fishpatrol

1. I had my stats midterm this morning. It wasn't as horrible as I'd anticipated, but then again, L and I did spend the past couple of evenings gorging on sour gummies I keep in my office (they don't taste that great, but hey, sugar is sugar) and going through all of the past tests. Even though I spent more time staring blankly at the questions and whining, something must've made it into my head. ;;; The past few days was very similar to the days preceding the computer programming exam last year, where L and I flailed and were all "Of course I'm right WHY DO YOU NOT TRUST MY JUDGMENT" at each other.

1.5 I'm glad there aren't any midterms for my "real" grad classes, but I have a couple of research proposals coming up and my mind is drawing a big, huge BLANK.

2. Autumn is my favourite season, but man, I don't remember there being so many ladybugs around in past years. I remember liking them when I was little, but one day, a switch flipped in my brain and now I'm terrified of them. I was flailing (think windmilling arms) like a crazy person in the middle of the street, trying to avoid them. Ugh, bugphobia.

3. I find the hard drive of my Macbook to be really noisy even though I'd already had it changed once. I had a bit of spare time today before I had to catch my train, so I walked all the way to the Apple store (half an hour), waited around even though I had an appointment (fifteen minutes), had an Apple Genius take my Mac to the back room (ten minutes), returned the Mac to me saying that he couldn't hear a thing and refused to change my hard drive, thus leaving me to drag it back to res (half an hour). On the plus side, at least I got some exercise?
I'm pretty sensitive to noise, so it could be just me -- or maybe the Apple Genius was hard of hearing. >__O Either way, the hard drive noise is irritating and ugh, idk.

4. I let my dad have first dibs on my Kindle because he drove out and picked it up for me (also, I didn't want the additional distraction before my midterm ;)). My Kindle is significantly grubbier than when I received it, two weeks ago. I should've put it in a Ziploc bag before loaning it to my dad. ;) But hurrah, a new toy to play with ♥

5. Since I'm all caught up on Leverage, Psych is on hiatus, and Supernatural is going on hiatus soon, I'm thinking of taking akeyoftime's advice and trying out Dark Angel. Can't go wrong with young!Jensen and sci-fi, yeah? I watched Young MacGuyver and hee, young!Jared is so very adorable. But back to Jensen -- I have My Bloody Valentine on my iPod and I've been slowly watching it in increments. Watching it in 3D would be neat, but I think the "Omg ugh" factor would win out the "Omg, Jensen in 3D", haha. ;;;

5.5 And now I'm going to go curl up in bed and watch yesterday's episode of Glee.

There's this fly clinging, unmoving, to the outside of the screen on my window* and there's another one buzzing around the window on the inside (which is right beside me, unfortunately). It's almost as if they are trying to reach to each other through the window, which would be all sorts of sad and schmoopiness...but I really find it kind of gross and would prefer if they would just go away. D: It's a big house! Why do the insects always congregate in my room??

*-it's snowing! and a bajillion degrees below zero! aren't they supposed to be dead? or hibernating? or whatever it is that bugs do in the winter?

Now that I'm home with a stable internet connection(alsdj♥♥), I'll be able to read my flist as usual and will attempt to comment more.

I was going to write up a more substantial entry, but I ended up spending too much time reading SGA-related posts, and I'm all good!flaily over the latest episode (I'd intended to stop spoiling myself since I haven't even finished Season 3 yet, but I was stranded in Jacksonville due to a hurricane and SGA was on and the hotel thankfully had cable...so. I had to bite my knuckles from making squeaky sounds during the entire episode because my parents were just a bed over;;;;) and bad!flaily over the cancellation (WHYWHYWHY D:), and just plain flaily over everything (there's a huge-ass centipede lurking outside in the dark hallway D:).
I'm so sleepy right now, I don't think I can manage anything overly coherent.

So, here, have some fanart instead:
( John Sheppard<3 )

I'm sure many of you are "o___o?? what is this SGA and why does this crazy girl babble on about it all the time" so I point you to this pimp post which has some brief summaries and plenty of awesome pictures to rope you into the show so that you can all flail along with me. :Db

On a completely unrelated note, I don't think I am liking Jaejoong's new hairstyle very much. D:

Beijing Welcomes You is an awfully catchy song (I guess that's the point, huh? ;)). I sent the video to my parents just for kicks and because I was curious how many artists they could recognize. I'm ashamed to admit that I only recognized two of them: Jackie Chan and Han Geng. My mom named about half of them, including Jay Chou. I have over 300MB of Jay Chou songs, but I can't recognize him by face. *epic fail* Same goes for singers like Jang Nara, Wang Lee Hom, Lin Jun Jie...I like their music, but I have no idea what they look like. ;;;

