| SwankiVY's Life Story! |
SwankiVY's College Years! Be sure and click links and thumbnails while reading for the multimedia swankivy experience! Or see them all in one place here: Summer 1996 . . . Before entering school . . . So I moved out of my parents' house at age 18 and moved into an apartment with Meggie's friends John and Dena. They gave me an organized guide to the apartment's inside jokes so I'd understand what they were talking about. Very fun people. I was given part of the summer to acquaint myself with the city and get settled in. I got my student ID for University of Florida. I discovered I could climb on the roof of the apartment and had some fun doing that. I got partially unpacked and did some exploring on my bike. I was very proud of myself for managing to use a map and get myself to a local hotel/convention center called the Reitz Union, and when I completed this great feat I bought myself a frozen yogurt to celebrate. :) I hung out with Meg a lot, though at the time she was into the "Campus House" (a Christian group) and always wanted me to tag along with her, which I did a few times. Later in the story she ended up having to distance herself from those people because they largely treated her like butts. That's another story. I had to go to "Preview," my college's intro program, and my parents came for that. It was kinda dorky. I felt somehow more mature than the other freshmen because I lived in the town and knew a bunch of crap about the area already. I was feeling very liberated and creative, so I started going to poetry readings and doing some writing. While hanging out with Meggie and her friend Liz one day and getting annoyed over perverted X-Men fanfiction, I decided I wanted to write a completely original novel and went home on July 31 to begin writing the first book of The House That Ivy Built [link goes to my writing page for info on the novel]. It took me two weeks of sleepless nights and crazy wandering around at 3 AM at Denny's, but I finished my novel before school started and was very proud of myself. This was a huge landmark in my life as a writer, since this book was to shape a bunch of the rest of my life. I named my main character Ivy (using my own nickname for her, not realizing that it would later make things confusing), and she was the source of lots of fun for me in the following years. I started doing my hair funny in a style that required seventy-two rubber bands, and kept that individualistic style for a full six weeks before giving it up. In an attempt to get in better touch with my character's mindset, I did some of the weird things she did (like eating breakfast while sitting on the refrigerator), trying to think of better ways to portray her. I doodled some early drawings of the book's main characters and got to know them a little better. I biked around the town and sometimes ended up in a bookstore or a restaurant just poring over my manuscript and attacking it with white-out. I was sort of sharing a room with John at the time, which was kinda weird, but he was going to eventually move into the back bedroom once our subleasing third roommate, James, moved out. So I think I didn't set up my computer right away. I didn't really mind being crowded. But once John was no longer in my room, I got to decorate it how I wanted. Mia came to visit at one point and I made her read my book. I don't know that she really cared for it but she laughed in the right spots. She seemed a bit more interested in looking for stuff about Ween on the computer and trying to find a Japanese pen pal. Hmm. I continued to go to the poetry jam at the Civic Media Center, meeting some interesting people. I met one guy named Chris who was nice but a little wild for me (I went with him and a bunch of his friends to the movies and I was afraid for my life at how he drove), but later I got mad at him because I was talking to him about my new book and mentioned something about having an experimental drawing of my main character in my notebook. I hadn't been intending to show it to him but somehow he ended up trying to GRAB it from me when I opened the notebook for some other reason, and I ended up crunching it and almost destroying it by trying to stop him from seeing it. (It survived, crumpled, but I was shy about my new stuff and didn't want to share it with him just then.) When Meggie met this guy at the pojam, she growled at him because he was apparently trying to impress me and she didn't like that. She always did want to protect me. :) Before school started, I helped Ammy (my chorus friend from high school) move into her dorm and spent the night with her. We doodled some pictures of characters from my book and she read some of the novel, and we got to experience the drama of a crazy loud roommate who'd dominated the room with her stuff and had ear-splitting conversations on the phone, balanced with the homesick roommate who cried part of the night away as a result of missing her boyfriend. I didn't envy poor Ammy living in a triple. . . . Boy was I glad I had an apartment. Freshman year, fall semester So, I was a music education major, and at UF the College of Fine Arts did things a bit differently; unlike most other majors, you were supposed to spread your "Gen Ed" classes across all four years instead of getting them out of the way in the first two years. This makes things difficult if you decide to transfer outside the College of Fine Arts, as I would find out later. But for my first semester, I had but one Gen Ed class: College Algebra. Everything else was music-related. All music majors had to be in an ensemble, so I auditioned for University Choir and got in as one of the only freshmen. It was a big SATB choir (I sang soprano) and most of the members didn't really act friendly toward me. But that was probably because most were so much older--some were even grad students--and a lot of them were in the music frat. Besides my ensemble, I had to take an instrumental skills class--I chose Brass, and learned to play both trombone and trumpet during this semester. I took a class called Musical Styles, in which we studied the types of music and their history, and met my good friend Jessica, who had spotted me during Preview and decided she wanted to be my friend because my hair made her think I must be the only interesting person in the room. She had decided then and there that she would acquire me as a friend, so she invited me to sit by her on the first day of Musical Styles class and the rest was history. We used to make fun of our teacher and draw horrid pictures of an annoying classmate we called "Dumbguy" [link goes offsite], and we participated in Turkey Cursing and Wear-A-Fish Day.
I was also enrolled in a diction-for-singers program, and this semester I took English Diction and Italian Diction, where we learned the International Phonetic Alphabet and performed songs. I also had to take my music theory class--very intensive class--as well as the required piano skills class and my voice studio. My studio teacher was a temporary sub for the year--Dr. Andrews. For her class, she worked with me individually to choose songs, perfect them, and sign up to perform my required number of times for the semester. I was also required to hire my own accompanist, which was very stressful. I worked with a lady named Terri, but I had happened to choose her name off an announcements board while most of the other students worked with people who were already doing a lot of accompanying for the classes, and I was the only person working with Terri. She found it inconvenient to come out to the college, but she was a good sport about it. Besides regular classwork, scheduled practices with my accompanist and practicing piano and singing in the practice rooms, I was enrolled in the mandatory "recital attendance," for which I had to attend 15 concerts during the semester and collect slips to show I attended. I found a lovely "hidden" passageway in a hall to the balconies and usually sat up in the window to listen while drawing or doing homework. I also did homework or practiced my trumpet on the library roof or the roof of the auditorium. Jessica and I sometimes attended our required recitals together and entertained ourselves by doodling on the programs. I also rustled up and revised my short story "Moonlight" from high school--the one my English teacher had snubbed--and got it in decent shape. [Link goes to the full story on my short stories page.] I also had to go to a lab now and then to participate in a weird project someone was doing with vocal students--they were testing our voices and how they change over long periods of time taking voice lessons. In issues unrelated to school, in September I met a friend named David in a local bookstore, and stopped in to talk to him now and then. I also liked talking to a guy named William in a comic book store, but after that place shut down I fell out of touch with him. I hung out with Jessica and Meggie and some other school friends. I started eating things that were very bad for me often because there was no one to tell me to stop. I wrote a few songs and lots of bad poetry, and performed some at the CMC. Quite a few of my poems from that time are still amongst my favorites. Here are some poems from early in my college career (and if you follow the links, they take you out of the life story and onto my Poetry Page): "Free," "Girl," "Life in a Symphony," "Nine," "One Masterpiece," "One Side," "Unwilling Baby," "Up All Night," and "Your Life." I started getting to know my way around a computer well enough to edit my novel on it. I also learned to use the microphone and voice recording program on the thing and was delighted by the concept of being able to sing harmony with myself. I recorded me singing part of a They Might Be Giants song, part of a Ween song, and my own version of the six-part "Higher and Higher" harmony song I'd done in high school (but the recording quality was pretty terrible). Last but not least, I was able to screw around in the Paint program and make myself a funny personalized desktop wallpaper and a doodle of my Ivy character. I started an account on the telnet talker MuMu Land--the one Phil had shown me when I was still in high school--and met some very good friends on there. Their screennames at the time were blink, Rowan, and ShogunQ. We formed a little gang on the talker and chatted a lot, and we had plans to meet and go to Six Flags or something. Some other chatters offered to read my book and gave comments. It was very enlightening. Some of my MuMu friends ended up being people I chatted with on the phone as well. That was also when I first started talking to Jeremy, a.k.a. artman, and he was someone I'd be keeping around for many years to come as well. I also found out my parents had gotten AOL again--an unlimited plan!