Living Outside the Bubble: An Announcement

It’s kind of amazing that at one moment you feel like you’re living in a glass bubble that is stuck in cement and won’t let you move or change. Then almost three years later you look back and see that the bubble has been shattered and you’ve been traveling on a rocky, but wonderful, road.

All of that is to say that somehow I went from not knowing what lay ahead, to knowing that my future includes marrying a wonderful man. I don’t know exactly what lies ahead, but I’m excited to spend it with him.

Two weeks ago Ben and I went with my parents to adopt a new puppy. I was pretty excited for them, and my excitement was even greater when they agreed to name him Gryffin. First name: Gryffin. Last name: Dorrin. Full name: Gryffin Dorrin

Harry Potter lives on, y’all.

The adoption of Gryffin has nothing to do with the rest of the story, but every good story should have cute animals.

Photo by me

That evening we went to dinner at Fox and the Hound, the restaurant where we went on our first date last January. In case you’re into details, we each had some sort of sandwich that was on a pretzel. A pretzel, folks. A PRETZEL.

I love America.

Last May we had taken a day trip to a waterfall a few hours away, and on our way back made a spontaneous trip to the Morehead Planetarium. It was one of my favorite days ever and the type of day you think about when you’re stressed out and need to go to your happy place. So after dinner we headed to the planetarium, and at this point I’m thinking to myself “Heck yes! Put a ring on this finger!”

We made it just in time for the 7 p.m. show and learned about some of the legends behind the constellations (many of which involve love and weddings). After the show Ben told me he had something for me and we went outside. He got a bouquet of roses for me out of the trunk and we walked over to the ginormous sundial in front of the planetarium. He told me there was an extra rose in the bouqet and pulled out a ring box in the shape of a flower.

And then he got on one knee.

And I said yes.

And we celebrated and then quickly went back inside because the wind was blowing a thousand miles per hour and it was negative 57 degrees.*

Ben had talked to the staff at the planetarium ahead of time to tell them what was happening and to make sure they had a show on Saturday evening. So when we went back inside, he introduced us and we showed off the most perfect ring in the entire world.

There you have it! We’re planning for August 11 and I can’t wait!

Bing photo by me

Here are the specs for the ring: It’s a marquise cut aquamarine (my mom’s ring is an aquamarine). It’s surrounded by tiny diamonds and has diamonds on the band. He bought it on Etsy (swoon) from a woman who bought it at an estate sale. It’s even prettier in person.

*That’s the approximate temperature as taken by a Southerner who considers anything below 65 degrees to be cold and cruel.

Imagined Conversations: WTEWYE

If the quotes on the movie posters are any indication, this movie is going to be more painful than natural childbirth (I would imagine...) Photo via Movieline.com

Someone decided to make the non-fiction book What to Expect When You’re Expecting into a movie. Yup. Here’s how I imagine it went down.

Movie executive 1: I’m bored. Let’s make a movie, but something that won’t make me think too much.

Movie executive 2: A chick flick then?

Exec 1: Of course.

Exec 2: Well, we could look through the scripts that have been submitted and find a movie that has something new and original to say.

Exec 1: I don’t have time for that. I need a plane by my vacation in June, so let’s just remake something.

Exec 2: Or what if we just took a book and made it into a movie?

Exec 1: Yes! Brilliant! Then those crazies who were mad about Footloose will leave us alone. What’s a book we could make into a movie? Go look up bestselling books read by women.

[Exec 2 uses his phone to look up books on Amazon.]

Exec 2: Hmmm…Nicholas Sparks, The Help…looks like everything is already been made except cookbooks and What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

Exec 1: Perfect! Let’s do it.

Exec 2: That’s a non-fiction book, though.

Exec 1: So? How hard could it be? Didn’t they do that with the other movie about men not really liking women? What’s the book about anyway?

Exec 2: Pregnancy.

Exec 1: Oh. Well, at least pregnancy lasts nine months, so we can have a large cast of women from all different stages. Then we can advertise it as having an all-star cast with lots of women who really just look like we put a beach ball under their dress. Because, well, it’s Hollywood. They can’t look real. Write that down. Make sure the women don’t actually look pregnant. Also, make sure we hire someone to Photoshop the posters and stuff into glowing and glossy oblivion.

Exec 2: Perfect! Women will eat it up! And if it’s popular enough we can make a sequel about What to Expect When Your Kids Become Holy Teen Terrors.

Exec 1: And make sure we have a lot of product tie-ins so when women leaving the theater feeling inadequate, they’ll go shopping for products from the movie that promise to make them look all glowing an glossy.

