6:22 PM, A Tuesday Evening

About fourteen hours after my Monday morning yoga/pilates class, my abs suddenly began to feel sore. Really, really sore.

Now it kind of feels like the left side of my body is bruised where the rib bone sticks out.

Ouch.

My new sneakers came in the mail yesterday:


I really wanted these sneakers and were willing to spend $50ish for them at Sears when I first saw them, but they didn't have a size 8 in blue.

Since I never wear sneakers anyway and only needed a pair around because I forgot to bring mine back after winter break, the $29.99 sale sneakers from shoes.com were fine.

(They look better in real life.)

Now I don't have any more excuses to not go to the gym... except for the whole "lack of time" thing, of course.

I also need to buy more socks.

The scary green juice in the Naked refrigerator in the dining hall always kind of freaked me out, but the flavor I usually drank (the one with 2000% Vitamin C in one bottle!) was sold out, so I decided to give the green juice a try:


Surprisingly, it was delicious! Who knew a mix of spirulina, chlorella, blue green algae, spinach, and broccoli in juice could be so tasty?

I buy one every day now.

Water is usually my drink of choice, but when I realized that I was more than $200 above budget with my dining dollars after winter break, I decided to start buying the expensive super-vitamin C packed juices in hopes of getting better sooner and spending more dining dollars.

My dorm reeks of cooked ground beef and cheap cheddar cheese right now because both of my roommates are eating the nasty-looking, crumbly meat "casserole" from the dining hall for dinner.

Yuck.

I haven't used daily planners to keep track of the things I needed to do since middle school, but with all the pledge activities and all the fast deadlines for classes in the quarter system, I couldn't keep the dates straight in my head anymore and had to dig my free JMC planner out from under a pile of crap to help me keep on top of things this quarter.

Now that everything is written in the planner, staring at the packed pages makes me feel insanely overwhelmed.

Maybe I will find the time to procrastinate late next week if I pencil it in now.

Pledging Anxiety

My first GBM and pledge meeting were tonight; it was the first time our entire 82-person pledge class was put together in the same room, and just being part of such a massive mob of people was... a bit overwhelming, to say the least. I have never seen a lecture hall so packed before.

The GBM started at 6 pm and I didn't get back to my dorm until around 10:30 pm - we spent over four hours at the two meetings tonight, so when I told my roommates that I was "exhausted" when I got back to the dorm, I meant it.

Even though the GBM was pretty long (it lasted about two hours), it was also quite entertaining. Membership came up with this crazy family competition, where a three-person team representing each family raced each other to see which family could finish an entire loaf of wheat bread and a huge bottle of orange Gatorade first. For some reason, watching people gorge themselves in eating competitions is always grossly entertaining.

At the pledge meeting, we were bombarded by information about the fraternity and our PT taught us the "Toast Song." Each of us also had to go up in front of the packed lecture hall and introduce ourselves by making up a short rap:

Hi, my name is Karen.
I don't eat meat,
and I have size seven-and-a-half feet.

(Super lame, I know.)

We also got more information about our camping retreat coming up this weekend. I still need to get my hands on a sleeping bag/flashlight and prepare myself for spending three days and two nights out in an "undisclosed location" in the woods with eighty-two pledge "brothers"... WITH NO SHOWERS.

When the PT said "no showers," all the people in the front of the room burst into uncontrollable laughter because all 82 jaws dropped and 164 saucer-sized eyeballs were staring back at them.

There were some ha-ha moments and most people seemed reasonably friendly, but honestly, I have not been feeling the excitement or "love" of the fraternity yet. Every active I talked to raved about how awesome pledge retreat was for them and how they got to know their entire pledge classes over that one weekend, but I still have some doubts and reservations about what's going to change after our retreat this weekend.

Right now, I don't feel particularly connected to anybody besides the two semi-friends I kind of "know" from high school who are pledging with me; remember when I said I felt lonely in my dorm despite the constant presence of my two non-speaking roommates? Well, multiply that feeling by about forty, and you would get a pretty accurate picture of how I felt sitting with my pledge class tonight.

I admit that the loneliness was partially due to my lack of effort to strike up conversations with the people around me, but by the time the GBM was over, I felt completely drained of energy and was not in a small-talk initiating kind of mood. Stepping outside of my "comfort zone" will definitely be a challenge for me during this pledging process (especially since we will have to be interviewing seventy-ish strangers in addition to our entire pledge class).

