A blase entry, seeing as this is my break and therefore no extravagant places were visited. I'm still mulling over going to Pompeii, Castel San Angelo, and the catacombs, and for a while Capri was thrown into the mix, but I don't think I'll be going to Capri. A sign of encouragement for another trip to Italy sometime in my future, perhaps?

( A little bit about the apartment, I guess. )

I was waffling earlier in the spring (and, really, even before that) about minors and the Classical Studies, but I guess I didn't have the motivation. I can say with confidence that this Rome trip has inspired me to pursue the Classical Studies minor with gusto. I changed my Autumn quarter so that I'm taking 18 credits, 8 of which are Classic Studies classes. I'm really not looking forward to one of the classes, History 311: Science in Civilization: Antiquity to 1600. I'm not science-minded at all, really, but this class A) fulfills Classic Studies credits, which I desperately need, and B) fulfills my W-credit, which I also need like none other. The other 3 credits I'm taking is an Architecture course focusing on the Ancient World, which...is exactly where I am right now, so I'm sure there'll be a few architectural marvels that crop up in the class that I've visited. I'll have to take 18 credits again in Winter, but I don't mind because the Classics classes I will take revolve around books (the Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid, etc.), so I'm okay with that. It'll be kind of interesting, because I'll be taking that advanced class in winter, but in the spring I'll be taking an introductory course to Greek and Roman Classics. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, but...there's nothing anywhere that says I need the introductory course first.

My only regret is that I don't know if there will be history classes available in winter/spring which are accepted for the Classic Studies minor. I'd be far more interested in the history than re-learning about the books and/or the Pantheon/Forum/etc. There's a book us Creative Writers in Rome are required to read which is a history textbook of Rome told in story-style which everyone has been complaining about. I unfortunately didn't start reading it until the day of the quiz (which, yeah, I did poorly on, but mostly because they asked obscure questions), but I was engrossed in reading it. It did start resembling a list at some point, simply naming kings/emperors/popes and the people who plundered Rome throughout the ages, but I was gulping the pages down. Again, I regret that dratted sophomore year, when I should have focused on my interest in history rather than somehow convince myself I could take Economics and a CSS class, but oh well. The minor should help somewhat.

They've also finally put up the requirements for the Korean minor and....3rd year is required. I can't take 3rd year, not without overloading on credits and dropping the Classic Studies minor. Even if I did drop the C.S. minor, I'd still need a W-credit, which none of the Korean classes are fulfilling, and even if they did I'd wind up having to overload on credits to something like 25 credits. It just won't happen. It breaks my heart a little, because I do really want to learn more, but...it just isn't feasible. Maybe if I come to the UW for a Master's program, which is a headache for an entirely different day (and not at ~2AM).

Random fact: Rick Kenney (my enthusiastic poet of a teacher) has a Wikipedia page. It boggles my mind, somewhat, and I wonder who put it up.

And...this post got a bit rambly. Eeps. I'll leave off with mentioning how I love having un-grated Parmesan cheese, Ravioli con carne, marinara sauce, and bacon bits all waiting for me to cook with it tomorrow. ^_________^


A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb. --W. H. Auden

.....to have everything come together.

My dratted Italian visa (and thus my passport) finally came back! So now I can actually get ON the plane come the 17th! And I got my health screening done Tuesday, so I turned in my Concurrent Enrollment form when I went to pick it up, and I've just finished signing up for the Student Health Insurance (*winces*), so.....yeah. I'M DONE WITH THE PAPERWORK!! There are no more hoops for me to jump! At least before I head off to Rome, anyway.

I believe I have all the book-y stuff for Rome now (so long as the directors don't randomly add anything else to the booklist....). I've got Metamorphoses, an Italian-English dictionary, a little tour-book for Rome, Coriolanus and Julius Caesar, and I've also got a moleskine notebook! ^____^ It fits so nice and neatly into my back pocket! This is exactly what I look for when I pick up new notebooks/journals to write in; I think I've got a brand, now. Hee. It's not one of the city moleskines, which is slightly disappointing, but I wanted it more for the number of pages I could write in, so it's all good. Now I just need to come up with a proper name for my little notebook......what? Nobody else does that? (ETA: I've decided it's Leonard. *hugs* But not the proper way of pronouncing Leonard.)

I also had my Korean presentation today (on the 1988 Summer Olympics), which I had 99% memorized before class and (by going over it again and again and again and...etc.) I finished memorizing the last sentence just as the teacher walked in. Of course, as soon as I got up front I completely lost the flow and had to keep looking at my sheet from time to time, but it all came out. I got through the Korean part okay, but when it came to the English translation/question and answer time I was shaking like a leaf--hopefully not too noticeably. I don't know if it was the adrenaline or the nerves, but it took a while for my hand to stop trembling. I also proved my English-major-worthiness by saying "protestations." It's technically a word, but not with the 's' at the end, I don't believe. And my Korean teacher, whose English is her second (if not third or fourth or....some other number) language, caught it. *hides face*

Speaking of really bad English...I was looking through my Korean-English dictionary looking for the number 12 (it should be so simple.....but it's not) and I happened to look at the ordinal numbers (first, second, third, etc.). They wrote "twelfth" as "twelveth." Ha.

I've seen the first 3 episodes of Chuck, and...yeah. New show to add onto my Need-to-Keep-Tabs-On. Adam Baldwin FTW!!!!! Now if only NBC would put up episodes 4-12 instead of randomly jumping to having episode 13 up, that'd be great (because...I have nothing better to do besides homework...or update fanfiction....or do my reading for Chaucer and Rome.....or study for the Planets final come the 11th.....)


"And the wheel," said the Captain [of the load of bloody useless loonies], "what about this wheel thingy? It sounds a terribly interesting project."
"Ah," said the marketing girl [one of the bloody useless loonies], "well, we're having a little difficulty there."
"Difficulty?" exclaimed Ford. "Difficulty? What do you mean, difficulty? It's the single simplest machine in the entire Universe!"
The marketing girl soured him with a look. "All right Mr. Wiseguy," she said, "you're so clever, you tell us what color it should be." --Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Restaurant at the End of the Universe, technically)

So. My Italian visa. Which I've been griping and moaning about and probably making a lot of you roll your eyes at me from all the melodrama.

But once more, with feeling: I HATE VISAS!!!!!!!!!!!

However, I recognize that had I been more informed and if I'd been made more aware of what all the components were and when they were all due, I would be less angry with the visa (yes, I'm speaking of it like it's a human being, roll with it!).

So, really, my anger is aimed mostly entirely at the IPE office. *fumes with the thought*

In order to obtain an Italian visa, I need to prove "financial security." The only way I manage to attend and live at UW is through financial aid. So, I submitted the document saying I'd show I have financial aid so the people at IPE could write a letter saying, "She has money. Let her go to Rome."

Admittedly, I dropped the ball a tiny bit on this part. I didn't realize I needed to have already applied for summer aid by the time I submitted my visa application so the woman working with us Creative Writers (we shall henceforth call her YoSaffBridge because I don't like either woman) could send the collective visa apps sometime in the last week, so that's my fault. But the financial aid office doesn't decide financial awards until May-ish.

Can we see the issue here?

I submitted my visa application the 10th of April. YoSaffBridge only emailed me about the problem on the 29th. I'm not even going to try and speculate what all she was doing in those TWO WEEKS she had it.

And now, comes the true source of my anger (because up until that point I was merely frustrated). YoSaffBridge's office hours are from about 8-11ish and then from 2-closing. I got there at 2PM, almost exactly.

She walks in about 2:15 from her break. Then proceeds to take about 15 minutes to do...something. I have no idea what. We talk, she says I need a visa even though the program directors said all we have to do is sign an indemnity form if we didn't get a visa and pretend we're tourists instead of students. I go down to the Financial Aid office, I burden a very nice woman (Lisa, her name was, who was MUCH nicer than the last person I went to about financing Rome) with estimating how much financial aid I would receive for summer, I go back up to IPE about 10 minutes later with the estimate....and YoSaffBridge is "out."

I get that sometimes "when you gotta go, you gotta go." However, YoSaffBridge was only available for....10 minutes out of the 45 minutes I was at IPE.

Mayhaps I'm at the wrong university. When your hours are said to be from 2-closing, you're supposed to be at your office at 2 o'clock NOT leaving wherever you took your lunch at 2 in order to get to your office whenever you get there. Isn't that how it works? Or am I just strange?

