Gorgeous

This is Jessie. :)

Manager?

That could describe me... soon...

I'm not sure. Marcia, my boss, offered me a job as a manager of Cold Stone Creamery last night, and I'm excited. I think I'm going to take it. The only catch is that you have to have a car, and I am carless! But Marcia knows I'm working on getting a car, so that's why she offered the job to me. She said she thought of me immediately when the current manager put in her notice.

Applied for a loan on a car, a 2003 Ford Focus. It's 4950, so that's not terribly expensive, nor will it take a long time to pay off the car.

I'm sitting in the Starbucks lobby, it's 6:52am, and I've gotta start work serving coffee in exactly, well, seven minutes now.

:)

gottsta run!

allie

Team Honduras

We've been enjoying the Houston weather, and swimming as much as the sun will allow... And today we leave for Honduras! (For those of you in the dark: my youth group is going to Honduras; we're affiliated with Mission Lazarus.) So we leave this morning about 11. The Alaska Team (there're two divisions within the Honduras Team... The Alaska Team and the Houston Team) is going out to get lunch. We consist of Judy Singleton, Faith & Patrick Hewlett, Kara Vansandt, J.D. Voss, Tim Johnson, Jeff Smith, Brenden Turney, Logan Justus, Randi Collins, Eric Johnson, and myself.

I've been taking tons of photos! I'll try to make a photo post when I return, but no promises. The photos will be on Brenden's laptop.

Well, I've got to start getting ready!

-allie

Lately

• Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
  ~Berthold Auerbach

Lately, I've been thinking about what to do this fall. I feel a bit left out, since everyone's going to college but me, probably. I mean, Jeff Smith isn't, but that's cuz he's not gradgeeated yet. Chelsea, Elmore, Brenden, Randi, and Eric are all doing their thing, except that Eric's going off to the military. It feels like everyone's so planned out, and I'm just floating along, confusedly turning to one thing, and then another. It's hard to know what you want to do when everything you THOUGHT you wanted to do, turns out to not be what you ACTUALLY want to do!

So, here's the deal. I'm probably going to end up renting a single room from someone for a while. Just a room, not an apt, I can't afford that yet. I will probably be working two jobs, ColdStone Creamery on Thursday mornings and Friday mornings, and on Monday-Wednesday mornings, working at Wallace Group Services at a desk. It's a nice change of pace, at least I have two jobs that are completely different; one sedentary and one active.

I'll look around on Craigslist for room opportunities. Meanwhile, this fall, i WILL take one class: Sinfonia! :) Again! I'm so excited. If i can pay for it, it'll happen.

I AM THE MAN

Well, I don't have much time to write a whole lot, since I have to start getting ready for work here pretty soon. I need to be out of here by 9:45 and it's 9:12 right now! O.o ...but I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite stories. It happened about two months ago.

I was riding along on the bus with Brenden, and we were chit-chatting about something. Who knows what-probably music or songs or somethin'. We heard the bus driver, at a stop, raise his voice to a passenger that had just stumbled on. "Are you gonna be good today, George?" "Mhsldfm." "George? Do you hear me? You gonna be good?" "Msdfohdmfm." Painfully drunk, a tiny, scraggly native man came shuffling through the bus and decided to plop his inebriated self down right next to us. Across from us, rather. And up a level, but still. It was too close. I could smell the stomach-wrenching reek of his alcohol. Brenden and I just kind of rolled our eyes and kept talking. I believe I was telling him about my new piece.

"What I really like about it is the harmonics that it has in the 4th measure. It's like, you're in first position, you slide up and hit a harmonic, but you have to be back down to first position so fast that it's a great challen-"

"I AM..." -pause (as I stop in the middle of my sentence)- "THE MAN."

I looked around for where that came from, but the drunk guy was slumped up against the bus window, and appeared to be sound asleep.

However, a few seconds later, here it came again. This time I was watching. It was the native guy-he looked asleep but must've just been closing his eyes. He suddenly did a full-body twitch, and yelled, "I AM THE MAN!"

(Brenden and I tried to control our spasms of laughter.)

The bus driver, profusely angry, stopped the bus, came storming back, and demanded that the man shut up. Now, imagine, if you will, a sumo-wrestler.

The driver resembles one.

Now imagine an angry sumo-wrestler.

Again, the driver resembled it.

So you can imagine the intimidation that the drunk guy would've felt. Or should've.

He mumbled something to the driver and the sumo-wrestler stalked back to the front of the bus. Just as the engine started up again, Oh Tiny One looks up through the darkness of his hat with glaring eyes and says, slurring his words, "Yeaaahh...Real..intimidating."

(Surprisingly, he didn't get kicked off.)

Of course, there was another time where we were just boarding a bus and a drunk native guy was leaning over a trashcan, swaying, talking to himself, and occasionally yelling, "I LOVE MYSELFFFFFFF!!!!!!!!"

And now it's 9:24! I really must go.

First, a dialogue between me, Annie, and the IT guy at her work.

"I didn't say you were old!" -Annie
"You said I was like fifty!" -IT guy (Joe)

"I was just joooooking." -Annie

"Well, y'know, you do kinda-" -me

"SHUT UP!" -Joe

-raising hands- "Shutting up." -me

...minutes later...

"MARIANNA! What did you DO to this computer?! It's all messed up!"

"Hey, it wasn't me! The only one who ever touches anything besides My Documents and the Internet is you!"

"Well, it wasn't me!" -Joe

"CHILDREN." -me

"MOTHER." -Joe (...silence from me) "PWND!"

my feet do me no good

my eyes feel so unseeing
galaxies floating unnoticed

my heart so useless
heavy and dull, just for decoration

i feel watched, seen
tied, sad

i'm happy but i'm not
i'm angry but at what?

i'm sad by why?
i can't see an hour from now

i can't see next week
i can't even speak

my feet do me no good
i go no where

Drifting: Thoughts

Lately, I feel that all that I've known for the past 6 years is crumbling around me. Ever since I picked up violin, I knew I wanted to go into music. Music this, music that. I was going to get a bachelor of music degree, I was going to teach music, I was going to start a strings school. I was even going to perform at Carnegie Hall. In fact, I'm still planning to do that last thing, but as far as college is concerned, I've changed my mind. No music.

I'm just TIRED of it.

I'm tired of messing up, I'm tired of having to work so hard for 6 years and not really be much better or have much more of a repertoire. I'm still going to play, yes, but I'm not planning on continuing the activities I've been involved in any longer. No more music lessons. I think I just need a break, really. Maybe I will want to continue taking lessons a little later on down the road... maybe I won't be so put off. But for now, after this semester, no more music.

Perhaps I won't go to college this year at all. Maybe I'll just continue my awesome job and focus on it for a little while. It's not wrong to drift around in life for a while. I think that was one of the things I grew up thinking: If you don't know what you're doing every minute of every day, it's wrong. Just a habit that needs to be thrown away. I've been wearing it long enough.

I'm thinking...
photography.
I've always loved it, and I've been told I'm good at it. I really enjoy it and think that my mind is creative enough to come up with good ideas; creative enough to have lots of customers. Maybe I'll go into a partnership with someone who wants a partner. That'd be neat. :) I'd enjoy that. I love to edit photos just as much as I love taking them, so perhaps someone will need a photo-editor. Now... for a camera. :)

I want a Nikon, but I'm not yet sure which kind. Randi has a d80, which I've used and I love it... Or maybe I'll get a Minolta. They're both nice and sturdy.

Just my thoughts on drifting.

I'll be doing a lot of it in the near future.