It totally didn't help that I was feeling particularly self-conscious and a little light-headed from dehydration tonight. Note to self: bring Nalgene and LIP BALM to future meetings.

Not only is my pledge class huge, but the composition of my class also worries me a little; at installations, I noticed quite a few other people from my House who were also there to become official pledges. Since my roommate and I went around and kind of "met" most of them during the first few weeks of college and then literally disappeared from the House social scene afterwards, seeing all of these strangers-but-not-really again was awkward and will undoubtedly lead to some awkward conversations in the near future.

Interacting with one particular stranger-but-not-really I spotted there (who also spotted me) will be especially awkward and is definitely not something I am looking forward to doing. During welcome week, my roommate and I met him and his friend while we were up chatting and doing laundry for the first time on our own late one night and had a pretty good conversation with them.

A few days later, we saw him at a House meeting and found out that he had forgotten our names. We were both more than a little offended because it wasn't like we had just met in passing or something - we had spent a lot of time chatting on the couches.

After that incident, awkwardness tinged every subsequent encounter and we eventually stopped talking to each other.

I think we're working on ignoring each other now.

Having all these other House people I have weird, not-really-nonexistent relationships with in my pledge class definitely makes stepping outside of my "comfort zone" a little harder.

With all that said, I have only been a pledge for less than a week, so maybe the ambivalence and overwhelming-panicky feeling of aloneness are only natural parts of the transitional period.

I guess we'll see soon enough if I have what it takes to become a "brother*."

* Just a side note, but the fact that "brother" is the term used to described all active members of the "fraternity" (another sexist word that I have a problem with), even though about two-thirds of the members (in our chapter at least) are female, really irks the feminist in me. We need more non-sexist words in the English language!!

Hellooooo, NERD BOX!

Resolution: I am never ever letting myself get SO behind on reading for my classes again. EVER.

My environmental studies class meets three times a week, and not counting the optional, but highly "recommended" readings, there are 35-50ish pages of reading assigned for each lecture. That's about 100-150 pages of reading per week.

I stopped reading for class after the first two class sessions because I was too lazy to go on electronic reserves to print out the long articles.

And we didn't discuss the articles in class anyway.

And my printer was running out of ink.

And I forgot where I put the replacement cartridges I bought last quarter.

And "my dog ate my homework syllabus."

Excuse, excuses... but all the mental excuses in the world did not stop time from passing, and before I knew it, it was the end of Week 3, I had not done any of the readings, and the professor was rattling off a list of people, concepts, and OMG SO MANY READINGS that we needed to know for the quiz coming up in TWO DAYS.

15% of my grade... and almost two hundred pages to speed read through = NOT FUN AT ALL.

I spent Wednesday night scrambling to find my ink cartridge and staring, transfixed in horror, at the stream of seemingly never-ending pages that kept shooting out of my printer; I had more reading to do for my seminar and the first draft of my annotated bibliography to write for my writing class due on Thursday, so I essentially did not touch the environmental studies reading (aside from collating and stapling the articles together and then arranging them into a neat, but very formidable, pile on my desk) at all on Wednesday.

After classes on Thursday, I trekked out into the pouring rain to go to my first "fellowship" as a pledge down in Price Center. I ate ice cream (it was the cheap stuff that came in the plastic buckets, but there were almost one hundred mouths to feed, so I don't blame them) and "mingled" with so many people that all the names and faces became a big blur in my mind. I left early, came back to my room, grabbed my pile of articles/books and shacked up in the nerd box.

And stayed in there until 3:45 am.

I ate wasabi peas to stay awake.

(I don't even like wasabi peas; I always pick them out of the rice cracker snack mixes. I have absolutely no idea why I bought an entire bag of WASABI PEAS at Trader Joe's last week, but I paid for them so now I have to eat them.)

Of course, my mental capacity began to diminish some time soon after 1 am, so I did not retain much during the last hour and a half or so of "reading."

All I could recall as I was walking to class the next morning was constantly thinking, "REAGAN KILLED THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT AND CREATED THE MESS WE'RE IN TODAY!!" as I read the chapter on government and policy in my book the night before.

