positives: Moved out of my dorm, never have to live in one again, successfully dealt with an episode of Twitterdrama (Twrama? We gotta find a name for that), went tanning, applying for jobs left and right like nobody’s bitch (and okay yes that is the wrong expression when jobs are involved, I don’t care).

negatives: Have to be apart from SO for a while, no good alcohol at home (must remedy), feeling very tired lately, gained a pound (now up to 100. V. bad).

More later – currently I’m at a very posh tennis club attending some silly charity event. Tanning, tennis, charity, drama… so when did my live become an episode of The OC?

This will be relatively short, but I haven’t blogged in a while and I need to get out of that before it becomes a habit. I have (somewhat) of an excuse, though — it’s finals week, which means I’ve been, um, doing everything but studying. Now, however, nine hours before the most important (and also last) exam I have, I simply don’t want to study any more.

So, a quick rundown of things over the past few days.

Positive: I went shopping Tuesday for the first time in what feels like ages. Online shopping is all well and good, but it’s nothing compared to the feeling of being waited on in a nice specialty store, no matter how pleasing the interface. Finals were stressing me out, so I went and bought something small to relax some. Oh, it was expensive, but who cares, I wanted to do something fun. And it’s not like I bought this or anything. (You really have to see it in the store to get this — it is like the approximate size of our Sun.)

Negative: The final I’m taking tomorrow is, in fact, a makeup exam. Why, you ask? Well… it would’ve been today, at the ungodly hour of seven thirty in the morning, but I kind of overslept.

I set four alarms on my Sidekick, but due to my sound profile not changing back over to loud until nine am every day, I didn’t hear a damn one. Fortunately I woke up in time to go and discuss it with my professor, who later emailed me (and, I find, five other students — a sizable chunk of the twenty person class) to allow me to make up the exam tomorrow. *checks clock* Uh… make that today.

So I guess it’s slightly positive, since I am going to be able to make it up, but trust me, “Oh fuck!” is not a phrase you want to be your first of the day. :/

I suppose I had better get back to studying — and packing.

Pop Vs Soda provides us with some statistics (and a really cool map) so we can easily see the geographic distribution of individuals who refer to carbonated beverages as “soda” vs those heathenspeople who call such things “pop.”

Looking at the map, one wonders what’s going on with New Mexico — and what exactly the “other” appelation that seems to have a tenacious hold there is.

Sadly I must disagree with the stated conclusion on the site, however — “soda” is the Right and True way, and all who say “pop” err greatly.

Today I got to experience a moment of awesomeness, merely by virute of having index cards on my person — and remembering that fact at the appropriate time, which is often the failing of convenient items. I’d come across the concept of the Hipster PDA (and indeed, who has not, if they’ve spent more than a few hours on the Internet?) before but hadn’t quite wanted to take the plunge and divest myself of all my lovely gadgetry in favor of such a simple solution. I had, however, tossed a handful of these awesome Post-It sortable cards into the back of my Filofax ‘just in case.’

(As it turns out, I’ve been using them quite a lot with said Filofax — they are perfect for project cards and support material, which, when no longer considered an ‘active’ project, can be moved quickly to the reference section of my Filofax or my files at home. But I digress.)

Onward with my tale. I stopped in at my current favorite local Starbucks, only to find that for whatever reason, a band had set up across from the counter and was playing — LOUDLY. (It’s not a freestanding store, but inside a building at my university.) There was a huge line of people, all of whom had to repeatedly shout their order to the frazzled-looking employees.

Hell, I thought to myself, first I have to wait in this huge line and then shout to make myself understood? ….Wait! No, I don’t!

You understand where this is going — I quickly produced a card, wrote down my order in the legible blocky print that I have cultivated for occasions where the matter cannot be trusted to my pretty, if illegible, cursive, and handed over my order that way.

The Starbucks employees, weary of deciphering shouted orders, and probably with splitting headaches from the loud music? Were delighted. Everyone in back of me? Also delighted, if only that my order took a lot less time than the others. Me? Well, I’m not a hPDA convert just yet, but I will admit, I love the versatility of the product.

