Night Island

This break seemed to go by really fast. My classes start tomorrow night, and I still have various odds and ends to take care of before then. I'm taking a romanticism course focused on Coleridge's conversation poems and a general Victorian literature course. I don't expect them to be too difficult as long as my mental health doesn't take a nosedive this spring. *crosses fingers* I'm used to taking classes on Zoom, but the ongoing pandemic is still wearing on me. I hope the classes will help take my mind off of it.

I've been much more social on DW and elsewhere this year, which is important because I really miss social interactions when I'm not in class. I hope to keep in touch with people more this year. Still, I am an anxious introvert and all this attention can be exhausting. I may choose to slow things down a bit. I think I have responded to most of my comments on DW and will try to get to the others soon.

I don't think I'll do challenge #9 for snowflake_challenge, but we'll see. It's a little out of my comfort zone (even though I think I did it in a previous year), and if I were to rec some of my writing, it has been so long since I've thought about it that I'm not sure where I'd start.

I also signed up for getyourwordsout. I pledged to write 120 days this year, so I hope that can help to kick my creativity back into gear. I did almost no creative writing last year, and that felt like a mistake for my mental well-being. Somehow, I need to find a balance.

With each passing day, I become more and more glad that I did not enroll in new classes this semester, but like many of you, I am going a little stir-crazy at home. However, I do still have work to do since I had to take two incompletes last year. It frustrates me that I can no longer work at little coffee shops or the library for a change of surroundings, but I realize that is a small thing. I am making progress, though.

I should have one assignment done tonight. I will have three left after that--an abstract and two essays. Right now, I'm working on a bibliographical review essay for my Tolkien class. I chose to research Eowyn and gender because of course I did. Now, I just need to make sure I can find something interesting to say about those topics.

If all goes according to plan, I should be enrolling for the fall semester on Monday. Of course, I have no idea what the fall will be like. What if all classes have to go online again? I will have to think long and hard if I am willing to take these two classes online. I have two medieval lit classes planned: Middle English language and literature and Thomas Mallory. Yay for Arthuriana!

Well, that other entry, as so often happens, did not come to fruition. -_-; The title of this post is brought to you by the song of the same name by Joseph Fink, which was used as the weather in an episode of Welcome to Night Vale. The song sounds a little nicer than my actual morning, though. This is from one of the earlier episodes, but I've continued to listen to WTNV faithfully even after the fervor died down a few years ago. Mostly, it has been out of habit and love of the world, but some of the recent episodes have been surprisingly great. The second novel, It Devours, is one of my favorite things to come out in the last few years out of anything.

But that's enough about older fandoms that are past their expiration date. Back to reality, boo.

I have reached the halfway mark in my final semester as an undergraduate. Come December, I will be done with my undergraduate career forever. Graduate school will probably come next, but the point is that I'm done with this chapter of my life finally.

As for more immediate concerns, I should probably be doing other things right now. I have to write 600 words about the partition of India like I know what I'm talking about in my post-colonial lit class. I have to catch up on my responses to the short stories and poems from my creative writing classes. I've been trying to keep up, but I'm always so exhausted when I come home from school, and I can't seem to accomplish very much in the mornings before I leave. Finally, I have to pretend that I know what I'm talking about on my American poetry midterm this Wednesday. It'll probably be fine, but I feel pretty scattered and disorganized.

My poetry has been extremely well-received this semester. It has gone even better than I had hoped. I've only taken one poetry creative writing class before, but it feels like something in my mind has just clicked. I feel like I am flourishing creatively. Yet, none of this creative flourishing has found its way into my fannish life. I would really like to participate in Yuletide for once, but my time management skills say no. I hope I can try to squeeze in a treat or two, but again, my time management skills and finals may work against me.

I've been trying to have some fun this semester without overloading myself. It's so hard to strike a happy medium, though. On Friday, I went to Downtown Disney for a break. As it just so happens, I ate at the new Salt and Straw location on opening day, and I didn't even realize it until afterwards. The store was absolutely swamped, though, so that should have been a clue. I got one of their Halloween flavors called Creepy Crawly Critters, which actually contained real bugs unless my reading comprehension skills are totally worthless. When I was in the store, I thought that "real bugs" was just a joke, but based on their other flavors, it wasn't. So, I had real chocolate-covered crickets and mealworms in my matcha green tea ice cream. I also had a chicken tamale at Tortilla Jo's and a flor de Jamaica agua fresca, which I loved. *_* I'm currently
obsessed with that flavor and anything hibiscus. Downtown Disney isn't quite as fun now that it has all the security and increased prices for the parking lot, but I was happy to be there before the rain hit. I feel like I should be madder at the Walt Disney Company than I actually am.