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The latest update about the Spider Issue:
My housemate is terribly good at finding spiders -- I could hear her banging on the wall with the sponge mop and occasionally shrieking. Somehow, within ten minutes of arriving at home, she located five spiders, and then I joined her in the shrieking and whacking and the "you kill it"/"no, YOU kill it!" -- we managed to kill three out of the five. 60% success rate: not bad for two bug-o-phobics, right? After I got back to my room and was comfortably seated in front of my computer, I saw a creepy crawly thing scurry across my desk. I immediately smushed it with some Kleenex and mentally congratulated myself for being brave. And then the revulsion hit and I was all, "aldjfadjOMG UGH...! *shiver shudder twitch*" Maybe I should consider exposure therapy. .__.

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I signed up for Korean lessons a few weeks ago, and now I have three weeks of Korean experience. :D [/Horio moment] And by three weeks I actually mean five hours. This is the first time in a very long while that I've wanted to learn something just for myself and not for school, CV-boosting, etc. Aside from learning the language itself, I also want to see how I learn (pick my own brain, or so to speak XD). With both English and Chinese, I'm fairly good with learning and memorizing new vocab. However, when it comes to memorizing a strung-together sentence, I falter. I'm awful with reciting poetry and I have a hard time memorizing lyrics as well as melodies. In other words, I am good at remembering (and making use of the) parts, but not the whole -- I wonder how this will effect the way I learn a foreign language.

Some of the people in the class are able to look at a Korean character and read it aloud immediately. I have to look at the character, decipher the parts, and translate it into a romanized version in my head, before I can pronounce the word/syllable. I'm probably faster at writing than I am at reading. >__O;; The thing that's slowing me down the most is the fact that I'm still thinking in romanized form, rather than instinctively recognizing the vowel or consonant (which will come with practise, I hope). When I think of Chinese words, I come up with vague images of what the character might look like -- the character might not be accurate at all, or I might be thinking of the semantic meaning of the character, but I would not be thinking of pinyin. With both Japanese and Korean, I always think in terms of romanization, which makes sense since the English alphabet is the most familiar to me, and thus my brain's default setting.

This whole "thinking in certain languages" thing has always been of interest to me. In high school, I used to go around to my bilingual friends and ask them what language their dreams were in, and then try to figure out whether their thoughts featured more of one language than the other. Upon occasion, when my thoughts wander, my brain switches between English and broken Chinese with random bits of French, Japanese, and, recently, Korean mixed in.

Speaking of French, I wonder if I will end up with better Korean than French at the end of the ten-week lessons. French was a mandatory class for six years -- I dropped it as soon as I reached grade 10. XD 20-hours versus six years...well, perhaps personal interest matters too since that does determines the amount of practise and use outside of class, so, who knows.

And speaking of Korean, the k/g sound is too subtle for me to figure out under which circumstances the consonant is pronounced "k" and when it's pronounced "g". Also, all the different writings for the "eh" and "weh" sounds drive me nuts. HOW DO YOU KNOW WHEN TO USE. D: "ch" and "j" sound the same, and I don't understand the difference between "k/g" (kee-yuhk), "k" (khey-euk), and "double k/g" (ssang kee-yuhk -- and alksdfjl; at the double letters D:). It would probably be easier if I could type out the actual characters. But I can't figure out the Korean keyboard either (I know how to turn the function on...but each key stands for something different and if you press them in the wrong combination something funny comes out D:).

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eta: I originally uploaded this for dear_whimsy, but in case some of you guys are interested, here are a bunch of songs (12, to be exact :D) by 12 Girls Band. Find out more about them at Wikipedia and sample some of their songs on Youtube. (I'm too sleepy to write anything coherent nrrrgh)

I just spent the past half hour flailing a sponge-on-a-mop-handle thingie with one of my housemates. She came knocking on my door at a while ago, asking if I was afraid of bugs. I hate creepy crawly things that have more than four legs (crustaceans aside because I can eat those -- don't tell me about stir-fried cockroaches. I don't want to hear about it. >__o). But I followed her to the bathroom anyway, to see the big millipede. Akdlafsdljf. It was disgusting and I didn't want to go near it, even with the sponge-on-a-mop-handle. So we stood there, flailing at each other for ten minutes. None of the other two girls on our floor were home, but fortunately, the man who lives on the second floor came in with some friends and we implored him to help us.