I'd heard that IPE was horrible, and you have to watch 'em like a hawk to make sure they don't screw you over, but from the few, brief instances I dealt with them before it didn't seem bad. The secretary/person in charge (she seemed to have more knowledge than all the advisors put together, but she was only greeting people and answering the phone...) was very nice and helpful. But after YoSaffBridge....yeah. *takes out her hawk eyes*

Blah. I don't even know how coherent some of that is. I just got onto the elevator to escape IPE and thought, "She is so going into my livejournal." Grrrr.

I went grocery shopping yesterday, and I now have some yummy French bread, pepperjack cheese, lunch meat, and apples. Oh, and Pepsi, too. *drinks Pepsi to make up for the bad, bad IPE woman* Also went to B&N to pick up a copy of issue 13 of BtVS for Freddie and the 2nd issue of Better Days, since B&N takes about 2-3 weeks to stock the new issues. But they didn't have Better Days, sadly. I'll probably go to Pike Place and see if a comic store there has it. *hopes*

And there'll be Korean food tomorrow! The KSA at UW is hosting a "Korean Food Market" on the HUB lawn. Thankfully the food is bought through tickets purchased at the Ticket Office, so I can use my Husky Card to buy food. *cheers* Since I don't have cash and I demand Korean food. I just hope it's good food, and not fast-food quality Korean food (though I will still buy it).

The Korean test I took yesterday was difficult. Thankfully, though, it wasn't difficult because I didn't know my stuff (though it was still a factor). There was one section where it says, "fill in the blanks to reflect the translation given." Problem? There was no translation. Just a sentence in Korean, a blank, and whatever the heck our brains could come up with. Kim-sunsengnim wasn't there for the test, too, because she had to survey her TAs or some such, so we had no one to ask. Then there was a part where we had to use a certain sentence connector and come up with a sentence based on cues given in English. I knew how to use the connector just fine, but the cues weren't working harmoniously.

Kim-sunsengnim noticed no one finished the test, though, so we get tomorrow to work on it after taking a glance at it today to refresh our memories what we had trouble with. We informed her about the lack of a translation to "reflect" from, so she'll fix that. I don't know what I'm going to do about the connector thing, but at least I'll have more time to B.S. it and get partial credit.

Had my Planets midterm today, too. I know I didn't get 100%, but I didn't utterly fail either! I'm predicting perhaps about a 3.0, maybe a little less if the TAs didn't get their coffee/chocolate/whatever. The labs are weighted more than the tests, though, and I've been getting an average of 9/10, so I'm not worried about my Planets grade (unless something changes for the worst in the class).

I'm feeling a little calmer now. Probably #11 on "You Know You're a Writer When" shirt: You write out everything that makes you frustrated/angry and you feel better afterwards. Heh.

And I gave Nikki her bday present, so now I can show the x-stitching project I did for her.
( David Tennant in sepia )


Buffy: You're right. Ooh! She's even affecting my work, now. She's the Titanic. She's a crawling black cancer!
[She brings her foot up, around and down onto a bench, breaking it in two.]
Buffy: She's... other really bad things.
Oz: On the plus side you've killed the bench, which was looking shifty.
....
Willow: [on the phone with Rupert Giles] Giles, I just talked to Buffy and, yeah, I think she's feeling a little... insane. [pause] No, not bitchy crazy, more like... homicidal maniac crazy. So I told her to come see you, OK? --S.4, Living Conditions

[takes place in the musical episode, so everyone's singing]
Anya: I've got a theory, it could be bunnies. [uncomfortable pause]
Willow: I've got a theor-
Anya [accompanied by rock music]:
Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes!
They got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses!
And what's with all the carrots?
What do they need such good eyesight for, anyway?
Bunnies! Bunnies! It must be bunnies!
[Long silence. rock music stops]
Or maybe midgets? --S.6, Once More With Feeling, Buffy

50 Books in a Year:

6. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, Beidler Ed. Includes:
*The General Prologue
*The Knight's Tale
*The Miller's Tale
*The Reeve's Tale
*The Wife of Bath's Tale
*The Merchant's Tale
*The Franklin's Tale
*The Pardoner's Tale
*The Shipman's Tale
*The Prioress' Tale
*The Nun's Priest's Tale

One of these days I may actually read the entirety of T.C.T., but at the moment I'm good with this. Yay.

So, I'm a bit pathetic. Let's just say it involves a window that is not completely sealed from the outside, a spider which crawled all over my window but never came near me, me cringing and internally wailing, a bottle, and a kindly neighbor who took pity on me and squashed the spider. And now one of my chores later tonight will be to tape up the sides of my window so it may never happen again. *shudders*

Lots of Autumn 2008 pondering/querying behind the cut.
( Yeah, I know I said I'd leave off about this until it got closer, but I'm a nerd. )

Official-Rome-Meeting in T-minus 5 days! ...Not that I'm, uh, counting down or anything....*shuffles* And I went ahead and requested a copy of the impossible-to-get-Rome-book assigned to us through the library. Hopefully we're only supposed to read the book by the time we get to Rome. If we're supposed to have it on hand and/or have had it read by the time of the meeting...then I'm just going to have to shrug and tell them they should've sent out notices/had the meeting earlier.

It was a little surprising/eerie to me, but in my Planets class Toby was covering the atmospheres of Venus, Earth, and Mars, and I was following along with him, almost to where I started predicting where he was going with his lecture. O.o Guess taking Weather101 was of some use after all. Though, probably not in the way Jerome meant it to.

And, hee, I wanna go live on Mars, with its dust-devils that put tornados to shame and sandstorms that encompass the entire planet. hey, future scientists, get to work on it; we wouldn't want to make liars out of the Babylon 5 creators with their Mars colony, do we? ^.~

I've suddenly developed a craving for Korean noodles. A particular type, too. Naengmyun, particularly the ice-water broth variety. Though now that I think about it, the spicy cold noodles sounds tasty, too. *wonders where the craving came from, then goes back to her ramyun*


Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of tequila. --Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

After I got back from class today I checked my student page, and found they'd posted the next quarter's schedule up. And so, like the complete and utter dork I am, I went and tried to arrange my schedule about a month in advance. And I could very well make a schedule where I have classes ONLY on Tues/Thurs, but A) I would wind up having to make a mad dash across campus which would normally take me 15-20 minutes in 10 minutes, and B) I'm going to see what requirements there are for the Korean minor (which is FINALLY being offered!). If the minor requires a 3rd year, then I won't pursue it because I would go absolutely insane fulfilling all the other credits. If I only need to have taken through second year, then I'll probably take this Korean history class which also counts as a Writing credit, which would take care of all my GenEd requirements.

But, yes, I don't need to make those kinds of decisions until a little less than 3 weeks from now. Sooo....I'm not going to fret over Korean minor or No Korean minor.

I am going to (probably, if the teachers don't swap or something) be taking my Prose writing class from David Shields, an author whose books I have never read. I'll probably do that over the summer, before I take his class. I find it highly unlikely he would be so egotistic that he'd require us to have read his own book(s) for the class, but I'd just like to have some idea as to what his style is like.

I turned in all my visa stuff Thursday, one whole day before it was officially due, so that's over with. There was one tiny little section which the notary didn't know what to do with and I intended to ask the IPE person what I should do with it, but she wasn't there. >.< Sooo, I checked my email a little obsessively over the weekend to make sure there wasn't a message saying, "You screwed up. You need to come in PRONTO." As it's past the IPE's hours, now, I think I'm in the clear (at least for this portion of the application). If not, then it's IPE's fault, not mine. *sticks out tongue at IPE*

Washington weather really likes to be bipolar/insane. Over the weekend we got blue skies, rain, hail, and snow. In one day. With a few switches between them. *headdesk* My sister says she and Mom woke up to white on the ground in Olympia. In the UW's student newspaper, they forecast the weather in a little corner on the front page. They had rain, sun, clouds, and snow lined and bunched up to each other, and a little caption that said (roughly): "The weather's too wacky. We give up! Prepare for everything!"

See, this is why people in Washington/NW wear layers and all that. It's not because we think it's fashionable (though depending on what you do I suppose it can be). It's because of weather like this.

