on the mend

the morning after the wedding, dad got in a bike accident.
it was ugly.

he was in the hospital for a few days, but he's home now.
i took this picture the morning of mandy's wedding before i left for the hair salon; i just think it's adorable. this was before the broken bones.

dad's doing really well, he's back at work today, but hopefully he won't have to stay until 5. to quote Anchorman, he's kind of important... people know him... he's kind of a big deal. so he's roughing it for now until he gets to commandeer the couch later.

wedding/high school reunion

oh man, it was already a week ago. mandy and nick have been to their honeymoon and back, and now are on their way to virginia where they'll be for a couple years. but before that life is all up and running, there was a beautiful wedding to kick it off.

we started first thing in the morning with the hair. this was a great way to start the day because the last time mandy did her hair like this was in junior high Decembers when she needed sausage spiral curls coming out both sides in pigtails for her ballet role in The Nutcracker.

the curlers had to be removed one by one by all of us...
it was a team effort

afterwards we went over to a clinique counter at old orchard and got all prettied up. mandy's been to this counter a few times (practice runs) and this make-up girl is pretty great.

in the afternoon we went to the hotel to get ready-ready (as opposed to kind of ready) for pictures and the evening. this picture is mandy's dress hanging out with mandy's mom.

mandy's brothers are awesome and i've known them since they were little weenies and now they're all grown up and 007-ing it.

it's almost time here - mandy's helping her dad with the final touches

nick and some of his buddies are in the navy, so they showed in their spiffy uniforms. mandy and nick walked out under... i forget what it's called, there IS an official name for it... whatever, they walked out under four swords and two of the four officers are pictured here.

mandy made her own wedding toppers - herself as the bride, and embracing her role as providing a lifeline to her deep sea diver husband :)

mandy and her dad at their first dance... this is a moment of my own wedding i'm already nervous about, my pops and i on the dance floor. he's become a little weeper, which will make a total wreck out of me.

THIS is the high school reunion aspect of the night... cassie, tyler, joe, kendra. also at this table were, at any given time, at least four other new trier victims.

HAVA NAGILA
so that's the bare bones. the day was beautiful, the wedding was full of loving people, and i had to give a speech. it went well, surprisingly; i always point out conversationally that i absolutely failed my public speaking final in college because i had to leave the room to be sick. and since then, i shake uncontrollably when i have to speak in front of people and it only nerves me out more (irony at its best). when the best man was doing his speech i could feel my heartbeat in my ears and my hands were making my fork rattle on the table. when todd handed over the microphone, i looked at mandy and made a very clear decision - i began by explaining how i wrote a speech and left it over in my purse because there was something better to say.

i had a conversation with a woman in the lobby post-ceremony, pre-reception about how i know the bride. the story is that we met behind the diving board at the local public pool the summer between 7th and 8th grade. she came over to my house that day, i slept over at hers that night, and ever since we've been anchored souls to each other. so i took a clear look at my girl and explained how i told this lobby woman that at any point in our relationship, at any day that i've known her, i've known she's amazing. and watching her grow in this relationship and in the wedding planning shows me more about her and who i love so dearly and it leaves me thankful and proud to be her friend.

then i turned the attention on to nick and said "and the guy you brought home... he's awesome. nick, i'm so proud to be able to say i adore my best friend's husband."

so cheers to mandy and nick - and the whole wedding party ;)

one of the crazier weeks of my life

today is sunday. since last sunday:
1. mandy's wedding
2. dad's bike accident
3. moving back downtown.

and now i'm in bed on sunday morning, blogging for an hour before i get ready for church. as soon as the blogger picture thing is fixed, i'll post all about it.

i'm gettin back downtown

last weekend was an uproar. i broke a heart (and my own in the process) and had a crying-induced migrane (i always get headaches when i cry, but this was blindness and nausea to boot). i went over to betsy's and she made me sit still so we could watch Rent and eat pizza. i slept it off on her very comfy air mattress and woke up sunday to go apartment hunting with my parents.

and now i've gone and signed a lease...


my new pad is in the Sandburg Village. I'm on the 15th floor, facing South.

i have a balcony with chairs and eventually chamomile tea.


this wall will house my lifelong dream of having an entire wall of shelves for all my books and collected randomness from other countries... we're going to paint the wall (and the short wall with the kitchen opening on the left)... i'm thinking a mossy green.

