It has been three weeks since I have posted, but it really feels like an eternity. I am really enjoying my time here. Sometimes, I want to shoot myself because the work is so monotonous and I have crazy 13 hour shifts (This next week I have one day off but work 57 hours). I am learning a great deal about human nature and myself actually. Even when I want to slap a guest over the head and say they are an idiot, I have to force a smile and try to reconciliate the problem. That takes a lot. Some days you plead for an evacuation or a storm so that the ride will be shut down for a while. It is kinda like a recharge of your system when that happens.

I miss everyone. I have good friends here and I REALLY enjoy spending my time with them. However, I miss the people I am close to. The ones who I experienced life with. I could name the people, but you definitely know who you are. It is actually quite interesting. I accidentally erased all my contacts. At first I was really upset, but then, I noticed that the people who texted me were the people I should have in my contacts. A couple of the people I did not have the numbers for so I had to ask certain peeps for the numbers, but still...it says something about who I mean a lot to. It was just an interesting experiement.

Here is a shoutout to Noelle. I have been really confused about what to do with my life. You know, it was CCM all the way. I saw that God had put a finger in my life and just how it all worked out was kinda crazy. However, since being here I have been thinking WHY go to graduate school when Disney kinda likes my musicality and there is SO much opportunity here. I have been for about two weeks torn up inside about everything. I have to tell CCM and the government by June 1 what I am doing... so it has been even more intense. However, I changed my status today and Noelle texted me. She gave me some of the best advice I have heard (of course, she always does):

"I think of me in a mid life crisis...what would I be glad I had done vs had not done? I know as much education would be the best thing I could have done."
"True. So true. And why give up seventeen years for a job? I mean it would be great but I still need to try for my goal."
"Exactly. And you HAVE worked SO hard why say no now? Facing more hard work is scary... [...]It is normal to feel that way!"

For some reason, this is exactly what I needed to hear. It was the way she said it I think. I am just going to have to go forward with faith and hope that I am making the right decision. There will always be time for a job, but there may not always be time for graduate school.

How's the weather up there?

This past week has been really relaxing. I love the times where I don't have to do anything. I spend time with Chris, Moe and other friends and just relax. So nice!! I will miss them all. At least I don't have to sleep on Steven's couch now. No, it was fun. It is sad I will not be eating my Ceasar Salads anymore from Flemmings....

My family at dinner after my recital.

Chris and me at the Zoo with the baby and mama elephant.
The Fantastic Mr. Fox Party.
Fab girls in the Red Brick Mansion.

So, I think you all should hear about my airplanes...

Utah to Denver:

It was alright, nothing too out of the ordinary. I was kinda worried because I was C42 on SW, but Fred made it into the overhead easily, thankfully. So, we are going to land and the pilot says that there will be some turbulence. When isn't there? Well, this is the worst turbulence I have ever been in. We free fell for a couple hundred feet. It was enough of a drop to make people scream. While we were falling, we were thrown to the right really hard. It looked liked the people in the Disneyland Sing-along song video when they ride Star Tours (if you have seen it, you know what I mean). After it was over, the captain apologized for it. Nice thought. It was fun, pretty intense but cool.

Denver to Orlando:

I bored the airplane not really focusing because I just want to land. I overhear some people talking and, as custom, I start dropping some eaves. Then I hear a lady say, "I hope Seattle is not as rainy as everyone says it is." I press the call button (the first time I have EVER pressed it). To the flight attendant "Where is this flight going?" "It is going to Seattle then to San Francisco." "I am on the WRONG flight?!" I instantly get off the airplane. I boarded the wrong plane. Now what is wrong with this scenario? When I was waiting in line, they did the random people check. They checked my I.D. and an old lady standing next to me with a walker. We are probably the two least dangerous people on the face of the planet. Secondly, how did my ticket go through? All this stuff about security and things, BOGUS. I cheated the system, somehow...kinda like how when in the corn maze, I ended up outside of the maze no longer in corn... don't know how that happens.

