I’m mostly excited about Forensic Anthropology. And by excited I mean beside myself – I squealed when I got my e-mail from the department chair approving me for it. I think my favourite part is the professor, M. Aiello who I’m taking this quarter for Intro to Bio-Anthro told me that I should prepare for the course with a -colouring book-. Yup, he at that moment became my favourite professor in existance. I really hope he lets me TA Intro to Bio-Anthro Spring or Fall quarter, I think I’d die of happiness. I made sure Spring quarter I’d be able to TA time wise but I dunno if he’ll let me cause he knows I have a sort of ridiculous schedule and thinks I should drop one of my classes so I doubt he’ll be up for putting even more pressure on me.

I really am truly excited for this quarter though, beside French which is an unfortunate necessity I’m stoked on all the classes I’m taking. All of them are of interest to me or something I find myself at least curious to learn about.

I know I’m putting too much pressure on myself, but I really want to graduate on time and to do so I’ve gotta commit to 5 classes a quarter. It won’t be as bad afetr this quarter – I’ll be done with my major lab courses and done with my studio art classes so that’s a big relief as far as difficulty and time consuming as far as my courses go.

I’m just going to power through it. I could moan and cry and let it defeat me and just throw my hands up and add on an extra year of school but I won’t. I will beat it, I will get out of here, I will get myself on the path to where I want to be and I will be happy – because I’m getting there, I am. I’m getting back to really being happy and that, in itself, makes me happy.

I really slacked on a post this week and I’m sorry but it’ll get better next week with the new posting schedule! I know I don’t have a huge following or anything, but writing is cathardic to me and I like doing it even to keep my friends and family up with whats going on in my life.

I get asked this a lot, probably not shocking for everyone to hear that, and I’ve always known the answer — if the opportunity presented itself I would go for it, but honestly its expensive, I don’t live in Florida any more, since I’m over 21 my (adoptive) parents now can no longer request it themselves so right now? It would honestly be more of a hassle then it would a help.

That being said, it doesn’t mean I’ve never been curious – infact the truth is quite the opposite. Its something I’ll admit to have struggled with over the years. My (adoptive) parents -are- my parents, I don’t know other parents I don’t consider myself as really (actively at least) having other parents, but somewhere in the back of my mind I constantly am aware that biologically, I’m not their child – even if I’m not treated differently by anyone in my family or not; which is probably a perk of having been adopted at birth and thank whatever higher power may exist not having to have gone through the Foster care system.

My big news I mentioned a few entries back is something I never thought would happen.

When I was younger me and my parents had talked about getting my DNA tested but it used to be really expensive, like not worth it expensive for how young I was the one time it came up. The second lab we had in my Bio-Anthropology class we got told we could put our names in a hat, to have them drawn (3 people would get their DNA tested through National Geographic’s Genegraphic Project). I kinda made a bold step and asked the class that if anyone got chosen and really didn’t mind, to give up their test to me because – well I’m adopted and unlike the majority of people I don’t even have a sliver of knowledge about what ethnicity I am or where I fall on the Geneology tree.

One of the guys in my group ended up gettingp picked and he gave up his test for me – probably one of the nicest things someone has ever done for me and I don’t really know if he understands teh gravity of the gesture he made or how much I appreciated it (I’ll admit I cried when I got in my car).

Thinking about knowing something like half o my lineage is a world changing thing for me, its so weird. In both freaky and awesome ways. I’m really curious but I’m scared at the same time. Honestly, I used to make jokes and try and get out of famil history/nationality projects when I was a kid, I guess I won’t have that option any more.

I feel like I should say more, but I’m still having a hard time wrapping my head around it. So this will be a really short entry, but look for updates on my results as soon as I get them!

PS. Not this week (mmm midterms) or next week (mmm two papers due) but the following week after I’m gonna change my updating style. Tuesdays will be my generic update day and Fridays will be an outfit post! It’ll probably usually be me but maybe every now and then I’ll post someone else! We’ll see!

Oh and I can breathe again, that’s a big perk.

