The great, wide somewhere

Hopping off a plane always has me itching to hop back on. I went to Texas last weekend and now I’ve got that pack-up-and-go urge again. So because I like to make lists, and I enjoy daydreaming, here are five random places I would like to visit someday, in no particular order:

Svalbard:

It’s a group of icy islands north of Norway. They don’t get sun  from Nov. 14 to Jan. 29, but you can go weasel watching. How  can anyone turn down weasel watching? And there’s an entire  week-long festival in March to celebrate the return of the sun.

Positano:

This small Italian city on the Costiera Amalfitana in Campania,  Italy is pretty much built up the side of the mountain lining the  coast. The sides of the buildings are painted in an array of  colors. The town doesn’t necessarily boast the widest range of  activities, but it seems like a good place to go for those adventurous, cultural types who don’t mind exploring nooks and crannies.

Fes:

Is there any reason not to go to a place called Fes?

Santorini:

The entirety of Greece is on my list of  places I want to go, but Santorini is a must. The set-up of the  town looks similar to Positano, but the pictures of the white  buildings with the blue rooftops set against the back drop of the bluer than blue Aegean is breathtaking. I can’t imagine how gorgeous it must be in person.

Çatalhöyük:

It’s not a place to visit so much as an archaeological site, but if I  ever got the chance to check it out, I would. It’s in Anatolia, a  region in Western Asia comprised mostly of Turkey. It’s the site  of on-going digging and research. I’ve always wanted to explore Turkey, and if I wasn’t pursuing journalism, I don’t think I’d be able to resist the siren song of field research.

Anywhere cool you want to visit?

No plot… big problem?

30 days... 50,000 words... how 'bout it?

NaNoWriMo, anyone?

Ah yes, it’s that time of year again: November. And what is so special about November, you ask? Thanksgiving? Pilgrims?

No, dear readers. Novels.

For those of you that aren’t complete nerds and don’t ask your sister to buy you books like this for your last birthday, November is National Novel Writing Month. Chris Baty founded the month-long book fest in 1999 while working as a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.

As he says in his book “No Plot? No problem! A low-stress, high-velocity guide to writing a novel in 30 days:”

“…I decided that what I really needed to do was write a novel in a month. Not because I had a great idea for a book. On the contrary, I had no ideas for a book.

All of this made perfect sense in 1999.”

It makes perfect sense to me, too. What I got out of the book was this: Lots of people say they want to write a book, myself included. But how many of us actually try it? My go-to excuse is, oh, I’ll write a book when I’m a little older and I’ve traveled the world and I have something really profound to say.

Allow me a moment to call BS on myself.

Hemingway didn’t become Hemingway over night. When he started, I mean really first started and picked up a pen or pencil or whatever for the very first time, he was just come clown wasting time not doing real work. And now he’s Hemingway.

And let’s face it, we’re not all going to be Hemingway, no matter how old or wise we get. If my future is chick lit, so be it. I’d be happy leaving the next great American novel to another.

The point is, you have to start somewhere. The first book you write won’t be brillant. But the goal is not brillance, it’s completion. I can say with certainty that once you start writing, and you catch that bug, you never stop writing. And the more you write, the better you get at it. So while your first 50,000 word (that was Baty and his SF pals’ minimum requirement for a “novel”) will probably be crap… maybe your fifth 50,000 words won’t be.

And why November? Well, why not? In 2000, Baty moved it from it’s original month of July to November to “more fully take advantage of the miserable weather.” But you can do it any month. I almost tried it last May but it didn’t pan out. (OK, OK, I chickened out. Sheesh.)

So now NaNoWriMo starts in two days, and even though I’ve got a major anthrolpology research project to do, other homework and reading, grad school applications to complete, essays to write for those applications, and The Spectrum owns my soul…

I kind of (really) want to give it a whirl. Am I crazy?

Probably.

Meghan McCain wears a tank top, people go nuts

Meghan McCain shocked the world last week by revealing that she does, in fact, have a chest.

Meghan McCain. To tweet or not to tweet?

And people freaked out about it.

She took the picture of herself at home Wednesday night, and posted it to Twitter with a joke about how “spontaneous” her evening at home was. She could have been out at a bar, dancing on a table. Instead she was at home, reading, in a tank top.

Some have suggested that since she is somewhat in the public eye, that she knew what sort of reaction the picture would spurn, that she did it for the attention. Even if that’s true, does it really matter? It that’s true, then all this talk about it is giving her exactly what she wanted, in which case, joke’s on you, America.

It’s a picture of a cute girl with a lot of cleavage in a tank top reading a book – definitely not something to freak out about.