so i'm set to move in a couple weeks from now, i'm already packing and making an IKEA trip with mom tonight. i've never owned pots & pans before, they were always given and taketh away by whomever i was living with at the time. i'm very excited to be less than two miles from work and have a SOUTH VIEW of the city!

straight from the spider's mouth

Got it from Speak Up.
this link is hilarious.

bored-ness gone away

this weekend had three major points to it... it feels like there is too much to say, so much laughing and adoration and late-night calls to owen. frosting and song dedications and strange british men; storytelling and catching up with family and now blogging in front of the fire, going back over these fresh pictures and feeling very content.

1. mandy's bridal shower

fresh flowers, fresh food

mandy and her mom

carrie's mom made the signature book
(blue fabric & seahorses to match wedding's nautical theme)

serving up dessert

this cake from Dominics has a famous side effect... everything within three feet of it turns blue. tongues, teeth, lips, fingers, clothing, floors, countertops, everything. we discovered this when we used to work summers at the Starlight Theater at Gilson Beach. one cupcake led to another, and at one point frosting dyed our hair blue. so making every person mandy loves eat it at her shower was kind of a personal victory. grown women speaking like adults with their wild blue tongues.

2. bachlorette party: Howl at the Moon

i really dig this place. i'd never been before and thought it sounded good; turns out mandy's a regular down in florida where she's been living. oops. i didn't know. it's a dueling piano bar where you submit songs - the more you tip the bigger the show they give your music - and we got them to do a triple-threat-smackdown of the three versions of "i can't help falling in love with you." this picture is the back of mandy's head (that's what the veil is all about)

disclaimer: none of us are big drinkers. seriously. i know i'll talk about bars, drinking, etc, but this is only documented because it's mandy's first shot EVER. that's how much we're not big drinkers. but anyway, we had one here and it was very good.

so this unhappy looking fellow in the middle of us women was a brit we met. he was part of a dozen guys from england who took their boy out across the pond and to chicago for some stag fun. dude, if only i could handle taking mandy out of the country :)

3. visiting madeline rose hernandez

madeline rose, aka Maddie, tiny little sleepy thing who curled up on me and slept all afternoon. it was heaven. she's so sweet. she's the two week old baby of my cousin jeff and his wife effie.

mmmmmmuhhhhhhhhhhh

SO BORED right now. i'm sure it won' t last long.
realized i haven't posted in a week
and realized the past four days have been all work and no play.

let's rectify that, shall we?

more from the new setting

today was amazing, as is every sunday. just you wait until they start streaming the sunday messages from the church's website, i'll link to every last one.


today, dave was teaching from ephesians, talking about submission and what it meant in the way that paul was teaching it. dave said, "we have amazing human rights that we fight for, we're told that not fighting for them is a sign of weakness... [dramatic pause] ...we even have to fight for our right to party."

"just making sure you're all still with me."

the big 2-5

betsy sent me flowers :)

another chapter in the dispatch story

so for happy hallmark lovers day, instead of having a boy to have fun with, i had fun with a bunch of boys at Schubas tavern... pete francis ("formerly of dispatch") and his entourage were rocking out a valentine's day show and playing some classics.


this saxaphone player, "craiggie d," is magnetic.
he's fantastically fun to watch.


and then there is pete.


this is the best valentines day in a long while :)

took off to california

after this post is the Target story. i don't really convey in it how or why i was disappointed, but after talking with julie, here's what i'm settling on as the great disappointment: my Wunderman job is not a graphic design job. it's the Interactive Coordinator, which means i kind of run the account and make sure we're on time, within budget, that kind of thing. but after not having any job last longer than six months (except the architecture firm), and with the past four months of interviewing being completed without fruition, Target would have been the ultimate validation. i'd considered it a career job, one where i could be for years. and instead i'm taking the non-design job at the place i really enjoy, where it might segue into art direction in a year or two. part of me wants to totally walk away, but a bigger part of me wants benefits and regularity. ultimately, pervasively, i'm scared out of my mind that i'm not really any good at this but almost-good enough that i can fool most people.

