My shoes is party dance!

Yes, it has taken me months to get to this point, but I'm a completist, I'll soldier on.

Actually, I'll cheat a bit. I just updated some videos to Flickr, so here is 90 seconds of Sophie helping to unload the dishwasher. The silverware is her job. As you will see, she is pretty good at it, although she cannot reach the drawer...



I apologize if this is actually the most boring thing ever posted, but seriously you guys, she is unloading the dishwasher and it kills me with adorable. ;)

I admit I sort of put this one off, because I haven't been in the mood to dwell in a regretful headspace lately. So I think I will honor that and pick something sort of easy, rather than delving deep. :)

I regret not applying to more and better colleges, back when I did my applying. I made the practical choice - a state school with a graduate program in library science. I picked the one I liked best and that I felt would serve me best, but I wish I had been less practical and aimed higher for my undergrad education, and then took grad school as a separate thing (I was happy with my grad school choice, so it's just those two years of away-from-home undergrad that I would have done differently.)

URI did not challenge me enough as an undergrad. I took classes with people who just did not care. I was lonely because I was a married undergrad with no money and little interest in intense drinking - weird in every possible way! People at URI had money, they had no responsibilities, and they spent most of their nights at the bars. I skated through classes, getting A's for simply writing decently. I learned, but I wished for a richer college experience with more friends, work that was more challenge and less drudgery, and less dumbing down to meet the needs of the spoiled disinterested masses.

Things got better in my last year of my undergrad program. That happened because a professor I loved led me towards the honors program. WHY NO ONE DID THIS BEFORE THIS POINT, I DO NOT KNOW. The honors program was perfect for me, because the classes were more varied, more difficult, more interesting, and populated with people who actually chose to be there. It was in the honors program that I took a history class on the Holocaust (thus vastly expanding my understanding of European history and politics, as well as giving me the experience of taking this class from a Polish Jew who survived, a very big deal in and of itself), a weird but fascinating class on ecology and literature (we visited a compost farm!), and various women's studies seminars that seriously shaped me as a person. My final project was on sex education and the internet, basically, which should come as no surprise. :)

In my head, Brown would have offered me a similar experience all the time, for example. But I don't know if I would really have been happier there. So actually, maybe my real regret is not finding the honors program right at the start of my time at URI.

I think everything else I can possibly say about regret approaches Clichéville, because I really do feel badly about times I have caused pain or things I wish I had done differently, but also feel like I learned something from most of those times and am better for it in the end. So there, I have officially entered Clichéville, population me, and you can all leave now. ;)

Dreams - as in sleep or as in aspirations? I ASK AGAIN.

Let's split the difference. Lately, I don't remember my dreams. I used to, and as a teenager I kept a dream journal and worked on lucid dreaming and everything. But not so much now that my sleep is the way it is. Sometimes I remember one from my last stretch of sleep in the morning, though. This morning I dreamed about taking Sophie and some other baby to a farm to harvest something, and the farmers wanted to feed us Chinese food. ;)

Aspirations! You know, I need to figure out what those are at this point in my life. I have the big things I wanted for the moment, really. I'm like, the queen of wanting things - but as far as actual goals and loftier hope for the future, it's both simple and uncertain. I know, of course, that I aspire to be a good parent and to raise a happy, healthy daughter with whom I maintain a good relationship. Same goes for maintaining a happy marriage and family life and all of that obvious stuff. From there though, I'm not sure. I have mixed feelings about going back to work - when, how much, under what conditions, etc. I think my current work aspiration is to be a part-time school librarian at some point in the future, maybe next fall. :)

But other things I aspire to/dream about/look forward to: getting back into regular yoga practice, traveling, sleeping through the night ;), learning functional Italian, making awesome soap, creating a better OPAC system (library nerdiness), having more money, having more free time. I want to read more books, and explore more in general, and keep growing. Right now I feel like my goals are mostly small, but I think that is okay. I am mostly very happy, I just want to enrich my life and be able to relax a bit more in general.

Oh goodness. My bag, it is so very very full.

Right now: my wallet (red with a monkey!), the checkbook, my purple sunglasses, a tube of Badger unscented sunscreen, the bag for Sophie's sunglasses, a 7th Gen disposable diaper, a Baby Kick (cloth wipe), my inhaler.

An emergency snack for Sophie (oatmeal Snackimals!), an Epipen Jr., my Miss Army knife (yeah sexist, but it has come in handy!), Clean Well oregano oil-based antibacterial spray for emergency hand washing.

Several receipts -for contacts, post office, and Sophie's winter yoga session.

Adult ibuprofen, baby tylenol, pink lip/cheek makeup, a yellow Crazy Burger pen.

A 7th Gen pantiliner and tampon, and an old grocery list.

2 Zoya lip glosses, a Burt's bees lip thing (color: papaya!), and a strawberry chapstick made by Donika. (My lips, they are well protected.)

This was a good opportunity to clean out my bag! I should switch to something smaller, this thing is ridonkulous.

I am one of those people who cannot name one best friend, never really could. I have several people in my life who are close to me, in different ways, and they are all very important to me. I am like this about most things - I'm not into One True Whatever, generally.

Since I am not feeling up to writing about everyone important, I will write about my childhood best friends. Childhood was when I really did have specific best friends, and so it kind of makes sense to me to write about that.

In early elementary school, John Michael was my best friend. He got me into all kinds of mild trouble, actually. He once locked his grandmother out of her apartment so that we could steal her aluminum foil for our epic foil ball, and eat her chocolate chips. I watched movies at his house that I would never have been allowed to watch at home (of course, my parents' standards were very conservative, so it was nothing terribly shocking. ;)) Once we cased his entire house looking for change, and we found enough to order a pizza...so we did. We ate it at opposite ends of his huge dining room table, because we thought that was the most fancy way to do it.

