this is it.

looking through old pictures…

kristenjaneh — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 19:12:55 +0000

today, I…

kristenjaneh — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:01:11 +0000

1) realized that if I could, I would work at Kleinfelds’ for the rest of my life. Yes, this has stemmed from my obsessive-compulsive addiction to TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress”.
2) went out and did something I said I was going to do today, all by myself. This is a step in the Independance direction.
3) bought some christmas presents. yay!
4) Was very late for class because I made a misjudgement about which skytrain to take… there IS a huge difference between the Rav and the Mellenium Line. Avoid old skytrains at all cost.
5) ran into an old acquaintancy-friend on campus today, realized that situations such as that are, to me, very uplifting and energizing.

I also am very much badly missing my good friend Justin, who is all the way out at Harding University in…Arkansas. not a fan.
And I was told today that my H&M scarf is a gorgeous “aura-green” colour. Aura? aaaaalright.. sure.

so i’m back.

kristenjaneh — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:49:50 +0000

..after a long haitus. And there is no better way to kick off beginning #2 than to copy and paste an excerpt from a hilarious blog written by ‘fake Karl Lagerfeld’, which can only be accessed by a rather convoluted method which involves going to this OTHER BLOG, and looking for the picture of Karl on your right sidebar, halfway down the page.

whew.

Anyways, it is all about disliking twitter, and I do greatly dislike twitter. I once had a twitter account, so I know what i’m talking about. last year I was in a journalism class where the prof practically lived on the website… goodness.

anyways, without further ado, Karl:
Anyway, I was walking around Hyde Park and everybody’s looking at the sky. Even the doormen, in their Austrian jackets were looking up to the sky. Every single living thing in Hyde Park- plants included- was looking up toward the sky.
“What are you doing there?” I called out to a man in a tweed suit, with tweed shoes and a tweed pencil. He did not reply, his eyes mimicking the relationship between a child and a television.
“Hello?” I called again, stunned by the collective necks straining upwards.
“Twitter.” was the lone response from a man with no face, but a bowler hat.
“Hmm?” I hmm?-ed.
“Twitter,” he repeated, as if a wind-up toy.

The crowd in Hyde Park moved their arms up toward the sky, as if they were worshiping one of those religions, and started to say “Twitter. Twitter. Twitter. Twitter.”
“Is twitter not an internet service?” I asked the man who had no face.
“Twitter is the sky. Twitter is the sun, moon, sky, and Earth. Twitter is you, Karl.”
“Hippie.” I retorted.
The crowd began to sing “Aquarius”- that awful wishy-washy-my-mother-didn’t-breastfeed-me song, you know the one? I won’t even link to it here, for fear half of you form a commune and never bathe again, but you know what I mean.

I walked away from Hyde Park scared a little, to be frank with you. As I walked a way, the crowd grew louder; now singing “give peace a chance”. I wondered if I had stumbled into the 60′s by mistake.
I talked to my watch, which by the way, there is only two of in the world. I muttered generally, as old men do. “Nein nein nein” accelerated at the speed of a Franco-Prussian bullet train. As I went further away they had stopped singing “give peace a chance.” They were simply singing “Twitter’s what we need, 140 characters’ all we need, can’t read no books, but hell, we can read twitter.”

As I was on the outskirts of the park, the song had devolved once more, into something that wasn’t even English, French, German, Swedish, or Russian. I could smell the smoke of fires, as people threw each other into the air, hoping to catch a glimpse of what-? -Ultimate Twitter Nirvana? A world created from 140 characters? Ultimate knowing of what somebody had for lunch? Mm, obviously that. I walked into the empty streets, and had diet Coke with a deaf, dumb, and dead old lady from 1840, who did not know what twitter was. I saw Shakespeare in the alley, writing a new play. One hundred and forty characters long.

first paper of the year

kristenjaneh — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:28:57 +0000

alternate title: “I Need To Write More Often So I Minimize Gaps In Continuity Like This”.

this is what happens when you try and write a paper at midnight, after drinking a rum and coke, and feeling ridiculously overtired.

