A Burst of Domesticity

Do you think about the feeling of folding warm laundry? About how it feels to smooth out the wrinkles in your clothes and sheets and towels? About letting the warmth seep into the bones of your fingers and breathing in the clean smell of home? About the victory you experience when you realize all your socks have escaped the clutches of the sock-eating laundry monster?

It's a good feeling.

Or grocery shopping. Think about grocery shopping, especially as a college student: you've stopped eating cereal because you ran out of milk, and you had to make a sandwich with the end pieces of your bread, and you haven't cooked green things in a long time, and there are no bananas within reach —and then Giant. Wegman's. Costco.

There are grapes in my fridge right now, GRAPES.

You'd be hard-pressed to make me any happier in this moment.

Blog Challenge Outro

Well, this month has been difficult and wonderful and horrible and fun all at once.

There's no way, really, to describe the dread I felt some nights at 11:00pm when I realized that I still had to write and post something within the next hour. There’s also no way to describe how much I surprised myself at what I could squeeze out of my busy schedule, day after day, when I probably could have been sleeping. I have written some pretty lame poems, but I’ve also written some that I actually really love, and I’m ecstatic that I managed to write on “Rainstorms” exactly as much as I wrote on “Cry of the Stars.”

I’m so grateful to Stevie for holding these Blog Challenges, because they’re a big spark in my world that sets the fire of inspiration burning for a long time, and this month was no different from the past challenges in that aspect. I had been feeling creatively kind of dead before February, but I’ve become mostly alive again—phrases and snippets of poems and stories are constantly floating around in my head again, and I couldn’t be happier to have them back.

Hopefully it lasts! Hopefully you will hear more about the wacky stuff that happens to me at college, and find out what happens to Lill’th (our poor reluctant protagonist) and her friends, and read more fairytale poetry if I can think of any more fairytales to retell. The prompt vault I constructed for this challenge is still about half-full of unused prompts, so stay tuned for Scripture reflections, magical pets, “Ode to Squirrels,” musings on life and living, and a possible story about the sun and the moon as children.

I suppose this is me promising to keep writing, no matter how awful it feels sometimes to keep doing it, but definitely more if you people are actually reading it all.
Keep reading, readers. I’ll keep writing.

The Erruindel Chronicles: II

Part I
--
In Which Lill'th Is Not Given A Choice

"I am not going to marry you," blurted Lill'th immediately, drawing the natural conclusion. "I know you were that bear from earlier," she added quickly, as she could hear her mother approaching the common room, "and I'm not about to associate with magic like that, so you can take your offer elsewhere."

Eivex, apparently on a different page altogether, was speechless.

"I'm sorry if you were secretly in love with me," Lill'th went on, rather wildly, "though I honestly don't see how that would be possible, since you've never been here before."

"Oh, I—No?" said Eivex, his pasty face turning an incredibly deep shade of red. His long white hands were twitching nervously at his sides.

"Not to mention that you're probably old enough to be my father," continued Lill'th, who didn't know why she was still talking.

Fortunately for him, Eivex was saved from having to answer, as Za'allamaca, Lill'th's mother, glided into the room just then, holding a heaping load of clean washing, which she promptly dropped into her daughter's arms with an airy "Welcome home, darling" and a light kiss on the cheek. Eivex let out an audible sigh of relief and went to stand by the table in the corner.

"What have you done with my trousers?" said Lill'th, frowning down at the oddly-shaped clothing in her arms.

"I cut them open and sewed them into skirts," said Za'allamaca, flipping her long black hair over her shoulder, "so you can dress like a proper woman. Now that you are sixteen, after all."

Lill'th frowned harder. "Mother, you can't do that. Have you ever tried climbing the cliffs in a skirt? It's impossible! Also, these are so ugly."

Za'allamaca's beautiful dark eyes flashed, at once dangerously furious and wistfully nostalgic. Oh no, thought Lill'th.

