High Five for Friday!

1 ~ Halloween with my friend!

My friend and I had a colossal amount of fun last night.
We only had 3 Trick-or-Treaters, of whom was just the delivery guy (we gave him a few handfuls in a baggie), and one of the kids was just a neighbor kid.
Oh well, we looked cool and had fun.

(In case you can't tell, we watched Doctor Who. She's the Eleventh Doctor, and I'm Amy in an episode I totally have not seen yet.)

2 ~ Friends who get your little quirks.

I have a few friends who really get me.
And they are awesome.
Also, a shout out to the friends who still think I'm crazy: thanks for putting up with me!

3 ~ I had grape juice yesterday.

I know, I know, that's not really a big deal, but when it comes to food, I get excited very easily.
Just ask my mom.
I am a pretty mature person, but if you hand me a juice box. . .
Well, you'll end up with 4 year old me.

4 ~ Candy!

As I said, we only had 3 TOTer's.
And we were prepared for a small army.
Alas, a small army we did not receive.
Oh well, more for us.

5 ~ Cooler weather?

I'll be honest, I'm not really too keen on being cold.
However, I am ready for it to start actually feeling like not August.
It is November, after all.
Get with it, weather.

Being 21

Remember when you were a kid and you thought Sweet 16 was so far away? I mean, heck, Sleeping Beauty, Ariel, and Snow White were married at 16!

And then you turned 16 and you realized that you didn't know anything and what the heck were those girls thinking, getting married at 16?!

You just got your driver's licence!

You thought 18 was the thing. You could tackle anything when you were 18.

Until you turned 18.
Then you realized you totally do not have a handle on much at all.
The next milestone is 21.
21.
Where you can literally - and legally - do anything you want.
Within reason, obviously.
Well, let me tell you, Girls-younger-than-21, 21 is not what it's cracked up to be.
Yeah, you can basically do whatever you want . . . but with that said, there's a lot of responsibility on your shoulders.
I know a lot of gals my age - including myself - that would just love nothing more than to curl up with a tub of ice cream or and popcorn and watch Disney Princess movies all day.
And maybe a little a lot of Doctor Who.
But we can't.
We've got college.
We've got jobs.
We've got bills to pay, assignments due, and people counting on us to get things done.
That's not to say that we don't have moments of calm or just time to have fun and relax, but those moments don't come often.
Girls-younger-than-21, treasure your moments of freedom.
You might be bored, but another word for boredom is free.
And treasure the innocence.
And the simplicity.
Enjoy it while you can.
It's not going to last.

"But I just wanna help. . ."

I'm pretty sure we've all said that at some point in our lives.

To most of us, the desire to help seems natural, almost impulsive.

We have to do it.

We want to do it.

And sometimes most of the time, we can't.

Not in the way we wanted to, not as much as we wanted to, or sometimes just not at all.

I saw this the other day on Pinterest:

It reminded me of a time where I was trying to help two individuals, but it just seemed like every time I tried, I hit a brick wall. I felt like I was giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and it was just going nowhere.

One simply wasn't listening to advice - and instead making me their personal shrink complaining about problems they could have prevented, not if they'd listened to me, but if they'd used a bit of wisdom and common sense - and the other was simply convinced they couldn't forgive themselves for mistakes made in the past and that they couldn't change.

Needless to say, the fact that I wanted to help them so badly and I couldn't didn't exactly make me feel like a very good friend.

I felt like crap.

And that didn't help anyone.

That period ended, and those two friends and I just sort of . . . stopped.

Stopped everything.

Whether or not their situations got better or not, I don't know, and I'll probably never know.

I hope so.

All I wanted to do was help.

Fast forward about ten months.

I see that pin.

And I start thinking.

I realize that whoever made this pin is right.

You can't help everyone.

That's not to say your desire to or advice you may give isn't worth anything, but it just may not be what they need right then.

You may not have the experience, the knowledge, the skill, or the wisdom at that time to really help that person where they are.

But there's Someone who can.

And last time I checked, He takes referrals.

But there are people you can help.

People that need your experience and wisdom from where you are to help them where they are.

You may find those people to be few and far between, but they're there.

While you may not be able to help everyone, you can help someone.

And it's the someones of this life that count the most in the next.

Confessions: I pronounce everything wrong.

This is really embarrassing to admit as an English major and a bookish person in general, but I really do butcher the art of the spoken word.

It's the reason I took Spanish instead of French.

French people should thank me for that, because they would have murdered me.

But I seriously am horrendously bad at pronunciation. 

Point en case:

Friend of mine lost her school ID a few months ago, and our decals expire every year.

She got her ID, but then couldn't get a decal for a while, because they moved the office or whatnot.

Well.

She ended up getting a parking ticket - hey, there are only so many "visitor" spots - and mentioned it to me.

I mentioned to her that someone had said that if you didn't pay it, they wouldn't send you a bill or anything.

Then I said, "I guess it makes sense; I mean, they're not city or munsiple police".

She just stopped and stared at me.

"Alyse. Do you mean municipal?"

"Yeah. . . yeah, that's it."

She looked at me and laughed.

"You know what you are? You're one of those people that read a lot but never say the words out loud."

Yes.

Yes, that is exactly what I am.

That, and a dummkopf.

And actually, I can pronounce that right.

Disney's Old School Sass

Can we just have a moment to talk about how sassy some of the classic Disney movies are?

I mean, look at just Sleeping Beauty.