Exec 2: Yes! At this rate you’ll be able to get two new planes!

Question of the Week: Why is the sea so creepy?

Someone please explain to me why the sea sounds so danged creepy. Also? IT’S THE SEA. Since when does something that covers 70% of the world and could kill us all just by shrugging have the voice of a 30-year-old who talks like a 12-year-old? And, in case your wondering, when the sea shrugs, it causes a tsunami. Obviously.

Moral of the story: I’m adding this commercial to the list of reasons why I won’t be taking a cruise. I don’t need a breathy-voiced woman creeping me out in the middle of the ocean.

The Totem Pole of Twitter

via Wikipedia

I wasn’t exactly what one would call a social butterfly in high school. I was more like an owl who liked to take naps instead of go to Bojangles after school. It wasn’t because I hated everyone, or thought I was above them. It was mainly a lack of interest and a firm belief that Bojangles is one of the most overrated establishments in the history of mankind. But no matter how uninterested I was in the goings-on of my classmates, I still knew my place on the totem pole of popularity. And it wasn’t the top.

When you’re in high school, you look forward to getting off the totem pole (Aren’t you glad I was specific and didn’t say “off the pole,” making you all think I was a stripper in high school? Except if you are a high school stripper, please get off the pole and seek counseling.). You believe that no where else in life will things be divided by what table you sit at during lunch.

Wrong.

To this day, I still feel like life is divided like a high school cafeteria, and nowhere is this more apparent than Twitter.

On Facebook, everyone follows each other and so you’re on the same level. Sure, Laura or AC may have been way above you in high school, but now you’re friends on Facebook and you can see that she has just as many crazy relatives as you who make insensible comments on every post. On Twitter, you don’t have to follow everyone back, and even if you do, you can sort people in lists so you only have to read the updates of the people you care about. Twitter is basically the oligarchy of the social media world.

Here’s how it usually breaks down:

1. Celebrities: They don’t really count because they usually only follow about 13 people. Like their counterparts in high school, life has reached a pinnacle for them and there’s nowhere to go but down (in the number of Twitter followers).

2. Small World Celebrities: These people are usually bloggers or celebrities not of the Hollywood kind. They have tons of followers, and they often follow a lot of other people, but only respond to other Small World Celebrities, or Bridge Builders. Most people on Twitter are aspiring to become a Small World Celebrity, because that means you get a lot of feedback (positive reinforcement) and you can sell ads on your blog and become a Professional Blogger and war v-necks and striped shirts every day.

3. Bridge Builders: These are the people who could be Small World Celebrities, but they’re still a few steps shy of that. Either their book/blog hasn’t hit the big time, or they’re just not interested enough in becoming Online Famous. Small World Celebrities usually follow and respond to them, and this helps them get closer and closer to becoming a SWC. (It makes it seem more official if I use an acronym, right? Right.) They have a lot of followers, and will respond to most people who talk to them because they haven’t been barraged with everything yet, and still feel connected to the people below them on the totem pole.

4. Small Timers: These people usually update Twitter the most, and reply to others the most. They really, really, want to move up the totem pole. If this were a high school movie, they’d be crushing on Zack Siler or Jake Ryan, and spending their Friday nights figuring out ways to become a Bridge Builder or Small World Celebrity. They stick together via lots of replies and jokes with each other, often including Bridge Builders in these conversations, though the Bridge Builder usually doesn’t read the conversation until much later.

5. Posers: These people got Twitter out of curiosity, updated it five times, and then quit. You feel obligated to keep following them because you know them in real life, but it’s totally messing up your Follower/Following ratio.

Did I miss anything? I thought about giving examples of each, but that would be like making a Hot or Not list in high school, and that is definitely NOT hot. Besides, I’d rather be taking a nap.

My Reaction to Your Christmas Lights: An Illustration

The other day I was driving home and noticed a home that still had their Christmas decorations on their house. At first I began judging them and speculating as to what the inside of their house looked like. But then I stopped myself because the world doesn’t need any more Judgy McJudgersons. Instead, they need people to post on blogs about their hyperbolic reactions to Christmas decoration that are still up more than halfway through January.

So that’s what I did.

How a Train Broke my Soul and Made me Cry

One of my favorite quotes is from G.K. Chesterton and goes like this: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”

I used to quote that sucker to myself all the time. It was my mantra. My life quote. The annoying thing I’d say so I could prove I knew who G.K. Chesterton was. Get lost on my way to a new town? Adventure! Not sure how to prepare a recipe when half the ingredients are nowhere to be found? Adventure! Trying to impress someone? Adventure!

