thankful for sunny days

i am on the search for new [winter] boots and a new camera.

any suggestions?

on a side note: fashion week begins next week. anyone else excited???

this guy is supposed to be the next big thing when it comes to street fashion photography.

life of the beloved

most important lessons learned this year:

1. stop crying about the pain of the past and rejoice for the good that is here and is to come!

2. "i realize that there is a mysterious link between our brokenness and our ability to give to each other...those periods [of brokenness] have proven to be the times that made us able to give more instead of less. our brokenness opened us up to a deeper way of sharing our lives and offering each other hope." -henri jm nouwen (life of the beloved)

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so, i have this great friend, and her name is also amanda. we have a lot of fun together.

on monday, we baked banana bread together. on wednesday we met for our writing group (with maria too!) on thursday we went snowshoeing at the state park. today we went to grand rapids to see blue valentine, which turned out to be extremely different than we thought it would be. luckily, we were able to laugh about it together! in between my hangouts with amanda, i have had an inntertube water polo game, made a trip to happy hour at cityvu, made dinner with maria and lizzy, hung out with paul and andrew at the radio station, had TWO snow days-and cooked a delicious breakfast with some wonderful girls for one!, went out in holland, saw my brightest diamond and the soil & the sun, spent a couple evenings at butch's with good friends, went on coffee dates, sent in four job applications to schools in chicago, skyped with my good friend sarah, went camera shopping, and hung out with good friends. there were many more good things to be thankful about this week too! but...all in all, this was a WONDERFUL week!

tomorrow: potluck!

snowshoeing pictures (thanks, amanda!):

writing group meeting #1 (complete with illegal candles and goofy movie songs)

i came to dance dance dance dance

i love to dance!

luckily, i had a lot of opportunities to do so this weekend.

friday night was the women's retreat. we played bunko, ate pizza, talked about friendship and relationships, and danced. a lot.

saturday was winter fantasia. i got all dressed up and headed to the amway grand hotel for a night of dancing! i rode with kelly and caleb, aka my grandparents. thanks for chaperoning you two!

beforehand, we went to ottawa tavern in GR for some appetizers and drinks. get the grasshopper. it's like drinking thin mint girl scout cookies. or a mcdonald's shamrock shake. delicious!

here are some of us girls at the dance:

(thanks lindsay for letting me steal a couple of your pictures!)

in between all of this dancing, i have been working on my resume and cover letters. this week, i am sending out my first round of applications to chicago public schools! wish me luck!

the windy city

this weekend, my friend emma and i drove down to chicago to visit our friend sarah who is doing an internship there for the semester! WOW did we have fun!

we met sarah at her friend eric's house, and she greeted us with hugs and ingredients for vegan black bean burgers. they were so spicy! but so delicious. check out chef chloe's website for the recipe. i also got to try a beer called matilda from the chicago brewery goose island. it was pretty good. sarahthen took us to her favorite vegan bakery, the bleeding heart bakery. we got delicious baked goods! i had a vanilla/orange/blueberry cupcake. yum!

the three of us girls then headed to sarah's dad's house. i'm glad i got to meet him, sarah. he is a funny man! we got ready for the night, then headed to the empty bottle for a concert. we met up with a friend of sarah's, saw a few bands, danced a little, squeezed seven people into a photobooth, and played pool. then our friend parth called us, and we met him at a bar called mad river. this bar played a huge variety of songs (and played their respective music videos), and we danced SO MUCH! gosh it was so much fun.

the next morning emma, sarah, and i woke up and headed to wicker park to eat at earwax cafe, another vegan-friendly place in chicago. i had the best breakfast of the year: a breakfast burrito with eggs, cheese, black beans, veggies, avocado, and salsa. delicious! i recommend you eat there next time you are in chicago! i woke up this morning, and my first thought was that i wanted to eat breakfast there again.

unfortunately, my camera broke on the hulk roller coaster at universal, so i am camera-less for the semester and could not take any pics this weekend. donations and suggestions for a new camera are welcome!

