Off To The Gateway City

I'm going to St. Louis tomorrow!

This will be my third time flying on an airplane (in just over a year -- lucky me!) and I am so excited to visit another state! I always talk about how much I want to travel around the country/world, and I'm finally getting the chance to do that now.

I'm definitely going to visit this big famous thing.

Apparently, this used to be a huge sculpture of the McDonald's golden arches but one fell down or something. But I'm still excited to see the other one.

And I am SO excited to visit the zoo!

I've only been to one zoo before and I love seeing animals. This zoo has lots of monkeys, naked mole rats, zebra, rhinos, giraffes, owls, puffins, snails, and even a tiger and an elephant!

Although I'm excited to travel in general, I'm also excited about the real reason I'm going. I'm actually going to a conference to present a paper I wrote about the 'cruel spring' motif and it's correlation to corruption of motherhood in Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye.

I presented at the same conference last year and it was fun. At the conference, you read your paper to the audience and then they grill you. Some peepz are terrified of the grilling part but I actually like it. They say stuff like, "Why is your paper so terrible?" and "Did you do any research before forming those unfounded arguments?" and you cry and say that your professor gave you an A on the paper and run out of the room in tears. FUN!

So I'll be in St. Louis for the rest of the week and won't be online very often. I hope you all miss me!

I: The Way My Story Goes

I love photographs. Anyone who was my friend in high school knows that as soon as I got my first digital camera, I started taking approx. 3 billion pictures a day. Unfortunately, someone broke my camera and wouldn't admit it, and I never got a new one. (Which is probably good, as it reduced the number of terrible pictures existing in the world by about 3 billion a day...)

So anyway, even more than taking photographs of myself my friends, I love looking at old photographs. From the big box of photographs in my mom's closet, I pulled out some of my favorites to share with the world. Since I found so many, I'm going to do two entries: one with photos of my great-grandparents, grandparents and parents, and one with me and my siblings.

Great-Grandparents

Unfortunately, I only found one photo of my family from three generations back, and it's only of my great-grandfather (sorry great-grandmother!)

This is actually the first and only photo I've seen of my great-grandfather. I asked my mother who was in the photo so I could do this blog entry and she told me who it was. This reminds me that after you die, only a few generations go by before someone in your family can look at a photo of you and not know who you are.

Anyway, here are lots of photos of my grandparents!

Grandparents

Here is a photograph of both of my grandparents.

What a cute couple! Although I don't know too much about their early lives together, there are many pictures of them in front of this house/apt, so I assume they lived here once.

Look! My grandma is playing the cello!

My mom says that this is more of a posed shot than a candid, but I pretend granny loved playing the cello and this somehow influenced me. Whether she really played cello or not, my grandfather's music genes must have been transferred to me! He played guitar (for real).

He was a really good guitar player and I remember seeing him when I was young and he would often play guitar and sing. He even was a famous celebrity played at a radio station.

Guess I'm not the first person in my family to strive for fame....

My favorite picture of my grandfather actually shows him holding a guitar:

When he wasn't playing guitar, he was fighting in wars.

There is a HUGE photo on my living room wall of my grandfather and his five brothers, all in uniform. They went to various wars and all came back safely.

While my grandfather was fighting in wars, my grandmother was getting ready to set sail on the Titanic.

Just kidding. (How awesome would it be to have a photo of my grandmother standing next to the Titanic?)

Well, eventually they started having kids. Here's a photo of my grandparents with one of my aunts.

And here is another, similar photo, except this one features Eric Mabius on the left (?!)

So before we move onto my parents, here is my favorite pictures of my grandparents.


Parents

One day, my mom was born.

Then she went to school (feat. her teacher, Ms. Hernandez)

When I saw this photo for the first time, I pointed out how there was only one black girl in the whole class. And my mom said, "That was my best friend!" Good job embracing all cultures Mom!

Here is my mom's senior picture.

I guess she didn't pass the "taking good senior portraits" gene on to me......

Here's another high school pic. She's about to go to a dance with some dude who apparently became my uncle or something?! Confusing.

