Unsolicited Advice 10/14

Listening to the soundtrack from Ever After. So romantic. Sorry, I'm sappy tonight.
Munching Dove Cookies and Cream Promises
    I don't know that this will become a permanent feature or anything, but I sort of like the idea. I'm young; I haven't experienced much in my life yet. But that doesn't mean I don't learn lessons that are worth sharing. And maybe it will be helpful coming from someone who's just learned this lesson rather than a parent or teacher who's repeated the story over and over. Today's lesson:

Listen to Your Professors

Even if you don't respect them.

    Something I've noticed in my classes - and I'm guilty of it, too - is students not respecting their professors. I don't know why this is happening, but it really drives me nuts since I'm going to be a teacher at some point in my life, and I know I will lose it if my own students act this abhorrently.

    Surely you're thinking, "Well, she admitted to being guilty of it, too..." Yes, I did. But I'm not vocal about it. I'm not outspoken in my lack of respect; I don't tell them to their faces they're not good teachers, even if I think it's true. But there's the rub. I do think it. Which is just as bad. I just didn't realize it was until this past week.

    I'm going to tell you about two of my professors (no names, of course). One teaches a lit class, and the other an education class. The lit class professor - Prof. Lit, we'll say - assigned a paper two weeks ago. Prof. Lit said that there had never been so many disappointing papers in one of his/her classes before. Three quarters of the class had to rewrite their papers, myself included, which almost never happens. See, we were given six prompts to choose from, all very specific. What I think happened is that Prof. Lit was looking for something very specific in these prompts and if we didn't give it to him/her, we failed. Now, I don't think of Prof. Lit as unqualified by any means, he/she is just looking for something specific and isn't getting that across to the class in the best way possible. Of course, many people in the class were quick to blame him/her and also to blatantly ignore what he/she instructed at the beginning of the class on Tuesday (i.e. if you have something you would like to address in your paper in particular, email him/her and set up an appointment). This got me super pissed because, again, no respect for what Prof. Lit had requested.

    Jump to Thursday in Prof. Ed's class. I can honestly say that I had not learned anything in this class up to this point. Nothing of use to me as a teacher, anyways. We were supposed to have a guest speaker who had a family emergency, so he/she had to come up with an alternate assignment so our class time wasn't wasted. Prof. Ed instructed us to choose a text we'd like to teach in our future classes and formulate a writing prompt for our students based on a specific portion of the text. This wasn't a problem for me. That's not what I learned that day. Offhandedly, when giving advice about making writing prompts for students, Prof. Ed said, "If in the future when you get papers from your students and they all bore you to tears or no one is giving you the papers you want, look at your prompt. Maybe you're being too specific and not leaving room for creativity." Of course, I immediately thought of Prof. Lit and wanted to replay that moment for him/her (I promise, if you'd let me come up with my own topic for my paper, it'd be a billion times better), but then I thought of something else. Inwardly, I have little respect Prof. Ed. I haven't learned anything to help my in my teaching career and I think he/she repeats the same useless information over and over. But I learned something about respect - you don't have to respect someone to learn something from them. I normally have the worst time trying to focus on listening in that class, because I dismiss every meandering story as next to useless. But if I hadn't been listening to that one comment, I could have easily fallen into the same ditch that currently held Prof. Lit in my future teaching career. And now I won't.

    Moral of the story: Listen anyway. Their meandering nonsensical useless tale may lead you to your own epiphany. Don't let your insolence keep you from inspiration.

How To Wear Your Glasses So They Don't Wear You

Listening to Let the Groove Get In - JT, who else.
Ready for school to be over already.
    A few weeks ago, I won a contest over at The Lovely Side for a free pair of Firmoo glasses. Thanks Jessica! This could not have come at a better time. See, my family is cursed. Genetically. On my mom's side (the Walkers) there is a genetic tweak that gifts its recipients with deteriorative vision problems. But it skips a generation - so my mom's father has it, and his grandfather had it, and two of my three cousins have it. My grandfather is legally blind, and has been for most of his life. Aaron is now legally blind and he's only 25. Coulter isn't, but he's well on his way. That's another thing. It only affects the men. Or so we thought.
    My vision has been getting steadily worse each time I visit the eye doctor - which is once a year. I thought nothing of it. Actually, I did think of it, I just thought that's how everybody was. Apparently, that isn't supposed to start until you're about forty. I happened to mention this to my grandmother when she was here to care for my mother after her surgery, and she said, "Oh, you're just like your grandpa and the boys." Great.
    I'm not legally blind or anything, and I probably won't get to that point anytime soon as the curse isn't as strong for the girls (woot!). However, when I first got glasses, my prescription was -.5 in the right eye and -1.00 in the left. Now, about six years later, I'm at -2.00 in the right and -2.75 in the left, which is a change of about .25 each year (check out dem math skillz).
    So here's a fun fact: I haven't bought new glasses since my first prescription. I mostly wear contacts, because glasses annoy me and for a while I felt like I wasn't as cute with glasses. I started wearing them more though when I got close to Corey's brother Brett and his friends, because they all assured me that girls with glasses are super cute. And Corey loves them, too. Only problem is, they really didn't help me all that much.
    I finally left my last pair (I had two) at Corey's grandma's house by mistake over the Fourth of July, and realized I'd have to replace them - hopefully with an accurate prescription this time. And lo and behold, two months later, I won a pair for free! They came in on Monday and I love them.