--and it didn't cost extra to make more screennames, so I got my first permanent AOL screenname: SwankiVY. I unearthed my list of Internet contacts from high school and got back in touch with a few of them, including the girl who'd kidnapped my Space Ghost tapes. And guess what? She had disappeared not because she was a jerk and I'd gotten suckered, but because she'd been distracted by a long illness her husband had had. She not only agreed to send the tapes back to me--which she did--but she made me Space Ghost-themed address labels on her printer, with my new college address! I was so happy that my naïveté hadn't screwed me over and there really were good people in the world. Yay! Sometime that year a cop caught me on campus riding without a light on my bike. Did you know you can get a ticket for that, even if you don't have a license? But I got off with a warning because the guy didn't have any of the forms he would have had to fill out on me. Lucky. I missed my family and Mia, and we communicated by phone and letters. I got visits sometimes. But on the whole I loved living away from home. I really started branching out, being more self-sufficient, and embraced making my own choices. I resisted for a while but ended up giving in to the urge to start writing another book, so Ivy-book #2 began to trickle out of my pen [link goes offsite to the novel's info page], along with occasional cute drawings of the characters. Sometimes I hung out with my roommates and watched Star Trek: Voyager (there was a game we played in which we would fling wrapped slices of cheese at the screen if someone said something cheesy, which was often), and we'd go out to restaurants or screw around watching Space Ghost or listening to music. Dena took a music appreciation course and I actually got to help her once by taking her up into my secret passageway and giving her guidance on the answers. (It was a class for non-majors, so everything seemed really simplistic to me, but Dena was a business major and this was not her thing. She sometimes got mad at John and me and told us to "go color our homework," since we were in the Arts college and by her estimation she was the only one of us who was in a "real" degree program. Meh, we had fun anyway.) In October of that year, I got to see They Might Be Giants in concert, and then in November I saw a college production of the play Into the Woods that my roommate John was in. He played the Mysterious Man and his costume looked like Waldo on crack. It was hilarious. He was also playing the father of someone who was older than he was. What a great play. I saw it with Ammy. I found I had to practice a LOT with my music. I was good at music theory, but most of it was new information and it did not come easily to me (except for the ear training; I have really good pitch). I was not a very good pianist, and practicing those scales and chord progressions really killed me. The Brass Skills class put a trombone in my hands, and I was honestly too small of a person to handle it well; I physically could not reach one of the slide positions (though I did better with the trumpet). And I had to perform all the time for my voice class. Sometimes it was just for our small studio group of kids who all had the same teacher, but sometimes we had to do "combined studio," and that was a bigger deal. I performed a song called "Come and Trip It" for my first combined studio, and my second performance was a song called "I Love All Graceful Things" (which I loved singing because it showed off my really high notes). My other songs that semester were "Se tu m'ami se sospiri," "Caro mio ben," "Se Florinda e fedele," "Alma del core," and "The Daisies." I liked singing in Italian, but for some reason my voice teacher didn't seem to want to recommend any songs other than Italian or English. (Maybe because it coincided with my diction classes?) At the end of the semester, I committed a rather odd botching of things and slept through three finals in the same day. Somehow I still managed to get good grades in those classes. In fact, I had good grades in everything but math; I got a D in the College Algebra class. I received A's in Chorus, Music Theory, and Piano I; I got B+'s in Brass Skills and Diction; and I got B's in Musical Styles and my voice studio. For the studio, we had these rather nerve-wracking "juries," which involved singing for a group of voice teachers and getting critiqued. It was tough to choose the right songs and perform them. Actually, being a music major is tough all around. There were also juries for music theory, involving sight-singing, interval and chord arpeggio singing, and play-and-sing exercises. One of the things I'd slept through was the ear training portion of the test; what was funny was that the teacher said "Ehh, I'll just give you an A." (Because I always aced the ones in class, so there wasn't really a question. I just thought that was hilarious.)
During winter break I visited my family, and I got to go to my old high school for a visit as they were still in classes. I visited with my sister, Mia, and Heather. And when I came back I had a great visit with Victor--ShogunQ on Mu--who has the distinction of being the FIRST friend I met on the Internet who I later met in person! [That link goes to the full gallery of our visit photos, though a select few are above.] We had a ton of fun and made a video that was sort of like "Bruce the Duck" (except it was with characters from an X-Men humorous rip-off called X-Squad), and I ran around on a roof while he videotaped me, and we "hacked" one of the school buildings to run around inside it at night. It was great.
Freshman year, spring semester So, back to school with me, and this time the non-music class was a requirement for music ed majors: An interesting class called Teaching Diverse Populations. I wrote a lot of papers on diversity and interviewed some people and went to some events, and really enjoyed the class enough that I chatted with the teacher afterwards sometimes. (He wore a cowboy hat for some reason!) I interviewed a representative from a gay student union, went to religious services from backgrounds foreign to me, and went to see the play "Home" for Black History Month for the subject of my field observation paper. A few of my music major classmates were in that class, and they seemed to really hate it and did terrible on the papers . . . it was a pretty shocking class in some ways, though. The teacher made us watch the movie Kids and read articles packed full of incredibly foul language (and I mean worse than the f-word). I wasn't bothered, but I was certainly surprised. As for music, it was a lot of the same as the first semester: More University Choir, more diction (this time French and German), more Theory of Music (in which I learned to part-write!), and more piano and voice studio. I had another skills class--this time it was Percussion Skills--and a neat class called Introduction to Music Technology. The first part of that class was basically "here's the on switch; here's how to work the mouse" and the third part was how to use a music-notation program, but the middle part was on making Web pages. We had to learn to do this for the class, and my obsession with the medium began. My page started as a lame list of links and a collection of information about music technology--a requirement for the assignment--but after that was over I quickly made it mine and started building it in earnest on the grove.ufl.edu server. (An online friend, Adam, helped me figure out a few important things about coding while hanging out in the school computer lab together, and he and I had a couple picnics, but I lost track of him after a while. I think he graduated.) I also did a volunteer placement at a school, where I pretty much just went and met with a gifted kindergartner and we read books together. Most days li'l Cameron was cool but some days he seemed to dislike me. I dunno why. The big sad thing at the time was Meggie moved back to Tampa. It seemed we were doomed to