So what do you want to know?

I read my friend Jocelyn's blog today. She posted a very honest assessment of herself, listing all kinds of things about her, both good and bad. It sort of inspired me, so I will attempt to do the same.

I'm a big chicken and can't watch scary movies. I frequently dream about tornadoes. I think that guys lie about their height. I used to listen to country music and I know how to two-step. I know how to say, "You wanna fight?" in Korean. I am the queen of the snooze button. I once snoozed for 4 hours in college. Snoozed right through my class. My dog is on a diet. I love reality TV shows like Fear Factor, Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Beauty and the Geek and The Biggest Loser. I'm in love with Fitzwilliam Darcy. I get grumpy when I'm tired. It's worse if I'm hungry too. I think 'your mama' jokes never get old. (But your mama is old.) I'm scared of sushi. I operate on Jan Standard Time, which is roughly 10 minutes behind Central Standard Time. My mind works best late at night, but that makes it hard to go to bed, which means that it's hard to get up so I snooze a lot. My parents are divorced. It freaks my mom out that I'm 28 and not married. But I think she's really only afraid that it freaks me out that I'm 28 and not married. I'm not freaked out that I'm 28 and not married. I'd like to adopt someday. I don't have cable TV and I get 99.9% of my news from here and here. I hate using the mouse and prefer to use hotkeys. I love Quicken. I like to paint my nails weird colors. I think manicures are awesome. I love Barq's Root Beer. (It has caffeine.) I'm self-centered. I'm a control freak. Sometimes people just don't get my sense of humor. Sometimes some pretty outlandish things come out of my mouth, but I rarely wish that I could take them back. I tend to wear my heart on my sleeve. You wanna know something about me? Just ask. I'll probably tell you. I'm a commitment-phobe. Marriage scares me. I still wish I could be an astronaut when I grow up. I loved Sudoku way before it was cool. My favorite movie is The Princess Bride. I wish my name was Buttercup. I like to talk about myself. (Hence, the blog.) I love asking hard questions. Oh, yeah. And I'm human.

Ouch! That's gotta hurt!

So, for those of you that have been around a while, you’ve seen some of the words studies I’ve done in the past. We’ve studied love, we’ve studied hope, and we even did an unofficial study on truth. Today, we’re gonna switch gears a little. Today’s Word of the Day is “grace.”

I know you probably think I’m going to talk about the biblical meaning of grace. And so you aren’t disappointed, I’ll touch on it briefly. Grace is undeserved acceptance and love received from another. Although the biblical words for "grace" are used in a variety of ways, the most characteristic use is to refer to an underserved favor granted by a superior to an inferior. When used of divine grace toward mankind, it refers to the underserved favor of God in providing salvation for those deserving condemnation. In the more specific Christian sense it speaks of the saving activity of God which is manifested in the gift of His Son to die in the place of sinners.

But that’s not what I wanna talk about today. For the purposes of today’s discussion, this will be our working definition: elegance and beauty of movement or expression.

This is one of those interesting cases where the exception apparently proves the rule. Let me relate to you my recent experiences with ungrace.

Yesterday, Ben and I went and saw Mr. and Mrs. Iyer at the Indian Film Festival at SMU. I had never seen an Indian film before and it was actually a pretty good movie. It’s really interesting getting a glimpse into other cultures and seeing things from other perspectives. Afterwards, we had a little Indian food. We weren't sure what it was. It looked like a juicy, orange funnel cake. Ben said he thought it was fried juice. Anyway, it was very sweet and it made me wish I had a glass of milk to drink with it.

The movie was shown in a fairly small theater on the 3rd floor of Dallas Hall. It’s a stately sort of building, with a seal of some sort on the floor and a very ornate dome ceiling. As you can see from the picture below, as you leave the building, you walk down a number of stairs before getting to the ground level.



Out in front there is a large grass field. It was a nice day, so people were out just lounging and playing with their kids, etc.

