Hello, random lurkers! In future, I'm afraid you'll have to find someone else to lurk; I'm friends-locking this journal. No banner, no fanfare; just friends-locking. This is the last public entry. If you know me or have known me in real life and would like to be on my friends list, comment and I'll add you; if you don't know me in real life, sorry, but no can do.

*insert big colorful banner here*

So...

...I am seriously considering dropping Spanish.

( Allow me to organize my thoughts. )

...Thoughts? Anyone?

"Dear Bess,
I've read your essay and think it is very good. May I ask for your permission to show it as a model in class?

With best wishes,
RH"

Besst is rocking her Sappho seminar. :D

I've decided to give you guys a quotepost, since I meant to on Sunday and then I forgot. Here goes!

"Really, distance is not a factor when it comes to testicles."
Lee

"The tallest free-standing structure in the world!"
"The second one is in my pants."
"Your *mom* is in my pants."
"My dad just made a your-mom joke...WRONG ON SO MANY LEVELS!!"
Dad, John, Dad, me

"You're gonna get shards of glass in your eyes."
"Better than testicles."
Qwerty, Katelyn (...you don't want to know about that conversation. XD)

"Life is a lot better when you put things on your head."
Alex (I gave her a quizzical look when she was sitting with a sofa cushion balanced on her head)

"I would carry a sword if it were socially acceptable."
Emily Prime

"What are you doing??"
"I pulled a balloon out of your ear, bitch!"
Kat, Vasa

"This will end in tears from the one remaining eye."
Will

"Why does it have a sausage instead of a mouth??"
Will

"Let's play volleyball!"
"I'll be the net!"
Milena (I think?), Will

"So what if I wanna smell like fairies, okay?"
Will

XD

A few from home, and many many from the Reunion. :D (And for once my Reunion quotes are almost entirely different from Emily's, for some reason, so don't skip them if you've already seen hers.)

( quotes )

There you have it! :D

( It's that time of year again. )

There you have it! I might post a proper, questionful meme later if I get around to it.

I think I finally realized it when we were walking back from the grocery store in the snowy twilight singing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing" the night we got here. It's a short Christmas season this year...I spent so much of December trying without success to get into the spirit. But when we got here, it finally clicked into place. I think it was Mom that did it.

This is the first year that I've spent so much of the Christmas season away from home, or away from Mom. I never realized the extent to which parents create Christmas for their children. It didn't feel like Christmas at Dad's house, because despite the lights on the porch and the Christmas music playing, he hadn't *made* it Christmas. Mom always works so hard to bring it to us, and I knew that, but I never realized how important it was. There were the concrete things, like having all the right foods in the house and dedicating a day to decoration...and we always set aside family time for watching the classic movies and reading stories and drinking hot cocoa by the fire. Those things are important. But even if Dad had done those things, it wouldn't quite have been Christmas. There's something more to it. There's an indefinable spirit of festivity and childhood that is essential to a true understanding of Christmas as I was raised to understand it. And that's why it didn't quite feel like Christmas until I got here and watched my mom, who is so unhappy and bitter and lost lately, who could so easily forget it all and become hard, take such free and natural joy in making Christmas.

Now, I don't necessarily mean to blame Dad...he wasn't raised as we were, and he isn't used to "making Christmas" because he never had us with him until Christmas Day. And it isn't his responsibility or anyone else's to make me feel Christmas; as a rather eclectic and unlikely set of friends made me understand a few days ago, a lot of it is just my own ability to forget the crankiness and "honor Christmas in my heart" as Scrooge promises to do.

Still, there's something especially wonderful and easy about just feeling it, because there's a fire and songs and presents and Mom. There's something lovely about not having to remind myself how lucky I am.

So Merry Christmas, one and all! My spirit is late in coming, but come it has, and I intend to keep it!

Before the predicted Christmas Break quoteflood begins, here are the last few from the first semester at UofT!

"Maybe we could eat a homeless man?"
Vasa (congratulations, Vasa, you made it in! XD)

"I think I was a lobster in a past life."
Qwerty (crossing the first two fingers of her hands and snapping them with an interested air)

"I was like, I can't eat out anywhere, and I want some *cheese*."
Kat (on trying to go vegan)

"For someone who's not very deep, I'm incredibly not shallow."
"Are you talking about your boobs again, Maral?"
Maral, Milena

"Shoot it. Shoot it in the head."
"I think it only has half a head."
Kat, Alex (on the ailing bug found in Alex's lettuce)

"We were like, is that the subway in the sky?"
Qwerty

*speaking of a hypothetical residential neighborhood called Wildside*
"Evil Knievel, were he alive to see it, would tremble."
"And then attempt to jump over it."
me, Soupy (the rare IM!quote...I LOL'd)

"This person has pringles as lips and she would make a better mother than me??"
Qwerty

"I'm not a big fan of eggnog...what is nog?"
Katelyn

The next quotes you see shall be from family members and Cultists! w00t!

I have nothing to do for fifteen minutes before I go to dance class, except write down Spanish vocabulary, and who wants to do that for fifteen minutes? So I think I'll ramble about the collective woes of my comrades.

It's midterm season, and a cloud hangs over Soulerin House. Dinner is dotted with near breakdowns; lunch sees listless forks stirring stir-fry. A knock on the door is answered by a woebegone face with red marks where it hit the corner of a textbook in a moment of despair. (This actually happened to me. I'm serious.) Unfortunate students ask the gods why they felt the need to come to university instead of being a hairdresser or a hobo. And as for the life sci kids...they're ready to defenestrate themselves or commit seppuku on their well-sharpened pencils.

