(Look at this juxtaposition, oi?)

Tomorrow will be a day of no homework.  'Twill involve a physics quiz, but also much reading of novels and frying of my brain on Netflix, and getting much-needed extra sleep, and listening to my sweet new soundtracks:

I'd like to teach the world to smell like strawberries…

the one on the far left makes me think a bit of marshmallows,
which are another yummy, albeit human, invention.

According to the New Oxford American Dictionary, "strawberry" is derived (through Old English) from "straw" and "berry".  (So profound, I know.)  The problem with this is as follows:  if you look up any of the eight definitions in the same dictionary for "straw",  they all have to do with something being dry or pale or worthless.  Unless the pre-1150 A.D. Anglo-Saxons only ate underripe berries, that frankly does not describe well the amazing fantabulosity that is a strawberry.  Strawberries are bliss.  (If I were thirteen, I would write a perfectly rhyming ode to the strawberry. But I'm not, and no  longer brave enough to try.)


And—mon mot—have you sniffed one recently?  or even better, a full punnet?  I am convinced that one of God's most wonderlous gifts to humanity is the smell of ripe strawberries.  (Their genus name in Latin, on the authority of Wikipedia, is Fragraia.)  I wish I could get this into a Google picture, but I doubt it would produce quite the desired effect. And they're quite sweetly aesthetic, too.  I think I'd like to grow strawberries someday (you can grow them as potted plants, and not just beds).

Oy, I haven't had strawberries in a couple of months, and a craving is coming on right about now…

Also, this is one of the best things I have ever seen:

I overheard a girl ranting about how much the newest incarnation of Doctor Who sucks today. It made me curious to see Season 5.

(Emily—I'm five episodes into Season 3.)  

So, my day was long.  And relatively boring.  I went really early to school so I could figure out why the KVCC website wouldn't let me pay my tuition.  Due to my ride-hijacking arrangement with my mother, in order to get to school early at all, I had to go three hours early.  And then it took all of 20 seconds to get it worked out, so I could have done it in the 10 spare minutes I had before class if I'd gone at my normal time.  And I forgot to bring a snack, so I didn't eat all afternoon until about half an hour ago.  And then I sat through two hours of talking about the Romantics and the Realists and the Impressionists and the Modernists and Academic Art (basically, a LOT of 19th-century European painting).  I actually find all of it fairly interesting, but today my mind was off somewhere north of Jupiter's moons.  I hope i took enough notes to pass the exam the day after tomorrow.  Then I went to the library to meet with my group for a group project we're doing this week, and only one other guy showed up.  (We got it worked out after class, though...I'm putting together the portions of the paper everyone is writing.  The other guys are doing the PowerPoint, even though it turns out i'm the only one who's actually used PP before...but one guy was like, "You wanna be a writer?  Girl, this is RIGHT UP YO' ALLEY!")  (The group for this project [business protocol in Italy] consists of me, this middle-aged divorced smoker, and two crazy black guys.  It's interesting...) I also found out that the KVCC library is shelved according the Library of Congress system, which has been bugging me for a while.  Now I know why all the books have eight to ten-digit call numbers.  I also found out that they have a special career section, which explains the random lone bookshelf in the middle of the library thirty feet away from all the other bookshelves.  (I checked out Careers for Introverts and Other Solitary Types, and Careers for Perfectionists and Other Meticulous Types.  Wow, that combination makes me sound like such a standoffishly boring person, hahaha.)  So.  Then I caught the bus, listened to a This American Life podcast, made a cup of tea, read my friends' blog posts, and am now going to bed because I haven't gotten a decent night's sleep in several days and I'm exhausted.  Yech.
(Also, one of my fellow honors students Facebooked me to ask if I'd proofread his English essay for him.  Oo, I feel a slight shade of awesome.  But mostly just still tired.)

Staples.

Today in Modern Culture & the Arts, someone played part of a SpongeBob clip that sparked a forty-five minute discussion about swearing in front of children.  Then we talked about Caravaggio and Rembrandt and Vermeer using a documentary series written by a nun named Sister Wendy (whose gargantuan Story of Painting book I totally checked out from the library three years ago.  I felt so epic when I found out we were studying her interpretations).

Then I got on my Facebook and laughed at my sister's suggestion that I name my teapot Clive Staples.  

Then I printed lots of stuff.

Then I lent out my mini stapler to eighteen people.  (No relation to Clive Staples.)

Then I listened to a guy from the Student Success Center talk about interpreting our StrengthQuest Top 5 Strengths.  (Mine are Intellection, Input, Adaptability, Connectedness, and Empathy.  I'll probably write (a) post(s) about this later.)  Then I managed to catch the 8:45 bus and got home an hour early.  Then I decided to write a blog post by starting a lot of sentences with meaningless conjugative prepositional adverbs. 

(Not really, but it turned out like that.)