So I wait around for my flight to Orlando. Normal flight. Going to be four hours. We will land at 7:30P Boring, played lot's of word games in a book I stole from Chris...(sorry I will buy you a new one). Then the captain comes on and says that there are a lot of storm systems over Orlando and torndaos in the nearby area so we are going to hold in the air. If it comes to it, we will have to land in West Palms or Ft. Lauderdale. Okay... why does this always happen to me. Because we would descend at any time, we all needed to be in our "descending" positions. Seats upright, tables up, electronics up. Also, the captain says, "Parents, if you have children who get frightened easily, you might want to close the window because there will be a lot of lightning and the lazer show might scare several people." Okay... that is not something we want to hear. Since it is going to Orlando, you hear lot's of windows being shut. An hour rolls by. Captain comes on again. Control says that in about twenty minutes we will be able to land if the storms move because there is a 25 mile gap coming up in the systems. So hang on tight and we will land soon, but we still might have to land somewhere else if we can't make it in time. Forty minutes later, "We have been cleared to land." A flight attendant stands up to go back to her seat in the front and make sure everything is alright. Halfway down the isle, the captain comes on, "Brace yourself." Just then, you see the flight attendant go flying forward and the lights go out. The airplane starts shaking like nothing I have experienced and people start screaming. All of a sudden you hear this loud crashes and I realize that the overhead compartments have been jolted open because of all the turbulence. We finally get through the storm and the captain comes on and apologizes for what happened. You'll never guess...we flew through a system of TORNADOS!!! The result reminded me of the Twilight Zone where the man thinks there is something on the wing mixed with the Day After Tomorrow. So, we land smoothly. Evereyone starts clapping and shouting hooray. Reminder, we have been "entertainmentless" for a LONG time. My back was hurting...It is now 9:30P. We start taxing and then stop. Captain comes on again, "Because so many planes were not able to take off, there is no spot for us at the tarmack (sp?) so we are going to have to wait out. 10:00P we finally make it to the gate. I go to my MEARS shuttle. I wait until 11:00P to be picked up by the shuttle. Meanwhile, people have come after me and purchased last minute tickets and leave before me. Whatevs. I get on the shuttle full of 9 people and I am the last stop. 12:00A comes by and I am at the hotel. I have to wake up at 6:00A to go to Vista Way Apartments.

WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME AND FLYING!!!!!!!!!

Today, April 26, 2010

I met some really cool peeps and have hit it off which is great. I have been kind of worried because I was leaving the comfort of Provo and my close friends. It has been a blessing I have been laughing all day. I still don't know where I am working. I am living in a nice apartment with four guys and I have a roommate (which I havent had in three years...) so that is kinda new to me, but they are all cool and all from BYU (is that good or bad? We'll see). Nothing really exciting happened today other than going to Wal-mart and passing Publix and remembering all the free cookies I got from there! Orlando is all about green and so the Wal-mart every couple of minutes will dim the lights. This old lady came up to me and asked if she was going blind because the lights got dark. How cute??

Tomorrow is the day I find out where I am working, but I don't start work until Wednesday. At least I will have one more day to just relax.

Want to know the thing that I forgot?? Towels... I even went to Wal-mart but I told myself, I brought both my towels...nope.

Love peace and oranges!

Blakester

My brain hurts...

So I was reading a peer-reviewed article about Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and was trying to translate what this particular sentence means!!!

Premised on moments of duplication, proliferation, and inadvertent compulsion, Stevenson's account problematizes any putative control of meaning by deconstructing intentionality even as he warily asserts it.

I just thought you might get a kick out of it!

The Allen Family

My family is very interesting. If you were to meet us all at the same time, you would either run away screaming or die from laughing so hard. My mom is probably the best example!! She gave me a lot of genes including the I am kind a nut case sometimes. She walks into a bathroom, comes out and does not remember which way to go. She comes into my apartment to fetch me and then proceeds to walk down the hallway in the opposite direction of the door (which she is standing at) and thinks she is leaving... Okay okay I know I am harsh, but this picture at BYU really reminded me of a story.

We are all sitting around playing a game (probably Scategories or Cranium...something involving pencils and paper). My mom glazes over. We all proceed to look at her... she slowly moves the pencil closer and closer to her eye. The whole time we are thinking, "what is she doing?!" Then all of a sudden, my mom let's out a OW...kinda like when the woman falls off the grape smashing thing on youtube. "Ow, oh oh oh...my eye!" Yes folks, you got it. My mother poked herself in the eye with her own pencil...

Your new graduate student

CCM!

Graduate Schools

So I got into San Francisco Conservatory into Jodi Levitz studio. I just think it is funny after the whole sh-bang and the lesson etc. It is still pretty cool though.

