MY SEMESTER IS NOW OFFICIALLY OVER

And I mean "over" in the sense that it has now come to its natural conclusion, not that something so dramatically awful has happened that there's no point in continuing with it.)

NOW I CAN HAVE MY FIRST COMPLETE SUMMER BREAK EVER.

(And work on getting a job.  And a driver's license.  And a car.  And applying for things like scholarships and other schools.  But, you know.)

I AM HAPPY.  Even the fact that I had to walk a mile in the rain doesn't matter.  I had great conversations with my professor and the wonderful coffee hut lady and some dude on the bus who's a total European history buff.

[ Also, I have a brand-new tumblr and it's a lot of fun.  

I also have fantastic books out from the library that I'm rereading (because now I have TIME and spare brainpower!) and THEY ARE SO GOOD.   (The Queen's Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner.)  Go.  Read.  (Seriously, you should read them.  They're some of my favorite books of all time.  The Thief is the first one.  Do not be put off by the slow pace at the beginning.) 

Hopefully, I didn't fail my math final.  Keeping my 4.0 GPA would be a really nice cake topper right now.  (Unfortunately, KVCC is going to make me wait THREE WEEKS before they post final grades.  Yrrrgh.)

So, over the last several days, I've gotten emails notifying me that people are replying to a comment I made on a YouTube video…last summer.  And I wondered what the story was behind that influx of replies to an old comment, so I went to the video to investigate, and it turns out…I have the top rated comment on the video (which, for context, is this).  Ahahaha, I might have geeked out a bit.

Especially since the second top-rated comment?  IS IN ELVISH.

Oh man.

I am such a nerd.

:D

Oh my gosh.  I have been thinking/writing in Sentences In Which Every ("Important") Word Begins With a Capital Letter all day (well, all day Saturday, which was 19 minutes ago).  And trying to generalize everything into a Category With a Catchy Name.  This is bad.  I've only been on it three times, but TvTropes is going to ruin my life.

Just like this guy.  And he's two-dimensional; he hasn't even got an actual brain to fry on the Internet.

Century-old postcards, and fractal doodles

Today has been lengthy and blurry because I have felt rather sleepy for the last eight or so hours.  I got coffee with Leah and Rachel D., and we hung out in a Catholic bookshop and an antique store, where I bought (or rather, Rachel purchased for me) a 100-year-old postcard addressed to somebody named Ralph from his aunt Vira, who has uber cool handwriting of which I'm jealous:

People used to write the oddest things on postcards.  We spent probably more than half an hour reading them in the antique shop, and people wrote things like  
"Aunt Julia is dead, at 4 a.m. today. They are coming to move her body this afternoon." 
"This church looks wonderfully majestic on the outside, but it's as gloomy as a dungeon on the inside."  (That was the entire content of the card.)
and  "Why haven't you written?  Are you all dead?  We're having very pleasant weather, and the wind is howling something fierce.  Went to visit Fred today.  He asked why you haven't written."  I even found an old dental reminder from the '40s that said, "It's time for your dental appointment!  You need to brush up on your smile!"  


Almost all of the ones with writing one them were at least 90 years old.  They were really funny and sometimes very sad—and bizarre, because nowadays nobody would send news of a death in the family and/or tragic illness by postcard…

With Mom on the way home, I traversed Target, where I got some balloons and a journal, and ambled through Aldi, where I got some Kleenex and chamomile tea (I heard it's supposed to help you sleep/destress) and a berry-flavored Bolthouse, because it was on sale.

Also,

Vlogbrothers + Vi Hart + me + four hours of sleep + doodle mania  = a fractal made out of a giraffe shaped like a llama.  (Of which this is a rather poor photo.)

I apologize in advance for the inarticulate tweenyness of my fangirlness in this post.

So, I just watched the most miserably, helplessly tragically sad, infuriatingly vague and mysterious Doctor Who episode ever.  I teared up and was just about crying through the whole last half.  And even though IT WAS THE ONE SINGLE EPISODE WHERE NODOBY DIED—even the imaginary people who never existed—it was definitely the saddest episode out of the forty-five or so I have seen to date.  And now I feel all wound up and pensive and am not going to bed.
I FREAKING LOVE THIS TV SHOW.

Because, today, it made me cry.  Any fictional creation that makes me cry when it's not three in the morning has done a good job.  (Geez, David Tennant almost cried; that might have almost done me in even if it hadn't been a really sad episode.)

And, I figured out something before the Doctor did.  He was trying to figure out this bit of alien logic like always, and I was like "Oh, oh, oh, it's_____!!" and then four seconds later he did that thing where his eyes get really big an he says in that quiet 'lightbulb" voice, "It's the_____..." and then freaks out.  And I was like "OHMYGOSH I WAS RIGHT I feel so TimeLordgenius right now!" (I actually said this out loud and my mother laughed at me.) That kind of totally made my entire night. 
(Well, it made it until the episode got really sad and maddeningly mysterious...but also mysterious in a potentially-conceivably-nice way.  I love having all the answers and backstories and obscure details {probably the source of my Tolkienmania}, but just this once, I know enough to let it go.  After all, I've got my own imagination, right?)

(Though, referring back to the second paragraph, the episode prior to this one involved a giant wasp who murdered people with a lead pipe.  That was decidedly lacking in awesomeness.  That was just absurd.  And really gross.  So...most of the time I love this TV show.)

The Denouement of NaBloPoMo

I can't believe it's the last day of November.  In retrospect, it's astonishing to realize I actually wrote 32 bog posts over the course of the month (plus around eight more drafts, which may or may not be posted, or posted only in bits and pieces, as some of the are insanely lengthy).  It almost made the month seem longer, but not necessarily in a bad way.

Misfortunate morning aside, my day actually went pretty well once I got to school.  I hung out with Leah, Abby, Lydia, Andrew, Chris, a girl named Lucinda (for a few minutes) and a guy known only to me as Bob, which I'm pretty sure is not his real name.  We had lots of fun, and then we went to class, where we experienced this piece of sheer awesomeness, discussed two essays called "Meatless Days" and "How I Started To Write", got our annotated bibliography drafts back (149 out of 150 points!  So exciting).  Then I had a deep and thought-provoking debate with Abby, renovated my blog, and did simple interest problems in math (which I got out of 25 minutes early, not like it really matters since I take the bus) and had a Twix bar.

Only three and a half weeks left of the semester!  Hurrah!

I plan to keep posting pretty regularly, possibly every day, in December in beyond.  I seriously can't believe that we only have 31 days left before we're into the second decade of the 2000s.  Makes me feel old (yes, I know, that's a blasphemous thing for an 18-year-old to say).  

So, goodnight, sleep tight, may all your dreams come true...  (This is a joke, fyi.  At least five of my blog readers should get it.)

Happy birthday to my uber awesome dad (I'll be a good daughter and not divulge his age ;).  Love you lots! 

(Also, in case anyone was curious, a denouement is the last half of a Greek-style tragedy, after the hero's reversal of fortune.  It can also mean the end of something in a not-as-tragic sense, which is the context in which I'm using it here.  Sorry.  I'm rambling on in my geekiness.)

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