shenanigan's

that is where i am not. instead i am in the library with my bluebook. yay.

the midterm today pretty much sucked, and kind of brought back some bad memories from finals time that just generally made me more anxious than i would otherwise have been. so, although i kind of wish i'd gone to party with the girls, i kind of just didn't feel like being fun. but, i'm not going to wallow, i'm just going to work. i need to go to that stupid research training thing still and i want to go to institute tomorrow, so that means i can't procrastinate LRW; and farid sent us a practice exam question to do for class tomorrow. ha! just what we need.

my back hurts. maybe i should see if i can finally get myself to the chiropractor this weekend...

the yuck of the irish

my house smells like corned beef and cabbage, and it's kind of gross. that's what we had for dinner (we = me, g'ma, and my two aunts who are staying with us right now...but one of them thinks i'm my mom, so that's funny...haha!)
apparently around st. patrick's day is the only time you can really buy it, so g'ma says she makes it once a year. that's good. i don't think i'd want it more than that. but the carrots and potatoes were good. g'ma teases me for liking vegetables more than meat. haha.
but, dang, she totally redeemed herself when she broke out the home-canned pears for dessert. so yummy. mmm...

to shiv, and other shiz

i love you. you can always be my valentine. 'member that last time we hung out at the ghetto-wood not-so-ghetto-anymore clubhouse and laid on the giant beanbags gabbing for ever so long but still not long enough? sigh...heavenly...

in other news, today was day #2 of the office marathon at the JJs, and it was great. i finished a crochet project as well. yes, i do have a lot of work at school, but i put in a lot of hours over the long weekend to get ahead and have been consistently staying at the library until at least 7 every day (even holidays, as alluded to in my last post) so i feel justified in a bit of relaxation to keep myself from having a total spaz attack...since i'm in the middle of a minor meltdown lately as it is.

and, on a better note: morning prayers. remembered today. i've traditionally been pretty good at the scriptures and evening prayers, but i'm really not a morning person. remembering where i am and what day it is can be hard, but dang it, those morning ones always escape me. but hey, maybe i'm finally starting to get to be a better person or something. probably just "something"...like, i'm having a minor meltdown and know that i need a lot of help just to get out of bed and pretend i still want to be alive. that's morbid. just pretend i stopped at the better person idea. haha.

i've been listening to a lot of classical music again lately. not sure why exactly...

not quite

for those of you who wondered if i'm the biggest loser at school, there was one other person that i saw when i left the library last night; so, close, but not quite. yeah, apparently other people have things to do on valentine's day...haha...

love bucket

some of you are familiar with this concept (which i have mentioned before).

also, some of you may know malorie, my former jamba-buddy, roommate, and all-around cool girl, who uses "lovebucket" as a common term of endearment (for completely unrelated and unknowable reasons, but worth mentioning just because i think it's funny).

often i prefer to refer to today as "singles awareness day" but i must admit that i don't really hate valentine's day, i just hate not having a valentine. i like telling people that i care about them, and i like the idea of valentine's day, and i find that no matter how many times i dump my bucket of love over someone's head only to have him run away, a bucket of love is kind of like the biblical cruse of oil...always full.

so, although i'm a little disappointed that i still haven't found anyone who wants my bucket, i'm just going to keep carrying it around, and if you ever need me to share a bit with you, just say the word, cuz there's plenty to go around! :D

girly

well, i'm obviously not a guy, but sometimes i wonder how good i am at being a girl...
like, i have girl friends that i get along with and understand, but sometimes i'm forced to realize that there's this separate girl-culture that i'm not a part of...
i know, that sounds like some serious in-group/out-group bias, which is probably not very Christlike, but really...i try to be hygenic and avoid dressing too sloppily or like a pioneer or whatever, and generally i think i have passable social skills. sometimes i talk too much or too loudly or veer into questionable topics, but i'm generally friendly and entertaining. when i was younger i was pretty dorky and shy, but i feel like i've made decent progress over the last 10 years or so and managed to pull myself into the mainstream population.
but somehow i always seem to be confronted by the fact that there is this whole other breed of females, often resented by women and idolized by men, and i'm afraid that this distinction is perhaps the cause of my life's major woes...

