Remember that time I had a blog?

I do.

It's been quite a while and I could bore you with all that's happened since I last wrote but I'll just summarize and say that I took a bit of a hiatus to find myself. I wish I had a less cliche reason but it's the unfortunate truth.

I'm currently working on a master's degree in library and information science. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to capitalize that or not so we'll just say that I should be getting an MSLIS by December, 2010 if all goes well. If not, Spring 2011 and if I don't do it by then, something horrible has happened to me because I am too motivated to just let it slip on by.

I don't really know what made me write tonight (the avoidance of homework, the sudden realization that I am far too old to spend most of my time sitting on the computer and yet I do it anyway, today feeling like the first day of fall and that makes me exceedingly happy) but here I am. At a ridiculous hour of the night. Not sleeping. Again.

That's the other thing - since I started the MSLIS program, I have somehow managed to revert back to my college hours which means I'm up until 3 or 4 am everyday working on stuff. What. The. Hell. I worked so hard to get on an adult schedule and once I start doing fieldwork and practicum hours I'm going to have to be on school time so this is really just setting me up for disaster.

I think the other thing that has me up and writing is the fact that while I've been doing the grad school thing, writing has taken a bit of a backburner. I don't just mean poetry and fiction and all that stuff I like to write, but like, emails to people who long over-due deserve them. I'm kind of a bad person when it comes to keeping in touch with people I really don't want to loose touch with. And don't get me started on holiday greeting cards. I know that there is some unwritten rule in ettiquette somewhere that says any girl over the age of 25 should send everyone she knows a greeting card. Being 26 now, I feel this pressure but my problem is that 1) most of my friends don't have real addresses. If they're not moving from apartment to apartment every year they're in school or temporarily living somewhere or, 2) if they do have a permanent address, I sure as hell don't know it because the majority of the interactions I've had with them in the last 6 months has been over Facebook. It's a really sad reality of the times, I suppose. This is my very long explanation as to why you should not expect a greeting card from me.

Also, they never make good secular ones that are just all "Hey, I'd like you to appreciate the winter during the holiday season." I can only seem to find mass produced boxes of "Happy Birthday, Jesus!" and "Christmas Is The Season" and "May the warmest wishes of Jesus' birthday follow you through the rest of the year, warming your heart and spirit with Christmas even if it's already hot out because it's July and the last thing you want to think about is making your heart any warmer." Maybe not that last one. And I honestly don't have anything against Jesus personally, it's just that as a Jewish girl I'm not likely to send my non-Jewish friends "Happy Hanukkah/Chanukkah/Hanukah/Chanuka" cards and I kind of don't want a Merry Christmas card. I've gotten into conversations with people where they tell me that I should accept well wishes no matter where they come from and yes, this is true. That being said, sending a very religious-based card to someone of a different faith has a certain arrogance to it that I don't think many people consider.

Having grown up in a not diverse by any stretch of the imagination town, I was often sort of the odd man out and by third grade, explaining Hanukkah got old. This isn't supposed to be a rant about how I was the misunderstood minority because that's not what I mean at all. I just feel that there is a weird double-standard in the card-giving world. If I give an overly religious card that celebrates Rosh Hashanah to non-Jewish friends, they'd consider it a joke and assume I was being funny. This could be that for other occasions, when Hallmark didn't seem to have the right style of humor, I've been known to congratulate someone on their newly expected baby instead of sending a birthday card (and no, they were neither expecting nor female). That being said, I'm expected to assume that an overly religious Christmas card from my friends is a simple wish of joy and happiness for the coming year. Why can't they just make a card that's all "Hey, this is the season society says that I give cards to people I care about, so here's yours." Of course, you still won't be getting one from me, I just wish they made them.