    Since getting these babies, I've been searching for different ways to do my makeup to compliment my new frames. Here, obviously, I went for a bold lip. But I also love the idea of sporting some brighter eye makeup behind my lenses. Glasses tend to wash out your makeup a bit, so even if you do something more bright and dramatic than you normally would, it ends up looking really nice once your glasses are on. Here are a few looks I'm going to try the next time I rock my glasses. (All photos from my Pinterest.)

 

Red Lip & Neutral Eyes. Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. So sleek and sophisticated, and who doesn't love a little leopard print thrown into the mix?

 

Light & Dark. Obviously I don't have blue eyes. But this is the kind of dramatic look that will flatter any eye color, and I know it would look great behind a great pair of glasses.

Golden Plum. Again, obviously not a blue-eyed girl. (And frankly, I don't think this person is either.) But purple is a great compliment to brown eyes, and adding the gold to warm things up draws the perfect amount of light behind your lenses.

Iced Cranberry. I actually wore this on Saturday at work without glasses (since they hadn't come in yet) and I have never gotten so many compliments on my eye makeup before! Just think how it would pop with a strong set of frames!

Do you wear glasses? What sort of makeup do you wear to flaunt your frames? Tell me below!

LifeScouts: Ballet!

Listening to Justin Timberlake TKO - not sure how I feel about it yet. I want to like it, but I'm just not sure. Plus I'm pretty sure I can hear a guinea pig in the background.
Overwhelmed with homework.
    Normally, I write these posts when I don't have anything else to write about. Today, I just felt like giving myself a prompt and going with it.
    Ballet was a huge part of my life. I danced for nine years in two different ballet studios. I quit just before auditioning for company, and part of me regrets that so much. See, my feet naturally turn out. I walk like a duck, or a penguin, or some other absurd animal. And you don't even wanna see me run. If you didn't already know I danced, you'd figure it out pretty quick, even though I'm an absolute klutz. When I was a baby, my parents worried something was wrong and took me to get my feet checked out. The doctor said, "Oh, she's fine, just put her in ballet." So in kindergarten, that's what happened.
    I did everything but hip-hop and tap, really. Ballet, jazz, pointe, modern - I would've done tap and hip-hop if given the option. I learned Thriller when I was eight, danced to Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend from Moulin Rouge and A Hard Knock Life from Annie. I got to be a fairy in two different performances (I was fairy-obsessed as a child, and still want to own anything Tinker-Bell related). I was in the Nutcracker almost every single year. I was a Christmas Tree Doll, one of Mother Ginger's Children (twice), a Little Angel (twice), a Toy Soldier, a Big Angel. I quit the year I would've been one of the Party Girls, which is the one thing I regret most.
    Before you get excited, I don't mean the current definition of party girl - I would not have been playing beer pong in a tutu. The story of the Nutcracker is that a little girl named Clara receives a nutcracker doll for Christmas, and on Christmas Eve he comes to life, battles the Rat King and his minions, and takes her to the magical land he comes from where a bunch of different countries dance for her (girls on pointe from China, a belly dancer from Arabia, Mother Ginger and her Children, The Sugar Plum Fairy). Before all this occurs, she is given the Nutcracker at a Christmas party that all of her friends and their parents attend. I would have been one of the friends. They had beautiful Victorian-style dresses, got to wear their hair down in bouncing ringlets (not buns like everyone else), and got to do a little play-acting on stage while other people danced. It was every little girl's dream, just short of getting to be Clara herself, or the Sugar Plum Fairy. Personally, I wanted to be a Party Girl, then dance in Tea (the Chinese dance), then Coffee (the Arabian dance), then the Russian dance, and lastly the Sugar Plum Fairy, so I could get a chance to do all my favorites. But I never got to do any of them, because I quit to be in colorguard, which as I've previously stated really wasn't worth it. What sucks is even if I got back into ballet, I'm so out of practice and out of shape, I'd never be good enough to do any of those parts I loved. So I've missed my narrow window of opportunity.
    But I know if I'd kept doing ballet, it would have taken over my life - we're talking practicing like twenty hours a week - and I never would have met Corey. In missing my first goal in life, I met the one I never knew I wanted, until I did. So I guess I really don't regret anything.
    Except maybe not transferring to UNCW while I still could. ha ha.

 

What's something that was once a big part of your life? Something you thought would shape your future, or maybe something that has? Tell me below!

