A senior in college...

I started this blog when I was just about to leave for college for my freshman year, and here it is the last month of my senior year. You can tell the differences in years by the number of blogs I've posted, the number slowly dwindling as I got more and more involved with school. This blog serves almost as the symbol of my college career, or more of an anti-symbol, since it was neglected while all my efforts were put towards school. Don't judge me, I'm an English major, symbolism is what I do!

It's interesting to me the differences when I look at my classmates, the class of 2011 at Manchester College. Some are running around crazy (much like myself) trying to find what the hell they're going to do after graduation. Jobs, living arrangements, loan payments, some planning weddings. It's almost a mad dash from here on out for those of us not going to graduate school. There are the lucky few who have a job secured already, but it seems like there aren't many of those. We're being released from the protected womb of college into a cold hard world - one that needs fixing. The economy is floundering (supposedly being repaired, but how much do they actually tell us?). The world is supposedly ending: twice. The first day, according to radical Christian group, is the day before we graduate, so perhaps us Christian kids won't have to worry about surviving the world. The second is the one that people are supposedly taking seriously, just because an ancient civilization stopped counting. If the world does end, I'll eat my words, but then again, who will I tell it to?

Apocalypse and the rapture are just the more dramatic embodiments of our shared uncertainty. We don't really know what the future has in store for us, and for people like me, it's stressful and concerning. Even those that think they have everything all nailed out will fall victim to the unpredictable nature of life eventually, just later than the rest of us. As we all stand now, though, it's a guessing game. We're graduating in little over a month with degrees that might end up being worthless, depending on how education and motivation ends up being viewed.

We all may as well throw a handful of dirt in the air. We've always hoped for glitter, but dirt is more plentiful and pretty much the only thing that we know for sure will be there (pending the apocalypse, of course).

This is why not everyone should write...

http://myimmortalrehost.webs.com/chapters122.htm


So I was forced to start reading this thank to a friend (thank you and at the same time, I hate you for making me pull my hair out).

It's a Harry Potter fan fic. I don't even know what to say about it more as a description. It just doesn't really deserve any kind of praise, though I could analyze and critique it all night.. It is supposedly the worst fan fic of all time, and I don't think I would contest that fact. Although this was supposedly written by a substantially young author, it still gives me hope that because people write like this and people don't correct them, I will have a job some day. :)



Here are a few of my favorite lines - for content and also mistakes:

"...we started to make out keenly against a tree."
- How does one make out keenly? Especially against a tree?

"Then he put his thingie into my you-know-what and we did it for the first time."
- You know, I tried to be adult about this, because I know a lot of fan fics contain sexual fantasies and all that other sick stuff... but if you use terminology like I don't think you're older enough to get things published online. At least I HOPE this is a young writer. Then again... sad sad.

"I grabbed a steak and almost stuck it into my heart to commit suicide."
- I just about died laughing because all I could picture was this girl beating her chest gorilla style with a slice of meat.

"...he yelled at Snape and Loopin pointing his womb at them..."
- I am picturing a certain "V-assist" method that was talked about once. Or being in the stirrups at a doctor's visit.


"...he said triumelephantly..."
- Insert elephant trumpet here.

"We started frenching passively.."
- Passionately?

“'Crookshanks!' I shouted at him. Voldemort fell of his broom and started to scream."
- This is my favorite. Has this person ever even READ Harry Potter? I love how Hermione's cat's name is not a curse...

"Snap was spying on me and he was taking a video tape of me! And Loopin was masticating to it!"
- Holy crap, I seriously lost it with this one. They were videotaping her and now Lupin is "masticating" to it. Nom nom nom nom - LMAO

"..came down his pail face..."
- LMAO Bucket face

“THE BARK LORD IS PLANNING TO KILL THE STUDENTS!”'
- WOOF.

"I smelled happily and went into a dark room."
- *sniff sniff* Yup, you smell happy to me.

"I put on my Invisibility coke..."
- Nothing like an invisibility coke. Ahh, refreshing and sleuthy.

"He put his spock in my you-know-what and passively we did it."
- Maybe I'm missing a new generational slag word for "penis" or the sort, but "spock" is different" To say the least, I hope it's a typo, because that image is an interesting one. Once again, passively?

"...I sent a telepathetic massage to Drako and Vampire..."
- God I wish massages could be sent telepathically.

