Graduated & off to Camp

One of my (possibly odd) prevailing thoughts this weekend involved spelling. Did anyone ever notice that graduate (the verb, the ceremony) and graduate (the noun, the person going through the ceremony) have the same spelling, but different pronunciations? I thought that was strange.

Bizarre spelling quirks aside, I did graduate on Saturday. The ceremony was good and it didn't rain on us, thankfully. I got to graduate with another member of my theater fraternity - my big. A big, for those who may not know, is an established member of a fraternity/sorority who acts as a mentor to one other new member. Usually, bigs and littles don't graduate together, so I thought that was really cool. I graduated wearing shoes made of purple canvas that, I was told, turned a lot of heads. My shoes could be seen from the stands. Both the photographer and the university president commented on my shoes.

Sunday was the party, which was nice and relaxing. The prep for the party was, of course, chaotic and stressful, but everything was great in the end. Family members and friends showed up and, despite some irritating last minute cancellations from some guests and others who simply didn't show, I did like the party a lot. There was plenty of good friends and good food - we're still figuring out ways to re-invent the leftovers so we can keep eating them!

Yesterday, I got more good news when I checked my grades - I made Cs in Spanish and Speech (classes I was expecting Ds in) and As in my theater classes. I've graduated college with a 2.73 GPA overall. I'm pretty happy with that. My first semester of college, I ended with a GPA of 0.93, which just proves how far I've come.

Still trying to decide on next steps. The ideas I'm kicking around include teaching or nursing, both of which involve a return to college, which will at least let me delay the repayment of college loans. Beyond that, my ultimate goal is to write, so I'm working on building my writing portfolio and, as usual, gearing up for Camp NaNoWriMo.

What is Camp NaNoWriMo? It's the same as NaNoWriMo, which takes place every year in November. The difference is that Camp NaNo takes place in the summer. I took part in it last summer and achieved my first NaNo win. The purpose of it is to write a 50k word count novel in one calendar month. That first win, last summer, I ended with a final word count of 50,066 words. In November of 2011, I got a second win with almost 60,000 words. This year for Camp, the people at NaNo are holding two sessions, as they did the first year. Last year's sessions were in July and August, back to back; this year, they have changed it to June and August, which I think will be better. With a month in between to recover, it increases the odds for participants to take part in both sessions and win both.

Besides my plans for Camp, I'm working on searching for a job, either in a theater or not at this point. I'll be getting back into blogging and vlogging regularly - a link to my YouTube channel can be found in the sidebar on the right. Look here for more updates on my life!