it is amazing how refreshing a good weekend with good friends can be. i am back and ready to take on this semester and student teaching!

edit: turns out i do have a picture from the weekend! i found this on my phone. ladies and gentlemen, the fabulous sarah russo:

a toast to the new year

new year's eve 2011
the best nye to date!!
i spent the night with my best friends sarah and emma in grand rapids,
and we met up with a few different friends throughout the night.
we went to el rancho, queen's pub, and a bottom40 dance party.
we ended the night with a sleepover!

i can't wait for this year.

my new year's resolutions?
be happy &
manage my money

what are your new year's resolutions?

on theme parks and being home for the holidays

theme parks are a wonderful place. my cousin heather's au pair, laura, said about las vegas, "i love that place because it is like all the world in one city." i believe you can say the same about theme parks. as i stood in lines and walked around the magic kingdom and universal's island of adventures, i loved listening to people speak in many different languages and accents everywhere i went. although these parks cost three times as much as cedar point (plus the cost to travel there), they are a hundred times better to visit! these parks are entire cities of fun. these parks don't only create fun with their rides--they give you an entire experience with their sidewalks lined with comic book cities, cartoon characters, castles, and color! universal and disney world make standing in long lines FUN.

i went to florida over break to spend some time with my cousin heather, her kids, and my aunt bonnie. we hung out at heather's beautiful home and visited theme parks. i loved getting to spend time with my cousins! heather is great to talk with, and her kids are extremely cute and funny. i wish i had videos of them from the entire week. ella woke me up every morning shouting, "amanda! amanda! wake up!" then she would hug me, hand me my glasses, laugh, and tell me, "you look funny with your glasses and pajamas. and your hair is crazy!"

a second highlight of my week was visiting the wizarding world of harry potter. laura and i walked through hogwarts, rode rollercoasters, saw the actor who played draco malfoy, went to honeydukes and zonkos, and we drank butterbeer in hogsmeade. it was a dream come true.

i then spent the rest of my time at home enjoying some quality time with my family.

here are some pics from the trip!

my mom and i went to holiday nights at greenfield village, too!

here she is with a snowman we found.

a manifesto

Poetry for me has taken many forms over the course of the past few months.

Poetry for me has been a source of stress, enjoyment, self-help, and release.

At first, I was focused on form. I had no idea where lines should break or how to choose the right words to fit a certain number of required syllables to make my poems interesting. As an education major that has to strictly follow formatting rules when writing lesson plans, having to fit my poems into a certain format stressed me out greatly at first.

I then realized that if I first wrote out what I wanted to say, I could then insert that into a particular form. This is when I began to have a lot more fun! My own voice began to come through in my poetry once I realized that I could write about the people and places that I knew. I didn’t have to make up something that I didn’t actually know or care about. I inserted dialogue and made my characters talk! I brought scenes from my memory to life by describing them in detail! This was all very exciting to me.

As the semester went on, I wrote many poems about my childhood. While these poems contained many beautiful images, they had no turn and no meaning. Once again, I was frustrated because I could not create a turn in my poems. What I realized was that these poems did not matter to me. All they were to me were good memories of times I spent with my family growing up. I wrote these poems as a way to remember good memories while trying to cover up bad memories of the past year.

This was my moment of insight: I couldn’t create meaning for my readers in my poems because they didn’t hold any meaning for me. I wasn’t writing about what truly mattered to me at this point in my life.

So…I began to write about everything I have been forcing myself to not write about. My past year has consisted of hard family relationships, broken friendships, and break-ups. Who wants to dwell on these types of events? I didn’t at first, but once I let myself go to that place of hurt within myself, poetry came more naturally to me. The more I wrote, the better I felt about everything that happened. Writing poems about the hurt of shattered relationships has helped me release that pain that I have been holding on to for over twelve months.

My advice to every aspiring writer: don’t be afraid to write about what you are scared to write about. Let it out! You will feel much better once you do, and you will have significantly better writing to show for it.