I started walking down the stairs, in my cute skirt and heels I wore to church. And then I bit it big time. I completely fell flat on the ground. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I fell DOWN the stairs. I don’t know what happened. I didn’t twist my ankle or anything. I’m just walking and then I’m on the ground. Real fast. Oddly enough, I remember thinking as I fell, “Wow, this is gonna hurt.”

I didn’t damage myself too bad. A few bruises and a skinned up shin. Oh, and a few sore muscles in my side and arm. I tried to take a picture of my leg so I could post it, but the picture didn’t turn out very well. Oh, well, it’s probably better that way. Luckily, the most injured part of myself is invisible – my ego is currently very humble… Ben thought it would be funny to preach at me: Pride comes before a fall. But I’ll just blame it on that dang fried juice.

Luckily I learned somewhere along the way to laugh at myself, so I sat there on the stairs and laughed hysterically for a few minutes. Then I took my shoes off and walked back to the car barefoot. If only there had been a hole I could have crawled in between the stairs and my car…

So, apparently, in addition to humility, I also need to learn grace. But at least I have one thing going for me: at least I can elegantly eat french fries... :)

(I did figure out what the Indian food was. It's called Jalebi.)

Rain on my parade

It just wasn’t in the cards for me to have a perfect day.

I spend hours every week compiling numbers for the boss lady. Then she found out that the numbers were automatically being generated for other departments, so she had the reports guy create it for her, too. So basically, I do nothing at my job. Here is the email that I sent to my boss.

From: Me
To: The Boss Lady
RE: I quit

Basically that little spreadsheet just made me obsolete. Can I spend the rest of the day looking for a new job? I thought about sending an email to the report guy congratulating him on the accuracy of his numbers. Can I go home now?

Jan

I love spring. It really puts me in a good mood. I found myself singing today. You know what I was singing? B2 25M. My friend Tracy has a meeting in B2 25M and I just thought it was fun to say and even more fun to sing, so I started singing B2 25M to I’ve Been Working on the Railroad. You know the end where it goes

“Fie, fi, fiddly i o
Fie, fi, fiddly i o
Fie, fi, fiddly i o
Strumming on the old banjo”

Yeah, that part fits perfectly with “B2 25M.”

Also, I’m in a good mood cuz tonight is the P&P party. What does P&P stand for, you ask? Pride and Prejudice, of course. It came out on DVD on Tuesday so a group of us are getting together tonight to watch it. There will be between 10 and 15 girls there. Sort of scares me, actually. That’s a lot of estrogen in one room. But we’re gonna get together and eat and watch a pretty good movie based on my favorite book in the whole world.

Today is a good day.

Beautiful

Here in Texas we have been enjoying fantabulous weather. For the past few days, I’ve been riding around with the windows down and the sunroof open. I’m even sleeping with the window open. I LOVE early spring. It’s a bit cool in the mornings, but by afternoon, it’s lovely.

I had to email my bro, who lives in Philly, to tell him how great it was here. On Tuesday, I checked the weather in Philly – 33 degrees. HAHAHA!

Also, just off my balcony is a Bradford pear tree. I noticed this morning that it had little baby leaves on it. Which is sort of odd since last year’s leaves didn’t fall off until the week before Christmas.

It’s okay that we don’t get much of a winter here. Spring is my favorite anyway.

The Olympics

I get hooked on the Olympics. Every time the Olympics come on, all I can do for two weeks is watch. They always show the good stuff during Prime Time from 7-11. But it’s not very good for my productivity level. It even got to where I would check the stats during the work day and then go home and watch, even though I knew what was going to happen.

But this year, I was confused by the Olympics. See, here’s the thing. I know a little Italian. (And when I say a little, I mean VERY LITTLE.) Roma is the Italian name for Rome. Napoli is the Italian name for Naples. And Torino is the Italian name for Turin (as in the Shroud of Turin.) I’m just confused as to why they used the name Torino instead of Turin. I mean, in 2004, the Olympics were in Athens, Greece. I’m sure Athens isn’t the Greek name for Athens. It doesn’t make sense to me.

But then I found this on the Shroud of Turin website. HAHA!!