Anticipating summer

Today was just beautiful. Blue skies without a cloud to be seen and temps in the low 80s. The faint scent of flowers on the gentle breeze blowing across campus. Everyone is sitting out on the lush green grass of the quad reading or talking. On my way to class this morning I ran into the girls and we went for bubble tea (actually I was skipping out on the errands I was supposed to be running before class but whatever, I never just run into the girls on campus so it was a little treat). Then a grueling six hours of class later, I finally get outside again and it's still lovely. I love that days are so long in the summer. But the weather being so nice is going to make these last two weeks of school really hard, longing to be lazy in the sun while needing to get lots of work done. Oh how I long for summer break . . .

Hello Star Wars

So, just a random note to say that I keep seeing this kid walking around campus in full Stormtrooper get up. Actually I didn't know it was a kid necessarily except for the fact that I saw him without his head/helmet on today. The nice and yet bizarre thing about college campuses is that you can be wearing and doing just about anything and people won't give you a second glance. So, Stormtrooper around campus is seemingly totally normal. Of course, it's not really normal but that's besides the point. What I want to know is why anyone would decide to walk around in costume for no apparent reason? Especially in the weather we've been having lately, it's not very costume conducive. It was pouring rain the first couple times I saw him and today it was too warm to be comfortable in Stormtrooper gear . . . probably why he took off the helmet. I guess I should give him props for his dedication to costume wearing . . . a round of applause for the Stormtrooper?

Yes, it's only Tuesday

How is it still only Tuesday?! I feel like I'm coming off a week of Thursdays that never amount to a Friday! There is too much work and too little time . . . I'm drowning in work. Even as I type that though I am in fact procrastinating, oh pooh. I have an entire book to read before tomorrow morning and numerous other articles that need to be read but am I doing any of those things? Of course not. However in the past 5 hours since I got out of class, when I should have been reading, I got all of these things done:

1. Bought my ticket back to Michigan in June
2. Paid 2 bills
3. Made and ate dinner
4. Completed my remaining financial aid paperwork
5. Wrote 2 important e-mails to professors that I'd been putting off for the past week
6. And last but not least my Japanese homework (the most student-like activity and I almost forgot to put it on the list!)

And now it's time to go to bed.

To bed to bed said Sleepyhead,

Let's wait a while said Slow,

Put on the pan said Greedy Nan,

Let's sup before we go.

My grandmother used to say that to me at bedtime when I was a kid and so I say it to you now . . . to bed to bed . . .

Where will you be in 10 years?

Usually I'm quite unconcerned with age. I take it in stride that most people think that I'm several years (at times even a decade) younger than I actually am. Other peoples' age doesn't really seem an issue to me either as I have friends across the spectrum. But today I did a bit of wigging out over age, although I guess really it was more about the passage of time than age to be precise. It was a rather foolish and embarrassing freak out and in retrospect completely unnecessary but that's usually the point of wigging out, isn't it?

Why the wigging out? Well, next year is my 10 year high school reunion. In preparation for this reunion people have started to get in touch and such over the internet. This morning I had a particularly dense onslaught of internet contact with former classmates and it sort of pushed me over the edge. I've stayed in touch with an array of friends from that time but there are people that I haven't heard from or seen in quite a while. And the pictures that I see now of them and the things that they have to say about their current lives is both uplifting and bizarre.

I realize that I've progressed down a rather different path in life compared to many of them but I hadn't expected their current lives to be so alien from my own. Some are married, and some have kids, neither of which is surprising at our age but they've all aged. That really doesn't clarify anything does it? I guess what I mean to say is that they look grown up, in a way that I don't think I am. Plus there is a certain quality to memories from that adolescent time in life, as though they will always remain unchanged and in technicolor and therefore so will the people in those memories.

So many times I'm surprised by life and I guess this is no exception. When I was in high school I don't think I considered very seriously where I would be in 10 years and perhaps that is why it catches me so off guard to find that life has progressed. Although had I imagined it that would not have necessarily made me more prepared, would it? Food for thought . . .

It's all gone

Yes, it's all gone. I've chopped off my hair. The stylist at the chair next to mine came back half way through the cut looked at the hair on the floor, then at the hair still on my head, and said, "I missed the massacre!" I would prefer to call it a liberation but to each their own. It was 9 inches from my neck hairline (we measured to see if it was long enough to donate but I was an inch shy) and it all got cut off. My head feels light and airy, and free! I haven't had my hair this short, above my chin, in nearly two years and I must admit that I'm enjoying it (well at least the 2 hours since I've gotten it cut). It'll definitely be interesting to see the reactions I'll get tomorrow at work and on Monday at school. People had noticed the difference between me wearing my long hair up (a habit to get it out of the way) and down, and kept asking if I'd gotten it cut etc. What will they say when I actually get it cut, and significantly too . . .