Last week, with everything going on and putting me in a bit of a funk I decided it was time to just do something nice for myself – even better this niceness was free! Awhile back I got a free credit for JewelMint, now usually I don’t partake in monthly sites because usually it means me forgetting to cancel that month or something and then me ending up out money I likely already don’t have. But I had a free credit and ya know what? I needed a pick me up, I was picking myself out something pretty! I ended up looking about, typically I go after rings but this necklace, the Prarie Rose, really caught my eye, it goes with so much of my fall/spring wear that I was sold. Its a bit more lavender then brown in person, but you can thank cruddy iPhone photos for that.

I was really shocked to open my package and see two boxes in it! Actually I’m going to call JewelMint in the morning, I just haven’t had time since they arrived on Monday (perfect timing right? really cheered me up after the weekend!) Because I only ordered the one, but hey this other necklace is still gorgeous, I’d been eyeing it too and I may actually consider buying it if it was a mistake and they ask me to send it back. The Easy Rider necklace just fits the other half of my wardrobe perfectly. If it was a free gift for me the ladies at JewelMint did a damn good job of picking!

I’ve worn the Prarie Rose literally all three days since I got it, I love the way it looks with my turquoise ring I bought myself in Paris when I was abroad.

I’m contemplating doing a weekly outfit post of myself and talking about where I got the look from, sort of something inbetween just updating my Lookbook.nu and what I was doing at CollegeFashionista. It wouldn’t be specifically college based so no breaking of any promises there. But I think it’ll help me really get back into blogging and keep my writing chops strong! Thoughts anyone?

Anyway back on topic. So last night my internet broke and I angrily stormed off from my desk, I happened to have done a pretty thorough cleaning of the floors in my living room a few days back so I slipped a little and thought I had just gotten another little splinter when I felt the prick in my foot, but upon further inspection… I was kinda really, really wrong. Now I’m not just comparing a little prick of a tiny little splinter that’s just grazing my skin and mostly stuck in my sock, when I say really really wrong, I mean off by about 2 inches with not one but -two- separate splinters in my foot, both quite a bit thicker then any splinter I’ve had before.

So thusly, I called my Mom, “Mom, there’s a piece of wood in my foot.”

You’ll have to excuse the two photos of dirty feet in this entry, my kitchen needs a sweeping and ya know I wasn’t exactly going around and scrubbing my foot with a huge splinter in it, tad painful.

Anyway. Now this seemed like no big deal at first, until when I pulled at it with tweazers… the half an inch piece (not pictured, this is post-breakage) just completely snapped off leaving just this little frayed edge that was outside of the skin for me to unsuccessfully pull at. Well this created a problem, but thankfully after a little work I got a good portion of the sucker out, awesome right? Wrong. At this point is when I also realized I had a -second- splinter.

So needless to say my life just sucked at that point.

Thankfully the smaller splinter came out with no trouble, though I came to realize the sucker was a pointy wooden triangle stuck directly into the muscle of my food, its actually the only part still sore. But this was sort of the least of my problems at the moment… Now I was faced with a decision so I called a few friends can I had just, well, no idea what to do!

At this point all I could do was kinda poke, prod, and pick at my foot hoping to some how get down to this other piece that was lodged way farther under the skin, so far that ya know normally if you run your finger over skin with a splinter in it you feel it, yeah I couldn’t feel the sucker.

Like any responsible adult, at this point I just needed a distraction and to not feel like I was all alone and what not so I went over to my friend Stan’s and hung out, to which a night full of splinter jokes and beer that tasted like blood and cinnamon commenced from. We all watched a movie and stuff and I kinda tried to fiddle with the splinter a bit but it was fairly clearly to me at this point that there really was no helping it. I was kinda stuck with the left over piece until morning when I could call my Mom to make sure it was okay to go to the hospital.

This is when not having insurance really sucks, I should have just gone last night but if my Mom won’t split the costs with me there’s no way I could afford it right now other wise.

As you can see from my cleaner footed Emergency Waiting Room photo… well there was still a nasty half and inch bit left! No bueno, very very no bueno I assure you. Thankfully going to the Emergency Room at 11am on a Sunday means there’s practically no wait and I couldn’t have been sitting there more then a half hour, even with getting my vitals done, before they took me back and took a look at the sucker.

