i'm on a roll in language development this week. phonetics was cancelled today, so i had no class till 1pm and i was 'this' close to skipping 266 because i wasn't feeling wonderful and i'm just plain bored by the class. but i went anyway and it was good. we worked for a while on ambiguous language, which is interesting stuff. our worksheet was children's jokes in which we had to determine if it was phonological, lexical, syntactic or deep structure ambiguity. none of that really matters now, what amused me the most, besides the jokes which i have to admit were pretty entertaining, was leah's response to one of them. so the joke and it's answer goes like this (keep in mind these are simple examples in which we're looking for ambiguous language): "what's worse than raining cats and dogs?".... "hailing taxis!" cute right? so leah breaks out laughing, which is followed by this: "i don't get it." it was priceless. apparently she did get the joke, but couldn't find the ambiguous language, hence the i don't get it, but it was definitely an entertaining moment.

after class ash and i neglected out research papers, put on our sunglasses and went rollarblading to get ice cream. after having ice skated the first 8 weeks of this semester, i lost the ability to rollarblade. my goodness was that an awkward first couple blocks. i had no idea it would be so hard to transition. they seem so similar... ha... they're not. but never fear, i survived, improved and the ice cream and sunshine was superb.

at awanas tonight i worked with a little guy by the name of abishuah. stevens point parents have very odd naming ideas for children. that's the weirdest i've run into, but there have been other creative ones.

i think i have bronchitis. mom thinks i might too. fun times. bubye

Bob's your Uncle... huh?

today i actually almost enjoyed language development. usually with lecture we're given confusing and pointless worksheets on stuff i don't care about because i don't pay attention, so i end up moaning woefully to dave about how i hate them, don't know what i'm doing and how we should get up, leave and never return. but today it wasn't so bad. one worksheet was fun. we had to match the common phrases from New Zealand with their actual meaning. all i can say is wow... they have some interesting phrases. when i get the sheet back i'll post them. i might want to start using some of them cause there's some good ones! i should start my own phrases. how fun.

i wish i was laying outside staring at the stars, but it's cold and cloudy. and i need to find someplace dark to do that. i don't think campus has such a place. darn lights... gotta flood the all darkness with light, just in case. *sigh* makes sense but kills a country girl like me whose night sky's have always been illuminated by only moonlight. oh well. this summer i'll sleep under the stars. that'll be fun. coyotes will howl along the river and nag at my nervous side, but i'll be tough. ok, that's all. ta ta

so what's the verdict on this style?

i was fixing ash's printer which is on her shelf on her desk... under her loft. i became relatively well tangled in the wires of the bed above me. i needed to be rescued. we thought it was a lovely result.

it all started with dinner...

last night was a blast without even try to make it so. ash and i went to Green Tea for chinese and were gonna go get a movie, but i decided we needed to meander around our little downtown and admire the sights. we hit up some stores, tried on hilarious and wonderful sunglasses, purchased sunglasses, ate giant gumballs, smelled perfume, doused me in perfume that smelled exactly like old lady (mind you we didn't realize it smelled like old lady before spraying it on me) and then proceeded to eat more giant gumballs. after we had exhausted our funds, we headed back to my car to go back to campus, but randomly decided to drive the course of the SHAFFR run that we had signed up to do last night, but then backed out of. so ash used her incredible memory to guide me along the route she ran last year. we drove 9 of the 10 miles of the loop and saw no runners to our great disappointment. so... i turned around and started to drive the loop backwards. by this time it's about 8:20 and dark out. once the decision to find the runners was set in place however... things went slightly crazy. i had to work at 9, so clearly we were on a time restraint, but finding the SHAFFR runners was of utmost importance. who cares if gas is $2.90 a gallon.... ahem, so anyway we started the loop backwards, heading into the wild blue yonder that is the outskirts of stevens point and woods of central wisconsin. there was one large mistake made however... in our initial loop with our zeal to find the runners and ashley randomly pointing out roads that she thought looked familiar, we neglected to ever once look at the road names. so we made it about halfway through the loop and totally missed whatever road we needed to turn on since we clearly didn't know the names, passed some random asian grocery store and were like, hmm, yeah, we're lost. so i whipped us around and we chose a random dark road and lucky us, it just happened to be right. throughout this whole thing, we were acting like crazy SHAFFR stalkers, with our new dark sunglasses sitting haphazardly on our heads and giant wads of gum in our mouths. we cared not one bit that we got lost... like 4 times. finally, after many random turns and random road choosings, we saw a flashing light and white dots bobbing up and down. woohoo we had found our runners. it was a moment of incredible jubilation. we proceeded to take a wrong turn one more time, but stuck it out anyway and the road led us back to stevens point. we got back at 8:50, i went to desk 5 minutes later and ash came to keep me company. from 9-12 we sang, took pictures, played the game of life, listened to music, drew pictures, hula hooped, i became a model for ash's drawing and it was a lovely evening.

