A while back, I was trying to pick a major and was told taking a future employment test would help me decide. Here were my results for the top ten occupations I should consider based on my interests/strengths.
1) College Instructor
2) Special Education Teacher
3) Social Worker
4) Administrative Assistant
5) Bookkeeper
6) Foreign Language Teacher
7) Business Education Teacher
8) Parks & Recreation Manager
9) Community Service Director
10) Speech Pathologist
So basically I'm destined to make no money and I might be a woman.
2010 was my first full calendar year back in America and I very much appreciated being able to absorb all this entertainment. Here were my favorites.
My Favorite Albums
1) Valencia - Dancing With A Ghost
I discovered this band this year, and immediately was smitten by their record from two years ago, which was written after the lead singer's girlfriend died in a car crash. While that record was about the loss and mourning that comes from the fallout of death, Dancing With A Ghost is about what is left standing after the dust of tragedy clears - the hope for a brighter day shadowed by the discovery of an even greater darkness you weren't aware existed. I have yet to experience the sense of loss that comes from losing someone close, but I know I'll have Valencia to turn to when the time comes.
2) The Graduate - Only Every Time
I waited three years not knowing if this band was going to ever make music again, but the wait was worth it - "Pull Me In" is the standout track, a song about the lead singer leaving his wife to head out on the road in order to support their life is one of the most beautiful I've heard - it's play-at-your-wedding worthy in my opinion. My favorite album art of this list as well, it captures the sound of the album so well.
3) My Chemical Romance - Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys
How can you not like an album with that awesome of a name? I usually hate 15-song albums because that means the fat hasn't been trimmed, but it was all meat on this album.
4) The Narrative - Self-Titled
Fronted by two singers who met on Craigslist, The Narrative make me wonder why more bands don't have male and female vocals. Probably because they wouldn't sound as good as these guys (and girl). "Don't Want To Fall" is the most beautiful piano song by a female vocalist I've ever heard (so I've included it below).
5) He Is We - My Forever
Speaking of beautiful female vocals...this lead singer is like Taylor Swift in that she's blonde and sings about love songs. She's unlike Taylor Swift in that she can sing live and writes awesome love songs.
6) The Maine - Black & White
I love their play on words ("I did the right thing to the wrong girl", "growing up won't bring us down") which are so simple but work.
7) Two Door Cinema Club - Tourist History
The definition of catchy. These guys can shred.
8) Neon Trees - Habits
They make me proud to live in Utah. There is not a single who person who hasn't liked "Animal" after I introduced it to them. And I've introduced that song to a lot of people.
9) Mercy Mercedes - Believe It
Sugar-sweet pop-rock done right. I love how this band has guitar solos. Points down for the lame album art.
10) Gorillaz - Plastic Beach
Is there a sicker start to a song than "Stylo"s beat? Found this album's instrumentals stimulating to my ears.
My Favorite Movies
1) The Town - Good year for Boston movies - it feels like a different country because the culture/accents are so different. Ben Affleck has come a long way from Gigli.
2) Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I - I usually don't enjoy the movies, but this one had great humor, was so stunning visually (seriously, where did they shoot?), and wasn't constrained by trying to jam 700 pages into 2 1/2 hours - I loved the pacing and the character development between the trio.
3) Inception - Coolest movie ending ever?
4) The King's Speech - The only movie on this list to make me cry. Amazing, amazing performances from Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush - wow. Like The Social Network, the premise is quite ordinary, but unlike The Social Network, this movie made it come alive.
5) The Ghost Writer - Second coolest ending this year. And a good twist thrown in. More people need to see this movie.
6) Scott Pilgrim vs. The World - The most fun I had in a movie theater this year. Michael Cera is the idol of awkward adolescents everywhere. Ramona Flowers is my type of woman (that's her on the right).
7) Catfish - The best twist of the year (and it came from a documentary). Made me laugh and gave me the creeps. It's also why I will never try online dating.
8) True Grit - Nice storytelling - took many unexpected twists and turns for me. Hailee Steinfield for Katniss in the new Hunger Games movie! Girl can act.
9) It's Kind Of A Funny Story - Actually was a funny story and now I have a crush on Emma Roberts.
10) The Fighter - Another great immerse-yourself-in-the-world-of-Massachusetts movie. Some of the fight scenes were actually really poorly staged for me, but Christian Bale made me forget about them very quickly.
Favorite animated movie: Toy Story 3 - Really refreshing to see Pixar put real effort into this knowing even with a terrible product they would've made millions (see: Shrek 3). I was a little disappointed I didn't cry after I heard everyone else did.
Favorite indie film: Monsters - a very different, slower-paced take on alien invasions. Great chemistry between the leads as well.
My Favorite Book
The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance (A Memoir)by Elna Baker
Made being a Mormon funny and interesting instead of boring as it can tend to be (and tends to be perceived). Did make me wonder if all girls are as obsessed with love as she is though.