This is where it gets kinda funny. The RN, the doctor, and the nurse who took my vitals all kinda freaked out independently when they saw the splinter, the doctor swore she’d never seen one like it before, it was actually really oddly calming and hilarious the way she was mildly freaked out (not in a concerned, but in a ‘what the hell that’s new’ sort of way, we always knew it could come out, it was just how…). It also turned out at this point it was damn good I came in as it was starting to get infected (yay $50 antibiotics!).

Now we just… well how the heck were we getting this thing out! She kinda just did what I did, poked around a bit, prodded, pulled at the skin. Well this wasn’t working, didn’t work for me with my eyebrow tweazers and now wasn’t working for her with her medical ones! This, well, this is a bit of a problem now isn’t it. This means cutting.

So this means the scalpel got brought out…
Well turns out the scalpel? Yeah that wasn’t working so great either since at this point was when she really realized how deep this piece of wood was in my foot, even after all the work we’d both done so far pulling at skin we couldn’t even get to it. It also turns out I heal pretty damn quick, apparently this pocket of fluid had developed that normally takes like 3 times longer so… this is the painful part (no, the splinter, all the poking and proding, walking on it, no none of that was the painful part).

I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever had a part of their body numbed with a needle in this fashion… but especially on a sensitive area like the bottom of my foot? Well this was one of the most painful things I’ve ever gone through.

It turns out having an inch long need stuck into your foot that is already tender and sore with a sharp piece of wood poking at its muscle and then wriggled around to disperse the numbing stuff all over the area (yes, wriggled around while stuck into my foot) is an INCREDIBLY painful thing.

I’m never having a baby.

Thankfully though once it was numb and I wasn’t wriggling any more from the tenderness of my foot it only took her about 2-3 minutes to get the bit of wood out, which she proceeded to make me take a photo of and said, and this is a direct quote, “You pretty much had a pencil lodged in the sole of your foot.”

Yes, a doctor compared my splinter to having a pencil stuck in my foot – wonderful. She also all of a sudden understood why I was calling it a piece of wood, not a splinter.

I had an eventful weekend.

I was already going to graduate with 4 degrees… what else could I really want? I realize though, that after all this time I could not continue with my Public Relations degree so over my time in England I really had to think about what I was going to do, if I was going to switch anything it needed to be immediate upon my return to Chicago. It put me in a hard situation, I didn’t want to lose all the work I’d done in my Public Relations degree, I didn’t want to lose the classes and have them be worthless from my Journalism minor either and I certainly didn’t want to go back to majoring in Journalism…

When I was a little girl, maybe as young as 7 or 8 I wasn’t that girl who played with barbies (though there’s NOTHING wrong with that), I played sports and I preferred being outside and I had an intense obsession with dinosaurs, that was when my interest in history really routed from. Around 9 or 10 this transitioned into an intense interest in Egyptology. By the time I was 12 this has transitioned into my fascination with reading about World War II and Eastern European/Russian history, something that has stuck with me to this day. The thing is, I made a stupid decision when I started college, mostly influenced by the type of people I was hanging out with at the time. I wanted to live a glamourous life, I wanted to wear pretty clothes and go to fun parties and I wanted to be one of those girls who everyone envied. I was already starting school 2 years late and I didn’t want to graduate at 30 with my PhD just to be a teacher… I didn’t want that.

In reality I just wasn’t mature enough to realize that I would be happy doing that, that I wouldn’t have a problem teaching and that that ‘glamourous’ life was just the brain of a 19 year old wanting to be the exact oppposite of what she had been in high school. But I realized at some point that there was ust so much more to life then this, why would I limit myself to what I was doing because of some ‘optimal’ idea of what I thought my life should be. I just wanted money and glamour, I never thought about if that would actually make me happy, if I could do that for the rest of my life. I’m a much different person then I was at 19 when I got accepted at DePaul, I’m almost entirely different in my own eyes. I hardly recognize myself some days, and that’s not just because I went back to my natural hair colour and am no longer platinum blonde.

