The Match Runner

.....after saying I was going to about two months ago.

So without further ado, let's jump right in.

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Now this picture is very exciting.  It's a door.  BUT note the dharma logo on the front.  Yes, my room is, in fact, a dharma station.  Oh and that little lion on the floor i've had since i was super little. 

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If I was on cribs and I was doing this, I'd have to say "now this is where all the babies are made" or some type of sexual thing because that always happens on cribs.  However, since no action happens here and since it's not cribs, I'm just going to say it's my bed.  Yes, I do like koalas.  I've had the one on my bed since seventh grade and GUILTY CONFESSION: I can't sleep without it.  I know im a baby.  The koala on the left is from Darren.  I love it.

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This is also horribly exciting: THE DESK.  Every now and then I sit down and work.  Ummmmm yeah.  Obviously there's a bulletin board there. Ummmm ok. next picture.

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The dresser.  It's pretty new.  If you were to look on the side on the left you'd notice a giant chunk of wood missing.  The day darren took me down to buy it at IKEA we came back to assemble it and he dropped the box against our quartz fireplace.  But you don't notice it and it works, so it's okay.

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I'm the kind of person that's paranoid about being late.  You know, the kind that sets five alarms for everything?  Yeah, that's me.  Lately though my plans have been backfiring.  Yesterday I woke up at 7:50 for church at 8:00am.  I use my phone as my alarm, and it was nowhere to be found.  I had put it on my nightstand the night before.  Today, I was supposed to wake up at 6 but my alarm never went off again.  I woke up too late to leave for class, so I had to leave later for the break.  Stupid alarms!

This is my last week in french, i'm pretty much ecstatic.  I can't wait for it to be over so i can sleep a bunch before school starts again.

I feel like I've been writing in this thing a lot, but it must not appear that way because I just realized a lot of them are hidden entries.  So I figure it's time for a little update.

Darren came back and it was SOOO good to see him, I love that boy and he's my best friend so if he's gone for awhile I miss him.

While he was gone I started that 4 week class that I wrote about before.  It's pretty crazy, we're covering 16 week material in 4 weeks, so like a weeks worth of material in one day.  It's intense and sometimes it's hard to cram everything in my brain and then learn new stuff immediately, but on the other hand it's nice to have information still fresh in your mind when you need it.  So yeah I've been keeping busy mostly with school, 4 hours in the morning followed by a couple hours of lab if i need it, and then lotsa homework.  I feel immersed in french.  Someone was talking to me in English and I answered in French because i felt like i was in class.  OH and another thing, so many people have been falling asleep in the class (she doesn't notice sometimes) because it's so dang early and boring.  During the break we pretty much all go get coffee asap so we can stay awake, i think we're becoming dependent on it.

On Tuesday I got some really sad news from a good friend of mine from CLU.  His dad passed away super suddenly from a heart attack, and it's still hard to believe.  I wish i knew what to do for those who experience these situations.  I can have the potential to care too much , and then when i try to make things better and I realize that there's nothing I can do, I can really spiral downhill.  I think it's great that he is surrounded by so many people who care about him though.  I just wish there was something I could do.

I have really been looking forward to sleeping in this weekend because i havent been sleeping well, so thats what im off to do!

Sooo I'm pretty excited for a couple of reason:

1.  I've got 1 out of 4 weeks down for my French class

annnddd

2.  Darren comes home tomorrow.

About number 1: his past week I discovered that I don't think I can ever be a good morning person.  This kind of sucks because I always feel horrible when i sleep in on weekends because I feel like i missed a big chunk of the day.  Oh well!  I averaged about 5 hours a day of french (including the lab and stuff) and then 2-3 hours of homework in the night.  I started to think and breathe french, it was kind of scary.  Actually I just started to think french, I don't know if you can actually breathe it. 

The best thing about this class is that I have an excuse to go to Starbucks or Jamba Juice every morning. Yesss!

And number 2:

After a week of non stop french and homework, I miss spending time with Darren considering he's pretty much my best friend/boyfriend.  So I'm excited to see him again, and I'm glad he had fun even though I'm still pretty jealous.

Allllsooooo: I GOT A BURRITO BLANKET GUYS!

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1.  Le Cours de Francais
Soooooo at CLU you need to have two college semesters of a foreign language.  Ok, no biggie, I took semestre un (fancy schmancy talk for "semester 1".........) back at palomar and thought that I would take my second semester at palomar as well, seeing that i knew the teacher's style and learned fairly well with it.  Obviously I go to CLU for the school year, so i had to take French 102 during the summer.