not get to live in the same town. So even though many of my pals from high school were still living in Gainesville, this was a really awful thing for me. Phil and I did start to be on better terms again--he'd decided he could be around me without being disappointed that I wasn't his girlfriend or feeling bitter about the ending of our relationship--and we sometimes met for late-night Denny's trips. In my free time, I came up with lots of silly things to do. I rode around town going to my favorite places: Books Inc. to talk to David and buy used books, Hyde and Zeke's to buy used CDs, the Reitz Union poster sale to get decorations. I collected candy and made myself a "candy drawer" in my desk, and I also liked to keep several containers of baby food in my desk, which I would eat with a spoon. I wrote a neat short story called "Grace." [When I link a short story title, it'll be going to the short stories page offsite in case you want to read it.] I continued to meet people from online here and there. I met a guy named Jeff and we hung out together. He really liked my hair for some reason and was always calling me "cute" until I threatened to hit him. We went to poetry jam once, and I got him interested in Ween. Turned out he kinda had a crush on me, though, and when I reminded him that I don't exactly work that way, he was distant for a while and ended up jumping almost immediately into a relationship with another girl. I just kinda shrugged. University Choir continued to be mostly unfulfilling, even though it was now my second semester. Incidentally, once music majors got to second semester they were allowed to pledge the music-related professional fraternities, and there was this girl in my class who offhandedly asked me one day what time the pledge barbecue was. When I told her I didn't have anything to do with that group, she looked confused and couldn't understand WHY I would not be PLEDGING. She said, "Aren't you second semester?" Um, yes. When I revealed that that was the case, she tentatively touched my knee, leaned over, and said softly, "You know . . . they'd TAKE you. . . . " It was easier for her to believe I was afraid they would reject me than it was to imagine I WOULDN'T WANT TO BE IN IT. (This should give you some idea of why I did not fit in in that class.) Vocal studio continued to be demanding, along with the piano classes. I kept up, but it was SO much practice. The percussion class was a lot of fun even though I wasn't that into drums; I did very well in it and I liked my teacher, and I liked that practicing my instrument didn't piss off my roommates like when I was on trumpet. The German diction class wasn't bad--I'd sung in German before in high school--and I was able to double some of the songs I performed for the diction class in my studio so I had fewer songs to learn. French diction was more difficult because it was pretty foreign to me, and because it was more demanding we only had to choose and perform one song for that part of the class. I ended up choosing a song and the teacher vetoed my choice, saying she'd recommend just about any song but that one. (I liked it because it made use of the higher notes, and I liked the idea of singing high A's, but she said it had a loud piano part and was just too powerful a song for my delicate voice. Weird, eh?) In any case that ended up leading me to a really beautiful song called "Au Bord de L'eau," and it's probably my favorite that I sang in my whole time at UF (even though it wasn't even for the voice class). For Studio, my English songs were "What if a Day" and "This Little Rose." I did two Italian songs--"Le violette" and "Si, ma d'un altro amore"--and then I got to learn the German songs ""Heidenröslein" and "Mondnacht." ("Mondnacht" was really not my style, but I liked "Heidenröslein.") Every song done for Studio had to be translated so we understood what we were singing about, written up in International Phonetic Alphabet, and memorized (as well as performed in character as much as possible).
The end of spring semester brought me six A's--Diversity, Percussion Skills, Chorus, Music Tech, Music Theory, and Piano--and B+'s in Diction and my voice studio. Our chorus class had an awards ceremony full of gag awards. I wasn't too excited about the fact that they gave me an award that insinuated that I was a huge airhead. (I gather that it was a reference to how I often ignored the teacher's attempts to start class by continuing to read whatever book I was enthralled with at the time.) Most of the awards were in very poor taste. They even made fun of one member by saying no one knew who she was unless you mentioned she was the girl with the big boobs. Not funny. The end of the year became even sadder for me when it turned out my friend Jessica was changing majors. I thought I was never going to see her again. Summer 1997 This is the one and only summer I had off during my entire college career. I had a deal with my parents that they'd cover my living expenses by giving me $400 a month, but only if I was in school and if I kept my scholarship. But since summer classes weren't on my agenda I had to get a job. I landed a summer job at Baskin-Robbins doing a night shift. I enjoyed it--and ate LOTS of free ice cream--but got fired about a month later because I was the first person to screw up after the management over-hired. I overslept into my shift and they tossed me at the first offense. I was very upset; I'd never been fired before! I tried a very brief stint with telemarketing (sort of--working with the Paralyzed Veterans of America trying to get donations), but that was awful and I quit in about two days. While looking for a new job, I was revising my first novel and trying to learn about submitting it to publishers, though of course it never did make it to publishable quality. I still hit the Poetry Jam all the time, creating such gems as the blasphemous "Modern Goddess" and its sequel, as well as a piece I called "Rant for the Ranters" (an objection to the campus preachers who were always accosting me when I biked through the Plaza). Some cool people--one of the hosts, Jimmy, and a cool local poet named Jerry, and a cool artsy guy named Blake--were fun to talk to and hang out with. I also met a guy named Sushil at a bus stop, and we randomly started talking and found out we were both writers. We exchanged e-mail addresses and ended up editing each other's books. Weirdly, I also met a guy named Will online who turned out to be his roommate! Small world. Small city. In August I got to go see Ween in concert with Jeff and his girlfriend. (He later married her. And divorced her in the same year. Hmm.) I got word that Meghan had decided to get involved in a romantic relationship with Phil's younger brother, which surprised me, but I was glad she had someone even though it was someone I hardly knew. I joined the FLIGHT fan club over a book I liked a lot by Vanna Bonta, and communicated a lot with other members of it. I got kind of involved and designed a tee shirt for the group, and became the official distributor for it until an important date related to the book passed. I wrote a new poem called "Steps" and read it at the Jam. My parents took pity on me and helped me out for my last month or so even though I hadn't gotten a job.
Sophomore year, fall semester The reality of what I was training for fell on me like a ton of bricks, and I became rather unhappy with my choice of major. I had ended up joining CMENC--the College Music Educators' National Conference--and becoming a music teacher seemed so . . . not right for me. I enrolled in the Introduction to Music Education class, in which the teacher graded hard and seemed personally insulted when we missed questions--it was, after all, out of the textbook, which he'd written. This was also the year for which they found the new permanent fourth voice studio coach, Dr. LaFond. He became my teacher and I didn't get along with him at all. He was always appallingly late with no apology to my lessons--I'm talking twenty, thirty minutes late to a fifty-minute lesson, which I could not make up--and then acted mystified as to why I was not prepared to perform my quota of songs. Also, my accompanist, Terri, kept a planned date with me to discuss the semester's schedule, and when she arrived she informed me that she wouldn't be able to accompany me this year and promptly disappeared from my life. I had to hire a student from the piano studio, and she was already overwhelmed with her own classes so working together stressed us both out. It was not a fun semester, and plus there was an older sort of fratty dude in my music classes who kept picking on me and acting like it was funny. For my Skills class I took Woodwind Skills, in which I learned flute and clarinet, and I was again in University Choir, piano, and music theory. My Gen Ed class this semester was Introduction to Computer Software, which had enough math in its Excel unit to qualify it for a math credit (I needed that because the D in College Algebra didn't earn me any credit!). I didn't really like very much of the music we did for University Choir that time, which was unusual; usually there were a few songs I liked, but it was all very demanding music and yet not enjoyable. (My favorites were "I Have Had Singing" and "My Spirit Sang All Day," but we had this long string of German songs that just didn't appeal to me and seemed to just go on and on.)
