mood: 
pretty damn fantastical
music: Beat on Repeat – Jet
To say that I’ve been reading a lot recently would be a complete understatement. I’ve been reading practically every hour of the day, and any time that I’m not reading, I’m writing something, whether it be an essay, a scene in my superhero story, or even just a text message.
I haven’t felt so good in a long time.
I’m not sure what exactly it is that’s making me so happy lately, but I’ve just been feeling so free and ambitious and powerful and damn good about myself. Yeah, there are problems in my life. Anxieties, insecurities, annoyances, difficulties. But they’re honestly not really getting to me. Is it the walls I’ve built? Is it the lessons I’ve learned? Is it my positive attitude? I don’t know, but I’m not going to question it.
“And if I’m flying solo / At least I’m flying free.” – “Defying Gravity,” Wicked
I’m flying through fanfiction, fiction review short stories, and school reading at the moment. Watching Justice League has of course gotten me into that fandom, and the community that I’ve been following produces some pretty high-quality fiction. The only thing more disappointing than a lack of fanfiction for some fandom is a lack of GOOD fanfiction for some fandom. Thank god that comic book/cartoon fans can actually write! It’s exciting, and I’m quite addicted. 
I’ve also been reading a lot of stories for Berkeley Fiction Review, of which I am a part. There was a fiasco a few weeks ago when I realized that I hadn’t been logging the stories that I’d read (I’m required to review 50 for a passing grade), and the director of the organization said that she wasn’t just going to go by my word; I had to redo them, even though I’d already done like 35 stories. After stewing in anger and frustration for a day, I decided to read all 50 stories over the weekend in retaliation for the shitty situation. And to prove to myself that there was no reason getting bogged down/to let anything get me down. I actually managed to do it without going crazy and felt pretty awesome afterward. How’s that for overcoming obstacles!
Also have fallen in love with Paradise Lost and Shakespeare plays lately. Paradise Lost especially has been an eye-opener. Just… Wow. It was a struggle to get into and understand at first, but once I did, oh man. I was completely enthralled, to the point that I would be excited to go to lecture. I actually started drinking coffee regularly to ensure that I’d be able to remain awake throughout the entire duration of all the Paradise Lost lectures, LOL. Milton is an amazing artist, and I cannot fathom how he wrote that epic blind. What a baller!
Anyway. I’ve just been feeling really strong lately. I think maybe it’s my freedom that’s been fueling me. I’m definitely not infatuated with anyone right now and not really wanting to be. Seeing my friends in difficult relationships has really turned me off of the idea of ever engaging in them again. I mean, I know that I’m very different from them, so I could have completely different relationships with people. And I mean, I have some friends who are in some very solid and strong relationships, too, so it’s not like I’m blindly denying successful relationships or anything. But I’m pretty sure that getting with anyone right now, right here, would cramp my freedom, and I’m really not down for that ATM. Independence FTW!
I’ve also been feeling pretty good about my friendships lately. There are a few select people that I’m really sad that I don’t talk to anymore, but it’s come to the point that like… If they don’t appreciate me enough to make the effort, then I’m not going to bother. I’ve “bothered” for much too long. But for the people who are making the effort despite whatever gap has widened between us, I’m willing to go to the extra mile and take a leap. C.J. didn’t have battery class today, and Katie was doing drug testing for her summer job, so C.J. and I ended up hanging out alone at Qualcomm for a while, just talking like we used to. We discussed religion and then I shared my feelings/stories about being bi and coming out and stuff, and then he told me some really funny stories that I’d heard of vaguely but not in their entirety. It was fun and enlightening, and it made me feel better about our friendship, which has felt like it’s been waning this semester. So hooray!