I ended up not having enough time to even skim through two or three of the articles; there was a question about one of the readings I didn't get to on the quiz, but AP Gov't knowledge saved the day. (Hopefully.)

Pledge Retreat is next weekend, and the work just won't stop piling up; the final draft of my annotated bibliography and the second draft of my paper proposal are both due in my writing class after retreat, which means I have A LOT of research to do and two more drafts to turn in during class this week. I also have two "short" essays to write for my environmental studies class, an assignment to do for my "political inquiry" class, and the first midterm for my meteorology class to take on the same post-Retreat week.

And in between all that, I'll be going out to events/meetings as a pledge.

Basically, I will be living in the nerd box for the next two weeks, if not for the entire remainder of winter quarter.

A side note:

At info night, I asked someone if pledging was time consuming.

He asked me what my major was.

I told him I was a history major.

He said, "Psh, you'll be fine. I am an EE major and I still did relatively well when I pledged last quarter - I got a 3.5."

I wanted to hit him.

Like hundreds of pages of reading per week is supposed to be... easy or something?

Because I Changed My Mind

Here are the results of a surprise phone call and a day spent shopping and eating not-as-good-as-San-Francisco sourdough pizza at a little imported slice of home due to the cancellation of my one and only Tuesday class:


I am going to have a very busy quarter.

(My nail polish is chipping... a lot!)

(And I really miss REAL San Francisco sourdough bread from Boudin.)

Off With Them Rosy Goggles

Back in high school, three day weekends were what I lived for; I would even take it upon myself to declare "three day weekends" of my own sometimes.

There were never really any particularly exciting plans for the three day weekends for me to look forward to or anticipate, but just having that extra little "break" from school was solace enough for me to risk suspicion from the school (all the badly forged "sick" notes handed over to the grouchy lady with the hot pink lipstick) and my parents (all the unevenly distributed (but quite large nonetheless) number of absences recorded on my report cards) due to all the cutting and what-not.

College, on the other hand, has been so much more "chill" that I finally felt freed from that suffocating feeling of being completely overwhelmed by nothing in particular that always resulted in the sudden urge to plop myself down on the floor and curl up into a ball to cry and cry and cry.

Fall quarter was great; for the first time in a really long time, I felt genuinely content and happy with where I was in life. I loved my classes, did amazingly well in all of them, and was enjoying all the newfound freedom that college life afforded.


I don't know what happened, but everything that I thought was so great about college was completely turned on its head when I came back for the start of Winter quarter after having a pretty awesome (despite the getting so sick near the end that I couldn't hang out with my friends at all) winter break.

I have no idea if it was me or if it was something else beyond my control, but something changed. And definitely not for the better.

When I got our of the taxi and stepped onto campus again late on Sunday night, it felt like my eyes were finally opened and I was seeing all the harsh realities of my life on campus for the first time ever.

For example, my relationship with my roommates? Sure, we hang out a lot, but upon entering my dorm room for the first time in three weeks, I suddenly realized that it wasn't because we particularly liked each other. The blaring truth was that we spent (a lot) of time together out of pure necessity because none of us have met any other new people here who have stuck around since college started.

Along with my huge luggage, I came in on that Sunday night bearing two (slightly squashed due to the plane ride) cute Daiso boxes of freshly baked cookies as a belated holiday gift for my roommates.

While they both focused their attention on me for about ten seconds to thank me for the treat, once the politeness protocols a gift recipient must adhere to were taken care of, they immediately returned to their previous, individual pursuits (the computer screen for one and the pillow for the other) as if a commercial break had just ended.

Even though that kind of "we're all sitting in the same room, but I'm just going to do my own thing at my desk and pretend that the two of you do not exist" behavior is pretty much a typical ritual for me and my roommates, I never realized how strange and awkward that kind of pseudo-relationship was before returning for the start of the new quarter.

I knew my both of my roommates loved gingerbread cookies and while I despised them (the cookies, not my roommates) with a passion and the smell of molasses made me a little nauseous, I bought all the spices (and other special ingredients in a well-received recipe I found online), whipped out my set of piping tips for the first time in about a year, and spent a few hours baking and meticulously decorating a large batch of gingerbread men for them.

If they appreciated them, I wouldn't have known. Unless of course, I did some serious extrapolation of the emotions present in ten-second cordial thanks they expressed on that night.