And now switching back to Rome topics...my first Official-Rome-Meeting is the 29th, so yay! I can actually jump up and down about it now since the visa thing is over with. So my Tuesday looks like:

9:30--Go to first class of the day.
1:30--Finish last class of the day.
3:00-5:00--Go to Rome meeting (YAY!!)
6:00-undetermined time--Go to review session for my Planets midterm on May 1st (and, on Wed., another review from the professor himself at 6:30). *twirls finger*

I'm not ecstatic about that last bit, but what can I do. The TA is supposedly going to hand out extremely comprehensive notes, soo...yeah. Want/need those.

I've also bought my flight ticket at long last, so now I know when precisely I leave the Seattle area. Huzzah for having to be at the airport 2-3 hours early, and therefore needing to be there by....well, actually, I'll have to wake up in the early early early hours of the morning just so I can get my stuff together, arrive at Sea-Tac, and be there for the 2-3 hour security check-in. @.@ Ooohh, I am sooooo sleeping on the plane. Or drinking an insane amount of caffeine. *headdesk repeatedly*

*Edit 7:25* My decree: Squirrels are much cuter than crows, and have my undying support over crows. Especially when 2 crows decide to bully one poor, cornered squirrel right under my window. And then proceed to stalk my window when I scare them off.


Zoe: You know, sometimes it sucks having a father who’s the town smokie.
Carter: Well sometimes it sucks having a daughter who’s the town delinquent. [Zoe glares at him] I take it back.
Zoe: Gee, thanks.
Carter: It always sucks. [exits the car] HA!

Zoe: Please, don’t make me do this. I hate old people.
Carter: You don’t do this, you won’t live to be one. --EUReKA, Dr. Nobel

A quick and easy way to show that, though I'm an English major, I have such a long way to go to be "well-read." And to also show that an obscene number of books that I have on my shelf are not read (even though a lot of them were required reading...oops).

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of... whenever this meme started). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

( My Not-So-Impressive List )

Hmmm...there were quite a few books I'd never heard of...nor do I believe they'd be books I'd have interest in reading (Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything??? I think not).

In other news, one of my aunts in Korea sent an email to my MSN account, which I never use, and my mother wanted to know what it was. I checked, and discovered I had missed another email from that aunt, from way back on Christmas. The Christmas message was written all in Korean, so I had a time translating that. And I suppose it shows how much I've learned, because I knew most of the words. I just didn't know how to put them together. Seriously, Korean is like a jigsaw puzzle. If you don't have the right connectors, it ain't all gonna come together. *headdesk*

(Superman becomes possessed by the spirit of Deadman)
Superman: So I know this place where the milkshakes are so thick that I NEED YOUR HELP.
Wonder Woman: ....That's pretty thick.
(Much later, after Deadman leaves Superman's body...)
Superman: ...you have to eat them with a spoon! What am I doing in Africa? --Justice League

[Preparing guns before the shoot-out]
Ray Carling: Yeah, but can you hit anything?
Sam Tyler: You should see my Playstation scores.

Gene Hunt: Steven Warren is a bum bandit. Do you understand? A poof! A fairy! A queer! A queen! Fudge packer! Uphill Gardener! Fruit picking sodomite!
Sam Tyler: He's gay?
Gene Hunt: As a bloody Christmas Tree! --Life on Mars

I like sunny weather. It's even the good kind of sunny weather--not too hot sunny weather, but not bone-freezing cold sunny weather like Washington sometimes gets. And we even get some precipitation, so it's not like "OMG, we're heading into a drought!!! FREAKOUT!!!"

Last night at 11:20PM-ish I was sitting at my computer, thinking I might go to bed early 'cause I was feeling a little exhausted, but my iTunes just started a song I liked (Shounen Heart by Home Made Kazoku; JPop/Eureka seveN soundtrack) and I wanted to finish it.

My phone started ringing. I was totally perplexed, because I recognized the ringtone (but I am horrible at mental association, so I didn't recognize it as my mother's ringtone) but my first impression was that solicitors were calling me. Picked up my phone, saw it was Mom, and couldn't comprehend why she was calling me so late. Turned out she intended to call my sister, but hit my speed dial by mistake. *rolls eyes* Good thing I hadn't been in bed by then; I probably wouldn't have appreciated the wake-up call.

I was sitting in my Weather class today and the teacher put a bowl of water on the overhead for a demonstration, and the light from the overhead made a nice stripe of rainbow on the walls of the lecture hall. I think my attention was diverted for a good 2 minutes by all the pretty colors. *has bad, selective ADD*

Took a listening comprehension Korean test yesterday, which I was freaking out about, of course. I sometimes have to ask people speaking in English to repeat and enunciate what they say, how the heck am I supposed to keep track of what someone is saying in a foreign language?? The sheet Kim-sunsengnim handed out made it seem as though it was going to be a test of 25 diction (she speaks, we write down what we hear and translate it), and all of us were completely going insane over the idea of having to do 25 sentences in 40 minutes. Thankfully we only did about 15. It helped even more when she actually read the translation of a few sentences ^.^ I didn't do nearly as badly as I thought I would, though there were a few instances that I couldn't hear her clearly and didn't pick up a few verbs. Blah. It's done, and I didn't fail it, so I'm okay.

Korean's homework, however, is beginning to get a bit frustrating. My teacher is the head of the Korean program, and she doesn't have any faculty to help her, so we all understand that she's got a huge plate to deal with. But...she has this tendency to not be very clear about assignments and when they're due, if they're due at all. She doesn't collect or grade homework, though she assigns it in the hopes that we're motivated enough to learn Korean to do it on our own. Then, for this quarter, we had 2 compositions, a skit, and a project due. We finished 1 composition, so that's good.

The second composition she forgot about, and then decided to...merge it with the skit? Our composition becomes the skit? But then she also said that if we wanted we could do our composition on our own...... And there were 2 students who were saying that the composition could be done in lieu of the skit, which to me doesn't make sense because the skit is sort of an oral presentation, which is different from a writing assignment. But beyond giving us a topic, she hasn't really explained it to us. And now there's a project due (I think next Wednesday), but she hasn't said when the composition/skit/whatever-the-hell-it-has-become is due. *headdesk*headdesk*headdesk*headdesk*headdesk* BAH! Humbuggery.

And I swear I won't do this on a weekly basis, but I AM SO GLAD ANTM GOT RID OF KIM!!!! Well, technically, she got rid of herself, but still. I have no idea why they chose her in the first place. There were a few girls I liked so much better than Kim, and they were shafted so she could just quit before she was even judged. Grr. Plus...could she have fit anymore "like"s in her last hoorah? "Like, I don't believe in, like, high fashion, like, the $2000 clothes? Like, who would, like, buy that stuff, like, it's so, like, expensive?"

*cue eye-twitch and aneurysm* I hope I was never that bad (I am aware I overused the "like" to some extent in high school). If I was, I apologize to those who were inflicted. And hopefully I'm much better now. Being declared an English major has helped me become more self-aware of my speech, I think.

Which, minor random note that no one will care about: the MyUW page (a sort of homepage for UW students) showed I was declared an "English (Creative Writing)" Major about a week ago. Yay!! *does a happy dance*

This "XP Antivirus protection" thing just popped up, and while I'm glad it's wiping out the bad stuff....GRRRAAAAH! I just want to surf the net!! I tried to hit the "cancel" button, but it wouldn't let me cancel. At all. I hit cancel, and it just took me through a loop of "run this program" "if you cancel it won't run" "remove this harmful programs" and then back again. *headdesk*

This had better be a legit program. Because if not....I don't care if I don't know how to be a hacker. I will become a hacker and I will find the source and I will DESTROY IT FOR RUINING THIS ONE DAY OF INTERNET SURFING!!!!!

And now, to remove that malicious software, I have to pay $49.95 for the "license" or whatnot. Seriously? I went through 5 minutes of trying to get the hell out of that circle of "run program" just so it could tell me, "Oh, you have spyware/etc.....but we won't take care of it unless you pay up." *headdesk*

Okay! Getting this entry back to a happier (or less frustrated) note, I register tomorrow. Going for ASTR 150: The Planets, ENGL 321: Chaucer (WooT!); and then finish off 2nd Year Korean (but I won't register for this right away, because I'll be saving a space in another English class for a friend [no worries, Nikki, I didn't forget!]). I was thinking of taking the Architecture 151 class, which is an easy 3 credits (so I hear) but...that'd extend my Tues&Thursdays longer than I'd like. Plus, it'd mean that my Tues&Thursdays would look like: Astronomy lecture: 9:30-10:50, Korean: 12:30-1:30, then Arch: 3:30-4:50. That's 2 two hour breaks in my day, and....I honestly hate those kind of days. I'd much rather get my day done and over with early, even if it means I have no break. It would do nothing for me, except perhaps boost my GPA by some negligible amount, so...I don't think I'll take the class. I'm okay with 15 credit-quarters.

