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Monday, Feb. 14, 2005 - 12:20 p.m.

Happy Valentine's Day

I love Valentine's Day, not because of that mushy love stuff, but because pink and red are the celebratory colors. Woohoo!

So, I have had to eliminate my Cuba theme for this month. I cannot find my hundreds of pictures from my month there, which means they are still packed up, thus neccessitating my digging through big heavy boxes. So, nix that. Because this is my parents' house, I don't want to leave a bunch of my shit lying all over the place. Thus, I have left the majority of my stuff packed.

Note: At this point, SuperGeniusKid came over. To fully understand my life here, you have to realize that on any given day at any given waking hour, SGK will show up with a kind request from her parents, for Oreos, to jump on me, or all of the above. In the beginning, I indulged her, so now I am paying the price of having to re-teach her how to treat me, aka, as a person and not a jungle gym. Why are those playground staples called jungle gyms anyway?

So, now that all my graduate school applications are completed and sent (Oh the blissful purgatory of waiting, when you are neither accepted nor rejected!), I will plan a March theme. Hopefully, this will give more structure to this journal.

That said, enjoy the day of pink and red!

Thursday, Feb. 10, 2005 - 8:27 p.m.

You Are From Neptune

You are dreamy and mystical, with a natural psychic ability. You love music, poetry, dance, and (most of all) the open sea. Your soul is filled with possibilities, and your heart overflows with compassion. You can be in a room full of friendly people and feel all alone. If you don't get carried away with one idea, your spiritual nature will see you through anything.

Tuesday, Feb. 08, 2005 - 10:01 p.m.

With all hope, tomorrow I will begin to scan photographs from Cuba. Right now, though, I have a monster headache, probably from looking at tax returns all afternoon, waking up earlier than usual, and lack of hydration. I hope your day went better than mine.

Sunday, Feb. 06, 2005 - 12:42 a.m.

Speaking of International Core, the quote found on that webpage:

��Imagining the Self'� is a class in the International Core. It focuses on the importance of understanding how the external world influences who you are as a person. During the course, both students and professors were challenged to re-examine how they perceive themselves and how to shape our �future selves' in positive ways.�

cracks me up. When I mentioned taking this class to my mentor, she said, "Alice, you don't have any problems with exploring who you are."

I never regreted not taking that class. My classmates who did take that class told me the last assignment of the semester is to dress up as an object with which you identify. One classmate dressed up as trailmix, the other as a penis.

These two classmates of mine are very smart, congenial people, so I concluded that, well, this class must have some appealing aspects, not least of which is making yourself the center of the world and your study.

Life is already a free class on figuring out who the hell you are and where the hell you fit in in this world, not to mention universe, why pay upwards of $500 a credit for a class trying to condense what history has shown cannot be condensed?

Sunday, Feb. 06, 2005 - 12:29 a.m.

I have decided to create a theme for every month. The theme depends on what I feel like or in what I am interested. This article inspired my February theme.

In January 2002, I took a month-long class titled Community Development in Third-Word Countries, an International Core curriculum class at the university from which I graduated. I spent the first week of January on campus, discussing the five books I had to read over Christmas break and absorbing lectures on culture and history. The next three weeks I spent in Cuba with two teachers and 20 other students.

Cuba was my first international experience, beyond Canada, which doesn't count because my dad works with a Canadian and we drink Canadian beer. Cuba remains a dream of a memory. In the following month, I will blog about some of my stories and, with any luck, post some pictures of my trip. That should motivate me to actually scan those pictures. Ah, remember pre-digital cameras?

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