example 1: my empty-handedness at the end of the friday night institute activity
example 2: the obvious disparity between myself and the preferred "ex"
example 3: the confusion of the bishops of every singles ward i attend at my lack of dating history (and my inability to be satisfactory to the guys they then throw my way)
example 4: my inability to properly advise my guy-friends about girls

the fact is, there are a whole bunch of very attractive, highly-fashionable, confident women out there who just have something that i don't. moreover, my lack of having those things makes me completely unable to interact with or understand these women. furthermore, this is what most young LDS guys seem to be looking for: trophy-wives. i'd be a great wife and a great mom, but i'm not worth fighting over or showing off, and i guess that's why i've been sitting here on the shelf so long.

i dunno...i always thought it was better to be a "real" person who was too busy with meaningful life pursuits to be overly concerned with looks and fads, but i wonder if this isn't maybe just some type of rationalization... i didn't want to be a "sell-out", but maybe i should realize that what i've been labeling as silly and "shallow" is just reality and if i want to win at life then i have to play the game like everybody else...
maybe i'm not as noble as i pretend to be...i'm probably just as shallow as everyone else, but i know i can't compete so i'm "self-handicapping" by pretending that i don't want to be like those other girls when the truth is: i'd love to be beautiful and chic and treat people like crap just because i know i can get away with it; then maybe i'd be the heartbreaker instead of the heartbroken for once...haha...oh well.

ash wednesday

sometimes i forget i go to a catholic school, but it's kind of hard to miss people walking around with ashy, black crosses on their foreheads. it seems that the catholic church now recommends that you do something proactive for lent, rather than just committing yourself not to do something. i think i'm going to try it. in fact, this seems like a good time to nail down my new year's resolutions, which i often put off until my birthday. (yes, i'm so self-centered that i prefer to count years by my age rather than just the calendar...)
this may seem silly, but my proactive-lent commitment is that within the next 40 days i will go on a date with a boy...this of course will hopefully involve being asked, but if i can't manage that (which is vastly likely) then i guess i'll just have to suck it up and do it myself. this might seem like a silly thing, but with the half-hearted decisions i keep almost making in this area lately i think it is necessary. i'm not very good at burning bridges, so i think things will be better if i just start building some new ones.

day of birth

there was a note from my g-ma on the counter this morning saying she had to take a friend somewhere but would be back tomorrow night, and she was sorry she wouldn't get to see me on my birthday. but, i figured that would be okay cuz jody and i had been plotting a way for me to try and get some stuff going with this one guy and having the house to myself might work out nicely. i wore my favorite sweater, and my birthday necklace (someone got me a present!), but i didn't do my hair so i think i kind of looked ugly. oh well. i skipped my first class and went to lunch with jody, and then after school i stayed at the library for a while. i had a couple messages, one from my old roommate sam and one from my sister nicole and called them back in the car on my way to FHE. i called my parents cuz i hadn't heard from them yet and it was getting late. my dad gave me some news from my ward at home, and asked my mom if she wanted to talk, but she was tired and going to bed. yeah...my own parents forgot it was my birthday. oh well, they might remember tomorrow or something maybe. i didn't remind them, cuz it seems like a weird thing to point out to parents... went to FHE and tried to pull some tricks with that guy, but he was sweaty and went home to take a shower, but would maybe come by and hang out...i waited for a couple hours, but finally gave up. i feel kind of funny cuz i took lots of medicine for my back today but didn't eat much and it still kind of hurt anyway... but i should be getting some better painkillers tomorrow i think...
it's good that i have facebook cuz having like 30 people say happy birthday virtually almost makes up for your own parents forgetting...and i finally got a letter back from my sister in the mtc, so that was a good present. so, yeah...sigh...i'm cold...and feeling a little lonely in my empty house...

brokeback hill

went sledding yesterday, and of course i just had to be the one who got hurt. yet again it seems i have an unavoidable propensity for injury... that combination of hearing and feeling your skeletal structure shift in that kind of abrupt and painful way would be a rather singular experience, except that it's happened to me before...but then i had parents to take me to the chiropractor and health insurance, and now i don't. getting out of bed was torture, as was sitting through church, fighting the urge to crawl on the floor and lay down under the pew...i skipped out on sunday school to lay on the couch in the hallway...i was so happy to get home, heat up my rice sock (thank you kennarae!) and have been laying here for about four hours now.
i'm not looking forward to tomorrow. the chairs at school are really uncomfortable to begin with, but with my back like this i'm dreading school tomorrow. i think i might cry just thinking about it...oh wait, i already did...yay...happy birthday to me...
on a happier note, i have some good friends, and got a couple of really sweet presents. thanks guys. life's rough, so it's good to have those little things that remind you that it isn't always as bad as it seems...