FRIDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Changed the doohicky a bit, can you tell?? So proud, gonna learn this stuff eventally! Gonna go to the dentist first. Had a scary dream that we went and they were really scary. There was a big round secretary post in the middle and it was really hard to get their attention to get in to see a doctor. And I asked one whether they would take my insurance, because I think everyone else there didn't, and when she saw that I have Aetena, or whatever it's called, she flipped out and called me a rich girl like I was slumming it or something. It was scary. Does this mean that I am scared to go to the dentist, it's been...a really long time. So long in fact, that all I really remember well is the cabinent where they kept all the stickers. Maybe a little candy too, but I mostly remember the stickers.

I wonder if we're going to play today.

Well, gotta go see.

Morbid thoughts on the brain today, probably not a good sign. Would people miss me if I died in some horrific accident? Not a good sign at all. Maybe I shouldn't be able to hide in my room all day.

Gender issues. Basically, boys are dumb, that's what I got out of the chapter. Especially the hair guy, how much dumber can you get, he obviously has no idea about anything. Reading about that stuff is interesting but depressing. I like to read about it in other cultures, I can make judgements or whatever on them, but when it's about my own culture, it's just scary because I can't make judgements because I'm part of the system. Do I giggle? Do I laugh? We seem to think that around girls we laugh but around boys we giggle, which is so depressing because it's not a planned thing. It's so much a part of us that we don't even realize we're doing it. Did Scarlet O'Hara realize the way she was treating boys all the time? Maybe she didn't. We don't seem to, though we are nowhere on the level with her. Darn! Should have been taking notes! Why do all the movies show us that boys are weak and manipulatable? Or maybe it is showing that women are connivers. But it wouldn't be so easy for women to be conniving if the boys weren't so weak. I wonder if that works in the real world.

I could definitely be evil!

Quick, quick...yesterday was sort of a nice change of pace, I got off campus, there were people there that I didn't know, though not many 'cause there were billions of Soka people, and I wasn't doing homework. So it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. I can only say this because I got done a lot earlier than was said and was allowed to leave. I feel kinda bad for the people who had to stay, but apparently I didn't feel bad enough to stay. The woman who was in charge of us asked the person who was in charge of them if they needed us, and they must have said no, because I'm sure they would have held on to us if they needed us.

It was like the movie that shows all about industry and alienation of the workers. We were like the people doing the same thing over and over again in the noisy, crowded factory. At least they got to sit down. Poor Ann, she's so short that she had to work to get her arms up to the table and so they hurt now. The tables were pretty much the right height for me to just hang them there and sift stuff. I never really thought about all the work that goes behind the scenes, I just figured they were all run through a machine, I didn't think they would have to be sorted first, and then these people do this and so forth and so on. Wow, what did they do when they had to count every ballot by hand, and for all the different categories too! Wow, that must have been even worse and there would definitely not be next day results!!

Must run to be advised!

It's weird, normally I like to go to class and I would just rather not do the homework, but lately, I feel like I would just rather do the reading or the writing or whatever and not go to class. Does that mean I'm enjoying learning more, or just that I'm lazy and I don't want to leave this room? Maybe a little of both. I need to get invloved in something, like I have said a million-and-one times. And I think it needs to be something off campus, which makes it all the harder. Doesn't seem to be able to be SGI, that would just kill me, not make me want to branch out or whatever the purpose of the exercise would be. Maybe it would be good to get out there though, to try to change things...but it's not the physical stuff that's going on, mostly, it's the whole atmosphere of non-learning.

Maybe I'll just go to sleep and wake up in 50 years.

It's weird, I don't feel like I exist on weekends. Now that it's Monday, I can feel like a regular person again. I have no motivation on the weekends, maybe it's when I have no plans that I feel like I don't exist. Therefore, we are what we do? Okay, weird.

I hate people who hate biasness but are just as bias themselves! Can we say "everyone on this campus"!?!?! We pick and choose what we want to believe, whatever paints the picture the way we want to see it. So far, we have two editorials that I know of about articles in the newspaper. Both bring up excellent points as to where the student writer went wrong, both were written by staff or faculty. Students didn't even question the articles because they agreed with the basic sentiments behind them. I admit that I didn't argue either (in my defense, I don't know if I read them). How could those articles have been allowed to go to print with such obvious bias? I have heard it said that it was a good newspaper because it generated so much out-cry, but that's not the type of uproar we need. All the comments we about mistakes that the paper made, not newfound information that made everyone, students, staff, and faculty, think about things. They thought about things alright, how the writers mishandled the information they got. I am associated with the newspaper; I don't want to be associated with this type of paper.