My how I was naïve until this weekend. That was before I took a train ride. A train ride that would only be called an inconvenience by people in polite society. Other parts of society would use different words to describe it, and I know this because I was stuck on a train with these people for four hours.

For several months my boyfriend Ben and I have talked about taking a short trip on a train. We’ve never ridden a “real” train, and the romance of the railways was calling us. So for Ben’s Christmas gift I bought us round-trip tickets to Greensboro, a town 90 minutes away, where we would stay with some friends. We’d start with a short trip, and go from there if we had fun and the romance of the rail proved to be more than just the imaginings of Christian romance novelists and Hitchcock movies.

Excited like two middle schoolers going on a field trip, we boarded the train at 4:50 p.m. on Friday, and expected to be at our destination by 6:27 p.m. At about 6:15 the train began to slow down, and came to a complete stop 5 miles away from Greensboro.

Fine! Alright! That’s cool. I’m sure we’re just stopping to wait our turn at the train station. No big deal. It’s like what G.K. Chesterton, said…[insert pretentious quote].

Then the voice of doom, ready to crush our dreams came over the intercom. In a voice filled with static, he told us that there had been an “incident of trespassing” with a different train and we’d be waiting on the tracks until it was cleared up.

Oh me. Oh my. Oh me and my naivete. As someone who grew up across the road from a train track, I knew what this could mean. But optimism won out and I told myself it would be quick and “incident of trespassing” couldn’t possibly mean “someone was hit.” It probably meant they found a hobo riding the train’s caboose. They’d throw him off along with his sack and we’d be on our way! Adventure!

Three and a half hours later I knew the truth. Three and a half hours later we were pulling up to the station—our spirits broken and our fists ready to fly at the next person who asked if they could get off the train to smoke their precious cigarette.

I had looked at the local news online (free wi-fi) and found that “incident of trespassing” was Amtrak’s way of saying “someone was hit.”

At this point, we’re finally off the train and already beginning to see this as a story we’d laugh about later. No big deal, except our poor friend had been waiting the entire time to pick us up and sitting in the parking lot listening to Slipknot to pass the time.

We were returning home the next day and I was determined to embody the spirit of adventure. Although it felt like we had just gotten to Greensboro, we were boarding the train and on our way home. We sat down, got settled, and that’s when it happened.

The crackle.

The voice.

The announcement.

Another train had hit a pedestrian and we’d be waiting at the station for at least two hours while they investigated and cleared up the situation.

Less than 24 hours later, the same thing happened. I couldn’t do it. I looked at Ben, our stunned faces…were…well, stunned…and I told him I couldn’t do it. This was no longer an adventure, it’s just an inconvenience. A really long inconvenience. So we got off the train, called our friends, and left.

But not all was lost. I did learn a few things during our train travel.

1. A love of Uggs is a catching disease. On our first train, there was a large group of families going to a cheer competition. Every woman in the group under the age of 45 was wearing Uggs. It’s like some sort of fashion-blindness had infected the whole group, making them unable to comprehend just how ridiculous and out of proportion their feet looked. YES. I said it. Uggs are ugly and look like they were created based on a dare.

2. People are very serious about smoking. The train stopped in the middle of the woods and it was middle-of-the-winter dark outside. This did not keep the smokers on the train (of which there were many) from calling the train employee a horrible and mean individual for not letting them off the train to smoke their precious cancer sticks.

3. Trains are the low maintenance way to travel. Not a single person asked for our ID when we got on the train or when we handed in our ticket. We also had our bags on the floor in front of us and not a word was said about them not being above our heads. No seatbelts, no rules about sitting down as we were stopping, basically no rules at all. This and the behavior of our fellow passengers, leads me to believe that we would have spiraled into behavior that is usually only found on reality TV if we’d been left on the train much longer.

When we got off the train, we were able to stay an extra night with our friends, and then my [super amazing and generous] parents came to pick us up. In case we were a jinx, we didn’t want to risk another train death if we tried taking a train. So we got a full refund and will be taking cars and airplanes from now. Because planes are nothing if not punctual and full of rays of sunshine.

In Which I Board a Train

In a few hours I will be boarding a train and traveling a couple hours west to visit friends. I’m not really sure how this will go. Although I’ve spent the large majority of my life living less than 50 feet from a rail line, I have never been on a real train. I’ve been on subways, but not trains.

