What is the deal with drug movies? Honestly, I don't get it. "Ooh, so wonderful and artistic! So break through! So sad! So amazing."
I tried watching Requiem for a Dream today and I think I made it about a third of the way through it before I had to shut it off. It was just too annoying and too "Ooh, this is amazing stuff." Figures too, all the hype being from the artsy-fartsy type of people I know. I have nothing against them at all but sometimes I'd rather stick with my generic films.
I did make it through Role Models without letting stereotyping and such killing me too much. It was pretty funny. I love the props they give to LARPing. Freaking bad ass and hilarious. Now I want to go out and do it. I like that they still allow the nerdy kid to keep his identity as opposed to having him completely transform as is typical in those films. His LARPing made him awesome. Goooo good films.
I attempted to watch Alexander and had to stop 1) for bad acting 2) complete historical inaccuracy. Alexander was NOT GREEK! HE WAS MACEDONIA! Not the same thing. He just spread the Hellenistic culture with him like the virus it was. I know my Alexander. Historians don't play dat.

I surprised myself yesterday. My mom randomly quizzed me and to my own awe I can still name the four stomachs of the goat )that I learned about when I was like...eight). For your information: rumen, masum, oba-masum, and reticulum (I almost missed that one). YEah boi! Haha, I'm so nerdy.

So I'm done with the semester, thank goodness. It was a hard one. I am pretty confident that I failed my stats class, my first ever in my whole academic career. I walked out of my final about to have a small heart attack but then I decided I should just celebrate instead. My GPA is going to be shitty this semester but in some way it equals to me because I was at my happiest this semester. I had relatively few freak outs and even the ones I did have didn't completely reach me. I was very smiley and just...mmm, positive, rather content, kind of engaged in my world more. My body only hurt very minimally the entire semester. I had one cold. Any other wounds or pains were consenting on account of self-defense class.

In other ways I have been very discontent. There were days when my professors and my world left me wanting to yell because they just were not giving me the answers. If a professor is going to say that "50% of you are only here because of social forces and 'real learning' can't happen here" then I want to here what the alternative is. I have been debating those things intensely. I have been debating about why I feel such an intense sense of apathy.

The answer I believe I am finding is that simply I am starting to grow really tired of school. I am feeling a driving desire to get out and go work and engage in "reality." I'm tired of being trapped inside and only ever reading and writing as well. One night I was near exploding and just got out of my room and walked around campus trying to reconnect with my senses and feel the cold wind on my skin. I felt boxed in and I lamented at how hard it is to be free in the age. It is so much harder to just pick up and go with so many more ties holding you down. It isn't just an adult thing either. I mean a hundred years or so ago if someone were living in rural New York what would they have tying them down? A farm? Maybe a family? Maybe ignorance but at least they could start walking and discover. There was primarily just an obligation to work and survive. Now there are things like bills, education, technology, friends, etc...all these things chaining you to where and what you are. Sometimes I think that the curse of being a historian is knowing how it has been and wishing you could go back.
I'm not really sure that I was a person made for this age.

My last week of school was quite good. I made friends with this guy I will call Jew Matt (since I know about four Matts at my college). I worked a lot in the library and he spent about five straight days in there. When his ass was going numb in the seat he would stand up and come to the desk to talk to me as he waited for life to come back to his butt. We had some hilarious conversations. (This is too much information but he mentioned anal sex expecting me to have a "Ew! Anal is gross!" reaction and I didn't so much as flinch. It was very amusing to see the brief second of shock pass over his face when I just continued talking.) Shooting the shit is a lot of fun and half the time I thought I was going to fall out of my chair. He inducted me in to man-society (though I was demoted a little because I haven't seen Shawshank Redemption).