Ever since I became conscious of how awkward it was to be in a room with two people whom I have lived with and spent most of my free time with for three months and constantly pretending to ignore their existence, I haven't been able to shake this nagging feeling of loneliness that has clung on to me like lint on a new sticky sheet of a lint roller.

The fact that my roommates have a class together this quarter and often come back to the room chuckling about something before abruptly ending their conversation once they notice my presence is fueling this paranoid suspicion of mine that they are talking about me behind my back, which is not exactly helping the situation.

I can hear it all now:

"God, she's so damn MESSY!"

(Yes, I am the "messy" one and my third of the room looks especially bad compared to the other two sides of the room which are both governed by a strict "everything is returned to its place after use" principle. I don't mind clutter at all and clean desks actually kind of freak me out.)

"She never empties out the recycling bin!"

(Justification: there were only two bins for three people in the room when we moved in and I graciously decided to share mine with my other roommate who didn't have one when the maintenance folks never brought us a third one. I don't mind a semi-full recyling bin and would empty it eventually if it were left to my discretion. Besides, it's next to her desk, not mine.)

And so on, and so on, and so on.

Of course, I haven't actually heard these complaints coming out of my roommates' mouths, but I'm pretty sure they are thinking them.

The roommate situation is a lot more complicated (for many reasons) than I made it out to be, but I did not intend for this to be a post bitching about living situations, so I'll save it for next time.

My point was that the significance of "three day weekends" in my life has changed a lot since starting college. (And it only took 998 long-winded words to kind of make it clear.)

Both of my roommates went home this weekend, so I have had the room to myself for three nights. Aside from the one night I had alone at the end of finals week, I have never been alone in our room before. With all the tension that I have been feeling in the air since the quarter started, I can honestly say that I couldn't have been more glad to have a little space and time to recoup on my own this weekend.

Once my roommates left for the weekend, I felt a rush of uninhibited freedom reminiscent of the way a tween feels when he or she is left alone in the house alone for the first time (Tom Cruise sliding around in his underwear in Risky Business comes to mind, though I did not strip down and do a little dance in my room).

Although I did not manage to catch up on much of my work this weekend and spent a majority of my time overanalyzing a decision I had to make, nearly driving myself crazy thinking about all the "What if..."s, and not making up my mind until the very last minute, a weekend without the roommates was very welcome. I am a little sad that they will be back tomorrow and that the whole routine will start up again, beginning with the massive amounts of work that I have piled up and all the untouched textbooks crying for my attention.

Here are a few things that made me happy this weekend:


Painting my nails with the awesome Sephora "Rosy Glow" shade that I picked up at the mall on Thursday.

While my roommate was testing eyeliners and mascara on her eyes at Sephora that night, I discovered the display of nail polish and went a little crazy with the testers.

I walked out with a new "professional" emery board that kicks the 99 cent one I had out of this universe, a bottle of "Rosy Glow," and a different shade on each finger of my left hand.

A little backtracking - why was I at the mall on a Thursday night?

Well, I was considering pledging for a Greek organization on the encouragement of a friend, and "Installations," where "business casual" attire was required, were on Sunday and I had a closet full of tees, tanks, jeans, and flip flops.

I could not believe my luck at the mall that night because I found the perfect outfit, at an amazing price, at one store:



EXPRESS.

Red line items were an additional 30% off that night, so the ONE wearable sale shirt that I dug out of the bargain bin and the ONE pair of normal-looking dress pants that I found on the racks ended up costing me just a litle over $30.

That's right.

I paid $33.92 for both.

Crazy, huh?

AND the pants and the shirt matched! And fit me almost-perfectly! (The pants were a little too long for me, but it was nothing a pair of heels couldn't have fixed.)

That's what I call crazy shopping.

The next day, I decided to go to the bank to deposit a check. While the teller was doing my transaction, she told me that I was preapproved for a Bank of America rewards credit card and gave a little spiel trying to convince me to accept the offer. I wasn't really interested and was ready to decline, but then she told me the bank was offering me a $3000 credit limit.

$3000 for a girl who just turned 18 two months ago and had no credit history? Even the teller was shocked.

So I signed the little paper she gave me and my card should be on the way soon.

"Be responsible!" she advised as I walked toward the door.

I will!

