Friday March the 27th, I went to watch Watchmen with Diana at Spectrum. I really liked it! It was really deep and really interesting. It was definitely violent and I had to look away from the screen a lot (as is the norm for me, LOL, since I love comic book and/or superhero films yet am a total wimp), but also very sexy. I really want to read the comic now; I’ll definitely do that over the summer.

Afterwards, we got Chipotle and then went to my house to change and get dressed up and then rushed to meet our friends at the Benefit Concert at my old high school. Things were fucked up for a bit, with Mark and Jess both raising their voices at me in annoyance, which obviously resulted in me crying. But I don’t think that anyone actually knew that, so it wasn’t too embarrassing, just distressing. I hadn’t even done anything wrong or stupid in the least. So my friends all went in and got seats (I gave Amanda my ticket because I’d promised to buy her one) but I couldn’t until my mom and sister came with my ticket, which was like after 7 PM, which was when it was supposed to start. So I didn’t get to hear the pre-concert stuff, which I was disappointed about. So I just sat on the steps and at my Chipotle while trying to stop being stupid and crying until my mom and sister came. Then I joined my friends, who had kindly saved seats for me.

The concert was definitely not as good as it has been in its previous years, but it was still very enjoyable to watch. I spent half of the concert being mad, but I got over it eventually. At Intermission, I chatted with my friends, hugged some acquaintances I haven’t seen in a long time, and got to talk to Helen and Sean for a while, which was really nice. I miss them kids; Pit was so much fun. After the concert, the Venadies asked us to eat with them at Denny’s. We decided that we’d go to BJ’s instead, but then Diana announced that she wanted to make an appearance at Denny’s to see the Venadies before going to BJ’s. So everyone except me headed over there. Once everything was cleaned up, I drove Ben, Tiffany, and Mark to Denny’s to join them. But the Venadies hadn’t shown up — in fact, they never actually did. Wooooow. Apparently they decided to go to Guppy’s instead and didn’t feel the need to inform us. What bitches. Whatever, it’s not like I was super eager to hang out with them anyway. It’s always so awkward being Diana’s best friend because we’ll be chatting incessantly and arriving everywhere together (including social events) and then suddenly people will see her and be all excited and huggy and totally ignore me. Yes, even people who I am acquainted with. I mean, I know she’s so much more exciting, but would it kill people to at least say hello to the friend? The friend, who they are plenty familiar with? Jesus. And they rank ME “worst-mannered” on Facebook.

Denny’s was all right; I arrived late because I had to wait for Mark, Ben, and Tiffany, so I missed out on Diana telling everyone about her (now ex-)boyfriend. I sat with Mark at first but then switched seats with Diana so that I could talk to my friends. After all, I hadn’t seen them in ages! But multiple people (including this very talented singer named Amy, who apparently keeps telling Mark about how I’m so pretty; I’m really, really flattered because she’s super cute) asked Mark why I wasn’t sitting with him, and he got all joking-sad but I’m never really sure if he’s really joking or just covering up his actual sadness. I wasn’t sure how to react to that. I’m hardly an inattentive girlfriend, but there is no way I would sacrifice time with my friends to spend it with my boyfriend, who I’d seen nearly daily during my months away from home. I especially did not want them to think that I was valuing him above them and was being a bad friend and lavishing attention upon him.

Later, I remembered how distressed he had been throughout and after the concert. That was why I had waited to give him a ride in the first place; he was just so bummed and I felt really sorry for him and felt really bad for being mad at him earlier. (Still, I severely dislike when he raises his voice at me like that. It happens often enough to leave an impact but rarely enough for it to lose its ability to get me down.) But maybe I should have been a better girlfriend and comforted more and talked to him more throughout the meal, rather than ditching him for my friends. I still stand by my choice of talking to my friends, but I now really regret forgetting his unhappiness so quickly that night.

“Bros before hos” has always been a really important philosophy for me. But then again, maybe it’s more bros = hos, or something. Mark and I talked about this recently, discussing how for him, his love is divided into different categories (e.g. friends, family, lovers) that he loves a lot but in completely different ways. He brought to my attention that in contrast, my love is distributed along a hierarchy of people. For example, I always put friends first, but I also consider my lover to be my best friend. I dunno. It’s interesting.

Anyway. On Saturday, we all went to Kelly’s house. Her family had friends over, and Wendy cooked up some delicious things, as usual. I always look forward to her meals; they are simply wonderful. Hanging out at Kelly’s is always a lot of fun; she always has lots of drinks and food and the nifty kitchen area for all of us to chat and tell hilarious stories. We updated each other on college, and everyone got to hear my angsty tales about my college experience. Fun stuff. Dale also approached me and asked me about how things were going at Cal, and I told him the truth. He has probably been the most helpful person I’ve talked to so far, which is so freaking random, but I’m grateful for it, of course. He expressed genuine sympathy and told me that he couldn’t imagine my position because all of the college friends that he’d made he had met in the first semester through living together. That made me feel a lot better, you know? He didn’t reprimand me for being too shy to join clubs, he didn’t tell me I needed to get out there and make friends on my floor and in my classes, he didn’t look at me funny with somewhat of a pitying look. He just told me that I was in a really bad situation and that he was sorry but hoped that next year I would get the opportunity to do what most college students get to do–meet people at a time when everyone is like WTF IS GOING ON?! That really helped, somehow, and I’ve been much more apathetic to my lack of friends here ever since (props to Alex as well, who told me flat out, “Why do you need friends?”, LOL). It’s really contributed to my happiness.

