The whole getting-back-into-your-room system is stupid, really. The East Community Center, the place that issues temporary keys to people like me, is open 9am to midnight. If it’s “after midnight” and the Community Center is closed, you’re supposed to call the Residential Advisor on duty and have them let you into your room. If they don’t answer their phone, you knock on their door. I don’t know if a lot of people tend to get locked out with phone in hand, but I don’t.

Sounds great, cool, whatever. The problem–the RA’s on-duty hours are midnight to 7am, leaving a two-hour gap where you can’t get let back into your room. Two hours!!

Last year, I got locked out at 8am one morning, so I found the on-duty RA (didn’t know about the 7am thing), knocked on his door, and luckily he was kind enough to let me into my room, even though he had just gotten out of the shower and was totally wrapped in a towel when he answered his door. I decided to stretch the rules again today, but when I knocked on the door of last night’s on-duty RA, there was no answer. I’m so grateful I at least took my student ID, because that meant I was able to go have a bowl of cereal in the dining hall and then let myself into this computer place.

I don’t have class until ten this morning, but I had been intending to go to the gym before class. That’s not happening now because I would have had to get into the shower at the gym by 9:30, and now I won’t even GET to the gym before then. I’m tired, though, and this has been a lousy morning, so I might just skip my first class and go to the gym anyway. It’s not like I was going to pay attention today–Jan and I were planning to get some homework done in today’s lecture. I’ll just have to leave him hanging. I’ll send him a text message about it, of course.

When I woke up, I was tired and I thought “maybe I’ll take a rest day today”. Well, perhaps I should have, because it would have meant sleeping another hour and probably NOT getting locked out of my room. Now, not only am I tired and could have used some extra sleep, but I’m awake doing fucking nothing because I’m not even at the gym. I am definitely going as soon as I get back in my room, man. I will not allow this to ruin my whole day. At least I got a blog post out of it?

Twenty more minutes, foo’.

Edit: I got back in my room, laid down on my bed, and fell right to sleep. I guess my body needed a rest!

I’m drinking this ridiculous size of coffee right now. Last week, I went to Starbucks because I had a gift card, where I ordered a decaf coffee. They didn’t have any brewed, unsurprisingly, so they had to do this “pour-over” thing, and I ended up waiting about ten minutes for my cup. Because I had to wait so long, the barista gave me a coupon for a free drink on my next visit.

After class today, I decided to head across the street and use the coupon before going to work. I wasn’t especially tired or anything, but I decided I wanted some caffeinated coffee this time. I thought it might help my headache and stuff. I ordered a grande brewed coffee (that’s a medium coffee, for all you folks like me who don’t often frequent such high-class coffee establishments), and the barista was like, “Are you sure you don’t want a venti? It’s free!”

I thought about it for a minute… I SO don’t need that much coffee… “Alright, sure.” When I think about it now, it’s really not that much more coffee than a grande, and the cup is about the size of a regular old travel mug, but walking down the street with it, I felt absolutely ridiculous. I kept imagining what others might be thinking of me. “She must be really tired.” “What a loser.” “Bet she paid a fortune for that!”

I think it’s pretty interesting how the workers at all coffee shops are called baristas, not just at Starbucks, yet Starbucks is the only shop I know of that uses Italian words for their coffee sizes. (Besides “tall”, what is that? ) My mom works at Caribou Coffee, and she is a barista. When she worked at Biggby Coffee, she was also a barista. They’ve got small, medium, and large drinks, though! I guess “barista” probably came before Starbucks’ fancy sizing terms and probably inspired them, rather than the other way around.

I turned in my first paper of the semester this morning. Well, it was my first paper if you don’t count the two fifteen-sentence compositions I have had to write for Italian, which I don’t. I don’t even count this as a paper, actually, but the professor called it “paper one”, so I guess that’s what it is. It was blissfully easy (oho? ). It didn’t require an introduction, thesis, or anything really. All I had to do was answer eleven questions about a research study, and all my responses total were not allowed to be more than three pages in length. I wrote it in maybe an hour this morning, before going for my gym run. I wish all papers could be like that! I mean, it’s not really that hard to write formal, analytical papers, but it annoys me quite a lot. When I think about how much I hate writing papers, I wonder why the hell I’m majoring in Communications. The content of the course is good, though!

