It seems like I only ever blog at work anymore. I did mean to type up a post yesterday evening at home, but then I got caught up playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. I beat the game (finally!) on Saturday, but I’m intent on finishing up a few other sets of side quests before I go ahead and buy Revelations.

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.