antimony

I had a big performance last night. I danced at a big dance show at a theater at Washington University (not at a bellydance-community event, but at an event where there were dancers from all over the city, and people payed $20/ticket to see the show! Our school danced to two songs, the first was more traditionally bellydance, and the 2nd was to a song that was a cross between arabic and afro-cuban styles of music, and the dancing was a blend as well. It's super-cute. I was in the traditional piece. There were 5 of us dancing with veils, and we formed a semicircle type shape around 3 dancers with swords. I was the center veil dancer, which was most cool. As a completely unrelated aside, the ballet dancers wear the ugliest crap backstage... baggy sweatpant overalls, grungy insulated socks... oh those poor things, too skinny to keep themselves warm. Also some of them were grumbling about how the cosumes we and the Indian dancers were wearing were a lot cooler than theirs. I would be grumbling too if the skirt of my dress was cut to look like mis-proportioned flower petals. Anyway, so right up until like an hour before the show, the veil dancers are still going over stuff. At rehersal yesterday afternoon, my veil shrink wrapped itself to my face while I was dancing. We were all anticipating a disaster. But when we got on stage, it went off without a hitch. Our teachers take on it was, "Have you guys been shitting me for the last 3 weeks? Did you guys just know it all along and mess up in practice just to freak me out?" I twas awesome. The audience was clapping along with our music, it was great. I learned a lesson from it too: We thought we were unprepared, but we had practiced hard, and when it came time to do it, adrenaline pulled us through. I think that's where I'm at with my exam: If I make a solid push of studying these last 10 days, and I consitently do well on my practice exams, then adrenalyn should help me pull through with enough of a margin to feel pretty confident about my score. Also, my micro roses are developing buds. I'm going to have real live roses that I grew all by myself on my balcony!

congratulations! I'm sure you'll do great in school! My college friends and I would have bad porn parties, too. I think the worst was called Red Heat, it was an 80's red-scare themed porno starring a balding guy with a painted-on birthmark a la Gorbachev.

Congratulations, I am seriously happy for you guys! And I agree with Valentina, that is a hilariously adorable picture of you two!

I took my first practice half-exam today (18 questions in 2 hours). I was tired, had a headache, was forgetting shit right and left. And through all that, I still got 50% of the questions right. That pass mark on this test is usually about 60%, and about 30-40% of people who take each sitting pass. I have two weeks to go, and a lot of formulas to memorize, but it's in my grasp. The questions I got wrong, most of them I knew what needed to be done, but couldn't remember the formulas or the details. That's easy enough to brush up on in the next two weeks. I have a dance performance on Friday, that will involve about 4-5 hours sitting around back stage. I will be sitting around with my flash cards, and I think it will be a huge shot in the arm for me, since 4 hours of memorization will do me a lot of good. Breathe. I got my bottle of Baku earlier this week. I've been wearing it to bed every night to try to slow down my racing mind. When I track down my scotch tape, I'm going to move it to a roller ball, to keep by the bed. Still Breathing.

You just took the one that officially makes you a PE, right? I remember a lot of my ChemE classmates planning for that. Congratulations on getting through it! On the prperty and Casualty track (That I'm doing) there are 9 exams, and I'm taking the 4th. Even though there's a ton of them, and they're all crazy-hard, I love my career, so I keep reminding myself that it will totally be worth it when I'm done.

Me and my ginormous egg brain have settled into a peaceful coexistence. I mean, I don't think of it that way, I am much more likely to explain my success as coming from my single-minded stubbornness. But now that I am really out in the real world, I am realizing that my egg brain might be a little bigger than I give it credit for (I should thank my mom and dad for their good genes, and whatever the hell they did with me when I was a baby) It's funny, though... I went to college with a bunch of crazy-smart people. Then I worked for one of the big 4 consutling firms, and they only hire crazy smart people, and in both of those environments, I felt like I was very intelectually average. I'm starting to suspect that I had a bit of a skewed perspective. Not that my coworkers are dumb! Maybe they're just more well-rounded, and not so intelectually compulsive... I don't know...

Dude, I would *love* to see your house into home progress! I used to *love* watching This Old House as a kid (it kinda freaked my mom out. Well, that, and I would watch the GED on TV math classes - I loved those too) Anyway, I would be totally excited about seeing what you do with the place.