Mark and I have been doing really well lately, too. We’re watching Glee together again (since it’s back), and he’s been coming up consistently to hang out with me and chill with my friends. He’s been coming to me for some support a lot lately, too, and I’m honored to help him as best as I can. Once, when he was really upset, he told me that he’s so proud of how strong I’ve grown this year and how far I’ve come. That made me really happy, along with the really, really nice note he left for me one morning: “Thanks for always being an amazing friend. Don’t know what I’d do without you. Love, Mark.” How special. I’ve come to the realization that our friendship has reached the like…lifelong quality that characterizes my friendship with Diana. No matter what happens to us, we’re going to last. I know it. In times of desperation and despair, we turn to each other. Sometimes it feels like there’s nobody else in the world who will listen the way that he does.
To show him how special he is to me, I baked him a pie for his birthday (which was on Friday)! A key lime pie, to be exact. Out of scratch, too! (Well, except for the crust, since I didn’t have the pan for it.) This doesn’t really happen, you understand. I love to cook, but I’m not much of a baker. It’s something that Mark always lamented when we were together, so I figured it’d be nice to go out of my way to make something for him. I hope it meant more because he knows that I don’t ordinarily do such things. But OMG, the night that I was going to give it to him, he texted me to tell me that my friends and I should go see him to help him finish the strawberry cheesecake that a girl in his a cappella group had baked him.
I was so upset, LOL. Anyone’s baking would be more legit than mine! The cheesecake tasting good was both exciting (just because I love good food, hahaha) and really disappointing (since mine would probably never measure up). My friends had to bear through me nudging their sides like the whole night in consternation, haha. I got even more upset when Mark told us about how his OTHER friend in DeCadence was making him a red velvet cake. How the hell do you beat a red velvet cake?!
Well, I did my best. He came up last night and I decorated the pie with whipped cream and fresh fruit that I’d bought the day before and an…inscription? Well, you know. Sugar-gel text, haha, reading “Happy Birthday, Bestest!” And he was genuinely really excited and delighted. I actually asked him if he was exaggerating/being sarcastic at first, heh, but he said that he wasn’t. He seemed to really like my card, too. So yay! I’m definitely one of those people who enjoy giving more than getting. There’s just something about that brief look of delight on anyone’s face when you give them something that they are really excited about — it’s beautiful and really heartwarming.
…So this entry was meant to talk about the power of words. Whoops. I’ll save it for another time, I guess. Time to eat some din, watch some JLU, and slink on over to the Daily Cal. Woot!
mood: happy
music: Only Heart – John Mayer
I love weekends. I love having what feels like all day to balance doing fun things like watching cartoons, reading fanfiction/books, playing WoW, and chatting with friends, with productive things like catching up on/doing ahead reading, writing papers, and working out.
I’ve been watching The Justice League lately and seriously enjoying it. It’s just the right amount of EPICNESS and the right level of humor. My one pet peeve about cartoons is the cheesy lines they always use for comedic effect that just don’t cut it for me. But I seriously laugh at stuff in this show, and I love that while they make it appropriate for children (e.g. always having something happen/interject before “hell” is said), kids are definitely not their only intended audience. There are a lot of great sexual references that kids would easily miss, and there’s hilarious things like Wonder Woman’s ass being slapped off-screen (and Batman’s ensuing vaguely amused expression, LOL). And the epicness is just…obvious, hahaha. The reason I like cartoons so much is that I love action but I also hate gore, and for live action anything, action without blood/wounds is kind of really unrealistic, haha. But with cartoons, I can watch awesome fights without having to cover my eyes in squeamishness. I also like how they’re not focused on romance. It always bugs me that live action stuff seems SO intent on involving romance in everything. Doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it, I just feel like they often focus way too much on it when what I care about is the action/adventure/quest/mission/saving the world part of stories. This also doesn’t mean I don’t love watching live action things because I definitely do, but sometimes I find them sorely lacking in their realism. When I watch something, I want to feel like I’ve been transported into a different world, yeah? Not just being told a story, but being placed in it. I love that feeling. Imagination is one of the things most precious to me.