So I made a choice. I knew what I wanted to do, what would make me happy. I knew that bringing challenge back into my every day life would keep me on my toes and excited for the rest of my life, doing something I’d always been passionate about would be better for me. The only downside is, well, my Dad didn’t exactly take me telling him well. My Dad is unfortunately one of those people that when it comes to money, that’s sort of all that matters. He can ice the cake however he wants, but money is in many ways more important then happiness to him, because he thinks that money is what is going to bring happiness, when for me money has caused way more problems then happiness. I’d rather struggle a bit but not dread getting up and going to work every day then be living in fantastic means but hating what I do. Going to grad school and getting my MA, hopefully eventually my PhD in Anthropology is what I’m going to do. I don’t care if my parents support me or not, all I was ever promised was my undergraduate education and that’s all I would ask them for. I am on my own so I will do what is going to make -me- happy not them.

So I threw out my PR major, condenscend my classes in Communications into a generic Communications minor, kept the Media Arts degree (three classes from completion!) and am going for it, I’m going to graduate with my BA in Anthropology and get my butt into a damn good grad school and be happy with my life if it kills me (it might, GRE books are scary). But its going to make me happy, I haven’t been this excited about post-graduation from my undergraduate degree in a really long time, I was always aprehensive and skiddish about it, but now I feel an odd content feeling.

That feeling is called happiness, and its amazing.

I’ll start with my Dad as its the shortest and simplest story. In May, actually while he was visiting me he got the call literally as he got off of his plane, he found out he’d gotten accepted to work overseas. Work overseas? What does that mean? That means my Dad got hired as a contractor to do supervisor work over in Afghanistan on military compounds. This was both amazing and horrible at the same time. This caused a lot of strain in our relationship both financially and other wise, but for him it was great. It finally got him up and working and making money again instead of feeding into a business that was quite a bit of money in debt after the economy crashed, that’s sort of the problem with being in construction. I’m so proud of him for going for it and taking the opportunity even though he’s doing a job at 60 that a lot of men at 40 wouldn’t even be willing to do. He’s hit another rough patch (after his second trip out from December to March he will no longer have work unless he finds something within the next month) and unfortunately we are no longer on speaking terms for now, but as everything usually does I’m sure once the stressors are down and he’s back in the clear things’ll get better between us.

This next paragraph is more difficult for me to write as it involves my Mom and a life treatening illness, and should explain why I’m a bit disinterested and meh about talking about me and my Dad’s issues, as they are pretty much non-issues in comparison.

In June I got a phone call from my Mom telling me she’d gotten some weird blood work back and been told she needed to see an Oncologist. I knew what this meant immediately but decided I just would push it to the back of my mind and not stress myself sick over it until we knew for sure. While I was visiting her in the beginning of August, what was suppose to only be a 2 week trip down, she sat me down one night and told me the truth: she had lymphoma. For those who don’t know, lymphoma is cancer. Not only did she have lymphoma in her bone marrow but her spleen was where the majority of it was an, well, by this point in time it was already rather enlarged in risk of rupture which would be, well, incredibly deadly.

This story is not all bad, August was also a good month for my Mother. In December of 2010 she compelted her General Education BA with a specilization in ESE education and from February until the end of May was a substitute teacher, unfortunately as is a rule in Florida she did not get the permanent hire for the position because a teacher who lost her job applied, however, in August she was offered a 2 month substituting position from a teacher that they knew would not be returning even when her maternity leave was over. In November, my Mother was called into the Principle’s office and officially hired as a teacher, less then two semesters of substituting and she’d reached her goal — this also meant that she now had insurance that would cover her cancer care, which was the most important and amazing news she got out of the experience.

