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!