So, it's a 4 week class.  Monday through friday from 8am-12pm, plus 16 hours of lab.  I started this morning.  I got up at about 5:20 this morning (EW) and took a shower/got ready.  I have to leave at around 7 because it takes awhile to get there.  In today's case, i left a bit earlier so that I could grab  a delicious jamba juice smoothie before  class considering I didn't sleep much the night before and needed a lil boost.  OH MY GOSH BAD IDEA. I was shaking in my boots (or in this case, my sudoku shoes) for a good hour into class.

Finally, 12:00 came!!!!!! HOORAH! By this time I was embarrassed because my stomach was growling in class so the first thing i did was walk back to my car where my heavenly peanut  butter and spun honey sandwich was packed (Oh, and sun chips.  I love sun chips.)  I parked relatively far because I figure hey why not, I can get the exercise.  I saw a package on my passengers seat which i had put there this morning.  I told Darren that I would help him sell his old textbooks on amazon since I was putting mine up anyways.  So far, I've sold one of my books, and around 4 of his.  I'm a little bitter about this, but i'll try not to let it show.  So I had to run to the post office and send off one of HIS books....*ahem*....and then i had to run to the bank, and finally i enjoyed a delicious sandwich.  All of this may seem petty to you, but i was pretty sad that my sandwich eating activity was delayed a good 30 minutes!

I went back to palomar and did the lab for 1h20 minutes, so i had 5h20 minutes of french today.  JOY.

2.  Flight of the Conchords

Recently  I discovered my new favorite show.  Yes my friends, I have been exposed to the greatness that is FotC (all the cool hardcore fans write it like that soooo yeah). Basically, it's a show about 2 New Zealand guys (who play themselves) who move to New York to try to make it big in the music industry.  In reality, they actually are a band called flight of the conchords and they are pretty big, but in the show they're pretty horrible.  Anyways, it's great.  I needed a show to watch since i dont have arrested development around anymore.  WATCH IT NOW.

Flight of the Conchords - The Complete First Season

You know, I love digg, i really do.  However, sometimes I think that many of the members of diggs are teenage/college guys with abnormally large libidos who sit in front of their computers all day playing WoW or watching videos that are probably "not safe for work".  Some of the articles are great and very informative, some are political, some are odd (my favorite being the "top 10" stuff).  However, sometimes the abnormally large libido gets in the way and they submit stories that I really don't care for.  Actually, they really piss me off.  I go there for cool stuff, not gross stuff.  Some articles are like "the top 10 sexiest nerds" and those seem to get comments from the boys which are OF COURSE bursting at the seams with sexual innuendos to prove masculinity.  It's almost as if when a guy sees the title something goes on in their brain -- "oh, this is a somewhat sexual article and i am a man hence i am supposed to like sexual things, and therefore i should make a sexual joke towards this article to bond with other men".  that is seriously what it seems like sometimes.  Boys make me laugh.

Anyways, an example of a time when one of these stories pissed me off was today.  The story was called "Why Women Need To Embrace Porn".  Once I saw that title i laughed.  There seem to be relatively few females on digg so the men seemed to love this article.  I didn't bother reading the article because I don't care for that type of thing and I knew i would get more pissed, but i did read some of the comments.  It seemed like a pow-wow of men coming together admitting they love porn and how they hate that women/girlfriends/wives are so uptight about it and that ALL women who disagree with porn are actually insecure......Hahahahhahahaha.  If you know me, you probably know how i feel about this stuff.  I happen to hate porn, but not because i'm insecure.  See, I think that sex is something that should be really special and private between two people.  I think it should be an expression of love.  To me, porn takes this image of something sacred and beautiful and kind of does a 180 with it.  It becomes something aggressive and lustful and really degrades it, in my opinion.  I think it's harmful for kids because if they start watching it at a fairly young age and make it a habit then they might build up (whether they like it or not) very different expectations of what it actually is.

So in that way, I think porn is unhealthy.  I also think it has the potential to promote somewhat selfish behaviors too. especially when you consider what usually accompanies porn viewing.  I would worry that a habit of pleasuring yourself to that kind of material might lead to associating sex with pleasing yourself.  I think that although pleasure on both sides should be good, sex should be something that you do because you love the other person, not because you want to feel good yourself.  Again, I don't know, this is just a thought.

So, today I made gnocchi.  WEIRDEST THING EVER.  They look like pasta shells, but they're pretty much potatoes.  So you're expecting one thing and then WHAM! THATS NOT PASTA!  I made a easy cream butter sauce and threw in some cheese/garlic/basil and stuff.  If it was pasta, it would have been awesome.  And if you're a gnocchi fan, you would have liked it too.  The texture is just wayyyy too weird and I'm gonna have to get used to it.  I also made some awesome bars. delicious!