After my eventful trip to the bank, I crossed the street and headed toward Marshall's in search of some cheap socks because I didn't bring any with me down to San Diego. While I was there, I checked out their huge shoe selection and fell in love with a pair of $25 heels that I wore around the store for about forty-five minutes while looking at socks:


I had bought a pair of heels at the mall the night before, but the moment I saw these shoes, I knew I wanted them a lot more. I walked around the store in the heels over and over again carrying the shoe box with my flip flops inside, trying to decide if I should get them or not.

I stupidly decided not to buy them.

I should have followed my heart. It would have saved me a lot of grief. (Same lesson applies to the bigger decision of whether to rush or not that I fretted about all weekend.)

Once I got back to my room that night, I regretted the decision.

I was back bright and early the next morning to buy them. The other pair will be going back to the mall.


I missed an awesome concert on Wednesday and felt like a bitch for telling my roommate I would meet her there and then never making it (she even got me an autographed poster and an EP from the band I really wanted to see and refused to let me pay her back for it) because I was at the info night for a Greek organization that my friend wanted me to check out with her.

I had no idea that it was going to take so long, but it did and I felt absolutely horrible for bailing on her.

Since I am not gushing about becoming an official pledge and starting the journey of "Going Greek" this weekend, it's obvious that I didn't go through with it. I had a cute outfit that I was dying to have the occasion to wear all ready to go, I had met some really nice people at the info night who seemed genuinely friendly and awesome, but I decided last minute not to rush this quarter.

I think I made the right decision, but I can't help but feel a little guilty for not rushing with my friend, who also did not rush because I decided I wanted to wait to do it.

Honestly, I never imagined myself being a part of anything Greek-related in college, so a lot of my inhibitions and opinions about "Greek life" fed into my hesitations about rushing, even for a not-really-part-of-the-whole-typical-Greek-scene organization. The mental pros/cons list that kept running through my mind since info night was driving me absolutely crazy; I kept staring at my outfit, walking around the room in my awesome shoes, and changing my mind every few minutes about whether I wanted to do it or not.

My conclusion (made about an hour before the Installation ceremony would have taken place) was that I was not ready to make such a big commitment to the organization and that I would reconsider it next Fall.

Or at least that was what I told my very disappointed-sounding friend on the phone after keeping her hanging and subject to my constant mind-changes for the past few days.

Even though I haven't gotten much sleep lately, I don't feel sleepy at all yet and it is past four in the morning. I think these may have had something to do with it:


I could probably live on these awesome Trader Joe's Espresso Chocolates (that I just discovered last week) and a bag of peanut butter filled pretzels. Throw in a handful of Gummy Vitamins and I am set.

I think I definitely want a single next year. But can I afford the $1000ish premium put on personal space?

Wonderful World

While passing a gardener mowing a lawn on my way to class early one morning, I breathed in deeply, anticipating the sweet, earthly scent of freshly mowed grass to fill and calm my body.

Instead, I got a strong whiff of suffocating gasoline.

I've been down so low
People look at me and they know
They can tell something is wrong
Like I don't belong

As I walked through the eucalyptus forest toward my dorm to pick up notebooks and grab a snack in between classes this morning, the nagging feeling that my shoes had come untied suddenly began bothering me.

I looked down and remembered that I was wearing flats.

And that I haven't worn shoes with laces in over a year.

Staring through a window
Standing outside, they're just too happy to care tonight
I want to be like them
But I'll mess it up again

My 8 am Yoga/Pilates class started this week. Aside from the short-lived high and sense of overall balance that follows me out of the small, mirror-less studio at 9 am, I have actually started to feel worse about my body since classes began.

God, my arms are awkward.

It kills me that I can't sit up straight with my legs crossed for even thirty seconds without excruciating pain in my back.

And I know that it's a wonderful world
But I can't feel it right now

Did I mention how I can't wait for this quarter to end so I can finally go home?

On the other hand, I am absolutely terrified of the appointment with my orthopedic surgeon that awaits me.

I am so sick of thinking about and answering questions from people about my back and the surgery when it is as clear as day that they do not even begin to understand how hard the topic is for me to discuss.

They can take their fucking insincere sympathy "Oh"s and shove it.

Well I thought that I was doing well
But I just wanna cry now

I hate how I have been forced to find a way to explain my situation to those kind of people so often that I have begun to talk about the prospects of surgery in a very matter-of-fact tone, as if it were "nothing."