"I once climbed to the top of the Black Tooth itself," Za'allamaca said in a low voice, "in the most lovely silk dress. I never faltered, not once in my long ascent. The dress is still lovely. By Loej's hands, I married your father Jacob in that dress. Pah! Do not ask me if I have climbed mere cliffs in a skirt."

Eivex, whose presence Lill'th had momentarily forgotten about, had a sudden fit of obviously fake coughing. Za'allamaca turned to him, instantly charming and elegant again, the perfect hostess. (Lill'th looked between them, feeling conflicted and emotionally whiplashed.)

"Now, sir," began Za'allamaca, "about that goat and its rainbow kids—"

"I have changed my mind," interrupted Eivex, somehow turning an even more impressive shade of red than before. He tugged at the laces on the front of his shirt and cleared his throat. "I am no longer interested in the goat. I...I would like to marry Lilith instead."

"Lill'th," said Lill'th automatically, then, "WHAT?"

Eivex smiled anxiously, showing more teeth than was strictly normal.

The spray of wildflowers sitting in a vase on the table seemed to wilt in the long, awkward silence that followed. The wooden floor creaked faintly. A small purple mouse fled the room through the open doorway.

"All right," said Za'allamaca, finally. "Let me fetch Jacob."

Lill'th dropped her pile of hideous trouser-skirts in shock as her mother glided back into the kitchen. She couldn't be serious. She was serious. She was calling Lill'th's father right now to come perform the betrothal, probably right here in the common room, with its old worn furniture and dirt-streaked walls.

How was this happening? Wasn't she supposed to at least make this choice for herself? Lill'th had been planning on probably choosing Aaron, who was nice to her and didn't smell that terrible if she really thought about it. Today was supposed to be her special day, the day that marked the beginning of her dreams coming true, and yet here she was, about to be forced into arranged marriage like some sad girl in Ayla's Fairy Tales From The Ringlands. When she'd dreamed of being married, it wasn't at all like this.

Lill'th was about to start crying when Eivex urgently grabbed her arm and whispered, "Quick, before your mother returns," which was a horrible thing to say just now, so she got angry instead, flung his hand away, and turned her back on him.

"Okay, first things first," said Eivex from behind her, "I am not old enough to be your father."

"That doesn't matter much now, does it?" said Lill'th, fuming at the streaky wall.

"Secondly," Eivex said, "I don't actually want to marry you, I just needed some way to convince your parents to let you come with me without it looking inappropriate, and it seemed—"

"Hold on," said Lill'th, turning back around. Nothing today was making any sense. "You don't want to marry me?"

Eivex's fingers started to twitch again. "Do you find odd things happen to you often?" he asked. "Nights get messed up, trees fall behind you, sparrows and cows love you, lots of thunderstorms, anything?"

"Well, let's see," said Lill'th, glaring at him. "A bear showed up as a man who's pretending to want to marry me in order to kidnap me instead, for undisclosed reasons. No, nothing weird."

"Do you like fire?" he persisted.

"Hate it."

"What about water?"

"I can't swim, if that's what you're asking."

Eivex scratched his head. "This doesn't make sense."

"NONE OF WHAT YOU ARE SAYING MAKES SENSE," yelled Lill'th.

"There's a prophecy about you," said Eivex earnestly, "only I didn't realize it was you until just now. You're supposed to have amazing powers, and you're the one who's going to set this land free."

Lill'th threw her hands up in utter confusion and despair.

"Free from what?" she cried.

The End of Myself

The end. This was it: I could feel the precipice crumbling beneath my toes. I took no step back, only stood there looking into the thick darkness. Eternity was not forever, then; it stopped here, a dry, dusty cliff with a wall of black in front and down and on all sides.

I pushed against the wall. It pushed back—nothing to be done.

So? What now? To go back the way I came? Tell whoever's there (if anyone is left?) that I've done it, I reached the end of eternity and it is nothing but nothing.

Despair rose in a choking instant. I had hoped to find something when I pressed forward: a sign, at least, to guide me where I needed to go. But here was only cold dust on my feet, and everywhere a darkness so heavy I could have been blind. Perhaps I was.

A footstep.