LifeScouts: Parade!

Listening to Coco's Big Bang Theory over Skype
Looking forward to seeing him tomorrow!

    This seemed like the most logical LifeScouts post to do next, considering part of the story was told in the last one. I've actually been in three parades, though. One was the homecoming parade for my high school, which was the band's first real rehearsal marching together for the first time. The next was the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, which despite being really neat, and something cool I can tell people I was involved in, was one of the most miserable experiences in my life. I did see the Cheetah Girls (for those of you who even know who that is) on their float right in front of us, and that was cool, being fourteen and a Disney freak. The third was the Christmas parade in Atlanta, which was neat being back in my own state in a parade that was televised and important. But still cold and miserable. I know I must sound like an absolute spoiled brat - "I've been in three parades and I'm still complaining about it all!" - but it was a lot of hard work up to that point, a lot of stress and yelling and injuries, and then we were all awake at three a.m., in the sleet and frigid puddles (our shoes were not water proof, or cold-proof), walking for blocks and blocks and blocks. In my opinion, it wasn't entirely worth it.

LifeScouts

Listening to Bust a Move by Young MC on repeat (because I want to drive myself insane. No, I'm going to use it for a school project so I have to keep listening to it.)
Thinking about how incredibly relieved I am that this stupid summer course is almost over. One day left, guys. One. Day.
    So, I don't know if any of you frequent YouTube like I do ("frequent" here means "visit every twelve and a half minutes"), but there's a dude called Nerimon whose real name is Alex Day who's pretty cool. And he makes entertaining videos. He also started this thing called LifeScouts. Which is also pretty cool. Just kidding, it's actually pretty awesome.
    The concept is that you're sharing stories and experiences with people by reblogging these little badges and describing how you "earned" them. You can also buy physical badges, but as I don't wear pin badges or have much use for them, I prefer the rebloggable badges. Plus, I realized something. I'm horrible about starting things and not sticking with them. And I love to write and really need to keep myself doing it, so I thought what better way to keep blogging than to tell you (the general public of the internet) a story every time I can't think of something to write?
    So here's the first one:

Empire State Building!

    My freshman year in high school, I joined the color guard in the band. Now the band at my high school was pretty intense. They were third in the nation my sophomore year at Grand Nationals. That being said, they run the program like the military. They have multiple week long rehearsals in the middle of the summer in the middle of the day, outdoors, where kids were dropping like flies. Oddly I didn't pass out until I quit color guard, but that's not important. The band was selected to march in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is in New York City, of course. We all got to go see multiple landmarks, the Empire State Building being one of them, where the most memorable fact that I learned was not the number of floors, or how long it took to build, but that if you throw a penny off the top and it hits a person in the head on the ground, it will kill them. Then the next day, I woke up at three a.m. to trudge through ice and snow with a giant freezing cold metal pole, get trampled by a fat trumpeter, and fall on some spectators during our big performance. But I still caught my flag from the toss after I got up! 

Ambiguity

Listening to On the Wing by Owl City. I cannot tell a lie; I love this guy. (That rhymed!) Seriously, though. He's a veritable vat of awesome-sauce.
A-pondering the fact that I DON'T HAVE STATS TODAY! Rejoice with me, people. 
    What's this??! Sarah's doing another post this week?? I know, the world is in a state of shock. It's madness. I just had the share this little story that happened on Tuesday. I just find it so amusing.
    So I was in American History class, sitting in my normal seat in the back of the room. It was the middle of class, and I was taking notes like a good little student. (Stop laughing, those of you who know me personally.) My professor was lecturing about the New Deal, and the super tall black guy who sits on my right leaned over and asked, "What's your ethnicity?"
    Now, this is not the first time Super Tall Dude has spoken to me. He randomly comments on stuff at least once a week, but the question caught me off-guard. I thought I heard, "What's your last name?" But I knew that couldn't be it, because he doesn't even know my first name, so why would he need to know my last name? So I said, "Huh?"
    "Your ethnicity," he repeated. "What's your ethnicity?"
    I was still kind of dumbfounded by his question, so I stuttered a bit, but managed: "Part German, and part Native American? A little Irish?"
    Keep in mind, this is all mid-lecture. During class. When the only other person talking is my professor. How he didn't ask us to leave, I have no idea. Super Tall Dude said, "I've been trying to figure it out all semester; you're so racially ambiguous!"

How is this racially ambiguous? ha ha

    I must have had a weird look on my face because he went on, explaining himself, "You have this dark undertone to your skin, so I thought maybe you were mixed or something." That made me laugh. Not because it's weird, but because I've been asked that before.
    I mean, in the summer, I actually get asked questions like this a lot: If I'm mixed, or Hispanic, or why on earth I'm so dark. But I've long lost my summer tan, so it was totally unexpected. Especially in the middle of a lecture in class. How bizarre is that?