Hansee Hall Ball in about a week! I'm not a dance-person, but it'll be nice to be "social." Plus....chocolate fountain for $3. Um, yeah, sign me up! The only downside would be having to buy dress and shoes, but I figure I should invest in them anyway for later in life. I don't know precisely what "later in life" will entail, but...best be prepared, neh?

Okay! Randomly, livejournal logged me out of my own account, even though I have it set to never log me out. Um....it's a good thing livejournal kept the entire entry so I could copy it before I logged back in, because when I did the entry was about 3/4 missing.

Umm...okay. Is it some sort of hidden message sent to me by livejournal or some other unknown forces...??


(Wash is playing with plastic dinosaurs.)
Wash: (as Stegosaurus) Yes...yes. This is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it...this land. (as Allosaur) I think we should call it your grave! (as Stegosaurus) Ah! Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal! (as Allosaur)Ha ha ha! Mine is an evil laugh! Now DIE! --Firefly (sidenote: I went looking through my previous lj-Firefly entries, to make sure I didn't use this quote already...and found out my last Firefly quote was Jan. 28. Heh, talk about unplanned regularity....)

And I shall say it again for those who missed it.

OMG IT SSSSSSSNNNNNOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEDDDDDD!!!!!!!

I was actually up when it started layering, which was around 4 A.M. because I totally misjudged how difficult my homework/test was, but I couldn't really appreciate the full effect because, hello, 4 A.M. doesn't provide the best of light. It snowed some more while I was out and about at class, so I wandered aimlessly during my hour break, just letting the snow fall into my hair and probably brightening my cheeks up to a nice, puffy red that is entirely unbecoming of me, but you know what? I didn't care!!! 'Cause it was snowing and it made everything GOOD.

The snow's going away, which makes my friends (arbitrarily putting the plural there, because I know my friends love the snow too) and I sad, but supposedly it's going to snow more tonight. Hopefully this isn't like the "it'll snow over the weekend" kind of snow, because Saturday it was just cloudy and then Sunday it was nothing but clear blue skies. Kinda put a downer on things.

Because of some outside interference my Korean class didn't have class Friday, and thus made our test a take-home test. I printed it out at home, and I knew it was supposed to be more difficult than the in-class test for obvious reasons.

The level of difficulty was ridiculous! I spent at least 4 hours doing it all. That doesn't include the hour I had to put aside to type up my film journal that was also due today. It got to the point where, for some of the questions where I had to put a reply, I was sorely tempted to write, "He will want to shoot himself in the foot for taking so many classes." (don't mean to be morbid, it just fit really well with the prompt). Blah. I wound up getting 2 hours of sleep in total. I'm not feeling all that bad right now, in actuality. I don't know if it's because I somehow "stored up" sleep over the weekend, or if I'm just getting used to pulling all-nighters and my body's like, "oh, okay, it's one of those nights, is it?" I think it's the caffeine, though. *curls fingers possessively around her precious Pepsi*....and I totally didn't mean for all that alliteration. Are all the English classes finally having some sort of an effect? Good gracious, I hope so......

And then of course everyone got into a whole heap of panic when one of the students started tossing around, "Korean essay" and such, not really equating it with the composition. None of us were any happier with the thought of the composition, but at least they're not two separate assignments. That's due Wednesday, which makes me just so gleeful! </sarcasm>

Also have my Weather midterm this Wednesday. Blegh. At least it's only 30 minutes, and most of the questions are multiple choice.

I was thinking about being a Summer Orientation leader this summer, but A) I don't know if I'd be required to find my own housing (I think I would) and 2) I want to do the Creative Writing program in Rome this summer, which conflicts with it. I don't think I'm going to be an Orientation leader, but *shrugs* I guess it would've been a good way to have an entry-level position.

Speaking of the Creative Writing program....They finally have some semblance of a webpage up for it! Here! It merely states that prospective people should look back on 2007's program, and some bit about financial stuff, but at least I know they're planning on it! I just don't know if I can afford it or not; supposedly board is not included in the expenses, and then of course there's the plane tickets required, and then the tuition/program fee itself. I'd probably have to get a private loan to pay for a good portion of it, which I don't want at all. I don't think financial aid provided by the University would get me through both the abroad program and my fall quarter. *sigh* I'll just have to wait until they have info sessions and see what they advise.

I turned in my CW-application last Friday, and they are supposed to respond by the 5th Friday of the quarter (the Friday I turned it in was the 3rd of the quarter). I'm actually pretty okay with the thought of being an English Lit major if I'm not accepted. Completing all the credits will be easier as just a Lit major, and I could still go on the Rome program if I'm not a CW major. I have thoughts floating at the back of my head saying, "If I do get accepted...does that mean I'm beholden to it?" which I know is just the lazy bum side of me trying to avoid more work, but it's still something I should take into consideration if I do get accepted.

I got Nikki lured in with Firefly's series premiere, and she loved it. ^.^ I like getting people hooked onto shows I like. I get so easily pulled into other shows, it's nice to have a change of pace. There was a part where [WARNING: SPOILER FOR FIREFLY!] Kaylee seems to have died, and Nikki was just absolutely horrified at the thought, and I was sitting behind her trying not to crack up because I knew Mal's bad, bad ways. I managed to fake my snorts of laughter into what sounded like choking back tears, apparently, so it was all okay on that front.

My sister finally mailed my phone today (rather than Saturday like I was expecting), which I'm thankful for. I like to think I'm not dependent on the thing, but...without that phone, there's no immediate way to get ahold of me, which wouldn't bode well in case of an emergency or something. Email doesn't really do much of anything, unless I'm carrying around my laptop (which would be just plain dumb) or some sort of device that accesses the Internet...like a cell phone! Which defeats the purpose. So, yes, cell phone on its way = good. Now I just hope the UW mail system doesn't break down somewhere.

Nikki and Donald (her next door neighbor) found this really cool "experiment" where you take a bottle of Diet Coke and drop Mentos in it, and it creates a fountain of fizz and carbonation and all sorts of goodness. They had a free 20 oz Diet Coke from a Dominoes pizza deal, and they bought some Mentos from Ians, and we (Nikki, Donald, I-wen and I) all went outside onto Denny Field to try. It didn't work, and we decided to try again, except this time with a 2 Liter bottle. It almost-kinda-not-really worked, and we were sad and trotted back to Hansee, trying to figure out why it didn't work (we didn't really read through the directions all the way....not that the directions were explicit). I was carrying the bottle, and I dumped it into the garbage lid-first.

It exploded!

We realized we'd made a mistake in keeping the lid screwed on, which didn't allow air to come in and start the carbonation process. We're gonna try again later this week, with some improvements on our process. Hehehehehe.

At least now we know what to do if we have lots of dining plan money left (which is no longer refunded to us at the end of the year, curse you HFS!!!). Look up fun food experiments and do them. Hee.

And as I'm sure you noticed, I changed my layout. Went through 5-8 different premade layouts, and all of them had just one tiny little thing that was missing (first was a tags sidebar, then icons for each entry, couldn't change color schemes, then back to tags, etc. etc.)

[Blair has been using Larry in a research project to see the effects of television on monkeys]
Jim: They found Larry.
Blair: Where?!
Jim: That mini-kong of yours busted back into my apartment, and he trashed it. Now, Animal Control has the place surrounded, right? So I'm gonna give you half an hour to bag him, and if he doesn't come out with his hands up, well then I call in a SWAT-sniper.
Blair: Did they say what he was doing?
Jim: He was watching TV.
Blair: You're kiddin me!... What program? --The Sentinel

College Drinking Games Lead to Higher Blood Alcohol Levels - washingtonpost.com

SUNDAY, Jan. 6 (HealthDay News) -- The first on-the-scene study of college drinking behavior shows that parties with drinking games result in higher blood alcohol levels, while themed parties encourage college women to drink more heavily than men, new research suggests.

Naaaahh! Really?! That are real insightful stuff--I's never knew drinking more alcohol makes me more drunker and give me higher blood alcohol level. Is this what I are supposed to learned in calledge? </purposefulstupidity>

As a friend of mine posted on Facebook--This just in: rain makes things wet!

