Hayley's Comet

Last night and this morning I finally let go of everything that was holding me back from sketching figures. I think it had to do with fear mostly, and self-criticism, but now I’m loosely drawing arms and legs the way I was meant to.

This week’s Collection Development class freed me to do this, where we are required to do a project where the figures aren’t necessesarily human. They don’t have to have hands, feet or even faces, and they don’t have to be on the 9-heads scale. I’ve already come up with a few collection ideas based on this freedom.

My project (due in three weeks) requires me to design a collection for a company of my choice; well, chosen from a list. I picked Betsey Johnson, and will be designing two different 12-pc. Arizona-themed groups!

I’ll write more once I finish this twist dress for Draping tomorrow!

This post is dedicated to my mom, who thinks I don’t blog enough.

Yeah, yeah I know the “Learn something everyday” experiment fell through, but I had a lot of drama to deal with during the break and so all I felt like doing was going to the pool and watching Frasier.

I don’t really have a lot to say at the moment. I have my second day of class tomorrow and I’m looking forward to it. I’ll write about school tomorrow evening.

I’ll leave you with a quote to think about (see next post).

It turns out my shower has been leaking water into the apartment below me for the past six months.

I’ve had problems with my shower since I got here. Low pressure, no pressure, no cold water, no hot water, no water at all - you name it. They “fixed” the hot/cold water thing about three months ago and that’s when the problems really started. It turns out that every time I would take a shower, water was dripping in through a crack between the hot/cold handle and the wall. Oops!

Two somber maintenance men came to my door this afternoon and said, “May we talk to you for a minute, Miss?” Based on the way things have been going here, my first thought was, “what did I do now!” But their “somber” news was just that they needed to turn off my water for a few hours to fix the leak. After three people looked at it, one guy took the shower head and on/off thing out of the wall and fixed it, accidently cracking some of the tile around it along the way. Luckily he caulked it all up and it’s fine. They even sent a cleaning person in to mop up their muddy maintenance man footprints.

They told me that it should work fine, that I’ll still have hot water, etc. I’m skeptical. I also heard them tearing out and replacing the ceiling below me.

Who let this happen? The people below. They were always “noisy troublemakers” (maintenance man’s words, not mine!) so they apparently didn’t notice that their ceiling was about to cave in. I guess that’s his nice way of saying they were drunk or high 24/7. The occupants have since been evicted, hence the quiet. If these walls could talk, though…

This is a great metaphor of how things work in LA (and perhaps life). Nobody pays attention, things get shoved under the rug and no one gets clued in until parts of the ceiling cave in.

Having a free place to live certainly helps out my situation, but I don’t think people understand that I actually like being an RA.

Yeah the occassional middle-of-the-night calls are rough, so is getting residents to do paperwork that I need them to fill out when I need them to do it. There are other things I don’t like that I can’t really mention here, but I can tell you that residents haven’t always been nice, or excited to have me knocking on their door. People try to break the rules before they even begin. Those who have let me in without as much as a scowl or guilty “I’m hiding something in the freezer” demeanor have made it all worthwhile. I could go to nine difficult rooms and hear a funny story  from the tenth room, and make up for not only the nine prior but also any other thing that may have gone badly during the day.

Maybe it’s the diligent psychology 101 student in me, but I enjoy seeing complex relationships unfold, and doing what I can to make things go smoothly; this of course, not counting my own complex relationships, problems with which I like to avoid instead.

Move-in day is my favorite. Everyone meets for the first time and the manner in which this happens determines the how rest of the quarter will go. Something as simple as holding the elevator for someone or buying a trash can for the apartment can make it, letting the door close behind you or leaving a passive “paws off!” note about personal belongings can break it. Parents act like children and their children act like children, too. It’s easy to tell which parents belong to which resident, no matter what the physical differences are.

I spent this quarter’s move-in day as a direction-giver and elevator operator. I stood near the entrance of my building and greeted parents and their students as they came in. I remember walking through those sliding glass doors myself, after being hastily told that I couldn’t park in that garage and would need to find a spot elsewhere. The building smells the same way as it did when I move in, and that gives me odd deja vu.