Lately I’ve been feeling really… unintelligent. I do pretty well in class–not as well as in high school, but that’s to be expected, and my approximately 3.5 GPA is quite good in comparison to a lot of the students at my uni, but I still feel, for lack of a better word, stupid. I think a big part of it is my performance in Japanese. I do better than some people, but I forget vocab easily if I don’t use it often, and while I don’t have too much trouble picking up on new grammar patterns, it takes me a little while to get accustomed to them. Maybe if I can manage a 90% on my test on Friday, I will feel better about myself. My goal was a 90% on last week’s test, and while I only got an 88%, it was definitely an improvement from my 85% on the first test of the semester. I will exercise self-discipline and study a lot and in advance for this test.

For the record, the coffee did not help my headache. It’s not so bad, though.

I bought a new watch over the weekend because I wanted something low-profile that I could wear every day. For the longest time–basically my entire life–I hated wearing watches, but in the last week or two I had become really fucking sick of pulling out my phone every few minutes to check the time, especially when I was running late for class, so I decided I finally needed a new watch. I have others, but I don’t like any of them enough to wear every day, and most of them need new batteries, anyway. For a few months I have been toying with the idea of getting a small, bracelet-style gold-colored watch to wear some of the time, but since I wanted something I could wear all the time, I bought this lovely guy (or girl, considering the whole women’s watch thing):

I think it looks nicer in real life, but I don’t have my camera on me to take a picture of it right now (thanks Amazon for the picture above), and, depending on your resolution, it’s probably a bit smaller than the picture shows. It’s basically just really nice and I’m glad my grandma gave me $50 for Chanukah because otherwise I wouldn’t have had the extra money to spend right now.

I went and picked it up from the mail room yesterday as soon as was possible, and of course I opened it right away and started setting the correct time and date. My dad used to have a watch that showed the date, and you had to wind through 24 hours to get the date to change, so that’s what I thought I had to do with this watch. The date was set to the fifth when I took it out of the box, so I sat there for nearly half an hour trying to wind to the 31st. I got to the 19th before Georgina suggested that there might be a way to change the date independently of the time. Just then, I accidentally pushed the crown partway in while turning it, and when I next looked, the date had gone back to the 13th! Lo and behold, I could have taken about thirty seconds to wind the date correctly. It’s at the first now and I am very happy.

I went to bed like a half hour after putting the watch on, so I slept in it because I didn’t want to take it off. New things are for wearing immediately and for as long as possible! I wore it while running at the gym, too, which I don’t know if I will do again because the band is leather and the inside got sweaty from my wrist. I might buy a replacement battery for my old digital watch, but gosh I hate digital watches. Perhaps I’ll just stick to checking my phone while I run. It’s not like I’m running outside right now anyway, it being the winter and all. Treadmills are my friends.

Do you wear a watch? I can’t believe I used to hate them. They’re useful little buggers and I think I’m in love. I would also really like to know what you think of the running with a watch situation.

Ciao! (Did I mention I’m taking Italian now, on top of Japanese?)

I just couldn’t take that orange monstrosity anymore, alright? I was proud of it at the time, but I think I was more proud of the fact that I finally got it done after having the header image sitting around for two weeks than I was proud of how it actually looked. I became disillusioned with it rather quickly. That, about a month, was the shortest time I’ve had a layout up in a long time, actually. Probably since at least a couple years ago.

Anyway, please let me know what you think of this one. You might need to execute a hard refresh if things don’t seem to be showing up correctly for you.

I think it’s getting to the point where I should make a “past layouts” page. I’ll get on that.

On Friday night, there were some guys playing with a ball in the hall at a right-angle to mine. I was in the bathroom in that hall when suddenly I heard the deafening roar of water rushing through the pipes. The ball had hit and broken a sprinkler head, so all three of the sprinklers at the far end of the hall were spraying, putting out some imaginary fire. It was pretty intense:

The bathroom on the right is the one I had been in–look how close the water is getting! Thankfully my hallway was untouched… the people living in the flooded hallway were not allowed back in their rooms until this evening (Sunday). I doubt the people responsible will come forward, but I hope they have at least learned their lesson and won’t play ball in the hallway again. The resident advisors DID warn us that something like this could happen.