I tried to keep my spirits up, though, and continued to be my silly individualistic self. I wore a costume to school on Halloween (I was Electra from a comic duo my online friend Bunky made up), and was pleased to see some other people wore costumes too. I was still hitting the poetry jam pretty hard, not always able to bring new material but frequently reciting repeat poetry or excerpts of novels and short stories. Sometimes I just listened to poetry while doodling. I took my flute from the Skills class and accompanied myself on a horrible silly song I don't remember properly which I know was called "Child of No Man's Land," and I did an equally melodramatic but better-executed song called "Night" [link lets you listen to a clip of it]. I wrote new stuff when I could, but sometimes I just liked to perform, and I remember doing a piece from Rent once. There was a series of poems I wrote inspired by a recital I attended; I wrote a poem in response to almost every song the performer did, and a lot of them were cheesy, but it was fun to sit up in my little alcove all alone watching the show from the hallway to the balcony, writing. The pieces I'll share (linking to the poetry page) are "Daughter of the Wind," "Graveyards," "Hidden Sights," "Memory," "Ocean's Memory," and "Only When It Rains." For leisure, I was spending a lot of time enjoying music, making crafts for my friends, watching the occasional episode of the new show South Park, and chatting online. I didn't do a lot of television and movie consumption during my college years, but I did acquire a few new musical loves (Moxy Früvous, The Arrogant Worms, Dar Williams, Loreena McKennitt, Blümchen, and some musicals, to name a few). Blinky Laura got me into the Dangerous Angels series by Francesca Lia Block (and I went on to appreciate almost all of her work over the years), and I also liked the Sandman comics (what I read of them). I continued to find cool people on the Internet and hang out with them after meeting in real life. There were a couple of people named Chad and Tricia, and a guy named Gavin I had lunch with a few times; there was a dude named Shawn with whom I hung out until he moved, and I met a girl named Carey and a guy named Steve. I don't remember quite when I met Steve, but he liked my writing and we used to talk a lot. At the end of this semester, my business major roommate Dena graduated, and Mia moved in. She brought her boyfriend Reuben along with her, and they kept to themselves much more often than I had expected; we'd been so close in high school that I thought it'd be a blast rooming together, but she didn't seem very interested in anything but him by that point. My mom was very upset about this situation--her having her boyfriend living there--and she told me that for every month the boyfriend was living there unapproved, my rent was going to get docked a hundred dollars. That annoyed my roommates as much as it did me, but happily my parents didn't actually follow through with it. I didn't like having the rent held over me for control of what went on in my apartment, but I was kinda stuck with it since I after all was getting a free ride for my living expenses. After four months (!) Reuben found a job and was able to move out. I don't remember very well what the songs were for this year's voice studio except that it was a huge struggle. My teacher would show up late for the lesson after I'd been standing outside his door for half an hour, say something that wasn't really an apology (like "I couldn't find a parking space"), and then we'd charge in and work on songs while he told me really weird things like "I can tell singing is very painful for you" or something like that. He was one of the least empathetic people I'd ever met, and it confused me. He repeatedly said I wasn't ready to perform and actually wouldn't LET me do the amount of performances I was supposed to in order to fulfill my class expectations, and I have to wonder if it ever crossed his mind that I was receiving twenty- or thirty-minute lessons most weeks when they were supposed to be almost an hour. I think we recycled some of my older songs, and I know I did the song "Ouvre ton coeur" which was new that year (and not at all well-matched for my voice). My accompanist and I had a meltdown at the same time and we went to my voice jury having both stayed up all night working on our stuff. I also had to perform my piano final--a memorized piece called "Lydian Nocturne" [link lets you listen to me play the piece]. The whole experience was pretty terrible. I ended the semester in a not-so-happy state, collecting only two A's (piano and choir), one B+ (Woodwind Skills), three B's (Music Ed, Music Theory, and my voice studio), and one C+ (the computer class). Our University Choir had Secret Santas and I got a really nice gift from mine (which was probably a first for me in my life), and it ended up being from the guy who'd been picking on me since I'd started school; turned out he'd started to feel bad about bothering me and requested me as his Secret Santa so he could have an excuse to give me something nice. I kinda felt like it was too little too late, but it was also a nice gesture and it was nice to know some people who act like jerks can turn themselves around. (The South Park shirt he bought me was absolutely huge, though.) Sophomore year, spring semester Time for re-evaluation. I had been pre-registered for my usual music classes, but during the narrow little window of the drop-add period, I panicked and decided I wanted out. University Choir was doing some horrendous piece and I was facing another semester with a voice teacher who didn't want to show up to my lessons and yet another open slot for an accompanist. I talked to a counselor and changed my major to Elementary Education. (I had to stop participating in the experimental program that was testing voice students' progress, too, because I wasn't going to be taking studio anymore, and the gal doing the experiment was very disappointed. Aww.) I hate to say it, but the main reasons I picked it were to avoid a thesis, avoid too much math, and still get a degree in four years' time. But since I was transferring outside the College of Fine Arts, I was flagged big-time as being behind schedule on my Gen Ed. I was immediately thrown into an entirely Gen-Ed-saturated curriculum, which is difficult to handle when none of the classes are related. At least I had a couple taken care of with earlier classes, and I didn't have to take any English classes at all because my high school AP scores meant I was exempt. I took Anthropology, Introduction to Weather, Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics, and Introduction to Philosophy, plus an education course required for Ed majors entitled Introduction to Education. This last was taught by a laid-back Canadian, and my friend Jessica was in the class! She'd changed to Elementary Education as well, so now we had more fun to look forward to! We made fun of a boring classmate who was one of those guys who goes back to school in his fifties or something and who insisted on volunteering to answer questions with really long anecdotes, taking up class time. (We drew pictures of him and referred to him as "Big Stupid," which later evolved into "BUS" as we decided he was "Big Unbelievably Stupid.") I taught Jessica how to write in Oatanese and she tried it a few times. I was required as part of the class to volunteer (not exactly a volunteer position if you're required, is it?), so I did so and did some work as a tutor at the One Room Schoolhouse. That was my favorite placement, but it was still kind of a drag. I used to go to Intro to Ed, hang out with Jessica until it was time to go volunteer, and then do that, after which I'd bike home and meet my friends in the Plaza of the Americas for lunch. One time we even had a weird movie party at my place, gathering the strangest videos we could find and watching them. My contribution, Forbidden Zone, was dubbed the weirdest. Mike G. was a new friend on the scene as of this year, and we had a blast. He was an English major I met at Pojam, and he and Mike P. and I used to hang out, along with his friends Bill, Phil, and Ally. We'd go to Pojam, hang out and some of them would get drunk; we'd eat home-cooked meals, or go to parties, or bake bread. I remember we used to light an empty bottle of Goldschläger on fire because it made a neat effect. They made fun of the way I brought a can of Spaghetti-O's and ate them out of the can. During this time I also often hung out at Mike's dorm and we made vegan food, because he was a vegan. It was nice to have some new friends around, because Meggie wasn't around anymore, and I was still bummed that Mia wasn't turning out to be the Funnest Roommate in the World. I spent a fair amount of time chatting to online friends too, and some notable ones were Fred (whom I met through Jessica) and Ronni (whom I had written after viewing her Web page one day). I went through a phase of writing a lot of stuff specifically with the Poetry Jam audience in mind--they were a rather offensive and irreverent lot, and I played to that a bit with my short stories "Dear God" and "Derika & Emily." The philosophy class was great fun, and was taught by the head of the department. I got interested in the subject and went to a few philosophy-related lectures with classmates who were sorta-friends, and I did well in class writing papers in which I chased myself around in logical circles. The math class was just the lowest level math available, because I kept flunking math-related stuff. Mike's dumb frat-boy roomie was in the class, so I figured I'd be all right. It turned out to be pretty easy. And Anthro was awesome. It was largely a lecture class, but it had a lab component and our experiments were fun. I even got to prick my finger and test my own blood to find out what kind I have. I'm O-positive! I