Not even a card

The wee hours of our 6th anniversary are dwindling away, and I'm sad to say that Rod has said 'Happy Anniversary' a few times, but no formal recognition otherwise.

Last night we reserved the hotel for Cancún, and that's great because our money is going towards Mexico, but really, is it too much to spend $5 on a card? I did it. I bought a card. I gave it to him, and got a thank you and a kiss in return. The last time he did this, he went out and blew $400 to make up for it. A card is not asking a lot. Just a little note of recognition.

And perhaps you are wondering why I haven't said anything to him. Well, sure, it's not fair that I don't let him know why I'm upset, or even that I am upset. I think he thinks I'm freaked out over my philosophy midterm. But after the last time, I just didn't think it was possible. It absolutely blows my mind. I sat in the bathroom and cried for an hour last time, feeling so unimportant and unappreciated, and that was only Valentine's Day. I'm making too much of this, I know, but again that unimportant, unappreciated feeling is festering again inside of me. I know, I know. Get over it, it's not like he doesn't love me.

The Sun! The Sun!

Yes, the sun. It came out today. It made me happy, cause skies weren't grey. Too bad it's cold outside. But I'll take what I can get at this time.

Yesterday was the scene of an epic battle against time and crowds and impatience to find Brady's costume. By the end of the afternoon, Rod had a headache, we both lost our patience with each other, and we were forced to go with our backup plan. I didn't come through for Brady or Austin. But little can be done. Oh well.

I dropped Rod off at work and took Morgan home, and expected to settle in for the night with the remote control and my textbooks, until Jette called and we made plans to go see 'Surviving Christmas' with her visiting friend. The movie was painfully funny, and although I could see that Ben Affleck's makeup was too evident at times, there wasn't much for me to tear apart. It was a psychotically entertaining movie and I enjoyed it.

It's been a fairly lowkey weekend all in all. Nothing new to report.

Where's the sun?

Did the sun just suddenly die? Where is the sun? Why am I trapped in perpetual greyness and gloom? Ah, it's so bloody depressing! No wonder I don't want to do any work.

I handed in my African politics paper yesterday (Thursday). I wrote it on Wednesday. Rod and I managed to avoid any fights this time, but I suspect that the reasons are not because he wants to spare us arguing over something retarded. I think it's got more to do with his being sooooooo close to finishing the fourth Harry Snotter and I sent him to Jette's for a while so that he wouldn't be around.

In other news, I was pleased to hear that Russia will go ahead and ratify the Kyoto accord. I'm not an insane environmentalist-warrior type, but I would sure like to leave the planet better than it was when I got here.

ahhhh crap...there goes my attention span. I swear, I had something interesting-like to say, but it's gone now. Oh well. Maybe it will come back later. If *it* does, I will.

To friends not forgotten

Today would have been Wayne's 26th birthday. Wayne was a solid guy, and a solid friend. I don't have a lot to say today. It's best just to reflect on a life that was so valuable and so short.

Rest in Peace buddy. You are missed.

Busy doing what?

I know. We've established that I am unemployed and that I'm not working very hard on my school work this semester. So you must be wondering what happened yesterday. Well, I was laid up with a headache for most of the day and when that cleared, my knees swelled up like balloons in anticipation of the ugly, cold, snowy weather that dominated today. Plus, I had my interview for SIHA International Projects, and I have to say, I have even less hope than I did before, because this morning, I was not awake enough to make an impression, and then I got another headache. So I guess I can kiss Guyana goodbye for now.

Rod's at work right now. He works very part-time as a banquet server at the Sutton Place Hotel (read: Saturday nights). Sometimes, I enjoy being alone, like tonight. Other times, I can't stand that he goes to work. It's all part of my split personality disorder. Tonight I'm okay with it because I actually have a small urge to do some school work. It's weird, I know, but true. Tonight it's just me, my playlist and some good old African Politics. I have a paper due in that class on Thursday, so I'm just sort of putting some things in perspective before I start in earnest.

Better to be inside than not. Outside is a winter wonderland-type thing going. It snowed all day, and it was the wet, sticky kind of snow, so I've already seen one snowman (Rod made it in our parkade), and the kids across the street had a big, fun snowball fight. Too bad I hate cold weather. I might have enjoyed today. It's just that when you grow up in a location where snow is a major factor in your life 3/4 of the year, there's the chance you will come to despise it. It's almost pathelogical in me.

Enough rambling. Back to the books.