so to escape this cloud over my head i took off for the weekend and went to see my amazing friend and college buddy Julie. this is julie:


she's living out in san diego, where it was 75 degrees and next to the pacific ocean, two things that are the opposite of Chicago right now. julie asked me what i want to do, anything i had in mind, and instead of going with snorkling or the San Diego Zoo, all i could think of was a lyric from Counting Crows "Long December" which goes, "It's been so long since I've seen the ocean... I think I should."

so that was the big event on saturday. we got up, met up with julie's friends for breakfast, then spent three hours collecting shells and talking about life on the beach. it was the most unbelievably perfect thing for my state of mind. julie's so good with me, we've seen each other through a lot and when we're together it's like, nothing matters enough to change us. we could meet at the beach or on the moon, and it would always be us, and it would always be easy.


so i'm back in chicago now, it's valentine's day, and i'm a little more settled than i've been. my feet have put in motion again, and even if i'm not buying the direction yet, there is one and that's something. i feel like i've lost track of what i want out of life, like why am i working and to what end? which are new feelings and questions for me, i'm usually one to be all "one day at a time" and zen or whatever. i'm typically an in the moment type of person, but suddenly the 25th birthday is two days away and the next ten years are looming. and i'm scared by my not having any clue what they'll do to me.

and on that note. crazy life events have always come along rapid fire, and i'm too used to that to stay with these feelings for very long. despite my apocolyptic forebodings, i'm pretty confident the fog will lift soon.

breaking the Target silence

so, children, today let's look back over what's happened, mellow on it, and move on.

my last post was put up the day before my big Target interview. that day i flew in to Minneapolis, was picked up at the airport by a guy with my name on a piece of paper, and taken to the Raddison Hotel. it was lovely and a little overwhelming to be given a king-size bed.


i woke up at seven last tuesday morning and got all prepped up, going over my responses to the usual questions and putting putty stuff in my hair. at 8:30 i was picked up in the lobby by two Target employees, and the pair took me on a hike through the skyways, which was unfortunate because i thought we'd be outside. i had heels, an overcoat, a scarf, and we were indoors. i showed up a sweaty mess, mortified.

thankfully the first thing i had to do was take the SATs; seriously, there were math and verbal sections. now, the woman i've been referring to as Target Lady has been telling me that this is not a test, per se, but an "assessment of how a person learns." then the Target soldier that escorted me to this point asks if i had been told about this. "Not a test, but an assessment," i parrot to her. she chuckles. i flinch inside. "It's a test," she assures me. "Then the last part is a personality test." i flinch again. then i sit at the computer for about an hour and click my way through fractions and reading comprehension.

after my non-test testing, i've regained some composure and have my first interview. i meet with the creative manager, who looks startlingly like Silent Bob. he's very nice, engaging, shows me a lot of what Target is up to, and explains the job. i'm totally buying it. we chat design and part ways another hour later. it's now about 11am. Target Lady and i finally meet, she's gorgeous and seems very fun. she's very encouraging, but keeps asking me "how it's going" and i'm not sure how to answer. to say it's great might be cocky; to say it's not is weird. so i go with a humble middle ground, saying i'm enjoying myself and enjoying learning about the work. she seems satisfied by that.

she took me up to see Silent Bob's boss, with whom i discover i have much in common. we're both from Chicago, have lived in Boston, and she's familar with three of the firms on my resume. all good signs. we have a very lively conversation in which i explain how i've had so many jobs in so little time, and how that's led to me either being entirely cog in the system corporate or a solo flyer. i've never led a team, and looking back i think that, ultimately, was my downfall.

Target Lady picked me up from boss-lady's office around 1pm and she walked and talked me to the front door. we expressed the usual closing remarks, nice to meet you, thanks for the opportunity, etc, and she told me to call Friday for an update if i didn't hear from her by then. at this point i'm realizing that i'll know by the end of the week what my next big direction will be. Wunderman at this point had given me a soft offer, laying out the package for me but not asking me to formally sign anything until the big dogs in New York approved the deal. so as i said to my HR person at Wunderman, this was not a plan A / plan B situation, but two plan A situations. it would be decided this week what would happen.

i bummed around downtown Minneapolis for a couple hours, got some lunch and called some people from a Barnes & Noble cafe. i wasn't feeling particularly confident about everything, but hearing myself talk about my work helped me realize that even if i don't get this job, i might still be a worthwhile designer.

