So about those summer goals....

Just like rules are meant to be broken, I suppose goals are too.

Classes begin in a week and I feel the pressure to squeeze what I can into this last week. It's literally my last week of freedom. With a packed schedule between 40 hours of work at JCPenney, 20 hours at The Gainesville Sun and then two classes ( thank the lord one is online ) - I'm going to find it hard to keep up a social life. Hopefully you've seen The Devil Wears Prada with Anne Hathaway and Meryl Streep,and if you haven't then you should, because it imitates exactly what my life is going to be like these next four months. Yes - I will be the one running for coffee, breakfast, lunch and dinner (probably somewhere in between as well), while trying to make it from 13th street to twenty minutes out of town to JCPenney.
Here's the trailer:

I have completed some of my summer goals like potty training Gizmo (sort of), finding out there's no way to fix my bike and making my first Starburst wrapper bracelet (which is awesome).

My internship at INsite has been tied up and I'm left with $50 in gift certificates to places around town. I learned what it's really like to work in an office - which is not always my cup of tea. I find that my mind wanders in an office and that my ADD comes out.

Since I've come to find that some of my summer goals are just unrealistic, like finishing the book I've been writing, I'm going to make some fall goals that will hopefully be a ton more attainable.

Fall Goals:
- Establish a routine for practicing guitar
- Make updates to this blog at least once a week
- Make writing, photography and art work portfolios
- Work on my personal website

Starburst Wrapper Bracelet

Finally I have made a bracelet made out of Starburst wrappers!

I can remember back in highschool, during lectures no one cared or needed to listen to, students put together these bracelets out of saved up, wrinkled and dirty Starburst wrappers. I had never done it, even back then when high school classes didn't seem that useful. So, after my mom bought me a 1 lb bag of Starburst's for this past V-day, I decided I would make use of these wrappers and make a bracelet.

This is what became of that idea.

Oh! And this is where I learned how to make a Starburst Wrapper Bracelet.

Summer Accomplishments

For the first time in a long time, I have taken the summer off of college.
wwhhheeewwww
In the mean time I am still working about full time and I have started an internship at INsite Magazine.

I have also decided to finally chug through a list of goals for the summer-which-I have already accomplished one - Thank God!

Anyways...here is my list of things I would like to accomplish this summer:

• Make a Starburst Wrapper bracelet


• Fix all my torn or broken clothing/jewelry


• Finish writing my fiction novel


• Build a personal website


• Pay off my Best Buy bill


• Read the sookie stackhouse series


• Potty train my chihuahua mix Gizmo

That's all I can think of for now, but look for more to come!

Keeping My Chin Up

Here's some advice:

Don't ever trust Facebook to keep a secret....a secret.

I recently made the mistake of trusting the "you and me" filter button on the comment box--OOPS. MAJOR OOPS!

But needless to say, I had someone turn my words around and use them falsely and irrelevantly against me. Lets all laugh, right? No--she didn't know the emotion, the terrifying experience I had behind those words and the only one who knows the truth to the whole thing is my boyfriend AKA HER brother.

Oh yes-I have fallen into a family dispute with my boyfriend's family. Now I'm screwed.

I apologized, and apologized--oh yeah--AND APOLOGIZED. I guess some people aren't willing to forgive, even for something so small and minute. I'm a very forgiving person. I may not always forget, rarely do I, but I will forgive. It is after all, apart of my own religious beliefs, as I thought it was apart of hers too since we read from the same Bible-to be merciful and to forgive.

I asked what I could do--but I got no response, just insults.

This is when I had enough. I had let her scream in my face while sitting on my hands for the sake of holding together any kind of relationship with his family-BUT-I'm not one to be made a fool of and you will "get yours."

I used to be a passive person, but my passiveness has turned into patience, but the patience will break, especially when you turn something against me that you have no understanding about.

GROW UP.
GET OVER YOURSELF.
AND MOVE ON HUN.

We both have better things to do than make each other angry, especially when it's not going to solve anything and I've given up on the fact of forgiveness and actually-I don't really care anymore to receive it.

The situation made me grateful for my parents and myself. I realize how great of a person I can be and that I was raised in a good way. (not that she wasn't)--we are very different people, but we should both be empathetic. I wasn't to begin with, but I didn't realize how different we were in the way we "took things." But I apologized and tried to reason. I even broke it down for her.

Oh well--I still have my boyfriend and that's all that matters.