Now I am going to follow Hannah's YouTube link and watch part of A Very Potter Musical, because I am bored and feel like taking a respite from homework, since that's what I spent all my "alone time" doing for the last six days.

There is no spoon.

I don't really know what I'm doing.

For all the philosophy of the universe cannot fit into one small, female, right-sided 18-year-old brain.  After all, girls never carry a map in their heads, because they actually have something inside them (like lots of family film references).  Sometimes my mind is incapable of housing even a single golden drop of philosophy.  Thus, I sit down and want to impart some moving, deep, insightful nugget of sageness to the Internetverse, and I have nothing to say but that I have nothing to say.

This is one of those mornings where I wish I were someone else.  Must be that perfectionism kicking in (except that you never saw that post, because I wrote it three times and never posted it.  It just wasn't right...)  Now matter how deep and creative I can get, I only have to peek around the corner to see so many people who are better at it than I, more well-rounded than I, who say everything that I wish I'd said and now cannot say, because that wouldn't be legal.  Or a very nice thing to do.

You know, I actually began this blog post with the full intention of writing about a spoon; but I can't fit enough logic between my eyes to say anything profound about a spoon (though I can make movie references about it).  Did you know New Jersey has a museum for spoons?

There's a tall old lady sitting two tables down from me at this retail coffee shop who looks just like Ian McKellen, except she's female.  It's a tad bit eerie.

It has come to my attention that November is National Blog Posting Month.  Whatever.  I don't know what you'd possibly get out of me if I actually wrote a post every single day.  It might be an interesting exercise.  Technically, I wrote three blog posts yesterday; I simply didn't post them.  So maybe I'll actually accomplish this.  If I care enough to try.

Normally I love/hate winter, but I'm excited this year to show off my amazing coat (even though it's the same coat I've owned for three years).  I wish coffee shops could take Metro transit bus cards as currency.  I wish they sold white hot chocolate in the United States.  They sell it at an airport in Zambia (Africa being, of course, the most logical place to sell hot chocolate [read with sarcasm]).

In the event of an emergency, plan ahead.

Don't ask me for help.  

All I can do is stare at spoons.  And write poetry. And make wishes.  And string words together in Victorianesque sentences that show up with far more regularity in my English essays than they do in my blog posts.  Sometimes I write sentences so long even I forget what the beginning said by the time I reach the end.  Maybe this month I will blog about authors and writing styles (or in other authors' writing styles...).  A notion that has just now intrigued me...

Am I merely writing reams of nothing?  How much of what I say is worth your time, or mine? 

Have you ever wanted to throw out some British slang, but refrain, because you aren't sure if it might be something horribly vulgar? I do that a lot.

I am so ready to be done with school.  Yes, that sounds horribly demoralized, since I'm only midway through the first semester of my freshman year, but I think I have pretty much gotten over any novelty of being a college student.  I hate research projects more than ever.  I find sleep simultaneously rapturous (I think that's self-explanatory) and a dreadful nuisance (it takes up so much time!  And just pushes all my deadlines that much closer).  Can't I just sit here and research Byzantine history on my own?  I love Byzantine history.  I'd do it, honest.  Why do I have to spend so much money to listen to somebody else who's already done the research?

Sometimes I wonder what I have to offer in words.  All my days pretty much sounds the same to me.  School, procrastination, meltdown, bus rides, getting lost.  I'm so moody I don't even have good and bad days; I have good and bad periods which consist of three or four hours.  Or minutes.  In the metaphorical version of my Magic Mary Poppins Bag of Everything, I have a few dozen anecdotes of encounters with crazy people, funny people, nice people, "interesting" people, and flat-out "what-the-heck-are-you-DOING-on-the-same-planet-as-me?" people.  But how interesting would those little vignettes be if you weren't there (or if I'm not there is person to reenact it for you?  That's half the fun).  I think I'll be a mime for Halloween.

Whoever decided not to put a jump button into the player controls for Legend of Zelda games needs to have their brains rearranged.  Or at least the glitches in their games.  Kudos to my little brothers for putting up with my hollering fits at the television because my shapeshifted character can't climb up onto a single crate to cross the dragon/bird/thing infested bridge.  Or because I accidentally fell off a rooftop and died.  Sixteen times in a row.  it really might be a fun game, if it were a little more versatile in the roleplaying aspect.  (And if my game weren't the one with all the mysterious non-canon twists.  Haha.)

I miss my friends.  Some of them have changed into different people (or weren't who i thought they were to begin with), some have moved far away, one is off at college, and some I just don't see at the times when I would really like to talk to them.  I need could consider getting a Skype.  I need to My life would be easier if I would get over my fear of talking on the phone.  I need think I need to stop thinking so much.