We had a secret hideout, and there are tapes of us, somewhere, interviewing his pets. ;)

We keep in touch, though we haven't been close in a long time. As I was writing this, he posted to Facebook that his apartment burned down! So I've been thinking of him a lot in the past few days.

Nellie came along a bit later, in second grade. We grew up together, always at each other's houses. My mother babysat for her and her sister while their mom worked, so we saw each other all the time. We even share a birthday - she's exactly a year younger than me. We always celebrated together, and that made it feel even more like we were sisters when I was younger...even though that actually doesn't make a lot of sense, really.

Nellie and I played epic pretend. We acted out stories we made up long after most people would admit to doing it, actually - I remember being old enough that we discussed the fact that we had a tendency to play out the lives of oppressed people. This makes me laugh to this day. (Not that I think there was anything wrong with our doing this, I just think it's funny.) We were orphans and runaway slaves, we climbed trees all the time, we had sleepovers, and we borrowed Nellie's mother's copy of "Our Bodies, Ourselves" - and that is where I got the majority of my pre-internet sex education, folks. (Nellie was well-versed in these things and got me up to speed in a number of areas.) Nellie got me through the transition from childhood to puberty, and then to the beginning of what comes after that. We drifted apart around the time I started dating Ryan, but I still love her a lot and I am happy to see her living what seems like a great life for her in California.

That's all for now, nutshell-y though it is. I need popcorn and TV, people - Sophie's molars took a few days off but they are BACK WITH A VENGEANCE and we got no sleep last night. Fingers crossed, please, that tonight goes better because there are only so many of those nights that I can handle before my brain goes blsjdhwjuhetrthgtx, ok?

OK so you know that meme I keep saying I will do? I also keep putting it off. So let's bite the bullet and start okay?

Here's Day 01 - Introduce Yourself

Most of y'all kinda know me by now! However, some of you are actually newish 'round these parts, so I'll tell you a little bit and then we can be done with this day. :)

I am GOING TO BE 29 ON SATURDAY, FOLKS. That is how old I am. LAST YEAR OF TWENTIES OLD. I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS HAPPENED. Okay, moving on! I am married to Ryan, who was my high school sweetheart if you can have one of those when you are homeschooled as a teenager, and we have a 14-month old daughter, Sophie. Somehow, she has come to be less shocking to me than my age is. I wonder when that happened?

I was a school librarian before we moved to Vermont. I taught in a K-8 school in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire. I miss it, but a) there aren't many jobs to be had for me around here right now and b) as much as we really, really could use the money, I am happy to be home with Sophie while she is small, so I'm not really looking very hard. Sometime I would like to part-time librarian again, but we'll get there when we get there.

I have been around LJ since the dark ages, whenever those were, I don't remember anymore. I am a maintainer at [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com], and that's very important to me even though I have far less time/energy for it than I used to due to having my hands full of toddler. VP developed and maintained my geekdom in the areas of feminism, women's health, and sexuality. I was also a peer sex educator in college.

Nowadays, I can be found in parenting communities on LJ too (mostly P101 and [Bad username or site: @ livejournal.com]), and now and then I still find time to dabble in fandom and graphics communities, though that is very rare.

Fandom, you say? Why, yes! I am a bit of a media junkie, though lately that's pretty TVcentric just because that's what I have time and energy for. I'm a Whedon fan, but I also watch like, half the things under the sun that are not reality TV. I value TV with plot, in much the same way I value books. Yes, me, a librarian! Knowledge should be smelly and all that, and books are kind of sacred...but what I mean is, plot is plot, and I definitely over-identify with fictional characters. Whether they are on screen or in books doesn't matter so much to me. I'm not saying the TV shows have to be *quality* or anything, I just like plot. :)

I also eat food. Like, I actually see that as part of who I am, to a degree, because I have the luxury of choosing my food with conscience and politics in mind. I'm not really a vegetarian in that I eat fish, but I eat no other meat, so...pesca-vegetarian is, I guess, the term? Anyway, so there's that. I've been a vegetarian all my life, but I don't see it as being as important as other dietary choices I make. I think it's more important to eat locally, seasonally, and organically when possible, etc. It's not possible for everyone to make an effort to do those things, but it's possible for me - and given that, I see how I eat (in a general sense) as being just as important as how I vote. It's important in a different way, and some overlapping ways actually. I won't go on about this, because this subject is totally it's own post at least - but I love food, and cooking, and I think about what I eat. It turns out I have tons of things to say about eating, actually, so...yeah, I'll come back to it sometime.

Other things I am interested in: BPAL (http://www.blackphoenixalchemylab.com), yoga (I used to do it every day! Now I go to toddler yoga once a week, and sometimes a mom class. But yeah, it's a goal for the future ;)), photography (I used to take pictures like an emo college kid, because I was more or less one of those), pop culture, music, and a zillion other things that I dabble around in via the vast reaches of the magical int0rnetz. I...am running out of ideas and it is bed time, so if you are someone who doesn't know me well and you have questions about things I left out, go ahead and ask. :)

To everyone who had to re-read this very basic primer on Sarah, forgive me, I feel totally like a navel-gazer right now. But I like this meme, in that I like reading about everybody else and a lot of the questions are fun in theory, so. Here we go!

( 30 Days of Meme - the list of subjects )

It is Saturday, and ( thus, I meme. )