The issue is that I get motion sickness. I keep peppermint Altoids and Dramamine in my purse for just these occasions. But the Dramamine hasn’t always been there, because did I mention? I threw up the first time I ever flew in a plane. It was my junior year of college and we were going to New York City for a journalism conference. We were in one of those planes that was so small, upon seeing it I started to wonder if they used a large slingshot to fling it into the air in the general direction of NYC.

By the way, if you’re looking for a way to bond with the girl from your college whom you barely know, but will be sharing a hotel room with, I wouldn’t suggest vomiting right beside her. I also wouldn’t suggest using this as a tactic for making yourself seem like a classy young adult, rather than someone who grew up in a town known for having a KKK billboard outside its town limits until the 1980s.

Yeah, you read that right.

So you can probably see why I’m a bit nervous about the possibility of adding “train” to the list of places where I’ve yakked up my dinner. I’ll keep you updated on the whole situation via Twitter, especially if this train ride turns into something that would be made into a movie starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine.

Things I Don’t Feel Like Googling

Either because I don’t want  Kim Cattrall to show up in my history, or because even Google can’t answer everything.

1. Is Canadian bacon really Canadian? Or is it like french fries and the name has nothing to do with its origin?

2. Who the heck is Pitbull?

3. What’s the proper etiquette for when someone on Facebook asks you to vote for them (or their baby, friend, dog, mailman) in an online contest, but you look at the other contestants and find that your friend shouldn’t win?

4. Are there a lot of documented cases of squirrel attacks? Because sometimes they stare at me and I wonder if it’s not the apes we should be worried about.

5. Is the dog in Tin Tin named Rin Tin Tin, or is that something completely different?

6. Has someone done a study about the correlation between what college someone pulls for and how annoying they are? Because I’d read that.

7. Is Sex and the City just a plot constructed by the Illuminati to brainwash women and replace them with annoying, sex-obsessed women who don’t seem to age, even though Kim Cattrall is about 87 years old?

8. What the heck is a dew point?

9. What’s the email address for the person in charge of marketing for McDonald’s so I can write them a strongly-worded email about how absolutely horrible their commercials are that have songs in them? They need to know that they are slowly driving me crazy.

Designing Woman

I originally started this blog as a landing page for my business as a freelance graphic designer, copy editor, person-who-will-do-just-about-anything-that’s-legal-for-pay. I haven’t been pursuing freelance jobs as much as I used to since I started my new job. But I still work on fun projects at home and work, so I thought I’d share some stuff I’ve made lately. Take a gander, and if you ever need a custom invitation, blog header, poster, or just something pretty, get in touch!

This is something I made for my Facebook profile and the new cover image that’s part of the timeline redesign. Side note: The new layout for the profile pages is awesome. Mainly because it allows for something like the cover image. Second side note: In case you don’t have the new profile yet, the blank area to the left is where your profile picture is.

A while back I asked my friends what kind of business they’d own if they could own any type. My friend (who lives near Atlanta) came up with this brilliant idea. I Googled it and apparently no one has opened this restaurant yet (!!). Seriously, wouldn’t you want to eat a stack of pancakes from Hotlanta Hotcakes?

Everybody and their sister is starting an at-home bakery these days, so I put this logo together for fun.

I bought train tickets for my boyfriend and I for Christmas. We’ve been talking about taking the train for a while now, so I designed these old-fashioned tickets to go along with the gift.

One of my favorite lines from a Sufjan Stevens song. I was really just putting this together to play around with clipping masks and compound paths. I liked the way it turned out, though.

Question of the Week: Bounce House Camping

I love camping as much as the next person, but we have clearly dropped the ball on bettering this wonderful family activity. Camping is the toaster of outdoor activities. You see, somebody invented an appliance to toast bread, and since then little to no advances have been made in the field of toasters. Sure, you can get extra wide openings for bagels, but what if I just want one piece of toast? You’re forced to stand there, making sure it doesn’t burn your single piece of toast because it doesn’t know that there’s only one piece. It just keeps on toasting the non-existent piece of toast.

Why the heck haven’t the engineers of the world done something about this?

But I digress and that’s not the question of the week. The question of the week is this:

Why aren’t campgrounds full of bounce houses in lieu of tents?

Think about it for a minute and let’s do as we were taught in middle school health and wellness class and make a pros and cons list.

Pros:

- Comfortable sleeping on a huge air mattress.

- The air machine thingy provides white noise that would drown out the noise of bears and raccoons walking around the campsite.

- Fun activity to do in between hikes and s’mores making.

Cons:

- None, unless you hate whimsy and fun.

Let’s take it a step further and see how bouncy houses could transform the landscape of camping. Take a gander.

I rest my case.