I tensed, ready to run. Another step, closer this time. Warm light sparked, flickered, and illuminated a face. It was him.

"When did you get here?" I asked.

"I've been," he said.

Typical Conversations #21

It's been more than a year since I last added to this series, but I just found one old unpublished transcript and realized it was time to begin again.

--
MOM: Scattergories. 'C', for vegetables. Go.
ME: Cucumber.
MOM: Carrots.
ME: Cilantro.
MOM: Cabbage.
ME: Corn.

*long pause*

MOM: Any more?
ME: Cauliflower.
MOM: That's a good one.

*another pause*

ME: CANNED VEGETABLES
MOM: Hahahahahahahaha no. Okay, now 'A.'
ME: Arugula.
MOM: Avocado.

*pause*

ME: I can't think of any more! Apples! Aaarrranges!
MOM: Those are FRUITS Davina

How I Turned Nursery Songs Into Nightmares

This is a story I've already shared with some friends, but I think it’s worth commemorating in writing as well. It is best told in two movements.

I. Adagio, suspenseful
The background of this sad tale is as follows: in my Engineering 102 class, we’re building and programming small Lego robots that are tasked with searching an arena for yellow and blue canisters, capturing the canisters, and delivering them to separate landfills, one of which is marked by a strong light source. (If you've talked with me recently, you've probably heard about this robot thing, because it is somehow the most stressful project I've ever undertaken, even though from all accounts it’s very hard to get a bad grade in the course.) For the purpose of the preliminary competition, which is the focus of this story, we’ll ignore the yellow canisters and the landfill without the light source.

My group coded a search function that makes the robot run in an increasing spiral from the center of the field. This involved a lot of switches and loops-within-loops, which got seriously confusing, so we decided to take an upperclassman’s advice and put bits of sound into our code at important points, in order to know what the robot was running at any particular time.

What a great idea, I thought to myself at 11:43pm as I was adding the sounds. In fact, I’ll choose the musical notes to be recognizable songs at each part of the function, so I can immediately know what’s going on. How about the first four notes of “Mary Had A Little Lamb” at the end of each search loop? It’ll be cute, I thought.

It’ll be cute. Cute.

Try this out with me. Sing the first four notes of “Mary Had A Little Lamb”—just the first four. You’ll find yourself singing “Mary had a—” and stopping there. And this is precisely what chimed its charming way through our heads every single time the robot completed one square and prepared to enter another.

Mary had a—
Mary had a—
Mary had a—a what?
What did Mary have??

II. Vivace, enunciated
For the other sound bytes, I foolishly chose snippets of Brahm's Lullaby. In particular, the robot declared that it had found the direction of the light source—when the light sensor read 50 or above—with a loud, four-note ascending melody before it would drive towards the light. This was all right in practice, when we used a phone flashlight as our simulated “light source” and only heard the melody a few times before the robot reached a threshold where it released the canister, backed away, and turned around.

On the actual field, during our competition, it came to our attention that our wheel motors were out of sync, enough that our robot had a significant left-turn drag whenever it tried to go forward. This meant that every time it tried to drive towards the light, it would turn left after about two inches, lose the light, rotate again until it found it, play the melody again, and repeat the whole process.

At around the tenth repetition of the melody, I started to tremble and cover my ears. At around the twelfth repetition, the robot leaped forward into a dramatic left turn near ninety degrees, then stopped in utter confusion, as the light readings on that particular part of the field fluctuated constantly between 49 and 50.

The melody began to play endlessly.

I yelled in anguish, lunged to the other side of the arena, and scrabbled at the robot’s off-button until the whole program aborted.

“Shut UP SHUT UP SHUT UP,” I screamed.
Fellow students nearby backed away, some laughing nervously.

Throughout the rest of the day today, Brahm's Lullaby has kept needling its way into my brain and taunting me with its deceptively innocent tones, but the song is ruined for me, forever. I've had to keep myself from clawing at my own ears in the middle of the street.

Needless to say, the sound bytes are coming out of our code as soon as we don’t need them anymore.

