple of reasons. One was that, if you put a project aside for five years, you can almost guarantee that it'll never get picked up again, or that the original inspiration will be long gone, so I was very apprehensive about starting this piece up again when I was in such a different place in my life. The other reason I found it problematic is because that first part of the dance is really, really good. So good, in fact, that every time I sat down to choreograph it, I was afraid to, worried that the next step I wrote would be the craptacular one that would ruin the whole dance and I wouldn't know what step to replace it with to make it good again. The dance works so well because it's really simple (so I don't mess it up with too many steps or lots of fancy combinations) and also because it's a piece that I specifically created for my own personal education and enjoyment, rather than a piece to be performed anywhere, which means I had a little more wiggle room to reuse steps and follow my own vision without worrying that people were going to get bored watching it onstage. I'm proud to say that I believe I completed the dance without totally destroying the spirit of the thing. :-)

Of course, now I'm completely exhausted. Finishing a piece of choreography is draining unto itself, but this feels like tying up such a huge choreographic loose end, and completing a remnant from a stage in my life that feels like such a long time ago. Writing that piece felt weird sometimes, like Adult Florence and High School Florence were communicating in a way that they usually don't. It was like revisiting a piece of my former self, which felt good. That year of high school was one of the times I felt healthiest and most "myself", and so being able to connect with that person made me feel more like "myself" and less like the grown-up version of me that I'm still struggling to get to know.

Plus, now I can erase something from my "projects" list and replace it with a finished product--always one of my favorite things to do.

Dear "Glee",

I LOVE YOU SO EFFING MUCH.

That is all.

Love,

Sarah

EDIT@08:16 UTC/GMT. Wow. That was ugly. I expected it to go for 30 minutes and have maybe 1 minute of broken connectivity. Instead it lasted over 4 hours and we had 10 minutes of downtime directly related to the load balancer upgrades and then another 5-10 minutes of downtime when our primary Pingback database server crashed and the secondary couldn't take over; which could have been indirectly caused by the network upgrade missing a self-VIP.

Anyways, we're up, we're working, the load balancers are barely breaking a sweat right now and I need some food and a shot of whiskey. I don't even *like* whiskey!!

Thanks mhwest and dnewhall for helping out!

---

On Saturday the 14th at 4AM UTC/GMT we will be upgrading the operating system of our network load balancers to a newer version, one that will allow us to use both CPUs! Nifty, because multiprocessing is nice.

Since we have 2 load balancers, the plan is to upgrade 1 at a time, and there really should be very little impact to our website. Hopefully you won't notice a thing and I'll get to go back to the hotel and watch some wonderful late night infomercials.

We've got a lot of exciting projects coming up for 2010 and we're hoping that we'll be able to deliver them all to you, that you will find it useful/cool/lovely and then you will use the site even more. Behind-the-scenes work like this will give us the capacity to handle the anticipated traffic, so expect a few more maintenance windows especially in the beginning of next year as we've got some neat ideas to improve performance around here! We had the recent 30-45 minute outage yesterday due to one of our logging databases filling up disk space -- not so great design coupled with my human error in handling the initial problem -- and it looks like we're going to finally have some resources to eliminate stuff like that. I can't wait!

As usual, I will be updating status.livejournal.org before and after, just in case you are not able to reach our main website during the work.

Seems I was premature, now you may make your wish.

"You people and your quaint little categories."

Imagine my amusement at spending an evening introducing my mother to Torchwood only to come back to the internet to find this new topic. Brilliant. Ironic, but brilliant, because really? Sex is one thing everyone has an opinion on.

Sexual Ethics? Well, mine probably aren't that great. But then, what defines good sexual ethics? Monogamy? I think it's pretty obvious that isn't the only choice and really doesn't suit a lot of people at all. Not going behind someone's back? Boundaries on who you are or are not interested in? Denial? To me, it sounds like a lot of denial.

Years ago when I was in high school, I was staunchly in the court of you don't have sex until you're married, you only ever have sex with that one person and you have babies. Well, I was raised very Catholic. But then you look around at the world and you have all this sex in movies and television and advertising--it's everywhere, quite literally. Sex sells, as they say, it's the forbidden fruit, Garden of Eden and all that.

"Here's to Eve, mother of our race, who wore a fig leaf in just the right place. Here's to Adam, father of us all, who was Johnny on the spot when the leaves began to fall."

I have a problem with roommates. Not mine, usually. I had one long-term relationship at the beginning of my college years, after that I sort-of dated two of his ex-roommates, from different years. The one guy I did date was roommates at the time with his roommate's ex-roommate. It was a complicated sort of web of a mess but strangely, never seemed to pass the boundaries too badly. But then again, we didn't talk.

"I don't date."

