• 11:34 I'm sad I missed the deadline for the @MeghanTonjes video but I couldnt upload a video here. I'm going home today though! #
• 14:37 There's a guy working at the restaurant here that looks like @OSUBrit. #
• 18:13 We're in Atlanta. Second time zone of the day. :) #
• 21:36 @caseadillas I tried, but the guy caught me looking at him and since I am a huge chicken, I decided against taking the picture. #
• 21:37 I'm home again and feel so out of the loop. What have I missed in the past week? #
• 21:41 @carmenritos haha. Well that's fun! #
• 22:19 Too. Many. YouTube. Videos. I'm sure I'll watch most of the ones I missed, but I'm really not feeling up to it at the moment. #
• 22:34 @carmenritos What are you reading? #

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• 03:32 So there was a homicide down the street and I'll admit that that freaks me out a little. #
• 21:04 twitpic.com/5w5np - Yay margaritas! #

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• 14:42 twitpic.com/5s8uz - This book reminded me of Kiera from @vlogsmoothie. #

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• 15:52 twitpic.com/5pp20 - Look Carmie!!! #
• 19:43 I come to El Paso to escape the rain and then they get a heavy thunderstorm! What's that all about? #

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• 00:26 Never Facebook from text. You message the wrong people. #
• 20:48 Apparently I have been missing a bunch of DMs. Sorry if I never responded to you! Twitter hasn't been sending them to my phone. #

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• 03:10 I miss my Mommy. Haha #
• 12:27 Good morning! I still have no internet but I'm at a rehearsal for Trebla's recital. I got to go to another recital last night. It's been fun #
• 16:55 I've been to two states today and a casino! #
• 21:04 OMG American Idol finale. #
• 21:57 I'm an hour late but oh my gosh Kara!! Wow. lol #
• 23:53 I'm awkward and standing in a line for Terminator. #

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• 05:09 Anyone up in the Twitterverse? DM me please. #
• 17:21 twitpic.com/5ihs7 - Want a snowcone? #

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• 00:30 Misses @SconeLover19's presence in my life. And my Skype kids. Talk to me, yo! #
• 11:30 Every time I fall a little bit harder. Every time I fall a little bit farther. Every time I fall right back into Your arms. #
• 13:35 Stress stress stress stress stresssssssssss. Okay, I feel better now. How are you? #
• 13:41 @carmenritos Oh okay. Yay! What was this dream? #
• 13:44 @carmenritos That's crazy! I don't think I've ever had a Harry Potter related dream. This makes me sad. haha. #
• 14:45 I'm gonna be in three time zones today. Central, Eastern, and Mountain! Yay to be going to El Paso! I'm nervous...it's been a long time. #
• 14:47 I won't have twitter on my phone except DMs. I'll miss you guys! <3 #
• 15:16 You know you're an ex band geek when you find yourself singing along with Irish Tune in the car. #
• 17:27 We are in Atlanta. I've never been to Georgia. Hello, EST! #
• 18:47 On the plane! #
• 22:13 Landed! #

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• 01:40 @spectrem haha. I know of both! Jealous of the Building 429 concert. I plan to go to Chico's next week when I visit EP. #
• 01:42 I need to remember to make my clip to submit to @meghantonjes' music video! This is my way of publicly reminding myself. #
• 02:18 @kmcmatt It's disgusting. Beyond. Belief. #
• 14:38 @chibi_anzo Thank you! I hope work is good. :) #
• 15:21 I like where we are when we drive in your car. I like where we are here. #
• 22:35 @carmenritos What are you watching? #
• 22:53 @terranaomi My guess is: "The Various Reasons I Owe You" #
• 22:59 @carmenritos Oh I see! Hmm...I haven't watched much of his stuff, but I hear he's hilarious. #
• 23:51 Totally sending out random e-hugs again. *HUGS* dailybooth.com/bethsavoy/348226 #

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I guess I have to post this now. I'm certain I've done this before, but I suppose I'll do it again. YAY Memes.