As for me...I will probably do badly on my Spanish and anthro tests, and my mythology midterm might not go so well either. But I am mostly a calm observer of the madness, watching with a mixture of amusement and sympathy as my hallmates prepare for suicide and other methods of escape. Who knows? Maybe in the end I'll join the nihilistic throng. But for now, I wear my trademark unruffled feathers with pride.

( Don't you worry about what's on your mind )

Apart from the random "Manly Men" line, that didn't work out so badly.

The "Be Pete Wentz" Poetry Meme

01. Put your music player on shuffle
02. The first lines of twenty songs = a poem; the first line of the twenty-first song is the title.

( Ice )

Believe it or not, this was the best of three tries. My itunes fails at this.
And of *course* I got the freaking vampire song. *sigh*

This Thanksgiving is undeniably strange...my house will be empty in three days, my stepmother's father just died, and here I am in Canada, where it's just another Thursday. I can't seem to connect with people here in all the ways I'd like to, and my connections to people at home are stretching fast; I have friends whom I'd like to help, and I can't seem to find the words to do it right. I feel like I've gotten shallow somehow...I don't feel as deeply involved with any of the things that are important to me. Maybe I've been unconsciously making room for some new passions or connections that I expected to make here, and nothing has stepped up to fill the gap.

So I guess Thanksgiving this year is an opportunity to reevaluate the way I'm living here, and bring the things I love into fuller consciousness. I love my family, and that in itself is unusual. I love the Cult, however sporadic our contact may have been lately. I love my friends here, and I hope we'll get closer as the year goes on. I love dancing. I love this city, and that's something I don't think about enough, just the fact that I'm *here* and it's exciting. I'm on my way to a degree in something that interests me and engages me. Maybe my connections are weakening, but I know it's in my power to strengthen them. Maybe I feel a little lost right now, but I know I'm on the right track. I just need to stop looking at the ground.

Reflections aside, I have a paper due in 6 hours and I barely know what I'm writing about...so Thanksgiving must give way, for the moment. But I'll return to it later; I might even recognize the occasion with a pie.

Quotes! I has them! And now you can has!

"My bottom tittle is a bat!"
Qwerty (look up the word 'tittle')

"No matter how badly you're doing in calculus, you can always succeed in poo-kicking."
Deborah (the farmer in my math class XD)

"Well, I can't take your disease-juice!"
Crazy Kool (aka Emily 2 aka my travel buddy)

"My imagination does not allow me to use olives as trees."
Qwerty (food-art)

"Robarts: Does it look like a llama from the sky, too?"
Qwerty

"You don't jam things to make jam."
"You jam things to make babies."
Katelyn, Alex

"So she had a sauna, but it wasn't actually a sauna, it was just a horse breathing on her..."
Ratha

"Well, she doesn't do much to *stop* the berry."
"IT'S A BERRY!!"
Liat, Alejandro (a mythological figure was raped by a berry)

"This one wakes you up, this one chills you out, and this one healths your kick."
Qwerty

"Oh, an onjoing goke! I *love* onjoing gokes!"
Crazy Kool

"John, can we just feed you straight lard? So you'll be a better pillow?"
Emily Prime

"Can you just run with the thought and pretend it's a sneaker?"
Crazy Kool

Son todos. :)

My roommate wants me to go get 8 inches of my hair cut off at a special Christmas Locks of Love event.

Eight inches.

Am I a horrible person? Honestly, am I? Every time I tell someone I *don't* want to give my hair to Locks of Love, they treat me like I'm disgustingly selfish. Sometimes they even directly call me selfish (as my roommate just did). So...am I a horrible person?

Okay, so if you put it in the worst way possible, it goes like this: I'm very vain of my hair and I would rather keep it myself, for no particular reason other than vanity, than give it to children with cancer who don't have any hair of their own.

So yes. I'm selfish. I've known this for a while, actually, though I'm not sure it's something other people always realize...or maybe they do and I'm just oblivious.

But to put it in another way, in the defensive way that pops up whenever someone makes this accusation...is it really the end of the world if cancer patients have to wear wigs made of fake hair instead of real hair? I mean...it's still a wig, right? They still have cancer, right? Does it make *that* much of a difference?

The answer to which, of course, is: "Does it make that much of a difference if your hair falls just above your shoulders instead of halfway down your back?" Which it doesn't. So we're back to me being selfish. And being stingy with cancer patients, which is about as low on the morality scale as you get.

But here's the thing: No one yells at girls who wear their hair short. No one yells at guys who wear *their* hair short. If you are someone who would rather wear your hair short, no one hounds you to grow it out long so you can cut it and give it to cancer patients. But because I choose to wear my hair long, I get chastised for not cutting it off? Is it me, or is that unfair?

And...my hair is *me.* I'm attached to it. It's a part of my physical appearance that happens to have a lot to do with my self-image. I would miss it if I cut it off. And "Well, it went to a good cause" would honestly be pretty cold comfort.

Which probably brings us back to me being selfish.

*sigh* And this entry is pointless, because I'm never actually going to become a better person and cut off my hair. I'm just going to sit here and feel guilty every time someone mentions it.

A brief overview for those who would otherwise be confused by some of these answers: This year, my mom is moving to her brother's house at the beginning of December, so we won't have Christmas at the house I grew up in. So some of these answers are confusing, because I have to answer them for what we always *used* to do, what we do at Dad's house, and what we might end up doing at my uncle's house.
( A 50 Question Christmas Survey )

( I miss dancing. )

Anyway. I miss dancing.

"Canary in the coal mine" isn't puzzling at all, if you know a little bit about coal-mining; back in the old days before animal rights, they used canaries to tell if the air was safe. If the canaries died, they got out because that meant they would die too.

"Waitress in the weeds" is anyone's guess.