"...I shited pointing my wound..."
- I'm trying to figure out if this can be a past-tense of "sh*t" or what. I know what it's supposed to be, but it made me crack up anyway. And although pointing a wound is nowhere as near as funny as pointing a womb, it still is an interesting thought.

"We went sexily to Potionz class"
- ...............


Okay, I cannot seriously continue. It's too much - my brain will explode. As the story goes on, the "author" completely loses any kind of resemblance to the English language, mixing their typos with an excessive amount of leet-speak (or whatever that short hand crap is).

For the past...

She's beautiful in her simple little way
She don't have too much to say when she gets mad
She understands she don't let go of anything
Even when the pain gets really bad
Guess I should've been more like that

You had it all for a pretty little while
And some how you made me smile when I was sad
You took a chance on a bruised and beaten heart
Then you realized you wanted what you had
I guess I should've been more like that

I should have held on to my pride
I should have never let you lie
I guess you got what you deserved
I guess I should've been more like her

Forgiving you, she's stronger than I am
You don't look much like a man from where I'm at
It's plain to see desperation showed it's truth
You love her and she loves you with all she has
I guess I should've been more like that

I should have held on to my pride
I should have never let you lie
I guess you got what you deserverd
I guess I should've been more like her

She's beautiful in her simple, little way



This isn't a cry for the past. This song just can fit my last situation so nicely.

Why I don't Sleep

If you know me well, you know that there are spurts of random amounts of time brought on by random events in which I either don't sleep or sleep hardly at all.

This is one of those times.

And it's not because I don't want to sleep. I love sleeping. In fact, it's one of my favorite things to do. There is little better than laying down and not having to worry about what time you're going to wake up to go do something. Dreams are a way that you can easily get away from the real world, but like that real world, you have little control about the topic they follow.

So no, I do like to sleep, and I do want to sleep. I'm more often than not exhausted and completely tired, but when I go to lay down, sleep never comes.

To explain this in the easiest way, I just can't stop my mind from thinking. As I stretch out under my covers, my mind continues to race as my body relaxes. There is nothing more annoying and absolutely maddening as having every muscle in your body relaxed, but still having your mind wide awake.

And, valued readers, it's not like I'm going through any kind of tragedy in this point in my life. Sure, I have a lot to do in the life I'm living, but I try to make it that I'm not missing any deadlines, I pay my bills on time, and I do my homework before I lay down so it won't haunt me while I try to sleep. But try as I might, my mind doesn't cease to think and worry for me as I try to rest myself up. even in my personal life, there's nothing completely pertinent that should keep me up at all hours. Those who know me know that I struggle with some things day in and day out, but those shouldn't be enough to keep me from the precious sleep that I need.

And yet, somehow, it does. I find myself obsessing over things that aren't mine to obsess over. As of late, I've been writing a story that is not of my own, trying to put my own words into situations, feelings and thoughts that I haven't been through. I find myself researching things that effect this story, things that are tangible to other people so as to try and understand exactly what happened. I obsess over the things that I don't know, and wonder if there are ways that I have overstepped boundaries, or reasons that I have given to not get these in return. I worry about things out of my control, thinking the worst and playing out scenarios of how things might be if those terrible and sometimes far-fetched worries came to fruition.

I can't help it. I don't really think anyone can.

Take sleep aids, someone has told me. Well that would be nice, but the interesting things about sleep aids is that they do knock you out, in the fact that you're no longer conscious, but hardly ever do you actually get a restful sleep with them.

Besides, in the dark and the still of the night, there's far too much that can be done instead of wasting it sleeping.

However, tonight I find myself struggling to understand something that I will never see again once I pass this class. Something that is completely useless to me as a person, and yet, because I am ambitious and crave a good grade to raise my overall GPA, I stay up until all hours of the night trying to figure the damn thing out. While I struggle with that, though, other, more interesting things call my name and I find myself once again being distracted by things that seemingly warrant my attention more.

Who the hell needs physics, anyway. I'm going to be a writer, so I'm going to write, damn it.

Falling: Do you see it happening?

Last night I was walking across the street on a well-known campus here in Indiana, and somewhere between talking to the person next to me and looking forward to the event we were trekking to, I managed to step into a pot hole, twist my ankle and fall flat on my face in the middle of the icy road.

Now, before any of you who are aware of my ever-clutzy state just roll your eyes and shake your head at me, thinking, "That's a typical Jessie thing," I'd like to qualify it with the fact that it could have been made a lot worse but I had thought ahead and put the three inch heels I had planned on wearing back in the closet in favor of my snow boots.