wrote a lot during this time, and thoroughly enjoyed more online friendships, some of which later became "IRL" friendships. I met a guy named Brian, and hanging out at his house brought his roomie Jeremy into the picture too--we later went to an anime convention together. Fun. (I think I also met my friend Donnie through them, but now I can't remember. In any case Donnie liked anime too and sometimes we hung out and watched it.) I met a guy named Aaron online and we used to go to Denny's (I brought him to Pojam a couple times), and he was a writer with whom I enjoyed talking about our art. We ended up hanging out with a Pojam guy named Karl, sitting around on my porch, and we had some great chats. (Karl was one of those people who moves around a lot and just kinda is a modern nomad, and I actually still hear from him now and then by e-mail. Aaron I mostly fell out of touch with after he moved away.) I met a guy named Raúl who was also a writer, but he was only an online friend, and I also met my music-and-language-buff online pal Richard. Many years in the future, Richard and I would still be exchanging long e-mails in between long silences and talking on the phone now and then. I became a vegetarian on my birthday this year, and I got to go to a Ween concert again in Ybor City later that month, and then in February I landed a deal in which I volunteered my services as a chat host in the Kids' WB! area in return for free AOL access. (This helped with some clashes between my mom and me, who were vying for the same hours when I was just a screenname on her account.) I spent a LOT of time hosting and really enjoyed it, and became one of the most popular hosts due to my huge amount of face time with the kiddies and my unusual profile in the online area. I started spending less time on MuMu Land and more time on AOL with Instant Messages (sometimes getting some hilarious objectionable ones from drunken college idiots who abused the searchable profiles), but AIM was getting pretty popular and some of my friends could still talk to me there. (I was still very much in touch with Victor, Jeremy, and blink--a.k.a. Laura.) Also spent a lot of time with Bunky online (his name was Jim), and we looked forward to our chat times a lot. We ended up meeting this year in person as well; he vacationed in Florida and met up with me. I wrote a cool poem called "Glow" for him. We also used to hang out in the "Creative Weirdos" chat room, and at one point we had an online party and I won a prize for a recipe for a disgusting and weird cake. (The guy who ran the party actually sent me some very weird things in the mail, including an oversized set of plastic silverware festooned with fake fruit.) In April I met an online friend who went by "Squirrel," though later he dropped that name and just went by Michael. I got to meet him a few times when he drove over to visit me. I also got to see the musical RENT on April 11! And sometime around then I got really excited about the anime Tenchi Muyo! and went out of my way to acquire more of it. (I even got the comics when I could find them, and tried to doodle the characters.) I started my third The House That Ivy Built novel and actually ended up composing some of it straight onto the computer instead of hand-writing it for the first time, but I wasn't too happy with the results. Later I also tried some outlining techniques and found it to be a disaster. I'm a seat-of-your-pants writer, apparently, and I learned that the hard way when trying to force my characters into the outline ended up making everything fall apart. The end of the semester came and I had survived the Gen Ed deluge, winding up the year with one A (Philosophy), three B's (Anthropology, Intro to Ed, and the math class) . . . and one withdrawal. The Weather class proved too difficult for me. It's the only class I ever dropped. I was sad to have had to drop it, too, because I sat next to my roommate John's ex-boyfriend and he was really a very nice guy whom I loved talking to. But the physics and vectors overwhelmed me and I had to bow out. ::sigh::
My 'Net friends James and Chris visited me from Alabama over Memorial Day [link goes to full gallery offsite], and we had some fun with that. Chris was a very silly musician and played amusing songs. (Later we wrote one together, sort of; he wrote it and performed it, and asked me to record harmony, which I did. The song was called "What's That Glowing Thing?") And I took a detour from writing my longer fiction to write a cute little piece of short fiction called "Clouds" after having been inspired by the writing style in the novel Emily of New Moon. Summer 1998 Still playing catch-up in a serious way, I had tons of credits I needed to square away to start the higher-level education classes. Junior year loomed ahead and I was nowhere near what I was supposed to have, so intensive summer school began. Meanwhile, John graduated with his theater degree and JW, a guy I knew from poetry jam, moved in and immediately started making our apartment very, very dirty. I overloaded myself with four classes that summer. One was a full-summer class called Introduction to Educational Technology. It was mostly a gimme, and I got an A. Then on top of that, for the first half of summer I took an easy geology course and a HARD psychology course. The geology intro course--also called "Rocks for Jocks" because of its simplicity--was fun and informative, but was a no-brainer and I got an A. It was the psych course that frustrated and delighted me. I ate that stuff up, and even though I had to struggle to get the B I received, I was enamored and decided to minor in psych. (The instructor was proud of his class's difficulty. He announced on the first day of class that half the class was going to have dropped by the end of the semester!) I learned about the difference between eccentricity and abnormal psychology, and embraced my identity as an eccentric person by writing an essay about it [link goes offsite to my essays page]. In any case, the second half of summer I added a class called "Man's Food." It was mainly about nutrition, and I still use its lessons today (hey, did you know abundances of certain vitamins can make your pee neon??). I got an A.
In July of that summer, my online friend Fred came to visit me for the first time [link goes to full gallery offsite]. Soon afterwards, Meghan had her first baby [link goes to the baby's newborn gallery offsite]. She named her Katelyn Julie. I didn't get to meet her for a good while, but eventually I got to, of course.
I went to a family reunion, too, and ended up getting stranded on the way back--it was really weird and caused me to write my poem "Lost." I also got to have a fun little meltdown in August which involved my computer's modem deciding to be uncooperative, and then the tech help people for my computer (with whom I still had a warranty) told me to try a new phone cord and when that didn't work they just told me I'd have to format my hard drive. Uh? When I got a second opinion, a local computer repair place said it seemed more like my modem might be fried, and sold me a new internal modem. My friend Aaron put it in for me and it worked, and then the company still wouldn't honor the warranty, even though I wrote them a nasty letter. They would rather tell me to wipe my hard drive and hope that fixes things than actually have to deal with me, and they never offered to send a tech. It made me REALLY REALLY MAD, especially since I had to miss two Kids' WB! hosting shifts because of it. And speaking of Kids' WB!, up until this point I'd been talking to one of the chat room kids who was in his teens fairly regularly and had had some great discussions with him about my novels, but around this time he went through a religious revival of sorts and decided he couldn't read my books anymore because they were objectionable or something like that. He lost his Internet access and there was a lot of hoopla around that, and I was disappointed that he was including my work as part of a category of stuff he couldn't involve himself in anymore if he wanted to be good. :/ Junior year, fall semester More general education to take care of: I got slammed with a difficult astronomy course, a rather tough abnormal psychology class, a health class, a sociology course, and a secondary philosophy course called Theory of Knowledge. (I'd liked my first philosophy class, but some weird mixture of the students' attitudes and the teacher's teaching style rendered me less interested in this class's material. Nevertheless, I got a good grade on a paper on "a priori" truths.) Abnormal Psych was fun sitting next to Molly, a high school friend; we made fun of our teacher and made a tally sheet of all the times he used cuss words or said something stupid in class (because he was sort of fratty and seemed to want us to think he was cool). I found it difficult to balance these subjects with no common thread, and also focused on hosting and writing. Some of the people from the WB! chat room were older kids who either wanted to be junior hosts or were just friendly in the room, and some of them talked to me outside the volunteer work. (A kid named Mark was particularly special in that regard; we even got to know each other well enough that I shared my writing with him and he edited a few of my novels!) I also had to take the CLAST, which was a pain, but I did okay on it. I mostly hung out with my lunch crew for fun, especially Mike G., with whom I took an epic trip to Wal-Mart to spend $80 I didn't have once, and with whom I often went to Miami Subs to play Bubble Bobble, and with whom I joked about the Pressed Fairies or watched the MetaSpy search engine cough up perverted search strings. He was something of an activist and worked at the CMC, and he got me into participating in the Critical Mass bike ride demonstrations. It was a peaceful bike-oriented