Plenty of people have heard me say this in the past two years, and it's true. I don't date. Dating someone means that I have to be with them and only them in that big accepted idea of dating, and unless I'm going to be with them and only them for the rest of forever, it doesn't sound very fair. Maybe I've taken that to an extreme. Maybe I'm terrified of commitment and am never going to get over it, I don't know. I don't date. It isn't fair and I've got eyes, I've got eyes and I'm someone who's been kissed a lot.

This evening my mother and I were talking about my youngest sister. She, too, had a terrible relationship, one that has fairly recently been officially shot in the water and ended. He tended to call her a whore. She's a virgin and her response was always "I've kissed two guys in the past year, how does that make me a whore?" I concur. I kiss two guys in a night. With startling regularity.

I think my record is at 14. There was a toga involved.

Am I wrong? Do I violate sexual ethics? Probably. But the important thing is that I don't violate my own sexual ethics. I'm true to myself, I don't hold myself back when it comes to feeling affection and attraction to people, I want the people I care about to be happy, no matter who it is they're with. Have I gone behind someone's back? Once, yes, and I told her about it. Plus it was a question of "are you happy?"

She was my roommate. I have a thing with roommates.

eating string cheese. string by string. the smaller the better. and letting them melt in my mouth.

Roasting chickpeas and smoking a clove (yeah, still smoking 'em) and listening to Radiolab.


Realizing more and more just how much alone time I need.  Still can never quite let my muscles relax, never quite let my guard completely down around here.  Realized, recently, two things, actually:

a.) I haven't slept really well for more than a night or two at a time since probably freshman year at school.  Last time I think I could possibly call how I felt, "happy."  Also, looking back on it, my bed was lofted and I used it solely for sleeping.  I wonder how much that impacted the quality of my sleep.

b.) Every time I've ended things with someone I'd been seeing in an even somewhat romantic capacity, I've had a multitude of people tell me how glad they were it was over.  Does this say anything about the people I've gotten myself involved with?


Home was extremely Connecticut-y.  Whenever I get home after being somewhere else for an extended period of time (Maryland, England, DC), I find myself adjusting unconsciously to the cold.  I pull out the heavy sweaters and thick socks, and get used to diving into bed and trying desperately to warm up the cold sheets.  Being away from the place makes it only more apparent, every time I return, of just how unbearably quaint it all is.  I got used to that.

I realize DC isn't quite the grittiest city out there.  Only here a few months, I have seen multiple sides and on the whole, have always found this city to be entirely more elegant and trendy than gritty.  Here on NY Ave, though, I see mostly the gritty.  It is always loud here, there are always sirens and horns and people yelling out back.  Look too closely outside at night and you see the rats scampering from garbage can to garbage can.  Nights are never actually all that dark; they glow pink from the city's street lights.  My first time at the metro stop near my house I almost walked onto a spot where someone had vomited something apparently pink.  Every time I walk anywhere I risk getting run over by an eighteen wheeler, and I was once accosted partway down the street from an overly friendly man calling himself "Stick-man."  Out my window I see a high rise, and at night, more often than not, cop lights from the block of houses a street over.  The white people in this neighborhood scuttle around with their coats pulled tight around their necks, and I hope that I don't look anything like that. Down the street on one side there is a strip club and on the other, a convent and a preschool.  I can't walk outside barefoot at all, not even in our small back cement spot.  There is too much broken glass and some mold from where W once let a steak rot for a few months. 


And so, I can't help but miss the stars and the trees and birds that don't bathe every morning in oil spots in the church parking lot down the street.   I miss rolling around in fields and biking down open roads and watching the dawn rise through the trees and fields on cold mornings while running.


Gone with the quiet of the fields, however, is also the self perpetuating anxiety that had the capability of wreaking havoc on my days.  There is no room for days where I wake up and look in the mirror and decide I look wrong for the day.  There is no room for looking for and feeling the nuances of how a light affects the day.  If I wake up and find that the sky looks sickly, there is no possibility I can stay home and lie in bed, shutting it all out. And so, I think, I have stopped looking for these nuances, and only take in what hits me in the face.  This is not how I have trained myself to do things, and have, in an attempt to still observe the world around me as properly as I can in a way I see fit, begun to compartmentalize what I see.  I tried to explain to W how I catalogue my days here; he says it is almost like a children's book.

On one page:

"Today, I saw an old black lady with purple dreadlocks."

On the next page:

"I stepped on every crunchy leaf I could on the way to work.  Now my boots are dirty."


It's all I can manage, right now.



It's not forever, right?

sixwordstories
Whether you're in the mood for a creative challenge or you're short on time or attention span, this semi-addictive community is perfect for those who find flash fiction way long. Once you get the hang of it, you won't be able to stop. The prince turned into a frog. The girl ran home to mother. Tough to write. Easy to read. It's a double threesome of fun.

dailyfoodie
Delicious, ambitious, and occasionally nutritious dishes make for an eclectic, all-you-can-eat feast. Whether you're searching for recipes for your next dinner party or you're jonesing for a late-night brownie fix, your cravings are sure to be well sated. A warm and inclusive community that welcomes all orientations, from carnivores to vegans, from gourmands to junk-food junkies. Guaranteed bias-free, food-positive, and pan-epicurian.