I have a good friend who has had a lot of trouble with her finances. My boyfriend has trashed his too. His stupid brother makes 6 figures, and is still so damn broke that he sometimes has to borrow money to pay for groceries at the end of the month. I am constantly frustrated with finding out just what my friends *don't* know about personal finance. I'm not talking about investing in stocks, etc. Just simple things, like how to maintain a little savings, manage their credit cards, shop for basic insurance, etc. I hate the fact that society somehow assumes you lear about money management at home, but the fact of the matter is that most people's parents aren't capable of giving the advice their kids need. Now that people get married when they're older, a lot of people have to figure out how to get their finances off to a good start when they're still single, while their parents may have already been married and living off two incomes at their age. Also, let's face it, the economy has changed a lot since most of our parents were 25. The number one piece of bad advice that too many of my friends have tried and failed at: "Make a detailed budget and stick to it." Ha! Only the most compulsive among us can actually make that work. That's not to say a budget isn't a valuable tool. I have one. I break costs down into general categories, and use it not to plan future spending, but instead to track retrospectively where my money goes. The simple fact is that purchases expand to use all available money. I get paid twice a month. So on the first of the month, I pay all of the bills due in the first half of the month, and on the 15th, I pay all the bills due in the 2nd half of the month. Also on the 1st and 15th, I have a set amount automatically transfered into my savings account. Personal Finance books call this "paying yourself first". After my savings is taken care of, I spend whatever is left however I want with no guilt. Anyway, it's true what they say. If you take it out at the beginning, you really don't miss it. When you're worried all month about coming in under budget, it's stressful. When you know you've already taken care of savings, money management is much more straightforward day-to-day. Even if you just put $25 out of each paycheck in the bank, in a year, you'll have $600 in the bank. And even though that doesn't sound like much, it represents a helpful financial cushion in case you have sudden expenses. If you can slowly increase the amount you put away, you come out even further ahead. As for a budget... At the end of every month, I download all of my transactions from my bank, pull it into excel, then sort them all out into categories: Rent/Food/Gas/Bellydance/Eating Out/Etc. Each month I sit down and go over them, and take stock of where my money is going. If I find that something is out of balance, I try to make practical changes. For example, if I see that I have been going overboard on eating out, I make that something to be conscious of in the following month. I don't aim to be compulsive about my spending, just conscious of it. I think that is most of my friends' biggest problem. They spend unconsciously. If they just asked themselves, "Will this item be worth as much benefit to me as the amount of time I have to spend working to make the money to pay for it?" - BPAL, a great vacation, etc are things that meet that criteria for me. More brightly-colored knicknacks from Target don't. Anyway, I'm done ranting now.

Sometimes, when I'm really wrapped up in studying and stuff, I get hit in the head with this incredibly intense melencholy. Out of nowhere, I suddenly get all sad about being so boring, so unsatified with my un-rock-star-ness. I get all nostalgic for nights spent up all night talking music and philosophy, ending up at a crepe shop for breakfast, our makeup all smeared, exhausted and intelectually sated. Or working the door at crazy shows. Or rolling at parties, being all talkative and one with the universe. I start getting this thought like I wish I had some musical talent, so then I could be in a band, then I'd *really* be a rock star. But I know tons of people in bands, and I know the whole rock star thing, doesn't really happen. And even when people give it a go, it's not really all that much fun. Well, then maybe I need a glamorous, exciting, interesting hobby. Then I smack myself upside the head. I have the single most beutiful belly dance dress ever made hanging in my closet as we speak, and I'll be dancing in it in a week and a half in front of a giant theater full of people. I *do* have a glamorous hobby. I guess I'm mostly just lamenting getting too old for those up-all-night talking music, art, and the nature of the universe things.

I tested as 50 on the female side. I did really well on the rearranged objects, and really poorly on the angles. My boyfriend took it and scored dead center. I get a kick out of these things, but since I'm in the habit of looking at everything through the lense of probablalistic distributions, so I can separate the concept of men and women having different probabalistic distributions of scores on certain tests, from the fact that I think it's stupid and jackass-y to make sweeping assuptions about individuals based on the overall population averages.

