Lettuce in My Book Bag

Grocery shopping without a car is sometimes great. I like getting out my burlap, ladybug-graphiced, Northern Ireland Tesco bags, walking to Rosauers and filling them with groceries. The problem, occasionally, is that I am over-eager in my grocery shopping, and I cram so much stuff in them that I can hardly carry them back. Especially fruit. I do love my fruit.

This method of shopping makes me feel like I am French. Apparently, that's how they do it over there. So I've heard.

Minus the Tesco bags, of course.

On Saturday, I became especially inspired (because the day was so gorgeous), and I decided to walk to Winco and spend my five remaining dollars of grocery money on apples and tangelos and cucumbers. When I was waiting in line to pay, the nice man behind me told me go ahead, because I had only my four bags of produce (and a gummy Easter Bunny sucker), and he had a cart full of ground beef and Corona and Raisin Bran.

I hadn't planned far enough ahead to bring my Tesco bags (it does require some planning), so I stuffed all my produce in my book bag, rather than take the plastic bags (I'm earth-friendly! See?). It all fit, except for the romaine. So, the head of lettuce bobbed happily over the rim of my bag all they way back to my house, constantly on the verge of falling out but never quite doing it.

It was a nice way to spend a Saturday morning.

Library

It will be a sad day when books disappear. Kindles are cool and everything, but really, nothing beats a book. Plus, if books are gone, what will happen to the libraries?

The death of libraries would be a tragedy.

I love libraries. Love, love, love them. I especially love the Spokane library that is right by Whitworth. It is a grey, painted, 80s-esque building halfway down Hawthorne Road. It is open every day of the week. On Sundays, people line up in the lobby of the library and wait for the door to open at 1 o'clock. It's a beautiful thing. I occasionally see nuns there. Not just any nuns. Blue-habited nuns riding bicycles (and if that doesn't make a good library, what does?)

I work in the campus library. I am that person who sits at the big desk on your left when you come in, who probably has a laptop open on the desk in front of them.

Yep, that's me. With the bangs.

My job is to shelve books when you turn them in and to scan your card and de-sensitize the books when you check them out. It's not to fix the copier, no matter what you may think.

I can give you your WIN-borrow hold; I can send a long distance fax, and I can even renew your books for you online via phone.

But, alas, I can't fix the copier. So please stop asking me.

Secret Life Goal and Radio

My secret ambition is to have a craigslist missed connection. Or, even better, a missed connnection in the paper! Any paper, it doesn't really matter, as long as it's there in print.

I know several people who have had a missed connection about them, including my sister (I was the one who saw it first!), and I feel like it's not an unobtainable goal.

Other things:
I have a radio show (not yet though. Not till Saturday) and I want someone to listen to it. Maybe if I'm lucky, I'll get someone to listen who isn't even a part of my own family! That would be a first, and boy, would it be swell. But even if you are a part of my family, you should still listen. It's going to be on Saturday nights from 9-11.

What I really want to do with it is to have give-aways of various (hand) baked goods, like Katie and I did last year, but that requires listeners who call in and win. And they have to live in the greater Spokane area (because I can't give you an elephant shaped-cake if you don't live here. I'm sorry; I wish that things were different) It's a lot to ask, I know.

But I'll tell you what: if you don't live in Spokane, and you call into my show to win the baked-good giveaway, I'll take a picture of it for you and email it to you. How's that for a compromise?

Cause, yeah. I basically just want some listeners, so that I'm not playing music to myself for two hours every Saturday night. Because that is a little bit sad.

If you really love me, you'll listen to my radio show.

No pressure.

I Can't Do That

One of my goals over Jan Term was to become a singer-songwriter. It was only a semi-joke. I figured that I would need something to keep me occupied an un-depressed ( and it would be a cool way to introduce myself. I could say, "Hi! I'm Megan. I'm kind of a singer/songwriter Just getting started. You know). The fact that I play the piano only a very little and have never written a song in my life failed to deter me.

I wrote approximately seven measures of a song before realizing that I this dream is probably not going to pan out. Playing the piano is not as easy as it looks.

Free concerts are the best. Whitworth has a lot of them. and last year, I decided that I would start to going to them all. Because they're there. And free! I like hearing new music in non-intense environments, as opposed to big scary concert venues full of super-intense, dedicated fans who sing along with the band. I hate that.

So, singer-songwriters=Great. Tonight, I saw two of them, and wanted to be friends with both, because they just looked so cool and happy to be themselves.

One of them looked like baby bird wind-up toy while she played the piano (in a good way! Definitely a good way), and her music sounded like a mixture of Bach, Joanna Newsom, and circus music.

The other had a low, warm and lovely alto, and she sang a song to her sister, who was in the audience selling her CDs.

And it was great and full of people watching them play their keyboard and sing their songs.

Strange Whitworth

Whitworth is a strange place in many ways. If I was picking a college now, as the person that I am right now, I don't think that I would choose it.

It's the social dynamics. The education here is fabulous; the professors are exceptional, and I love the music department. It's the other parts that are a bit off.

First, there is the fact that so many girls here want to get married. In the near, near future. There was an article in the campus newspaper about how we (women) should focus on preparing ourselves for domestic life and learning how to please our husbands, rather than on our current studies and future careers. I kid you not. That was the essence of the article. It was a ridiculous argument. And the writing was horrible.

The friends that you make in your first couple semesters here are your friends for the rest of college. At least that's what it seems like. It's hard to meet people, unless your friends know their friends or you sit next to each other in a class. There are unwritten rules of social interaction which no one talks about, but everyone knows that they exist. There is no such thing as going on a date. If you are going on a date, you are already dating.

If you are interested in a person(romantically, you know) and do not know them already, then a good strategy (and an often used one) is to position yourself near them and have a loud, witty conversation with someone that you know who also knows your object of interest. Hopefully, your love interest will be astonished at your amazing conversational skill and will come over and talk to the person that you are in conversation with (but not to you.) Then, your mutual friend will most likely introduce the two of you. And then you will instantly fall in love and be married by the summer after graduation.

Whitworth is in Spokane, so that's a bummer (I never tire of complaining about Spokane. Never.) Spokane has a high concentration of huge, ridiculous-looking trucks and is populated with middle-aged, conservative couples with a penchant for yard sculptures. They don't believe in landscaping. North Spokane is not a place for diversity of opinion.

So if you, like me, didn't make a ton of friends freshman year, then you are stuck. Unless you are an exceptionally outgoing boy who plays in a band/is loud/lived in B.J./is a theology major or if you are a girl who is in Young Life/plays the guitar/enjoys rock climbing/ is a theology major, then you probably won't find many kindred spirits.

Of course, this is a little biased. And probably not true for most people who go here. But I still think it.