The blessed chloroform of the mind.

I am the kind of girl who will sit up all hours of the night to read a book.

And no, I'm not reading Twilight. I'm reading Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. Before everybody goes and points out that it's not exactly "light summer reading", I know. But the summer is the only time when I actually have time to read and I'm not about to waste that precious precious time reading cheesy romance novels, crappy mystery thrillers, or young adult series. I can honestly destroy (and by destroy I mean finish) one of those in hours. So I figure that my time would be better spent on something with more substance, or a better story.

I love a good story.

Don't get me wrong......I'm all for those young adult books like Harry Potter and Twilight simply for the fact that it gets people to actually sit down and read. I love that people clog stores and stay up all hours of the night not only for video games and movies, but also for books. I've also read some of these books and found that they're not for me.

I guess everyone has their own preferences. I guess I'm a book snob.

A brief note on Amazon's Kindle. I find that it's a fantastic idea and great also for getting people to read, BUT once again not for me. I guess along with being a book snob, I'm also a little old fashioned in the fact that when I'm reading, I like to feel the pages between my fingers. Also, staring at a computer screen for too long is bad for your eyes, and one of my biggest fears is losing my eyesight.

And if you look at your reflection, is it all you want to be?

Some days I feel like I lose a little piece of myself while I'm at work. Except for a few random little conversations throughout the day and lunch hour, I bury my personality and delve into the mile high stack of loans that I need to work on.
Then I tell myself that this is only temporary, and that hopefully one day I will be able to have a job that I can love and that showcases my thoughts, ideas, emotions. You know, pretty much why I'm in school to be a lighting designer.

Every time somebody asks me why I've gone into what I did, I always say something to the effect of "It's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun." And that's essentially what it is in a nutshell. But I used to try to explain the overwhelmingly huge amount of work and time that it takes, and why it is so rewarding at the end, and also how you have to say goodbye to it. Striking your show at the end is hard, and this job that I want so badly isn't for the faint of heart. I just sit back and tell myself that nothing lasts forever, and that while it lasted, it was wonderful, meaningful, beautiful. In that way, my work mirrors life.

Also you will always have the pictures from photocall to look back on in your portfolio.

Sadly I do not have a lot of photocall pictures from Millikin. The work I did there didn't exactly have an end product all of the time, and usually it was rushed because of the deadline, and I wasn't proud of it in the end. I had always just wished for more time.

I'm really looking forward to designing this coming semester at Columbia. After this semester, I will know for sure.

I'll know.