Oh man, I am so far into scary-brain territory, It's scary. Last night at dinner, I was so wrapped up in what I was studying, Rusty got treated to a long explanation of the purpose and execution of maximum likelihood parameter estimation. His response: "I recognized all of the individual words you used, but I don't really get what they mean when you put them all together like that." Poor guy, he puts up with some strange dinnertable conversation. Seriously, though, compared to actuaries, even *accountants* look like wild and crazy people. He came with me to St. Louis to follow my career. Though we also moved a few weeks apart, so no hand-holding on the airplane here either. I make more than he does, and since I don't see a 2nd tech boom on the horizon, I probably always will. Though our housekeeping often falls behind too, it's totally him that makes our house into a home.

I used to love baths when I lived in an apartment that had a huge beautiful clawfoot tub in it. Since then I've lived in places with stupid stubby bathtubs, and I'm totally uninterested in that kind of bath. I used to fill the bath with just slightly warmer than body temperature water, hook my arms over the side so I wouldn't drown, and take naps in the bath. As for spiders, I am quite frightened of them. The little grey house spiders don't freak me out too much, but anything more exotic than that? No way. I will be cowering, petrified in the complete opposite end of the apartment screaming to Rusty to take care of it. But I don't let him kill them since it's bad luck.

I watched "Say Anything" again tonight. (for like the 1000th time) I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that. I'm a brain. Unfortunately, *not* trapped in the body of a game show hostess. My boyfriend basically shares Lloyd's worldview. He's not into the whole buy/sell/process worldview. He doen't have a degree, and although he has a good job in computers, I don't think he's figured out what he wants to do when he grows up. Plenty of aquaintances have questioned what the hell the two of us are doing together. He makes me laugh. He's sweet to me. He's the kind of guy who would point out glass for me walk around. I spent about 11 or 12 hours studying today. He brought me a warm lunch, and warm dinner. He's been cleaning the apartment. He makes the whole house run while I focus on my studying. --- I was discussing relationships with other actuaries at a seminar a couple of weeks ago... And we all realized that of the sucessful corporate high-ups we knew, most of them did not have high-powered spouses. Even the female partners at the consulting firm I used to work for, their husbands were artists, caterers, one owned a fly-fishing shop... All good careers, but not corporate. And the men too, their wives didn't work, or also had similar non-corporate careers. I think there's a lot of value in having both people in the relationship working in fields with very different challenges and very different definitions of success. I think it makes it easier. You get stressed over different things, and not always at the same time, kind of makes it easier to be there for each other. That, and for people in very time-consuming or high-stress careers, I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting to be with someone who is more home-oriented than career oriented. I don't think it's a gender role thing, after all, I'm the one working all the time, and who spent the first couple of years as the primary income in our household. But, you know, *someone* needs to keep the home fires burning.

I'm PMS-ing. I have had a couple of little smudges in my panties today, but it really hasn't gotten started yet. I have a seriously bitchy headache. My skull feels brittle. I feel like the right side of my brain is swolen. I tried to study for a couple of hours then gave up. I'm drinking strawberry chocolate iced tea and waiting for the advil to kick in. This is my first summer using cloth pads, and I was a little afraid it would be hot to have flannel in my panties. I am pleasantly surprised. Yeah they're a little warm, but not *nearly* as hot as disposables. Also, forgive the TMI, but I am somewhat prone to getting a sweaty crotch... since the wings that wrap around are absorbant flannel as well, I don't get clammy around my upper thighs. Rusty is out at the Drinking Liberally social tonight. Honestly, I'm kinda glad he's out of the house. I like the alone time. I'm feeling cranky and antisocial. To feed my antisocialness, I'm watching Top Chef. Mmm. Snarky.

You can have John Kerouac... My favorite of the beats is Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I don't care that he's 87 years old, I would go out on a date with him tonight if I had the opportunity. "A Coney Island of the Mind" is my favorite book of poetry, in large part because he seemed to have more of a sense of humor than the other beats. And City Lights bookstore is one of the coolest places on the face of the planet, and anyone who loves books so much that he could create a place like that is a hot date in my book.