I was an hour late to school yesterday because of a tornado warning.  I was on the bus for two hours instead of fifty minutes.  It really wasn't as exciting as everyone made it sound, though.  I just got rained on.  And had to chase after my fedora (which thankfully blew into an empty parking lot and not the traffic-infested street).  it is über windy tonight, though, which is a bit poetically adventurous — very Emily Brontë. 

(Did you see that?  I worked the trema diacritic twice into one sentence without throwing in any Elvish.)

(Did you see that?  I managed to geek out about my geekiness while simultaneously referencing another geeky fact about myself.)

“We all experience many freakish and unexpected events - you have to be open to suffering a little. The philosopher Schopenhauer talked about how out of the randomness, there is an apparent intention in the fate of an individual that can be glimpsed later on. When you are an old guy, you can look back, and maybe this rambling life has some through-line. Others can see it better sometimes. But when you glimpse it yourself, you see it more clearly than anyone.” 

         — Viggo Mortensen

Yarr, 'tis the weekend.

Our air conditioning's broken and it's 87.2 degrees in here.  Yuck.  I went to Goodwill's 50%-off sale yesterday and get four denim jackets, about which I am quite excited.  i've wanted one of those for fourteen years and never owned one.
Beginning a week from Tuesday, i get to start spending 12 hours a week in school and at least 35 hours doing homework.  Oy.
Everything happens on Tuesday nights, and the one thing I'd kind of rather not be doing—MATH 114—is the one I am stuck in.
I'll be taking the bus to school for the first couple of weeks, because I can't take the test in the next eight days.  This is exciting and slightly less daunting than driving myself.  Adventure!  I've been on a train, I've been on a plane, I've been on a number of different horses, and now I'll get to ride a real bus.  (And not sleep through the entire experience, which is what I did the one other time I rode the bus.)
I seriously like this audiobook idea people have been suggesting.  You can multitask with an audiobook (well, i can multitask with a paper-and-ink book, too, but according to some people, piano lessons and leisure reading aren't meant to go together).  I should visit the Kalamazoo library.
We found our long-lost Anberlin CD today!  Blueprints for the Black Market.  It's been missing for six years, but nobody cared much because I'm the only who likes Anberlin, as of last year.  I looked up their Wikipedia article, and apparently they're originally from Kalamazoo.  Who knew?  (Rhyme.  Sorry.)
I am a hobbit.  Without the hairy feet and with a much slower metabolism.
Do lots of people get married every year?  Or is it just that an unusual amount of "I-Do"-ers seem to be concentrated around my social circles (and those are pretty small circles) this summer?  Four people in my church have gotten married in the last two months, and my cousin's engaged (which is slightly creepy, since my life experience with him has been limited mostly to a llama-y poem about how my eyes resemble frying pans and how i have a quick temper).  
One would think that if I can effortlessly recall my 14-digit library card number, I would be able to remember the seven digits of my cell phone number.  But alas, even after six weeks of owning a phone, I don't.
I get to do lots of cleaning this week.  The whole house + my room.  Pfft.
I practiced all week and have come to the conclusion that parallel parking is actually easier than angle parking or reverse straight parking.  Three years and six weeks of stress, wasted.  Ah.  At least I won't have it to squander on school, because my stress is already creeping its prickly fingers out the top of my stress-o-meter there; I don't mind not having any stress to spare.  But— "...[The Lord] said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you; my power is made perfect in your weaknesses.'" (2 Corinthians 12;9.  Yes, I did steal that from my pastor's message this morning.)  God is perfectly capable of stuffing those creepy stress fingers down where they belong, which is not in the bottom of my stomach.
Wow, this turned out a much ramblier post than I thought it would be.  Much ado about [almost] nothing.


When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me."  ~Erma Bombeck

I went to the library yesterday and checked out twenty-one books.  I now have to read all twenty-one of those books in twenty-seven days.  I have been mulling over the fact that, a year and a half ago, I would have had no difficulty whatsoever in accomplishing that feat, but since the onset of non-homeschool (and my MacBook!), I just can't do it.  I feel massively unproductive when I'm reading.  Which is fine during the actual school year, since I'm spending so much time being productive in school, but during the summer (unless I read something "classic" like Shakespeare, or something full of trivia I might actually be able to break out in conversation later along in life) it brings on quite the melancholia, and makes me feel like a rather useless human being; which sucks, because reading is one of my favorite hobbies.  (Darn escapism.)  It's rather frustrating.  And also—with the onset of college, I'm almost certain I just won't have the TIME to spend all that time reading fiction.  I wish I had a magic six hours that were only mine, so I could do whatever I wanted to or needed to and nobody could take them up.  I could be a superhero if I wanted.  Aah.  But I don't.  I'll have to tarnish the glory of my rabid nose-in-a-book reputation.  But school's worth it, right...?  Maybe I'll become a genius and develop a multitasking brain that can do mundane escapist things and important life-improving things both at once.  
*dramatic eyebrow*