Yesterday, I went to the grand opening of the Tokyo Central store in Yorba Linda. I've been meaning to go for aaages but never found the time. We ate from the buffet, and I had yakisoba for the first time. It's really good! ^_^

This morning, I woke up and turned my TV on to find a showing of Toy Story on Disney XD. I knew it was on yesterday, but I didn't realize that they'd be showing it again. This movie came out when I was in elementary school, so it is hugely nostalgic for me. I think that I love it even more as an adult, but that's Pixar for you. Toy Story 2 is on now, which I don't think I've ever watched in its entirety. I know I watched part of it on a bus ride during my school trip to Washington D.C., and I've caught bits and pieces when it has been on TV.

I'm behind on the new season of The Good Place, but I've watched the first episode of the 13th Doctor on Doctor Who. I really like her, and I'm happy to see the Doctor as a woman. I have a tendency to think of the Doctor as more male, but I really like the idea of Time Lords changing biological sex and/or gender. It jus makes sense. Watching Doctor Who again makes me want to catch up on the episodes with the Twelfth Doctor that I've missed because I really enjoyed Capaldi. I still have older seasons with David Tennant and Matt Smith to catch up on, though. It just reminded me of how much I love the show's mythos and concept.

Anyway, I was feeling a little depressed before I wrote this, but I guess I just wrote my way out. :3

I also just read Anne Rice's latest Vampire Chronicles book, Blood Communion, because hey, why not? It was short, but it felt like a return to form in many ways. Needless to say, I quite enjoyed it because it wasn't as out there as the one about Atlantis. There were some good parts, and the new characters didn't annoy me that much. However, ( A little bit spoilery ) I may have more to say later.

I had a hell of a time getting this entry to post correctly, so I'm just posting it now even though I wrote it this morning. I'm trying to clean up the typos right now because they make me self-conscious, but I will probably miss some.

How may I fail? Let me count the ways...

Well, because of my persistent lack of time management skills, some setbacks have come on the heels of my other successes. I had to default on all of the exchanges that I signed up for. I think this is a matter of biting off more than I could chew and not taking into account that my assignments would be due not long after finals' week. Plus, I'm still not a very disciplined writer. I had quite a bit of anxiety to deal with regarding both school and fandom as well. I feel like I'm getting past that now, and I'm hoping that I will be able to be more productive this summer.

In the future, I think I will focus on writing treats for exchanges. That way, I can simply focus on the writing aspect without any consequences. I really have loved the gifts that I have received from the few exchanges that I've done, but my purest joy comes from writing itself. I don't need something in return to be happy.

In other annoyances, something is very wrong with the Internet here. The speed is really slow for some reason. I'm convinced that it's down to dial-up speeds, but I don't remember what that was like except that it was horrible. I remember that it took ~30 minutes to download a 4 MB song, and anything larger was out of the question.

In spite of everything, I was able to finish some writing, so I'll post that shortly.

I was going to finish up the snowflake_challenge in this post, but it will have to wait because I feel like crap! The morning was mostly fine, but I woke up today not wanting to get out of bed even though I probably had the proper amount of sleep. I realized during class that I had fallen behind in the reading. Fortunately, I will be able to catch up, and there were no consequences this time. After I came home, I crawled into bed and proceeded to sleep for over an hour. I reluctantly got out of bed around two o'clock in the afternoon to eat lunch even though I felt like I could sleep more and did not feel like going to class at all. When I did go to class, I was horrified to learn that we had homework due that I didn't know about, so I spent most of the class period worrying about that instead of remaining fully present for the lesson. The professor won't let me make it up, which is fair enough, but I felt stupid for screwing that up. I felt like I should be too experienced by now to make that kind of mistake. Honestly, I feel really out of step this week and a lot like I'm just going through the motions.

As soon as I got home tonight, I took the the Philosophical Crap Test again because taking dumb quizzes like that is oddly soothing to me. I thought that it would make more sense to me this time since I'm taking a second philosophy class right now. It does a little bit. It may be a bit old-fashioned to post results to these kinds of quizzes, but I'm linking to my results for posterity's sake.

I wish this week was over already, but I have to get up in the morning to go to a presentation about studying abroad. I already RSVPed, so I don't think it would be right to bail. I just hope that tomorrow will be a little better than today at least.