Yesterday...what did I do yesterday? I found out that I am useless when if comes to soliciting quotes from people I don't know, though apparently I'm pretty good at it with people that I do know as evidenced by last year, not this year. I found out that I belong to a cult. All in a days work. I can't believe the organization down here, it's so "California." I don't think I can handle it, and then when I go back to Seattle, there are new people and it's a little different. So in a way, I don't belong in either place. Being an SUA student, especially first class, just makes it all the more difficult. But sometimes I like the recognition, but I still don't want to be treated differently because of it. Wait, sometimes I do, but only when I don't get it. Am I just making this problem for myself? Well duh, but... My practice is suffering sooo much, but I don't want to talk to any of the leaders down here about it. I don't know if I can talk to SGI leaders at all because I'm being so critical of the SGI and all they will tell me is that I don't understand or I'm deluding myself or something like that. Maybe not, but going to the leaders of the organization that you have problems with seems inherently silly to me. Unless I have specific suggestions I guess. When I talked to a couple people in Seattle, they seemed willing to listen, but I wasn't so willing to talk openly. I don't want to be a whiner and I want to have everything objective, not all from my own distorted lens. I know everything is from my distorted lens, but I want it to be as undistorted as possible, yeah right. Must be objective, and not get angry when people tell me I'm not being objective, but how do they know? I'm the only one that knows.

Wow, I barely knew it was Halloween. When I was a kid, it was a big countdown and then the day of was really exciting. Yesterday I had to remind people it was Halloween. It really is a Soka bubble, and I think I have created my own as well; I don't really include the freshmen in my bubble... I think I forget that a lot of them exist, though there are some that pretty much fall into the First Class category.

I'M DONE WITH MY MIDTERMS! I think.

I don't feel accepted...maybe. I think I'm making my own bubble because I feel outside of other peoples' bubbles or the big one that pervades this place. I didn't feel like that last year, what changed, beside adding another 87 students?? Even some people from last year seem more distant. Everyone is busier this year, including myself, even though I'm barely doing any clubs at all. I'm more distant, I only communicate with people on the most superficial level.

My haunted house would include:

A woman in a room breaks a nail, blames the observers, and rushes them with some instrument of distruction.

A couple in the corner making out, you think, but the woman is really dead and the man has blood in his mouth

Screaming coming from an open door, an bloodied man comes to the door, looks around and closes it

Someone looking like a "customer" being chased by a monster. Possibly a shill in the group, gets chased and "killed"

A confused dead person/ghost looking for help from the observer, randomly wandering the hall??

Stick them in a coffin, a small, dark, confined room

A child in a room playing with dolls and taking them apart

A man dancing with a dead woman

A doll maker making live people dolls, à la Jeepers Creepers. i.e. sewing on a person

Person in the middle of a massacre asking "What have I done?" Wants help from observer, is bloody

A person butchering a live person screaming for help

A teacher teaching to a class of students that he has killed

The inevitable dead Prom Queen

An old-fashioned room with a record playing, with scary pitcures on the walls, but nobody in it

A normal looking man passes group and takes his place in a scene above (or below?) Screaming butcheree or sewed person?

I'm much more into the psychological scare than just the boo scare, of course, those are important to. Hmmm, shall we say morbid thoughts on the brain??

Being busy gives me something to focus on. As long as I have something that I can put myself into, I'm fine. But is that running away, or avoiding the issue. Are they really issues, excuse me Gail troubles if I can forget them so easily. All I need to do is have my mind taken somewhere else. If they were that troubling, wouldn't they consume my mind? Oh, and I do have a mind that gets consumed!! And then there are the times that I'm thinking about this stuff and it gets worse. So then, why do I think about it? Wouldn't it just be smarter not to? Maybe it could fester, but sometimes I think I am really not think about my problems, not even in the back of my mind. Shouldn't you be able to tell? I would be so much easier if we could just forget about it and put our minds of something else and it would go away. Hey, I wish that worked with homework as well.