In other news, I have four papers due in the next few weeks (two next Friday just before Spring Break and two right when we come back from Spring Break). I finished one this past Thursday and I aim to finish the next one by Tuesday. I suddenly feel so worn out from all that writing though and certainly do not feel like writing more. But I must! I also have to read a lot of Donne, read King Lear, and read this thing about the Cold War for history. Those aren’t so bad; they offer me some respite from pounding out words and analysis for these papers, at least. It’s just a drag that I have to be working on papers during Spring Break, bleh. At least I’m on the semester system, though. What a blessing. I don’t think I could handle the pressure of the quarter system that most of my friends at other UC’s have to deal with. Props to them.
Oh, I bought black shorts yesterday! Finally! As a reward for getting my 45A essay done so early. They show some “cheg” (Hillary taught me this yesterday, haha; I knew there had to be a word for where your ass and legs connect) but I like them anyway. I also got red suspenders from Hot Topic, which I’ve wanted since forever. Yay! Went to a Red Light District party yesterday as a lesbian hooker, hahaha. I didn’t feel like looking girly so I just threw a red bandeau, white Oxford shirt, a cropped vest, and the new black shorts together and still looked mighty fine. I lost an earring, though, grr. But I also turned in someone’s dorm key to the brothers, so that’s more important, I guess. And it’s just a Claire’s earrings so yeah.
In other other news, I’m reading Donne, listening to John Mayer and Cage the Elephant, and craving sushi like whoa. Must get more work done so I can play WoW, watch more JLA, and read some fanfiction.
P.S. My comma key is being really annoying. It’s really making me realize how frequently I use commas…
P.P.S. Excited for Daylight Savings Change! I love how during the spring/summer up here, the sun doesn’t completely set until like 8:30 at night. It’s great!
mood: pleased
music: Heartbreak Warfare – John Mayer
So it’s like three months into my sophomore year, and I still haven’t blogged about college. This is super disappointing to me! But it’s never too late to start, right?
So how has everything been? So far, this year has been… Absolutely amazing, actually.
When I left home, I’d already decided that I wanted to start anew and be a better person.
I’m going to cut six inches off of my hair (I would dye it if I had the time before Berkeley!) and curl it often. I’m going to start dressing more tomboyish half the time and girlier the other half of the time. I’m going to wear concealer and powder and lipgloss and ponytails. I’m going to introduce myself, I’m going to be someone that people will want to be friends with. I’m going to be a motherfucking double major, even if both of my majors are cake. I’m going to drink, and I’m going to drive on freeways. I’m going to paste pictures of hot girls on my walls, alongside Transformers and Yu-Gi-Oh! posters. I’m going to joke more and laugh less, I’m going to touch more and be less unapproachable. I’m going to study more and complain less. I’m going to blog on-time and go back to journaling. I’m going to remember more and forgive less. I’m going to be more careful, more paranoid, more fun, and more uninhibited.
- xdelight, August 15th, 2009
And I did it. I really did. I got here, and the first day, I conquered my shyness and fear of meeting people and just walked into the hall and met everyone and honestly was just…myself! And boy did that do wonders. I’m still amazed, honestly, at how well just being myself worked out. And day by day, I just become more and more thankful for getting the opportunity to get to know and to befriend these wonderful people.
So I live on the eighth floor of my building, which has a splentastic view of San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge. Like really, it’s ridiculous how beautiful it is. Every other day, there’s an amazing sunset, I swear. I’ve taken so many pictures. It still wows me how close I am to San Francisco. I guess since I was little, San Francisco was like this fantasy city so far away that everyone had visited before but that I had never gotten the chance to see. And now I get to see it from the laundry room window every day. And it only takes $3 and 30 minutes on the subway/train to get there. Blows my mind!
Anyway… My floormates are awesome! God, where do I begin?
To start, Sandia, my roommate, is super cool, not to mention mind-blowingly pretty. She studies obsessively hard and parties harder, she’s a food snob, she dresses better than anyone I’ve ever met, she’s half Vietnamese and half Irish/Lithuwanian, she cooks and bakes, she’s neat and clean and carefree and honest and hilarious. One of the first things she said to me when we met was “By the way, I’m a bitch.” (Perfect! I love being friends with bitches. Assholes, not so much.) Seriously, though, she’s an absolutely awesome roommate, as evidenced by our roommate agreement, on which we wrote “whatever” for everything except not having sex while the other person is in the room, hahaha.
