I have ten hours to write seven pages. Taking away an hour and a half for lunch and dinner, I have 8.5 hours. Shit. How did I get to this point.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22556281-661,00.html

Mindblowing

4am
hungry
desire to go back
back to apartment
but
wait
no
rain
falling
LIKE A FREAKING FLOOD
IF I GO OUTSIDE I WILL DROWN WTF WHERE DID THIS COME FROM

I emailed my professor clearing up a miscommunication and the first thing he wrote in his response was OMG!

The week passes by really slowly when you're awake for twenty hours every day. Eight hours of sleep passes by quickly; but the time drags when you have to actively participate in four of those hours. LAME.

Sometimes I write such pretentious sounding shit in my essays. I go back and read it, and I think to myself: really? this is what I do with my time? Disgusting.

The conclusion of my last essay:
The interplay between eyes and heart is necessary for preserving beauty. The fallibility of human perception is acknowledged in the sonnet but balanced by an active distortion of beauty for the sake of preservation. The constant going back and forth between eyes and heart, each proving insufficient in some way, confines our experience of beauty, but also reveals that beauty inevitably operates within boundaries and under limits that human perception cannot overcome.

I guess that's not so bad. I've done more disgusting. Reading that now I realized that I started three sentences in a row with "the." Whatevs. But I really love being an English major. Poetry is becoming a little nauseating but that's ok because I'll never take it again while I'm in college. Except Shakespeare. I really really enjoy Shakespeare. There's so much to unpack in it and it gets me really excited!

My postcolonial lit prof can't lead discussions for her life yet still insists on assigning a book a class to read. I need to finish my essay for that class tonight. Will be a long night but nothing I'm not used to and can't do =].

Love hearts peace.

Shit doing one post a day is hard. I missed Monday by 35 minutes.

The rest of this entry will be positive.

I positively despise transcribing.

I also positively do not like having three essays, one test, and two news articles in a one week span.

Let's throw a little bit of positivity for the future in the post.

I will positively hate having to do three loads of laundry tomorrow.

End.

For the sake of having a post today...these were my girls from the first session:



Eubin (from Korea). This girl was so absentminded. And she got away with so much because she would just smile at you and run away laughing.



Michelle (from NY) and Jane (from Conn)



Danielle (from Hawaii) and Alyssa (from Conn). Danielle was sweet but a bit of diva. She used to be in showbiz, doing commercials and other advertising so she really know how to talk to people and could be a little manipulative. Alyssa was a pain in the butt. So annoying.



Danielle and Athena (from Mass)



Jane, Celine (from Korea), and Brooke (from Nevada)


End. Time for work.

The girls on the floor above us are running around in high heels. They've been doing this for about an hour. It's so loud. It sounds like stampeding elephants. Why would you run around in high heels. You can run faster if you take them off. They also can't be that comfortable.

My essay is destroying me. I think I'm talking in circles.

Take off your fucking heels. It's incredibly annoying and distracting.

stress stress stress.

I failed!!!!!!! I was supposed to have a blog entry every day this month. But i's now 12:41 am. i missed friday by 41 minutes. And there's a freaking fly flying around my head. It's buzzing. Make it stop. This entry sucks. I'm so upset I messed up my four day streak. Laaaaame. I have the hiccups. Omgggggggg they won't stop.

Hint of lime chips are delicious.

I think my Explo blogging will have to be done in several stages.

These are my girls from Session 2. Naomi and I had the cutest hall hands down.

I feel like throwing away all my responsibilities. I want to be around kids. Not that being with kids doesn't involve responsibilities; it definitely does. But it was so much fun. You can't look at these pictures and not smile.


Susie (from Italy) and Delaney (from D.C.)



Matylda (from Poland), Shanlyn (from Mass), and Fernie (from Mexico)



Emily (from Mass) and Kanon (from Japan)


Now let's all say "Awwwww."

I need a resume! I don't have one. I'm starting to realize the urgency of this matter because there are internships I want to apply for that have deadlines of November 2nd. Resume...I feel so grownup. Well, no, actually. If I was grownup I would already have a resume. Instead I'm the irresponsible teenager frantically trying to compose one.

What if I have nothing worthwhile to put on there. How sad for me. I also don't have anything worthwhile to say in this blog. That could also be conceived as sad. I think I'm just blogging now so that I have an entry every day of this month.

Ariane was telling me last night that she wants to make a documentary of our family because we don't know anything about our history. I was about to contest that until she started telling me all this stuff (like how tai gong was born in the U.S. WTHECK.)that made me realize shit I don't know anything about our family history. I blame my dad; he never talks. I know enough about my mom's side because she communicates with her children.

Fall break in 8 days!!! It can't come soon enough.

On Tuesdays my brain checks out at 11:30am. Why? Because I have Junior Sem from 10:00-11:30 and this class is so taxing. It drains my brain power. Our discussions really dig deeply into the text and they involve so much thought. There's just so much to process. Someone makes a point, I think about it and before I get done working through that part of the text another issue is brought up. And there are about a million things flying at me at once and I can't wrap my head around all of them. I know what I sound like now - I'm coming off as a lazy, unmotivated bum complaining because oh no God forbid he/she has to THINK in school. My point is that by the end of the hour and a half my brain has exhausted all its fuel but unfortunately I still have two more classes. Tuesdays are the suck.

I also have IV leadership meetings on Tuesday nights. Those are always very fruitful but draining also. Draining in a different way than Junior Sem is, but it still saps me of energy.

