long overdue...but posted nonetheless

Yeah, so I'm really bad about posting. What can I say? I'm pretty flaky when it comes to blogging. Maybe I'll get better, maybe I won't. (I haven't so far...but I guess there's always hope.)

I just can't sleep tonight, and I need to distract myself so that my brain will actually calm down enough to let me rest. (Just eight hours...that's all I need from you, brain. Can you just chill for that long? I promise you can go at it again in the morning. :P)

So what can I say that will keep me busy for a while, I wonder. School started last week. That's kind of exciting. I think that I'm going to like my new schedule -- starting at 10:50 and 11:00am every day keeps me from stressing out as much, I think. I'm out by 4 or 4:15 every day, which doesn't feel really late to me. I can still take care of things in the afternoon and evening, or in the morning if I feel like it. The workload isn't bad so far, just a lot of reading, and I seem to have a really great combination of professors to work with. I can already tell that Gender Communications is going to have the most interesting and thought-provoking discussions (and probably the tendency to irritate me), and that UN & Intl. Politics is going to be the longest, most boring class I've ever attended. I'm going to be doing something else on my laptop for an hour and fifteen minutes every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon and NOT feeling guilty about it. Don't get me wrong. I like to be respectful of my professors and pay attention to the material during lecture classes, because usually they're pretty interesting to me anyway. But the possibility of feeling guilty for distracting myself in this class vanished when I realized that my professor doesn't finish his sentences, can't explain all of the terms he puts up on the board, and feels the need to spend five minutes defining terms like "peacekeepers" by explaining that they "keep the peace." Yeah, it's going to be a long semester in that class. Silver lining (alright, maybe silver plated): I have the option of volunteering at the Model UN later this year. That could be interesting. Fortunately, my Sociolinguistics, Event Planning, and French courses all have much more potential to provide some stimulating material. Talking about language with language nerds every week rocks...and Event Planning will involve pulling off an actual event, which is awesome because practical experience trumps lectures any day. My French independent study and capstone shouldn't be too taxing, given that those are just my opportunities to do what I love and get credit for it. I can focus on whatever I want to, basically, since a lot of the texts I'll be translating are of my own choice.

I've already decided that I'd like to read at least one book a month this semester to give my mind some new ideas to think about, so maybe I'll find one that I wouldn't mind translating into French. Perhaps some C.S. Lewis? It would be a challenge, but a worthwhile one. I'd like to read The Phantom of the Opera in its original French, and Les Miserables too. I have a copy somewhere. Yeah. Story of my life: "mmhmm...I have that...somewhere...") I joined GoodReads this week to hopefully kickstart my reading project. I should probably add more books to it if I'm going to accomplish anything, though.

So today was my birthday. Feels kind of weird to be 22. More specifically, it feels old. Yes, yes, I know that, relatively speaking, 22 is not old. Maybe I just feel behind, like I should somehow be a lot more mature and have a lot more things figured out than I actually do at this age. It's quite unnerving. I guess I should probably just get used to being unnerved by life, though, because I don't see that changing anytime soon.

I suppose I've sufficiently distracted myself now, since I'm getting sleepy. That makes me happy. I'm going to get some rest now and hopefully...you'll hear from me again before the year's over.