today went went to the portage county cultural festival which was freaking awesome. it was like the world had exploded inside SPASH. i haven't got a clue how many cultures were represented there and that school is so freaking huge that i couldn't even begin to put on size on anything. to my great happiness, we watched some very adorable girls do irish dancing and clogging for about a half hour. oh goodness how i loved it. i wanna be irish. and talented. anyway, by orders of my mother i'm now on some lovely cough medicine to clear out my lungs before i get a secondary infection, if that's not already the case. my lungs feel weird right now... i dislike it and will probably start coughing shortly. such pleasant stuff i know. i'm done now. ta ta

we may have somwhat resembled this during our stalking, if you add in a car with me driving.

but don't worry, we can look normal too... sometimes.

proooo....crastination

tonight in leadership we were given a handout on procrastination and in my effort to confirm my procrastination habits, i've decided to reproduce it here so you can decide if you too are a procrastinator.

you may be a procrastinator if you:
- feel the impluse to clean your room before you get started on a project
- rewrite the first sentence or paragraph of a paper several times, repeatedly
- crave a snack as soon as you sit down to study
- spend too much time (days) deciding on a topic
- carry books around all the time, but never open them to study
- get angry when your friends ask, "have you started yet?"
- sit down to study and suddenly remember something very important you have to do
- check you email repeatedly before starting any homework or studying

it's official. i'm a procrastinator. i'm pretty sure i've nailed every one at one point or another, some more than others. i don't usually rewrite my paper intros, but the rest of them i visit more or less regularly, as well as others not listed. in my defense i work better under pressure, tight time restraints make me more efficient. even so, i'm still a procrastinator and i feel like 99% of college students are too. i'm normal... ha... normal, yeah right.

i lack the capacity to be normal. 99% of the time i don't care. sometimes i try to pretend though, today i even dressed nice to fool people, but it's all for naught. katie and i just came back from lunch and we went to her room so i could smell the new perfume she was so excited about. that's normal. she sprayed it in the air. normal again. what's not normal is that when i turned to smell it, i somehow managed to get perfume particles in my eye and began wailing "ahhhh... my eye!!! it buuurrrnnss!" as my eyes started a fantastic show of waterworks and became rimmed in red. katie started laughing, as did i which soon turned into coughing/laughing which just sounds stupid. i never did actually smell the perfume. we'll just assume it's nice. it's much too dangerous for me.

oh look. in the course of writing this short little post, i just managed to knock something off my shelf, which hit my open water bottle, which spilled all over my entire desk, which soaked many papers but fortunately missed my cell phone. it took me about 5 seconds of staring at the water bottle laying on its side (which is a long time) to realize that there actually had been water in it, which meant there was now water all over my desk though. i'm really beginning to wonder about myself, but on the plus side it forced me to dust and clean up my desk.

this afternoon will contain perhaps 5-6 hours of studying anatomy. it'll be a grand time. i have to go to class. ta ta

lisa appreciation day

today was lisa appreciation day. ash and i appreciated her alright. it all started on i think monday night. we decided to make a cd for lisa with random things on it. part 1 was the creepy ego boosting part: you are beautiful. you're a technological genius. you will be queen of the universe.... that type of stuff. part 2 we sang her a song... sounded lovely let me tell you. and part 3 we wrote her an ever so wonderful story all about her and us. it's great. i love it. t'was truly an amazing cd once we finished.

so today was the day, unknown to lisa. bright and early this morning i headed to the leadership room in the basement to collect a giant sheet of paper. ash and i then drew hideous and almost life size drawings of ourselves on that paper, which we then taped to her door frame so that was all she saw when she opened the door. the cd was in the center of the paper.

so we wait and wait, and wait some more for lisa to wake up. and wait some more... and a little more, till we can stand it no longer. i grabbed the phone and called and hung up on her i believe 5 times. mind you it was already 10:15am, so she had slept enough. we then stood in our doorway, staring anxiously down the hall. we heard the door creak open and then... "ohh noooo...." in a happy, moaning, kind of laughing, not really awake lisa voice. t'was wonderful. ash and i then skipped down the hallway to greet her bleary eyes. shortly thereafter we heard laughter coming from her room as she listened to our cd. she loves it. people are lucky to be our friends cause we're good ones to have. the end.

a lil' o this, a lil' o that...

last night i was reading an article that i have to write a paper on from the new yorks times about TMJ, that ever so lovely locking and associated pain of the temporomandibular joint. the author was throwing out random facts about the jaw and one of them caught my attention. a human jaw exerts 650-1000 lbs of force per square inch. who knew? it went on to say that you could bite off your own finger. that's pretty crazy. naturally ash and i discussed this. i brought up the fact that if we were ever attacked we could just clamp down on someone's arm and take out a chunk of flesh. but then that presented another problem... we'd first have to know whether or not our attacker had AIDS. such a complicated world we live in... you can't even bite someone without knowing their background first.