God knows the truth behind my actions and that's all that matters to me.
God Bless and Goodbye.

Chivalry is not Dead

It is rare though.

Dictionary.com defines chivalry as : "the sum of the ideal qualifications of a knight, including courtesy, generosity, valor, and dexterity in arms." ( http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/chivalry+ )

I've heard my grandfather talk about how our generation is basically screwed. Even the media says we don't know how to physically communicate with each other (minus the technology) never mind romantically connect.

I disagree.

I think our generation connects in different ways than past generations. You can't blame us for the ingenious inventions that have slipped into our hands like Blackberry's, laptops and Facebook.

How I love Facebook!

Back to what I said at the beginning of this post: here's my proof that chivalry is not dead.

There's a guy that I work with (we'll call him Jim), during the evenings mostly, who plays off this mask of being smooth with the ladies. Some of Jim's stories and attitudes makes me question whether he's a borderline player-BUT-he had one elderly customer approach him in a small panic. She couldn't find her daughter.

She kept punching the fact that her daughter had to use a walker and was supposed to meet her in our department.

Many other employees would have just paged for her daughter, but Jim actually paged her and then preceded to walk around the store to look for her. While he was looking she sat down in the corner on a purple bench. He returned about ten minutes later saying he found her and would show her where her daughter was.

He offered his arm to her and she rested her shaky arm in his.

This came as a shock to me. I literally watched them walk down the center aisle of our store, until my eyes got too blurry to make sense of them anymore. It wasn't a romantic chivalry that I was seeing, but it was chivalrous, and it shocked me because it was coming from Jim.

I would never have expected Jim to care to offer his arm out to her.

So--chivalry is not dead just rare, deeply embedded in the hearts of today's generation of men. My guess is that it will come out when he really cares about the person he offers it to.

New Beginnings and Tieing Ends

2010

In years past I have made the cliche new years resolution to lose weight. I've read the diet books, like "You on a Diet" by the Opra-made-famous Dr. Oz, tried the silly slim "milk shakes" (or so they pretend to call them). I have always gotten tired of the blandness of the diet.

This year I'm going to change the direction of my new years resolution to something more productive: finishing my own novel. I'm going to admit that I have already cheated this resolution because I have already started this resolution almost a year ago. It's a project I have been working on off and on, mostly in the coffee cafes of Books a Million. I figure that if I can somehow construct a best seller, just one, I'd be able to establish a writers road for myself, carving some kind of road for myself to start my writing career.

I don't know if you have noticed, but the job market for any kind of writer is as slim and transparent as a clear thread: impossible to detect. This makes me afraid.

This is another reason I started this blog. I was hoping to figure out how to write an established blog, attract readers and comments and then make some money off the advertising. So far, this has not happened. Most of the time I write on this, I feel like I'm talking to a blank computer screen. Well.....I guess I am, aren't I?

Why not make two new years resolutions:
1. finish my book
2. make a successful blog

Stay tuned.

How to be counteractive in the workplace

I've been working at Jcpenney now for 3 1/2 years, and I consider myself a great worker. I may not meet my quotes most of the time, but I'm reliable and independent. For Christmas, my now boyfriend was going to come and see me for the weekend (he had been out of town for the xmas break visiting family). I told her this before she finalized the schedules. She continued to schedule me for a 12 hour shift.

I mean 12 HOURS!!!

I figured she could have at least given me a shorter shift if she wasn't going to just give me the day off. So I found another employee who was willing to switch with me. I asked her about it and she said I couldn't switch. When I asked her why, she said it was because I was a better worker than her.

HELLO----WHAT A GREAT WAY TO SHOW YOUR APPRECIATION FOR A GOOD WORKER!

I said to her, so because I work harder I get a bad shift and can't see my boyfriend when he comes up JUST to see me? She nodded. And then I said to her, "well I could just call out like everyone else does when they don't get the shift they want." I said this, not really meaning I would, and she replied "you know what I would say."

This is the perfect way to make fabulous employees want to be counteractive to the employers workplace. It made me just want to stand around and do nothing, figuring that that way I would get what I want in the end.

Rule # 1 in Management (Yes i took a class): Go above and beyond to please your GREAT employees.

If you make your employees happy then they will be happy working for you, and therefore will work harder for you. It's proven that employees who feel a personal connection to their manager, will stick with a job even if the pay or benefits aren't as good as a competitive job.

HEADS UP MANAGERS!!!

Please your workers first and the rest will follow.