I got a new ID card today (was going to do it Monday, but I decided I had better things to do than wait an hour for a card when I could do it later in five minutes). I hate my new picture; maybe it's the vanity in me talking, but I look horrible. Maybe I'll just stick the card next to my cell phone to make it fritz out again, and next time hopefully I'll be prepared for a picture...maybe?

I need to figure out a way to stay awake in my Weather class. It has nothing to do with the teacher, but when the lights go dim and he starts talking about things I already know....I just kinda stop taking notes and then the inactivity leads me to conking out on my desk--which, in just the second row, is a REALLY bad thing to do. I get 7-9 hours of sleep, and I really don't want to lose anymore of my waking hours just to make it 10-12 hours, but I also don't want to start guzzling down caffeine at 9 AM 'cause I prefer it later in the afternoon. *sigh* Maybe it'll be better once we've moved on from "Air is made of molecules which take up space. This is a drawing of a molecule....molecules are made of these little tiny things called atoms which are further made of protons and neutrons and electrons" and I can start taking notes. Or else I'm going to have to do something else in that class, which very well may make me miss key aspects of the class.

The UW's Career Discovery Week is coming up the last week of January, and of course one of the panels I want to attend--what to do with a Lit major--is when I have class. I realize I'm only a Lit major until I submit my Creative Writing application (which I'm hoping I will be able to get on it this weekend, or at least before the third Thursday of the quarter, which is one day before the app's due date), but it still would help me greatly, right? Right. *sigh* I don't want to skip class, but I may have to if I want to get in on that. There are other panels for careers which I'm interested in going to, but this is one of the ones that I most desperately wanted. *shakes fist at UW and their poor idea of scheduling "convenient" times* I'm also going to go to 2 grad school-related panels, which frightens the hell out of me, but I really need to start thinking about what I'm going to do after I graduate UW and can no longer be identified as "undergrad."

I had an oral test in Korean today. It was only 5 minutes long, and my partner and I prepared a dialogue beforehand, but still. I hate oral tests. I can't listen to and speak foreign languages for the life of me. The only good thing about it was that you went to her office for the 5 minutes in lieu of going to class, so I had a second hour break. But.....gaaaaaahh! Hate! *fumes* Tomorrow's a written test based on the 2 chapters we covered last quarter, so it's all review, so I'm good. I like written much better than the oral tests. I suppose you could say it's the practicals I hate and the written I love. That's why I want to be a writer who writes books, not a journalist or something along those lines. Maybe a publisher, or an editor....but the second you put me in a situation where I'm being tested and observed, and I freak. Yesterday Kim-sunsengnim was doing some listening comprehension exercises, and since she was reading slowly and enunciating every syllable, I got the first 2 sentences pretty well. She read the third sentence, pointed at me, and asked me what it was. I blanked and there was nothing I could do except be an idiot and say "I don't know." And then, of course, for the 4th sentence I knew what it was and could've told her, if she'd chosen that one for me instead of the third. Grrrrrrrrr.

Probably should've saved the update for later today. Oh well. 'Tis why there's an "Edit Entry" feature on lj.


Dr. Jackson: Jack?
Col. O'Neill: Daniel?
Dr. Jackson: Are you you?
Col. O'Neill: Yeah. You?
Dr. Jackson: What?
Col. O'Neill: Never mind.
[later]
Dr. Jackson: Don't shoot! Just let them tend to Xe'ls.
Col. O'Neill: How do I know you're the real Daniel?
Dr. Jackson: ....Because.
Col. O'Neill: [shrugs shoulders] ...yeah, okay. --Stargate SG-1, Spirits

Pictures of Centralia/Chehalis flooding

I knew Chehalis/Centralia were completely flooded, but I didn't think it was this bad, or that the land was this low. I hope my friend's family down in Toledo is okay.

Yesterday in my Korean class my teacher was ill, so the substitute came....ten minutes late to a 50-minute class. She then proceeded to teach us ONE Korean Christmas carol for about 15 minutes (as per my teacher's orders, really, so can't blame her). Am I against Christmas carols? Not at all. I'd love it. I'd have loved it even more if there hadn't been a 40-minute test we'd been given only 25 minutes to do. And I'd have loved it even more if the students didn't b!%(# for 10 minutes about the really weird Korean font used for the reading portion of the exam that had been taken directly out of our required course pack that we'd already read. *headdesk*headdesk*headdesk*

On the bright side...since I've done my Korean skit/presentation today, all I need to do to not miss anymore points in Korean is to haul my butt to class Thursday and Friday. *cheers* I also only have a sit-down final to study for on Monday, 8:30 in the morning, so essentially Rocks for Jocks is done. *cheers*

The only things I have to worry about are my Poetry and Short Story portfolios. They both require tons of revisions. I'm fairly certain my Short Story is going to make me want to shoot myself (and not necessarily in the foot), but the poetry should be fine. Many of them might not be publishable (??is that a word? probably not...or at least not the right suffix), but they'll be enough to pass me through the class. And then....hopefully they'll be acceptable for my Creative Writing application. (Please? Maybe? For my sake???)

Then on Monday, after my test, I run to the Bookstore, sell back my geology book, run to Padelford (or possibly before the test), drop off my portfolios, run back to my dorm, pack up everything/prepare for leaving for the break, escort my sister from the car to Hansee (this might possibly be done *before* I do the packing....), and then I'M ON FREAKIN' WINTER BREAK FOR NEARLY FOUR WEEKS!!!!!

*dances and cheers and drinks far too many Pepsis than is healthy*

Later tonight I'm going to go down and have breakfast (yes, it's a late-night event thing). I was going to go to the IMAX for an extra credit thing for Rocks for Jocks, but I decided I *really* didn't want to completely use up my entire Wednesday running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Plus....getting back here at 8 PM, all the way down at the Medical center when I live in Hansee? Um.....No. (Maybe I'll edit this later with a nice link to a map of the UW campus, pointing out where the Metro Bus drop off point/Medical center is....but it'd be meaningless to you anyway, because the UW is so huge my dorm isn't even on the same map square!!)

Alright. I didn't mean for this to be a long entry, just something to mention the flooding, but then it turned into a whole production. So I'm gonna leave off now.

....to make approx. 130+ sheets of printer paper, standard quality? Cause I killed that many last night to make 24 copies of a 10-page short story, 2 copies of 4 2-page critiques, and 7 copies of a poem (one page). Though, to highlight my "environmental" side, I did double-side my short story, so it was really only 5 pages that I used for each copy, instead of 10 pages (which would have been SOOO much easier in terms of simply getting the job done).

I even went through the equivalent of 1 ink cartridge just printing the short story; I started probably a little less than half-way on one and then had to switch to a new one maybe after twelve copies, and now the new cartridge is just on the higher side of a quarter full. Thank goodness I bought 2 cartridges instead of one yesterday, which leads me into this next segment of the entry.

So after my last class of the day, at about 3-ish, I started walking over to the Office Max to buy ink cartridges, which is about 3-4 streets over and across a freeway. There's a little store next to it called "Cartridge World," where they stick to just selling ink cartridges and the like. I decided to check it out, since usually the specialty stores have competetive prices and whatnot. One HP-27 ink cartridge cost ~$13.50, as opposed to the $17.99-18.95 I've seen elsewhere. Sooo, yes, definitely bought it there. And they have this free rewards program where you buy 10 cartridges you get $7 off, and for every cartridge you return for a refill you get $3 back. It was a bit of a walk, maybe, but definitely worth it in my opinion. Plus, with joining the rewards program the Arbor Day Foundation or some such foundation will plant a tree! So, I get to make up for all those poor trees that died so I could pass my Short story class.

---- UPDATE LATER!!!!

RESUMED 9:30PM

Sorry--went to the University Bookstore Thank You Nite. 20% savings on top of other marked off prices, yay-ness. And some free stuff, too, along with raffles. I didn't win anything, though; sadness. They gave away MacBooks (while I am a PC user, I wouldn't have minded switching for free....) and iPods and such. 'Twas nice for the winners, but I still think they should've had a rule where if someone won something in an earlier raffle they were excluded from the next raffle. Oh well.

Aaaaaaaannnyway, back to the entry. Nikki came by and SHE'S GOING TO FREAKING LONDON AND SHE'LL SEE DAVID FREAKING TENNANT IN HAMLET!!!! Such awesomeness.