In other news, guilty yarn purchases . . . Weaving Works was having their annual 4 day Mother's Day Sale. I had to stop in and look around. I ended up getting some yarn to knit Anna a birthday hat and some lovely Colinette Tagliatelli merino tape to knit myself a scarf (I knit one for a friend and it was so lovely I couldn't resist!). Only 3 skeins though, I was quite proud of myself. Tomorrow I'll be working at the Mother's Day Sale at Acorn Street. I've heard that it gets a little crazy but I'm looking forward to seeing all the pretty yarn on sale . . . must exert maximum amount of self restraint and not buy tons and tons of yarn.

Bunnies make me happy

I should be studying for an exam, therefore I am procrastinating and posting . . .
Just a little something that made me laugh. I was using a Japanese to English translation website a while back and when I entered the address for a certain website to be translated, I ended up on a screen with this image:


I burst out laughing, it was so unexpected and so silly. I tried to get back to the same page again but apparently I could only mis-type the web address once. But now that I've found it again, I'd like to share it with all of you because as we all know sharing is caring.

I'm sick therefore you failed your exam, not really though . . .

Being sick is the worst. I don't know what I had but I was not a happy camper yesterday. It started in the wee morning hours and lasted all day . . . and a little today too. Completely tense muscles, body temperature alternating between freezing and feverish, and all the while a pounding headache, it made for a very miserable ol' me. But the worst of it was that even when I was passed out from exhaustion I was sick in my dream too! In my dream I was an assassin and I was on a mission with my assassin buddies but because I was sick and couldn't keep up they kept on dragging me here and there and then sticking me in prickly bushes when I needed to be hidden. So unfortunate . . . and so painful. I don't know how we were assassins because really we didn't seem to have a target and were just running around a giant wilderness where other people seemed to be having a pleasant barbecue but that's dreaming for ya.

Now that I'm feeling better though, it's back to the daily grind. I have to catch up on all the work I missed while I slept yesterday. This entails grading papers . . . massive amounts of papers. Grading makes me feel like an over educated elitist . . . or maybe the kids in the class really are just painfully simple. If you're in the class I apologize, I'm sure if you have the sense to find this blog and realize who I am you're not in the portion of the class that did abysmally on the exam. But what can I say when about a third of the class didn't even answer the essay question that was posed and the other third couldn't support their argument with a shred of evidence from lecture . . . so sad, but perhaps my expectations are just too high. Or maybe being sick is making me crotchety and hence a crotchety grader.

Friends or Rock? Rock!

Life has been a little crazy lately . . . 3 jobs plus grad school is really a recipe for insanity. I have the best intentions of posting regularly and then . . . well various things get in the way. For example, I had a fully formed rant that I was going to post about Buddhism and how some Western practitioners of Buddhism subscribe to a religion they don't fully understand and how that cheapens not only Buddhism but religion as a whole - the practice of religion without full knowledge of its past and present context seems irresponsible to me, but then again I'm not a devout practitioner of any religion (precisely because I would want to be a responsible and engaged practitioner). Anyway, I was really quite peeved about the whole thing after a discussion in class and I got home all ready to type away and then I got sidetracked by paying bills (how mundane!) and forgot all about my post. So it goes.

At the moment I'm faced with a dilemma of an entirely different nature though. I just realized that a rock show that I've been planning on going to for months coincides with a friend's birthday barbecue party. So what do I do? Rock show or birthday BBQ? This wouldn't even be an issue but for the fact that the BBQ is for a particularly fickle friend - a fair weather friend who has failed to be a decent friend (let alone a good friend) time and time again. Usually I would say to myself, "Be the bigger person, don't let their treatment of you influence the type of friend you are to them." But you know what, I'm tired of that. I'm tired of being the bigger person. I want to go to the rock show - the rock never lets me down! Plus its not just any rock show, it's Tapes 'n Tapes. Now, lest you're thinking that I'm a terrible friend (or perhaps even a terrible person) let me clarify that if this were any other friend or any other band I would be choosing the BBQ party without even thinking twice. That's saying a lot coming from someone like myself who is completely indecisive and often has to think of things five, six, or seven times, not just twice.