Hello, Wisconsin!

Spring! The birds are chirping, the flowers are blooming, I am procrastinating, and Midwesterners are getting married. This weekend I journeyed in a rented Prius to my mom's old stomping grounds  to celebrate the wedded bliss of two very nice people who I had never met before. Beautiful wedding, though! You haven't heard the Song of Songs 'til you've heard it read with a Minnesota accent. Due to my heathen-y, unbaptized state, I had to awkwardly stay seated during the Communion part of the ceremony, but better that than be smited by a vengeful God, I say. And I got to cross another state off my list. Since moving to the Midwest I have now visited for the first time Indiana, Missouri, and Wisconsin, and I am soon to see the Bluegrass State. That's right, I am going CAMPING this weekend in Kentucky. Anyone who knows me well, or indeed has talked to me for about five minutes, knows that camping is not my go-to form of recreation. In fact, as a child, my family would force me to go hiking, and my mother bribed me with M&Ms so that I would keep on putting one tiny, weary foot in front of the other. However! I am going with very fun people, and I am optimistic that this will be a good time. We can always drink, right?

I am pretty much the last person in GSLIS to be still working on a paper. Yes, blogging is my way of doing work. Here is my 100% accurate log of paper-writing:

7:45 AM  Up and at them! Let's work on that paper, eh? Then I can have fun tonight.

8:00 Can't do anything without coffee. I'll make instant to save time.

8:30 AM Oh, man, I forgot about my laundry. Folding time! Folding timmme, every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end...

9:00 AM Hmm, maybe I will work better at the public library. I'll just walk on over.

9:30 AM Ooh, look, the library has the new US Weekly! That Jon & Kate scandal--I just can't resist.

10:00 AM Ok, paper. Hey, my paper is about Facebook, so I should probably do some research by stalking people I went to high school with.

10:30 AM Hey, my paper is about Twitter, so I should probably do some research by stalking current grad school friends.

11:00 AM Why do so many celebrities Twitter? I will read some celebrity gossip and get to the bottom of this.

11:30 AM I haven't blogged in a while! Got to say what's up to the adoring public.

And so on. Amazingly, I have 8 of 10 pages done. That is all that stands between me and being 60% done with library school!! 

Sympathy cards are a subject rife for satire

Ok, I am finally feeling blogspired:

A lot of people ride motorcycles here....it's weird. There was an article in the Daily Illini about it today--hard-hitting, as per usual ("I love my motorcycle!") I think there is a whole biker bar here called the Ice House. Should I go? This poll is pointless. Of course I will go.

For a moment, I thought that the bookstore sold Illini-themed sympathy cards, but the reality is even more hilarious. They sell these cards that say "Sorry for your loss..." in muted orange and blue with sad looking flowers on the front. Then you open it up and it's a big cartoon of a scoreboard with Illinois winning and your team losing and it's like "BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME! GO ILLINOIS!" Haha, sucker! You thought a loved one died! Really your football team lost. I am going to send this to everyone. They have non-ironic Illini-themed anniversary cards though. Seriously. It's like Happy Anniversary... Go Illini.

So I recognized this prominent dude on Champaign's Yelp at the grad mixer yesterday. (By the way...the grad mixer...the dorks are NOT in the library science program. I said it.) I kind of wanted to call him out and be like, how do you have 423 friends on Yelp? I didn't even know that 423 people were ON Yelp. Instead I just creepily stared at him and then ran away. Mixin'! Also some people hated on GSLIS and library science in general and I almost pulled the "Oh, is YOUR program the number one in the country? It's not? That must be so different from my experience, then!" But then I didn't. Suckers, I totally thought it and then blogged it though.

Pip loves me now. He hasn't bitten me in over a week. He is nuzzling at my feet RIGHT AS I TYPE.

I love to videochat, so if you have those capabilities, get on that!

I missed a wedding back in Maine this weekend that apparently had a catapult that shot pinatas. I have sacrificed a lot to come here.

Back in the 1950s, people studied aerial photos as a hobby! I learned this from my job, which this week involves a lot of looking at aerial photos. Here's a fun self-test to see if you would be a good aerial photograph spy (which I imagine is what these were for--straight-up espionage). What is this? Be specific in your answer.


Stumped? Why, it's your neighborhood, silly! See how different things look from the air?

I am an elegant prose stylist. I need to figure out how to put up MP3s so I can blog about the Chambana music scene...get ready!