this has been a great day! and it's only 2:30 in the afternoon. it has been great for truly goofball reasons, but if you haven't discovered the depth and brevity of my goofballness yet.. well..

first of all, i had a really awesome day at work today. (you see how big a dork i am?) when i came in, liz told me that i had two set-up jobs to do since johanna wasn't able to come in today. eek! i never set up equipment myself. i've been shown, obviously, and it seems easy enough, but i'm kind of retarded when it comes to both technology and responsibilities.

plus the equipment is really strange. i had to set up one tv in the room next to the lab, but the thing with the tv is that the remote doesn't work in that room. this doesn't make any kind of sense to me, but it's true. you can change the channel in the hallway or in the lab, but not in the room where it has to be set up. i had to move the tv in and out of the room three times before i found the right channel to display that glorious blue screen.

i had to get the interdepartmental tv for the other room, and no one seems to know where that is. 'ask barb' is usually the solution, but barb was conveniently out to lunch. lots of running around before we finally discovered which key on mabry's massive (and i mean, you've never seen massive before) keyring opened which closet i was trying to find. plus the elevator is super scary. one day either the tv is going to fall on my head or my hand's gonna get caught in the elevator door. you wouldn't think so, but the job of lab assistant is a really dangerous one ;)

anyway, obviously this is nothing to most people, but every job i've had i've built a reputation of being the dumbass who can't figure anything out and screws everything up, but is too cute and nice to fire. today, i figured it out and i did it. so you see i'm a dork, but it makes me feel good.

and then i went on to english, which is quickly becoming, altogether, about the best three hours of my week. we got our first assignment today: to follow an interesting person around walmart for an hour and write a three page paper about them, their behavior, motives, emotions, et cetera. is this not the coolest assignment ever? i would do this for fun - and, very honestly, i'm so looking forward to doing this saturday morning. i have it all planned out. i'm going to walk to walmart - which is a sort of long walk, but it wouldn't be so much fun if i went with other people - and i would be content to spend hours there, searching for the perfect stalkee. then i'm going to treat myself to lunch and a movie (too bad harry potter's not still showing - probably a beautiful mind). this plan probably confounds most people, but the idea of having a day all to myself and away from campus is so appealing to me. dork that i am.

the great work of the day is king's letter from birmingham jail, which, i must shamefully admit, i did not read entirely before class since i was running around setting up equipment the hour before. (and yes, more shameful still, i had put it off until then.) and the parts i did read were rushed through at best, so the class discussion was this mind-blowing, eye-opening experience. this paragraph almost made me cry as neil read it. it's very long but i'm typing it all - it's that important and that good:

we have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and god-given rights. the nations of asia and africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'wait.' but when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million negro brothesrs smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking, 'daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?'; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name becomes 'nigger,' your middle name becomes 'boy' (however old you are) and your last name becomes 'john,' and your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'mrs.'; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; whenyou are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness' - then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.

i think all too often, we go through our lives without ever thinking about, never knowing, what other people have endured. i've certainly been guilty of this. it's nothing to us. but can you imagine the courage of those people who followed king, to go out there and protest and if hit to not hit back, and to come back and do it all again the next day? can you imagine the incredible strength of character to, after all their pain and suffering at the hands of white people, not want to retaliate, but simply get their message through and hope to coexist? it's amazing and inspiring to me.

and well, if i'm a dork to be energized by this stuff and to think and care about it, i'm glad to be. how different, do you think, would this world be if everyone read the words of king and thought, 'wow. yeah. let's do it.'

it's kind of strange and hard to explain, but i feel myself changing every day. everything i believe in and care about and strive for is shifting and reforming daily. it's becoming clear to me what exactly i want to do with my life, and what it is i stand for. i came to college with such a simple point of view and such limited experiences, and now i'm growing all the time. even by the time this semester is over, i feel that if i were to run into the one person who ever truly knew me, he would not see the selfish girl he left in disgust. i feel so far gone from that now...

anyway, it all makes me goofball happy, and that's good enough for me :)

i really like my new design. i am very proud of it. however, it's a very temperamental layout - i had to recode everything because every (p) (center) and (blockquote) tag made it look crazy. if you know html, it's a little unweildy to get along without your (p)s and (center)s. plus the text is spaced out by pixel until it fit just so on my browser, but i'm not at all confident it will look presentable on any other computer! also i know for sure it could never be read on netscape. but this doesn't come as a warning; if you're reading this, i'm positive you use ie. no one on netscape could have possibly made it this far. it's that horrendous. but i'm willing to give up the small portion of my potential audience caught in the stone age of internet browsers. if you use ie and it looks weird, please let me know. i really like it, myself! :)

you know the way i left was not the way i planned. but i thought the world needed love and a steady hand, so i'm steady now.
Dar Williams