There was a girl in my Korean class who collapsed and suffered from some time of seizure today. The same thing happened to her (coincidentally) in Korean class last year, at around this time even. It was pretty frightening. Hopefully she'll take care of herself.

I'm feeling better about my chances to getting into the Creative Writing major. The same lady who spoke to my Short Story class came to my Poetry class and pretty much gave the same spiel, but she seemed a bit nicer about it--maybe she's just not a morning person? But she did say that they accept about 80% of applicants, and from what she said I took it to mean the 20% who fall through do so because of sloppiness, mechanics, and because they write genre pieces for their fiction sample (lame!). Since I'm not (planning) doing any of those three things, I should be safe. Right? Right, we'll go with that outlook. Because not getting into the Creative Writing major totally screws with my class plans for the next five quarters (5 quarters until I graduate OH RASSILON...).

I'd pondered doing a double major with Korean last night, but after taking a look at it I cannot honestly do it without being a fifth year senior, and even then I'd probably have to overload on credits a lot of that time. It's just not feasible. I really hope they announce a Korean minor, although even completing that is a bit iffy, depending on what credits apply and everything. If they do come out with a Korean minor and all I'd need to take is the third year of Korean, then I'd totally do it, since it's actually feasible (I've plotted this out entirely, that's how nerdy I am.....), but if there's too many history/culture classes that I'd need to take along with the third year, then I probably won't pursue it. Dropping the hopes for a Korean minor would actually free up my senior year to take classes I want to take (which are English classes.....Why did I ever think about turning my back on the English major sophomore year....? If I hadn't then credit- and requirement-wise I wouldn't be so freaking cramped).

Washington weather is back to normal, finally. All that sunny weather was scaring me. We had more nicer days in October/November than we did June/July. But the rain is here, so it's all good. Though, I need a new coat, sadly. The one I have (from all the way back in the 5th grade....eesh) is no longer resistent to the elements. I think I'll save that for a shopping trip with Mom, though. Just so I don't have to endure her nitpicking what I chose to buy and wear.

This Osmosis water I'm drinking (and got for free, too) is really strange to drink. It's Mint Tangerine Water, and it tastes like I'm drinking toothpaste, or peppermint gum. Every time I take a sip my brain goes, "No! Don't swallow, 'tis poisonous! 'Tis POISONOUS!"

I bought Sabriel today (wanted to buy all three books, but the UBS didn't have the second book that matched the 1st and 3rd), but I don't think I'm going to actually read it until after the New Year as part of the "50 books in a Year" thing I'm planning to do. I might (re: will) buy another book at B&N this weekend, since I've got a 25% off coupon, which will also not be read til the New Year. It's kind of going against my nature, especially since I want something to read now, but I'm going to wait so I don't stress my brain out over when a full year ends like I know I will if I start on some random day like November 21st or something. Yes, I know there are logical ways to get around that, but leave my OC-nature alone!

We're beginning to peer-review in my Poetry class now, which kind of makes me want to bang my head since I don't know how to critique. At all. Heck, I don't know how to write poetry, where do I get off telling someone their imagery or language or what-have-you doesn't work? *sigh* Oh well, one person in my critique group (we're actually segregated into groups, rather than having it be a class-wide critique like in Short Story) seems like a very strong poet reader; she always contributes in class and has really good insight about poetry, so I think I'll get a lot of good stuff from her. Will you see any of that poetry posted here? Probably; it'd be a much nicer post than, say, my short story that I'm writing. 10 pages long already, and it'll probably get longer because I feel that my characters need more development, as well as the plot. I don't know how I'm going to cut that down for my C.W. major application (which accepts 5-10 page stories), but better to have lots of good material than little bits, right?

Okay. I need to go do dishes that haven't been done in more than a week (or two) and actually eat something, since I've only had a bagel, chocolate milk, and a grande cafe latte (I'm becoming more and more of a Seattleite....I do feel very sad at that realization...) all day, which was....~1:30ish. So, food? Probably a good idea.

Ickis: [refering to the blob] And when he looks at us that way, you know he's thinking... breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Krumm: I wanna be dinner. --Aaahh!!! Real Monsters. I miss that show...... Where have all the good cartoons gone????

I'm liking my Korean classmates, I really am. But sometimes......just sometimes, they're not the brightest kids in the class. Even the brightest kids in the class aren't the brightest.

Kim-선생님 (that's pronounced sun-seng-nim; I'm trying to improve my Korean-typing skills [with little luck]) was sick today, so a substitute came in (who was thankfully a native-speaker). We also had a test today (one for which I did essentially no studying for aside from printing out the vocab list and the mock test [which turned out to be the actual test *wins*]), so she reviewed with us. One of her games for helping us to remember the words was a "beat" game, where we clapped and said this weird little refrain and at the end of the refrain we're supposed to say the vocab word and what it means in English. The vocab words were even written up on the board in Korean in a nice table, and she'd point to the word the person was supposed to say. Doesn't sound that hard, right?

NO ONE understood what the hell they were supposed to do. They'd do the refrain, clapping all the while, and when they got to the part where they were supposed to say the word they'd stop, stare at the substitute, and ask, "What am I supposed to do here?"

The first person who had trouble with it, I understood. I didn't understand the concept of the game at first either (but, hey, I had less than 4 hours of sleep, I think my confusion was understandable), but I did get it before the end. But then the second person didn't get it. And the third. And the fourth. And each time someone didn't get it, the substitute explained, pointed at the word, ask them to try again, and they'd stop at the very same spot and couldn't understand what it was! The substitute tried it about 5 times before she made us split up into groups to attempt it, and unfortunately I got stuck in a group where the person next to me couldn't keep up with the rest of the group.

*headdeskheaddeskheaddeskheaddesk*

By that point I just wanted to be done with it all, because the review wasn't helping me in the slightest. I'm not an auditory learner; I have to see and write and say the word in my head for me to get it down, and all the noise of people clapping and fumbling wasn't conducive. But she finally gave us the test, I got the pronunciation and vocab stuff pretty well in the bag, the listening part I failed, and I got to get out before I did permanent damage to the desk I had (or my head).

I rolled my ankle on my way to my poetry class, and it still hurts now a bit, but I think my instant remedy of putting my Snapple Green Tea (Asian pear flavored!) to the ankle helped alleviate it some. I'm not too sure if I'm supposed to put heat on the ankle or ice, but if it doesn't get too much better by later tonight I'll probably try heat, since I did cold already.

And then, of course, to go with my rolled ankle I had the agony of running into the LaRouche people. They were campaigning against MySpace and how people don't live in reality because of it and all the 2000 friends they make that aren't really their friends and how the dollar is ruined because of something something something something blah blah blah blah....... Aside from the 'something's and the 'blah's all of those words did actually spew from the guy's mouth, and though I told him (repeatedly) that I didn't have an account on MySpace, he kept badgering me. Since all I wanted to do was get off my ankle and sit down, I think I got a bit short with him and left him hanging. Do I feel guilty? Not really.

For my poetry class we had to do this thing called "homophonic translation," which is where you take a poem in a foreign language and "translate" it using sound alone into the language of your choice. My teacher gave us this poem, at least the one in the top left box, called L'Anguilla. Mine turned out...probably as crazy as the rest of the class', but since I only have access to my own you'll just have to endure this example.

( Just keep in mind satisfaction brought the cat back....but you're also not a cat )

I'm thinking of going down to B&N over the weekend and buying one of two books, either Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov or My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult. Picoult isn't a "classic" author (at least, not that I'm aware of....) but the content of MSK seems very interesting/daring. I was pondering on buying one of them last weekend, but I didn't want to use up my money. But I got a 25% off coupon from B&N, and then on top of my 10% savings neither would be that costly. There's a whole list of books that I'm interested in buying (some of which are more my genre than the "classics"...) but I really want to get back into reading books of sustenance "substance." We'll see which one I buy, if I do.

Registering for classes went off without a hitch. I'm a little weirded out by it. My click to register actually went through quickly, taking only 5-6 seconds rather than the 20-30 that it did freshman and sophomore year. I don't know if the schedule I registered for will remain that way (aside from the Shakespeare class I registered for to "hold" a spot for a friend *waves at Nikki*); I'm teetering between a Minerals and Gems class and the Weather class. M&G is only 3 credits and Weathering is 5, and I need 10 more Natural World credits in order to graduate. I'm planning on taking an astronomy class on the planets sometime soonish, which would bring me down to needing only 5 more. So, if I took weather, I'd get it all done and over with, but my interest has been piqued by the M&G class. If I take M&G, I'd need to take another NW class, which would mostly likely be a 5 credit course, which means taking the 3 credits was useless in terms of completing the requirements. Soo....we'll see come end of winter break. Here endeth El Rant De UW-Hakseng.