Those fairies got some SNARK!

Although I do find it hilarious that Merryweather doesn't realize it's pink till Flora throws the whole roll over her.

And Merryweather minces no words.

I. Love. That.

And if you don't like Merryweather, we can't be friends.

Sorry not sorry.

"You can't sew! And she's never cooked!!"

And yet she never really comes off as rude, or disrespectful, just . . . young.

They can't really do movies like that anymore.

-sigh-

Still one of my favorite Disney movies ever.

I think this calls for a Disney Princess marathon.

Who's in?

21 Before 21

So today at 4 AM, I turned 21.

You didn't get up for my birthday?

Oh, it's totes cool; I didn't get up for that, either.

Anyhoo, I've heard of these "[things done] Before [Age of the same numerical value]" things before, and I figured I'd do one for my birthday.

These are in no particular order, save for the first one.

1. met Jesus as my Savior

2. graduated high school

3. published a book

4. been to Mile Zero, where I . . .

5. . . . inadvertently swam with tarpons

6. visited the Statue of Liberty

7. voted in a Presidential election

8. drank pigeon milk (my dad's cologne)

9. performed an amateur amputation 

10. made sushi

11. got a job (and still have the job)

12. got a full ride through college

13. went to the midnight showing of a movie

14. zip-lined

15. whitewater rafted

16. member of two honors societies

17. ran a 5K

18. changed a tire (yes, on the side of the road)

19. melted a plastic container on a stove by accident

20. had a pen-pal in another country

21. been to the Kennedy Space Center

So yeah, Happy Birthday to me! :)

21 certainly makes me no less clumsy . . .

. . . but oh well, nobody saw that.

And this is what I'd like to leave you with:

I know 21 isn't that old in the grand scheme of things, but thinking about it makes me feel kind of old.

I mean, I saw Y2K.

I saw 9/11.

I've seen Mad Cow disease, Avian Bird flu, and Swine flu.

I saw the capture and death of Saddam Hussein and the death of Osama bin Laden.

I've seen the funerals of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

I've seen the advent of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

I've seen the earthquake in Japan and the tsunami in Indonesia.

I've seen a lot, I think.

But this is really all that matters:

Why Pandora is awesome . . . and slightly awkward.

I gotta say, I love Pandora.

It’s free.

It’s got a TON of stuff there.

And it tries to understand what you do and do not like.

Heck, that’s pretty impressive.

But it can be sort of awkward.

For instance, you don’t know what’s going to be played next.

The wild card factor doesn’t really bother me, but if an objectionable song comes on, that’s always the moment a younger sibling or a parent comes into your room to ask you something.

And that’s probably when you’ve hit your skip limit too, so you have to switch stations entirely.

Ahhh, modern technology.

But really, I do love Pandora.

I have entirely too many stations, but oh well.

I really like that they’ve upped the number of songs played per artist – it used to be two per hour. Now I guess it’s like five. That’s always nice.

If I could suggest just one feature, though, it’d be an automatic list builder of songs you’ve given a thumbs up.

So much better than taking a picture of the song info. . .

UPDATE: A friend hath introduced me to Slacker Radio.
ME GUSTA.
Slacker Radio keeps track of the songs you've liked, which is very, very, very helpful to people like me who are prone to forget things like their names and trivial things like that.
Only downside is that they don't have as many artists as Pandora has, but I'm content to use both -- Pandora for my more obscure tastes, and Slacker Radio for the more popular ones.

Confessions: I've Actually Never Had Coffee.

I'm starting a new series, Confessions.

I figured I might as well start with the most shocking.

So yeah, I've never actually had coffee before.

And these are some of the looks I get when I say that:

Actually, that's probably all the reactions I've gotten.

Yeah. . .

I just . . . never really wanted to have coffee.

I love the smell of coffee beans, but not when it's actually brewed.

And I don't need it in the mornings, because once I'm up, I'm up.

So you wake me up at 3 AM and you had better have something really cool for me to do or I will hate intensely dislike you for a very long time, probably proportional to how many hours of sleep you robbed me of.

Anyhoo, yeah, I've never had coffee.

And I don't plan to, either.

And the reason why is because when I was a kid, I had to read this book, Across Five Aprils. 

It's about the Civil War, but there's only one part I really remember: the kid's mom loved coffee, but for one reason or another, they couldn't buy it, and she went through this awful withdraw and could not function, and I remember thinking I never wanted to be that dependent on something that I wouldn't be able to function if I couldn't have it.

Which rules out a lot of things for me.

Oh well.

And I remember a lot of my friends saying they never drank coffee till they got to college, but I'm almost a senior, and I still haven't had a drop.

I mean, I suppose it's kind of like tea: I just haven't found a flavor I might like.

Whatevs.

What coffee confessions do you have?

I Made a Thing / Mondays

So yesterday, I made a thing:

. . . I have no idea what led to that.

EDIT: Now I do.

My laptop left-click button is broken, so I had to use my mouse, but I had taken the USB receiver out the day before because I needed both USB ports for something and I had to go get it but I kept forgetting what I was looking for and came back with other things that needed to be done until I remembered I couldn't do much of it without the mouse and I just wanted to be able to open up a wormhole to my dresser and have it  ploop right into my hand. 

Think Portal. 

Also, it is Monday.

A friend of mine posts this every Monday on Facebook, and if she doesn't, another friend reminds her to. So now I'm posting it in case she forgets.

Our response to this Monday?