Maybe the sprinklers were putting out the fires of their egos, eh? Apparently one of the guys ran back into the hall to get his ball, but left before he could be identified. I get that he was probably scared of being caught, but it’s annoying. I feel so bad for the people who were affected.

Saturday (21 January) was my birthday, so I am now officially nineteen years old. It doesn’t feel any different, not that it would, and my brother claims I act like I’m seventeen, but so what! (Or would it be “so what?” with a question mark? )

I can now legally drink in Canada, hah. As if I would… It’s ridiculous just how much alcohol costs. Not to mention a hop across the border would take about an hour’s drive from where I live at uni. I have a friend who totally offered to go with me to Windsor, though.

I had a pretty good, very drawn-out birthday. Since my birthday was on a Saturday this year, it was more of a birthday weekend than anything. I went home to my mom’s place Saturday and Sunday, which was nice. I did not see my dad, which was also nice. I totally bitched him out over the phone, though, about his failure to pay court-ordered child support, among other things. That felt good to do and was a nice birthday gift, hah. My mom was proud of me.

On Friday night, my boyfriend Jan and I had dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings, where I tried ribs for the first time! They were quite tasty. We both ate sooo much meat. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be a vegetarian, then there are days like last Friday. Of course, we could have gone to that vegetarian restaurant down a nearby street, had I wanted to. I thought about it, actually, since it would have been a lot more healthy.

Saturday, my mom, brother, and I ate at Red Robin so my mom and I could collect our free birthday burgers (her birthday is this coming Sunday, the 29th). Then Sunday I ate at Pizza House because that was where my old temple held their free annual college dinner. I tend to eat more at restaurants than I do at home, so eating out three nights in a row totally stressed me out, but as Jan reminded me, it’s my birthday and I should live a little. I thoroughly enjoyed the dinners and even had left-over pizza for dinner last night.

Before you ask, these are the beautiful gifts that I received: a Worrible from Jan (I named it George), a couple of these guys to put on my phone (the pink cactus-suit girl near the bottom right and the milk carton third from the left in the second row down; Jan got one for himself as well, the milk carton two from the left in the second row), and this Doctor Who shirt in girly fit grey, which still hasn’t come in the mail yet.

I value this year’s birthday experiences over my gifts, but I always love gifts and you know I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t received anything.

I had a bit of an… issue when I was running today. Sometimes, when I go a while between runs, my bladder gets very… painful and unhappy and needs to be dealt with basically right away. It had only been a week since I last ran, and before last week it had been a month and a half, so I don’t really understand why THIS time it sucked but last week it was fine. Anyway, after what I don’t think was even a mile and a half, I had to try not to keel over from discomfort as I walked up the (way too many) stairs and collapsed onto a toilet in the girls locker room. After that I ran another mile and felt far better, if not a little (a lot!) out of shape from not having exercised regularly in about two months. I’m making an effort to get back into it, I swear. I start class at noon tomorrow and I will be at the gym before then.

Working out before class is great because I can just get up, eat breakfast, throw on some clothes, and head out. Then, when I come back all sweaty, I have to get in the shower anyway to get ready for class, so it’s not even a hassle. Working out after class or after work is cool because when I come home and want to wash the sweat off my face, it doesn’t matter if I’m wearing makeup and have to wash that off as well because chances are good that I won’t be going out again. Working out between classes, though…

Today was my first time working out between classes, and also my first time in a while working out in makeup. First of all, I need to get some waterproof concealer. The rest of my eye makeup stayed in place extremely well, but since the skin on my face got sweaty, my under-eye concealer did some kind of melty, streaky thing. I use mineral foundation, which is inherently waterproof, but in dabbing my face in an effort to remove some of the sweat and oil without actually washing my face (who wants to apply a whole face of makeup twice in one day??), some of that came off, as well.