Money wise, I am not really that happy about what I got. With the scholarship and the government loans, it wouldn't even pay for tuition. At least I got something right?? Now I just have to think if this school is really worth all the money that it costs, $39,000 a year (ahem). We shall see.

I heard back from Mannes, remember, the school that I really wanted to go to but had such an awful experience (aka faculty not being there and people being hoyty toyti to not just me but Chris as well).... I was not accepted. I am not really that surprised, but it still hurt a little. Hopefully I hear back from CCM soon. I did call them today though and the Admissions Office says that Cathy Carroll has not said anything about graduate students. I have a friend who applied and got rejected so at least this a positive sign? I hope so. Dr. Biggs says that usually the No's hear first. Haven't heard no...

2 down, 1 to go.

the gravel IS the place for me

So, this past weekend I have been working on two presentations. Of course, with me, I over work things and so I spent 40 hours in three days working on these projects. Saturday, I worked from 8a to 2a with a three hour break to see Blood Wedding at BYU. Anyway, I learned a lot about Joan Tower, Ruth Crawford-Seeger and Virginia Woolf. When I was choosing a reading example from A Room of One's Own for my Masterpieces of English Literature class presentation, I really admired what she is saying in this work. At first, I was kinda upset that the selection we were assigned to read came from a series of essays based on lectures, but then I realized that though it is not Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse it is still a masterpiece. The things she says are just so profound and deep. :) This is why I am not afraid of Virginia Woolf. I also had to incorporate the movie The Hours into the presentation. This is just a remarkable movie with an astounding message. I am showing the beginning where Woolf kills herself, which, btw I learned, is actually how she killed herself by putting stones in her pocket and walking into the river, and the letter she writes in the clip is exactly what she wrote to her husband Leonard. Such a profound movie about decisions and life itself. With a life full of death, sexual abuse and mental instability, Virginia Woolf was able to write some pretty amazing things. Here is the section I chose from A Room of One's Own. It is long, but it is great:

“It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulations of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; that was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me. Such thoughts were the work of a moment. As I regained the path the arms of the Beadle sank, his face assumed its usual repose, and though turf is better walking than gravel, no very great harm was done [….]

“Strolling through those colleges past those ancient halls of roughness of the present seemed smoothed away; the body seemed contained in a miraculous glass cabinet through which no sound could penetrate, and the mind, freed from any contact with facts (unless one trespassed on the turf again), was at liberty to settle down upon whatever meditation was in harmony with the moment. As chance would have it, some stray memory of some old essay about revisiting Oxbridge in the long vacation brought Charles Lamb to mind—Saint Chares, said Thackeray, putting a letter of Lamb’s to his forehead. Indeed, among all the dead (I give you my thoughts as they came to me), Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, Tell me then how you wrote your essays? For his essay are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, the lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which eaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry. Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay—the name escapes me—about the manuscript of one of Milton’s poems which he saw here. It was Lycidas perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in Lycidas could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege. This led me to remember what I could of Lycidas and to amuse myself with guessing which word it could have been that Milton had altered, and why. It then occurred to me that the very manuscript itself which Lamb had looked at was only a few hundred yards away, so that one could follow Lamb’s footsteps across the quadrangle to that famous library where the treasure is kept. Moreover, I recollected, as I put this plan into execution, it is in this famous library that the manuscript of Thackeray's Esmond is also preserved. The critics often say with its imitation of the eighteenth-century style was natural to Thackeray—a fact that one might prove by looking at the manuscript and seeing whether the alterations were for the benefit of the style or of the sense. But then one would have to decide what is style and what is meaning, a question which—but here I was actually at the door which leads into the Library itself. I must have opened it, for instantly there issued, like a guardian angel barring the way with a flutter of black gown instead of white wings, a deprecating, silvery, kindly gentleman, who regretted in a low voice as he waved me back that ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction.

"That a famous library has been cursed by a woman is a matter of complete indifference to a famous library. Venerable and calm, with all its treasures safe locked within its breast, it sleeps complacently and will, so far as I am concerned, so sleep for ever. Never will I wake those echoes, never will I ask for that hospitality again, I vowed as I descended the steps in anger. Still an hour remained before luncheon, and what was one to do? Stroll on the meadows? sit by the river? […]”

Tata for now. Go see the movie The Hours. It is so great.

"To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."