**I just realized that Monday the 12th I have NO CLASS!!!! Veteran's Day! Woo! And then, the next week, Turkey Day!!!**

I might update later. I have no attention span at the moment, and I get the feeling there's more to my day than this.

"I missed life. I was working." author unknown; 'twas published in "Smith Magazine" for a "six word story" challenge.

Not only was my late-afternoon class (Poetry) cancelled for today, it was a planned cancellation, so the teacher isn't going to be completely insane with "making up for lost time." So I have more than 1-2 hours of freetime that isn't late in the evening.

On top of that, instead of going over the homework that had been assigned yesterday (which I didn't do and resulted in me saying very audibly, "Oh shit!" when I realized there had indeed been homework I'd forgotten), we spent the class time going over a handout Kim-sunsengnim passed to us. Huzzah for dodging bullets!

And it's sunny! Like, 60-70 degree weather sunny. Just like it had been Tuesday. Instead of the stormy rain we had Monday and Wednesday. Soooo....going by the pattern, tomorrow will be a downpour, but Saturday will be nice and clear ^.^ I'm a little freaked out by the weather, because the last week or so has been bug-nuts (hee, thank you Jack) bipolar, what with the winds and the rain and the sun and then the rain again. Can anyone say, 'global warming'?

The set-up for Haunted House has gone (in my opinion) very well. We brought all the stuff out Monday, started putting up the walls and tarping them Tuesday, finished screwing in the walls and were nearly done with tarping them yesterday, and so today we'll just finish up the tarping job and decorate. We'll probably get Friday off, and then meet again Saturday to get costumes and all the last-minute things done before the big show. Huzzah.

And then....Sunday will probably be devoted to deconstruction. Oh jeez. Not looking forward to that.

Also not looking forward to this cold that's struggling to set in. I woke up the last two mornings with that really irritating nasal-clogging that always comes before the sickness. The stuff at the back of your throat that has to drop before all the other symptoms start sprouting, y'know? I've been trying to keep it at bay with vitamin C and such, and even bought an Emergen-C packet and water to get that bonus of vitamin C. I don't know what's wrong with the Emergen-C stuff whenever I make it, but I absolutely hate it since it tastes chalky and almost has a flavor, but can't quite commit to the flavor. Maybe it's my tongue. All that spicy food I've been eating over the years. I mean, I can't even taste the difference between peppercinis and jalapenos.

I get the very strong feeling I'll be missing Grey's tonight, like I missed Top Model last night. Knowing my luck, it'll probably be the best one yet of the 4th season. They'll bring Burke back, he and Cristina will leave SGH to elope and have babies and start their own hospital so Cristina can have lots of blood, and Alex will prove he's so capable that he takes over the Chief's position and the hospital sees a new Golden Age, and the whole Gizzie thing will disappear because I'm not at all impressed with either George or Izzie and their handling of the issue (or the fact that they made the issue period), and Callie will get back to her bad-ass self and be the Chief Resident that Bailey would've been (oh, shit, okay, Bailey will take the Chief's position and Alex can be the star neuro-cardio thoracic-whateverMarkis-surgeon). What happened to Mere and Derek? Don't really know. They probably went to New York to learn from Ross and Rachel in the art of "We were on a break!"

Ian's is apparently going to be serving "hot food" sometime in the future, which from the picture they offered includes chicken tenders and fries. So, another burger place. Um, all for a little more variety than the grease-laden fast food joints? *raises hand*

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters."

It's an oral history. It was passed down, word-of-mouth, father to son, from Adam to Seth, from Seth to Enos, from Enos to Cainan, for 40 generations, a growing, changing, story, it was handed down, word-of-mouth, father to son. Until Moses finally gets it down on lambskin. But lambskins wear out, and need to be recopied. Copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of an oral history passed down through 40 generations.
From Hebrew it's translated into Arabic, from Arabic to Latin, from Latin to Greek, from Greek to Russian, from Russian to German, from German to an old form of English that you could not read. Through 400 years of evolution of the English language to the book we have today, which is: a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of an oral history passed down through 40 generations.

You can't put a grocery list through that many translations, copies, and re-telling, and not expect to have some big changes in the dinner menu when the kids make it back from Kroger's.

And yet people are killing each other over this written word. Here's a tip: If you're killing someone in the name of God — you're missing the message. --Nick Annis in the preface to God is Good. (No, haven't read the book, am not particularly religious, but the last sentence caught my eye on Wikiquotes).

Probably no one who reads this will remember the entry in which I mentioned a certain little thing called the AVEVenture; it was a few weeks ago, approximately the last few days of September.

Nikki and I went out and walked all up and down the Ave, and got this "passport" which was to be stamped by eight separate places so we could turn them in and get prizes in a raffle. We got the first one done (and also happened to stop by Jet City Improv's station, where we both won frisbees), submitted it, and then....didn't know what to do. Nothing on the passport said we couldn't fill them out multiple times, and since there were ~32 stations, we figured we could fill more of them out. We filled 4 of them in about 2 hours, and we got a whole bunch of free stuff. Satisfied, we went home.

The raffle had loads of prizes. And I mean loads, from all sorts of different shops. But up until today, I figured I hadn't won anything because, hello, almost 3 weeks later and they hadn't emailed me, plus nearly 7500 people were predicted to have done it, and who knows how many of them used the same strategy as Nikki and I.

But then they emailed me today. And guess what I won?

A free private coffee tasting at Trabant Coffee.

................

*bangs head on the desk multiple times*

I know many people who like love coffee. They pretty much make up the majority of this school (Seattle, coffee....kinda goes hand-in-hand, right?). And out of all the people in this 40,000+ populated school, I get chosen for the free coffee tasting????

Can I get a do-over? Or maybe trade for someone else's prize?

Well, enough of that. What's done is done. I'll just have to admit to the Trabant people that I'm not a coffee person, and maybe they'll let me pick a friend to go in my place since they probably want an honest opinion.

My mind works in mysterious ways. I'm not a poetry reader, I don't like writing poetry, and I can never understand what any poem says unless it's plain as day. But for some reason....I like going to my poetry writing class. In fact, I almost like going to it better than I do my short story writing class (the free food in short story kinda tilts the balance in its favor....). I like the teacher, she's fun and she doesn't try to make us "read the deeper meaning" in a poem while actually teaching us what the deeper meaning of the poem is. And I sort of feel more free to express myself in that class; the short story class is more about writing a literary short story than branching to other genres (like scifi and fantasy genres--no, it's not scifi/fantasy, it is scifi and fantasy, they are exclusive!). I don't do the literary fiction. I've tried, and for the most part I've failed pretty damn well.

Another, slightly random tangent that only has a connection in my mind: I miss the merry-go-rounds at playgrounds. I miss spinning them and jumping on and lying back and hanging on to the bars and then jumping back off. I miss it dearly.

There's a third year Korean class at the UW, which I was kinda aware of but not really, because it's titled, "Readings in Contemporary Korean." So...people would assume it's a class based on reading Korean works of literature and not a language class, right? At least, that's what I thought. Apparently it is the third year, but the university takes so long to change the title in the course catalogue they haven't bothered.

I don't know if I want to take a third year or not (first I have to survive second year....). I especially don't know if I'd even have room to take it. It all depends on if I get into the Creative Writing major or not. After this quarter finishes I have 30 credits I need to complete in order to graduate as a Creative Writing major, in addition to the 15 General Education Requirements needed to graduate the UW that I haven't managed to take yet. I can only apply to the CWM in spring; if I don't get accepted, then I'm pretty much screwed and have to resort to English Lit, which (aside from the 5 credits/1 class that I know will be transferrable between CW and Engl. Lit [yes, I'm already planning for winter quarter even though fall isn't even midway; I am a nerd]) I would need 25 credits by spring next year. And out of those 30/25 credits, 10 of them need to be pre-1900 coursework.

I really shouldn't be doing this to myself. I'm only going to freak out even more.