The last night I was at school I took a wander around my building and found a bunch of friends in a lounge. Jew Matt, Kathleen, Jenna, Nora, and Moaning Matt(he complains a lot) and I all ended up planning a Nerf gun fight we're going to have when we get back next semester and then told poop stories. We recounted our worst bathroom experiences in graphic detail.
"I can't believe we're talking about this."
-continue on anyway-
Moaning Matt: "Dude, these girls leave their door open so they can hear me shitting our suite bathroom and I can hear them giving commentary. You know what, sometimes I have explosive diaherra, okay?"
Me: "Next time take a fan, set it outside the bathroom and aim it toward them so they'll learn to close their door."
Moaning Matt: "Ahahaha! YES!"
We lectured Moaning Matt about listening to the surge sound the showers make before they spew freezing cold or boiling hot water suddenly, "And then you jump in to a corner of the stall so it doesn't hit you."
Jew Matt: "I jump out of the shower. It's really funny because there will be girls there. I do it on purpose now."
-girls blink at him- "No..."
I really did end up falling over that night, legs flailing and everything.

It happened a few times in lunch conversations too when I decided to start kitty mewing at my friend. "Mew. Mew." She looked at me funny. "I don't cat call, I kitty call."

I've decided that I want to learn to play Magic cards. I sat in on a game and this guy Jamie kept to breaking out in to random accents when he was in "Evil Overlord, I am about to pwn you" mode. Freaking hilarious. My friend Nicole (who I think is my adopted 2012-er despite the fact that she was the bane of my existence in self-defense last fall) wants another girl to play with so it's not all guys. It should be an amusing time once regular games are started.

Next semester I am attempting to reduce number of clubs I am in. This semester I was listed in:
Pirates vs. Ninjas
The Sycamore (a magazine)
Sexuality and Gender Activists (aka SAGA)
Sex Collective
Campus Greens
Student Committee of Inclusive and Intercultural Excellence (SCIIE, but no one could ever remember such a long name)
Um...there might have been another one. I can't remember. I pretty much dropped Greens and I didn't reapply to be secretary of the Sycamore because I might actually want to enter the contests and I can't do that a secretary. I may try writing for them as a staff writer too. Dunno. That's optional at the moment.
Pirates vs. Ninjas is a dying club that I don't have the heart to resurrect. I'm sticking with it purely for a two and half year old dream of publicly "killing" my friend Paul in a stage fight. My friend Tina and I will be choreographing the fight and I am adamant that Paul has the script written in the early stages the semester so that the fights can be then be written and practiced until they are as believable as possible. I am technically the "Captain" now so it's within my rights to give orders.
I will be adding Sword Fighting Club next semester and might join Activism Symposium. I'm a strong candidate to be one of the next Sex Collective co-chairs in my senior year and possibly SAGA (more hesitant there since leading three clubs in my senior year is pushing it). I am a strong leader but at some point I need to limit myself.

I will also still be a student supervisor at the library. It hasn't meant much this semester except the staff knowing I am reliable and more students coming to me when they have questions. It also prompts me to feel I have more responsibility to be pissed off when books are misshelved on the carts (prompting me to post as my facebook status thus week: "Dear persons working at the library: if you do not know your ABCs or numerical order or how to read you probably should not be working here. I'm going to bust a nut if I see books misshelved on the trucks again. Don't be lazy, thanks."). Yeah bitches, I'm Conan the Librarian ! Have to thank my uncle for that one.

So my plans for January are to study anatomy (with a focus on muscles and pressure points), look in to topics that might be a potential history thesis, weave, walk every day provided it isn't too friggin' cold (and I'm not sick like I am now), practice martial arts, make plans for clubs I am, read some good fiction, attempt to lure my muse back out and begin drawing again.

Oooh and I almost forgot! I got the best Christmas present ever on Tuesday! My friend Heather gave me a red oak quarter staff with a dragon carving on it. I WAS SO FREAKING EXCITED! I thanked her endlessly. Really. SOMEONE GOT ME A WEAPON FOR CHRISTMAS! Also a good walking stick. I was literally skipping through the dining hall that night. People kept admiring the staff and I was shining with pride. (On a side note, our archives have weapons in theme apparently? The newest member of the library staff, whose project is organizing the archives over break, has promised to show them to me when I get back. I told her to look for the mummy hand as well "We have a mummy hand?!" "Yes we do." -grin-)

And that concludes one dang long entry.
Peace.
~Lo