Well I thought that I was doing well
But I just wanna cry now

It's not "nothing," but how am I supposed to condense all of the fears and tears into a short sound bite intended for people who don't really give a damn without scripting some kind of dramatic monologue that includes a timely and extremely emotional breakdown into shaking sobs at the end?



James Morrison is amazing. He has been on repeat on my iPod on and off for the past year, but has beat out all other albums for the past few months.

All of the songs off of his album are great, but if I had to choose one song, I would probably pick "Wonderful World" as my favorite.

I can feel my heart break a little every time I hear his voice crack a little on "cry" when he sings the lyric, I thought I was doing well, but I just want to cry now.

(Thank you so much for introducing me to this awesome album way back then, Anna.)

A Deceptive Seventy-Degree Sunday

It is the middle of January, and I went to lounge at the beach today.

Only in San Diego!

Maybe it's because I did not get a chance to hang out with my friends at all over winter break or because I did not really spend much time at "home" in San Francisco, but I feel kind of like I lack closure; I don't feel ready to be back in my dorm room here in sunny southern California.

Dare I say that I actually feel a little... homesick?

Other than feeling slightly depressed and lonely after my parents left on the night I moved in at the end of September, I have not once missed home since college started; there was always way too much going on and I just didn't have time to miss home.

Now time seems to have stood still and all I can think about is going home and hiding in my room.

I have never been the type to get homesick, so this is a completely new experience for me.

Let's rewind a bit; sunlight was beating through the blinds covering the window and completely filling my dorm room when I woke up this morning, so I checked the weather immediately after getting out of bed.

Super sunny seventy degrees in the middle of January? Seriously?

The first thought that crossed my mind was "PERFECT BEACH WEATHER!!"

After a bit of mind-numbing, rip-my-fucking-hair-out-of-my-scalp coercing (seriously, should it have been THIS difficult to convince people to go to the beach with you on a sunny day?), I headed down to Black's Beach with a towel, an article on "social constructionist perspective," a green highlighter, and my cell phone in a tote bag with my roommates.

Instead of the relaxing, warm-sand-between-my-toes, nap-on-the-beach-with-waves-crashing-softly-in-the-background afternoon that I had envisioned when I so enthusiastically suggested heading down to the beach earlier this morning, I spent an hour and a half sitting on damp sand, surrounded by heaps of smelly seaweed infested with little insects that loved to crawl all over my extremities, on my one bath towel shared with two disgruntled roommates, battling the strong sea breeze that seemed to have suddenly appeared along the shores the moment we sat down in the sand to taunt and torture us.

I still thought the bright blue water and the crashing waves were beautiful and I didn't mind the damp sand because it made building little sand bumps with my hands all that much easier, but I was annoyed by my obviously-not-happy-to-be-on-the-beach company who made snide remarks about how "noisy" the waves were and how "smelly" and "gross" the seaweed and damp sand were.

I didn't even mind the bugs (and I am scared shitless of bugs and have nightmares about bugs crawling on my skin/into my ears sometimes) crawling on me as I much as I did all the under-the-breath complaints and blatant passive-aggressive signals of discontent I was bombarded with as I sat on a small corner of my OWN TOWEL that I was graciously sharing with my ungrateful company this afternoon.

Did I mention that I had to share my towel?

"Complain, complain, complain, bitch, bitch, bitch, BLOW MY FUCKING BRANS OUT" sums up my afternoon on the beach pretty accurately and succinctly.

As we walked along the beach on our way back up the hill toward campus, I noticed several groups of girls lying on their backs in the sand, sunbathing in bikinis. Even though it was a sunny day and sunbathers on a beach in southern California is a typical, iconic image, something felt inherently wrong with the picture.

Just as the sun was shining so unexpectedly brightly and bringing a much needed burst of warmth to what seems to be a guaranteed dark and gloomy winter (if not meteorologically, then emotionally), something just did not feel right about the present situation.

The last pair of sunbathers we passed were lying near the rocks that lined the sandy path leading out of the beach, and as we turned and stepped onto the path, I saw something that sent a shiver down my spine.

There were bugs crawling ALL OVER the sunbathing girls' unsuspecting, bare backs!