Hmmm, I wonder if I'm going to be cold today?? It is such a good thing that Buffy is a rerun tonight!! I think I can get a good chunk of the dum dum dum duuummm midterm done if I really work at it, I just have to decipher my notes! Ahhhh. But I do think that was a good way to do it, instead of just jumping in headfirst...maybe I can use that in the future too. I just have to remember not to completely fall apart after this week. If I do no work on the other stuff, will have more weeks like this one and last. And that would suck, especially because finals would be there too. Ohh, the thought just makes me want to go to bed and not come out for a really long time!! Don't forget to print out the Sociology Proposal and to send it to the partners. That would suck to forget that!! Wow, that seems to be my word of the blog.

Me status? I haven't had a chance to think about myself because I have so much work, but don't worry, I'll be just as screwed up come Monday. I really really liked Whitman. Maybe I should write a Song of Myself, ehh, but it would probably be almost like his. Hmmmm, maybe, I can see lines and lines of cafeteria observation, hehe.

I'm so scared to use my computer! The screen is all funked up and I hope it doesn't get worse. But I think it is, now the blue shows up as purple. I just don't think that's normal. I thought last week was hectic, but this week should be fun!! But I may be blowing things out of proportion. I have a bunch of notes for AmEx. I am just worried that I don't have enough for his essays. Other than that, there is really nothing new to complain about, and that's not really new. If I had more time, I might write something, but I just don't. I read some Whitman last night for AmEx on Thursday and I really liked it!! It was so much fun, he just talked about random things, and about people. He asked really seemingly dumb questions that were very deep. The poem is life, random, inconsequential and deep all at the same time. He just is, was, and it doesn't matter what anyone else does or thinks, he is still him and I am still me. Well, doesn't it seem like I have the beginnings of a response paper here.

I must not shut down. I think I had been doing so well too! When I get frustrated or I don't know what is going on, I just shut down. That doesn't help anyone, especially myself. I think I eventually run out of patience with people or the whole situation. Last night was so frustrating because the person running the show had no idea how to do what she wanted, just that it was what she wanted. Grrr So then it was left up to other people to decide how to do it, but if they didn't do it right...well then. So then she was all harried because we kept having to go to her for help on what to do, because only she knew. She complains that she is so busy, but the only reason she is is because she has to do everything herself. The problem is that I can see myself doing the exact same thing. I have to micro-manage every little detail because someone else might do it wrong. I've never run anything like last night before, but I can see myself acting the same way as her. scary Must not shut down when frustrated!

I think the way I'm feeling is the same as when you walk into a room and then you forget why you are there. I seem to have no purpose at of right now. All I do is homework, or not, sleep, and eat. There is nothing special that I am doing. I also have a really short attention span when it comes to finding purposes. Like this geek stuff, I like to think that I just got really busy, and I did, but I am not thinking about it 24 hours a day anymore. I think it got really hard. Hopefully when the next week is over and I have some time to breath, I can focus on that again. I fear trying something too hard because I might not be good at it. I tell myself that I can never be very good and so I don't try. Either that, or I tell myself that it is easy and that I would be good at it, but I don't want to prove myself wrong. Must study.

Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!! OH MY GOSH! Hmm, guess I'm going to have to skip collecting tonight. Is it possible to study while making brownies? Hope someone will make them with me!! AHHHHHH, I'm just going to have to leave the AmEx study group early, ahhhhhh, but I need quotes from them. But it's a take home test and Soc isn't. At least that one I won't need to quote all over the place. And ‚©‚ñ‚¶ test, at least that one won't kill me! Wow, it's not as if I have a lot of homework, just projects and tests. All great fun.

So I wonder what I should write my AmEx paper on. Need to have a proposal by tomorrow...Religion, Minority Rights, Immigration, or perspective on the US...I don't know!! I need something that is possible to reasearch but not so boring that I keel over halfway through writing the thing. Immigration doesn't particularly interest me, and I'm thinking that I wouldn't find a new twist on Minority Rights, so that leaves Religion or Perspectives. Perspectives could be interesting, but is it overdone?? What about the US policy of isolation, how that broke, and how it's coming back together. I think I could do that. Talk about how Isolationism helped and hindered the economy and the people, what forced them to come out and how that has helped and hindered the economy, why some people want to become more isolationist again and what they think that will accomplish. What I don't understand is how people want to be isolationist in that they don't want to deal with certain people or whatever, and then they can turn right around and put their noses in other people's business. Okay, I think that is what I'm going to do.

