Dear Rose,
Thank you for the lovely Christmas card that you slipped under my door yesterday. It was very thoughtful of you.
I was just wondering, though: who are you?
xxoo,
Kaitlin
Problem solved (11:34 pm, 30 November 2007): It turns out that Rose is short for Roséngela, which is the name of my scout. I knew I recognized the handwriting from somewhere!
The thing about any show that involves voting off the weakest contestant is that they never turn out how you might expect.
On "reality shows" like Survivor and game shows like The Weakest Link, there is always some idiot who makes it to the semi-finals on the sole basis of being the member of an alliance. These people never win challenges and they get the dumbest questions wrong, but they're still there, weakweek after week.
Shows that require the audience to call in and vote are the same way. I'm sure there are many American Idol losers who deserved a record deal far more than Ruben Studdard (where is he now, anyway?). And look at how Mario Lopez and Sabrina Bryan, by far some of the best dancers on Dancing With The Stars, had their stay ended a bit too early (in Sabrina's case, way too early). I think in this case, two things are possible:
(a) people don't vote, thinking that their favorite is safe; and
(b) the fan base of some of the older contestants (primarily on DWTS) doesn't need parental permission to vote, so they organize en masse to push their favorite to the finals.
That's why I think the final of this season's Dancing With The Stars is so disappointing. Mel B. just kinda "walks around" as Jane Seymour says, Helio is losing his touch, and Marie Osmond probably had her 972 cousins vote for her. Dear God, her Freestyle was horrible:
The Freestyle is where you're supposed to pull out all of the stops, with flips and lifts and all sorts of crazy stuff, to show how much you've improved. It's not an opportunity to make reference to the fact that you make creepy dolls to sell on the QVC.
Please, for the love of God, don't vote for her.
Thanks for listening. :)
Forgive me, this will be very vague, but there's nothing I can do about it because I don't want to give too many personal details away. I need to make a very bad grammatical blunder and call this person "they," as I do not want to reveal the gender of the person (as that may give too much information away as well).
I received an email today from a friend. We've known each other for a long time, but in the beginning it was only a professional relationship. They are going through a difficult time at the moment, and I feel very bad about this.
However, today this person sent me an email that made me angry. For some reason they tell me not to do things that I would have the common sense not to do anyway. Also, they bring up mistakes that I made maybe one time maybe five or ten years ago, as if they expect me to do it again. Finally, while this person calls me a friend, they still sign their emails Firstname Lastname. We've known each other for about ten years, and we stopped working together in a professional capacity about five years ago. I don't know about you, but I only sign my first and last name when I need to be professional or when I don't know the person at all.
It's very hard for me to say anything about this to them, because (a) they are going through a very hard time at the moment, and (b) because of our age difference and former professional relationship, I don't know if it would make me come across as ungrateful or disrespectful or whatever.
I've accomplished a lot since we first met, yet I feel like they still think of me as the same person I was when we met (I was in high school then). Maybe this is all petty, but it's really frustrating to have someone I respect very much, someone who says "I consider you a friend," to treat me like they don't trust me.
Well, considering that I'm not eligible for the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council funding, and I've been rejected from the college and University scholarships at least twice, it's a relief to know that some scholarships want to consider me:
Hi Kaitlin,
FastWeb found a new scholarship for you. You qualify for:
Brickfish "Air Guitar Superstar" Scholarship
Award Amount: $500
The Brickfish "Air Guitar Superstar" Scholarship is available to students at least 14 years of age. You must submit a picture or video of yourself tearing up your favorite guitar riff. Videos must be your original creation and be no more than 30 seconds in length.
Have you ever noticed when you're at the AAA or the DMV getting your driver's license renewed, everyone seems to pick up his or her license and cringe at the photo? I think this is because the photographers really don't give a damn, and don't stop to check whether you have six chins or your lazy eye is showing or whatever.
The same is true for me for graduation photos - the professional ones, that is. I never have much luck with them.
The photo in this post is from my high school graduation. Note how I am not looking at the principal - I am instead looking at the diploma, trying to make sure I don't drop it while I do the funky "shake with right, receive diploma with left" thing. I'm also making a weird kind of face - I'm fairly sure I was in the middle of saying "Thank you" to the principal or something like that.