i called the transportation company and had them come get me at 3:30 instead of the arranged time of 5pm. i got to the airport early, got to my gate, got comfortable, and read for a while. the flight home was uneventful, my mom was there to get me at O'Hare and we talked about everything on the way home. the next three days were pins and needles, i was high strung and paper-thin as i tried to imagine every senario. some of my good friends at work asked about things, and i made a point to avoid speculation, promising to share the news when it came.

thursday there was a voicemail on my phone, Target Lady asking me to call her back. the last time Target fell through, i received the rejection on a voicemail, so i assumed this might actually be the call with the offer. Friday i called back and she said they enjoyed meeting me, enjoyed my energy and passion, but were looking to go in a different direction. they were looking for someone with other experience. "Other?" i asked. "As in, more experience, or difference experience?"

"Well, different, I guess," Target Lady offered.
"I didn't get much feedback from them."

which was, to me, almost insulting. if you don't tell me where i'm lacking, how can i fill the gaps? tell me what's wrong, so if i really want to work there i'll fix it and call you again. instead, Target Lady suggested i keep checking the Target site and let her know if i see anything else i would want to apply for. Target Lady is "my recruiter," after all.

right. like i want to get strung along a third time.
that's kind of unfair, i won't deny it. i totally am taking it personally that they are HUGE and maybe can't pay attention to every little thing.

it's funny, though, now that i've accepted the Wunderman gig (still a soft thing right now, but hopefully in about a week the ink will be dry) some of my friends are telling me they didn't see me as a Target person in the first place. and i'll admit, some things about Target are frightening. like that the building they occupy (the one of eight i was in) is run like a city, with it's own dry cleaner and post office. it's very button down and professional, meanwhile i'm sitting here in my jeans and pumas. i think this place suits my personality more, whereas Target's work would suit me a lot more. right now our clients are Applebees and Jack Daniels, ConAgra foods. i would have loved to have clients like the Target House.

ah, well. that's the Target story.
heartbreak on valentine's day, it's so poetic.

I LEAVE SOON.

last weekend was awesome.
visiting my sisters is always magnificent because they are so beautiful and sparkling and their friends are so nice and hug a lot and buy me drinks and talk to me about marketing. seriously, like three in-depth conversations this weekend about the finer points of target marketing. while drinking. and during the day saturday, our family celebrated dad's birthday and my impending one by painting a serving dish at one of those places where you glaze it and they fire the clay in their kiln. it was awesome.

but on to today. this week... i got to work early again today, half the office is out of the office dealing with unrelated matters (off-site meeting, death in the family, just plain sick, etc). and i'm leaving IN ONE HOUR for the interview that might change a lot of things. very, very scared. my eye started twitching today. i just need to think of this like i think of other interviews, like deal with it as though i'm just going in to chat, imagine that there are no reprecussions. have no expectations and nothing will let you down. which doesn't mean i'm not hopeful, i am very hopeful and excited. but i can't psyche myself out any more today.

wow. tonight i'll be in Minneapolis.

birthday bash

to retro-post, i'm going to show a couple of highlights from the
miami univeristy weekend of birthday fun:


anne found us a dinner spot that was up on a mountain. mountains in ohio, you ask? it was awesome. it's this somewhat quaint town (i forget the name, sorry!) with a narrow roads and nice pubs. this restaurant is a former potter's factory, and the tables are situated inside what used to be the kilns used for firing the clay. so each table is in this little brick enclosure and they're all painted in bright colors and have their own acoustic quirks – like the one we were in sounded like everyone was wearing microphones when you stand in the doorway.
AND they served water in mason jars. that's a cool point right there.




after dinner we bummed around, freshened up, and met up with a bunch of my sisters' friends at a bar where a sweet college cover band happened to be playing obscure grunge songs that were my favorites in early high school. like Toadies "Possum Kingdom". i was under the impression that i'm the only person who remembers that one. and THEN THEY SANG HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my dad and i, which was hilarious.

so it was the usual fare, dinner and drinks with the family.
happy birthdays all around.

delirious

gave in to the cherry coke.
it's fantastic.

i scheduled a nap:
five hour drive to ohio has room for at least one nap.
BRING ON THE SUGAR BOMBS
THERE'S ROOM TO CRASH TODAY!