protest/demonstration we did on the last Friday of every month, where the bike-riders of Gainesville would get together and take up a lane to ride around showing the world two important things: One, there's a clean way to get around, and two, there are LOTS of bikers in this town so you need to respect the bike laws! I rode this thing regularly for a while until some jackass people who just wanted any excuse to be anarchists ended up wrecking things for us, and I got involved in a protest involving police brutality toward some participant who was trying to ride naked. I left the scene outside the police station after I realized some of my fellow protesters were chanting "Bodies are beautiful! Nudity is great!" Uh, guys, I'm here to protest the cops knocking him off his bicycle and using unnecessary force to arrest him for it, NOT to stand up for Ernesto's right to ride naked. Okay, I'm done with you people. Toward the end of the semester I took a trip to New York City with my family, and over a holiday break I started my very first official studies into types of Paganism, which later became a full-on alternative curriculum for me. I wrote a short story called "Glass Dawn." I dove into Web page creation as well; I'd finally admitted to myself that I was going to have to do a big changeover to more permanent Web space, because this page was starting to get awfully big and it wouldn't be able to survive past my graduation on my school's server. I learned to work AOL's system and moved my page--now called Budgiland--to its new home at http://members.aol.com/swankivy2 , where it lived for about ten years after! (I had to use my extra space allotted to me by virtue of being a host in order to support it, too.) I also had my hands full writing the fourth Ivy book. Tons of poetry poured out as well as I continued to go to the readings. Some of my favorite poems from the latter half of my college career were "Forgiven," "Keys to the Past," "Married to Death," "Name," "Ugliness," and a long-winded allegory about the asexual experience, a piece called "Star?" I also performed some songs at a local coffeehouse. One of the songs was a kind of weird melodramatic song called "My Way" (which my friend Mike once played guitar chords for me on), and there was also "Beyond the Dream," which I think I only performed at Poetry Jam a few times. I started to take more of a leadership role in my hosting duties online, and became one of the authorities of the Kids' WB! online area. I took over the "Apply" screenname, which meant that it was up to me to screen, interview, and hire new hosts and junior hosts. Going through the applications was a huge pain in the butt, but I kinda enjoyed it and especially enjoyed my relationships with the junior staff kids I hired (children who were 13 or older--too old for the chat room--but too young to be adult hosts). Lots of the room regulars were fans of mine, though I also had a couple tough members who made it their duty to give me a hard time and screamed bloody murder if I silenced them with my hosting powers, claiming persecution and abuse of power and whatnot. I mostly just rolled my eyes and moved on.
My friend David from Malta came to visit me for a few weeks in September during this semester [link goes to the offsite gallery], and he stayed with my friends Steve and Aaron. In the meantime, my home situation was annoying because JW was becoming absolutely scary in his housekeeping habits [link goes to my rant about it, offsite]. I just tried to deal with it as best I could (sometimes by making fun of it with silly drawings). The situation with my roommate caused me to write a rant about it and create my Rants Page, where I also rambled about prejudice, childish vs. childlike, and how much I hate running out of toilet paper, among other things. [All those links go to the current rants site.] This was awesome because finally I had a place to rant, and one of my other first rants was the Nonsexuality Rant (which later was moved to the Essays section it now links to). In that, I outlined the top ten reasons people were always suggesting for why I was asexual, and rambled about why they didn't fit. (The site later got a lot of attention, as it was one of the first online spots that discussed asexuality and predated the well-known Asexual Visibility and Education Network by a couple years.) And in Web page news, I was also having a lot of fun recording my IMs with jerks who tried to cybersex me, so I made a page about that too.
I had a few friend issues and got annoyingly hit on by a guy who turned out to be my only real "mistake" from online; he insisted that I was attracted to him despite my assurance that I was asexual, and his degree of certainty disturbed me enough to think if he got a chance he might force himself on me, so I cut communication. Mia and I didn't really talk anymore unless Reuben wasn't around, and she didn't seem interested in talking to me so much as she would have pretty much talked to whoever was there, so I just kinda stopped hoping we'd get back to the closeness we used to have. It never did come back. I also experienced a distancing from my friend Mike G., because he'd gotten a girlfriend and all of a sudden playing video games and making grilled cheese sandwiches with me was no longer interesting to him. After all, who needs friends when you have a hot bisexual chick named Moon who wants to have sex with you? Hah. Well, I was a bit bitter that my friend disappeared on me, but I guess I should be used to that by now, considering I'm never the one with a significant other. He and his girlfriend and a few other friends came to my Halloween gathering that year, though, and I had my friend Chris from Alabama in again. [Both those links go to galleries offsite.] We went trick-or-treating.
I still had a nice relationship with my friend Bunky Jim, and we chatted all the time in IMs and once in a while on the phone and played on message boards or chat rooms. Sometimes he had a hard time because there was a lot of depressing stuff going on for him. I tried to be a light in his life, but it was hard to do from far away. I had my own depressing stuff to deal with too; in November, my grandfather--my mom's dad--passed away, after spending Thanksgiving time with his children. (My mom was among them, and stayed for his services.) I hadn't known my grandfather very well as a person, but was very sad about it for some time, and when I got to see my mom after the fact I didn't know how to comfort her except to just listen to her stories. It was all I could do. I got all B's that semester except for my astronomy course, in which I received a B+ (ironic; that one contained math!). I didn't get much of a break before heading into the thick of my education. Junior year, spring semester Spring was hardcore education classes: Research in Elementary Education (a tough class with a lot of essays and a required volunteer placement), Child Development (it had some psychology, but otherwise just the usual), Learning and Cognition (geared toward education majors), Intro to Educational Media (surprisingly difficult for a class about how to use the projector), Integrating Technology Into the Curriculum (really weird random class about just what it sounds like), and a weird one called Classroom Reading. I had a tough time this semester too, largely because of the volunteering. The school I chose was called the Caring and Sharing Learning Center, and it was a 100% minority school, which resulted in ALL-black students being tutored by ALL-white mentors. I didn't like the message they might've got from that, but I tried to ignore it. My first grader, Jarquez, was spirited and had reading difficulties, but we got along and made a book about colors. After that I'd play with him on the playground. He was too big for me to carry on my back and didn't seem to realize I was a very small adult. Heh. The bike ride was about 45 minutes each way. Nearly killed me. I put a lot into my lesson plans and work for the related class and ended up having the teacher repeatedly ask to use my work as an example. Yay. Unfortunately my classmates made me very angry all the time in that class. One girl, when asked to give the next mentor something to go on for helping her child, wrote down "he needs to work on his site words." YOU need to learn that the proper phrase is "sight words," dumbass. It frightened me that these people were going to be teachers!
Classroom Reading required me to make some games for classrooms, which was fun. I applied my artistic skills and made a few very cute reading games; my favorite involved paper pots of gold that could be opened and closed with Velcro, and children would be asked to put "gold coins" in the right pots according to which featured rhyming sounds. I also did a cute one with a train theme which encouraged children to "train" themselves in alphabetical order. (Yeah, kid games sometimes have to be cheesy.) Child Development got me thinking about how kids learn language and I ended up writing my short story "Baby Talk." I don't really remember much about the classes that semester because I was really overwhelmed, but I ended up getting almost all A's. The only class I got a B+ in was my educational media class. Unrelated to school, I was still going to Pojam, and started to attend an anime club where I was generally the only girl unless I dragged a friend along (and I did take Mia and Ammy at different times). I met a cool guy named Mike there, though he didn't talk to me very much at first because I guess he was afraid I'd think he was a jerk. He was a lot less shy about speaking his mind once we got on e-mail terms, and we used our interest in anime as a kind of excuse to hang out, taking turns purchasing the Tenchi in Tokyo tapes when they came out and sometimes viewing them together. I read a few Pagan books and collected information and supplies to write my own rituals.