Anyway, as I was quite literally rolling around on the ground laughing because I realized my stupidity (and because everyone else was laughing, so I figured why not) I realized that I hadn't even known I was falling until I was on the ground and pain pierced my ankle and knee.

For those concerned, I am fine. Just a scraped up knee and slightly swollen ankle ail me now.

But as I got back on my feet and we made our way through the night without any further incident (except for me once again succumbing to my ditzy moments and whacking my head on the seemingly random handle on the passenger dashboard of a fifteen passenger van) I realized that even as I looked back on it, I definitely didn't realize I was falling while it was actually happening. Like I stated, I was simply walking and talking (a usually easy combination, unless you're someone like me, apparently) and the next think I know my hands are extremely cold because of the frozen asphalt, and the pain started.

When you really think about it, why is it that we can't consiously remember these little incidents? I imagine that my eyes closed instinctively as my body was pummeling forward to save the soft treasures within the lids, but beyond that, I didn't feel anything. You would think that as your body, especially that of an adult who is over five foot tall and holds a bit of weight, was falling towards the ground around five feet away, you'd feel a similar feeling as to if you were on a roller coaster or the like. I'm sure there's some sort of scientific explanation containing some absurdly complicated equation with force and motion or whatever, but honestly, I'm not interested.

What I'm getting at, finally, is that things like this happen all the time in a less physical way. People say often that they never really realized that they were learning something, they just had a moment where they seemed to know it. Similarly, people say sometimes when they meet someone and spend time with them that they never realized they were falling in love - they just know that they enjoy spending time with them until all of the sudden they are overcome with an abundance of feeling for that person and they can no longer see their lives without them.

Like my knee and ankle though, these kinds of realizations of falling or learning sometimes lead to much more substantial injuries. You learn something and that's great for you - in that aspect there's not much negative. But in the topic of love, there's always room for insult and injury. You fall for someone and depending on different interpretations of events and conversations, it may not be reciprocated. Or even if it is, like one of my professors said today, "All relationships end (with death being one reason)."

I guess that logic gets into the stickiness of love being both a good and bad thing, so I'll save myself from accusations of being a cynic once again and stop while I'm ahead.

I wish we could see ourselves falling though. An out of body kind of thing would no doubt be creepy and too much to ask, but if we could just stop a minute and gather our wits and know what's going on around us, we might be able to catch things before they get bad and you're crumbled and broken in the darkness that no one deserves to be.

But then again, there's always the chance that that pot hole comes out of nowhere and you're flat on your face.

From the high school reserves: Writings on the Wall

I was looking in my various mail folders tonight while unable to sleep and found some of my newspaper articles that I had sent to myself while working on the paper in high school. For those of you who know me in college, you're used to some of my current snarky ramblings in The Oak Leaves, but I had forgotten that trait had started early for me. Here's one of my best pieces from high school. Enjoy the pun at the end - I remember being so proud at that. Remember, I was 18, a senior in high school and thought I was hot shit. :)


Writings on the Wall; do they bother you at all?
by JESSICA HICKERSON
News editor

With the smoke, hovering administrators and over-use of hairspray and body spray that go along with the gossiping girls in the bathrooms here at North County, I tend to venture there only on rare emergencies.

To walk into one of the two open girl’s bathrooms is what I would imagine walking into a prison must feel like. The lock of one door is completely missing, leaving only a hole with a deadbolt cutting through it.

Between classes, there is always a gaggle of girls there talking about who wants to fight who, who’s pregnant, etc. Annoyingly, they always stand in front of the sinks that work to fix their hair. Most obviously don’t have enough common sense to go to one of the sinks that doesnt work (but still has a perfectly good mirror) so that people who are hygiene aware can actually wash their hands.

The most annoying and probably laughable thing about the bathrooms though is the reading material you get as you are doing your business. Scribbles of pencil, sharpies, and even etchings “adorn” the plastic stall walls. Most public bathrooms have some sort of graffiti on the wall, but high schools, especially North County, have to hold a record.

In the upstairs bathroom, in one of the stalls, the walls read “this skool sucks ---” Now, I would have to say that obviously the school is not doing its job if ANYONE in high school still spells the place that they have been attending for at least nine year, “skool.”

In another stall in the downstairs bathroom, there are two whole paragraphs from two very needy girls wanting advice about what they should do in a problem relationship. What’s even worse is that someone answered them!! In all honesty, would you take advice from people who spend all of their five minutes between classes in the smoggy bathroom?