:)

my world is self-destructing

for the past three days:
get up at 5am
leave for work at 5:40am
get to desk at 6:45am
status meeting at 9:15am
lunch around 11am
meetings from 1-4pm
home around 8pm
phone calls 8-9:30pm
bed 9:30pm.
rinse, repeat.

today's mayhem is sponsored by Starbucks Iced Green Tea. It's the only thing keeping me fresh right now. i found out yesterday that the vending machine in the office kitchen i've never seen before carries CHERRY COKE (awesome), but the last thing i need today is a sugar bomb. i have the butterball site to map out, i'm momentarily procrastinating by blogging about it, and if i ingest any refined sugar i'll need a nap. and that's just not in the schedule.

also keeping me fresh: upcoming trips. and lots of 'em.
2/3 - 2/5 ... miami of ohio
2/6 - 2/7 ... MINNEAPOLIS
2/10 - 2/12 ... san diego!
2/16 ... my 25th birthday. that's a trip, believe me.
2/18 - 2/19 ... mandy's bachlorette party (downtown)
pictures of everything to come...

GOOD MORNING!

good morning and happy monday.
let's start the day off right.
i've been tagged by steve, the coolest kid in town, and must tag others as a result of it.
everything on this list will be linked over my lunch hour :)

here are my 4s:
Four jobs I've had:
- Wedding Photographer
- Security Guard
- Stage Manager
- Drug Counselor

Four Movies I can watch over and over:
- The Big Lebowski
- Pi: Faith In Chaos
- Metropolis
- On The Waterfront

Four Places I've Lived:
- Chicago
- Boston
- Iowa
- the SS Universe

Four TV shows I love:
- The Simpsons
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
- Six Feet Under
- Arrested Devleopment

Four places I've vacationed:
- Florence, Italy
- Havana, Cuba
- Capetown, South Africa
- Osaka, Japan

Four of my favorite dishes:
- salsa
- cornbread
- grilled veggies
- frosted mini-wheats

Four sites I visit daily:
- Threadless
- BBC News
- Speak Up
- Newstoday

Four places I would rather be right now:
- up a tree
- on a mountain
- on a surfboard
- walking around the chicago loop

Four bloggers I am tagging to fill out this meme and do something productive with their life:
Joe, Cassie, Jon, Allison

you start with a bottle...

one elegant answer to the Champagne Challenge, brought to us by Design Within Reach. i watch for this contest every year because really; what better reason to crack open some bubbly? these chairs are so cool.

pushing it

i'm getting more comfortable with editing the HTML in blogger. i added lists today (what i'm reading & listening to) down the sidebar. those links will be updated often and link right to amazon so you can check stuff out :) recommendations always welcome!

this is like, not something to write home about to any web designer, but i'm kind of excited i didn't break the whole thing...

pre-valentine

peatree
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

this "holiday" sometimes requires preparation, that's all i'm saying.
and i've only had one valentine ever, so maybe it's time to try something different? or i could just pick up some glitter and have fun that way.

this cartoon is from peatree, and it's very cool.
they have free e-cards too.

where to?

feet at the summer palace
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

some very excellent stuff going on.
Wunderman is offering me a job friday.
and i'll know by then when i'm flying up for my final Target interview.
(today i recieved the confirmation call that i do indeed get to go.)

in other work:
still working on bike jerseys for the architect bike team
starting a website for a painter
starting a multimedia press kit for elias fund
AND GET THIS
got a call last night from someone i haven't talked to in a year, who might be opening a bar and needs someone to do the comprehensive design. and my career having been what it is, i was able to list off the top of my head the people i would bring in to do the environmental design, the print collateral, the identity management, and the web site.

i'm starting to wonder if i should daydream about putting together a design team. i even have a business manager, unless my dear friend decides to move to austin TX, which looks pretty likely right now.

anyway. still not believing anything unless it's in front of me on paper. but things are really moving along nicely... like, wherever i will be a month from now is completely unpredictable. i literally do not know what next week will bring, but it will define everything after it.
(wish me luck)

alana

alana
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

this is what she looks like when she's less bored
and more indulgent of me taking her picture.

my cousins megan and alana

my cousins megan and alana
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

meg, alana, uncle kevin and auntie di were in town this weekend from michigan - these are the cousins i was talking about the weekend i was at the ohio / michigan border and my camera was broken... now you see why i wanted to take their pictures, these girls are amazing looking even when they're BORED (alana, on the right).