Comment on this meme and I will:
1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, a word etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.
7. In return, you must post this in your LJ.

I can't lie. I'm listening to Soulja Boy's "Kiss Me Thru The Phone." Though there are numerous faulty attempts to rhyme and the concept of the phone is ridiculous (and the spelling of "thru" makes me cringe), the song gets stuck in my head. 678 triple 9 8212. I blame Crystal for making it worse when I saw it on her "Music."

Anyway, it's the last day of BEDA! I was talking to a friend about BEDA a couple of nights ago as he pays little attention to the internet things I do, and he was like, "Wow, that's a lot of blogging." I told him it wasn't actually as hard or as bad as it sounds. It was actually quite fun, but I think my favorite thing was discovering all these amazing bloggers and blogs to read. I LOVE reading other people's blogs.

I've been saying "good-bye" to a lot of things lately. My job at the Writing Center, my job on the school newspaper, my current university, undergrad, friends I've made, etc. I've learned from these experiences that things always seem to end so anticlimactically. We may anticipate the ending of something for a long time, but it seems that when it does end, it's not really how we pictured it. Sometimes it's a sad moment that you never expected. Over the years as I've looked forward to things or dreaded other things, my mom has always told me the same thing: "It'll come and it'll go." How true is that. Though BEDA isn't quite at that level, I think the concept is still important. The days we didn't feel like writing or reading or WHATEVER, they came and they went. And because I like to quote silly things, I'll quote Chris Crocker, "It's a hair flip. I flipped my hair and moved on."

I know that this entry was nothing profound, but I don't think it needed to be anything amazing. I'll still be blogging and I hope you'll still be blogging. April came and went, didn't it?

See you soon!

This is the second-to-last BEDA entry, and though I really wanted it to be special and to involve potential readers, I think I'm going to go back to my roots on this one and talk about stuff I've been up to. I don't know about you guys, but I've realized that I get overly self-conscious about my entries now that I know people are going to read them. Before, if I were to post a blog, I didn't quite think about it in the way that I do now. I didn't think about my audience or (to reference an earlier BEDA blog) my online voice. Then again, I really only used my blog to vent, and I think that it's a good thing for me to open my eyes and see that there are so many things I can write about that don't include "I." It's really a good thing.

So, to totally contradict all that, I'm going to be narcissistic and talk about myself. I'll make it brief.

In the past week I:
- Celebrated Shakespeare's birthday and attended a Sigma Tau Delta party/informal induction.
- Went to Montgomery.
- Sang alto in church. (I am proud of this because I love to sing even though I am not so good at it. I usually just play my flute.)
- Went to the famous Big Bob's Barbecue in Decatur with Mrs. Love and Zach.
- Worked my last day in the Writing Center.
- Spent way too much time in Wal Marts.
- Sent out my Facebook gift exchange gifts! I worked really hard on them, so I hope everyone likes them.
- Went on a late-night food run to Taco Bell with Alex before he moved back home to Indiana.

Pretty much a whole lot of fun and nothing, but it's been fun. :) I'm graduating in a little over a week and my grandparents will be here. I'm so excited. May is going to be a great month.

What have you guys been up to over the past week?

I have lived in northern Alabama for almost two years now, and over these two years, I have slowly traveled to other cities in the area. I've gone to Nashville, Tennessee a couple of times, both passing through on our way to Indiana and to go shopping. Last year I went to Oxford, Mississippi with Sigma Tau Delta to visit Faulkner's home and a traveling museum of old texts that was set up at Ole Miss. Last October, I went to Birmingham by myself to take the GRE. Last November, I went to Gadsden to see John Green at the Gadsden Public Library. I also drove to Auburn last month to visit the university. This doesn't include camping trips to Lake Guntersville and Boaz, driving to Destin, Florida to go to the beach, and countless other trips to places with my family. I had never visited our state capital, though, and this past Saturday, I went to Montgomery to visit the heart of Alabama.

