New Year New Me!

So here it is: the standard New Year's post. 2012 was a really great year for me, full of transitions, opportunity, and positive change. I can only imagine what 2013 will have in store!

Big life events in 2012 (in no real order):

• First year not spent in school EVER
• First full year spent in Seattle since 2007
• Met Greg, started dating Greg
• Graduation ceremony with the class of 2012
• Got a big girl job in February - three subsequent raises within the next 4 months (Inkfarm)
• Got a better big girl job in December (Pure Home)
• Moved in with Greg in November
• Spent Christmas with Greg's family in Texas
• Went to my first burner community event, Critical Massive, in July
• Went skydiving in October
• Shot my first pistol/went to the shooting range for the first time in November
• Changed hair style four times - perm, shoulder cut, attempted (not) pixie, above-the-ears short
• Ran first 5K, St Patrick's Day run where everyone else except my mom did not wake up in time for
• Was a zombie/ran the zombie 5K 
• Started hooping
• Got a sweet ass LED hoop for Christmas
• Interned for six months at Seattle Met Magazine 
• Got my first tattoo in November
• Decided to apply for grad school at UW (I really need to finish that application...)
• Turned 22

Resolutions for 2013:

• Have a bitchin' bod for Burning Man barring burdensome bodily harm
• Practice hooping more - get to a decent level of adequacy to maybe perform at BM and maybe invest in a fire hoop
• Be healthier - lift more, run more, walk more, eat better
• Brush up and reinforce Spanish and Chinese (Mandarin mainly, but Cantonese is possible)
• Go back to school! If I am accepted anyways
• Shoot more pictures

Happy New Year everyone!

Halloween clubbin'

More random musings from when I worked at Level B...around Halloween.

We have a lumberjack in the house...make that two, a turkey and a Canadian. This is a start of a beautiful joke. Especially now that they've gotten onto the stage and are shaking their tail feathers and axes. Oh boy...

And there's an angel and a nerd...It's kind of a sausage fest again.

There goes a lumberjack/Canadian train.

Two cats and a hippie...woah, leather pants alert!

Angel, don't touch the lights. You're not hot enough to transcend the rules of the club.

The nerd is actually a 90s guy.

Yeah, Angel, there's a fucking scary decoration next to me. Her name is Donna. If you can't stop being a skanky ho, she'll end up in your room one night. Alive. And pissed because you just crept up, called her the freakiest thing you've seen and then moved her so she wasn't looking you in the face. I trust her vengeance will be sweet.

It just got really cold all of a sudden.

Bitches think you can walk in here, throw me your jackets without so much as a thank you and not even pay? No fucking way. Not in my house.

Now there's a pirate, two open shirted cowboys and a fairy?

Woah, we've got some making out going on on the dance floor, and a lumberjack can-can line. 

Everyone keeps getting freaked out when they look over here and see Donna, poor thing. Tiffany said everything in here can be animated as well...kill me now. 

If I'm nice to Donna, she won't kill me when she comes to life...I hope. I smoothed back her hair and fixed it for her.

Strolling down Canal Street

Ah, Canal Street. How I have missed your sidewalk street vendors and glorious buns. Looking into the bustling crowd here feels like looking into a distorted and shifting mirror. Besides the minority of tourists, it is mainly a sea of black hair, dark brown eyes, and small frames. I love the feeling of blending in. It makes me feel mildly invincible that no one could pick me out here; that I can easily slip right into the crowd and not be followed.

Can I though, really? Looking at the crowd here, I find the more than slightly-worn clothing, the sweats, the bowed heads and plastic smiles. I stand tall and proud of who and what I am, in my mildly fashionable clothes and Urban Outfitters bag. With my slight smirk and chin held high, I really doubt I could be mistaken unless I deliberately changed me demeanor...which I would anyways.

Walking this way up Canal Street, I can feel the class divide easily. Despite barely making ends meet and having only the little extra for trips like this, I know I am steps above the people here. Whereas the authorities would question why I was in a sketchy part of town, they would question why the street vendors were in the U.S. And how is that right?

A weeknight at Moonie's

I wrote the following while working as the coat check girl at Level B last fall! There are several more that I'll upload later. The random bits calling out and judging people are just observations I had while working.

Written 10/26/2012

I recently had my first real drunken Tuesday night last week. It was the Tuesday before Fall Break. My classmates had backed out of the Multimedia Journalism Workshop drinking game I desperately wanted to play the next day, so we decided to try our hand at Moonie's Trivia Night. We were four journalism majors with various minors and knowledge pools - how could we go wrong? It started with the first fishbowl...it was blue, I think. Norah decided we needed to drink for the whole refrain of some song, so we did. Fifteen long seconds of nearly freezing cold alcohol. Now only was I on my way to inebriation, I was on my way to brain freeze. Awesome.

For those of you who don't know what a fishbowl is, let me break it down for you: Imagine for me, if you please, a plastic fishbowl, roughly a foot tall similar to the one you might have had as a child.

...slow jams? Really DJ? It's only 12:45am.

Anyways. Imagine the fishbowl you used to keep Gary the goldfish in with all the pretty stones and maybe a little old school diver. Now replace the stones with ice, and the gross bowl water with a mixture of some blue jungle juice, a pint of vodka, a little soda, and a little blue curaçao to top it off. Add a fuck-ton of brightly colored long straws and you have the drink of the night. Oh, replace Gary and the scuba diver with sour gummy worms.

This was the first time I had ever drank and fishbowl. Shared between three of us.