Okay, we can handle this. There was nothing about yesterday that was hard. I wonder if it's just about the stress of being graded. I hate being graded. When I get a less than perfect grade, I think that I have somehow failed in some way, that never again will I receive a good grade. Quite stupid actually. So is my method, then, that of an overachiever? Just do more so that they cannot penalize you for anything. Who knows?

All I want to do is sleep. Why does lying on a bed feel so good. Even if you're not sleeping, but you are doing nothing. To me, doing nothing is the best thing in the world. If I never had to eat or drink, I could just sleep all day long.

Yup, I really have nothing to say. Except that I must write poem with the line. I attempted once, but it was really bad!

What if the eyes are the windows to the soul?
What do you see when you look into mine?
What do you see when you look in the mirror?
What if the eyes are the mirror of your soul?

Wow, going to have to just STOP and...maybe later

Monday again, why does it seem like it's always Monday? My life is an eternal wait for the weekend and an eternal disappointment as Monday comes for another round. It's not even as if my weeks are that hard, I have a lot of time in the morning to do whatever I need to. Maybe I am still suffering from highschool-itis. It's weird, I enjoy certain aspects of the week, like, I can't wait until Tuesday at 8, or swimming class on Monday and Wednesday, but as a whole, I don't enjoy the week. I think I must not look at things in their whole, but in their pieces. The same goes for the weekend. Monday isn't so bad. I have the morning to finish up the homework that I was too lazy to do the night before. Bio is really long, but not hard and most of the time it's kind of interesting. Japanese is Japanese, but swimming class is a lot of fun. That is the extent of my day, why do I worry about it and dread it so? Tuesday, Soc and American Experience, eh. Like the Buffy watching, can fall into a world that is not my own and everything is finished up in an hour. Wednesday, same as Monday. Thurday, same as Tuesday, but no Buffy, plus Japanese. Friday is a good day! Almost like a weekend, I like it. See, my week is not that strenuous, I really do have a lot of free time, I just don't get to use it because I am either sleeping or complaining that I don't have enough time. It's all in the attitute. Time Management again. I will conquer you!! I have lists, they will find your heart and stab at it!!

So, what do you do when you don't want to talk to anybody? It feels like all I want to do lately is talk to the people I always talk to. That could stem from me being annoyed with the entire world, but that has been on the downside lately, thank goodness. I think I am getting more homework done because of it, that's the bright side, could it just be coming from a feeling that I need to get my homework done?? Every time I do something that is not homework oriented, I feel guilty, and it sucks! All I want to do is be able to play around and not feel like I'm the biggest slacker there ever was. There are parts of me that do not involve homework, but lately I feel like I've been pushing them to the background. I want to do well in school, but I want to be a complete person as well. I want to be able to hang out with people while not doing homework! Time management has always been something that I am sooooooo bad at, that is another thing I have been trying to work on, but it seems like it takes up so much time!! So, I feel like I shouldn't talk to people and that I don't really even want to. I still see the freshmen as different and I think I'm even pushing some of the first class away, or if not pushing, then ignoring. There are so many people that I don't see very often. I thought I went through this at the beginning of last year, this whole social thing, but apparently I'm doing it again. I must end this cycle. It comes from my own insecurities, so I just have to end those. HA, easier said than done. Oh man, gotta chant then I suppose.

Dag nab it!! It read the durned book!! Now I'm all thinking about time and stuff again. I wonder why it depresses me so much. There is a total lesson to be learned from that book and I get it and I agree with it, but there is a little part of me that says, "whoa, living forever would be Great!" I guess the topic of whether I should drink or not is probably never going to come up, but I can still think about it as a hypothetical question. If I did live forever, that would mean that there wouldn't have to be any rush as to anything I did. If we lived longer, would we still get the same amount of stuff done, but only do it slower? Or if we had shorter lives, would we manage to squeeze it all in? So in that vein, someone who lived forever wouldn't get anything done, because they would always have more time in which to finish it. That sucks. There goes my whole, why I would want to live forever argument. sigh Why are we, I in particular, so afraid of dying? Because we don't know what happens afterward? It doesn't really matter, I think, because it's not like we'll be conscious of our deadness. I think some people are afraid of that, that they'll still be them, but that it will be all dark or something of the sort. Death is a funny thing, without it, there wouldn't be life. All cliché, I know, but it's true. Like Tuck said in the book, the stream keeps on flowing and makes a circle. If the end of the circle stopped, then the beginning wouldn't be able to happen. Like those time predicaments where it couldn't happen beause it never could have happened the first time, or something. unh

