He likes our neighbor. I let him borrow my room to show her my kitten. They're "friendly." I have no reason. I should have no connection. I feel ill.

No more LJ (or Twitter, or Facebook) for me from now until fall break (one more week). Hopefully this will make me more productive? (My posting history on LJ suggests that I spend almost no time on it, but that's not true--I check my friends page 2-3 times daily. LJ is also my link to my TV-watching, which also needs to be postponed.)

I have massively failed on all 6 of my New Years' resolutions. Not to say that I cannot, or will not, pursue such goals now and in the future, but except for the first one (which doesn't lend itself to an assessment of failure until the year actually ends) I have so very much not done what I said I would. Giving up, moving on.

Unrelatedly, my grad student advisor just referred to my thesis as an SP (related to JP, the term for one-semester required junior independent work; stands for junior paper). It's much less imposing-sounding, actually :)

Comment to this post and I will give you a letter. Upload and share five songs beginning with that letter.

lost_spacecase gave me R...I went through my iTunes and, with difficulty, picked only 5.

1. Rag Doll - Aerosmith
Yes I'm movin', yes I'm movin', gettin' ready for the big time, tap dancin' on a land mine

2. Redemption Song - Bob Marley and the Wailers
How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?

3. Rock On - David Essex
Still lookin' for that blue jean, baby queen, prettiest girl I ever seen

4. Rock You Like A Hurricane - Scorpions
The night is calling, I have to go, the wolf is hungry, he runs this show

5. Rumors - Waking Ashland
I'll take off my makeup, I stop and listen, I am alive now, I watch my head spin

Taken from zorabet...

( Meme )

YOU'RE ON MY FRIENDS LIST, I want to know 28 things about you. I don't care if we've never talked, never really clicked, or if we already know everything about each other. I really don't. You are obviously on my flist, so let me know with whom I'm friends! (Feel free to only answer some of them if you like!)

You know you want to.

( Read more... )

SO THAT IT IS IN WRITING AND I DON'T FORGET IT (I will totally forget it):

Happiness and getting enough sleep have a strongly positive correlation coefficient. (This is a time of both. Actually, "summer" could be tossed into the correlation.) Take the hint during the school year, self (and anyone else who also hasn't quite gotten it yet)!

...is a warm gun (no, not actually, but that is the title of a Beatles song and I just (a few days ago) watched Across the Universe and ( now I will talk about it more than I initially intended. )

What I meant to write about was I just got back from a yoga class at Yoga To The People, a studio here in Berkeley (there are also studios in NYC and San Fran, I believe) where yoga classes are open to everyone and entirely donation-based. I went there with another LBNL intern, Eva, who'd never done yoga before (I'd only done one class--not one course, one class--once last semester), and we both loved it. Some of the poses were really hard and I couldn't hold them properly; I guess most people had trouble on at least one of them but some of the people there were really good. I didn't expect how sore I would be until I got up, started walking, and picked my stuff up off the shelf and it felt so heavy! But it's not the same kind of sore as after playing frisbee, for instance; there's nothing even approximating pain, just a full-body feeling that your muscles have been fully used and are now done for the day. (Then again, we'll see how I feel in the morning :P)

At the end of the session we stretched out and lay down while the lights were turned down, and the instructor read a yoga-related passage (don't know where the passage was from). Then the music became slow gong sounds, completely filling the space around me without actually being loud, and then it went back to being normal and at that point I'd been lying on the ground in the dimness, eyes closed, stretched out and not moving and only listening to everybody breathing and the music and I forgot about my body, sort of, and when the gong ended and the flute-y notes began to play again I felt a little like I was the music, and there were no individual people in the room anymore, just consciousness and sound. Of course as soon as I thought that, and actually I think I had been noticing, or wanting to notice, similar deep transcendent feelings even prior to that moment which had the same effect that I'm about to say, I began to be conscious of the feeling, which grounded me again in my pre-yoga perspective. All the things I might have expected to feel ran through my head in word form, rather than as feelings, and I felt like I was on the edge of experiencing them without really being able to get into it.

Eva and I are definitely going back, hopefully regularly (we need to go buy yoga mats so we don't have to keep renting them, plus I'll totally use a yoga mat in life in general), and I think it'll only get better, because I'll get better at the poses plus I'll be able to get into it more because I'll kind of know what's coming instead of having to figure out what's next and sometimes look around to see what others are doing. The instructor was explaining everything the whole way, of course, and by the way she pretty much never stopped talking, literally she was constantly talking kind of the way I'm typing now, except occasionally when she told us to all exhale on a "ha" sound together. It impresses me that she can keep that up and skillfully lead a group of all skill levels together. I am sort of interested in becoming a yoga instructor. Not that I know yoga, but hey, I'm learning now! (Power Vinyasa Flow to be specific.) If I ever need something new and productive to do with my life that'll be a top candidate. (Dear LJ: "that'll" is a word that you should recognize. Please don't underline it with your little red dots. Love, Veronica)

Having come out of that yoga session, it is comical to me now that I'm in the middle of a required online "Ergo Self-Assessment" for the lab (which is VERY concerned with safety, and apparently 2/3 of lab injuries are due to ergonomic causes), which is talking about repetitive motion, awkward positioning, and keeping the same posture for too long without a break; though I know these were probably concerns earlier in the day, when I basically did nothing but read on the computer, they seem silly now. Yay yoga.

P.S. Berkeley is awesome. ( Quite awesome. )

I think I'm becoming a girl, heaven forbid. I like shoes, and skirts, and makeup. Not nearly so much as many people I know, but enough to be unusual for me. The other day I went to a thrift store with some Wildcats and randomly bought 3 pairs of shoes and a skirt (one of the pairs of shoes was orange & green sneakers which are just like a pair I almost bought 4 years ago, but I picked the black & blue pair...so lucky they were in my size! awesome).

