Romney Sons @ their “finest”

I’m Liberal. Supremely so. This blog isn’t about politics though, so I’m going to keep my personal views to myself and share with you something I ran across today and found really FUNNY!

1. The fact that Tagg Romney announced that he wanted to take a swing at the President of the United States when he’s got the most rude, disrespectful, and uncourteous fatherI have ever seen in a debate. Talking over people? No problem. Sounding like a slimy real estate or insurance agent? You got it.

2. Then there’s poor unfortunate Josh Romney’s “serious” face at the debate, which can be translated into a (super creepy) killer glare. Josh Romney is definitely who I consider to be the ‘hottest’ of the 4 Romney sons, but I digress. This is so funnyyy.

Source – http://buzzfeed.tumblr.com/post/33751329834/josh-romney-in-the-audience-of-tonights-debate

Poetic Tidbits – Oppen, Reznikoff, O’Hara

Charles Reznikoff, “On Brooklyn Bridge I saw a man drop dead”

On Brooklyn Bridge I saw a man drop dead.
It meant no more than if he were a sparrow.
Above us rose Manhattan;
below, the river spread to meet sea and sky.

George Oppen, from Of Being Numerous, “A Language of New York”

A city of the corporations

Glassed in dreams
And images–

And the pure joy
Of the mineral fact

Tho it is impenetrable

As the world, if it is matter
Is impenetrable.

Frank O’ Hara, “Having a Coke With You”

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them

I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

Note: I need to write a 10 page paper tying these together somehow. I will probably leave out the Oppen tidbit as it is from a much larger collection. The paper is due Thursday and I definitely don’t have time to do the piece justice in context to the rest of “Of Being Numerous” although I have so, so, so much to say about it if I could analyze just this one little tidbit. Enjoy the poetry, it’s all very short and sweet. Wish me luck with this paper!

Sorry to be falling behind on Blogging Honesty – I have 2 papers due this week and another due the week after. Then I’ll be done with my semester, wow. I’m really excited for it to be Thursday night lol, when both of these papers will be done. It’s 2AM and I’ve been up since 7 and I am totally WIPED right now. And I don’t really have much work done on either paper yet (1 is an 8 page first draft to be peer edited, and 1 is a 10 page paper on poetry and politics in New York City)

Such fun! Peace out, imma at least start outlining my ideas for the poetry paper 🙂 I’ve already read the pieces for my other paper (Aristotle – gender, sex, desire in Metaphysics, Physics, On The Generation of Animals) and annotated the readings heavily as I went through them looking for the 3 particular themes I’m supposed to focus on. So now it’s just a matter of penning my thoughts and as its a rough draft, it’s second on my priority list. Final paper is actually due 2 weeks from now for that class.

Aiight, good night. I’ll go to bed before 3AM I promise. Need to be up at 7:30 to get ready to get to class on time since I’m at home in Long Island. I was missing the comfort & feeling a tad homesick. I guess I need to be out of NYC to write a paper on it. Ironic.

Catch UP!

Hey everybody!

I’m experimenting with moving Nail Spark* around again. Right now, I’m posting on a Blogger (nailsparks.blogspot.com) but I have no idea what will ultimately pan out. I can’t run two active blogs, I simply can’t. I’ve gotten so overwhelmed with the things I want to say that I end up shutting down and not posting anything at all, and that isn’t fair to the readers of either blog.

I’m going to go back to doing things my way then – slow and steady. The pact I made was that I would never apologize for not posting, because these blogs are like my personal diaries, and if I don’t have time to write in them, then I simply don’t have time and there’s nothing that can be done about it.

That’s fine for Controlled Derangement, which is my personal blog, but that’s not as okay when it comes time for Nail Sparks. A nail polish blogger is only as famous as her followers, and right now, I can’t say that I have too many. Nope, don’t have too many at all. And I want to gain more followers there, but just don’t have the time right now to post actively, blog, do my homework, study for LSAT’s, work, and maintain an internship. IDK what to do yo. There’s a lot on my plate right now.

These dilemmas aside, life is pretty good overall. I’m enjoying my time hanging out with friends, and sometimes, I catch myself with a goofy, silly grin on when reading texts from a certain person. It’s great and I’m happy and I’m all smiles when I’m thinking about that. But then there are times when the reality of my GPA sets in.