Haleigh

When a writer poses that last-resort but all-too-common question, “What should I write about?”, she can generally expect three kinds of responses from three kinds of people.

1. The Unintentionally Narcissist Friend: “Write about me!” 
2. The Extremely Unhelpful Friend: “idk, like something”
3. The Friend Who Spends Too Long Pondering Everything: “Write about how the ethics of raising and killing free-range chickens can be applied as a metaphor to war.”

I suppose it’s to be expected. Who can really rise to the sudden demand of inspiration? Who can truly fulfill the role of Writer’s Muse at a moment’s notice?

Then there’s my friend Haleigh. Also known in previous years as my blog-stalker—or if you were a keen observer of that one speed poetry post two years ago, you may have glimpsed her lurking beneath the charismatic Sirenia Featherheart’s captivating work.

Haleigh has been probably the single best prompter I’ve encountered so far. Where most people clam up and supply stupid ideas, she’s always ready to supply suggestions that are specific enough to inspire, but still vague enough to take their own form in any writer’s hands. In addition, Haleigh’s prompts tend to have the added benefit of humor, which I am sometimes prone to neglect. I’ll forget that poems can be funny, and then Haleigh comes along and tells me to write a clerihew, or a poem based on the lines “weeping, wailing / (do you care for parasailing?)”, or on the name Francesca.

So this is just to give credit where credit is due. Tonight Haleigh resorted to being the Unintentionally Narcissist Friend, but since the unintentional part was very sincere, and since she actually totally deserves a whole blog post about her, I decided to take it.

Thanks for everything, Haleigh. Let’s speed-poem again sometime soon.

(Note: This post has focused on Haleigh’s role as inspiration in my writing, but it should also be mentioned that she edits all my papers like a boss, and can absolutely knock your socks off in an iambic pentameter competition if you are foolish enough to challenge her. Girl’s cool. Don’t mess with her.)

for the preservation of possible victory

I am watching Death Comes To Pemberley with my family, so...this is my blog post for today.
We are taking an intermission break before the third episode as I write this post, and they're all eating a second dinner. It's great. I love my family.

The Interview (Or Not)

This morning as I walked to my first class, located in Disque, I noticed some papers taped to the glass doors: "Psychology Graduate Research Interviews →". Throughout the rest of the day, I walked past those papers several more times, and didn't spare more than a passing thought for them.

That is, until I headed for Physics 101 recitation in the adjoining building, Stratton, where I realized that the professionally-clad women climbing the stairs to the second floor with me were, in fact, heading to those specified interviews. They wore heels, blazers, pencil skirts, killer makeup, and classy beige messenger bags—the whole deal. I felt suddenly self-conscious in my bright green sneakers, bright red plaid sweater that really didn't match my grey-and-darker-red plaid scarf, giant coat, and yet-another-shade-of-red backpack. 

The women seemed confused by my presence, and I don't blame them. I'm still confused as to why my physics recitation is in a classroom on the same floor as the Psychology department. 

Well, I got to class, and they got to their interviews, and we closed the door to our classroom, and I forgot about them for somewhere close to an hour. My TA, a tall, slightly bearded ex-cop (SVU investigator in Tennessee, to be exact) and current Ph.D candidate in astrophysics, had just placed a large trashcan on top of his table to demonstrate some concept involving work when a tentative knock came at the door. 

He opened the door, and a short, well-dressed woman with a namecard on a lanyard looked in. 

I can only imagine what she saw: a looming man wearing sweatpants covered in chalk dust and nine weary engineering freshmen trying to take notes, not to mention the kind of gross trashcan sitting on a table like nobody's business. 

"Oh," she squeaked, "I must have come to the wrong place."

"That depends," said the TA. "You could hop in and learn some physics if you want!"

The classroom door had begun to swing itself closed at this point, so I could no longer see the woman's face. I only heard the palpable horror in her retreating voice as she said, "Ohh...God," and fled. 

The TA turned back to us as the door shut itself behind the woman, and shrugged. 

"Darn," he said. "I was hoping she'd actually stay and learn physics."