The paper from hell

Yes, that's right. I'm working on that paper. Due tomorrow. At 2 pm. Well, it's not a hard paper to write, I just have no interest in writing it. It's more than half done, and never fear, I'll probably finish it within the hour, but still. This paper has caused more trouble than it's worth.

Rod and I have been exchanging biting comments back and forth all day, and everyone who knows about the paper has been after me to do it. I'm sorry, because I know you have my best interests at heart, but I operate best at the last minute. Without the intense pressure of a deadline looming near, I just don't get inspired to think clearly....let's simplify...if I know that the deadline is minutes away, I can articulate my arguments without cluttering them with a lot of unnecessary junk. It's my method, and it has never failed me (or I've never failed because of it).

Well, as if that wasn't enough, all day, the cats have been tag-teaming me, each taking their turns bothering me when I do try to write. It's irritating, and I ask Rod to help me out, which led to an argument. Well, he's gone to bed and in the morning, he will wake up not caring. Me? I'll fester and stew on it like I am now, and then I'll get the urge to shoot him in the ass at close range with a BB gun. It sucks. He told me he didn't like my meaningless conversation throughout the day. That's fine I guess. But it sure did hurt hearing that, and now I know that no matter how hard I try to let it go, it will bother me and I won't talk to him at all for the next week or so unless it's to convey something meaningful...whatever meaningful is. I'll try to be a grown-up about it, but in the end, I'll just feel a little stab of hurt everytime I want to talk to him but don't, because it could just be meaningless chatter. It's not spite, it's just what I have to do to avoid making things worse.

I'm so immature, but hey, I'm a girl. I guess the stereotype is that I'm bound to blow little things out of proportion or something. *In case you didn't get the intonation, that was sarcasm* Ahh fuck. This paper is more fucking trouble than it's worth.

PS. I swear. A lot. If you don't like it, sorry, but really, cussing is a very effective way to impart my feelings. Besides, better off swearing then relieving my anger in other (worse) ways, right?

Wowwee!

Well, I'll bet all my 2 readers are wondering where I was yesterday. Well, I did a ton of laundry, cleaned the house, baked (and burned) some bannock, went to a Thanksgiving supper being hosted by friends (who announced a bundle of joy was on the way), came home, dealt with the laundry some more, and went to bed. Forgive me for being a little too busy yesterday.

Today did not start out well. I woke up feeling dreadful, ready to keel over, but I managed to drag my ass to school. I went to my SIHA international project interview, and I feel I did well, however I think my chances are slim because I won't be around at the U of A next year. At any rate, I'll be going to the local projects interview and hope that something pans out. But the biggest news yet is that I was informed that I was selected to be on the UAMUN's team going to the National Model United Nations in New York in March!! It's extremely competitive, and I am hugely honoured to be chosen to represent the University of Alberta with distinction.

Now I have to calm down enough to start my history paper....I know, I suck....been whining about that paper for days, but I'm just not in the mood to write a retarded 4 or 5 page essay for a class that I don't enjoy. Plus, I'm dealing with a brain aneurism or something where the left side of my skull is trying to kill me. Go figure.

Okay....time to work. No more putting it off. It's due Thursday at 2 pm.

What happened to Saturday?

Well, Saturday, being Saturday, missed its appointment with the old blogger machine for various reasons.

Yesterday morning was all about laying around and being lazy. Then in the afternoon, we had a rare Joe siting, as we picked both him and Jette up to go wander at West Edmonton Mall (largest mall in the world--about the only thing Edmonton's got going for it). Then it was home for what looked like a boring night at home, until I got the idea of going to the Casino. We went, I won some minor winnings and then lost it all just for fun. Rod wasn't winning anything significant at the slots, but then, he's a fairly conservative better. If you want the bigger winnings, you've got to bet bigger! Anyways, it was home to bed.

Well, now it's Sunday. But it's the Sunday before Thanksgiving, so it's not really Sunday...it's the "lost Sunday" experience. We'll go out to Mundare for the Ukrainian version of Thanksgiving (turkey and pyrogies), I'll try to do my homework and urge to come home early-ish, and then, who knows.

I'm going to have to run to the library before our little drive to Mundare because I have to get some books for my History paper. All this work for a 4 page paper...what a frigging waste of time and energy. I'm telling you...if this wasn't my last semester, I would've dropped this class at the beginning of September. Oh well.

Mission: Impossible, but not Improbable

Well, I spent a couple of hours on the net this afternoon looking at university websites for info on Grad School. A lot of the schools I looked at are off limits because I'm not in the undergrad honours class, nor am I in the A percentile. Right now I'm somewhere between a B and a B-. I can work my damnedest and pull it up to the necessary B average, so I'm not worried. I even found a couple of programs that I'm quite eager to explore. One program is in B.C. and the other is in Ontario, which were both my target areas when I finished my BA.