Let’s face it….At this time next year, I will know what the next three years of my future hold. I’ll know where I’ll go to law school and I REALLY, REALLY DON’T WANT TO END UP ON LONG ISLAND. I know St. Johns and Hofstra have great law programs – nothing against them at all – but I just don’t want to attend a law school which’ll make me commute from home. I don’t want to end up back home with no freedom after I’m finally 21 and when I’m ready to pursue a real, meaningful, lasting relationship. You can’t do those when you can’t stay out past 10 -.-

Minor details though, hm? Right now, there’s a lot of uncertainty and it’s taking me a while to accept that I don’t know what my future holds. I mean I know the far future – I AM going to be a lawyer. I really will. But the process of getting there…I have no idea how that’ll pan out and that is terrifying me!

I knew I wanted to be a lawyer fairly early in elementary school. I had a brief bout where I wanted to teach but my lack of patience made me abandon that idea fairly quickly. From 2nd or 3rd grade onwards, law is all that I’ve pursued.

I knew I wanted to go to NYU fairly early in high school. NYU was my dream, but I knew it was obtainable. I think I have the ability to step back and rationalize pretty easily when it comes to knowing my limitations. I applied to Princeton and Dartmouth but I knew I would be rejected. I knew I could get into NYU – I had the GPA, the AP scores, and the application. That isn’t arrogance, it’s just knowing where I stood in the application pool. And I did get in, and of course I didn’t get a full ride but I got enough to make that goal of mine a reality.

This is where I’m scaring myself. Right now, here’s the breakdown of what I really have to offer.

An overall GPA of 3.34
I don’t foresee it going up (by much) within the next two semesters, if at all.

Let’s face it. In HS I had a GPA of 4.0 and I still didn’t get into the Ivy’s. My SAT  score wasn’t phenomenal, but it was above average, and that’s probably the only reason I got the money I did for NYU. I also made it pretty clear that I would only attend if I had enough financial aid to make it possible, and that NYU was my dream school.

I came here three years ago all starry-eyed and full of dreams. Thought I’d do great since I’d picked the two majors I loved and a great minor to boot.

Now, here I am as a senior writing pretty bitterly about my love-hate affair with this school.

Do I love my NYU experience as a whole? Yeah, I do.

Would I have gone to another college if I had the choice? I think about it sometimes, and wonder why I didn’t apply to Emory or Loyola or Temple or even University of Michigan. Maybe that would have given me a different perspective, visiting these other colleges and comparing what I could have to what I already knew NYU was like. But overall, I don’t think I’m that unhappy that I wish I could take it back. NYU changed me for the better, and it has left me with too many priceless memories to count.

But if I could have foreseen my current situation (and unhappiness), I WOULD NEVER HAVE DECLARED A MAJOR IN POLITICS AT THIS UNIVERSITY. I should never have done that, and I have been regretting it since the day I took more classes than necessary and couldn’t justify dropping it down to a minor.

I’m now eight classes in at the end of this semester, out of the ten I need to take. I am also completely miserable.

I haven’t thoroughly enjoyed a single politics class at this university. The department has great, renowned professors who are undoubtedly great, charismatic people as well. But they simply cannot teach for shit.

The easy ones…it doesn’t matter, because the TA’s are the ones who grade, and an easygoing professor just means you’re going to do horrible on your papers because the TA will want more specificity than you were given during lectures.

Then there’s Power and Politics in America, quite possibly THE WORST CLASS I HAVE EVER TAKEN AT THIS UNIVERSITY. OR EVER. FROM THE PAST TO THE FUTURE, NOTHING WILL COMPARE TO THE MISERABLE WRETCH OF A SYLLABUS THIS CLASS PROVIDED.

I have a separate rant about that, and I should probably have mobilized my classmates and lodged a formal complaint within the Politics department but I was just so frustrated I didn’t want to deal with the Red Tape and the bureaucracy. So I’ll have my two cents on this here blog, and if somebody wants to tell me to kindly take it down and pursue the matter in private, I will gladly do so. It’s too late now, my grade is what it is and I have nothing left now but to be disappointed and disdainful that yet another politics class has failed me so cataclysmically. I’m starting to sense a pattern. This department SUCKS. Avoid. AVOIDDDDDDDD.