We set out at around 7:20 AM in two large vans. The smaller van was purely faculty and family members/friends and my van held a variety of students and others. Our driver was chair of the English department, Dr. Elmore. It took about 3 1/2 hours to get there. We played word games and answered trivia questions posed to us by Doc. When we got there, we were late to our first appointment at the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church and Parsonage. This church is the church where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pastored from 1954-1960 and began his quest for civil rights. It was the center point of the Montgomery bus boycott started by Rosa Parks. The Parsonage was the home of Dr. King and his family at the time, and it still holds much of his same furniture. We were very rushed to get to our next appointment, but it was very interesting to say the least.

Our next appointment was at the F. Scott and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald museum. It is located in their house in Montgomery. They only lived in this house for six months, but we were told that it is the only home that belonged to them that is open for the public to see. Zelda was born in Montgomery, and the picture that was taken for her only novel was taken in a room in the house. Unfortunately, the tour only allows you to see a couple of the rooms in the house, as the museum is very poor. One interesting fact is that the Fitzgeralds rented out some of the rooms in their house as apartments and to this day, the museum still rents out the rooms. They someday hope to house writers in residence there, but wouldn't that be cool to rent an apartment in Fitzgerald's house? Although the home was in a somewhat run-down neighborhood, I think it would still be neat.

After that, we had a quick lunch at a Burger King that was on our way to Troy University. We visited Troy University to go to visit their Rosa Parks museum. This was probably the most organized tour for us. I don't really know how to describe the experience, but it was really almost like something at an amusement park. They started us out in a room where we started to watch a film about Rosa Parks on these big screens. In the middle of the movie, these two doors opened up and we were to stand in front of this interactive bus where we could watch a reenactment of the scene on the bus. Then, we have 15 minutes to walk through the museum to look at pictures, read newspaper articles, and watch videos about the Montgomery bus boycott. It was interesting.

After that, we were supposed to visit a bookstore, but as we had been running late to all of our appointments, the store was about to close and we weren't even sure where it was. I was a little disappointed, but totally exhausted after all of that. We arrived back home in Athens at about 6:30 PM, and I went home and went to bed.

Overall, it was a fun trip, though I wish we had had more time to really appreciate what we were seeing. The state capitol building was just down the road from us when we were at the church, but we didn't have time to stop at it. Maybe next time. :)

I'll be the first to admit it: I'm a lurker. When I'm on YouTube, it's my first instinct to merely exit the video after it's done. While reading other people's blogs, I prefer to just read them without any interaction on my part. When I watch BlogTV live shows, I really don't care to talk in the chat room. I prefer to just to listen to the show and come and go at my convenience.

I've been an online lurker for years, I'd say. With the exception of close friends, I never left comments on the blogs I read or the videos I watched. These sites were merely one-way communication for me: The person would share and I only took in what they had to say. In recent months, this has somewhat changed for me. I decided to stop lurking and start communicating. I have forced myself to attempt to leave a meaningful comment on most videos I watch, knowing I would appreciate the same thing. I have @replied a variety of people on Twitter. With BEDA, I have attempted to leave blog comments on several different blogs. I have started talking a little bit in BlogTV chats, though I still really would rather just be a spectator. From doing this, I have actually made a handful of online buddies. People I'm subscribed to have taken notice of me and replied to me. Some have followed me on Twitter. Some have ended up being my Skype, Facebook, and Myspace friends. It's made me wonder why I remained anonymous for so long.

This whole topic made me wonder: Do I have any lurkers? Are there people who read my blogs or watch my videos and don't comment? If I do, why do they lurk? Are they people I used to know or are they people I have never met?

With the internet, it's all too easy to be anonymous. I challenge all of you to comment on a blog or a video you usually just lurk. You never know, you may make a new friend. I will do the same. Let me know if anything comes of it.