My Bachelor's one is the same way. I was receiving two diplomas that day, so there was a bit of confusion as to what the dean should be handing to me. I also had four or five sets of honor cords (about nine or ten cords all together) and two tassels on my mortarboard (since I had two degrees), and they were swinging all over the damn place. And when I got my first Master's, I was looking similarly goofy. My tongue was hanging out in the middle of a "Thank you," and I wasn't sure what was going to happen then either as I was actually walking through, so I looked a bit hesitant. (I received a diploma cover, but inside there was a letter reminding me to submit my thesis.)
Let me illustrate how bad my Master's one was. When I got it and said "It's horrible," my parents said (as parents tend to say), "Oh, let me see, I'm sure it's beautiful." They took one look, and they couldn't even fake it - they said, "Yeah, that's bad."
I shouldn't complain, though. I had other photos from the day that were very nice. When my cousin Justin graduated from high school, they prohibited cameras, saying that a professional photographer was going to be there. He had a similar predicament to me - a weird face and tassels swinging in the way. So that sucked.
Anyway, my point. I just got my photos back from my recent MSt graduation and I'm similarly unimpressed. I look blotchy and my face looks huge, and my lazy eye is really obvious in most of the pictures.
Maybe I'm just too critical. But you would think that these photographers, who specialize in this sort of thing, could do something about it, couldn't they?
I remember my high school and college yearbook photos, particularly in college, where they gave you all sorts of options to airbrush and lift and tuck and all that great stuff. They could put your head on a different body, put in a different background, remove stray hairs and blemishes, basically anything you wanted. When they had a bit of trouble with the glare of my glasses, they had me take my glasses off, saying they could add them back in later. How cool is that?
I'm just sayin'.
Sorry for such a long delay since my last post. As you noticed, my parents came to visit me for the first time since I've been here, to celebrate my MSt graduation. (In Oxford you don't get a graduation automatically - you have to book it. It's annoying because sometimes you have to wait over a year to get your degree, but in some ways it's cool because you can arrange a reunion with your friends or do your Bachelor's and your Master's graduations at the same time.) They were here for five days, not nearly long enough in my opinion, but a wonderful time nonetheless. (Note: The photos in this travelogue are not chronological, they are merely illustrative.)
I went to Heathrow on Friday morning to pick them up. I was totally panicking because it was their first international flight, and it included a stopover in Canada. My mom's not a huge fan of flying, and with my being a neurotic firstborn, I always expect the worst. They arrived safely - 45 minutes early, in fact - but their luggage did not arrive with them. The airline was going to deliver it "some time the next day" - whatever that meant. More on that later. So we went, without luggage, to Oxford.
As we were boarding the bus to Oxford, I was delighted to see Chrissie and her dad running for the bus. I knew they were arriving the same day, but I didn't know they'd be there at the same time. So it was a nice bus ride back, despite the lack of luggage.
For reasons I will not discuss here, the college ended up putting my parents in a hotel. We lucked out tremendously because it was a lovely hotel, and they only charged us the rate for booking a college room - I think we saved at least 50%. The room had a view of Magdalen Tower, and was right on the High Street, so it was convenient for everything. We ate lunch at the Grand Cafe, since we had to wait a bit to check into a room.
My mom was very jetlagged, so she slept for a while. My dad was not tired in the least, so I got to take him for a short walk down the High to the Covered Market, and some colleges along the way. We got to peek into University College, which I had never been in before, and which was the college that Bill and Chelsea Clinton attended while at Oxford. My dad loved the architecture, and the Covered Market, and took lots of pictures.
That night, we went to the MCR guest dinner. It had a Halloween theme, and the food was not terrific, and my parents had to wear what they wore on the plane, but it was a nice time. Fortunately, people were not as dressed up as they usually are for guest dinners, so my parents didn't look out of place for not wearing suits, etc. What I liked best, and what was most important to me for the week, was that they got to meet the friends I've been telling them about all this time. That night, I lent my parents some pajamas (I had some baggy gray sweats that my dad was able to wear!) and gave them some shampoo and stuff.
The next morning was my graduation. The luggage had not yet arrived - no matter how much I tried, I couldn't get an estimated time of arrival or delivery out of them. So we went into town very early to rustle up some clothes and stuff. My dad got a dress shirt and a tie, and I gave my mom a blazer and some shoes and we bought some makeup and deodorant. Again, they felt bad that they couldn't wear the clothes they packed, but they looked good and totally not out of place.