The area of concentration of the evidence brought forth in both papers could also determine the type of reader to whom each paper is directed. It seems as though Dothan’s “The ‘Sea Peoples’ and the Philistines of Ancient Palestine” possibly appeals to a broader audience. It covers the Philistines’ “commercial, technological, and cultural achievements” by looking at a variety of artifacts found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, Canaan, and Egypt (Dothan, p1279). Because the reader does not need to be an ‘expert’ in any one subject to fully understand the arguments Dothan offers, Dothan lends himself to a wide audience. The language is not difficult to comprehend, and PICTURES are also included. (whee!)

back to school?

kristenjaneh — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 23:42:35 +0000

year 2 at UBC isn’t starting off so well, and classes are still two weeks away from starting.

some July morning a while ago, i signed up for the courses which a) interested me, b) were prerequisites for my prospective major (English), and c) weren’t already full due to the large number of 3rd and 4th year students who had first priority with course selection. i had some good courses, 99% of which start after 11 in the morning. i was sort of content..until today.

i decided that i was going to re-look over my course schedule, just to make sure i was completely happy. siiiiiiighhhhhhhhhhh….i should have left well enough alone. now i am facing the identity crisis of identity crisises. (read: yes i am a bit of a drama queen, but i really am worried.) i don’t know what to do with my life. i don’t want to waste a valuable year of study (and $$) by being ADD with courses, i wish i had a direction. but, unfortunately, i can’t decide what to study, and i can’t think of any way where i can tie together all of my interests into a major that will give me a career i will be happy with.

i am currently having trouble expressing myself in an intelligible way, so forgive any ramble..

here was my previous plan: major in english. minor in visual arts, anthropology, or sociology. immerse myself in the Ubyssey. end result…journalism. sounds easy enough. but this doesn’t make me happy. in fact, as ‘good’ as i may be at writing papers and as much as i love literature, i don’t really WANT to have a schedule full of just…english. papers. reading. writing. books. even with a couple of electives to give some variety, having a large concentration on just English scares the heck out of me. so, then i look at a Sociology major. problem here: the courses that interest me (and many of which i am currently registered in) are ridiculously random. case in point: Crime and Society. Racial Inequality. the science of Social Interaction. all this stuff. the courses i NEED to take are things like Sociological Research. Statistics. in fact, to get a major OR minor in Sociology, NONE of the courses i am interested in are needed, or wanted. but, i could just suck it up, i mean, i am aware i’ll have to suffer the undesirable to work towards my goals.

i want to know a lot about many things, which may or may not have anything to do with each other. i believe this is my problem.. my parents are slightly exasperated with my outbursts: “i don’t WANT my university degree to suffer from tunnel vision!!!” i can’t seem to conform, happily and calmly to what the rest of my peers do…concentrate their interests. i can’t. i don’t want to. i refuse.

and maybe i’m just being stubborn, or maybe i’m missing something blatantly obvious that would make this a whole lot easier (in fact, that is probably the case). please enlighten me! is anyone else feeling like this?? am i just blowing this all out of proportion and being a drama queen?

and now, just for my own sake, i am going to reiterate my problems in point form so they are a little bit more concise. (feel free to stop reading anytime now.)

1. I have no idea what i want to do as a career. in fact, i probably will never settle on one career, and will be one of those people who change careers frequently throught their lives.

2. in that case, how am i supposed to choose courses and/or a major that provides me with flexibility to change my mind if i want to? for example, i don’t want to spend 2 years taking English major prerequisites, and then all of a sudden i decide i want to be an archeologist. crappy.

3. do i have to sacrifice what i REALLY want to learn about (the environment and current world issues, other cultures-both modern and ancient, art, literature, people, different and new schools of thought, crime, justice) in order to be placed in a nice little “major and minor” box, to have a neat, decent paying career?

4. is there some sort of a career that involves all that i’ve mentioned above? note. i can’t pick just ONE of those things to study, i really want to study ALL of the above.

5. am i asking too much?..i’m kind of nervous that i might be.

welcome to the jungle…

kristenjaneh — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 17:01:19 +0000

driving back from 100 mile house yesterday…was HOT. me and my friend Cam decided that on this road trip, we were going to go old school and not use the a/c, just have all the windows down and pretend like we were in a convertible. ha. this lasted for about an hour, until we flew down from the mountains and into an incredibly hot and desert-y valley. the wind became HOT. that’s when we busted out the air conditioning. plus, the combination of hard rock turned up way too loud and the wind rushing past the car driving 150 is pretty hard on the ears.

anyways, we kept driving, eventually passing through kamloops. and it was about half an hour out of kamloops where we began feeling like we were maybe passing through the tropical exhibit at the aquarium. like a jungle. a really hot, humid, wet and drippy jungle. it even smelled like the aquarium exhibit.. a smell, that in my mind, can be best discribed as “musky”. like the entire mountain range decided to have a steam bath. good stuff.