I mean, not to bore you with the details of my makeup or anything, but it really sucks to work out between classes when I’m wearing makeup. Can’t wash my face, DEFINITELY can’t shower, and it’s really just very annoying. I think I’ll stick to my morning schedule, from now on. I’ll try not to let good books get in the way too much of waking up early.

At least I’m just going to a dimly-lit auditorium for class tonight where we will be hearing a guest speaker and watching a movie. Hopefully the movie will be interesting enough that I will forget all about how I want nothing more than to stay home and read.

The time actually passed really quickly because it was basically spent playing games with the people who would come up to the table. I was expecting something more like carnival games where I would simply direct the players in what to do and then monitor their game-play, but instead I got to play Japanese board and card games with them. It did start to get old after a couple hours, but at least I was occupied.

The person in charge of the games table turned out to be a Japanese teacher at the university. I believe he teaches third-year Japanese; I’m in second-year. I felt pretty embarrassed talking to him because he was speaking Japanese and I kept having to ask him to repeat himself, and then sometimes I still only understood part of what he was saying. I was probably pretty disrespectful, too (in Japanese culture it’s important to be extremely polite to your superiors), but he knew I was only a second-year student so hopefully he understood. Maybe he won’t remember me when I have him as a teacher next year… or maybe he’ll remember me and like me more because of today. He was very nice, at any rate.

And then there’s one of my Japanese teachers who I’ve had ever since I started three semesters ago. I love him to bits, but I always get so caught off guard when I run into him. I remember the first time I saw him outside of class, instead of the required bow, I WAVED. I was so, so, so ashamed. It’s easy to remember to conform to Japanese cultural standards in a Japanese setting, like class or today’s Mochitsuki, but outside of that, oh man. OH MAN.

I ran into him a couple times today since he was also working at the Mochitsuki, and he waved both times. Both times! I don’t understand things anymore. “Leggetto-san, konnichiwa!” And yet, a wave. Ah well. I’ll go nurse my smarting brain and tired stomach with some good old-fashioned video games. That, or a book. Not a Japanese book, though. I need some respite.

I had been putting it off all break, but I finally sorted out my work schedule for this semester as well. I’m cutting back my hours a bit because, while I was able to handle 15 hours a week on top of four classes last semester, it got pretty stressful at times. My mom suggested that I focus on school and just cut back on my spending, so that’s my plan. I’ll only be working three days a week, and I’ll only be losing 4-5 hours, which really isn’t bad. Now I just need to get myself to actually study and put effort into my classes during the additional downtime. I’m not usually one to use my time particularly well…

Speaking of which, I just spent the last hour and a half knitting. I’m knitting this really wide scarf/shawl/wrap thing. It’s three inches long now! After probably about three hours of work, but hey, of course it’s going to go slowly when there’s freaking 81 stitches in a row. It might be kind of nice though because knitting really relaxes me, so if the project for some reason takes all semester (betcha it actually will ), that just means I’ll have something to help me relax whenever I need it.

I’m using this gorgeous red yarn I bought last night when my mom and I went out shopping. It’s really soft and kind of chunky, and it’s more of a deep red than a bright, more “standard” red. It has these really subtle black fibers woven in and I absolutely love it. Sorry to gush about yarn, but it’s exactly how I pictured the yarn I wanted to use. I couldn’t believe they actually made it.

I’m already almost done with my book for January (I have a goal to read a book a month in 2012), and this isn’t even the book I had planned to read for this month. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is coming out on the tenth and that was going to be my January book, but nothing says I can’t read two! Anyway, I ended up reading The Hunger Games after my brother read it and loved it. My brother doesn’t read, and as he put it, “it’s the book people who don’t read actually like.” I had been dead set against reading it for ages, but when HE liked it, I decided to give it a go. He’s not wrong, it’s SO good. I haven’t read too many books in the last several years that I’ve gone through this quickly, so you KNOW it’s good.

Speaking of goals, I actually put together a bit of a mini-site the other day to help me keep track of how I’m doing. It’s at Twelve if you’re curious, which you totally should be.

Best of luck to everyone starting a new semester at school or those like my brother who have finals coming up.