All right, my first week of the semester is over! It seems that my last semester at this college will be somewhat low-key although I really must put a lot of effort into my intermediate Spanish class if I want to improve. I have mixed feelings about the semester already. Since this is my last semester, I am already starting to miss the college that has become my home over the last five years. It was the college that I never wanted to attend at first and that I often wished I could have been done with faster as I took my time to ease myself into the demands of college life, but I hate to say goodbye now. I will miss everyone and everything that has become familiar to me, especially favorite guy. I hope that I will be able to see him a lot before the semester is over and that I will get the chance to see him even after that because the idea of possibly never seeing him again brings tears to my eyes.

I didn't really feel like doing anything this morning, so all I did was do some Spanish lessons and goof off on the Internet. There were plenty of things I should have been doing, though. I still want to continue with snowflake_challenge, but I will probably get to that later today.

It sucks that Alan Rickman had to die this week. :( Unlike with David Bowie's passing, I was familiar with Rickman's work. I am an unabashed Snape fangirl, and Alan Rickman is at least 50% of why I started loving the character in the first place. He will always be remembered for the way he bewitched our minds and ensnared our senses. From that first Potions' class onward, I became a Snape fan instantly.

They're doing a HP reread over at Tor.com. I may look into participating even though I am already planning to do a reread of The Tale of the Body Thief at vc_media. Like the first reread post says, I'm sure Rickman's death will affect the way I read that book now that he and Snape are gone. If I do participate, it will be my first reading of the book since I read it when it first came out. My, how time flies.

Day 09

In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include
a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I've been meaning to write up a New Year's resolution post, so I'm glad that this was today's challenge.

( Goals for 2016 )

I could put more, but it's good to start small, isn't it? I will have my hands full with these goals already, and any additional goals could probably fit under the above categories. At least I know that many of these goals are common, so I won't be alone in trying to live a better life in 2016.

Crap, it's Halloween tomorrow. I haven't even enjoyed October properly yet. :( Not to mention that I've let my journal updating slide.... I'm not even totally sure what I want to do with this journal anymore. When I created it, I hoped it would be my introduction back into fandom and Internet culture. I hoped that Dreamwidth would be a recreation of LJ in its heyday, but neither site is as vibrant as I would like. Of course, it doesn't help when I check out for these long absences, but I can't shake the feeling that I should move on to another platform.

This semester is definitely not my favorite, but I'm trying to stay open-minded until the end. Philosophy is a killer. I oscillate between liking and disliking Spanish in equal measure. The first half of world literature hasn't captured my heart like I expected it would. Despite the fact that I love mythology, I'm not so enchanted with ancient literature. I think the Iliad will grow on me. I also liked Oedipus Rex, but it made me very uncomfortable at the same time. I want to read the Aeneid in full someday, though. Other than that, my classes have passed in a blur.

A lot else has happened, but I'd rather get into that later.

It has been dangerously close to a year since I updated this journal. As such, there are a few things that I should mention right away...

I dropped that Shakespeare class last fall. D: It just wasn't my cup of tea. I love Shakespeare, but the class didn't do it for me. Like I said, I wasn't too thrilled with the focus on comedies at the beginning. Plus, the workload prved too much for me because I was dealing with some major depression that semester.

Other than that, every other class went fine. There were bumps along the way, but they didn't hold me back in the end. The instructor for the critical thinking class has become one of my favorites. In fact, I am taking another of her classes this fall. I think she's wonderful, and as far as I can tell, the feeling is entirely mutual. :3

Since I had something akin to a depression-fueled breakdown that semester, I decided to take only two classes the following spring. I took the second half of English literature with the critical thinking instructor (Dr. P) and mythology to make up for that dropped Shakespeare class. Both were great, and I did some of my best writing in that semester. I don't think that I took as much advantage of the mythology class as I could have, though. However, I *did* win two writing contests.

In other 2013 news, I fell for my freshman composition professor. <333 I may have mentioned that before, but my feelings exploded in the fall. I always thought that he was attractive and charming, but I found out for sure that he was single in the fall. ;3 Not sure what I'm going to do about this. There's the tricky student/teacher relationship to consider. Plus, he's nineteen years older than I am. Since I'm weird, both of those things are turn-ons in their own special ways. I don't know his feelings for me... this whole situation has made me feel like a giddy school girl. I want to make a move, but I'm scared~ He's so awesome! He likes Doctor Who and sci-fi, made us write about slasher and zombie films, assigned The Time Machine as reading, enjoys mythology, and used to teach The Hobbit in his class. This sounds like my ideal guy.

I was going to dive into what I've been up to this summer, but I think I'll leave it here for now. As always, it was good writing!