on a completely different topic, i got my info packet for my CA job for next year. i'll be on third floor, room 313, which will be the newly alcohol free floor. that could potentially make things harder. and if the guy CA who is on that floor now stays there, i might have the worst co ever. he never does anything i've been told and he doesn't make showering a regular habit. i feel bad, but i'm crossing fingers that he leaves after this semester. i doubt he will. *long sigh*

and the sighing shall continue for a little longer. my grandpa had another stroke on sunday. worse than the last and affecting his speech and thinking to a degree. for some unknown reason my aunt and grandma didn't take him in on sunday even when they suspected a stroke. yesterday a million tests were done and he just got out of surgery. it was very long, apparently went ok, but last i heard they were calling in a cardiologist cause his heart rate was 2x as fast as it should have been and they couldn't get it down. we're praying for the best on this one. i'm really not enjoying how fragile human life is. that reality has touched me too much this school year. i've had enough.

tomorrow is lisa's appreciation day. ash and i have a surprise in store for her. she'll love it. more on that later.

i've concluded that one of my pet peeves is filling out survey/questionaire things. ya know... the type that are meant to 'get to know you better'- what's your favorite food? smell? tv show? movie? time of day? website? then there's the ones that are all important like, what did you enjoy most about this or that? what could we do to improve? what were your goals? did you achieve them? if so how? what are your suggestions? blah blah... i hate em! it just so happens that i have 4 of them sitting in front of me to do... of all types. makes me want to scream while viciously tearing them to shreds. yes, i'm passionate about this.

and on that passionate note i'm ending this long post so i can go work desk. wahoo.

this is a good one!

today was a good day. we made a music video to a song 90% of the world has probably never heard and it was beyond hilarious. we actually went to some work for this to turn out well. the following pictures follow some of the procession of preparation to completion of our beloved video. enjoy.

ash was going to be our male singer so i had to help her with her facial hair... she was hot when the outfit was complete. it was decided she was just too sexy for me... thus her response to my enthusiasm

mandie's character needed to have birth marks all over her body. we happily assisted with that colorful make up job. oh we're good....

lisa was suppose to have been in a car accident which made her hair turn from black into bright white...

she was a frightful sight to behold, or be around, because she left a cloud of baby powder everwhere she went and would leave white blotches on everything she touched....

this is how lisa repaid me for turning her hair bright white. as you can pretty clearly tell it was one of those bonding moments between friends....

this is the cast of the "MMMM MMMM MMM..." music video. we were truly amazing. i was suppose to be a little boy, a normal looking little boy... and katie was my counterpart. in addition to us all having our own staring roles, we were backup 'mmm' and 'ahhh' singers to ash. it was a stunning video. a real catch you off guard, stop you in your tracks, jaw dropping type production. we're considering showing at the next leadership meeting. i'm sure the rest of the staff in the hall would be interested to know what kind of use the leadership room is getting these days...

sara was our faithful camera girl, who is fearfully camera shy. but she loves cuddling with me, so i tricked her. again lisa left her residue after she laid on me. poor sara had the hardest time not laughing at us. we had to practice it twice in front of her so she could get over her laughter to be able to hold the camera steady.

after our musical debut, which was fabulous by the way and we watched it twice because it was so funny, ash, lisa and i went out to eat and then headed to goodwill to find a bigger pot for our rapidly growing sunflowers. we then proceeded to try on hideous clothing and laugh at eachother. ashley found the most, umm, beautiful wedding dress. fit her like a glove... just meant to be. we had locked our laughing selves in one of the dressing rooms to try on our treasures and i'm willing to bet that people overhearing to our conversations could have either been slightly disturbed or very confused. once the store closed we figured we should perhaps leave, though that decision only came about after serious talk of how they would actually go about kicking us out of our little dressing room, so then we returned to pot our flowers on the floor of our room. twas good day. a very good day indeed.

i have a job!

i have a job for next year which means free room and board and about $6000 less to pay for my college education next year! woohoo! yes yes... i did indeed suffer through the rigorous and time consuming process of applying for staff in the residential halls for next year and yes yes... i did indeed get the job. i can now proudly say that i will be a CA in Pray-Sims next year. being the international hall... i plan to become well versed in international, umm, stuff (yeah, that sounded intelligent). initially i wasn't so excited about being assigned to that hall. selfishly i didn't like the thought of one of my challenges will be that of a large section of my residents will be international students and not excited by the fact that i won't have a co-CA for my floor, but as i become more adjusted to the idea, it's growing on me. and actually, i will have a co, but it'll be a guy. pray-sims, for those who don't know, is a male hall and a female hall essentially connected in the middle by the elevator (yes, i'll be in the only hall with an elevator), so technically, instead of the T shaped hall with one gender floors like i live in now, it'll be an L shaped hall with a male wing and female wing. or this is what i've been told... i really don't know much about pray-sims since i've been in it a total of 2 times, only once past the lobby. so far i've been told that one of the guys that got hired is really awesome, so that's good, and if the hall director that was offered the job accepts it, i'll apparently just love her, so i'm hoping for that. so things are brightening up for me. in other news... i think i might have found a potentially very good summer job as well... dependant on application and interview of course. *sigh* for the moment at least, i'm feeling pretty good about myself.