They were lying in an area with especially damp and gray sand, so their surroundings juxtaposed with the goosebumps-worthy image of dozens and dozens of small insects partying on their bare backs created a fearful situation that I would not soon forget.

While I huffed and puffed up the steep hill toward campus (boy, am I out of shape!), trying to get that horror movie-esque image of the mini invasion of the girls' backs by the combat squad of small insects that I had just witnessed out of my mind, I managed to pinpoint what felt so wrong about the sunbathers on the beach that had been bothering me.

Even though the sun was shining brightly, the beach was full of people peacefully lounging around in the sand, and the waves were crashing ferociously in the background, something about the scene along the beach felt dead.

I was surrounded by people (two of whom were sitting a little too close to me for my liking) on the beach, but I still felt completely alone - not in a peaceful solitude way, but in a "HOLY SHIT, I am alone in a haunted graveyard on Halloween at midnight" kind of way.

I felt like I was in a graveyard full of rotting things and rotting bodies, and seeing all those bugs crawl around on the seemingly "lifeless" bodies lying on the damp, gray sand all along the beach really kind of freaked me out a little.

On the surface, people were just hanging out on the beach on a rare, sunny-enough-for-the-beach winter day, but just a few inches below the cheery exterior lay imagery freaky enough for a cheap horror movie.

Again, on the surface, the sun was shining and solar-powered Californians were especially happy about having an unexpected opportunity to recharge their batteries before going at it for the long haul, but with a little digging behind the misleading facade, you would have found a very frustrated and slightly depressed Californian native who would have given anything to sleep in her own bed and curl up on the floor of her freezing, San Francisco bedroom again.

It's crazy what a random call from your mom informing you that she had just bought a new, super high-tech toaster oven and laughing at you for intentionally "forgetting" to pack those nasty Omega-3 vitamins can do to you.

One Down, Nine to Go

It has only been one week, but I can already tell that winter quarter is going to suck. Unlike my awesome fall quarter classes, my winter classes are pretty uninspiring in comparison and dragging myself to class is already starting to become a pain.

Starting the quarter off sick and completely sapped of energy didn't exactly help either.

The most interesting class of the quarter is probably going to be my environmental studies class, which also happened to be the first class I attended at the start of the quarter. While I was overdosing on Ricola cough drops on the first day of class in an attempt to stop distracting all the people around me with my violent, hacking cough, my mind wandered from the amusing factorid that like my Ricola drops, the professor was from Switzerland, to the sudden, fearful realization that there were NO WINDOWS in the lecture hall!

Being in the windowless room immediately made me feel slightly claustrophobic; I began to pay attention to every other lecture hall I walked into afterwards and noticed that there were no windows in any of them either. Now that the box-like lecture halls have moved over to the conscious side of my mind, I can't shake the trapped feeling that threatens to overwhelm me whenever I walk into one of the rooms and the door closes behind me.

Even though environmental studies is an interesting subject, my professor brings a lot of real-life experience with environmental policy-making to the class, and the assigned readings have been pretty interesting so far, the class itself is pretty intimidating. It is an upper-division class and all the other people in the class look and act like real "adults," so I feel a little out of place. The class is also VERY reading intensive, so I hope I can keep up as the quarter progresses.

My "Political Inquiry" (also known as STATISTICS and RESEARCH METHODOLOGY) class meets in the same lecture hall that my history lecture met in last quarter, and I was completely shocked to see the room so filled to the brim with students that late-comers had to resort to sitting on the floor on the first day of class. Nobody ever came to history lecture last quarter, so the room was rarely ever more than half-filled (aside from the two days when the midterm and final were administered). The professor is very energetic and his slight New York (it sounds Brooklyn) accent reminds me of my AP Gov't teacher from high school. Even though I like the professor, the class itself sucks because the subject is pretty lame.

My TA for the class used to be a math major as an undergraduate and spent a majority of the first section using the example of corn growing to talk about functions and writing weird math symbols on the board that kind of freaked me out.

Even though my earth science book on "The Atmosphere" was ridiculously expensive (and I have yet to open it and read a single page), the class itself seems very straight forward and I am glad it does not have discussion sections. Meteorology is not a subject I am particularly interested in learning about in great detail though, so my mind tends to wander during lecture.