I think my misery is compounded by how glorious, helpful, caring, and GREAT the English department is, especially in comparison to the COMPLETELY CRAPPY Politics classes I’ve had to take.

But then I need to face the facts and realize that my writing skills are nowhere above average on the NYU Scale. Though I may have gotten A’s (or their equivalents) in HS, I’m never going to be an A student here. Everybody is better, and I’m stuck with the B+’s.

Well that isn’t helpful when you’re trying to build back up a GPA that’s been disastrously ruined by the choice of the wrong major.

So overall. I’ve fucked myself over and made the wrong decision, and realized it so late that I can’t take it back. I can only pray and hope that I’ll do well enough on my LSAT to counterbalance my low GPA. I’m sure it can be done, provided I have all the other things in the application package. The extracurriculars, leadership, etc. All of that can’t hurt, right?

So now you understand why I am SO, SO, SO stressed about the LSAT?

I don’t just want to score above a 170.

I need it!

NYU – Major & Minor Requirements

This is just a reference guide for myself really 🙂

CAS Morse Academic Plan – Core Classes
[X] Writing The Essay Fall 2009
[X] Conversations of the West Fall 2009
[X] World Cultures Spring 2010
[ ] Foreign Language (Up to the Intermediate II level)

[X] Spanish 2 Fall 2009
[X] Spanish 3 Spring 2010
[ ] Spanish 4 Projected Fall 2010

[X] Course in the social sciences English major overrides

[X] Course in the arts (Expressive Culture) English major overrides
[ ] Quantitative Reasoning

[ ] Quantitative Methods in Political Science (V53.0800)

Major – English (10 courses/40 credits)
[X] Literary Interpretation (V41.0200) Spring 2010
[ ] British Literature I (V41.0210) Projected Fall 2010
[ ] British Literature II (V41.0220)
[ ] American Literature I (V41.0230) Projected Fall 2010
[ ] Theory of Drama (V41.0130)
[ ] Arthurian Legends ((V41.0717)
[ ] Senior Seminar – Dramatic Literature (V41.0971)
[ ] Dante & His World (V41.0143)
[ ] The Theory of the Avant-Garde, East and West (V41.0730)
[ ] Introduction to Old English Language and Literature (V41.0315)

Minor – Creative Writing (4 courses/16 credits)
[X] Creative Writing: Introduction to Fiction and Poetry (V39.0815) Spring 2010
[ ] Writers in Paris: Fiction or Poetry (V39.9818) (8 credit intensive)
[ ] Advanced Fiction Workshop (V39.0820)

Minor – Politics (5 courses/20 credits)
[ ] Quantitative Methods in Political Science (V53.0800)
[ ] Power and Politics in America (V53.0300)
[ ] Business and American Foreign Policy (V53.0736) pre-req: V53.0300
[ ] Political Parties (V53.0340) pre-req: V53.0300
[ ] The Politics of Administrative Law (V53.0354) Projected Fall 2010

On that note, I absolutely HATE my CAS advisor. Not only does she not know shit, but the (absolutely useless) seminar she encouraged that I take last semester, though it boosted by GPA, made no dent in my required courses. She knew I had enough AP credits to cover my electives, and should only be taking classes toward my major/minors, but instead of telling me to take another course in political science my first semester, she told me to take that seminar. And then this semester, I could have taken British Literature or American Literature (I) conjointly with my Literary Interpretation class, an option she didn’t even tell me. Further, she told me (essentially) that I would do bad if I took both literary interpretation and creative writing in the same semester. Instead, the classes are so different (and don’t have as heavy a workload as she implied), and I’m slated for A’s in both (hopefully)

So basically, NYU advisors suck, just know your own shit tyvm. Now I’m going to cram and finish all of those classes by spring 2012. Just you guys wait and watch.

But thanks to idiot counselors who don’t know what it means to be helpful to freshmen, I’ll graduate with 132 credits instead of the 128 needed. One extra class, all for naught.

Hmmph. I’d do a better job as advisor than half of their current staff.

Guaranteed.

Trust me, I know my shit.