I turned 21 and took a birthday trip to Las Vegas with my dad [link goes to birthday Vegas gallery offsite]. I started doing my first Pagan rituals and even learned about spellcasting, though I never got very into it because it just didn't really seem to jive with how I wanted to do things. Regardless, I learned about it. The stuff I was reading inspired me to consider the importance of the Earth to any nature religion's core, and I ended up writing a rather emotional short story entitled "The Mother." In March I went to Ohio to visit Bunky [link goes to gallery offsite], and managed to sneak in a quick first face-to-face meeting with Ronni while I was there. One weekend in early April, I went camping with Mike P and his girlfriend, along with my sister Patricia and Mike's friend Bobbitt (with HIS girlfriend). It was kind of fun; he was about to turn 21 but since he wasn't officially until midnight, I had to supply the alcohol. Heh. (I bought him Goldschläger, his favorite.) We had a campfire and enjoyed the night, but didn't enjoy when Patricia and I got stranded on our own in the dark due to both the guys leaving to do things and taking forever to come back. It was definitely an adventure. On April 9, I went to see an online friend, Brendon, in a play he had a part in. That was our first meeting, and he went on to become an important friend in the future . . . especially where Meghan was concerned. Right after that, my mentoring program ended and I did an assignment summing up my reaction to the experience.
In May, Fred came to visit again and we went to visit Jessica, the girl who'd introduced us. [That link goes to gallery offsite.] We had fun at the beach. I was really broke during that time for some reason, and had to ask my parents if they could start giving me more money since the cost of living and rent were going up but my parental allowance was not. They agreed to start giving me $450 a month instead of just $400. (Yep, most of it went to paying a third of our rent, which was over $900 by that point.) And then summer hit. Summer 1999 For extra money, I took an office assisting position to replace a professor's office aide, and I took my summer A classes: The Language Arts methods class and a class called Social Psychology. I got A's in both. Language Arts Methods was quite odd. I enjoyed it and really kicked its ass, but a lot of it was involved in actually doing projects rather than coming up with how to teach our children by using assignments like these. I wrote a short story called "Problem Recipe" (not as a class assignment), having been inspired by the meaning of art in people's lives even if they're not artists, and I wrote another short story called "Protector Cat" in response to a weird dream I had. For Summer B I took a class about the sociological and historical foundations of education, and also one called Developmental Psychology. I really liked my teacher, and another student named Bob and I used to stay after class and talk to him. Bob and I became friends and hung out outside class too. (Some people thought it was weird, because Bob was a man in his fifties returning to college. But we saw eye-to-eye on a LOT of stuff.) During this, a shitstorm hit at AOL and they had to close Kids' WB!, which was catastrophic for me because one of the perks for AOL hosting was extra Web space and I was going to lose it with my HOST name. The kids were terribly upset as well, and it all happened so fast--we really had to scramble to even get enough information to stay in touch with each other. I wrote a little memorial-type essay about it [link goes offsite to the essays page]. I applied for another position and got hired in Hecklers Online, but I still had to move and re-route all my files. It was a huge pain in the neck. Mia and JW moved out, and my high school friend Ammy and her friend Melissa took their places. Yay for clean and social roommates! Senior year, fall semester Now we come to a fun semester: Seventh semester in the fall of '99. I met my friend Scott when taking my math methods course; I complimented his Yoda shirt and it was all over with. We became study partners and had a lot of fun harassing each other all semester. (Another girl at our table, Noelle, was really cool too, and she was one of the few in the program who also wasn't a typical "teacher girl," but she was absent so often that it was hard to depend on her.) We learned all kinds of ways to teach math, and I always did silly things on my papers like write my characters or my friends into the example problems I created. My other classes included Teaching the Exceptional Child (where we learned about different disabilities and how to teach kids who have them), Art Methods (the class that teaches classroom teachers how to use art to convey curriculum essentials), and Social Studies Methods (a really fun class that had us do projects like pretending to be a historical figure to give a speech and comparing and contrasting historical kids' literature). I also took another psych class: Psychology of Aging. The class was taught by the teacher I liked over summer, and Bob was also in that class with me. We had a blast. In response to an article about people who freeze their eggs in order to have healthier children later in life, I was inspired to write my short story "Mother's Day." Some other fun leisure things I did: I made a few reproductions of Flower Fairy drawings (copying art by Cicely Mary Barker) to work on my art, and I did my first Pagan holiday-type ritual, for Mabon 1999, and thought it was fun but that I had a lot to learn. I was not really fitting in with the education majors in most of my classes--they were teacher-mom types for the most part, and most of them seemed a bit spooked by the way I dressed and the fact that I did things like take important tests with a giant pencil. I didn't really care, except that it was annoying to have to group with "normal" types sometimes and put up with their normality.
In October, my friend Jeremy (Brian's roomie) and some other pals invited me to go to Anime Weekend Atlanta--an anime convention in Georgia [link goes to gallery offsite]--and I wore a sort of half-assed Washu costume. That was pretty fun, and I hung out with my friend Donnie there too. Around Halloween, I happened to talk to a self-published author who ended up hiring me to work on his Web site, so there was a little extra cash.
I went trick-or-treating with friends again that year, dressed as a fairy. [Link goes to that year's Halloween gallery offsite.] I studied with Scott a lot that semester, and we had a prank war. I also got kinda into a game called Creatures, where you raise your own virtual animals and teach them stuff. It was fun and I played it with my friends. I wrote a new short story called "Brady" and was very happy with it. I also got into an art form I "invented" for myself which involved trying to draw music; I'd draw a visual representation of every song on an album, and later I made a Web page featuring them [link goes offsite to the gallery of song drawings on my doodles page].
The end of that semester was hairy. Scott and I ended up working together on a math methods final project, and most groups had four people to whom the project tasks could be delegated. We were already disadvantaged by only having three, but one of them was Noelle, and she withdrew from the class before the end of the semester, so we both had twice the work to do. Then Scott ended up coming up with lesson plans that were somewhat substandard, and I ended up having to re-do them all. And then . . . we got to class and the teacher forgot to let us do our presentation. (We'd had a joke all semester that he was ignoring us--we jokingly called the teacher out on it whenever he would never call on Scott to ask a question--but when he plumb forgot us we were honestly shocked.) We ended up getting an A++ on our project, though, and the teacher wrote "Great outline! I am very sorry for forgetting your presentation" on our grading sheet. Heh. He also wrote "I'm very proud of your effort! Your resource book is as good as a group of 4, yet you had to work with a skeleton crew. Parental involvement and lesson plans sections were awesome!" (Here's one of the lesson plans I wrote.) For Art Methods, I had to plan a whole unit that relied heavily on art, and I did it on fairies and mystical creatures. I got a 97% on it. I hit the books for my Psychology of Aging class and kicked the exam's butt. And my historical fiction projects and presentations were well-received by my teacher in Social Studies Methods. I ended the semester with all A's except for a B in my Teaching the Exceptional Child class. Before everyone went home for the holiday break, my Social Studies Methods teacher had a party at her house for her students, and I attended (bringing my Internet friend Michael--a.k.a. Squirrel--along for the ride). It was pretty fun.