Today's entry sadly won't be my Montgomery entry either, because my best friend is going to be calling me soon for help on an English paper that he (unexpectedly) found out is due tomorrow. He was supposed to take it to his university's Writing Center to get it fixed and asked me to look at it first. I barely sent it to him today thinking he had until late next week to turn it in. To my credit, he didn't know it was due tomorrow either. Hopefully my experience will be helpful enough since I'm technically an employee at a writing center. I'm not as familiar with the format he's using, but I have handbooks that shall help.

This makes me wonder---I know two people that may read this that work in writing labs/centers. How do your centers work? What qualifications/credentials do you need? How did you get hired at your writing lab? I'm just curious. To be perfectly honest, the teacher that oversees the writing lab at my university hired me without question. I've taken a few classes with her and when I expressed interest in it, she just said, "Oh, you're good. Just take your application to the business office." That was that. Everything else has been hands-on, and I've learned how much I DIDN'T know about grammar, style, and citations. I still have work to do, and I plan to read some grammar books this summer to help me before I start my TA position at Auburn.

These questions are for everyone:

How did you learn "proper grammar?" Did you have specific classes that taught you grammar? Do you think teaching grammar is important?

I'll be the first to admit that I didn't learn anything about grammar in middle school or high school with just two exceptions. In taking AP English courses and "gifted" classes, I guess my teachers assumed we already knew it. Before I got placed in a "gifted" class in seventh grade, I took the "regular" seventh grade English class. At first, I remember being completely lost as the other kids did this little chant thing to identify the parts of speech in a sentence. Before I knew it, I was doing it as well. This only lasted a couple of months until I started the "gifted" class. In the "gifted" class, we did projects and other things instead of learning grammar.

In high school, I had three different English teachers. One teacher was on the verge of retiring (she retired the next year), and she was the only teacher to ever go over grammar with us. I remember reading the boring grammar book and absolutely hating it. Years later, I am so grateful she did that with us. Though I hadn't learned it all, her assignments taught me more than I ever would have realized. My other two teachers were much younger and did not believe in going over grammar. I never knew what I was missing.

Even in college, I have not been required to take a grammar course. English majors who are minoring in certification are required to take a "Grammar for Teachers" course, but straight English majors aren't required to take anything like that. I feel like I've missed out. It makes me feel like I might be writing this very blog and am completely unaware that I'm ending sentences with prepositional phrases (Honest to goodness, I did not know of this rule until last semester). Maybe I'm breaking some other rule that I had no idea I was breaking.

Anyway, I'm rambling. I don't intend these blogs to be perfect, but my point is that I think that teaching grammar is highly underrated. Though I realize it is not the MOST important thing to teach students, and our need for some it is questionable (but that could be a whole other blog in itself), I still feel I've been cheated. We need to know our grammar.

I realized tonight when I woke up exhausted from a nap that I didn't really NEED to take a Dailybooth picture just because it has been over 24 hours since I have taken one. I didn't NEED to upload my pictures or write an extensive blog entry just because I went to Montgomery today and visited Fitzgerald's home, the Rosa Parks museum, and Dr. King's home and church. These were great things and a nice trip, but the internet doesn't NEED to control my life like that. It should be quite the opposite. I should be able to visit the internet at my own leisure on my own terms. I should control its input in my life. I should be able to feel well-rested before I sit down and write a coherent blog.

So that's why I'm not going to write my Montgomery blog yet or take a picture. I look and feel like crap. And as for Dailybooth: it seems almost wrong when I've been taking a picture daily for 70 days straight! Though it's neat to have record of every day, it also means that for 70 days, I have been getting on the computer and making the time to pose for a photograph. Exactly why?

I'm probably just grouchy so I'm going to leave this entry here. I almost sound like any of the internet "purgers" in this entry, but my point is: I shouldn't feel so obligated to keep up with any of these things if it's taking important things away from me. I'll write the details of my trip when I'm better-rested.

