Kohl's Kills

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I get overstimulated easily. This could be a part of ADD, this could be my hypothesized borderline Asperger's, or it could just be Grace being Grace, the ultimate Oversensitive Princess. But it does give me at least one more excuse to stay home and hide on the weekends.

Shopping for clothing, although I love it, is hard.

Shopping for food is also hard.

Noisy restaurants are hard.

The Search: Trials and Tribulations

I consider myself a casual academic. Basically, I love learning and thinking about the kinds of involved, obtuse subjects written up in research journals, but I don't have access to the data or resources to actually conduct my own research. Like I'd love to research supermarket scanning data (what goes into shoppers' carts at the checkout line), but do you really think Nielsen is going to let me have that information for any less than $100,000 and an academic research grant? Yeah, OK. I probably should have gone into a doctorate program to satisfy my lust for information, but it wasn't until recently that I discovered where my Aspergery interests lie (economic and spatial sociology... the study of how economics influences why we live and work the way we live and work in the areas we live and work). Also, the couch is comfy. I like my comfy couch depression. I can't believe I created a rear end depression in the couch in only nine months.

An Ode to Facebook

Facebook and I hit freshman year at the same time. I was awkward and eighteen, Facebook was unpolished and geeky. The both of us were insular, too; that year neither of us stretched our horizons any farther than the main campus drag. But Facebook, with all its growing pains, opened up a whole new world for me, myself, and I. Facebook showed me that there were people out there, hanging out and probably drinking or doing some other unspeakable act with enthusiastic debauchery, living only a few hundred yards away from my adopted library nook. Facebook showed me that even if I wasn’t pretty, even if I wasn’t an extrovert, I could still stalk people with wild abandon.

Various updates

Here's your bi-monthly Grace Updates and Thoughts Post.

• For Lent I am giving up all fun food - in my definition, all food that is sweet. In theory, this is not that hard for me to do. I'm not a snack person, I'm not huge on packaged desserts, I'm usually too lazy to make my own desserts, and I don't have to buy ice cream every time I'm at the store. The problem is that Dan keeps buying me chocolate on sale. I have a couple bags of Ghirardelli chocolates, 5+ bars of Endangered Species Chocolate (my favorite due to the absolutely random name), an entire commercial display of chocolate truffles, and a sample of everything Walgreens had to offer in the aftermath of Valentine's Day. So basically I have to avoid chocolate like the plague for six weeks, which is mighty difficult, considering I have an entire cupboard cabinet exclusively devoted to storing chocolate. I have endured three full days of the torture. Last year I survived three weeks before giving in. Let's see how long this lasts.
• I'm taking two accelerated classes at DeSales this semester towards my Accounting degree. I just finished taking Legal Environment of Business, which is the we're-unique new new new updated Business Law. As is happening more and more often through the confluence of age and meds, I was more relaxed during this class. Little pressure to excel or study my day away. I was like, you know, a B+ is not that bad. I've survived a B+ before with my perfection complex intact (although that happened in freshman year of college... shhhhhhh!). I didn't actually make a decision to try to fail, but I did tell myself I was OK with it. So I didn't study too hard, browsed Pinterest on my phone during class, and tried my hardest not to care about legal terms and arbitrary grading. Unfortunately, just as I had tried my hardest to fail that one quiz in Roman History class because it only counted for 2% of my grade and I wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't that much of a nerd, I got an A. Darn.
• Work is coming along. The whole mess in the classroom earlier this year did a lot to sour me towards education. There really is a lot wrong with the system, and it's very frustrating to work within the system and kind of bang your head against the way day after day after day. My new classroom is full of people who really do love the kids and want to do their best for them, but it still has its (thankfully normal) classroom problems. It's OK. I was successful in beginning the process of making Small Girl do things like sit and listen and work, partly through the Power of Me, and partly through my coworkers realizing that, oh wait, Small Girl does have the ability to sit for more than 15 seconds at a time. But truly, I just miss my little guy in the other classroom. I keep asking everyone who goes into that classroom on a regular basis about how he's doing. I get a lot of generalities, because to them he's just another kid in just another crazy classroom. Just not to me.
• I am suffering through the NFL offseason. Seriously, I need football to sustain my attention span. I marked the beginning of free agency on my Google Calendar and drive Dan nuts by wanting to watch all the condensed games since the beginning of September. He wants to watch movies, not watch the Raiders and the Jets flail around and fumble the ball, but I need more more more. Four days until free agency. :-(
• I continue in my quest to be more feminine and hott, read more fashion magazines, browse more Pinterest, obsess over more recipes, and drink more sugary coffee drinks (I've especially enjoyed that last one). Ooo, and Etsy. I think I made some disparaging post about how people sold absolute beep on Etsy for exorbitant prices. I still think that's true (one day you find this beautiful bracelet on sale for forty bucks, then the next day you find the charms for that beautiful bracelet on sale for twenty cents a pop), but heck if I've realized that there are many exceptions! I stumbled upon the awesome work of glass bottle jewelry, where people make and sell stuff like this. Now that's something I can get into. 

I now leave this post to study the state of the dairy industry for my marketing plan. You never know when those random trade magazines that are totally not written with your everyday consumer in mind will come in handy.