I tried to make conversation with everyone while they waited for the elevator. I also ran to unlock the front door because nobody knew that their key wouldn’t unlock it and they would have to come around. I barely remember anyone’s name, but I liked being that friendly face despite the humidity, parking nightmare and troubling, homesick feelings of being in a new place. All of those feelings were thick in the air. I laughed at the people who brought three suitcases just for shoes and wondered how that girl would get along with her roommate, who brought three suitcases just for books. When the elevator broke, I fled the scene and helped parents and students alike find their rooms, especially those who had been walking in circles and kept passing by the stairs. I will talk to anyone who will listen to me, so helping students move in, as well as being a speaker at orientation, felt more like privledges than chores.

I think that having such a rough freshman year of my own makes me want to “fix it” for everyone else. Someone was telling me the other day that my astrological sign, Pisces, means that I need to fix evertyhing. I don’t know if that’s necessarily true, but I do want to help people, and since I hate feeling uncomfortable, I want to lessen the blow for others. I remember what it was like to say goodbye to my parents, how I felt sleeping five feet away from a complete stranger for the first night with my new roommate and how very badly I wanted to give up and go home. Well, look at me now, right?

I’m not sure where I was going with this, and my computer battery is almost out, so I’ll close with a quote from one of my favorite books by Paul Arden, It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want To Be:

“If something is new, you can’t expect to like it right away because you have nothing to compare it with. The effort of coming to terms with things you don’t understand makes them all the more valuable when you do grasp them.”

Yesterday I lifted a crate full of acrylic paint and other crafting supplies, as well as a totebag stuffed with other various knicknacks from my parents’ house in Arizona. I lifted it from the car to the elevator [took a break], the elevator to the fire door [took a break] the fire door to my front door [took a break] and my front door to my kitchen table [took a break and ate some raspberries]. Now my wrists, arms and lower back are strained. If I bend over to pick something up, I may be stuck that way, old lady-style. Obviously, my 3 days in-a-row workout last week did nothing for my muscle tone. I am out of shape and old gymnastics aches and pains are taking their toll. I now lay in bed with an excruciatingly hot heating pad under my back. When the levels of pain and heat reach some kind of pain equilibrium, I will have to do something.

I did not lift from the knees. It was a clean jerk that jerked my back out of whack.

If I don’t do any extra-credit learning on the weekends (just learning that is imperative to survival - where’s the nearest Chevron, for instance), this entry will make me techincally “caught up” in my quest to learn something every day.

Intrigued by the lyrics of the Rush classic, “Bastille Day” I decided to delve into the actual event and see if what they said held any truth. Since Rush is the “thinking man’s band” I assume they would get their facts straight - misinforming a classic-rock audience of nerds can only lead to each member of a classic rock nerd audience writing angry fan letters correcting the band’s lyrics and asking to be hired as the official “fact checker.” Here are the lyrics for your thoughtful-music listening pleasure:

Theres no bread, let them eat cake
Theres no end to what they’ll take
Flaunt the fruits of noble birth
Wash the salt into the earth

But they’re marching to Bastille Day
The guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Free the dungeons of the innocent
The king will kneel, and let his kingdom rise

Bloodstained velvet, dirty lace
Naked fear on every face
See them bow their heads to die
As we would bow as they rode by

And we’re marching to Bastille Day
The guillotine will claim her bloody prize
Free the dungeons of the innocent
The king will kneel, and let his kingdom rise

Lessons taught but never learned
All around us anger burns
Guide the future by the past
Long ago the mould was cast

For they marched up to Bastille Day
The guillotine — claimed her bloody prize
Hear the echoes of the centuries
Power isn’t all that money buys

Well put, Geddy Lee, though there’s no specific details besides “Bastille Day” and the part about the dungeons that relate exactly to the event.

Simply stated, Bastille Day, which occurs on July 14th, is France’s Independence Day. On this day in 1789 - also the first year Rush went on tour, mind you - the “general populace” marched towards the Bastille, a fortress-like prison which also happened to hold most of the government’s artillery. It imprisoned mainly political naysayers who had written letters against the monarchy of Louis the XVI (no need to count on your fingers, that’s the 16th Louis). The “storming” of the fortress intimidated the owner of the prison, who opened the gates to prevent fighting. This would be just as if the WTO had let those grungy Seattle hippies who were protesting their convention in 1999 right on in the Convention Center, expecting that they would all walk across the street to Gameworks after to enjoy some NASCAR racing or one of those sweet motion simulator game where you ride a snowboard or jet ski. This didn’t quite happen in France so, “possibly because of a misunderstanding, fighting resumed.”

