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.

I blew out the power in the my room because I was so desperate that I was trying to run two space heaters simultaneously. Bad idea. >__O I got the power back on, but only one space heater going and I can feel the cold seeping through the walls, the floor, even the power outlets. And did I mention my two big windows? lsfjsladjf;l When I had to venture outside to go to class, I wore a tank top, a light knit sweater, a knit cardigan, a sweatshirt, and then my winter coat over all that. I also wore leggings under my jeans. AND I WAS STILL COLD. I am not made for this weather. D:!!



-30 WHAT.

The mix-ups between "your" and "you're" (generally in the "you're"=>"your" direction) drives me batty. There was this community I wanted to join to leech music -- the "request to join" post was chock-full of grammatical errors ("you're"=>"your"s were the least of it), and I didn't much feel like wading through the incoherent rules (I think this may be a sign of elitecitis).

Anyway. Back to the "you're"=>"your" issue. One would presume that elementary school teachers would have crammed the rule down your throat -- along with the whole "i before e, except after c" thing and etc (though I can never spell "perceive" right on the first try). Personally, I think the blame belongs to the creation of "ur". With "ur", one can use the same representation for multiple purposes; for instance, "ur momma" or "ur dumb". I can't decide which is worse, "ur stupid" or "your stupid" -- as far as I'm concerned, you're both stupid. When I'm the queen of the internets (which is essentially the equivalent of being the queen of the world), I'm going to banish "ur" to somewhere far, far away, to a place where everyone tYpeS lik dis. I'm also going to make Jaejoong my boytoy, but that is neither here nor there.

So randomly, there's this patient by the name of Arthur Ford at the clinic I work at, and every time I file his chart, I gigglesnort a bit on the inside. (If you don't get that reference, then you probably also won't know why sticking a particular type of fish down your ear would be beneficial to your performance on language related exams.)

Whenever I read shoujo manga, I have this irritating, but mostly involuntary, habit of comparing myself with the female protagonist. The problem is when the character acts in such a way that I start thinking: omg, I would never in a million years do that, what is wrong with you, woman -- I have to remind myself to stop waving my fist at the computer screen because it makes me look like a lunatic. There's something about shoujo that repels me yet attracts me at the same time (though with many titles, it's mostly, *repelrepelrepel*).

I was reading Lovely Complex yesterday (I went through all of the scanlated manga in one go -- I had an awful headache afterwards XD;) -- it was a really fun and cute manga. The issues I had with it were the same as the issues I have with most other shoujo titles: at first the main character acts against the traditional female role (in the case of LoveCom, Risa is taller than most girls, she's loud and generally unfeminine in terms of her actions), but when she realizes she's in love, she immediately reverts to tradition (again, with LoveCom, Risa starts mooning after the guy, she cries all the time, she wishes she were "cute and quiet").

( cut for length )
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Some other random things I have been thinking about include the following (they cannot be considered to be full rants intellectual discussions because I have run out of gas. Need to work on that stamina, Meemo.)

-If there's one thing that all those sociology classes have pounded into my head it is the notion that just about everything is socially constructed. If such is the case, human nature is neither fundamentally good nor evil because these are socially constructed concepts and the meanings of such terms are thus susceptible to the change of time and space.

-On the subject of human nature...it occurs in predictable ways at times. In a given situation, not everyone will act in the same way, but the same pattern of interaction will occur each time. There are several recent incidents (confined to my little corner of Livejournal) that come to mind. Let's take that anonymous (a.k.a. "honesty") PoT meme thing for example. I don't remember how many times variations of that have cropped up, but if you look at the comments from each one of them, they're really along the same vein. Fics, characters, people...anything bash-able gets bashed. I think this illustrates a certain side of human nature: when the opportunity to vent without the risk of having one's identity revealed arises, many people will take that opportunity. I'm a big advocate of the yin-yang concept (y'know, a bit of light in every darkness, and all that). In this case, in every group of ass-kickers there will be ass-lickers. You can probably come up with a list of categories that you'd place each commenter in these honesty memes, and this list would be consistent for every meme. In other words, it's just one big cycle (that can rival the Energizer Bunny in its "goes on and on"-ness).

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Okay, my fuel meter is pointing to empty now. *ran out of coherence* Perhaps it's time to get off my soap-box and rejuvenate through sleeping.

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One last note though: in the case of both rants (I will admit it! They were simply rants and not much else ;__;), I cannot stop myself from reading shoujo manga or stop myself from skimming those damn honesty memes (sometimes I agree with the hate -- it's just another weakness, don't judge me!) -- the same way that I can't stop my teeth from grinding from seeing traditional gender roles in all its glory and feeling disgust at some people's behaviour. Maybe it's analogous to car crashes -- in all reason, they're awful things, but as a spectacle, they're quite spectacular.