I just got back from striking Little Shop. It's finally coming to the end. The show itself was really good, but working on it was unnecessarily stressful this entire semester. I'm just sitting alone in my room now, after having passed up three opportunities to go out. I want to get some work done. It's kind of lonely though.

Thanksgiving was nice. Everyone came home and I didn't see any of my friends, but I was pretty okay about that. Bang bought me a winter coat which is nice, because it started snowing today. Being home was just so nice and relaxing though. He keeps buying me stuff and calling me on the phone. It's a nice gesture, but also kind of weird at the same time. But we actually had a serious conversation when I was home about what I'm going to do after college, and about internships and stuff.

So my parents said that they'd let me go abroad. I've been getting really excited, even though I won't be going for at least a year from now. I'm definitely going to Paris. I found out that if I go through a SUNY school, it's super cheap.

I also signed a lease for a house last week. 15 Whitman St! Seven of us are going to be living there, and it's an amazing house and I'm excited.

This is long overdue, but the classes I'm taking next semester hopefully are: Chem 2, French 4, Neurobiology, and Intro to Research. And I applied to be a tutor. Next semester is going to be so much more manageable...

Meh, this entire post makes me feel like I'm growing up or something. I don't like it at all.

today was... good. it's weird that i'm weirded out by that. i got a chance to go to the post office which i've been putting off for a while, i got tickets to see 'the imaginary invalid', got some brisk, i found out i did well on my genetics test, and i got four points back on a test i didn't do so well on. just as i was leaving my professor's office, he said "i don't know if this has come up at all, but i wanted to let you know that we really enjoy having you in the class, and we've noticed that you've been participating and really trying hard." it was really nice. also i just got a check in the mail from my brother for a random amount, and when i called him, he told me it was the amount of my GPA.

-to your boyfriend, three times in a week
-the dining hall
-in front of your professor
-in poetry class
-walking back to your dorm room at 11am

this is just me being a huge snob but i don't understand how people are pre-med and have completely non-science majors. it's like saying 'i don't like medicine/science enough to major in it, but i also don't like my own major enough to stick with it through grad school'. i may be below average in my classes, but at least i'm passionate about what i want to do.

back to work.

i don't think i can handle the stress anymore. or at least, i'm not doing a very good job of it. last night, sawyer just held me for a while while i cried, and he was trying to help me breathe. i just got really anxious about this test, and i can't handle how much weight one test can have. sometimes i just sit there and stare at the question and immediately give up because i can't do it no matter how much i've studied. that's probably the worst part. i've been writing my poetry assignments at midnight the night before they're due. i feel like such a fake. next semester i'm only taking four courses. no more costume design. i just want to go home and eat my mom's noodles.

for halloween, i dressed up as winnie the pooh with clothes i already own, and went to a party with some people. i realized the morning after that i didn't even get any candy which is lame.

So I am officially a Biology major! My advisor is one of my professors from last semester, and he's really nice. It's so relieving to know that someone is going to be helping me along my course choices and stuff.

Saturday was my birthday, but also Parent's weekend. My parents didn't come to visit, so I spent most of the day just doing homework and then at night we went to some comedy shows on campus. Since his mom was here on my birthday, Sawyer and I had my birthday-day last weekend, and he took me to the aquarium (!!) and dinner. On friday night, there was a blackout on campus. that was fun. anyways, we went to this really good vietnamese restaurant in chinatown, and then we saw "new york i love you" and it was better than "paris je t'aime". my birthday was very nice this year. Sawyer gave me the best present. All week he told me he'd been "studying japanese with ezra" when he'd actually been going to the crafts center and taking pictures. he cut out big letters spelling "happy birthday linda" and then had each of my friends pose in pictures while holding each letter around difference parts of campus. and then he put all the pictures together on a posterboard. i'm pretty sure i cried for about ten minutes after he gave it to me. it made me feel like this: http://cuteoverload.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/picture-16.jpg?w=382&h=506

yesterday it snowed. and not just a little snow. a lot of snow. but today it's pretty nice out. wtf boston.

i can't decide if the best part about yesterday was waking up at 7:30am after going to bed at 2:30am because my neighbors think it's cool to play guitar until 2am with their door wide open, taking two practice chemistry exams and realizing they're way harder than i originally thought and SOMEHOW having to assume that when he says "excess air" he actually means "02", or when i was finishing my Genetics reading and realized I haven't done any practice tests or even any studying for that matter even though the test is in less than two days, or that I need to write a poem by tomorrow, or that my costume designs were due 5 days ago and i'm still not finished... but really, i have to say that the cherry on top of my day was when lawrence took me to the dark room (to show me a gel of double stranded RNA transcribed from the chitin-acetylase domain of a cDNA gene from c. elegans. okay, so that part was cool) and i unknowingly touched the door handle, which had ethidium bromide on it. which is an intercalating agent. which causes cancer.

today has been okay though. i will take my chem test at 7, then study for genetics. and on thursday it will be over. well, except for an oral presentation, french test, and costume designing. and reading and problem sets...