Originally McCain had this to say about the ordeal via Twitter:

“so I took a fun picture not thinking anything about what I was wearing but apparently anything other than a pantsuit I am a sl*t, this is why I have been considering deleting my twitter account, what once was fun now just seems like a vessel for harassment”

After a few more Twitter posts, she came to this:

“do want to apologize to anyone that was offended by my twitpic, I have clearly made a huge mistake and am sorry 2 those that are offended.”

The fact that she felt the need to apologize is ridiculous. I understand that an apology is an easy way to get people off your back in these types of circumstances, but she shouldn’t have felt the need to. She didn’t show up to a public political event wearing a skin-tight denim cat suit. It really shouldn’t matter what she wears in the privacy of her own home. Yes, she’s in the public eye, and yes, she blogs about politics and voices her opinion on political issues, but she doesn’t put herself forward as some sort of brilliant political mind that has all the answers. She’s a young, college-educated woman who likes to express her opinion and happens to have famous parents.

On Thursday, she wrote a blog for The Daily Beast entitled “Don’t call me a slut,” in which she addresses the “controversy” created by the photo. Many of the commenters talk about what the picture and her less-than-strictly political blog posts on The Daily Beast mean for the Republican Party.

They mean nothing for the Republican Party, nor should they.

One of the main problems I see with politics is that it becomes too far removed from normal, everyday life. Politicians and the people who talk about them in the media become these weird caricatures of actual people. It’s very off-putting.

But I find McCain to be refreshing, even if I often don’t agree with her political opinions. She’s smart and has an interesting take on politics and the way it influences her life as a young woman. She’s not overly intellectual about it, and I find her to be more accessible for a younger generation. She’s a Republican, but she’s willing to consider the other side’s ideas (such as with her support for gay marriage), which is more than we can say for some people.

She’s 25 years old. Her life shouldn’t be all politics, all the time, and she shouldn’t have to live in a tank top-less bubble just because people know who she is.

Cabin fever

When I woke up yesterday, I felt alright, but as the day wore on, I started feeling worse and worse. I was stuck at the Spectrum office writing, editing and listening to the candidates for this week’s SA presidential elections from 10:30 a.m. to about midnight. By the time 10 p.m. rolled around I was wearing the sweatshirt I’d worn that morning, my boyfriend’s sweatshirt, his jacket and my gloves, sprawled out on the office couch, trying to sleep in between shivers.

Surprise, surprise, I didn’t go to class today, spending most of the day asleep in bed.

Someone please explain to me why I feel the urge to repaint my bedroom walls?

Being sick makes me feel antsy. I get really bad cases of cabin fever very quickly. But it always creates an urge in me to do the most random things that I probably wouldn’t think about doing otherwise.

It hasn’t been too bad today, probably because whatever was making sick seems to have already passed. Right now I merely feel the urge to do my laundry, clean and redecorate my room, knit a sweater and rearrange my bookshelf.

The more involved the illness, the more ridiculous it gets. When I had my wisdom teeth out last winter and subsequently spent a week in bed, I spent a lot of that time contemplating how much I really, really wanted to go dirt bike riding. And climb a mountain.

Hopefully I’m right and this little bout of sickness has passed, or my next post might be about how I broke my legs sky diving.

Grad school blues

My brain hurts.

I’ve felt pretty lost lately – lost in a pile of GRE review books and graduate school applications.

My future? Maybe.

To be completely honest, I don’t know where to begin other than to say… ow.

My post-undergrad dreams have only recently solidified. For the past few years, I’ve had vague ideas about what I wanted to do after graduation, but it didn’t start to seem even moderately real to me until I started filling out the online applications to journalism graduate programs a few weeks ago.

Now I’m buried in checklists. Yes, I’m that nerd sitting in the back of the class with her planner out, frantically checking and double-checking the lists of “required supplemental application materials.” Cue the headaches.

The other thing that’s made it more real for me is that whole other-people-are-applying-to-the-same-grad-schools thing. For the last year or so, I’ve been able to think about my fellow applicants as these vague, blurry non-existent people on the other side of the country who obviously won’t be as qualified as me.

But as I’m figuring out what I’m doing next year, so is everyone else. Other people applying to the same programs as me aren’t just faceless whoever’s from the middle of nowhere. They’re people in my classes, people sitting three desks away from me.

And it’s terrifying.

Now I have concrete people to judge myself against. What if they’re better than me? What if their résumé looks more impressive? What if I don’t make the cut? Would a school really accept a bunch of people from the same place?

Sadly, writing this isn’t really making me feel better. If anything, I’m freaking out more now. Here’s hoping the people behind the admissions desks at Columbia can’t smell fear.