I can see it in their eyes—THEY'VE ALREADY DIED INSIDE.

It's not that I don't understand calls to boycott Arizona and I'm pissed at the laws being passed here as much as pretty much anyone, but the thought of the boycotts themselves sort of leave a pit in my stomach. I mean, our economy is hella shitty, jobs are scarce and it's not hard to imagine who will be most effected if well-meaning people from other states try to damage the economic situation here even more. I admit I am also seeing this through the eyes of, "Wow, if this actually worked it could possibly fuck up my life." but really, if people want to help they should probably do something that would ... I don't know, help. But the boycotting thing seems to be a great opportunity for people to feel better about themselves while ignoring the fact that they're not only not helping but might actually be making things worse. And we did not even elect Jan Brewer, okay. Said link also has some suggestions for things that might actually help, most of which involve supporting Arizona fix it ourselves.

I've been fucking around on Tumblr a lot, recently. After finally getting the hang of it I officially declare the site neato. If you guys have Tumblrs you should totally cough 'em up.

Final grades starting to trickle in, I have so far gotten a B in Spanish composition, a B in intermediate Chinese, and an A in Phonetics. I've just barely earned all of these grades, like my actual grades were an 80, 81, and a 90.2 or something. I'll be done with everything here on Friday, and I'll be back in Flagstaff for the summer from this weekend. Hooray.

So for my Chinese linguistics class I have to give a half hour presentation. One of the first presentations of the semester, actually, I'm like fourth out of the class. The topics we've heard so far were stuff like, "How the Chinese Writing System Was Developed" and "How the Simplified Characters Were Derived." Okay, cool, that's interesting stuff. This presentation thing looks pretty easy, actually!

My assigned topic is: "Culture and the Idealized Cognitive Models of Mandarin Chinese Compounds." Come on, man.

My linguistics final went shockingly well, except due to running on literally no sleep at all I couldn't think of a proper example of a Spoonerism, and so in desperation I scrawled down "cupid stunts," which I think is a username I've seen around sf_drama. Yes. On my hardest final for my most important class, on this ridiculously serious business test, I wrote cunt down as my demonstrative example. Bonus irony points for the fact that on another section of the test I focused on social dialects and how we choose the appropriate words for particular social situations.

That was the very last question I had to answer for this class or any class at all for the entire semester—nay, school year. I'm so done.

Added some folks from the Star Trek 2009 Friending Meme. Hello!

In even less exciting news, I'm back at university to take my final two ... finals. Some of my grades are already coming back; this semester came out okay, and probably better than could've been expected, considering I spent almost the entire goddamn time with strep throat—I ended up missing like two weeks of classes, if you add up all the times I had to miss because I was too sick. College is still soul crushingly difficult for me, but I'm actually sort of confident that I can do this just three more times. That's it! Three more times.

It's like a chant. It has replaced my old motto, which was, "I'm the best, I'm good at everything, and nobody hates me."

Actually, I think I'll keep the old motto, too.


( new trek things i wanna write about at some point )

So. Dreamwidth. I like the site a lot, and I hope I can split my Internet attention even further and put my account over there to good use. immelmanturn brought up the concern that she wouldn't be able to keep up with her friends over there, and after investigating the problem, I discovered you can set up an RSS feed of your Dreamwidth like so: today_dw. LJ users can friend those. I'm really aware of the fact that "discovered" in this case means "realized something that almost the entire Internet already knows." Still! I encourage other people with DWs to do the same! If you don't plan on crossposting, anyway. I don't, because I think I'm going to try and stash all my writing stuff over there.

Also, if I don't have anyone here already added? Your usernames, cough 'em up.

School is winding down, and in my head I've already moved back to Flagstaff—I'm going home at every opportunity, and only come back down here to take exams and stuff. My family's taking over running a taekwondo studio, as some of you guys know, and with that apparently comes drama. We're talking theft, blackmail, lies, betrayal—it's like it's right out of a shounen sports manga. Serious business. It also has involved a serious amount of work, and so far most of that's been serious, disgusting cleaning. I spent yesterday working with my brother, climbing up on the roof of the offices. We had to swing from the I-beams in the roof, in order to clean up piles of filth and dirt off an indoor storage area that I'm pretty sure hasn't been cleaned or even seen in years. I'm surprised I didn't have an asthma attack right there.

