20 Days into 2008

Many things. Many things to say.

Semester two is looking great. Stressful, but happier in a way. Less frustration. More ease in my comfort with timing and figuring out which classes can be ignored more than others. It is also nice that I have learned to take time off on the weekends to just go out and explore beyond the campus.

Getting off campus...
...is amazing. The bus system here is great! All the Vancouverites rag on it, but if they only knew Edmonton's ghetto havoc ETS, they would know the greatness they have. The bus drivers are amazingly nice as they haven't been accosted by belligerent junior high kids with too much eye liner or oversized hoodies who think they are all that. These bus drivers will literally stop and pick you up if it is raining, even if the bus isn't headed where you are. They will drop you off at the closest stop to get you where you need to be, just so you don't get soaked. Happened to me so I know this fo shizzle!

Karla and I usually find ourselves out and about on the bus system sometime during the weekends. A new word for our bus adventures is that they are "weekend-ary". This was at first confused with (and quite rightly so) thinking she said that "[our] bus rides seem to be wheat and dairy". While we have made trips to Safeway to buy items including wheat and dairy, I didn't think she meant those purchases were our defining weekend activities, so I put what she had said together quickly after my initial foible. It's now a joke in which we actually say "wheat and dairy" in relation to weekend activities.

(Weekend) Activities...
...are looking better than semester one. For example, I have signed up for Girl's Flag Football which is a Totem Park-wide activity that will have games on Sunday mornings. I am excited! Our floor only has 6 people signed up but apparently we will be absorbing the four girls from 6th who signed up, so I'm sure we'll make a great team to represent Dene. I'm really hoping my soccer skills transfer. Such skills involve being shifty and deceptively fast and from what I have heard, these things should help me out on the permafrost mud-field.

Weekday extracurricular activities now include volunteering at the afterschool program at Strathcona Community Centre. I am excited to the max! I signed up for the UBC Trek Learning Exchange Program and attending an orientation on Saturday morning. There was a small group of mainly first year students who were interested in helping out the community, and we all got to pick which place we wished to volunteer at for the minimum of four months, 1-4 hours a week. I will be helpin' out the kids on Mondays from 3-6 pm doing various activities. I thought I would start out somewhere with smaller kids and next year I will go somewhere I can academically help or supervise. But either way, I am really excited because I am so PASSIONATE about helping out. I would really like to be a teacher in some capacity. The positive feeling people talk about when they explain how rewarding teaching is...I can feel that.

I am also feeling...

• Music! I've rediscovered my passion for sound! For a while I was stuck in a soley Carrie Underwood phase which, do not get me wrong, was great, but now I am branching out and re-entering the world of Other Artists. Among them: Sara Barielles (sounds like Fiona Apple), Belle and Sebastian, Kimya Dawson, The Kinks, Satyajit Ray, and Rilo Kiley (they have finally won me over after a longstanding one-sided anger stand-off). I am so glad Dennis the Menace (my iPod) decided to stop acting like his namesake. No more random battery drains!
  
• Red nailpolish*. The deep blood colour. It's a hard shade to find and I am still on the prowl. I will find my bottle, though. And for under $10 because I am no sucker.
• Sleeping! After my little episode throughout the Christmas break, it is nice to get a full eight hours. There's nothing like three weeks of insomnia to make you appreciate steady hours of rest.
  
• French. Maryse Duggan automatically makes this semester is great. She is more like a teacher than a professor. This means she is not some fool who thinks they are awesome because they have 200 people looking at them with tears in their eyes. Concept: she actually cares.
  
• Watching my roommate stress eat. It's just funny.

'Tis now the late hour of 10:50 and said roommate is getting ready for bed which means I should probably being doing so as well. I have come to the conclusion that living with a roommate is something akin to a mother dealing with a newborn: you have to start being stereo with the other person in order to get stuff done. Studying, for example. If I am studying, it is my feeling that she should also be doing so. Sleeping, as well. If one of us has fallen asleep for the night and the other lumbers in 4 hours later being loud, it doesn't make for the best situation.

With these great thoughts, I shall bid all 4 of this blog's readers bon nuit.
--C

*The obligatory but necessary/true statement: I was onto this red nail polish thing way before that site or anyone else knew the happs. Just so y'all know.