So yesterday we went to a padres game, which was really fun.  I thought we were going to lose, but then in one inning the padres broke the tie by getting like 4 people in, so it was about 6 to 2 i think.  It was awesome.  A very hot day though.  I also got stung by a bee in the ear. AGAIN.  it's always my right ear, i have no idea why.

Sometimes I go through rough patches.  These rough patches coincidentally happen to come along once a month.  I also happen to hate them.  I wish men would understand what it's like to experience these rough patches.  Sure, physically it sucks but I don't really care, you get over that part.  It's the emotional part that knocks me dead everytime. Oh, hormones.  It's amazing how sad we can feel when situationally everything can be okay.  But our hormones tell us differently.  It shoots some of us to extremes and puts the limbic system in limbo.  It's so unfair.  When these patches come along sometimes all I need is a shoulder to cry on and someone to hug me.  I don't understand how it works, how these extremes can be so easily diminished when the boyfriend holds me.  I wish that could happen right now.  The way we react to human contact is so incredible.

Havasu wasn't that good.  I was excited when I shouldnt have been.  I wish that I could have been out there more and was able to do more stuff.  I went as a favor for my youth pastor, to stay with his wife and 4 month old baby in a hotel.  He told me we would be able to come out and hang out with everyone for awhile during the daytime, but this wasn't true.  I didnt get burned.  which was good.  But I also only got to hang out with the people at Havasu for about 3-4 hours in total for the 3 days i was there.  Back in the hotel room, all I could do was read.  It's hard staying in a room reading when you want to go out where your friends are jumping off cliffs and having fun and swimming in the 110 degree heat.
 

/end complaining.

Today I was SUPPOSED to wake up at 6:30, but sometimes I wake up and turn off my alarm when I'm in one of those states where you're awake but you're not....now I just sound like I'm on drugs.  Anyways, So I woke up at 7 something and got ready for church.  I went and saw Brandon, Michelle, Nelson, Leslie, and a bunch of other cool people I've been missing.  Then Cory snuck up behind me and picked me up off the ground.  It was good to see all of them.  Church was good, and afterwards they needed help with a car wash for raising money to go to Africa, so I helped out with that too. 

    Sporadic car washes like this are the feared enemy of my porcelain skin.  It's all pretty and white and untouched and then WHAMO SUN!  So now I'm sunburned.  Luckily, I am prepared for sun-related devastations such as this and have a cabinet of aloe and menthol spray to sooth the burn.

    Apparently I'm also going to Havasu next week.  I'm going for free, which is awesome, and I'm staying in a hotel helping Michelle take care of the baby.  Hopefully that will minimize the burnage of my skin. Ahh I hate baby poop.

    So last Wednesday me and Darren went to balboa park to see the Pompeii exhibit.  Pretty cool, they brought in a lot of artifacts and body casts which were pretty interesting to see.  Afterwards we walked around the art museum and then ate lunch.  It's right next to the SD airport, so we got to see all the planes come in too (though i hate planes, it helps to see them all landing safely...maybe I'm not a hopeless plane case).  After that we experienced the joy of downtown San Diego traffic and ended up in a parking garage.  We walked to Horton Plaza and hung around there for awhile because Indiana Jones didn't start until like 2 hours later.  We got starbucks and went into some shady toy store that had a bunch of board games but there were no employees in there.  It was weird.  Sam Goody's was cool though.  Darren ended up getting Blues Brothers for 15 bucks and we watched it later that night (a really long movie, but lighthearted and I laughed).  Indiana was good, I wasn't expecting anything spectacular, I was just hoping that it would be a fun movie that's enjoyable to watch.  And it was.
    LOST FINALE WAS AMAZING OH MY GOSH SHOOT GUYS, FIST FIGHTS, ISLAND MOVING, 500 LB C4 EXPLOSIONS, APPARITIONS, COFFIN MAN, HOW THE HECK ARE YOU GETTING BACK TO THE ISLAND AHHHHHH!!!!!???That pretty much sums it up.
   
Tomorrow is our 2 1/2 year anniversary.  GO US. We considered last Wednesday our anniversary date, so tomorrow we are just going to Yogurt Palace (NO HATING ALLOWED) for lunch.  I love that boy and I am excited for all the other years ahead.  He makes me smile like no one else can.  awwww

Now I'm going to go play the game of the year edition of Oblivion that I just bought.  I can't stop playing it.  It's so addicting!