But the more general observation, and the one that makes me happy, is that I'm actually learning to care about my appearance. I mean, I've cared how I look for a while now--I'm not still how I was at age 10, when the only thing that motivated me to brush my hair was my mom saying, as we neared the front of my school, that she wouldn't let me out of the car until my hair didn't look like a rat's nest--but I had valued laziness over appearance. I didn't call it laziness, I called it convenience or comfort or saving money, but laziness was definitely part of it. Now, the way I feel about how I look is contributing to my comfort level, which is kind of new. I got a haircut recently because I knew that I needed to get rid of the dead ends, even though I wanted to save money and try to get my hair to grow long enough to donate. But I got it cut, and I'm so much happier with it now.

Basically I'm willing to put a little extra effort into looking nice (only a little, although it's growing, it's an ongoing process), and the result is that I feel better about myself. Why hadn't I figured this out before? I guess you don't know how something will make you feel until you try it, or get close enough that you start to experience the expected emotion.

Related note: This reminds me of an episode of Chuck (GREAT show, and my recent obsession) where Morgan, Chuck's best friend, is worried that he's immature because people have been telling him so, and Devon, Chuck's sister's live-in boyfriend, decided to help him out, starting with the issue of being a "tucker". In every guy's life, he says, there comes a time when he starts to tuck his shirt into his pants instead of leaving it hanging out. Devon says he just started doing it one day, and Morgan feels really uncomfortable tucking his shirt in, but he manages to do it in front of the mirror with Devon there to support him. I identify with Morgan here (though I promise that in general I am way more mature than Morgan! you'll see why I protest if you watch the show).

Unrelated note: got home yesterday, unpacking today/never, Fort Myer for an updated insurance card/hopefully tomorrow, general GRE Thursday, dentist Friday, hopefully hanging out with people tomorrow/Thurs/Fri, flying to Berkeley Saturday morning and staying there for my internship all summer.

I have converted a box that had tea in it (now the tea bags are hanging out on the shelf) into a "Swearing/Whiny Bitch Box", into which I must put money every time I swear (out of anger/frustration...i.e. singing "I"m On a Boat" = totally okay) or whine to others in an emo way. If I had made the box 12 hours ago, I would already have put money in for the latter offense ~4 times. (I'm tempted to reprint here the text message that corresponds with one of those, but I think that would warrant paying the box.) The money can end up going anywhere--maybe I'll sprinkle it out on the street for people to pick up--as long as it isn't spent on or given to me.

In better news, my JP (junior paper, semester-long independent work) was due today at 5 and it's way not done, but we got an extension until tomorrow at 4! Hooray. I think it will not suck now.

In even better news--if I were to make a list of the top 5 things I did this school year, which I am not, this would for sure be on it, and vying for #1--I ran a half-marathon yesterday! 13.1 miles on a mostly flat road course in Long Branch, NJ, by myself (or rather, with no one I knew; there were 9000 runners there), and it went really well. Official times aren't up but I think I ran 2:01 or 2:02, which is a bit faster than I thought I would.

( More thoughts on running )

Nooooo the KenKen website won't load the puzzles! What am I going to do???

...oh right, my homework that's due today.

Dear self,

Please stop falling asleep. Please suck less at writing. Please learn to focus. Please don't be such a failure.

Love,
Me


Dear advisor,

Please don't be upset that my draft is still nowhere near done. I really can't deal with that right now.

Thanks,
Me


Dear neighbor-I-share-a-bathrooom-with,

Please stop making sex noises. It is 6 am.

Thanks,
Me

Unrelatedly, I have given up facebook for Lent--deactivated the account, so that's why you won't find me. Not that there's much intersection between people who will read this and people who would've looked for me on facebook, but oh well. By the way I am glad I chose to give it up because I'm already in facebook-withdrawal and am realizing how often I normally go to facebook for no particular reason. Hopefully I won't just revert back to my old ways come Easter.

I got to time a cardboard canoe race today and it was quite entertaining. The hardest part appeared to be getting the boats in the water with both people inside--usually this did not succeed and it was hilarious.

This seems a good place to write out my resolutions for the whole wide world to see...anyway, here are the 6 ways in which I will make 2009 a good year, in order from vague and difficult down to concrete and really-should-not-screw-this-up.

( 1. Learn better who I really am )

( 2. Learn to think of Will as only a friend )

( 3. Treat Facebook as a means of communication with friends, nothing more )

( 4. Put office hours, problem/review sessions, and just plain schoolwork time on my schedule )

( 5. Run 600 miles )

( 6. Shower daily, floss every other day, and wear my nightguard every night )

A lot of resolutions? Probably. Are they all things that I "need" to do this year? Probably. So I think that is fine.

Taken from purplemoocow...none of whose songs I knew :(
Play away! I'm curious to see what songs people know.

Step 1: Music player on shuffle.
Step 2: First line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3: Strike through the songs when someone guesses both artist and track correctly.
Step 4: Looking them up on Google or any other search engine is CHEATING!
Step 5: If you like the game, post your own!

( Lyrics )

Stolen from neonnchrome1123

( End of 2008 meme )

Feeling much better, but awkward on at least 3 counts. And since all I do is post whiny nonsense here, it seems, I'm going to stop for a while.

Well this is the second-worst day of my life.

("Second-worst day of your life so FAR", Homer Simpson would add.)

ETA: Ok, it's getting better. The first half of the day was probably the third-worst (I'm just guessing now) half-day of my life.