Ninety-eight “stormers” of the Bastille and one sole “defender” died among the stampede, but other officials were assasinated shortly after the fighting between Bastille guards and “the general populace” (Wikipedia’s words, not mine) ceased. Feudalism ended soon after and a declaration of rights was established.

I will celebrate this year on July 14th by listening to Rush and eating French fries, just like I do every day.

Nick asked me at Rubio’s today, “What are refried beans?”

“Beans that have been fried, then fried again.” That was my reply. Wrong!

Wikipedia knows best:

“Refried beans are traditionally prepared with pinto beans, but many other varieties of bean can be used. The raw beans are soaked overnight, stewed, drained of most of the remaining liquid, and converted into a paste with a masher. Some of the drained liquid is added if the consistency is too dry. The paste is then traditionally fried with lard, typically in a cast iron pot or skillet, and seasoned to taste. Lard is often substituted with vegetable oil in “vegetarian” and “fat free” varieties. Onion and garlic may be sauteed in the oil before the beans are added.”

That definition was twice as long, and you can thank me for shortening (no pun intended) it. I can now understand why sometimes beans taste onion-y or garlic-y and give me heartburn - it’s the oil! Also, I need to mention that Rubio’s skips the lard part, so their beans are un-refried. I appreciate this. I think that I’ll also just keep eating black beans, un-fried and un-refried, rinsed, right out of the can and into a taco.

What does it mean to be “in escrow”?

Nick and I drive by real estate for-sale signs all the time that say “IN ESCROW” and haven’t been able to come up with a good definition. I always thought that if you were selling your house and had finally reached a deal with a buyer but they were slow to pay you (possibly because they were still trying to sell their house) it put you in escrow. Then I thought that a higher bidder - wearing a ten-gallon hat, no doubt - could come along and pay cash for your house, edging out the buyer and rendering them homeless, twice.

Wikipedia thinks that escrow is when “…the mortgage company establishes an escrow account to pay property tax and insurance during the term of the mortgage.”

Wait, but what’s an “escrow account”?

• “an account established by a broker, under the provisions of license law, for the purpose of holding funds on behalf of the broker’s principal or some other person until the consummation or termination of a transaction, or
• a trust account held in the borrower’s name to pay obligations such as property taxes and insurance premiums.”

You lost me at “provisions” and then again at “principal” - is that like in calculating compound interest? I know about that, I took Finance. Does it have to do with Elementary school principals?

“a principal is a person– legal or natural–who authorizes an agent to act to create one or more legal relationships with a third party.”

A legal person is a lawyer, so does that make a natural person a caveman, or a nudist?

“a natural person is a human being perceptible through the senses and subject to physical laws, as opposed to an artificial, legal or juristic person.”

So an agent is like what celebrities have?

“an agent is a person employed to do any act for another or to represent another in dealings with third persons.”

Ha! I was technically right about that, but I’m getting the runaround here. Let’s see if I can cut and paste a few things to re-write the definition and get this figured out:

Escrow is when the mortgage company, or broker, establishes an account, under the provisions of license law. This account has the purpose of holding funds on behalf of the broker’s principal’s agent, who creates a legal relationship with a third party, until the consummation or termination of a transaction. The escrow account may also be used as a trust account held in the borrower’s name to pay obligations such as property taxes and insurance premiums.

Hmm. Or we could just ask Freeadvice.com:

“It’s simply (this is unecessary mockery - they don’t know what I’ve gone through to find out this information) an arrangement where a third party – such as a title insurance company or a lawyer – holds money or documents and distributes them according to instructions from both parties.

In a commercial real estate transaction, for example, the escrow agent may obtain funds and documents from the buyer, the seller, and the commercial lender. When everything is ready, the escrow agents make sure the money and papers wind up in the right hands. Escrow agents make transactions flow smoothly and reliably.”

So a ten-gallon hat-wearing auctioneer can’t swoop down - like a crow, get it? - and buy your house instead. It would be much more interesting if treasure chests, secret passageways and mysterious tapping heels were involved. It’s time to pick up a Nancy Drew book and do a little sleuthing, though I don’t own The Case of the Mysterious Escrow.