This month is getting hard now that we're in the final week. Some days I just don't feel like I have things to talk about, so I'm going to answer a question Sean asked on my last entry.

"If you were told you had to leave the house right now never able to come back and could only take 5 things before leaving what would they be?"

My family had a fire once when I lived in El Paso. It was a minor fire and only few things were lost in it. However, given that I have lived this situation, I'll tell you exactly what I took as I would probably only take those same things again.

1. My family. That is probably a given, but in the situation, we had to wake up my little sister and get her dressed as it was a Saturday morning.
2. My pets. This took a while. At the time, we had 3 cats and a dog. One cat was particularly difficult. We did, however, manage to get all of them out of the house.
3. The outfit I was wearing. Honestly, that was all the time we had. Our safety and the safety of our pets was much more important than items. I don't even remember being that worried about losing things. However, if I had had time to run back in, I probably would have saved:
4. My flute. As someone who has been playing for ten years, my flute has been through so much with me. I still play in church and though it's replaceable, there's something about your particular instrument.
5. My teddy bear. I thought long and hard about this last item. I consider photographs and my laptop. However, my teddy bear was the first thing my parents gave me. It just seems more important to me than a laptop (Though I would despise losing all my documents...maybe we can pretend I already had them saved on my USB flash drive and it was in my pocket).

Well, I have to get up early tomorrow, so that's all I have for you. Have a great weekend, everyone!

Have you guys ever seen the movie Secret Window based on a Steven King novel? Do you remember the part where Johnny Depp's character, Mort, starts typing something and then he says out loud, "This is just bad writing." Then his other personality proceeds to reply, "You know what to do, so do it." Agreeing with the voice in his head, Mort deletes the entire block of text.

Yeah, that whole scene was so me right now minus the second personality. That's not to say I don't talk to myself, though, but my writing is so horrendous right now. I almost wrote "write now" instead of "right now." What?!

I was thinking about going off on the bad writing tangent and bringing up my role in my university's writing center. However, I don't really have any good stories I can think of at the moment.

I guess I'll just report a little bit about my day and call it a blog. We had our Sigma Tau Delta induction today since it is Shakespeare's birthday. It was fun and I officially passed my office to someone else. We're going to Montgomery this weekend to see F. Scott Fitzgerald's home and go to the Rosa Parks' Civil Rights Museum. I'm excited.

Yesterday, I found out I was offered a TA position at the university my brother currently attends. If I accepted it, I could still live at home, have my tuition paid, and receive a fairly good stipend. At the same time, I really feel like it would be a mistake for me to stay here. As if it was a sign, today, I received my acceptance packet from Auburn with all the information about getting registered and such. I spent the afternoon making a doctor's appointment to update my shots and trying to see about getting advised so I can register. I'm trying to convince my mom to go down to Auburn with me either tomorrow or next Friday so I can look for an apartment and such. I'm honestly a bit stressed and scared about it, but I really feel like it's where I belong.

This evening, I talked to my parents about getting my own insurance policy and all the bills I would need to pay each month. We also discussed if I wanted to remain a "dependent" and stay on their insurance policy. I wasn't really sure which I should do. Then, my dad said, "Well, you can always just go to *insert name of brother's school here* and live at home." It sort of shocked me that they would want me to still live at home, but I explained that I felt like it was my time to move out. It touched me that my dad really wanted me to stay, though.

Well, I think that's enough blogging. It's midnight right now anyway. Sorry this post was boring. Maybe I'll think of something good to write about tomorrow.

Oh oh oh oh oh and since everyone else asks people to ask them questions for a future blog...ask me questions? I owe Casey some questions.

Today's blog is going to be a picture blog! It's also late because I ran out of time, but better late than never. I'm also going to cheat and change the time on this, so shhh!

( Lots of Pictures )