beeteedubz

Did I mention I was going to die this week? Just informing the world, in case.

my eyes itch

There is a guy in my psychology class who has a full handlebar mustache.

Another guy at my creative writing meetings is the spitting image of Robert Pattinson / Edward Cullen, except bathed.

I survived my essay, clearly. I only hope I passed. On the way is a rush of lab assessments, lab write-ups, a data analysis crap worksheet, a fundraising week I have make arts&crafty things for, and exams. 

In other news, Becca and I are slowly making our way through "Doctor Who" season 1 which is pure awesome. Christopher Eccleston is the best doctor of my life. As much as I know I'm going to love Tennant (because I already do), I'll be so sad to see Eccleston go.

This Saturday we've planned a pancake morning. I say we, I mean me. My mom has a recipe for the best pancakes in the world (I'm not biased) and I'm introducing this world of tastiness to my friendsies here.

And now, I nap. Can you tell I need it?

the concept of smiling

I was doing research for my essay and I found a picture of some men at a factory in an office just hanging about. It struck me that not a single one of them was smiling. Then I realized that a lot of people in old pictures don't smile. So, when did the concept of smiling in a picture come to life? 

Because it's a pretty weird concept. When did we start thinking, okay, everybody, we're going to document this moment possibly forever so look as happy as possible. Not, so just keep doing whatever you're doing in the moment because if you stop to smile and stare at the camera, it's not really the moment anymore, is it? That's why I like candid photographs so much more than stop-and-smile ones; the candid ones actually portray the moment as it is, for the most part. I mean, there are some pictures of the stop and smile variety that do too. But I guess I just don't see why a whole line of people has to get together and smile as brightly as possible or else it doesn't look good. 

Why do we smile in pictures? When did it become not okay not to smile? Is it an obsession with being happy that we feel necessary to show the rest of the world? Why are we obsessed with being happy? 

I remember a girl from high school who I would see get her picture taken on several occasions -- the stop-and-smile pictures. Each time, she would smile as the camera flashed and then after the picture was taken, she would put on a much more genuine smile that looked so much better on her. The one in the picture was fake. So, what is even the point?

Also, I'm quickly coming to the realization that my essay is going to be the exact replica of the example of a bad essay our lecturer gave us in class. Woohoo.

putting the pro in procrastination

My mom left yesterday morning and I already miss her. I actually didn't even know if she arrived safely or not until I got an email this afternoonish from her. And now that she's back home, my dad is jetting off to Dubai for three weeks. So it's just my mom and my sister at home by themselves for three weeks. I think that's going to be a bit tough for my mom so I'll keep emailing her from time to time. I really can't wait to go home. 

I found out my exams timetable for second semester. I have exams on 26 May, 1, 3, 4, and 8 June. This is going to be fun. AND to top it all off, my flight has been booked since September for the 17th of June because I didn't know when I'd finish exams. So I have 9 whole days doing nothing in Manchester until I go home. Sigh. At least it'll just be fun to vegetate for that time, yeah?

I still have an essay to do and I have barely started. I promised myself I'd have the first half of the research done today. It really shouldn't even be that difficult. It's just that it's a history essay, which I am not used to now since most of the writing I've done for school is science-y fact oriented. You know, more like a narration of the topic and re-explanation, showing your understanding, etc. Speaking of which, I got another first on my second essay for tutorial, which I am quite happy about. A little annoyed that it's the exact same score as before but whatever, it's a good score. This one was on the science of sleep and dreaming. It's actually really interesting. Both my science essays have been really interesting this year. But this history one just does not thrill me at all: "How has the factory discipline changed the nature of work?"  I don't know and I don't care. But, alas, an essay must be written! If only I had the motivation, dedication, will... 

Oh yes! I forgot to mention .. I went to Oxford again with my mom and she loved it and I loved it again and again and again and I really wish I lived there. And we did go see the Queen musical, "We Will Rock You," which was so so good. I absolutely loved it. It was so much fun and good music and just awesome. 