Over the holiday break, I got a request from the guy whose Web site I was doing to read his book for pay and identify errors, so that was my first paid editing job. When I got back to Gainesville from my parents' house, I made my first Pagan Web site, and shortly afterwards I visited Fred in California [link goes to the gallery offsite], and we had a Yuletide ritual of our own. It was quite a good time and I even got to meet his parents. Fun! I'd learned enough about Earth religions and Paganism and whatnot to know what I thought sounded like fun and what I didn't like about the established practices, and I knew enough to write a little ritual for Fred and me to do by ourselves. It was a nice celebration that included food. Then I spent the widely anticipated NEW YEAR'S DAY 2000 at my parents' house for a party with family and close friends. There I opened the time capsule I'd made in the fifth grade gifted program, and the group and I had a fun time listening to the tape of my voice and playing with the string that was cut as tall as I'd been then. (Sadly I hadn't grown much since I was 11.) Senior year, spring semester Now came the part of my education I'd been dreading . . . STUDENT TEACHING. I'd come to the conclusion by this point that I did NOT want to be a teacher, and had planned accordingly, but I wasn't getting out of this. I was enrolled in "Clinical Seminar," which was basically a once-a-week class meeting to discuss our placement and a home base from which to organize it. I got a position teaching first grade, and a guy at the same school offered to carpool with me. I also finished up most of my methods requirements by taking Health Methods (Scott was in the class, and we grouped with others and studied) and Music Methods. That last was ridiculous for me, but they determined I had to take it. I decided to get something out of the class regardless, and pushed myself to excel. I wrote original songs for the class assignments (even though everyone else was just writing new words to existing nursery rhyme/folk songs); my first teaching song was about the colors of the rainbow. The lyrics are here and a recording of it (badly played) is here. I also performed a blues song on the ukulele, and aced every test ridiculously. Scott was in another period of the class and I helped him study. The teacher, Ms. Ward, was obsessed with us memorizing long passages and reciting them. It was a really, REALLY weird class! I killed the exams with a perfect score plus every available extra credit point, and the teacher about had a heart attack and wrote how awesome I am all over my papers. (Haha!) Oh yes, and I also had a class about how to make tests called Measurement and Evaluation. We had to make tests and administer them and then analyze how good our test-making skills were. I had fun with it. Having Scott in my Health Methods class was awesome. We took turns taking notes (well, sometimes) so we didn't have to do as much writing, and we used each other as partners if it was required for class. (Sometimes we had to have groups of four, though, so we had to branch out.) I kind of dragged Scott through that class and the Music Methods class--he needed lots of help studying. In return he often took me places in his car (we liked to run around and eat out and play Ms. Pac-Man at the Putt-Putt place), and his pet name for me was "bitch." He stole my shoe one day in class and totally made me look for it for like fifteen minutes before revealing that he had it. I helped him with some personal stuff during that time too (mostly with his girlfriend and whatnot), and we were pretty close. We kept a silly notebook like I used to with girl friends in high school, and we wrote notes to each other in it. Student teaching was awful. I liked my first graders, but hated having to teach them. The class was small and the teacher was nice, though. The children were sweet and seemed so interested in me, and sometimes I got to tutor them individually. Sometimes I taught a lesson or ran a reading group, but actually a lot of what I did involved observing and evaluating and, of course, grading papers. The kids gave me Valentines in February and going-away cards when my placement was over. But then things got worse when I had to do upper elementary. I was placed with a teacher who told me to my face on the first day that she didn't want me there, so I requested a transfer and ended up in a fourth grade class with a teacher who put up with me but found out early on that I didn't plan to go on to actually be a teacher afterwards and sort of looked down me because of it, occasionally treating me like I was wasting her time. I got an eye infection during this time and had to wear glasses instead of contacts. It was traumatic because I was always grossed out by eyes in general and now there was something wrong with mine, so every time I had to get a checkup for it was a nightmare. Despite the worst semester of my life, barring none, I got through with the placement and completed the classes, and managed to get some enjoyment out of some of the experiences. My fourth graders were interesting kids, and the unit I taught them (about writing their own fictional stories, of course!) was entertaining. (I also helped them review for their math test by inventing a game.) For reading group, our kids were reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and that was how I was first exposed to Harry Potter. I thought it was pretty good and ended up checking out the second book once it was out. I still wasn't done with my school, though, when the placement was over, because I had one more leftover methods course to take in summer. I got a "satisfactory" in seminar--student teaching isn't graded--and made A's in my other three classes.
My sister Patricia, a student at New College in Sarasota, spent this semester in Japan at Waseda University. She was majoring in Asian studies and it was very common for people at her college to do a semester in another country, so that was hers. She met her boyfriend Yuichi and I eventually got to meet him when she brought him back for a visit. Over spring break that year, Fred visited me [link goes to offsite gallery], and then in May, my friend Jessica got married, so I went to the reception and the after-party of that in Melbourne [link goes to offsite gallery], where I met a cool guy named Steven and ended up keeping in touch with him on the 'Net.
And shortly before the end of the semester, I met my friend Jeaux online and we decided to meet. That was historic; from that point on until the present, Jeaux and I have met approximately once a week to have lunch/dinner and have fun. He started going to anime club with me and usually left my place when it was time for me to host my chat room, but eventually he also started staying through that. We had the same sense of humor and were both writers, and really enjoyed each other's company. Shortly after meeting me he was nice enough to take me to an eye doctor appointment when I kept having my stupid infection. He even went to Poetry Jam with me a couple times, and I read a new short piece of fiction called "Goodbye" (another nice irreverent piece). I also completed my short story "Bloom" in March, and had a fight with a dumb chick online who swiped some writing from my Web site in April (setting off a chain of unpleasant copyright disputes--that link goes to my rants page where I talk about the experience). I continued going to Putt-Putt to hang out at the arcade with Scott a lot. I still saw my friend Bunky online sometimes but I think this was around the time I stopped seeing him around as much because he got addicted to Everquest and was always playing that. I also got to go to see the Indigo Girls at Gasparilla in February. It was COLD, but the concert was great.
Summer 2000 I finished up with a rather annoying science methods course--got an A--and achieved my BACHELOR OF ARTS IN EDUCATION, with basically what amounted to a minor in psychology (but education majors weren't allowed "majors," just "academic specializations"--that was mine). I received my diploma and ended up with a GPA of 3.56. Nice! (My mother sent me flowers and a card telling me that I was "the shit," among other things. Yep, she really made the florist write that on the card.) My roommate Melissa had to get a sublet, so a freshman named Katie moved in with us for the summer. I did a stint as an office assistant for the same professor again, and did some Web work for their program. I also managed to get my first computer virus that summer--downloaded and ran an .exe file that turned out to be a Trojan, but the guy who sent it actually DID often send me cute .exe things! I used my roommate's computer to download and apply a fix program and all was well. I also had a little time to do creative things I'd been putting off; for instance, I decided to make a graphic novel issue based on a scene from The House That Ivy Built #3, and I wrote a new short story called "No Longer Junior." I had some fights with my mom about whether I could stay in my college town after graduation; she had expected that I would come "home," but I didn't want to, and I think we had some misconceptions there because she seemed to think I expected my parents to continue to pay my rent even though I'd finished school. I wasn't ready to leave Gainesville yet and planned to get my own place and a job, but my mom really wanted me to get a car for some reason and said it was "necessary for self-sufficiency," but then suggested that the car would be given to me and the payments would be something they would assist me with. I didn't want to give my parents leverage to hold over me now that I was ready to strike out on my own, so I pissed my mom off by refusing the offer. I'm still not sure to this day why she wanted me to get a car so badly, or what might've really been going on there. In any case we resolved our issues eventually when she got on the same page as me and realized I wasn't really suggesting a situation where a compromise was possible. I was a legal adult and knew what I wanted to do, and when my mom realized I was planning on stepping up to the plate and behaving like an adult, she stepped back and let me be one. Mom and most of my family attended my graduation party on July 1 along with a bunch of my friends. And then I was ready to pursue my post-college future. . . .
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