Lina, my roommate, only likes to reads biographies. She also reads lumberjack jokes found on the internet aloud to me and we both laugh really hard at them. We haven't had any conflicts and I can't really imagine anything serious ever happening. I can study in my room while she's here. I can go to sleep with the lights off. It's amazing.

Sawyer typed "I LOVE YOU" on the graphing calculator I was using last night so that the next time I used it, I would see it. And he got out of his band practice early to talk to me tonight because I was having another one of my academic meltdowns. For his birthday, I got him a Nikon FM2, and we napped in the Commons.

So I was able to solve most of my Genetics problem set. That is a big deal. Evolutionary Ecology actually has a normal (not huge science lecture) class size. Poetry is awesome and my professor is awesome and his assignments are awesome and I really can't think of any more adjectives right now. French kind of sucks because I can't speak French.

O-Shows were also awesome and if I can find pictures at any point, I will post them. I'd kind of like a couple weeks to take a break from costumes, but I think I have to start designing Little Shop of Horrors soon.

Tomorrow I'm going to the gym and then Fall Ball later at night. On Saturday, I'm auditioning for Traveling Treasure Trunk, a children's theatre group. My point being that, life is good at the moment and I am grateful.

my mom and dad brought me to school on sunday morning. they helped me unpack and get settled into my room, which i really like. there's so much space to store things. except i live above a dumpster and i'm too weak to close the window by myself. so i'm breathing in some nice dumpster smells right now.

the first night, the cast and crew went out to dinner, and then later, we were invited to a "partY" which just turned out to be a group of people watching the real world. yesterday, elly and i went to costume stock and started fittings. it's nice to finally be putting things together, but overall it was an incredibly tiring day. i hate it when actors say "i would never wear this" or "this isn't what my character would wear" becauseeeee they really don't know. anyways, at night, lina, theresa, and i went to davis square to get ice cream. then i listened to all the obnoxious freshmen talk loudly in the hallway and fell asleep at midnight.

but yeah, i am happy to be back. i will be happier by the end of this week when more things have gotten done and sawyer gets here and i don't have to walk all the way uphill to eat. tufts actually renovated some stuff, like the atm machines and the rez and the sinks in the dressing room, which is cool.

now i'm going to email some people about getting a job, and go do more fittings.

I just got home from Illinois. I can't tell if I'm tired from the 14 hour car ride, or from only having eaten beef jerky all day.

( things i did this summer )

i'm glad you're so disappointed in me, mom. more so than you are in anybody else, apparently. and also, thank you for bringing this up at dinner, when no one was even talking about anything related.

so i'm finally done living in nyc. my last day of volunteering was good. i shadowed the doctors again and they explained some x-rays to me, and i saw a patient with a really severe case of scoliosis. i talked to one of the residents, dimitri, about why he had chosen to go into that field, and he said that he just fell in love with it, and also that it allows him to have a good lifestyle. they all seemed pretty happy and most of the time in between seeing patients was spent laughing. i was introduced to one of the attending doctors who was so enthusiastic about medicine and offered to give me advice or recommendations if i ever need it.

so i'm in springfield, illinois visiting Bang with my family now. he lives in this very quiet, suburbian development, and there's not much in the town. surprisingly though, i really like it. i never thought i'd say this, but i don't think i would mind living in the suburbs, as long as it's close to a metropolitan city. i think i always associated the suburbs with "settling", which isn't necessarily true. anyways, i just hang around the house during the day and play with their dog, and late at night, we play video games.