My next-door neighbor CJ is also awesome. He’s a bando (alto sax!), Italian, loves dessert, likes jazz, and is an actual Mac user, as in he’s used them since forever. I respect that, even if I don’t like Macs. 
He’s really witty and funny and neat and germaphobic. And really caring, too; I go to him when I’m upset because he has less of a carefree/whatever attitude towards stuff than some of my other closest friends. He gives really good hugs, too! He recently told me that he likes me because I’m open and have a “whatever works” attitude about everything and never judge and always understand. This makes me happy!
I’m also really close to Katie, who lives down the hall. She’s legitimately German (well, half), lives by the beach and has lived in Germany for part of her life. She’s a runner, and one of the most randomly picky people I’ve ever met (she doesn’t like pizza, hot dogs, cheeseburgers, pasta sauce, syrup, any kind of sauce actually…LOL). She was one of the first friends I got really close to here, because we watched I Love You, Man together like the first or second day of school and then went back to her room and just talked for hours getting to know each other. We bonded over our fresh breakups and stuff. She’s excitable and funny and always has a story to tell about everything. I love stories!
Another one of closest friends here is Jordan, who is ridiculously cosmopolitan. He’s lived in a gazillion different places, but he’s from Vermont (and his family is currently living in Senegal). It’s been really fun educating him about California and how we do it here, and I’m excited for him to come down to SoCal so that we can show him around to everything. I really didn’t think that he would ever want to really be my friend, but he definitely surprised me, and we’ve gotten pretty close in the past few months. He has a very carefree attitude towards most things that I’ve been trying to adapt and alter to fit me. Jordan loves sports (especially soccer), loves snow, loves multicultural stuff (he’s learning Arabic!), and always wears a green baseball cap and drinks water from this jar he carries around.
I’ve also started to get a lot closer to Katie’s roommate Dana lately. She’s nice and chill and a lot of fun. She plays mellophone and also really likes my favorite turquoise blue! She’s half Japanese and half Mexican (so cool!) and is always easy to talk to. She had a boyfriend up until like a week or so ago, and I’ve been comforting her about the breakup ever since, and it’s really helped us to get closer. She’s a sophomore like me, and at first I thought that we would have no chance to get to know her because she would be with her friends from last year all the time, but she’s definitely been interested in getting to know us.
These are my closest friends here and kinda like my main squeezes (haha!). I used to be nervous that we would never become a group: for a long time it was Jordan, CJ, Sandia, and me in a tight group; and then it started getting to be Sandia, Katie, Dana, and me in a group; but now we’ve merged into one and it makes me happy. Sandia, Dana, Katie, and I want to live together next year, and CJ (who is living with Jordan) already told me that he definitely wants to live really near us, e.g. if we live on Northside, he wants to live on Northside; if we live on Eastside, he wants to live there too. So I’m really glad and relieved that we’re going to be able to stay friends.
I kinda want to take a moment to describe what I’m like here. It’s definitely…more me than I ever imagined that I could be with anyone other than my friends from home, you know? For one, all my friends think that I’m a really extroverted person. The other day, Katie had a Mayer-Briggs personailty test results paper, and I was like, “Ooh, I want to show you guys what I am! Introverted, …” And she and Eleanor were shocked that I would say that. I felt so proud! And when I told Dana about it, she was like, “Actually yeah, I would definitely ping you as an extrovert.”
I like it.
