Remembering Boredom

I am stressed. out.

I just took a midterm tonight, finished the first part of a group project over the weekend, and have 3 more projects in my lap. I have class 3 nights a week, an online class, church obligations, and sorority paperwork.

A year ago, I came home every night unless I had social plans. I'd get to make dinner and watch TV. I was really bored and felt directionless.

While I'm glad to be learning new skills and to have some direction, it's hard to remember what was so bad about not having stuff I had to do at night.

I wish my pride could handle being a law firm support staffer in the long term. I could work 35 hour weeks, have great pay and benefits, and spend my paycheck on travel and designer shoes. Sadly, I do want a career of some sort. Le sigh.

At least as a student I get spring break - 8 days until take-off!

A Researcher's Dream

First, apologies for not posting this past week.  I was sick, busy, and caught up in everything going on in the news.  Can't.  Look.  Away.

Anyway, more on that later.  For now, I can't not share this tidbit that everyone probably already knows about already, but I've just discovered it and am way more excited than I should be.  On NYTimes.com, you can find articles from the early parts of the 20th century.  Perhaps even earlier, I don't know.  Many of them cost money, but some are free, such as this one from 1914, with the headline FASHIONS FOR SUMMER FROCKS HARK BACK TO 1870; Styles One May Buy in Paris at Small Prices --More Plaids Than Roman Stripes in Fashion Centre.

This may prove infinitely useful as I work on my research paper about Madame Grés for my online class.  The daughter of a librarian, I've been around microfilm and whatnot my entire life, but I never did master the art of researching the old fashioned way.  Putting everything online, even if they are pdf's, makes life so much easier.  As for how you find these wonderful windows to the past, if you search a word it will give you every article they have with that word, I believe... including articles from 1914. :)

ETA: They have articles as early as 1851, which I believe is their entire collection.  You can narrow down to search for only recent articles, though. 

The Right Choice

When I was in 7th grade, there were two boys named Matt in my class (the advanced class - we were all nerds). One was tall and skinny. He was my 'boyfriend'. The other was shorter, stockier, and wore glasses with transition lenses. This second Matt was a really nice guy. He wasn't particularly anti-social, but many times if there was downtime in class, he wouldn't jump into a bunch of conversations with his friends like everyone else was doing. He'd sit back and observe. I supposed I was also observant then as I noticed this and asked what he was doing.
"Sometimes I just like to sit back and watch people."
At the time it seemed a little creepy, but since I liked just about anything that was outside the norm, I also found it kind of cool. I started to imitate, probably lacking the actual thought process to fully analyze at that point. But then it became a habit, and I became curious by various cliques and social tendencies. In high school, I was curious where exactly my group of friends fit, and in college I was quick to observe the differences between a New Yorker's attitude and the attitudes of those from the Midwest.

Being a huge math nerd, I have an eye for patterns, trends. I'm only one week in, but this skill I've developed is precisely what working in fashion is all about. Taking note, anticipating, etc. It's a big math and numbers game, which will probably give me a slight academic advantage over most of my classmates, drawn to fashion for the artistic side. The one exception would be that girl who used to be an investment banker.
The rest of it is getting inside the mind of the every day consumer. Not insisting on your own taste, but recognizing the mainstream taste or the specific taste for your market. This is the same sort of thing needed in entertainment, but people actually pay attention in fashion.

Yes, this was the right choice for me. This will be good.

Oriented

Today I left work early in order to attend my orientation for fashion school. Since the bookstore is only open until 6:00pm or early on weekdays and closed on weekends, today was the only day for me to pick up my books. So, I rushed out of work, caught the train, and coolly and calmly walked up to my school for the first time. The thing about fashion school is that everyone thinks they know about clothes and fashion and most of them do. My style is much more classic than that of those I passed. It's also more, ahem, work appropriate. After picking up my books, I passed a girl who looked like she stepped out of a Madonna music video circa Holiday complete with a mini jean skirt, teased hair, and many thin bangle bracelets.

Suddenly feeling old/out of place/from the wrong decade, I tried to find the seminar rooms. Luckily it only required talking to 2 different security guys. The orientation sessions were broken down based on program, which means I was with other night and weekend fashion merchandising management majors who already have a bachelor's degree. Those 10 other women and one dude seemed much more like me than some of the students I had passed on the street. More conservatively dressed, varied interests, born prior to 1990... One even has a kid! Hopefully I'll have classes with a few of them.

Then of course, one of the professors at my orientation advised that we don't buy our books prior to our first class, but half the books I purchased were listed on the syllabus for one class, and well, the other 2 look interesting at least!

Added bonus - I got my id card after orientation, and there was no line! Sweet.

Back to School!

Okay, confession time - I'm a nerd. Like, a huge nerd. When I was in kindergarten, I was jealous of my brother in 2nd grade because he got homework. I wanted homework! Before 6th grade, I remember using the map of the school to plan my route during passing period. To be fair, my middle school was 3 stories high and our passing periods were 4 minutes long. However, I also did the same before my freshman year in high school...and did what I could before freshman year in undergrad as well.

I will be starting school in 10 days, and while I don't have to worry about passing periods as I only have once class per night, I have planned for just about everything else. I've even poked around the site I'll use for my online course. I'm confident I'll be able to find the classrooms for my regular class as the buildings are identified by letters (A, B, C, and D). However, I was worried about where to go for my orientation, which is next Tuesday. I've known the date and time for weeks now but not the location. You can imagine how awkward and nervous I was getting until yesterday when I received a letter in the mail with all of the room locations for all of the program orientations. Most seemed to be in classrooms, a few in the amphitheatre, one in the faculty dining room. Mine was toward the bottom of the second page. SR 8. SR8??? I scrambled for the campus map online. Nope, no building S or SR. We're new students; how is this supposed to help? Sure, maybe there will be people there to direct me that day, but I'm going after work. I don't have an extra 20 minutes to get lost.

So today I called 3 different people at the school. Yes, I'm going to be that girl. First I needed to dispute a charge on my bill (why something called 'student refund' is a charge to me, the student, is beyond all reasonable logic). Then I needed to figure out how to get into my email which hasn't worked for weeks now. After that, I discover an email from an administrative assistant regarding mail to me that had been returned to them, and that I needed to reply by today. So, I quickly called her to straighten out the mail situation and afterwards slyly asked her, 'um, do you know where the SR rooms are'? And the mystery was solved - they're in the basement. 'SR' stands for 'Seminar Room'. Crisis averted.