My Muir 50 class on "The Graphic Novel" couldn't be more different than Muir 40 from last quarter; instead of the room with the oval conference table and the cool swivel-y chairs, we're in a cramped room with individual plastic chairs and too-small desks and a chalkboard that does not work. I really liked my Muir 40 instructor, but I am feeling indifferent at best about my Muir 50 instructor.

She was my roommate's instructor last quarter and I feel a little cheated because my roommate either did not warn me about her when I was picking classes because she was jealous of my priority enrollment and awesome Muir 40 TA and wanted to watch me suffer this quarter and laugh at me behind my back or she simply had lower standards than I did. I like to think that it is the former.

I have no idea why this thought never occurred to me when I signed up for the class, but I was completely shocked when I realized, on the second day of class, that a majority of my classmates were the anime and manga-loving Japanophile-type.

When we did "cheesy self-introductions" on the second day of class, we had to include our favorite character from a graphic novel, and I sat in my seat, transfixed in a kind of silent horror as classmate after classmate rattled off names of characters I have never heard of from graphic novel/anime/manga series I have never heard of as a majority of the class chuckled or nodded in apparent agreement at their "awesome taste" in graphic novels/anime/manga series.

As I turned around to face the class to introduce myself, I noticed that a girl sitting in the row behind me was even wearing a t-shirt that announced to the world that she was an "anime freak."

Oh boy.

My favorite character?

I didn't know any, so I picked Snoopy.

When I told my roommates in passing about what happened during my first two days of Muir 50, the one who was a former student of my current TA laughed (in a "I am laughing AT you, not WITH you" way) and muttered something about being glad that she did not choose to take the class on "The Graphic Novel" in a tone that indicated she knew this was going to happen and sought to avoid it by avoiding the class - another reason why I thought the former was more likely than the latter in her TA recommendation. (Bitch!)

It's going to be a long quarter.

Hacking Up a Lung

I only have one complaint about my winter break trip to the east coast - there wasn't enough time to do everything I wanted to do in the city! There is never enough time (or money!) to do everything I want to do in NYC though, so that just means I have to visit again very soon. I ended up only spending about a week in New York proper, but I am pretty satisfied with all the things I managed to do and see with the resources at hand.

Spending an incredible day at The Met (leaving only when my mom reminded me several times, while dragging me out of the museum, that the loudspeakers announced that it was closing in less than fifteen minutes), watching my first Broadway musical sitting in FRONT ROW of the orchestra, finding the ducks that Holden spent so much time wondering and worrying about, witnessing (and shamelessly participating in) sheer Brooklyn madness at a local mall during a huge sale, and laughing my ass off when a group of street performers on Fifth Avenue (the "afro-bats," they dubbed themselves) dragged my uncle into their circle to take part in an act of their performance where they "risk their lives for your sick amusement," are just a few memorable highlights from my trip.

With so many exciting things happening before and after my Christmas in suburban New Jersey (my last post)... why has there been such a serious lack in postings lately, you wonder?

Well, I got sick. Really, really sick.

And it sucks.

Plans to head down to Times Square for New Year's Eve were thwarted by whatever crazy illness I came down with on the 30th that started with the worse migraine ever (that was not helped by the fact that there were about twenty people in my aunt's house in Brooklyn, the TV in the living room was blaring all night, the smoke detector in the kitchen kept going off every ten minutes due to the marathon cooking going on in the small, not-so-well ventilated area for the party of twenty, and people (the little kids in particular) just WOULD NOT leave me alone!), progressed into the worse sore throat ever, followed by the complete loss of my voice, and ultimately developed into a hacking cough that seems to sound scarier (and more violent) by the hour.

I have my voice back (kind of), but I have been coughing so much in the last two days that my head hurts from the pressure of the coughs.

Winter classes started today and I can't believe how drained of energy I am from just sitting and listening to professors discuss their syllabi in lecture. The quarter system flies by too quickly to waste time being sick!

I really miss my bed at home and the ANTM marathon on VH1 that kept me company during my stuck-in-bed-because-I-am-so-sick four days back in San Francisco before flying down to San Diego.

There is so much to write about, but I don't have the energy or mental capacity to deal with anything when I am sick; all my posts would be made up of paragraph-long run-on sentences that I would lose the train of thought of pretty easily if I made any attempts "organize" my thoughts into anything meaningful while I am in this state. Hopefully I get better before I forget everything!