I want a pair!!!! Waaaaa!!!

I am not working in the field I got my degree in. I have a BE in Chemical engineering with a 2nd major in Math (It's not a "real" math major, because math was offered through the college of Arts and Sciences, so I did the "Math major for engineers" track which lets you apply a lot of your really math-intensive engineering classes towards the 2nd major, and take a handful of math electives to round it out.) Anyway, when I started applying for jobs my senior yer, I realized the dirty little secret of chemical engineering: The jobs pay so well because they *suck*. I made the decision that I didn't want to work on an oil rig, in a paper mill, or pretty much anywhere else in a hard hat. I had done lab research in the summers, but to continue doing that, I needed to go back for at least my masters, and preferably a PhD. I love chemistry, but wasn't passionate about it in the way you need to be to do a good PhD. By the time I graduated, I didn't have a job, and had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Well, that's not strictly true. I knew I wanted to move to San Francisco to be with my college sweetheart who had graduated a year before, but I had no idea how I was going to do it. My parents were spending a year in San Diego (my dad was on sabatical) so I moved down to San Diego with them. I hung out on the beach, worked for a temp agency and got a really great tan. I applied for jobs in finance and stuff, but I wasn't making any traction. I don't even remeber how the subject came up, but my parents, or one of their friends suggested I look into becoming an actuary. I did some online research, looked into what it took, and decided to give it a shot. After all, the job prospects were good, I had enough math to be able to do it, and it didn't involve wearing a hard hat. I quit my job as a temp, settled in at my parents' kitchen table, and for about a month and a half, made a full-time job of studying for the first two actuarial exams. After I took the two exams, I started applying for jobs. Two months later, the day results were in, I got a job offer from one of the big 5 consulting firms in San Francisco. I jumped at it, and moved up to SF 3 weeks later. So, the boyfriend and I broke up a year later, and the job eventually started to suck, but I learned a lot about both what I wanted to do and what I didn't want to do. When I finally couldn't take it anymore, I contacted a recruiter, and put myself on the market. The job I took here in St. Louis is exactly the perfect job I need for the place I am in my career right now. (And it's with one of the first 10 companies my recruiter gave my resume to) Anyway, the job in SF, though it was an awesome learning experience, and looks kick-ass on my resume... I often got home after 7 or 8. I didn't want to go to work in the mornings, and I was tired all the time. I liked my coworkers, but my bosses didn't like me, so the whole experience was really kinda soul-sucking. It was clearly the stepping stone I needed to get to where I am now, but I would never go back to that world. My friends in SF were all like, "St. Louis will be so boring compared to San Francisco!" But what I realized was that I was always to tired and unhappy to enjoy it. Now I have tons of free time, and really get to make the most of what St. Louis has to offer. I make enough to easily cover my expenses and put away some really solid savings. I am looking at buying a townhouse this year (which I could not have done in SF) and I came to the realization that if a consulting firm said to me, "we'll double your salary if you'll come back to consulting" I would say no. The quality of life I have now so far outweighs what the benefit would be of almost any amout of extra money. That's not to say I don't want to work to advance in my current field. I do. I know that by taking this job, I have put myself on a track where I won't get as high of a salary as quickly, but I'll always get my evenings and weekends to myself, and that's a *much* bigger benefit in my personal reckoning.

Actually, I used to run all over San francisco in 3+ inch heels. That said, spike-heels are super-impractical in the city. You have to be ever-vigilant for steam grates or anything else where you might put your foot down and suddenly have your heel sink 3 inches lower than you expected. In most cities, if you look around, there aren't actually that many women in stiletto's. Lots of crazy-high wedges, those heels that look like stilletos in profile but the heel is actually as wide as the shoe, curvy louis heels, etc. Or even just pretty pumps with more practical-ly shaped heels. It was funny, and my old roommates were the same way, even though we all owned some seriously spiky shoes, we each had 4-5 pretty but practical pairs that we actually *wore*. I would only wear the stilletos on evenings out where I would be taking cabs from place to place. Now that I live in St Louis where I drive everywhere, though, the sky is the limit. I wear the most impractical shoes even to work since I won't have to schlump to the bus stop in them.