Anyway. So after dinner, we went upstairs to play Taboo, which I am of course pwnage at. Yay! After some fun rounds, we went downstairs again and had some REALLY GOOD DESSERT, OMFG. It was this delicious angel food cake with ice cream; so simple and so, so good. I love simple things. Afterwards, we hung around for a bit upstairs before deciding randomly to go see Monsters vs. Aliens, haha. It was a good movie, a fun flick to watch at night with friends. I was really sad when we had to leave. I hate leaving them; I miss them so much up here. I’m really looking forward to getting to chill with them a lot over summer.

Overall, it was a good spring break. Oh, except…

My great-grandmother passed away, bless her. It was pretty crazy, actually; my mom came home from spending time with her in Taiwan the Monday after I got back, and she passed away two days later. So then my mom that Saturday morning to go back and figure stuff out with the funeral and all the crazy will blah blah stuff. I teared a little and “prayed” a little, but overall, I’m glad that she died. She hadn’t been living much of a life (for the past two years, especially), with her vision and hearing shot, her physical body weakened (she used to exercise and garden all the time), her constant returns to the hospital, her “adopted” daughter feeding her ridiculously scant meals just to save money so that she could spend it… A life like that isn’t really worth much. She was suffering greatly before she died, and I’m really glad she doesn’t have to suffer now. I only wish that she could have witnessed me speaking Taiwanese the way that I can now. She would have been so delighted and so, so proud.

Me with my buddy Sean!

Me, Mark, and his ridiculous Asian afro.

ELAINE IS A HAPPY SHIPPER

*Spoilers!* (If you can even count a movie from over ten years ago as spoil-able…)

~

FIANCEE!

~

^ BEST, MOST EPIC, MOST SATISFYING MOMENT IN ANIME EVER

Is it shallow to want a medal, too?

Hah, not in this life time, Elaine. Shoot for the stars, yeah?

mood: unproductive
music: When You’re Around – Motion City Soundtrack

Found this survey in my LJ and updated it…

Copy and paste this into your journal. Bold the books you’ve read, italicize the ones you are working on or might read, and leave the rest visible.

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
1984 – George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer – William Gibson
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
American Gods – Neil Gaiman
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement – Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Dune – Frank Herber

P.S. I found Jayne’s entry that she wrote after I told her that I liked Mark, way back in 2006. It’s a good read, and very perceptive.

mood: lazy
music: Inaudible Melodies – Jack Johnson

These questions are taken from the Livejournal front page that lists a variety of prompts for LJers with writer’s block.

Do you think people deserve second chances?
I think that people deserve second chances and third chances — but not fourth ones. Everyone makes mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that constant mistakes can be forgiven.

When I think about this philosophy, I think of Jayne. I think of the way that she betrayed me and broke my heart and shattered my faith in her over and over again — and the way that I was able to give her another chance. I believe that when someone very important to you does something wrong, the right thing to do is to give them another chance. But this doesn’t mean that you should keep your heart soft. My beliefs have always tended to run in the direction of “Forgive, but never forget.”

Do you behave differently online than you do in real life?
This used to be a very, very strong yes, but nowadays, it’s less so. I used to be much more carefree and willing to speak my mind online than IRL. I think that I was a lot less silly online — not necessarily more serious, but just less…obnoxiously strange, haha. I was definitely much less socially awkward online as well, and I was willing to say my opinion a lot more than I was in person, since I had the time to think about what I wanted to say and debate whether I should or not, whereas in person, the conversation would have already moved on by the time I decided whether or not to share my thoughts, haha.

I think that things are different now, though. Since I’ve become much more comfortable in my public skin (LOL, that sounds creepy and weird), I don’t feel like I act that differently online than in person. It’s a good feeling. No pretenses. No acting awkwardly different in person.

It’s Tax Day in the U.S., a day when the mind might be too occupied with deductions and long lines at the post office to think about poetry. But let’s try: what’s your favorite line of poetry? Song lyrics count.
Favorite line of poetry would be E.E. Cummings’s “i like you better than everything in the sky”. I used to have it in my profile all the time, and Ridtsy used to always make fun of it. It’s where my most commonly used username comes from — but is that because of the quote or is that because of Ridts? That’s irrelevant, I suppose.

If you were to have another name, what would it be?
In middle school, it was Aurora. Then, it became Arralee. Then, it was Adrianna. Then, it was Ariadne. This year, it’s Avaline. Can you tell I like “A” names?

Who (or what) do you consider to be your first love?
Michael, a silly boy who I fell head-over-heels for when I was twelve. I loved him to death. He thought that I was a total freak (okay, fine, he said, “I don’t think you’re a freak” to me, but then later he said “I hate Elaine”, so…), but my friends managed to convince him to dance with me at a school function. It was the best moment of my life until Mark asked me to Winter Formal in Junior year. I will still never forget those three minutes during which the wish I’d carried within me for a year and a half came true. That night still exists within me as a symbol of hope, and of impossible things actually being possible. I was young, but I loved him with all my heart. Strange emotions flood me when I look at his Facebook pictures — not of love or regret, but of nostalgia and an unexplainable feeling of fondness.