The graduation was great fun. At Catz, I was with all the girls I had matriculated with - Chrissie, Jade, Melati, Gunjan and Radhika; along with Dunlaith and Dominique, who I had met along the way in the MCR. We took all sorts of pictures and had a lovely lunch. At the ceremony, I was seated next to my lovely Mark, who made me laugh through the whole thing. The ceremony itself was very surreal - lots of bowing and holding hands with the Dean and speaking in Latin.
Our gowns were very cool - black with lace and green hoods (the green hoods were for the Master of Studies - other degrees have other colors, and some degrees have fur). We took lots of pictures, which you can check out on my Flickr and on Facebook.
After the graduation, some friends joined us in the pub for some celebratory drinks and photos. Again, I wanted my parents to meet as many of my friends as possible, so this was another opportunity for me to fit some of that in.
That night, after going back to my room to change (the gown was heavy!) and going back to my parents' hotel to fix up (their luggage came - finally!), my parents and I went to Brown's on Woodstock Road for a lovely dinner. My dad had a chance to try a traditional steak pie and a sticky toffee pudding, two traditional British foods, which was cool.
One of my favorite parts of the week was walking back from Brown's to the hotel. It's a bit of a walk, and we had planned on taking a taxi for all or some of it, but once we had made it to Cornmarket Street we decided we could walk the whole way. What I loved about it was that it was the weekend of Bonfire Night, so we saw tons of fireworks going off above the beautiful buildings on the High Street (especially the Church of St. Mary the Virgin and Queen's College). Even though they were for some guy called Guy Fawkes, I liked to think that they were in celebration of my graduation. :)
On Sunday, I tried to do a bit of a walk around Oxford. We saw a few colleges and sights (RadCam, Bridge of Sighs, Blackwell's, etc.) and took lots of photos. I tried to get them in to ChCh for br
unch, but the porters were vicious and we could only get in to the cathedral. In a lovely turn of events, I got a call from Chrissie while in ChCh, to ask if we wanted to meet up for lunch. So we went to the new Gourmet Burger Kitchen with Chrissie and her dad, Melati, Teresa and Chung, which was very nice. We were actually pretty tired after that (it had been a long few days!) so we went back to my parents' hotel and collapsed. None of us wanted to move when it was dinnertime, so we ordered takeaway pizza (which was actually nice and cheap compared to our earlier meals of the week!). I was worried that we didn't see enough, but when my mom bought a souvenir book about Oxford, we realized that we had seen quite a lot!
On Monday we got up fairly early to go to London. There were a few sights I still wanted to show them in Ox, so we got to those first - the Divinity School, the Duke Humphries library, and the Covered Market (my mom hadn't seen it yet). Then we went down to the train station to go to London. We got a group rate, which included underground passes, so it was actually a good deal compared to going on the bus - and it got us there a whole hour sooner!
Because of our detour in Oxford, we were a little late getting in to London - about 1:30 pm. We went to a pub just outside of the Paddington Station, called the Pride of Paddington, and had fish and chips. From there, we took the tube to Westminster and saw everything there - Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, etc. We then walked alllll the way through St. James Park to Buckingham Palace, then alllll the way back to get on the tube to Knightsbridge to see Harrod's. My parents were exhausted by then, so we hopped back on the Tube to go to Picadilly Circus. We didn't see everything on my list of things to see, but we saw quite a lot, so my parents were happy. By the time we were in Picadilly we were exhausted and didn't really care about where we ate, so we went to TGI Friday's and had some drinks and nachos. We really weren't that hungry for anything else - we just wanted to relax. W
e stopped to buy some souvenirs after that, then got back on the tube to go back to Paddington. We got back to Ox around 10ish and crashed pretty quickly.
Tuesday was the day they went home. That morning, we had breakfast with Enrique (who had been away all week and hadn't had a chance to meet my parents yet), then packed up and boarded the bus for Heathrow a little past 11. When we checked them in, we found out that they were indeed supposed to collect their luggage in Toronto - no one had told them that! So that's why it didn't make it to Heathrow with them. We ate lunch at a "pub" in Heathrow, and my parents went through security a little before 2:00. They got home at around midnight (US time) that night.
It was wonderful to share these experiences I had been telling them about for so long. I wish we had more time, but the expense of it all plus the difficulty of finding childcare made it tough. For a long time I wasn't even sure if the whole trip would work out - but I can't tell you how happy I am that it did.
Good news: My parents are here to visit me!!!!!! Yaaaaaaaaay!!!!!!
Bad news: The airline lost their luggage. It's on its way now, but we may have to buy them clothes to wear to my graduation. Fuuuuuuuuccccck.
