Happy birthday to me:

By the way, Monday was my birthday.

23.

We had an orange food night.*

"Orange food nights" originated when I was in high school, and my best friend Britt and I would go to the 24 hour grocery store and stock our cart with our favorite junk foods, which all happened to be in the orange-yellow-beige color palette. We'd go home, put in a disc of Gilmore Girls and stuff our faces in true Gilmore style.

We'd savor the sickeningly cheesy flavors of Velveeta Shells & Cheese, french bread with nutella, Wheat Thins with cream cheese and orange soda. Often followed by some midnight cookie dough (more than once without baking any cookies).

This year we made a few fantastic additions: Peanut Butter Cap'n Crunch and Garden Salsa SunChips.

A night with the girls is always worth the stomachache that inevitably follows.

*note: this is an exception to all of the food rules I profess in my life and all over this blog. But birthdays are the perfect occasion for breaking the rules.

image via

rain

Apparently, this post was a false alarm, but I think now the chill is here to stay.

I think this is the first semester where I love all of my classes. I've always loved learning and have taken some valuable classes from really insightful professors, but there has always been one class that gets put on the back burner while I focus on the rest.

I'm taking a Literature and Film class and it is fascinating. Our instructor's research emphasis is in cultural studies, specifically how romance and love are portrayed in our society through film. We've read studies about romance and relationship addiction, analyzed several films and works of literature and had some of the most interesting discussions I've had in college so far.

My Persuasive Writing professor, who is oddly similar in speech and mannerisms to my dad, is teaching us how to use argumentative writing to solve real problems in communities. Our assignment for the semester is to find a real problem and work toward a practical solution to it. And he's not lying. Several of his past students have actually implemented their ideas and created significant change.

My advertising classes are inspiring, as always, and I feel like I'm constantly learning about my own creative process and how to refine my ideas. I get to make a legitimate commercial this semester and that has been exhausting, at times, but so exciting. I'm learning about the way typography, photography, graphic design and all kinds of visuals communicate in different ways. And I've been pumping out concepts, roughs and comprehensive campaigns since day one of our creative track class.

I'm loving every minute of it.