i've come to a conclusion. i finally decided that getting married and having that life would be nice. up till today it had been one of the things i always envisioned for myself... but way down the road. i wanted nothing to do with that in the present. i've changed my tune. i love college, i really do. i love my friends and the experiences, i love the independence, i love that i'm suceeding, i love that i'm making something of myself, but i hate the drama, i dislike the tendency toward monotony, i dislike exams and i especially dislike that i feel buried under so many more years of school. i had actually enjoyed that reality wouldn't hit me so soon, because after graduation i'd just be back for grad school, but now i don't like that at all. marriage just sound like a really nice route right about now. why? i have no clue. clearly i have no one to marry and there most certainly is not a line of guys waiting outside my door. ironically i haven't felt the need for a relationship at all this year, i've been truly satisfied and that's still a current feeling, so i'm quite lost as to what sparked this idea. i know marriage isn't all roses, but it's a different kind of work. its a struggle that i feel i would be more motivated to fight. *sigh* chances are i don't know what i want right now and marriage just sounds nice. in my defense, whenever i think of marriage, i imagine marrying my best friend and what would be better than that? nothing worldly in my opinion. i may be falsely making myself believe that it would be the easy solution to everything, which it most certainly would not be, but dang it... i'm kinda fed up with my life and the stress due to college right now. my list of stressors is long. and though i believe that i deal with stress decently, it doesn't mean i enjoy or want it. *sigh* whatever.

another conclusion: this blog exsists for my therapy and pretty much that reason alone. i write to relieve stress and express my tangled mind. the number of people who read it is extremely limited... potentially more than i even realize. i'm pretty much writing to myself, but i'll just keep pretending i have an audience. it does me good and therefore has reason for continuation.

productivity is roughly zero in this room of mine. ash and i both have 2 exams this week, both of which we have to study for... winging these would result something unbearably unpleasant... and yet we can't do a thing. last night ash wrote out 1 note card for history; i didn't even pretend to pretend to study. lisa twisted her ankle on the stairs, again, so she was in here icing her ankle and we were moaning about how much we had to do. so what did we do? we created music videos and such. i guess in theory that's productivity, just the wrong kind. it was a heck of a lot more enjoyable than studying though. tonite will probably be unpleasant. after sitting though phonetics today, it sounds like that exam is going to be a lot harder than i anticipated, but on the plus side, class was cancelled on thursday. i doubt my skills in phonetics so it makes me nervous. i know all the IPA symbols and their sounds, but their catagories and such haven't been cemented into my mind yet. and apparently we're not only going to have to transcribe spoken words into phonetics, we're also going to have to read and transcribe the IPA symbols back into graphemes. which i guess should be fine, but when things are transcribed they're not separated into words, a whole utterance will be within two brackets. that would be something like me writing out an entire sentence without any grammar or spaces, with part of it in a foreign language or something because some of the IPA symbols don't look like the grapheme they represent and are just weird symbols. so yeah... good times. i need to get my act together and get to work.

somebody on third floor has a speaker in their window and is so generously playing music for the entire campus to hear. its drifting in my open window and making me want to go outside where the sun is shining and the wind is plotting to blow me away. i'll have none of this studying stuff.

for whatever reason, here are some random pictures for your viewing enjoyment...

melissa and i went to a concert at state fair this summer. we escorted our little brothers and yes, they LOVED that...

lisa is insanely strong... she carried ash up 4 flights of stairs piggy back once. and after she carried me around as you see in this picture, we put ash and mandie on her back, while i merely had katie on mine. oh lisa... however do you manage that.

last night we went to the opera performance in the fine arts building. it was pretty entertaining. my former bio lab partner Ben was in it which was cool cause i'd never heard him sing solo before. the pianist caught our attention though. her name was Alexxis. anyway, she was wearing brown shoes with a black dress, which just seemed strange and from our angle her face didn't look very attractive. she also had pretty much no figure at all and if that blond hair was real, it looked astonishly fake. ash leaned over to me and whispered that she thought it looked like a man. lisa said the same thing 2 minutes later. we left wondering, but promptly forgot about it. alissa called us today. Alexxis' name was formerly Will.