and THAT is when we randomly decided to take a hike. yes, a hike. up a mountain.

and i will have to tell that story later, as my kitten is currently destroying my dad’s editing desk, as she is bored. and probably hot. poor thing. heh. she’s adorable.

well, i’ll have to leave all my millions of readers in SUSPENSE. (dun dun dun.) tune in next time to hear about Kristen and Cam’s Adventure Hiking Up a Cliff in 40 Degree Weather.

some thoughts.

kristenjaneh — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:13:33 +0000

well, i have been keeping up with regular blog posts even less than i thought i would be… not that there isn’t anything interesting happening, on the contrary, my last couple of weeks have purely been insanity.

today is beautiful. i love the sun. in fact, i just heard a Ben Harper song that kind of discribes my mood right now, “She’s only happy in the sun”..i especially love the way summer smells. i wish i could bottle it up to look at whenever i was feeling down or longing for the sunny days in the middle of january. (october, november, january, february are the worst months in my opinion. october and november signal the cold beginning of an unwanted winter season, and january and february are when time seems to go by so slowly, and both the sunshine and the end of school are too far ahead to think about).

i think this is why people create art.. all art, like music, or writing, or dancing, photography, or sculpture, or painting.. because they can almost capture the feel of a moment, the memory of your emotions, the sights, smells..so it is frozen in time. life is so short, and people gravitate towards things that they know, the familliar, things they can hold on to. i would always ask my parents what they would save from the house if it was going up in flames. every time, they would answer, the photo albums. pictures are incredibly valuable. economically speaking, a printed photograph is about 75 cents worth of ink printed on glossy paper, or scientifically speaking, it is a collection of spectrums and molecules and things created by some chemical reactions that the eye somehow translates into colours, and shapes. electronically speaking, pictures are bytes of information. emotionally speaking, a photograph is, interestingly enough, incredibly valuable. maybe because within the picture, time is frozen, capturing faces, expressions, memories, emotions, feelings. it’s the good times, all over again. it’s almost as if you can go back to what you had. you can live in the past, for just another moment. sometimes i like to live looking backwards too.

here’s my unedited ramblings again! maybe someday i’ll do some concrete research, edit this, and write an essay. that sounds like fun to me. i wish they taught university courses on this sort of stuff.. the sociology and psychology of art/art appreciation. maybe i’ll teach it one day. heh.

start of a long summer break!

kristenjaneh — Wed, 06 May 2009 01:57:58 +0000

so.. i expect that i will be blogging a bit less this summer, seeing as though i am part hippie, and can’t stand to be sitting inside, staring at a computer screen, while it’s nice and sunny and warm outside, and when there’s stuff do be done with friends and such. i was talking to my boyfriend the other day, and he voiced a similar perspective.. somewhere, somebody i know is having fun, and i must be a part of it as well :)

a friend of mine is going to zambia for a nursing/humanitarian trip, i’m going to post a link to her blog on my blogroll (hehe.. if i can figure out how to do this) so you can all see the wonderful things she is doing! i’m super excited for her. i sometimes wish that i could be a nurse, some of my favorite people are really sweet, kind, and caring nurses who are passionate about people and what they do.. i’d love to join in one day, but who knows if that’s part of my future or not.

i watched the movie “The Boy with the Striped Pajamas”..and my family is eagerly awaiting the movie review that i wrote after i watched it. maybe next post :) just a disclaimer: this movie is SO VERY SAD. in fact, i was in some sort of wierd melancholy funk a few days after i watched it. so don’t watch it yourself unless you’re ready for the cold, hard truth.

hmmmm.. well other than this, i am excited about the summer, and what it holds! my one worry is that i won’t get the chance to go everywhere and do everything that i want to because i’ll be a) working or b) out of money. of course, the reason i’m working is because i need money.. so those things are kind of mutually dependant. well… summer is summer. i’ll have a good time no matter what!!

well that’s all for tonight.. i’m off to go paint or something. i slept in until 11, so i feel as though i need to do something productive with my day! see y’all later..and go catch the Canucks game! it’s pretty exciting so far…

enough said…

kristenjaneh — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:58:20 +0000

today’s soundtrack!

kristenjaneh — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 20:10:07 +0000

sunny spring happiness is HERE.