Sweet T. and Biscuits

So whether my fellow college students want to hear it or not, I'm done with exams and heading home for the holidays on Day 2 of Exam Week. This is awesome because I get to go home and do generally festive things , but it does have some drawbacks. One of the more serious ones is of course everyone's general lack of holiday cheer in the traveling world. At first I thought it was because I was saying "Merry Christmas" to someone who actually gives winter sacrifices to Norse gods or something, but even after switching to the oh-so-PC "Happy Holidays," I'm still getting sour faces and general lack of cockle-warming cheer. Mmm I love the word cockle. Side note-let's start using words that sound hilarious in general context/serious settings. Like my new favorite word: invaginate. This word is so infrequently used that autocorrect just got all up in my business about it, which is sort of ridiculous because the word "autocorrect" also isn't r

Now for some vintage posting, which was originally on the Saybrook Blog in 2008. This is my contribution instead of writing a meaningless Anthro final paper. More will follow later this week. On The Homefront: My Tofurkey Day November 28, 2009 by Tara Tyrrell Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s right after my birthday, it’s naturally cheerful in a way that makes Christmas seem tacky and forced in comparison, and it’s always always always delicious. I’ve never been the kind of girl to pick daintily at a salad, or count carbs instead of grabbing life by the balls and eating that entire pizza. So naturally, Thanksgiving is a great day for me. You spend the whole day cooking, starving, salivating, cleaning dishes so you can reuse them to make yet another pile of delicious food, and finally sit down to a meal the size of a small third world country around 5:00. By 5:15, your barbaric gorging begins to slow, and by 5:21 you

Today's class is given by one of our TA's-not the male one unfortunately because that would be entertaining. Things are laid out in bullet points on the slides (no pictures WTF?) and she's taking like giant pauses between phrases. It feels like a high school presentation by that one girl who everyone ignores but she daydreams about this presentation and the whole class' sudden realization that she's a genius. The high school soccer captain (WAY better than the football team let's be honest) asks her out after class, she gets voted prom queen, after graduation she crowd surfs offstage...but actually people are just bored. It's the sort of dream that I might have had except I was pretty aware of the fact that being smart wasn't going to get me anywhere within those four walls so I made up for it by being funny and trying to keep my head down when anyone mentioned Battlestar Galactica (mmm Lee Adama). Immigrants are coming over. The TA tactfully says “

I am seriously considering skipping class today. There are many factors to this possibility: I am not feeling well, I'm fucking exhausted, it's cold and rainy outside, and the Yale Daily News' joke issue is today. I drag my ass out of bed and convince myself that I have to go to my 10:30 class because I need to ask my TA if I can miss section later this month to go home for the weekend. So I get up, get breakfast, and make it to class like ten minutes early (this only happens on days I don't want to go to class, somehow-days when I'm wide awake always involve me being late to class). My TA isn't here. What the fuck. Well fine I'm here already and there are only like ten people in this class so I can't leave. Let's talk about Women and the New Republic. Not Banana Republic, not OneRepublic, but the New Republic. I initially misspelled banana. Damn. Okay so there's a woman feeding wine to a bald eagle in this picture. It's like college, but pat

Missed class on Monday because apparently I have yet to master the advanced technology of the alarm clock. Apparently we're talking about the 18 th century now. I always get confused with the use of centuries instead of just saying what year it was...the 18 th century is the 1700's, just fucking say “the 1700's” why do we need to make shit more complicated? So the Daughters of Liberty and Daughters of Britain. Professor was talking about how women weren't involved in politics, and if you asked a woman back in the day what she thought about politics apparently she'd say, “But what have I to do with politics?” which just goes to show that women back in the day really were uneducated, who starts a sentence with a conjunction? Britain was considered to be a big girly country, clingy and whiny while big bad America was all manly, ripping up the New World and urinating all over to claim its dominance. Some writers begin to see the principles of liberty as feminine

So I've decided that the only way for me to keep up with the blog and survive the scholastic firestorm that is this semester is to combine them...so I bring you the Class Notes Series. Don't worry, these aren't your average class notes. I'm taking a class about women in America before the 20th century, and it's a little bit boring so I decided to take notes the fun way. So here they are, Part One, for your enjoyment (Part Two will be posted by the end of the day). Witches: Giles Cory-pressed to death. Use of torture and accusation of a man-odd. It was actually difficult to get a conviction of witchcraft and most sentences were not death. Most accused witches were middle aged. Typically married. Had few or no children. Middle age considered to be the prime of a person's life. Finished with childbearing, basking in acquired status of a powerful wife/mother. Danger was misuse of such power (ambition, pride). Large families were considered to be a sign of a ha

Your second summer of college (especially if you go to a school of overachievers) generally carries with it an implication of travel. Some go to foreign countries to take classes at exotic universities. Some go to big cities for internships. Still others go to places of need to spend their summers doing humanitarian work. I went about twenty minutes away from my house for the summer. In all fairness, I do live in a pretty amazing place. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park is home to a huge amount of diversity, with lots of species found nowhere else on Earth, more rainfall than anywhere else in the country outside of Mt. Olympus in Washington, blah blah blah I'm the child of a trail guide and can't turn it off . So for my internship I decided to spend the summer living in Park housing at Sugarlands, the area of the Park closest to my hometown. (Not that I wouldn't have gone elsewhere in the Park, it just happens to be where I ended up.) When I say close to my hometown

I suppose the time has come for two admissions to be made. 1: There will never be a Mexico Part 2 entry. Sorry. Long story short, we got pulled over by guys with machine guns and searched for drugs, went snorkeling in an underwater state park where we saw a "little" shark that was about six feet long, and Dad and I got Montezuma's Revenge, which is one of the most horrible things ever. 2: My blog posts seem to be products of sleepless nights away from the frenzy that is college, so they will never be regular. They will, however, bear interesting time stamps. I love StumbleUpon. Unlike MyLifeIsAverage, Facebook, LameBook, Shitmydadsays, or any of the other time wasters I love to frequent, StumbleUpon will never run out of material. It takes material from all the dusky corners of the Internet and delivers it to your computer screen, custom fit for your enjoyment. You check some boxes and find random stuff that makes you happy. It's great. Recently, I Stumbled Upon this

Ugh. Doesn't it bother you that such a famous saying ends with a dangling participle? Irks the hell out of me. As I'm sure it's becoming apparent by now, I only really have time to write about my own stuff when I'm home, and I've always got new things on my mind at that time. I wrote half of the Mexico blog and my power went out, so God knows if I'll ever have little enough going on in my head to finish it...I may abandon ship. Don't judge me. Despite the fact that traveling gets easier, and you start memorizing airports and CT Limo trips, going home never ceases to be strange. Furthermore, the more time you spend away from home, the less it feels the way you remember it when you get back. My idea of "home" has become so scattered, so far removed from the familiar concept with which I grew up. Of course, I've talked about life as a college nomad before. I talked about how I fell in love with Yale, how home ceased to be enough for me, and how di