14 days until tufts!!! holy crap.

this very unsettling thing keeps happening where i can't look at people normally, and it's for a weird reason, too. i keep thinking of like, chimpanzees, and how we're just evolved forms of very animal-like creatures, but somehow we identify one another as human and not animal. i think of our dangling limbs and the placement of our eyes and noses and then everything starts looking really strange, the way words don't look like words when you stare at them for too long. these body parts are made for practicality, but we've dressed them with eyeshadow and shoes (and not just one kind of shoe, but millions and millions of shoes). and how do people form interests in baseball or cooking or shopping? what is the point of these things, and how many people go through their entire lives not questioning it? shit. this is extremely silly, and i'm not trying to be deep or anything. i'm really hoping this doesn't last long though because it's annoying. it only really bothered me once when i was thinking of sawyer and how he is experiencing the world through his eyes only, just like i am. which made me feel like we had very limited views of each other's thoughts or whatever.

i was able to shadow some med students and residents at the hospital today. it was nice to see them both as people and as doctors. they were genuinely kind and professional to me and the patients, but i could also imagine them in a frat. it was funny. i think they may have thought that i wanted to shadow them for the medical information, but that's not it at all. i have years to learn medical jargon. i just want to see how they talk to the patients, if they actually care, if they're happy at their jobs, and if it is fulfilling. i really don't give a shit about money, except for paying off college loans. however, i have to admit that being called "doctor" would be neat. one of the med students saw his name written on a whiteboard with "dr." and got all excited. he was like "wait.. that has to say 'mr.', right?" and then he got embarrassed and erased it. he was kind of dreamy. he looked like a young patrick dempsey. also, on the wall of the office was a paper with a little cartoon and the caption reading "Spine Guys people girls ladies"

after that, sawyer came to see me for the day because apparently we can't go for very long without seeing one another. it was lovely. we had italian ice, smoothies, falafel, cupcakes, candy, and sandwiches. fatties.

dr. lou vella was telling me about detox methods and obesity and told me to look up 'leptin' when i got the chance. so i looked up the wikipedia page. anyways:

"Lung surfactant activity

In fetal lung leptin is induced in the alveolar interstitial fibroblasts ("lipofibroblasts") by the action of PTHrP secreted by formative alveolar epithelium (endoderm) under moderate stretch. The leptin from the mesenchyme in turn acts back on the epithelium at the leptin receptor carried in the alveolar type II pneumocytes and induces surfactant expression which is one of the main functions of these type II pneumocytes."

I actually understand all of that!

It's 7pm, and this is what i've eaten so far.. or, How I know I'm pmsing.

toast, french fries, piece of cantalope, fruit roll up, fruit by the foot, skittles, two scrambled eggs, spoonful of haagendaaz ice cream, cashews. still hungry.

this past week was great. some friends came and we all hung out in new york. the first night everyone was here, we made dinner at ann's house in brooklyn. chicken, grilled veggies, and coorain made delicious biscuits and scones. the next day we went to the beach. it wasn't ideal weather but it was still fun and not crowded at all. it rained real hard once we got back into the city, so we went separate ways that night. the next morning was the brooklyn museum, then we ate at the shake shack, then lina left. sawyer, coorain, and i ended up falling asleep in central park at one point, and then elly left to go see her uncle and i never saw her again. we finally found a mexican italian ice vendor which made me very happy. later that night, coorain and ann came over to the apartment and we all watched "everything is illuminated", which is a great movie. the next day was pickle day. everyone was gone by that point so sawyer and i went to buy pickles and watched "500 days of summer" which was good but not great. then we went grocery shopping and made dinner. the next and last day was jamba juice day. we got jamba juice and went to the m&m store and were being touristy in times square.

( Read more... )

in other news, lou vella, who is this chiropractor i interviewed with like a month ago, just gave me a job for the next two weeks i'll be here. he's going to pay me to scan old binders of health articles onto his computer. so that's pretty sweet i guess.

two things i will probably always hate about tufts: the doors to carmichael dining hall, and their financial aid.

When I got to the Trenton train station, Sawyer was waiting for me in front of his car in a suit holding a sign that said "Le", bahah. Then we drove to this venue for a show that his band, Pompeii & the Ashes, were playing in. They were 10x better live than on their cd. Seriously really good music. www.myspace.com/pompeiiandtheashes

The next day, we went for a drive to this little place called New Hope, with shops and restaurants and stuff. Then we drove some more and got lost in some farm-y areas. Then I watched his band practice for four hours... that was cool. Then the next day we walked and got ice cream from an ice cream truck and then went to one of the band member's houses for a family party, where they performed again... which was also cool, because I was neither a band nor family member. Then this morning before I left, we watched MTV for a much longer time than should be permitted, walked around a park, and shared a pickle which we got from a barrel and it was delicious and probably the best decision we've made as a couple.

