veronica mars, FBI

Being home has made me realize how much I do miss my fandom. I take myself and others too seriously these days, and coming home helps me to undo that a bit. When I was working in a lab at USC, I remember this graduate (soon to be USC graduate student) tell me to remember to not change so much, in a way where I don't get all caught up academics. After she told me this, I remember other graduate students, the new ones would come in and they would start talking to her about academic things or books that they had been reading and I guess that is sort of what she meant. We get caught up in being in school that even when we don't want to be... we sort of are. I think she didn't want me to be someone who felt like they always had to be studying or being academic and realize that there are other sides to life. I was also still in my television-crazed ways back then and she told me to keep with that in a way. Don't feel like when you're at lunch you have to talk about this author or that current news event -instead talk about the TV show you saw last night. I keep thinking about that recently, and I have got to say it's pretty good advice.

So in the spirit of that, I made a Veronica Mars graphic.

Veronica Mars fans have officially until June 15th, but seriously the show is over. If it get a second chance, it would be revived as a somewhat serious spin-off where Veronica Mars would be an FBI agent. Here's my ad for it.


And my makeover.... the before + after shot.

let's get started

I think I felt a lot more comfortable posting at my livejournal account. Because when I started being honest in my posts and talking about my life, I started to lock my posts so that only my friends could read them. It was a way of censoring and just having a chance to reflect. Anyone else who goes to it thinks I haven't posted in a year and that I write of only my fandom life.

I feel real hesitant now to even write anything, because there is no way of blocking this so I really don't know what to do about it. Part of me wants to stop writing here and start a new livejournal account. Paranoid, huh? Then I started reading someone's blog and it talked about how they go about writing in their journal and made me realized how stupid it would be for me to be constantly censoring myself. I have been wanting to write in this for days but I haven't cause I thought, oh no, what if X-person reads it or Y-person reads it. If anything, this is just going to be for me, and I doubt many people will actually read it. (And if you do, don't be a lurker, comment!) So I decided instead to just censor names of people in my stories... and here I go...

the balance

I keep meeting new people and I'm like ah! You're awesome. I want to tell you all about my life. Connect. Except I realize that I can't. Because my life involves conflicts with other people that that person may know about. Or perhaps I'm a researcher, and they are the interviewee and maybe that might compromise the research. I realize that my conversations can easily turn into gossip, so I am trying to avoid that also. I just want to have open, honest conversations with people, which is so hard to do.

They put those rats in cages, don't they?

This summer I am working for 5 weeks with a professor doing research at a high school. It takes me almost 2 hours to commute, maybe 1 1/2 on a good day. I began thinking that it would be something light I could take on, and still have time for the usual leisure summer activities. In the third week, I still somewhat thought I could achieve this. But on the last day of my week, on Thursday I felt the strain on myself. Maybe it is because I am simply not getting enough sleep. I felt the stress get to me.

I am a sociology major, so basically the research methodology when we are not doing focus groups, or other forms of interviews through this qualitative work is to observe in the field, everything that we experience or see. While I usually analyze things sociologically, needing to, and needing to remember to is so tiring. I think on Thursday during lunch, I mentally checked out. All I wanted to do was eat my lunch. I didn't want to have to listen and hear what other students were saying that weren't talking to me. I didn't want to analyze anyone's actions, except relax on my own. Maybe I was just having a bad day. Maybe I should listen to Daniel Powter.

However, I think all of this, I could deal with. Yet, unlike maybe other types of research, like for instance, chemistry or biology is not as emotionally taxing. We started talking about reciprocity in our research on Thursday before we left the site. I think maybe this is where I felt a bit helpless. I want to be able to give back and help these students either in if it's just talking about my own experiences with race, or giving workshops or whatnot. It was so frustrating leaving the school day with that somewhat sense of helplessness. I started calling all my friends because I just needed to get it out. I reached Mara, and I basically verbally vomited on her how I was feeling.

I go back to the school tomorrow and only have 2 more weeks left. On the other hand, I feel like a total academic nerd because I love doing this. When I did my research last year with elementary school students, I think that was the most fun I had writing a paper. I think after my interviews, no matter how they go, I am excited that I did get to learn about this person and get to see life through their eyes.