I’ve been fun, and loud, and confident, and and vulgar (CJ and Jordan even talked about this when I wasn’t there and declared that I’m “the most oversexed person they’ve ever met”, and later that night Sandia introduced me (drunkenly) to her friend as a “dirty joke whore”, hahaha), and really friendly (trying hard to reach out to all the people on my floor and not just the ones I’m closest with), and really helpful, and really affectionate (hugs all around!), and really conversational. But best of all, I’ve been really open. Within the first few days pretty much everyone knew that I was bi, but even more than that… I tell people my random thoughts, my frustrations, my accomplishments, my insecurities. It’s really liberating. Especially when people actually like me MORE for not hiding myself. It’s been really great, and…enlightening, you know?
I dunno, it might sound corny, but I just love being myself here and being loved for myself. I’m really happy here, and I feel like I really belong, something that I really lacked last year. Like, I don’t even want to go home. The one weekend that I did go home, it felt really lonely and all I could think of was how sad I was the last time I was there. But here, it’s just… I don’t know, I feel so free. I feel like… I fit in here, with these people, better than I’ve ever fit in anywhere or with anyone in my life. I definitely made the right choice to come to Cal… I mean, a lot of people here have a lot of qualities I never found in Irvine… Atheists who don’t want to get married and don’t want to have kids and who are totally cool with my bisexuality and sexual innuendos and I dunno, I’m just…really, really grateful to not feel inhibited anymore.
And academically? I’m currently taking eighteen units. English 45C is an English major core class about American/British Literature from mid-19th through 20th century. I thought that I would really love the class, but I’ve only liked one book so far: Nabokov’s Lolita. This makes me sad. But the teacher just talks about concepts that are WAY too abstract for my tastes. I don’t think I’ll get an A, though… This GSI cares less about style and more about content, unlike Dimiter, who I had for 45B. Boo. 
I’m also doing Sociology 1, which is pretty interesting, actually. I’ve been doing really well on the papers, so that’s definitely a plus. What else, what else. Media Studies is really cool; I’m really happy to have decided to double major in it. I’m really interested in a lot of the stuff we study, and I dunno, it’s just so…fitting! We even have studied fan fiction! And I wrote a paper on the Transformers franchise! How amazing is that. (I also wrote a paper on WoW for Sociology, LOL. Hooray for resources!) I’m also doing an Intro to Journalism class with Jordan, who wants to write for the Daily Cal, the school newspaper (kind of… It’s actually independent because they were sick of the school monitoring what they said! I love Berkeley, hahaha). It’s kind of pointless, but at least I’m getting a lot of Journalism practice. And I’m going to apply for the Daily Cal too, even though I know my chances of getting in are slim. I’m a good writer, though! And I’m actually better at journalistic writing than I expected. Hmm, what else? Oh yeah, I’m also doing Poli Sci 1, which is American Politics. It’s…a drag. I honestly do enjoy the textbook readings and everything that I learn from it (which is a lot, especially considering I basically failed AP Gov in high school, aaah), but the lectures are absolutely impossible to stay awake in. I’ve tried everything, I swear. Even when I work on other homework, I fall asleep! What the hell. I’ve basically given up on going to that class, since all I do is take hour-long naps in it, and if I use that time to go to the library instead, I get so much more work done.
Oh yeah, the library! I go there all the time now, to get work done. Wow am I productive in there! I always thought that I was most comfortable working in my own room, but I really do get distracted less there. Maybe it’s just because now there’s all these people within like 20 ft that I can just walk over and talk to when I’m working in my room. I dunno, but the North Reading Room is really pretty and I really like the atmosphere. It’s a great place. I’ll definitely be spending more time there in the next couple of years. I’ve also discovered the awesomeness of Memorial Glade, which is just this huge…grass…thing where people chill and picnic and play frisbee and ball and stuff. Sometimes when I’m feeling like just chilling, I go there in between classes with a sandwich or sliced peaches or something and just relax and read and people-watch. It’s very nice.
What else, what else! Oh, Mark, obviously, but I’ll talk about that another time. I’ll talk about what I’ve been up to another time, too. So… Yay! I’m glad I finally churned this out.
By the way, I’ve been sick a ridiculous number of times this semester. It royally sucks. I’m suffering from the flu right now… Blegh! Will definitely sleep early again tonight and hope for a quick recovery!