Her doctor’s allowed her to wait until winter break to remove the cancerous spleen. On December 21st she went in to have the bloodflow cut off from the organ (procedure 1) on the 22nd the spleen was removed (procedure 2). Just to put into perspective to everyone how inflamed and enlarged the spleen was… your spleen is suppose to be about the size of an orange. After the spleen had decreased in size (they guess around a third) with the blood flow cut off (thusly feeding off of itself) it was still so large that the doctor said it reached from her rib cage to almost her pelvic bones, yes, that is a spleen that is about the size of the watermelon slice this woman is holding. She was in the hospital for a week and unfortunately had to go back in on the 28th to drain fluid that was collecting in her torso, however now she has had the drain remove and seems to recovering well. She’ll be allowed to return back to work but of course has to be very careful, something worrying since she works with ESE children (children with severe emotional and behaviourial issues). But we’re just glad the worst is over and hopefully she can put off chemo until next summer when it won’t jepordize the job she worked so hard to get.

Some of you may know but some of you may not but I’ve been struggling with my own health issues for about 2 and a half years now without having the slightest clue what was wrong with me. I was too dizzy to function some days. I was getting really achey and in March I fainted at the Glassjaw show after just 1 beer because I was standing on a balcony and had a vertigo fit (for lack of a better way of saying it).

Unfortunately my symptoms got much more severe about half way through May. I was sitting at my computer and I got up to go try and get Pickles out of the window (I do not condone yapping at midnight!) and about halfway there I lost all feeling in my legs after a brief moment where I felt like -every- nerve in them had gone off. I couldn’t get up off of the ground immediately and it took me about 3 minutes until I could get back to my chair. For the next two weeks I was in so much pain that I really didn’t leave my house and certainly could not make it to class. My regular doctor finally admited that since it wasn’t MS (which we had found out officially 2 weeks earlier) that with the new severe pain that she should have me tested for fibro myalgia. Why is this significant information? Because I’d been calling on and off for 2 weeks trying to get her to give me a recommendation for a rhumetologist so I could see if it was Fibro in the first place but she was insisting this was all being caused by a mixture of carpal tunnel (in my hands, which only hand minor numbness and weariness at this point, and certainly nothing comparative to the numbness and weariness in my legs even post collapsing). I was finally put on painkillers to control the pain and after a few days of being a bit loopy was able to return to school, unfortunately I had another pain episode that was, honestly quite a bit worse a month later that caused a devistating blow to my summer classes participation grade, because apparently two doctor’s notes, an e-mail from the school, proof I’m on painkillers, and not being able to walk is not a good enough excuse to miss a freshmen level course that I still got an 88% in based off my exams/papers (I however recieved a C+ because my attendence grade was dropped a full letter for missing 3 classes).

Unfortunately no matter how many places I looked for and called in the Chicago area, no one could see me prior to September 16th. For awhile it looked like I wasn’t going to get diagnosed until I returned from London, thankfully though after I returned to spend the remained of my summer with my Mother at the end of August a doctor in Daytona Beach was able to fit me in.

Diagnosis: Fibro Myalgia and a slight allergy to milk that I was previously unaware of but apparently that’s why it was making me a bit phlegmy.

I can’t not express enough how relieving it is to have a diagnosis, now I can go to my school and officially get academic consideration and assistance because of it and no longer just simply be at the mercy of whether a teacher wants to be understanding or think I’m a liar who is just hungover (yes, I’ve had that said to me over the course of this by a professor).

Well, I think that’s enough for today. In the next few days you’ll get a 100% good post, promise! I have loads of updates about what I’m doing in school now that I’m dying to share with everyone but I thought I at least owed the people who read my blog and follow my tumblr an explaining of why I mostly disappeared off of the face of the Earth.

I was lucky enough to stumble across this Fashionista on moving in day! In true fashion major style she couldn’t just throw on a simple pair of sweats and a shirt to move in; she had to be dressed at least nicely with a pound of accessories on (rings, my favourite and own personal demise!) I want to talk about tone mixing today; we’re told never brown and black, simply never! But I present you, yet again, with a falsehood!

Style On over at CollegeFashionista.co.uk!

STYLE ADVICE OF THE WEEK: Are We in Canada? over at CollegeFashionista UK!

Check out my first actual article for the International CollegeFashionista site over here! I’m so excited to start snapping photos of Westminster students! Bring it on Fashionistas and Fashionistos.