If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my friends

My taste in music, which I have mentioned before may or may not be relatively indie at times, but in certain situations I will settle for nothing less than the bubblegum pop from my early adolescence that I certainly eschewed at the time but have embraced with open arms of late. "Stacy's Mom" by Fountains of Wayne just came on and Oh Em Gee does that song make me happy. This sometimes purported origination of the MILF is all kinds of delightful. Also included in this mix is "Addicted" by Simple Plan as well as a little bit of the soundtrack to Mamma Mia (you just TRY listening to Dancing Queen without improving your mood significantly) but even some more respectable selections like Vampire Weekend, The White Stripes, The Killers and the Strokes. It is, by far, one of the best mixes I have ever made, aside from how spot on my iTunes genius is capable of being (the one time it ultimately fails is when I want to listen to the Beastie Boys because the mix inevitably ends up consisting solely of the Beastie Boys, TTC [a French rap group] and The Roots, because these are the only Rap/Hip-Hop artists that I have more than one song of)(what can I say, I'm a white girl).

However, the basis of this mix is questionable. It makes me vaguely ashamed and I hate to tell you that I purchased this song last Sunday night and I've already listened to it 19 times (not counting the number of times it has played on my shuffle). But I. LOVE. THIS. SONG. It makes me smile, it lets me know everything's gonna be ok. It puts my hands in the air, people.

Yes, Party in the USA is the basis of this, my most awesome of mixes. And I love it. While I was not 100% present upon purchasing it from the iTunes store, my roommate commented that she admired how unabashedly I was dancing to it on my bed and how enthusiastic I was about it. And I've decided to go with that. Sure, I can continue to dislike Hannah Montana (I mean, really, it's just a wig! How does no one notice? How is this the premise for an entire TV show?), but I do love me some Miley Cyrus when it's just so catchy. And who cares if it's vapid and poorly conceived and has nothing even remotely approaching depth? I've spent way too much of my life trying to like deep music and trying to be deep myself, when really, sometimes I just want to listen to my music and have some fun.

So I'm gonna go listen to Beautiful Girls by Sean Kingston (which I totally know all the words to) and enjoy myself. Later I may break out some Sufjan Stevens or Decemberists, but right now I just need to rock out to some bubblegum pop.

Find a job you love and you'll never work another day in your life.

I'm at one of those epic places in life where I'm making decisions and finding new things and charting the course of at least the next couple of years of my life, if not the rest of my life. So I was all about library science and basically becoming and archivist and working with way-cool old rare books and manuscripts and stuff. It would be sweet. I'm currently interning and the Special Collections Resource Center at Swem Library (at the College of William and Mary) and all I've done so far is go through this box of letters and things to sort/organize them to be usable in the future. And it is THE FREAKING COOLEST THING EVER. Seriously. I read a letter written by someone FROM THE TRENCHES OF THE CIVIL WAR. Seriously.

And then I think about how I'm taking classes in rooms where Thomas Jefferson took classes and then I have a history nerdgasm and I know why I go to William and Mary.

But anyway, I was pretty stoked and set on the whole Library Science thing. I'm looking at Pitt and the University of Maryland because while they aren't top schools for Library Science, they are both in the top 10 and frankly I like the idea of going back to Pittsburgh and not being 7 hours away from home/my nephew. I got the idea from reading The Time-Traveler's Wife because the time-traveler got an MLS (Masters of Library Science) and works at an archive in Chicago and every time he talks about his job in the book I'm like, "OMG that's so cool." And it still seemed cool months after I first read it, so not just a momentary fancy.

But then I went to the grad fair last Thursday. Right next to the UofM able were the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, then the Columbia Theological Seminary and the Yale Divinity School. Talking to the theological seminaries was nice; they're both Presbyterian and again, PTS has location location location on it's side. But they're seminaries and I REALLY don't want to go into ministerial work by any means. And you can get an MA from either of them, but MAs are in the minority with most students going for an MDiv (Masters of Divinity) (does it make you think of Harry Potter and crystal balls and tea leaves? me, too). BUT if I want to get PhD, I probably have to get an MDiv and not just an MA (that's what they told me).

Anyway, then I got to the Yale Divinity School and she started telling me about possible concentrations and I was just so intellectually excited by the possibilities. I'm currently working on a paper for my Theory of Religion class about Unitarian Universalism and cognitive/moral/linguistic relativism and this guy named E. E. Evans-Pritchard's ideas about anthropology and it is the most excited I've been about writing a paper since I was taking The Golden Age of Pirates and I wrote 12 pages in 6 hours about idealized Madagascan piratical socieities and how they were projections of the ideas of Locke and Hobbes onto non-existent situations. Anyway, the more I study religion to complete my minor, the more I realize I wish I had been a religion major because it's like history but it also has aspects of anthropology and linguistics and stuff that I find fascinating [religion as a cultural phenomenon is really the COOLEST. THING. EVER.]

So now I've got all these other schools I want to apply to BUT it also brings out the same anxiety I had when applying for undergrad that maybe I'm just not good enough and maybe I'm just not cut out to even think about getting a PhD and maybe it will just be a waste of my money.... Last year when I first started thinking about my future and graduate school I went to a Phi Alpha Theta (the history honor society) presentation about history grad school and it literally scared me to death about going to grad school for history because they explained that you have to want to study what you're going to study with all of your heart or it's a waste of your time. And I knew I didn't feel that way about anything in history (thus not writing a senior thesis), but I think I feel that way about religion. But I also think it's kind of late to be figuring that out.

So that's where I am. History? Religion? Library science? Job security? My future happiness? What do I even believe I'm capable of? I really was due for some kind of crisis soon; it's been awhile. But at least it's familiar territory.