Do all great minds think alike?? I guess it depends on what you mean by think. Is it the thinking process or the end result of this thinking? Because if it is supposed to the be the end result, or the solution, that these great minds come up with, they definitely don't all think alike. It also depends on what you think is a great mind. Maybe you think that only the people who think the same things as you are the ones with the great minds. In that case, well, yeah because you are defining who they are and so controlling the outcomes. People who think alike aren't really worth anything to each other anyway. What's the point of spending all your time with some you agree with 100%? These is nothing to be gained for either person except that they will feel good because someone agrees with them. That has no value in the real world.

I think people here fall into this trap all the time. Because there are a lot of people in the world who disagree with them and who really don't seem to be changing their minds, the find solitude in a place where most people think alike. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated and the state of the world. There is nothing wrong with sometimes feeling that you can't change any minds. The point is to keep trying! Sure, they can come to campus every once in a while and just say what they think and have everyone agree and they can feel better, but if all they do is stay here so that noone will disagress with them, they are hiding from the world. In the end, they are having no effect and their point of view is pointless, they may as well be apathetic to the whole situation.

Then, in reverse, I think that people find someone or something that they like or want to believe and then do so. They might have no idea what it is really about, but they are told that it is a good thing, a Democratic thing, a liberal thing, that the Republicans don't like it, and so on and so forth. Because they are supposed to think a certain way, they do. That is not thinking for yourself, and exactly what they say those others are doing. Even when they are told this, when they read some great literary of the past such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, they agree and think that is what they are doing. Wrong

I think this is what frustrates me the most about this campus. I have been having the feeling that everything is useless, and if it all continues like this, it is all useless. All the graduates from this school will get out into the world where everyone will stop agreeing with them and they will be lost, they won't know how to agrue...oh, excuse me dialogue with them about what they really think. They may even be lost as to what to think; it's so easy to know what you are supposed to think. Then this school will have meant nothing and been a large pit into which thousands of people threw millions of dollars.

But! We must not give up. There can be a solution if people will just start thinking for themselves. One way could be to bring on campus a bunch of Republicans, whom everyone on this campus must disagree with on every principle, to show the people here that they are not devil-creatures trying to bring about the apocalypse. Maybe they might even gasp find something in common

So, what is life all about? What differentiates the people who are happy and who aren't? Is there one standard that everyone has, or is it all just arbitrary? Maybe we are taught to be happy or sad, unknowingly, by our parents. In the grand scheme of things, what is the purpose of happy and sad, is there a use for these emotions? Would things every get done if everyone was depressed all the time? Is it happiness that drives people ultimately, do they even think about that? With something so seemingly important to our lives and out productivity, why is it that happiness is such a fragile thing? One day it is here and the next it's gone. Or is that true happiness? How can happiness be fake? It can be faked to the outer world, but it's harder to fake inside, unless you're just deluding yourself...In out little complex computer that we can a brain, how is it that we are all so similar but so different, can't we just pick one????

I feel happy learning, but when it takes a classroom turn, I get turned off for some reason. I like researching, but I hate having to write it all down. It's not like that's hard, I classify and connect them all in my head, or else I wouldn't understand anything, but getting it all down on paper just seems so tedious. I learn for myself, not so that I can show others that I am learning. Do I feel like they don't trust that I've learned...I don't want them to think that I haven't learned. Papers are such an odd thing, because they are barely ever your own creation. There is always outside help in grammer or thoughts.

Am I becoming a recluse?? All I want to do is sit in my room and talk to certain people. I don't NOT want to talk to others, but I don't have the same sense of contentment when I do. This is bad, what do I do? Become more social?? Ack, scary.