I'm with you on the community. My LJ pretty much got abandoned after my first year out of college... but here, yeah, it's like a portal to talk to friends, not strangers. I'm sorry about your mother... My mom is probably getting both of her hips replaced next year, and it's hard for me to imagine my vibrant mother turned into an invalid. It's too much facing mortality for me. The thought of her dying... well, it's unthinkable. Finally, although I'm not to the point in my life where I feel old, or left behind, I get a similar "This WAS your life" feeling from going out with old friends when I visit my home town. Many of them never really left, life had totally gone on in my home town and I wasn't around to see it. At the same time, though, I've changed and grown and left it behind too. I think the only thing for it is to not think about it as getting old, but instead as personal evolution or something. I don't know. Anyway, welcome to the blog side

Welcome! Those sound awesome, and if you like fresh citrusy stuff (which it seems like you might) I absolutely adore Embalming Fluid, and would totally recommend you try it.

inkdark moon wrote: I was going to comment in response, but then my comment turned into a novel, and I decided to re-think my response and write it up here instead. I can say with absolute certainty that I am happy with my life now. I mean, in a moment-to-moment sense, I am frustrated with the exam process I have to complete for my career, and I'm busy and tired, but in an overall sense,. I'm happy. But, the thing is, it's the things that are causing all of that busy-ness that make me happy. I have, by grace or luck, stumbled into a career that I enjoy. And the whole exam thing means that every day, when I get up, I know I will spend anywhere from 4 to 8 hours that day, studying, learning new things and intellectually challenging myself. And studying it all on my own makes it way more rewarding than college ever was. The biggest misery in my life is to be bored. I hate it. Everything around me can be falling to pieces, but If I am setting goals and occationally achieving them, I'm happy. If I'm learning new things, and having to stretch my brain to do it, I'm happy. So I guess what I'm saying is that my own happiness is both an internal thing *and* the result of my interacting with the world. My happiness comes from knowing I can rise to a challenge. My goals and my challenges are different from everyone elses, and the things that are important to me aren't important to others... But I have found the things that I am passionate about, and the *path* I am taking to get there makes me happy. I've succeeded in the realm of my career to find a job that challenges me intelectually. And I have been lucky in my love life to find a guy who loves me so much, he gently holds me to my *own* standards instead of his. Seriously, that's love. He wants me to meet my own goals and grow in the direction I chose. It's a daily struggle for me, but I try to do the same for him. As for why there are so many depressed people... I think the modern world, for all of the supposed choices we have in every part of our lives, is actually very disempowering. We are all constantly overstimulated with exhausting trivia, and by the time we start looking inwards at what we want and need, we're too tired, and our heads are too full of marketing and other people's opinions. I'm not saying I'm above it. I'm there just as much as anyone, asking myself, "Is this what I want? What my parents want? What my friends think is best for me? What is "socially acceptable"? What I have been conditioned to believe someone of my social/financial/whatever station should do?" I think one lucky thing that happened to me was studying TaeKwon Do as a teenager. Right in the middle of those very formative years, I had a chance to learn a little about setting and achieving goals as I moved up the ranks. As I advanced, I was given more and more responsability, and, cliched as it sounds, I really did learn the satisfaction that comes from a job well done. I learned how good it felt to push myself so far beyond the limits I thought I had. I know I have more thoughts on the subject, but I'll leave it here for now.

Valentina: You're totally gorgeous! So you fit right in. Minilux: Lucky you, dating Christopher Walken... And that shirt is such an awesome color on you!

Oh my god, that's a bedroom with *potential*!!! And the hobbit hole is crazy-awesome.

Yeah, I am just blown away by it. I agree that the website makes it look all star-trek-y, but in real life, I think it just looks kind of modern and unusual. I love how the saphire looks like it's floating.

Today, for no particular occation, my boyfriend gave me: This Titanium Ring!!!!! It's not an engagement ring, we're not getting married until I finish my actuarial exams and he cleans up his credit. I had lost the stone from my old ring, and had jokingly told him he should get me a ring for my birthday. He told me he got this one for me just because he loves me. The center stone is white saphire, the two larger side stones are moisenite, and the 4 smaller side stones are rubies. I'll try to get pics tommorrow. I am totally twitterpatted.