Miscellaneous 2-11-15

It's come to this. I have 3-5 much better post ideas knocking around in the back of my head, but the necessity of writing for English and studying for the Physics quiz on Friday, along with the desire for actual sleep tonight, means that I'm just going to tell you all about my day.

• My friend Tatijana feels deeply about the neck structure of the apatosaurus, not to mention the tragedy of the species' unavoidable demise. I wish I could empathize well enough to write a poem for her, but I barely know what an apatosaurus is. It's all right, though, Tatijana: I'm like 97% sure that there will be dinosaurs in heaven. 
• I learned about Laplace transforms today. Our professor talks as if we've forgotten how to do algebra, and in my case, he's actually right. I tried to solve something like 3 = 2 + 4B and really thought that B = 1/2, or some stupid mistake like that. Oh well. Practice makes perfect! Someday I'll look back at this post and think with a sentimental sniffle, I was so young, I had only just learned what Laplace transforms were.
• Currently trying to teach myself the NXC coding language (a C-based programming language specifically for LEGO NXT, for those of you who don't know) so that we can actually program our Lego robot, hopefully in time for the preliminary competition next week. Things are a little complicated by the fact that my computer refuses to connect to the robot, but my groupmate's computer connects just fine, so we're trying to work out this strange emailing-code and snapchatting-test-results arrangement, which is not too bad. 
• Songs of the week: True North - Jillette Johnson, Send Me The Moon - Sara Bareilles, Queen Of A Sad Land - A Silent Film, Jupiter - Sleeping At Last, Blood I Bled - The Staves, Someone - Future of Forestry. 

That's it for now! You may expect a killer haiku tomorrow night when I take a study break. 

The Erruindel Chronicles: I

In Which Our Story Begins

It was, without a doubt, the dumbest bear she'd ever seen.

The stupid thing lumbered oddly from side to side, ignoring the sheep, and seemed only moments from outright falling off the side of the mountain. Several sheep on the outskirts of the flock were braying in mild terror, but the rest remained blissfully oblivious to the large black creature bumbling its way drunkenly along the precarious edge of the gorge. As Lill'th watched, the bear stumbled into a bush of thorn-vines and began to flail weakly, like a dying octopus—not that Lill'th had ever seen an octopus, but they were a common monster in her favorite picture book, The Enthralling Exploits Of Naffyt The Pirate, and the comparison seemed fitting.

The bear stopped moving suddenly. Lill'th squinted in suspicion. Had it died?
Or, no—that was definitely a snore—it had fallen asleep, in the middle of the thornbush. The dumbest bear, she swore to herself.
But what animal slept like that? There was something unsettlingly wrong about the way it had moved, the way it had overlooked the sheep, and the way it now twitched between snores.

Lill'th was no fool of a shepherd girl, and she quickly gathered her flock to bring them home to Om for the night, leaving the stupid black bear snoring gently with vines creeping into its mouth. The sun set gloriously on her way back to the village, reaching through the twin-peaked Blue-Horn Mountains to light the Blue-Foot Valleys all on fire—though not literally, Lill'th thought, as the thick, tough grass covering the valleys was entirely too wet to be burned.

She had tried burning it once, as a very young child attempting to cook a huge pile of “beetle-flowers” for her mother, and had nearly died from the smoke that quickly filled the outhouse. Her mother had been hysterical upon pulling young Lill’th from the billows of smoke, though to this day Lill’th could never be sure whether it was with worry or with laughter.
“Loej’s eyes, child,” her mother had cried, “I told myself you’d finally learned to poop in the proper place, and here you are, burning yourself alive! What in Thykaismoss were you doing?”
“Uhhh,” Lill’th had rasped.
(Thirteen years later, Lill’th was fully potty-trained, but still grew faint at the sight of fire.)