The mission, should I choose to accept it, is to obtain some sources of funding because I have run out of Student loans, I've already used up my line of credit, and I am too poor to pay my bills, never mind have any type of savings. So now the theme of this blog comes back to haunt me...Now What? I'm open to suggestions...uh, rephrase that...*Lawful* suggestions.

In other news, Edmonton turns 100, blah, blah blah. So much for civic pride. I've never made it any secret that Edmonton was just a stepping stone to bigger and better things. I know, I sound like a snob, but it's true. I have to hope that there are better things waiting for me in life then to stay in the World's Largest Truckstop.

I'm still nowhere near getting my history paper done. I know, I know. I just talked about how I was going to work to pull up the GPA, but it's a 4 page paper, so I can be cut a little slack.

Meet the Family

That's right. All you Canucks know that Thanksgiving is this weekend. But I have the added bonus of having Fridays off from school. So my weekend started at 3:15 today. And it did not start entirely well. I've got a headache, and my precious darlings, my widdo babies, my sweet little kitties are driving me nuts with their incessant bad behaviour. Max is chewing plastic, Purrball is chewing plants and has gone back to scratching the table leg instead of her stratching post.

Meet my two little dears and one big one.

Max is an 8 year old white cat with a penchant for chewing plastic and constantly pestering anyone trying to use the computer. He's got a bitchy little 'tude, and he's such a little daddy's boy. He loves playing tag with other cats, and he actually trained our former neighbour's kitten to play the way he likes to, but she moved. My oldest brother, my sister and I got him for our Mom for Mother's Day in 1996, but since my parents are constantly moving these days, it was decided that it would be best for Max to come live with me, so he was sent down to Rod and I 4 years ago.

Princess Purrball (of Vegreville) is a 3 year old white/grey tabby cat who has an alter ego named DestructoKitty. She's not the sharpest crayon in the box, but she's cute as hell. She purrs incessantly...literally, all you have to do is *look* at her and she starts humming like a motor. She's broken lots of my picture frames and knick knacks, she's recently gotten into eating Rod's plants, and she does not like to play tag with Max, so they tend to fight sometimes. She was one of *many* kittens born to Rod's parents' cat Mitzy out in Vegreville. After the funeral of a member of Rod's extended family in April 2002, I couldn't tear myself away from her, so Rod made the on-the-spot decision that we were going to steal her from his parents.

Rodney is a 28 year old Ukranian-Canadian boy from Vegreville. I met him in Residence and the next year, I harangued him into dating me. It will be our 6th anniversary on the 27th of this month. He has had a bit of a bumpy ride in terms of his education, but now he's all graduated up from University like a grown up, and he's out in the grown up world making money to support my lazy ass. My parents love him to death, wish that he was their own and all that, and we're all immensely proud of him. He's a dork/geek with a taste for corny humour and computer/video games that I hate. And he's completely willing to give his life for the company. He stands at a neck-twisting 6 feet 5 inches, and children everywhere love him because they easily see the big lovable child in him. I love this man.

As for me...well, I can't tell you all about myself in one shot. I'm complex...it takes time to get to know my intricacies and appreciate them as being small pieces of a larger picture. I would never dream of denying you the slow, painful/pleasurable process of getting to know me.

What's this? Two in one day?

Yes. Periodically, I feel the need to post multiple posts because some things happen that just need to be recorded as soon as possible.

Oddly, this is not one of those times. I just want to post again tonight.

I dropped off my essay for the NMUN competition today, and I made my appointment for the SIHA interview. I went to history, and for several reasons left class disturbed tonight. I won't get into it because you can never be sure that you aren't being spotted online. I will say that sitting beside a right-wing know-it-all is starting to frustrate me a little, and I mean no offense to either right-wingers or know-it-alls in general. I just don't get along with this one particular guy. I could hardly contain myself when he decided to proclaim the post-Presidential debate polls as a vast left-wing conspiracy (though obviously not in those words).

I periodically joke that there are times when I want to pull out a BB gun and shoot various people in the ass when I have issues with them. Well, the whole left-wing conspiracy thing had my imaginary trigger finger itching like crazy. Plato, Kant, Foucault, Rawls...they are on my list of imaginary targets. George Bush would be on that list, but I'm afraid that if I shot him with a BB gun in the ass, I'd be causing serious brain damage.

Ay any rate, I guess I need to go...do something....important or something.

It begins...