My Boyfriend: “I’m hungry.”
Friend: “Me too.”
My Boyfriend: “Let’s get food.”
Me: “It’s raining.”
My Boyfriend: “I shall make the rain my bitch, and it will make me a sandwich. Two birds, one stone.”
My Friend: “…Yeah I was just going to use an umbrella.”

In the flurry of media content surrounding the shootings, there’s always room for items that surprise no one.

It’s the Information Age (…I cringed too); we have the ability to discover all sorts of minutiae on any number of newsworthy items.  Why, then, do the recent events at VA Tech – and the now-obligatory reaction to ferret out whatever details we can – make me uneasy?
Maybe it’s because of the lingering fear that whatever hobbies are found, whatever musical tastes scrutinized for violent themes, others who share these tastes – though not the mental illness of the shooter – will be tarred with the same brush.  I saw it happen after Columbine, when my high school instituted a restrictive dress code that banned, yes, trench coats, Marilyn Manson shirts, and hats (hats?).
With rumors already surfacing from various sources regarding the shooter’s interests (Counterstrike, naturally), can I be blamed for simultaneously feeling sorry for the victims and thinking, “There goes the neighborhood.  …Again”?
Better to simply feel for the victims, I think, than to cast blame on environmental factors that are unlikely to have been the primary cause.

Just a quick post for now, I need to get my thoughts together. Very shocking, especially for those living on campuses now — mine doesn’t have any sort of plan for this sort of horrible event, but I’m thinking that will change.

CNN coverage of the events.

My thoughts and prayers are with the families who lost loved ones today.

Man Jumps to Death Off Empire State Building (via Gothamist). Sad. Not to mention therapy-inducing for the poor guy who spotted the leg.

Apparently the building itself has been host to at least thirty suicides in its years of existence.

I’ve encountered a really strange point of view as regards academia lately — namely, that to be ’serious’ regarding something (an area of study, in this case), you can’t present yourself at the same time as being feminine.

On a predominantly female messageboard I’m involved with, the subject had come up yet again — people seemed to think that showing up to classes dressed nicely (okay, not clubwear-nicely, even I can see that is pushing it) meant you weren’t going to focus on the subject matter of said classes. So, presenting a feminine exterior equals a frivolous interior?

I had to know more — these were women, surely they understood that they could be serious about coursework without having to present themselves in a predominantly masculine or slobby manner? A few people did agree with me, which was reassuring, but the majority seemed to hold the viewpoint that “college is for seriousness” — which was apparently totally incompatible with dressing nicely.

I like to dress nicely for my classes. I shower, and I make sure that I haven’t chosen unfortunate color combinations, and, yes, I do accessorize. This, far from making me not want to focus on my classes, in fact makes me concentrate harder on what’s being taught. If I showed up unshowered, in sweatpants or what have you, I think I’d be focusing more on “I’m so tired” or “I smell” than on the lesson.

I’m joking, a little, but I’ve found that I cannot work to my full potential while dressed like a slob — that extra twenty minutes of effort in the morning allows my subconscious to make the distinction between “oh I am so tired” just-out-of-bed time and “time to focus like a normal person” time. More power to those of us who can work that way, but it just doesn’t work for me. And I’m a little tired of being brushed off as ‘not really serious about the class’ because of it — after all, who is waking up early to make the effort to be fully alert in class here?

So much for that. I also find that I like to present myself in a more feminine, put-together manner in other aspects of my life — including and not limited to gaming or geekiness. Part of it is that I greatly enjoy being a walking contradiction, shocking the predominantly-male geek groups I tend to hang out with (until they get used to it, of course). My cellphone rings the Star Wars main theme — everyone’s looking around all, ‘Where’s the geek?’ and then it’s me. This is the sort of thing I thrive on; let others do as they may, but I’m going to continue dressing however I want.

And trust me, I take my major — and my geekery — damned seriously.