I'm so not looking forward to classes starting again for the MAT. Remember before I started at my placement, when I was getting so tired of the work and frustrated by how I couldn't produce anything high-quality because I was so overwhelmed? Well, we haven't even started class yet, and already I'm feeling that way again. I'm trying to do this tech project that we have due tomorrow (tech, by the way, being my least favorite of the classes I have to take), and none of the sites we want to work will let us do exactly what we want. It's all really unhelpful and frustrating and confusing. And it makes me annoyed because none of the work I'm doing in these classes is anything I really want to do. I'm in for another six weeks or so of convoluted classes that I always feel lost in. I was really optimistic earlier today, and getting plenty of stuff done, but now I'm just kind of gloomy and I've given up on accomplishing anything much. I just know this is going to happen every day for the foreseeable future, too, and that just makes me dread going to class even more.

Sorry to be such a downer. :(

There was a while back, when my voice failed to operate. I couldn't speak. I couldn't sing either.

But my voice is back now, and while I cannot sing for as long as I'd like - or as loud as I'd like - it's getting better. I have to remind myself to take it easy, to not overdo it because I probably will if I'm not careful, but it's here again.

And so's that joyous feeling of being able to open my mouth and actually sing so that the rest of me gets light and shiny and happy, too.

I love singing.

I've had one of those days, one of those weeks really but today seems like the culmination of it, or rather the beginning of something majorly big. There's a way of thinking that I've begun to habitually use, where I assume that everything happens for a reason, but a lot of the time it's a stretch. Today it was easy, and I felt like everything happened the way it was supposed to. I guess I "won" and I got to enjoy it, for once. Or maybe fate allowed it because it needed to be. I don't quite know. All I know is that I got to see an old friend and that it was a lot of fun, and that many good things are in the works, surrounding the event. Many good things, so that I will be prepared for the tests to come, which may be bigger and and more terrifying than anybody could possibly imagine. Or maybe just typical aggravating tragic human existence, I don't know. But I do know that tests will come, I need to be ready, whatever good things that might come my way are there so that I may do what I need to do. To all of you out there who face or may face difficulties--have faith, and have courage, and enjoy your blessings while they come, but recognize them for what they are.

( Basic HTML for LJ )

EDIT: Now with expanded, extra HTML help beyond the basics, here!

I'm waiting for my laundry to be done in the dryer, which is the main reason I'm still up. After I retrieve and fold it, I'm going to bed. Whatever, I'm so used to 5 hours of sleep at this point that it won't make any difference. :P

I had my last day at the middle school yesterday, and it went really well. The kids were totally sweet and wrote me goodbye messages and everything, and I realized that I did get kind of attached to them after 4 weeks. I do still firmly believe I'm meant to be a high school teacher- I just feel so much more comfortable and in my element there- but the middle school placement was beneficial, all the same. At the very least, it taught me that middle school isn't as bad as I make it out to be. If the job market is slim enough in a year that I have to take a middle school job, I might not be happy about it, but at least I'll no longer approach it with the kind of dread I might once have. They're crazy, but I'll admit they are kind of sweet.

One thing that I find odd and which makes me unhappy, though, is the way the curriculum is approached nowadays for middle schoolers. Specifically (and this 100% has to do with the standardized testing focus), my middle schoolers do reading skills, language skills, writing, and study short stories from an anthology- but they don't really read many novels. We do have literacy labs where they get into groups and choose from a selection of books to read together, but middle school teachers don't really teach novels that much anymore, at least not that I've seen.

I can't remember reading a single short story when I was in middle school. You know what I do remember reading? The White Mountains. On My Honor. Bridge to Terabithia. My Side of the Mountain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The Diary of Anne Frank. Call of the Wild (which I didn't actually read- the first book I had ever been assigned in school that I didn't finish- but it was assigned to me, which is the point). The Giver. Flowers for Algernon. And a bunch of others, which I don't remember as much. Many of these are still favorite books of mine today, and I really loved reading them. Short stories are cool and all, but very few short stories that I've read in my entire school career have stuck with me in the way that a book does. Part of the reason I'm so attracted to high school, I think, is because I can actually teach novels without being criticized for detracting from the mandated curriculum, which doesn't place them in middle school as much.

This isn't to say, by the way, that I object to focusing on reading skills in middle school. Honestly, I think the general idea they have is right. It makes absolute sense to me to teach kids how to perform the physical action of reading in elementary school, refine their reading and language skills in middle school, and give them more opportunities for literature examination and analysis in high school. What I don't like is that the schools seem to be doing this in an exclusive way, and I think that all of these components should be present throughout the levels- just with more of a focus on one or the other at a given time. That's not crazy, right?

Look at me. I'm a teacher, thinking about teacher things. ;) Laundry should be pretty much done now- good night!