new setting

new setting
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

our church outgrew our building so we now meet in a local school auditorium. which we're outgrowing quickly. it's all very hermit-crab-like but with fewer crabs and more Jesus freaks :)

jon, our worship leader, decided to bring us back to our chicago roots and teach us some blues this morning, which is a great way to start the day.

giving the sake the jazz fingers

giving the sake the jazz fingers
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

apparently this makes the whole process more, shall we say, magical. for those that don't know, sake bombs are when you balance sake on chopsticks over a glass of beer, then pound the table to make the sake fall into the beer. then you down the whole thing in a couple swallows and try to ignore the taste it leaves behind in your mouth... thankfully i'd had a martini and a half by this point and was excused from the saki :)

dinner at chen's

jenna and scott at chen's
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

chen's on clark is this classy chinese restaurant where we had dinner. brad set up a reservation for sixteen of us and we had a feast underneath the sweet blue lights pictured here.

plan S

grad school.

learn flash.
reemerge and make band websites for all eternity.
slowly climb out of grad school debt for rest. of. life.
which would still be so much better
than flailing around for months like i've been doing.

hurry up and wait

just talked to miss Target. she asked me about my interview. apparently mister Target was worried that i am too oriented to the NFP side of things - she said "we want to be clear that we are a for-profit" and i was like, "yes, i'm not going to sell all my possesions and live in the mountains, i want to work. i'm a city girl. i miss things the NFP world doesn't offer, like budgets."

i feel like this hold i have there is precarious. like they know i seem pretty good but they want to make sure they can't get something better. like they're looking for someone more marketing oriented, maybe more agressively bottom-line and less relentlessly cheerful. but little do they know, I'M RIGHT HERE. DESIGNER OF YOUR DREAMS.

i'm still scared.
between Wunderman and Target, sometime in the near future i will end up somewhere in the spectrum of [unemployed entirely] and [dueling job offers, one being significantly better than the other].

miss Target told me to call tuesday and that's when i'll finally find out if i'm actually getting on a plane or if i need to work on my plan B. which by now, this many plan B's into the job hunt, is like my plan R.

little victories

fixed the picture missing on "no woman, no cry" post. see me at my most high school-est. wait, i'll save you the scrolling: it's not pretty. i look at pictures like that, condemn myself as frumpy, and thank God for all the plucking my eyebrows get these days.

enough about that.

more on target when i can pry my heart out of my mouth. a million thanks to everyone today who listened to me pick apart the minute details of the twenty minute interview that left me with no understanding of where i am in this process.

but i'm very sure they want to fly me in.
not sure enough, though, to say so positively.
but mister Target loves my work? that much i can say with confidence....
the worst part of interviews, for me, is my "chance to ask questions." cause i am TERRIBLE at it. i'm such a snotty optomist that i don't anticipate things i'll need to know, and then i ask stupid questions because if i don't ask anything they'll think i don't think ahead or something. which, let's be honest, i don't. i throw life's ribbons in the air and watch them flutter while they land, and then i read the patterns.

c'est la vie, non?

how do these things happen?

i definitely have the super mario brothers theme song in my head, complete with the sound of the coin count rolling down when the level is completed.

seriously. i wasn't allowed to play nintendo, ever.
eh?

prounounced schte-fann book-er

link to a great design presentation.
Stefan Bucher, who i've seen give this presentation twice, has now made his words of wisdom available to the general public.

also, the picture that should display below (in the no woman, no cry post) isn't displaying. i'll have to fix that after work tonight... sorry.

no woman no cry

i had the most interesting conversation last night about regrets and what we do to each other that seems to make sort-of-sense at the time but later on becomes this festering bruise you can do nothing about. this picture was taken in 1998, these are the people I hung out in high school. i can name each one for you, i can tell you grade school back stories. but to be depressingly honest, i can't tell you much about their lives now, and more to the point, what i might have loved or hated about them eight years ago. i don't remember all the little parts of our whole.

i do have some regrets, it's impossible not to, but mostly i'm the type to realize that if we meditate on who we were when we made the decision, it made sense at the time. in other words, "if i could only go back..." i'd still be that person i was then, and i'd probably pull the same shit with the same consequences.