I'm probably going to end up doing a lot of work there this summer. I'm wondering if I can put the volunteer hours on a resume, because I'm not going to get paid and that'd be nice. I have enough jobs for my resume, I'm pretty sure, this would be something new and interesting.

My workload in all my classes has dropped to essentially nothing, which I think means everyone is gearing up for final exams, but I don't know, this is my first semester at university. Maybe it's just a happy homework scheduling coincidence. Everything is very calm on campus. I had nothing to do yesterday so I rekeyworded all my icons, added every school I can remember attending to my profile—it's still short at least three—and walked around the perimeter of my school.

Dude, I live in a crappy place. It reminds me of lots of places in Southern California except without all the people. Los Angeles except without the beach. Sylmar. Van Nuys. Freaking Burbank—I have returned from whence I came. I picked a college town that's essentially the same as the city I was born in, and I really can't stand LA.

Meme: The rules are that for 8 days you have to post something that made you happy that day.
day02 Yesterday I played the grand piano downstairs uninterrupted for about an hour. I also found my favorite kind of milk, which should count towards this meme, because it initially made me extremely happy. I didn't know at the time that it was spoiled, and I didn't even admit that it was spoiled until I'd chocked down an entire glass of it. That's how happy I was ... initially.

I've written my third ... thing about my family in the last week, this apparently is a popular topic in language classes in the month of February.

( fda )

I'm proud of myself. I mean, it wasn't hard, that's really basic Chinese, but holy crap that looks cool. Doesn't it? Doesn't it?

Man, I wish my linguistics problem sets were taken from languages that at were at least remotely close to English. Not because it'd make it easier—though it would—but because I have to do all of them on the computer, which turns half the unusual characters into empty boxes in Microsoft Word. So instead of spending the last fifteen minutes analyzing from Apinaye (spoken by 1400 people in Brazil, I think), I've been trying to fight the formatting and make it readable.

Looks like I'm going to have to stay up late doing homework, which is great, because I've got to get up at five to make my classes tomorrow. My sleep schedule? Forever hopeless, I'm afraid.

I think Arizona's losing the Superbowl. But I really have no idea. They're all partying and cheering and booing downstairs.

My first attempts to learn to knit have been met with failure, it's depressing. I think the yarn the lady in the store showed me is too fuzzy, I can't see what the hell I'm doing it and irritates me.

The one thing I want to do this year is write more. Not just fic, but actual original stuff—I've just finally put another idea I've had for the last few weeks down on paper, and I'd like to actually, you know, work on it. The only thing that bugs me is that the heroines I write tend to lean towards being bitchy, powerful, and mentally unstable, and this girl is a regular, wimpy person with awesome motivations like a crush on a boy and wanting to be with him!

My main characters are almost always women, should I try and change that, I wonder? It's not as though the heroines are running together in my mind. Even Merik and Cassidy, the two characters who have a ton in common—they both evolved from a character I made up when I was twelve so it's like they're related—have really distinctly separate personalities, I'm pretty sure. And when it comes to the principle characters I invent, men and women are pretty equally represented.

I don't know, it's just something I've noticed about my writing, and it's a little strange when you consider the fact that when it comes to fiction I enjoy, it's generally the male characters that are my favorites. But it's probably natural, I guess, that I'd wonder what Bizarre Situation X would look like from Random Chick Z's point-of-view, since I'm a girl, after all.

Hm, worth thinking about.

Well, wasn't that exciting! In other news, I'm thinking about, uh, not getting a food plan or taking any student loan money to cover meals. This'll motivate me to get a job all the quicker, right?

Despite my complete and utter hatred of Batman Begins—which I've ranted to my friends about probably more times than they appreciate—I'm pretty excited to see the new one in, oh, three or four hours. Alas, that I have a final exam tomorrow, so Bryce and I are dragging our books along with us for the long wait in line.

This gives me about one more hour to finish writing various reports and complete various labs, and all I can think is, "Huh, I wonder what it is about my writing style that makes it unsuitable for this particular fandom? Maybe if I changed it to present tense and made the sentences shorter, with more description..."

Being unbearable geeky and pretentious is an art form I have perfected. As is avoiding my homework!

I am amazing.