Scenes from the City

So I am taking a photography class at the Fleisher Art Memorial in Bella Vista, and it's been a good time. I am learning all about the different symbols on my camera, like the little face symbol and the mountain symbol and the Eiffel-Tower-with-the-moon-behind-it symbol. (Really, who designs these things?) Anyway, I wanted to share some of the photographs I've taken recently. So here they are!

This is a pretty design on a Hookah at Leila Cafe.

LOVE this picture of broken glass in a window on South Street.

There are mosaics like these all over the South Street area.

I like the colors in this one... the yellow against the blue sky.

Again with the yellow and the sky.

I used the Tungsten setting to make this one really blue.

Tried my best to get the pinky-purply sky in this one.

Playing around with digital macro - my new favorite setting on my camera.

Scenes from Rittenhouse.

Travelling on Septa. Exhilarating.

Whizzing past a stop on the R3.

Grammar Gripe of the Week

Because I am the grammar police, I constantly obsess over how much I despise people who can't speak English. And by that I don't mean native speakers of other languages - they're okay. It's people who were brought up speaking English who still can't speak English that get me. I admit I occasionally make a mistake, what person frantically running their fingers over a keyboard doesn't? But chronic mistake makers really get my goat.

One thing that's been bothering me lately is people who don't know common phrases. Here is an example, from someone's Facebook status (no names, sorry if the person who had this status reads this):

So-and-so is not to sure what this day in tales.

I first thought this must have been a joke. Of course the person knows that it's "entails" and not "in tales". I mean, what does "in tales" even mean in this context? It makes no sense. But I don't think the person was joking. Another one that bothers me is when people say "could of" or "would of" when they really mean "could have" or "would have".

When did we lose sight of our own language? Oh, it depresses me.

I think I'll make this grammar gripe thing a regular feature, as I really like pointing out people's mistakes. For other grammar nerds (and members of the police force) I'll also direct you to another woman who does this, The Sentence Sleuth.

I will write better. I will write better. I will...

I always delight in hearing my boyfriend's story about how his handwriting was so atrocious in elementary school that a teacher made him stay in from recess and write "I will write better" over and over again on a piece of paper. Unfortunately, his printing has not gotten any better. I still find it atrocious today how he scribbles carelessly and squashes his letters and makes lowercase e's by drawing the curve first, then inserting a haphazard line.

I was also thinking about handwriting this weekend while we were up in NH for the wedding of one of my boyfriend's childhood friends. We were browsing through some of his old yearbooks, and as I read the "autographs" of girls in his class, it seemed exactly the same as the handwriting my friends and I used to have. I wondered - 'is handwriting trendy?' Are some types of handwriting "cool" at times, and others not? Was it "cool" to write in swirly, bubbly, big letters that conjured up images of giggly girls with braces? It might have been, because I remember striving to that effervescent handwriting... though I could never quite get it.

And now with all this texting and emailing, will kids not even regard handwriting as a form of communication anymore? What does the "cool" handwriting look like today? (And don't say: Times New Roman.)

This article doesn't really answer that question; it's more about how cursive is a silly way to teach kids to write. But it is what inspired this post, so check it out: here.

Two Kick Butt Articles Today

Today I am excited for two completely unrelated, yet awesome-beyond-belief articles. Let's start with the not-gross one:

Tetris gives you more brain
Oh joy of joys. Now I can justify to my boyfriend why I can't just watch TV - instead I have to break out the old school Game Boy Color that should probably be dead right now, and jam away to the hardest level of Tetris. I find infinite joy in getting the spaceship and the little dancing Russian men, and I've since made it my mission to get TWO Tetrises in every game I play. Think an average of 1 hour/night of Tetris will rot my brain? Au contraire... it will make my brain BETTER!

And the gross (but so true and not usually talked about) topic:

Tonsiliths.
Ever cough up a little foul-smelling white chunk and wonder what crawled into your throat and died? It's called a tonsilith, and it's basically debris that gets caught in your tonsil cavities, which acquires bacteria that makes it smell. The good news is that EVERYONE suffers from these, but hardly anyone knows what they are or what they're called. Well, a few weeks ago, I got curious and Googled "smelly white throat piece," and eventually came upon a wealth of tonsilith (or tonsil stone) literature. I felt like a great weight had lifted from my shoulders, and I was amused when the NYTimes did a piece on something I had just discovered. It was like they were inside my mind!

It's time to move on with my life now, but I hope you appreciated those articles and that tiny glimpse into some issues of my life (namely Tetris addiction and smelly white throat balls).

I'll leave you with another random but awesome link - the Eagles' Shawn Andrews performing a little ditty I like to call, "Getting my Michael Phelps On". Just skip to around 2:40, the rest is boring.

Some Funny Pictures

I know it's been a while since I've written. So sue me. I don't have anything to say. But I do have some things to show, as a few silly things have happened recently. Here goes: 

Watching Good Day Philadelphia, as per usual, and they spelled Philadelphia wrong. As per usual. Oh hi, Marc Lamont Hill. 
Then Will and I played Scrabble. Interestingly enough, he won. But not with this word. 
And our Wii is apparently possessed. 
Phallic tomatoes. Gotta love em. 
Then I went to eat lunch at the Continental Midtown. The calamari was great. The quickie? Not so good. 

Hope you enjoyed!

Bang, Pow, Crash

Oh today is just one of those days - when I feel so overwhelmed with all that's going on in life, and like there's no time to do anything.

In college, my days were planned. I had specific assignments I was working on, club meetings, rehearsals - I knew what my activities were, I knew who my friends were, I knew my major, and I knew what I was working toward. In the real world that kind of structure doesn't exist. And so I have days like today, when I wonder where I'm going with my life and what happened to all my dreams and hobbies and interests. I make long lists in my head of everything I'd ideally like to do: take photography classes, speak Spanish, learn to make jewelry, sing, force myself into a regular gym routine, find a job that I love, volunteer at the animal shelter, decorate the apartment, clean the apartment, find some freelance writing gigs, become a better cook, accrue a more professional wardrobe, blog... GAH it's enough to make my head explode.

I feel as though I have no direction right now. There is so much I'd like to do, as you can see, but I have such trouble prioritizing and finding time and keeping my desires consistent. It gets very overwhelming, like I have a giant post-it note on my brain.

The biggest question I want to answer right now is: What thing(s) am I passionate about and how can I go about making a life out of that? But if I don't try a bunch of different things, how will I ever get an answer?

Boo to feeling this way. On one hand it's exciting to have so many possibilities, on the other hand...

...it's exhausting.

Things to find out BEFORE marriage

Oh Google ads, you never fail to make me laugh.



Also, the usage of the word "if" is incorrect. It should be whether. So there. Also, I posted something just like this a while ago, but I had forgotten about it until now. So who cares?