Highlight of my day: In Chinese class my professor was explaining to the class what a "yang rou quar" was. Which is basically a Chinese kabob. To explain it she said "the bamboo penetrates the meat," and with her hands motioned the action of sticking a bamboo skewer through meat by sticking her right index finger in and out of a ring she made with her left fingers. Yeah, we laughed it up.

I'm obsessed with drawing lucky charms all over my notes.

There was a huge discussion at my school when we decided to withdraw our school stats from all sorts of publications. Basically Haverford wants students to be able to find out for themselves what the school is about. By giving out specific stats, potential students are receiving a biased view of the school. Any information can be found on our website and students can inquire about anything they want, but we won't be personally making that information public in US News or any of our admission handbooks. This happened over the summer, but being all tied up in my Explo world, I didn't find out about it until school started.

One of the arguments criticizing our school for this had to do with us not being a very well known school, and being ranked helps us get our name out. The other argument is that we won't get as much money because we won't be nationally ranked. Getting money is always one of our biggest concerns because we have a terrible endowment. It makes us want to cry. And a lot of people thought we would lose a lot of applicants because other liberal arts schools in the top ten hadn't signed on to this initiative so they would still be ranked and we would be shafted. We already lose applicants to Amherst, Swat, and other schools ranked higher than us, so this initiative would only increase that gap. But that isn't really a valid argument now since almost all of the top ten liberal arts schools have signed on so we're not really losing out.

So what do I make of this? I never liked rankings anyways. I always thought they were a load of crap and a school should be judged by more than those limited criteria. I didn't even know what Haverford was ranked before I came here. So I think it's splendid. And I think most of the student body thinks it's great too. The argument a lot of people had was that we don't want people coming here just cuz of our rank. We want them to come because they like Haverford and they think it fits them. I think my school feels really strongly about not quantifying achievements and the quality of our education.

Which leads me to my next topic. Last night we had Plenary (where we pass resolutions to our constituion and other things). One of the resolutions proposed was getting rid of the honors recognitions on the booklet at Commencement. All the honors, high honors, phi beta kappa, summa cum laude, etc. stuff. The reasoning behind this was that printing academic achievements goes against the Haverford ethos of being self motivated and non competitive. There was a huge debate about this, and the resolution only passed by 53%.

I just couldn't buy into the pro side of this debate. Graduation is one day. And not only that, but it's the ONLY time that academic achievements are honored. Plus the people who are awarded those honors deserve it. Now the other side said that hard work isn't always measured by your GPA so it's not fair to give some people recognition and not others. Well, life's not fair and you won't be awarded for all of the good things you do and all the hard work you put into things. But this is just one way for academics to be honored. And getting back to what I said before about us not wanting to quantify achievements; people at this school have a huge problem with being smart. Everyone's so concerned about being modest and not flaunting their achievements that I think people are afraid to be smart. Not saying that we suppress knowledge and growth but that we're so concerned with not being competitive and maintaining grade confidentiality that academics is just not honored.

This resolution would also keep athletic achievements on the commencement booklet. So basically it's ok to have an athlete vs. non-athlete divide, but it's not ok to single out people who have pursued academic excellence. What? No, that's lame. What about excellence in the arts? If they're going to pass this resolution at least take out athlete recognition also. Every week the athlete of the week is published in the school newspaper but there's no academic of the week. So really graduation is the only time that academic excellence is honored. Part of Haverford's mission statement is academic excellence. And at graduation you're celebrating making it through four years of college, which you don't do with amazing athletics...you need a high enough GPA to graduate. Graduation celebrates academics. So really it should be athletic achievements that are taken out.

A lot of people were saying that by printing the names of those who got honors, then that establishes a spirit of competition at Haverford. But the way I see it, the fact that we're so concerned about not being competitive only means that we'll try our hardest to NOT be competitive and prove that commencement recognition of honors DOESN'T effect our school. So there's kind of a paradox there. Publishing the honors will only encourage us to not fall into the expected paradigm of competition.

And shit it's graduation. You're happy to be graduating. Who's going to be jealous of the person sitting next to them for working their ass off and getting the highest honors. It's your class and you'll be happy for everyone. Ok anyways this topic is probably extremely dull for everyone since it only concerns me and my school, but I felt really strongly about this and was mad when the resolution passed. Luckily though it doesn't officially change the commencement procedures; it only means it'll be presented to the commencement committee as our point of view. And since it barely passed I don't think it'll do anything.

Ok I'm getting sick of talking about my school.

I mailed in my study abroad application about a week ago. I stuck on 27 stamps. I'm so excited for Belgium. It'll be sweet. It won't be Haverford and that's the best part. I love my school but I'm ready for a break. I want to be something else besides a hardworking college student. I want to be a goof up. I probably won't do an excellent job of that though...I tend to feel too badly about not working or trying hard. It's ok; I'll make myself get over it once I'm in Europe.

I'm looking at the list of things I said I would talk about. And I'm trying to briefly touch on all of them. It's a long list. How did I get it in my head that I had to talk about all these things.

Oh yes, reading is my life. Seriously. That's all I do. I read. And write. Before all I would read about was all the sexual images in shakespeare. Anything open is a vagina. Anything sticklike is a penis. And anything that goes into something else is penetration. PHALLIC IMAGES EVERYWHERE YOU CAN'T ESCAPE IT. Homosocial/homoerotic triangle. Everyone's perverted. But I think we're starting to move away from that.

That's all I have time for. I have to go read (big surprise).

Peace love hearts and candy corn.