Friday I end class at 1:30, get to go take care of some financial stuff, and then.....I get to go stalk do some research for my short story class. ...Was no one else convinced? Me neither. Which is why I'm taking the paper that says "This is the assignment: go follow someone around and take notes on what they do" so that when if someone approaches me demanding why I'm sitting in the coffee house watching someone suspiciously close, I can wave it at them and say, "Call my professor! He made me do it!"

Saturday I go to Mt. Rainier. I'm predicting of bringing something with me for the bus ride, because I am a pretty quiet person when I'm around people I don't know, and I get bored of looking out a window for an hour. I should probably bring food, too; my geology professor/TA hasn't mentioned what will be provided on the trip aside from fare.

Sunday I'll probably go to Trabant and get that coffee-tasting thing settled. And then I WILL do my creative writing homework rather than waiting until Monday night to do it! I will!

For anyone who reads my lj in the hopes of seeing something pertaining to my fanfiction: I am working on it! But, you've read my lj. You know that I have 2 creative writing classes. I write fanfiction for fun; it's going to get scooted to the backburner if something important class-related comes up. For those eagerly awaiting an update to Crash Course Parenting--I know how it's going to go. I have a bit of it written already. I just need to get off lj and write it. So....I'll go and do just that.

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.... -- T.S. Eliot

So, as I've been saying and panicking about all throughout summer, I wanted to take 2nd Year Korean. But, as Sept. 26 approached, I realized that I didn't really have the funds for it. So, disappointed and a little resigned, I decided to let the dream die.

Then.....my mother and I talked. And we had words. And while those words weren't angry or demanding....well, since when did mothers ever need to resort to speaking the words of disappointment when they have the tone and the inflection perfected? So...I asked the teacher if I could possibly get in. I explained the whole tuition thing to her and she understood and so now I'm in the Korean class which was only meant for 20 students, with a room capacity of 25, and we now have ~28-29 students enrolled.

Why don't we get moved to a different classroom? I don't know. I think it's because UW wasn't expecting Korean to be so popular or something.

But, sadly enough, up until today I was feeling pretty darn good about this quarter's classes. And then I went to Korean and I felt so completely lost and the teacher was saying almost nothing in English and I was behind on work and and and and and--

My good spirit of this quarter's classes kinda up and vanished on me.

But, let's go to the other classes.

Rocks for Jocks (a.k.a. Intro to Geology) seems pretty damn interesting. The teacher is awesome, he even used the 'rocks for jocks' title in his lecture, heheh. He's really enthusiastic and he wants his students to do well. I know many professors say that, but he's really the only one I believed. For one thing, he didn't demand we buy the textbook. He said, "Now, my feelings on textbooks....is that they're expensive." So, we didn't need to buy the new edition or even the last edition or even the same-titled textbook, just any old textbook on Intro to Geology would do. I already bought mine, so I'm not going to go back and deal with the hassle of returning it, but it made me happy he wasn't so anal about it (on another note, we apparently have a lab manual we need to buy at the bookstore, which was neglected to be mentioned, so now I have to spend more $$ there instead of being just plain done with that class and the UBS. Grr)

The other reason I believe him is because he has so much extra bonus options for students to get a good grade. There are extra bonuses on his multiple choice exams, and can I say: Yay! I love m.c. exams; maybe I don't do well all the time, but when I think back on my Econ exams.....*shudder* And the funny part? He has the exact same reaction to the short-answer exams because of a last-minute change he made to his exams, but not his answer-sheets, so he had to go back and re-grade 500 exams. He said that was the last time he ever had those types of exams, heheh. But yes, bonus on the exams, and he has optional field trips that are bonuses too (though, if I do get a job as an usher which is a weekend/evening job, I might not be able to do too many of them), he asks a bonus question of one person every day in lecture which earns the entire class a bonus point if they get it right, and that's only the beginning of it all. So, yes, I do believe him when he says he wants the students to do well.

For my Intro to Short Stories (hereafter known as Engl 284) class I totally blanked and forgot to look up which classroom we were in, but it was okay because there were other students who knew where they were going. It was a kind of small classroom for almost 25 students, but when the tables were arranged in 3 rows we all fit nicely (you'll see why I bring this up later in the entry). The professor came in, and he was officially my first hot English professor (it probably helped that he wasn't old like my last male professor). He apparently had gone to India for some reason or another, and he just arrived back only the night before, so he was completely jet-lagged and apologized for it. It was a good thing he warned us, or else I would have thought he was slightly OCD or ADD. He kept doing the thing where you pick up a bundle of papers and tap them on a tabletop to straighten them. And while I do that occasionally, he was doing it every 5-10 seconds. Literally. As in he'd do it 7-10 times per sentence. And whenever he did set them down, his hands would keep twitching to them as though he wanted to do it again but was catching himself. Still, very fun professor.

He wanted all of us to be facing each other, though, which became a bit problematic. As I said, 3 rows parallel to one another worked perfectly, but then we tried to arrange them into a circle. At one point a whole entire row (with me) was blocked off from the exit, so we'd have had to go under or over 2 tables. Eventually we made it work and had class. Obviously there's quite a bit of writing involved, but I'm okay with that. I just hope I can also work on my fanfiction......*worries*

Intro to Verse (henceforth known as Engl 283) was okay. I'm not a verse-writer, I'm prose. But the teacher seemed to know her poetry stuff a hell of a lot better than my high school sophomore teacher (not that it's saying much....) so maybe I can do well. Unnervingly, though, someone expressed the concern that her poetry work might turn out crappily because she was a prose writer, not a poetry person and the teacher simply couldn't fathom how someone's poetry could be terrible. I don't know if this is because she has the belief that any person's poetry is their expression of art/etc. or because she didn't quite grasp that the content/format could be nothing but bile. Again, bit worrisome, but I'll have to do my best. Have to, since this is required for Creative Writing option. I wish I could say this would be my last poetry writing class, but...it's not. I have to take Engl 383, which is some sort of advanced verse writing, and then I have to take 10 credits of 400-level CW course. The 400-level I'm hoping will be flexible and I can just take prose-courses, but...that's not my luck.

She also has a textbook and coursepack for us, which makes me irritated because A) the coursepack is at the same shop I got my Engl 284 pack, and I could've just used 1 check to buy them both had she gotten her materials in earlier, and B) the textbook is available only at one shop, which is not the University Bookstore but some other tiny, closet-sized poetry shop across the freeway and kind of into Wallingford. Grr. At least she gave us explicit directions as to how to get there, including the bus route. Funnily enough, she also offered the Erotic Bakery as a landmark to locate the shop, and suddenly everyone (minus me, who has never been there before in her life) knew exactly where she meant. Heheh, maybe I'll meander into the bakery just for fun while I'm over there.

I had thought I could apply to the CW option in January, but I went over the English department website again and it said a person could only apply in Autumn and Spring quarter. So....come sometime Spring Quarter, we'll see if I'm just a regular, boring English Lit. major, or a Creative Writing major *hopes for the latter*

In news not related to classes, I've filled my week fairly well. Monday I went to the carnival UW hosts every year, got a henna tattoo on my hand, got some free stuff (a CD by Abra Moore, some little knickknacks, bottles of water and white tea), and that was it. Tuesday I went to the Burke Museum and got a free poster (owl eyes that stare at you no matter where you go....or maybe those are the circles on a moth/butterfly's wings....) and I went to a poster sale and got a not-so-free poster with a dragon and a fairy that are seemingly underwater. Wednesday I had only one class (I hadn't signed up for Korean and the lab I had later that day wasn't meeting since it was the first week) so I went down to Barnes and Noble. I bought the 6th volume of the Buffy comics, but since I haven't read the other 5 I'm waiting before I break that out. I also bought Mortal Kombat: The Album, to satisfy my MK-Muse. Hee.

Thursday I got 2 free posters at the Henry Art Gallery, 1 for being a student and the 2nd for signing up for a free membership at the Gallery. I also went and saw the sneak preview of the movie Outsourced (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsourced), which was awesome to the 10th power. I do agree with the girls I saw it with, though: Social Studies classes everywhere are going to be using that movie. Still, it was hilarious and the leading man was pretty damn easy on the eyes. And the end....absolutely perfect.

Grey's was also Thursday. It was pretty good, although my interest is waning. I'll still tune in every week to see what happens, but...Yeah. If I miss an episode I won't cry, unlike Eureka.

Eureka. OMG. I missed the 1st fifteen minutes because I was out at dinner with some other residents, but....OMG!!!!!! Henry! What are you doing?! And Fargo...and Jack...well, I'd say more, but I've newly converted a new