Tonight, Lill'th found herself oddly distracted and jumpy as she herded the sheep into the fold and went to wash up at the town pump before returning to her house, like something gravely important was about to happen. There was nothing she could think of to explain the way she was feeling, not even the fact that it was her sixteenth birthday and that she’d more than likely find herself betrothed before the night was over.
She went through her mental list of eligible boys one more time as she scrubbed at her hands and splashed water on her face: Aaron the weaver’s son, who unfortunately smelled like lard and mothroot dye; Levi the blacksmith-apprentice, who was handsome but took all of Lill’th’s jokes literally; and Jethro, another shepherd, who had already lost half his teeth from all the fights he got into. It was absolutely nothing to worry about.

It was, yes, a smaller and less dashing group than her sister B’naala had chosen from last year, but Lill’th felt sure it would be all right. Any of the boys would make a fine husband, and she was impatient to be married. While watching the sheep, Lill'th often dreamed of building her own house, expanding her flock, raising her children, and feeding her parents when they grew old and grumpy. She also occasionally dreamed of visiting the sea or the great White-Eye plains in the east, but those were far less practical fantasies and never lasted very long.

Softly singing an old shepherd's tune to herself, Lill'th crossed the shadowy cobblestones of the twilit town square to her home.

Sing the baby lambs to sleep
Baby lambs are baby sheep
Kill the wolves before they come
HUM HUM HUM

Lill'th pulled off her worn felted boots and left them by the doorstep as she went inside.

In my hand a staff I keep
A staff for guarding baby sheep
Kill the wolves before they come
HUM HUM—

Lill'th stopped singing abruptly. There was stranger sitting on a small stool in the common room, his long legs shaking slightly and looking incredibly cramped. Where had he come from? There hadn't been foreigners in Om since her own mother moved here to marry her father, twenty-three years ago.
As she entered the room, the man's pale features lit up with a wide, toothy smile.
"You must be Lillith," he said, and there was suddenly something familiar about him, like she knew him previously, but that was impossible, since he had just gotten her name wrong.
"It's 'Lill'th,'" she corrected him. "Who are you?"

The revelation smacked her in the face like a nasty mountaincat when the man stood up, unfolding his long limbs awkwardly and very much—uncannily—impossibly—like a dying octopus. In that moment, Lill'th knew—though she didn't know how she knew, but she definitely knew—that, somehow, this odd stranger was the bear from earlier that day. She reeled, taking a step backward.

"My name is Eivex," said the stranger, still smiling. "I've come to make an offer."

Lill'th panicked.

War, Warm Food, and Kale Smoothies

1.
It came to my memory today that when we were bored, Jeremy and I used to play war, also known as the most inane card game in existence. For those of you who aren't familiar, the game entails splitting a deck of cards equally, one half for each player, and holding the cards face-down. Gameplay involves dramatically drawing your top cards and throwing them down into the space between you. Whoever has the higher value card takes both. If the cards are the same value, you have war or something, and whoever wins gets six cards? I barely remember. I had to look it up.
Anyway, the game continues until someone has won all the cards. There is absolutely no strategy.
I'm fairly sure we used to play this for hours.

2.
If you know Nathan, you know that he's occasionally prone to be very emotional about very specific things.
One of these things is warm food.
Nathan could cry if you gave him warm food after a long day.

3.
Not too long ago, Dan made a smoothie with a lot of stuff that sounds like it will make a gross smoothie: broccoli, cauliflower, Brussel sprouts, and garlic, among other ingredients. It was healthy, I think, and didn't taste as awful as one might expect, but it was healthy.
Last night, Dan asked me if I'd like a smoothie.
I said, "That depends. Is it a regular smoothie, or THAT kind of smoothie?"
He said slowly, "I...could put kale in it, if you want?"

Now, what Dan actually meant was that if I wanted a healthier smoothie, he could add kale to a sweetened fruit smoothie. But I thought he was offering to add kale to his healthy smoothie, deigning to make it somehow more palatable for me, which would have been hysterically pretentious.

4.
That's it, if you were wondering. That's our family in a nutshell.
JuST KIDDING, it's not.
If you'd like more of a glimpse, you should have been around for the dance party that just happened in the kitchen to "What Makes You Beautiful," which was mostly my parents.