The box of photographs I found mostly were very old so there aren't many pics of my parents. Luckily, the small number of pictures is made up with the sheer awesomeness of the one photo I did find, which shows my father is a most glamourous light.

Look at those short-shorts and that modelesque head-tilt! How glam.

So after many years of giving birth to a bunch of brats, my mother finally hit the jackpot and gave birth to me. Here I am during my baptism, being held by my godparents Aunt Susie and Uncle Jimmy.

PART II FORTHCOMING

12 of 12 - March 2010

Thanks to the wonderful dpaste, I remembered to do a 12 of 12 for today!

So my day started with a push pin and a very close call.

I woke up around 9am when I felt this push pin pressing into my flesh! It was digging into my skin, kind of where Barbie's leg pops into her torso... Yeah, if it was a few centimeters over, I might be unable to have kids or something!!!!!

So hopefully there are no more surprise push pins in my covers.

After I survived that, I drove to Claudia's. It was raining.

We hung out all day!! I tried Arizona Cranberry Tea for the first time.

I played "The Chain" by Ingrid Michaelson on piano.

Then we looked at our middle school yearbooks (hilarious!)

While she did random things in my room, I unpacked my books from my first few years at college that were still in boxes. I have NO ROOM on my bookshelf.

Eventually, my sister Gabi picked us up and we went to Olive Garden.

Gabi wanted to see some Robert Pattinson movie because the Eclipse trailer was premiering during the previews. So we went to the movies. I completely forgot about R-Patz as soon as I saw this glorious poster of a movie I will be seeing later this month!

The R-Patz movie was decent. I'm upset that I saw the ending coming since it was supposed to be surprising. Boo.

So then I came home and wanted to get in the shower. But my brother was in there.

Instead of taking a pic of my brother in the shower, I got a shot of his glasses waiting to return to his clean head.

So then I took my 304th Daily Mugshot.

And I realized I only had 10 pics and needed two more.....

Hmm....

OH YEAH! GUESS WHAT!!!!!

I got a ticket last night to see my favorite singer in concert! OMG SO EXCITED!!!!!

I LOVE LEONA NAESS!!!!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

Chatroulette = Fun

Have you all been on Chatroulette yet? It's basically the most fascinating site ever and it's currently getting a lot of attention.

If you've been living under a rock or are over the hill and don't pay attention to hip modern things, the site is a way to video chat with strangers all over the world! You turn on your webcam, hit go, and are hooked up to someone around the world who is also signed into the site.

Christie and I have been on Chatroulette for the past few weeks and we've seen so many interesting things and met some cool people.

We've met people from foreign countries like Brazil, France, Australia, Venezuela, England, Turkey, Indiana and many from the UK.

Our first day on we met this dude and his girlfriend.

They were swingers (or so they said). Do you love my disguise??

We also met this dude, who said he was trying to get into a frat and needed to see Christie's boobs in order to pledge.

Yeah, sure.

We met this dude, who started the convo by playing us a song.

He played Miley Cyrus' "Party in the USA" on a trumpet! We were so impressed. Then he asked for boobs.

These guys didn't want boobs. Just a kiss.

We met this kid who was totally not lying when he said he was 18.

And we even met this one girl who I kept calling Miley Cyrus, asking her about her album, her boyfriend, and her latest movies.

So anyway, I start a lot of my convos with "Are you famous?" because obviously I want to meet someone famous and Chatroulette seems like an easy way to do that! If they aren't famous, I pretend they are (see above example). So last night, we talked to the coolest person we ever met on CR...

While I was on with Ross and Christie and we bumped into Snoop Dogg. Some jealous people (i.e. Cindy!) pretend that this was a wannabe Snoop, but I know it was him! Lots of celebrities use Chatroulette so there's no reason why Snoop wouldn't use it! And it wasn't just a picture or a Snoop music video. He moved around, smoked marijuana (!), and even blew smoke into the camera.

After chatting for prox. a minute, the camera froze (Chatroulette often has server problems since it just exploded in popularity) and we were disconnected. But our memories (and screenshots) will last forever!

So have you been on yet? If not, do it! I swear, it's fun.