My Favorite New TV Show
Terriers
A P.I. show with great chemistry between the leads, crazy plot twists (I can think of several instances where I gasped or shouted "no!" at the TV), and a satisfying finale. And it was cancelled. I don't understand why people didn't flock to this, there were no good new shows on the networks this fall.
My Favorite Company
Amazon
Their MP3 division offered an alternative to iTunes that was better in every way - no tax, daily deals ($6.99 is not a deal, Apple), awesome $5 digital albums that change every month, handed out MP3 credits throughout the year. A music-lover's wet dream. Oh, and they gave all college students free two-day shipping for a year.
Side note: My least favorite company changes this year were Netflix removing its friend feature and Facebook's new profile that doesn't have the text box where I can jot down the emo lyrics that are affecting me at this time in my life (hence their new appearance on the right of my blog).
My Favorite YouTube Video
This represents everything wrong with the Millennial Generation, but boy is it funny (and there's 3 parts!). This girl had some sort of video channel and was addressing her "haters" who were leaving her nasty comments.
She has some great phrases: I've wanted to make I'll pop a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushee" a shirt for a long time now. Haters: I'm not 9, I'm 11. Suck my non-existing penis. Get AIDS and die.
But if haters don't phase her then why is she having a breakdown (cue the unintentionally funny protective father who doesn't know a thing how this Internet thing works)....
You done goof'd. No more needs to be said. Now for the grande finale...
The dad makes it - I love the consequences line - you can tell he really wants to tell these kids off and he's halfway there, but then he's like, oh crap this sentence isn't going to make sense, but I just have to go with it. I don't know just the idea of a dad yelling at a computer screen is quite amusing to me. I just hope he doesn't use the cypberpolice to backtrack this blog post. I'm praying for a web redemption on Tosh.O. And yes, I know I'm a terrible person for deriving pleasure from this girl's pain.
I can't tell if these commercials are done ironically or not. I think they're not. Which is disturbing. This could air without any changes on SNL (actually it's already better than most of their sketches). The most interesting part is where people are wearing them at tailgates - do they really expect someone to wear this in public? Yikes.
Speaking of laziness...I've been watching a lot of TV lately. One of my professors told us the average person consumes 9.6 hours of media a day which I thought was ridiculous until I spent all of Saturday and Sunday watching the NFL playoffs and the Golden Globes. Yikes.
May I recommend watching Onion SportsDome on Comedy Central. The clip below should be enough of an indicator. (I fear people who read this not getting it though, since most of my followers are women...)
The other new show that I'm watching (and that you should too): Lights Out on FX. And Parks and Recreation this Thursday - seriously, it's as good as The Office was in Season 2.
My dad always asked/made us set goals as his minions/children so that we could grow/excel in life and learn...something. Clearly I missed the lesson. You see, I was never too hot on the idea of goals. The thing is unless you're really motivated you're going to either a) forget them or b) remember them (and realize they're out of reach hence killing any motivation).
On my mission in Russia goals were shoved down our throat, which turned me off the prospect even more. For some reason, we were instructed to have a weekly goal of 5 new investigators each week. I'm not quite sure why this was the standard since I didn't reach 5 new investigators for my whole mission.* Goals may work in other places, but in Russia no matter how ambitious or hard-working you were, goals had this way of saying "Hey, I appreciate the effort, I really do, but when you tally your numbers at the end of the week I'm going to crush your spirit by reminding you that the lofty goals you set are in a different stratosphere from your actual numbers." So as you can imagine, I've grown quite bitter towards goals. A good friend of mine's philosophy is if you don't set goals, you have nothing to be disappointed about. Sound advice.
* I'm not sure why I'm writing about my mission 1 1/2 years after the fact...I think it has something to do with me being asked how many baptisms I had today. I must say I prefer my answer to the kid who answered '1' but later divulged that the person had asked to have their records removed from the church. Zero is better than one in that case.
ANYWAYS, the point of this post was to highlight some of my goals from the past year that I failed to meet. It didn't help that the only place I had them written down was in an obscure folder on my computer. So without further adieu...my shortcomings of 2010:
Read 20 books- The only goal I actually achieved. I just readInto The Wild- I don't know if you can do something more hurtful to your parents, but I quite admired his daring living his life the way he did.
Pay off $1000 of car debt - I'm in debt $7000 to my dad for my car, unfortunately the Census and working at the fly lab didn't contribute enough to make a dent in that.
Straight A's- Ummm....no. No C's since freshman year though! The problem with me and grades in college is I'm not planning on grad school (at least for a while) and I have to take a bunch of classes I do not care about for my major where I just do the minimum amount of work possible and wait for the semester to end (Exhibit A: Native American Literature last semester).
Attend the temple 2x/month - Once I didn't achieve this the first month, there was little motivation to do so for the remaining 11.
Read scriptures every day - I can't say I recommend exclusively studying the Old Testament. Not the most exciting set of scripture.
So it wasn't my most productive year, but I did remember to do what my fourth-grade teacher taught me - D.E.A.R. - Drop Everything And Read!
And I did make a blog, so the year was not lost. And I'll still probably set goals for 2011.