Oh look, a poem. What?

the definition of stress

I am upset with Dan.
He says, “try something new
using the 'new constraints'
that this environment is giving you”
which means,
“i don’t care about you
enough to shut up when you’re
trying to write”
oh NO
NATHAN IS HERE TOO
I’M DONE
DONE

Week 5 at Drexel University, Winter Term

Alternatively titled, "How Is Davina Surviving? She Doesn't Know."

Also alternatively titled, "Apologies From The Author, Who Is Writing A Lot Less Fiction Than She Wanted To This Month."

Or, "Why This Is A Blog Post And Not A Story."

The first reason that this is a blog post and not a story is that I write fiction about ten times slower than I write poetry, because it's a form I don't practice very much but retain all my perfectionism about, and also because by nature it has to be longer than most poems. There are a couple things in the works, but it will be a while longer before they're coherent and long enough to post.

The second reason is that I am inches away from drowning in schoolwork. In addition to my regular coursework, which is challenging enough to juggle, I have not one, not two, but three tests next week, including a midterm in my hardest class. Monday and Tuesday are especially daunting, with tests on both mornings, two (fairly long) online homework assignments due, a lab report due, an in-class presentation scheduled, and another lab to complete. Not to mention the fact that I need to come up with a class schedule and register for next term on Monday as well!

I'm finding that this term is much more difficult for me than last term, because of all the new material I'm learning about chemistry, physics, differential equations, programming, and a little mechanical stuff for the robot I'm trying to build. Some of the new information is getting digested, but the rest is just hanging out in my throat, waiting for me to throw up or something.

I'm also in like, three group projects at once, which is pretty frustrating. On the plus side of this, though, I am making new friends, which is super exciting after a gap year in which I met new people at an approximate rate of 1 per every 3 months.

I hope this doesn't come across as complaining. I am very happy where I am, and I'm confident in God's ability to carry me through this, and I'm not even despairing about my grades yet.
However, this is definitely an excuse for any poor writing or ridiculously short posts over the next week and a half, as I crack down on my time management. I've already spent 23 minutes on this piece that I should probably have used studying for Chemistry.

Back to chemical kinetics, y'all.

Blog Challenge, February 2015

Today I had meant to write something that didn't mention Stevie's 2015 Blog Challenge. I thought I'd begin by writing and posting original content right away, and just let my readers take whatever I threw their way.
I am, unfortunately, a very distracted person sometimes, and I spent most of the evening sleeping and playing guitar instead, so...I'm going to talk about the Blog Challenge. Fortunately for me, it seems like an introduction to this month's posts would be a good thing to write anyway.
The Blog Challenge is a very simple matter, if you haven't yet heard of it: with Stevie Parris as our organizer, a bunch of participants attempt to write and publish at least one blog post every day for a full month. It's a fun way to get yourself into a discipline of writing, ignoring the pesky, elusive ideal of "inspiration," and the past one or two challenges I've participated in have been rewarding times of growth for me as a writer. I've previously focused on one of my two blogs at a time, but for this challenge, I'm hoping to post on both of my blogs about equally: Rainstorms, this one, and Cry of the Stars, where I post my poetry.
Because I'm smack-dab in the middle of one of Drexel's notoriously fast-paced terms, I didn't think it was a good idea to give myself a theme or limit myself to any one kind of writing, so if all goes well, you'll see a variety of posts on this blog. This should include journal-type entries, opinion pieces (or maybe some late-night rambling, who knows), and a short story here and there, along with one or two longer stories I hope to begin writing in episodic format.
If you are someone who has my contact information, and you care, please do your best to make sure I don't lose the challenge for something as silly as forgetting to post. Also, if you have ideas or prompts you'd like to see me try out, I will gladly take all the inspirational material I can get.
I hope it isn't some ominous precedent to be posting at night on the first day of the month. Here's to writing until we drool blood and cry sweat—best wishes to all my fellow participants, and may the odds volunteer you as the tributes in my favor, or whatever it takes to get me a better sense of humor.
Here we go.