For those of you not acquainted with me, there is something you should now. I am afflicted with Seasonal Affective Depression (SAD--gee, what a cute acronym). And now, the sun is coming out less and less, and I feel myself beginning to slip into automaton mode. I don't take any prescription drugs because I don't care for the side effects. I've battled this for most of my life sheerly out of strength of will. Sometimes I am successful, sometimes not. I don't own a UV lamp as it's too expensive, and I don't use tanning beds because...well, mostly I'm too lazy to make appointments, but also, I just like my once a year tans to come from the actual sun.

Today I need to go sign up for an interview for SIHA, and I have to turn in my NMUN essay. Additionally, I have to do my readings before American history class tonight. I suppose you are curious about my schooling. Well, on my webpage, there's the beginnings of the Education/Career page to give you the basic background. Essentially, these last five classes are all that stand between me and being the first in my family to graduate from University:

History 453 - American history from 1945-1960
History 360 - Arctic history
Political Science 461 - Ethics in international politics
Political Science 354 - Comparative politics of Africa
Philosophy 120 - Symbolic Logic

My weakness is that I have no aptitude for math/logic, so that's my only real problem, and even though the prof has made it an unconventional style of learning, it's still up in the air. I just keep reminding myself, all I need is a D. Though a C would be nice and a B would rock. An A would signal the coming of the apocalypse, so we're not going to entertain that option.

But it's hard to make myself do all of the work expected of me, given that I can't even get moving enough to even get in the shower.

Some things that don't make sense

Well, you will learn in time that I need some of the basics explained to me, because in my little world, I can't always get the connection, either through an honest mental block or a willful misunderstanding.

For instance, I was wondering why I have to take symbolic logic in order to graduate with a BA in Political Science and history. Now, be careful...this is one of those times when I am willfully misunderstanding, so if you are going to now try to explain the mechanics behind it, save yourself the trouble. I know the mechanics. I just want someone to explain why I have to have a basic formal studies class, which could likely delay my graduation because I do not have the slightest mathematical skills necessary to even scrape by in this class.

But moving on from my slightly venomous vitriol against Liberal Arts educational planning.

I haven't suffered any crises of existentialism or anything like that today, which makes for a very boring day for those who are looking for that kind of thing. I haven't done anything to benefit mankind today, which I know will irk those who believe that our lives should be spent in bettering human existance every minute of the day.

Today, I read my class readings, I went to Pilates, and I went to class. Not terribly exciting. Now I have to do my stupid symbolic logic homework.

Small wonders

A precious few friends are aware that this is my second attempt at blogging. I did it for a while last year, but I got so busy that I didn't have time for it anymore, and the host site deleted my blog after a while. Some truly mediocre observations were lost; gone off into the cyberspace graveyard after too brief a life. Oh well.

This morning, I put Rod to work on adding a touch of content to my fledgling web page. It now has a half-done page in my Education/Career link, and the updates link leads you here...to my wonderful, shiny, new blog. It's not much at all, but you have to sort of poke and prod Rod into doing some things (like my webpage), so it's really a good thing to get this far. Plus, I've been pretty busy myself and haven't had much time lately to design and work on the content. I'm still waiting for information from my parents for my family page; I'm still deciding what should go in the favourites and links; I'm in the process of deciding what the parameters for my life story are going to be; my poetry will take a long time to type out because we're talking in excess of more than a hundred bad poems which make me cringe to even read, never mind type; Photos....well...it's going to take Rod a while to master the concept of "albums"; and I haven't even begun to consider the contact page, nor have I looked for a visitor counter. It's really slow going, but I hope it will all be completed in time for x-mas.

Moving on. What's new in my life?

-I handed in my applications for SIHA on Friday. It would be incredible to be chosen to go to Guyana this summer, but I still worry about the prospect of being away from Rod and the cats for 10 weeks this summer.
-I have to write my NMUN essay, and I really don't know where to start. I want to be chosen for the squad *really* badly, but judging from the meeting on Thursday, I could be up against some stiff competition.
-The fact that my university career will end in a matter of 11 weeks has scared me into looking for a career-starting job, but it seems that without a Master's degree, I can't be anything. I'm considering Grad School, but truthfully, I need to pull off the semester of my life in order to pull the GPA up enough.

What does "Now What?" mean?

Well, it can be a very complicated question to answer. Now what? I'm never sure of how to answer it, so I do what anyone else bouncing from one uncertainty to the next would do...I avoid answer the question. Indeed, I avoid thinking about it as much as possible. Does this make me sound bad in any way? Well, stick around I guess. We'll see how I get through life.