However, some of these writings carry good messages. Across the toilet from the childish misspelling of school a scrawling reads, “STOP SMOKING," in big silver letters. I give kudos to this particular writing.

Writing on a bathroom wall is the lowest form of a call for attention. If you really need to write something on the wall of a bathroom while performing a bodily function, I seriously recommend a visit to the guidance office.

Perhaps they would not be so bad if correct grammar and at least correct spelling were used. There are a plethora of misused words, such as “their” instead of “they’re” and “freshman” instead of “freshmen,” which happens to be a very simple plural rule. My favorite is a certain phrase that is scrawled on the inside of one of the stall doors, “Sophmores suck.” I am not even going to explain that one, since half of the population of the school always spells the title of the tenth-graders wrong.

I highly doubt that anyone who goes into the bathroom to take care of personal business actually wants to read what’s on the wall. Personally, I don’t care who hates who, who loves who, and which sexual preference “rocks.” In all reality, those notions will probably be changed with maturity anyway.

Next time you’re in the bathroom looking at the desecrated stall walls, think to yourself and laugh about those who obviously think school is just a social function. And to those of you who think you need to write on the bathroom walls, think about who reads it and understand this: no one gives a crap.

Who Dey vs Who Dat

In "honor" of the New Orleans Saints winning Super Bowl 44 this evening, I thought I might declare my indifference (other than the fact that I hate the damn Indianapolis professional football team) to either team really winning because neither are my own choice by berating the winning team on their theft of their now well-known chant.

As almost every football-interested person might know by tomorrow afternoon, the Saints have employed a chant something of the nature of "Who dat? Who dat? Who dat say dey gonna beat them Saints?" Leading up to this championship game, the saying has grown much notoriety within the football crowd and everyone now relates it to the Saints.

However, being a Cincinnati Bengals fan, I noticed an odd and annoying similarity between their "Who Dat" and the Bengal's chant of "Who Dey" which goes, "Who dey? who dey? Who dey think they gonna beat dem Bengals?!"

So being a curious little person as I am, I did some research as to who came up with it first, what it originated from and ultimately whether or not my Bengals or the now championship Saints are the thieves.

According to one source (Wikipedia, as it were, don't judge me), "The Who Dey chant's first known use was by fans of the 1980 Cincinnati Bengals. It is similar to the phrase "Who Dat?" used by the New Orleans Saints since 1983."

This discovery seems to put the Bengals as rightful owners of the chant, which put my mind to ease.

However, upon further research, I found that this is much disputed within the field of football history (no pun intended). Fan sites all over the web claim different explanations over which team thought of it first. Saints fans claim endearingly and whole-heatedly that they came up with it first, because the origination of both sayings comes from a 1930's jazz song "Who Dat?"

As I continued to search through forums and even articles from popular sports writers about the controversy, I realized that I obviously wasn't the first to figure out this interesting little history between the two teams. It seems as if the entry made in Wikipedia might have been made by a Cincinnati fan, but who knows. In all honesty, through everything I've looked through, I can't find a definite winner. Both teams claim to the death aht they came up with it.

From an English person's view, both versions of the saying should make my skin crawl, in that the colloquial utterance of the words "they" and "that" are immortalized in such a way that can make even the most educated person look like a slummy hick. And delving deeper, if I were to have to choose the one that was "most grammatically" correct out of the two (if even such a thing can be distinguished) it would have to be the "Who dat." Considering the agreement in the "sentence" "Who that" is I guess more appropriate that "Who they." It comes down to the fact that both are lacking key articles within it anyway.

Back to the thoughtless football fan I am, I think I'll stick to my "Who Dey" chats when the Bengals play. But I must agree with some of the posts that I read that stated seeing a Super Bowl with the Saints and Bengals would have been AMAZING. The papers would have headlines reading something like "Who Dey vs. Who Dat!" And the crowd in the stadium would no doubt have countless similar vocalization wars during the game. That would have been pretty awesome. Then again, we Cincinnati fans just want to see our team in the Super Bowl again (not that I have personally seen them, since their last appearance was when I was less than a month old).

So in all reality, I guess it doesn't matter who came up with it first, seeing as the fans will love the chants and their teams just as much.

But other teams beware, "Welcome to the Jungle" is Cinci's, so back off the Guns N Roses, son!