After that problem was resolved, my housemate started pointing out all the spiders that apparently reside along our kitchen wall. She would hit one with the corner of the sponge-on-a-mop-handle and as soon as the spider started running, she would scream and toss me the sponge-on-a-mop-handle, and then I would smush it with the sponge-on-a-mop-handle. One of them was extremely difficult to get because it was cleverer than us and we screamed and flailed and slammed the sponge-on-a-mop-handle against the wall. I think we got it in the end. We're not sure though. :| So now I am completely paranoid and am compulsively looking up and checking out corners in fear of more spiders.

(Oh man, I even have a tag just for bug-related entries. *FAILS*)

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In other news, I was watching 非常大明星 on Tudou.com today, but this scene was not shown. D: Maybe it'll be in next week's segment?

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Yunho's Spokesman feat. Donghae is all kinds of ;dajfsdkl awesome. *___* Junsu should have more songs (Junsu's little dolphin scream at the end, lol♥!)featuring Eunhyuk's rapping. And I'll bet Changmin and Kyuhyun and also Jaejoong and Yesung would sound fantastic if they did ballad duets together (speaking of Jaejoong, he sounds amazing in Crying. I wish there were HQ MP3 versions of these solos. :x:x) But what I would really like to hear is Yoochun and Kibum rapping together in Engrish about bling-bling balls.

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I can't wait to see Junjo Romantica anime subbed! I bought the fourth volume the other day, and ;akjfdsl, Misaki is such a cute spazz and Usami is oblivious as always and Hiroki is going to get an ulcer if he keeps getting so worked up. Personally, I like Misaki and Usami's storyline more than Hiroki and Nowaki's. Both Misaki and Usami are so damned clueless, and their relationship is so dysfunctional, but in an awesome way. <3<3

I think a fly just flew into my light fixture and died. I whacked a fly with a shoe and I think it split in half. I didn't check. There are so many flies in the house right now, and I don't know where they're coming from. :\ (yes, outside, but how are so many of them getting in?) We had an ant problem last month, but they're gone now. I wonder if there are such things as fly traps? Should I buy a venus flytrap?? Why is it that I have so many bug problems that it deserves its own tag??

Will be seeing HP5 tomorrow (for the longest time, I kept forgetting which movie it was supposed to be: GoF, OotP, or HBP -- clearly, I fail as a fan XD;;). I would totally wear my Slytherin scarf...only I think I may get heatstroke.

I think most of my RL friends have heard my I-dislike-children-strongly-(unless-under-special-circumstances) rant. But reading posts like this makes me think that it might be nice to have kids in the (far far) future. XD

So there was this fly buzzing around in my room last night. I find the prospect of smushing it rather disgusting, so I tried to threaten it and lead it out of my room. Now, this fly, it must've known that was only threatening when I flailed a rolled up piece of paper around. It just crawled around the wall, not flying no matter how close I came to it. When my mom entered the room, it immediately sensed her intent to kill. It flew all the way up to the ceiling as soon as she came near. These bugs! They're getting smarter! D:

It is very irritating when all of your torrents get stuck at 99.8% for the past several days and refuse to budge.

Top 3 catchy songs:
Big Bang - Dirty Cash [K-pop]
KAT-TUN - Yorokobi no Uta [J-pop]
Tackey & Tsubasa - Crazy Rainbow [J-pop; I promise that you will be chanting, "crazy crazy rainbow star" after you listen to this!]

I don't imagine I can sleep comfortably knowing that there are currently three large spiders on my bedroom ceiling.

I was sitting peaceably at my desk, typing away. I happen to glance up, and what do I see? A big, fat spider in the corner of the ceiling. I look a few decimeters over and I see two more. I am now looking over my shoulder constantly out of paranoia. I don't believe these spiders are as friendly as Charlotte seeing as 1) I am not a pig and therefore cannot communicate with spiders, clearly, and 2) I asked my mother to kill one of their cousins (who was also inconveniently lounging on my ceiling) two days ago.

OMG PLZ MAKE THEM GO AWAY. T______T

ETA: Two of them are moving closer. Holy crap.
Screw this, I'm sleeping in the guest room tonight!

It's the second time in a week that a sparrow almost took off my head. I must look like a fool for ducking when a sparrow flits anywhere in the general vicinity, but I'm telling you, those two came very close to my face. I am now scared for my life. Also, the pigeons around this area don't know their place -- I am forced to walk around them because they don't get out of the way even when people aim kicks at them (I'm too scared to kick them XD; I think it'd hurt more if a pigeon flew into my head compared to a sparrow...)