I finally finished Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica, a book I had started in July and never got around to picking up again in earnest until this week. Determined to finish it before the end of the year, I read essentially from the time I woke up at noon to 9pm, breaking for meals, of course. It was quite a good book! I learned a lot and gained a lot of insights about not only Metallica but the music industry as a whole. Secretly, that’s why I read musicians’ memoirs and biographies: to learn what they did, what mistakes they made along the way, to gain inspiration, and to apply it all to my future career. It’s like the book’s author Mick Wall said about Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich: “He also had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the history of rock, what went wrong with groups and what went right with them” (pg. 442). That’s the kind of understanding I’d like to develop.

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but I’m always one for realistic, measurable goals, and this year I’m in a place where I would like to set some year-long goals to begin in 2012. As much as I am totally loving life right now, there are some aspects of my life where I’m dissatisfied. These aspects are very much controllable, and I think with the right goals and the right frame of mind, I can build better habits that will serve me well hopefully far beyond the coming year.

Read (at least) one book a month. I used to be an avid reader, but that interest petered off in high school and I haven’t really found time for it since. However, I’ve noticed a marked decrease in my spelling ability, I’ve had more difficulty with tenses in conditional sentences, and I overall just think I could really use the reading boost. One book a month seems easy enough, but seeing as I only read six books in 2011, it will definitely be a change. I already have some books queued up, which you can see on my Shelfari if you’d like.

Practice singing (with warm-ups) three times a week. This one’s pretty self-explanatory, yeah? I take voice lessons at a local music lesson place, and while my teacher hopes I will practice every day, most weeks I only practice once a week, sometimes twice. I make excuses about not having time, but the truth is I could easily find a half hour to practice most days, if not every day. This is something I need to do for myself and my future if I EVER want to see my dream fulfilled of singing in a band.

Practice guitar six days a week. I go on and on about how I want to be a singer, not a guitarist, but the truth is I’ve wanted to play guitar ever since I was seven years old. There was a period sometime in late 2010/early 2011 where I practiced every day, and although I’m still very much a beginner, my playing greatly improved during that time. I want the coming year to be a period like that. I want to learn more chords, I want to learn electric techniques… basically I just want to learn. I’ve tried the whole scale thing and it got boring after a few weeks. The way I see it, there are plenty of guitarists who were self-taught simply through learning to play others’ songs (*cough* Zacky Vengeance), and that’s even how my voice coach runs things, so why not give it a try myself?

We’ll see how I go!

I’ve been reading Enter Night: A Biography of Metallica by Mick Wall, and last night I read the chapter called “Wild Chicks, Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs”. It talked a lot about the guys in Metallica starting to live “in excess”, like “true rock stars”. It discussed how they’d go off with groupies, catch taxis for miles-long drives… the works.

It’s no secret that I want to start a band. I just want to make a living at it, but what if I became rich from it, too? Last night’s chapter got me thinking about whether I would live in excess. I pretty quickly shrugged off the idea of drugs, alcohol, and groupies galore. It seems like those things are expected of every “rock star”, but there are plenty of clean (drug-free), successful artists out there.

No, I just wonder what I would do if I were RICH. So, if I were a rock star…

1. I would buy a little house in the mountains. A few years in a row, my mom, brother, and I drove ten hours to Lake Placid, New York, a cute little touristy town in the Adirondack Mountains where the 1932 and 1980 Winter Olympics were held (“Miracle on Ice”, anyone?) and where they hold a prestigious ice dance competition in which my brother used to compete. Driving there, we always passed all these adorable houses tucked away into the mountainsides. They were literally built into the mountains (or at least that’s what my mom told me). I want one of those. In the Adirondacks if I can, please.

You know, actually, that’s all really. I would visit foreign countries quite often, of course, for as long as possible when not on tour. I might buy a lot of clothes and I would probably set up a home studio, but generally I don’t think I would spend too much. I spend a lot of what I make now, but nothing I want is extravagant, and if I suddenly came into a million dollars tomorrow, I would not know what to do with it save keep it for forthcoming everyday expenses.

I suck, really. Let’s hope I never get rich–it would be such a waste on me. Or maybe that makes me all the more deserving.