I took lots of pictures which I will get developed soon. I also bought a different zoom lens last week from this Italian guy on Craigslist. I met him in front of Penn Plaza. He rode a bike and had an orange backpack and his name was Filippo. Anyhoo, I really love the lens and it was only $40, plus he gave me two filters.

Volunteering has been okay. I don't really do anything except make charts, write some things down, and occasionally run blood samples up to the lab. I'm also usually at the receiving end of both the employees' and patients' complaints. I've learned some things though, mostly about the inefficiency of the healthcare system. I'm sure that working in such a stressful environment has had its toll on the employees (mostly the ones working in registration and non-medical areas) but it's still upsetting to see patients treated coldly. Also it's just ridiculous that this guy experiencing intense pain had to wait an hour just to get a room, and then another half hour while they figured out if his insurance would cover the visit. The nurses have been very nice though. One of them was telling me about which doctors she refers patients to.. that she always gives the names of young doctors who are just starting their own practice, which doctors are reassuring towards patients, and which are elitist. It was refreshing to hear.

poop. i miss my dad. i was just on the phone with him and he always asks me these really detailed questions like what are you going to do at the hospital? are you going to follow the doctors and push the IV thing around? did you eat yet? what are you eating? how's the beef going to be cooked? isn't food expensive down there? i asked him if he was lonely and he said, i'm not lonely, i just miss you.

when he was talking to me about jobs/working, he told me to "take it easy". hearing him say things like that always makes me feel better, more so than anyone else. i remember at the beginning of the semester, he told me to "be patient", too. he's a big ol softy. i've learned that he can't really be mean or put on a tough facade for a long period of time. in 8th grade, he used to ask me if i felt like an outsider and then he'd tell me that he was still proud of me and that it would be okay.

also i submitted a thing to www.mydadisafob.com and my dad is on there now! it's the one with the statue of liberty.

I went to Pennsylvania this weekend to see Sawyer. It went like this:

Friday: I got there around 2, and the first stop we made was Wawa for lunch, which is this local super convenience store that everybody there loves. Then we went to Yardley Ice House, where we got free water ice (italian ice?) because Sawyer's friend was working. We went for a short walk down the street; it was quiet and nice. Afterwards, we went back to his house. The area he lives in is about as suburban as it gets.. which I thought I never liked, but it was actually really nice. I guess I just don't like Utica. We just hung around his house for a while, had dinner, and later on, went to his friend Eric's house and sat in the backyard around a fire with music playing and making smores. A couple more people came and they were all very friendly, but it was still a little bit awkward because they're a really tight group of friends and I didn't really know how to jump into things. I don't have anything like that anymore, so I don't have a basis for comparison. We went in the basement later and watched Eric's brother play Zelda for a while. We got back around 1am and went to bed, and Sawyer left to sleep on the couch at 4:30 because his mom didn't know we'd be sleeping in the same room. (like in Blankets.) He was supposed to come back at 6:30 once she left for work, but he overslept and didn't come back until 9, haha. Then we were hungry so he got us cereal and we ate in bed.

Saturday: Slept/stayed in bed until 2, then went for a bike ride along the canal. I think we rode 8-10 miles in all, and we were definitely pooped by the end. Anyways, we rode to this huge field and laid around and I took some photos with the new (actually used) zoom lens I bought. At around 7, we went to his aunt's house, where we had dinner and everyone set off fireworks they had bought. It was kind of the same situation the night before, with the teeny bit of awkwardness, but it was still nice. Then we went back to his house and watched The Terminal, but I think I started to fall asleep before we finished it. We went to sleep, and he left at 4:30 like the night before, but this time, he came back on time.

Today: Got up at 1, and then couldn't think of anything to do. It was a beautiful day, so we finally just sat in his backyard in lawn chairs and watched the grass. Like old people. Then we hung around some more and then we left at 5:30 and then I got on a train and now I'm back in NYC. I can only describe what I feel as annoyed. I still don't have a job, and combined with the heat and crowdedness of new york, I feel like I'm at a standstill. I almost want to give up and go back to Utica, but I know I don't want that either. I don't even know if I can be happy anywhere for a long period of time. I just want school to start again. I honestly wouldn't mind it if I had to go back to Tufts tomorrow.