And now, a good ol' dose of gloriously wasting time:

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions:
Put an x next to the ones you've read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (x)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë (x)
4 Harry Potter series - J K Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible (partly?)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (x)
8 1984 - George Orwell (x) 
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( ) 
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x) 
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (x)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (plan to)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (okay, not the COMPLETE works...)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (x)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (x) 
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (want to)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x) 
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (want to)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (plan to)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ( )
34 Emma - Jane Austen (will do)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (will do) 
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (it's sitting on my bedside table)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (plan to)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquer ( )
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (it's on my shelf)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (xxxxx)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ( ) 
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood  ( )
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (x)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (x)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ( )
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (plan to)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (x)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (plan to)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (plan to)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (x)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (plan to)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (plan to)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker ( )
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (plan to)
76 The Inferno - Dante  ( )
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ( )
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ( )
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White ( )
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x one or two)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x in french too!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams ( )
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas  ( )
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (partly?)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( )

34. Well, I'm more well-read than the average BBC-er but that's a horribly low number. I don't have time to read anymore. I can't wait for summer. Reading, painting, music-ing, sitting outside, 21 Choices. That's all I plan on doing.

I think I should keep tabs on the books I've read and plan to read. That what Goodreads' for but I can't be arsed with that right now. So, since Bell Jar, I'm still on The Savage Detectives because I barely ever read. I think it's going way over my head but I'm still enjoying that. In between, I read Atonement which I think I've discussed here already. I have The Kite Runner sitting on my bedside table which I think I might start tonight because I've heard it's a pretty gripping read so I should finish it quickly. Then on my to-read shelf, which I brought from home, I have to re-read A Separate Peace because I read it when I was maybe 12 and I think it needs a re-read. I plan on re-reading a lot of books from high school in the coming years. Then there's To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf that I won at the Student Writing Soc launch, Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell, Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving, The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, MD, aaaand Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Dang my schooling getting in the way of my education!

Okay, I think I've avoided it long enough now.

happy easter!

I would simply like to wish all y'all a happy easter! And to inform you that I am having a lovely time with my mom here -- yesterday she cooked a delicious dinner for me and my friends and we all had a fun time cooking in our little kitchen. My birthday was great -- I love my friends and family and I got some super sweet presents!

As for the rest of my mom's stay, we're hoping to see the musical based on Queen (as in, the rock legends) tomorrow night and then we're off to Oxford on Tuesday! My mom's never been to Oxford and she knows how much it means to me so she figured she might as well see it while she's close. Other than that, we're just having a fun roam around town.

And lastly, I would like to tell you a little story. When Sorina and I came back from our concerting extravaganza, we began looking up (read: stalking) the various members of the bands we had just seen. One of whom was, of course, my cellist. She found their facebook page and a couple tagged pictures and after much fangirling between us two, she bursts into my room to tell me she has now friended the cellist. After we have just had a very obvious discussion including him and his band members in reference to them being our husbands. On our walls. Well, now there's no way I'm going to friend him, facebook etiquette and all. So she goes ahead and tags me in photos and tags him in photos ... and tags us in a photo together. At this point, I'm thinking, hey, if we're destined, he'll friend me, psh. A fortnight later, and still no luck. My future was slipping slowly away at the cruel hands of a facebook add, or lack thereof. Yesterday, Sorina tagged him in my albums, thinking this'll prompt him.

It did. I signed on today to see 2 requests, the first being the cellist of Two Spot Gobi. I think the realization went a little like this:

Me: *sees requests* Who the hell is Rob Lewiii--OMGHIAJHGKSFHKSFHGJKSFG SORINAAAA SORINAAAAAA!asdfd!!dssgdfdhdslif! 

I believe our wedding should follow in the coming months. 

I just remembered I don't actually know who the second request was from. Nor do I care. Toodles!

19

Happy birthday, self! Welcome to the beginning of your twentieth year. eep.

(19, to the minute!)

the student union's sink

I would simply like to inform you, dear people of the world, that our Student Union has the utmost coolest sink in the entire world in the public toilets. 

We (my weirdo friends and I) really feel they are Harry Potter-esque and are constantly standing around them waiting for snakes to emerge from the taps. Actually, that's a lie, we don't really spend all our time doing that. Just partly. Jay kay jay kay. But we do actually drag our friends inside to introduce them to the grand phenomena that this sink presents to us. It's pure awesome.