if i could give out one healing comment, one thing to say to people i've let down, it would be that i can see now the ways i was immature. i understand now what i didn't have the capacity to say, where i should have said please, where i should have said no, where i should have said if you tell me you love me i won't leave. where i could have confronted instead of backing off. where i could have kept my mouth shut and didn't. one time where i did keep my mouth shut and the next night, he died. i've gained and lost a lot over the years.

i'm only now in my life starting to realize how my mistakes shape me differently than my successes. how, as it was put in Vanilla Sky, without the bitter the sweet won't ever be so sweet. i've always felt the weight of decisions, the decision to leave iowa, to go to boston, the decisions towards money, towards posessions, towards travel, towards building a life i never thought i'd have.

and now with the upcoming possibility of minneapolis, and the upcoming birthday – 25 next month – last night's conversation was well-timed. i feel like all my baggage is in a garbage truck and i'm poised over the big red button to unburden it. where will it go? what will stick to the sides, unyielding? i am almost healed.

being sneaky

there's been movement on Target.
talked to Target Lady today
we're going to schedule the interview
tomorrow or monday.

(i'm whispering)
(so i don't freak out too badly)

i love che and all, but...

i'd like a new quote for the headline of this blog.
any suggestions?

bad, bad, bad

i looked. i tried not to, but i looked and i drooled and i try so hard to stay above this consumer BS but if i won the lottery today this is the first thing i'd go nuts over. i would LOVE a total upgrade. my Powerbook G4 is my little child - i call him Napoleon (not dynamite) - but poor little Napoleon buzzes loudly in a way he didn't a year ago. and all this iChat, Tiger, widgets, FileMakerPro Trial, all this and more are enough to make me think about how if salaries work out, maybe in a year i can go nuts. i think i can hold out that long. maybe if i enroll in some kind of program i can hold off on the temptation of widgets.

also not helping: how cool the movies / projects are that come out of Madhouse. corporate world is hard sometimes, especially when i might be moving over to the account side of things for a while. i wish i could have a DESIGN studio... i wish i could do anything as quickly as i can think it... i hate that it takes me hours to do a website, or to get that logo just right, or whatever. i love that as soon as i hear something, my mind's rolodex starts spinning and building and then visual expression starts pouring out from the subconscious to the frontal lobes.

i love graphic design.

YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHO CALLED

it's been quite a while, and i think it's in part due to my lack of a camera... this year for no clear reason i can think of, i had no desire to take pictures on christmas OR at the new year. i was pretty bummed about missing a camera when we went to try on bridesmaid's dresses for mandy's wedding, but what's a person to do. other than get a new camera. it's the American way.

but things have been going pretty steady for a while now. i'm still living at home and still itching to not be doing that, through no one's fault but my own sense of independence. last weekend was good, some girls and i hit the MCA and then House of Blues for Bottle of Justus. but the work, oh, the work. some crazy things are happening:

last thursday i was called into HR woman's office. she had a tone in her voice that had me worried, but turns out it was her excitement about the possibility of a position for me at Wunderman that would be the interactive coordinator, a person who works with account execs and creative types to make the big picture run smoothly.

MEANWHILE
target called.
the same day i talked to Wunderman HR woman, my other friend at target called, the one who i thought i would never talk to again. she was chipper as usual, and told me i'm being considered for a more senior position in the same community relations group... hopefully this week i'll have a phone interview with a Target Man... and then if that goes well, i'd be flying up next week for the in-person face-to-face interview. if THAT goes well, then i'll start packing.

MEANWHILE, this week
just finished a logo for Nebogroup
going to design jerseys for my dad's bike group
going to do a website for a painter we know
working on an Elias Fund press kit
still whittling away on my own website

MEANWHILE
i have a cold and am seriously hopped up on ricola.
and must be stopped.
:)

HAIR. GONE.

IMG_2741
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

fourteen inches sent to locks of love, which is a win-win deal: some child somewhere gets a wig, and i get hair that isn't a perpetual ponytail.

exterior illumination

IMG_2728
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

this is a two-story reindeer that we found driving around looking at lights. i think it's the highlight of the evening (OH! no pun intended!)

benny the bull

IMG_2724
Originally uploaded by faithful nomad.

i love when he divebombs the crowd