The Coffeehouse

This, is way overrated.

Forget that last optimistic-y, glass-half-full, new beginnings, sappy post.

I handed in my last essay last Friday, I woke up on Saturday and.....nothing was different!

I didn't feel older, smarter, more mature. Sure, I may have felt a teeny tiny sense of accomplishment, I liked all the "congratulations", I'm looking forward to presents. Still, this is disappointing...

All that's changed is...... the pressure.

Pressure to find a job.
Pressure to get married.
Pressure to clean room (okay, this one is understandable).
Pressure to [fill in the blank].

There was supposed to be independence! (fun)responsibility*! adventure! independence (yes, twice)!

At this moment, I'm feeling a bit of "gaaah" crossed with "blaaaaggh", with a touch of "uggghh".

This better get better. Il est nécessaire qu'il devienne mieux. (I miss French class...sigh)

___________________________
*whatever that is... responsibility that you want to have? responsibility by choice?

It's finally sinking in. It started to sink in at the beginning of March. Four more weeks! One month! [However many] hours! Technically, I finish on Tuesday, April 3, 2007. Done classes, assignments, exams, e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Unless I decide to defer something, or hand in an essay late. Or something. And my last day of work at my university library is on Wednesday. And although I'm excited (can you tell?), I hate when things end, beginnings are always so much more fun. I hate the last lecture, the last day of school, saying goodbye, packing up. I get all nostalgic-y. Right at the end, at the finish line, is another start line, a new beginning. Sometimes you don't know what it is you're starting, and oftentimes you're pushed right into it, not knowing in which direction you're heading.

So what's next?
Well, my room is kinda messy..

P.S. Sorry if the font size is weird, I tried.....

A not-so-comprehensive-or-profound list of things that stink according to queenie:

1) Seeing your old crush/"almost" around

2) Having your old crush/"almost" hang out with the your new crush/"hope-to-be"

3) Being very limited in communicating with new crush/"hope-to-be"

4) Not succeeding in ending useless relationship

5) When your ideal zodiac matches don't work out (see #4)

6) People not taking initiative/making the next move (see #4 & #3)

I'm pretty sure there's more to come...

A : Bienvenue à notre spectacle Yum Yum avec [ma partenaire] et [moi]!

B : Aujourd’hui, nous avons quelque chose d’excitant à vous montrer.

A : Nous allons aller en France pour preparer un dessert délicieux – les crêpes bretonnes!

B : Crêpes d’origine bretonne, une région à l’ouest de la France.

A : On lui dit que des crêpes ont été soutenus dans cette région parce qu’ils ne pouvaient pas cultiver assez de blé pour cuire du pain au four dû à la terre pauvre.

B : En Bretagne, les crêpes sont servis traditionnellement avec du cidre.

A : En France, il y a les endroits que s’appelle des crêperies, où on peut s'asseoir et manger des crêpes. À Paris, on peut les acheter au kiosque de nourriture sur le trottoir.

B : Ils sont servis traditionnellement aussi sur la fete de la Chandeleur, le deux février. Maintenant, le jour s’appelle le Jour des Crêpe.

A : On croit que si on peut attraper un crêpe avec une poêle avec se main gauche, tandis qu’on tient une pièce en or, on devient riche!

B : Je pense que je peux le faire! Je vais devenir riche!

A : Nous allons voir…Maintenant, la recette des crêpes…

B : Il y a deux types des crêpes – les crêpes sucrées, qui sont fait avec la farine de blé, et les crêpes salées, ou les galettes, qui sont fait avec la farine de sarrasin .

A : Nous allons faire les crêpes sucrées, on peut les utiliser pour le dessert comme Mille Crêpe, Crêpe Suzette, ou avec des fraises, du chocolat, et de la glace.

B : Pour cette recette, il faut :
- une verre de farine de blé
- deux œufs
- moitié de verre de lait
- moitié de verre d’eau
- quart d'une cuillère de sel
- six cuillères de sucre
- deux cuillères de beurre fondu

A : Pour la première étape, mélangez la farine et les œufs dans une grande cuvette. Ajoutez le lait et l’eau tandis que vous remuez. Ajoutez le sel, le sucre, et la beurre jusqu'à ce que ce soit lisse.

B : Puis, chauffez une poêle légèrement huilée à haute température moyen.

A : Versez ou écopez la pâte lisse sur la poêle. Utilisez un quart d’un verre pour chaque crêpe.

B : Inclinez la poêle avec un mouvement circulaire de sorte que la pâte lisse enduise la surface également.

A : Faites cuire le crêpe pendant environ deux minutes, jusqu'à ce que le fond soit brun clair.

B : Avec une spatule, tournez et faites cuire l'autre côté.

A : Fais attention! C’est considéré de la mauvaise chance de laisser une crêpe tomber sur le plancher tout en la jetant en l'air.

B : Tu as raison, Napoléon a blâmé l'échec de sa campagne russe sur une qu'il s'avait laissée tomber!

A : Et….Voila ! La crêpe française.

B : Vous pouvez ajouter les fruits et les écrous à la pâte avant de la verser sur la poêle.

A : ...Ou, vous pouvez éliminer le sucre de la recette et ajouter plus de sel pour faire une galette.

B : C'est très facile, bon appétit.

A: Merci pour regarder Yum Yum, à demain mes amis!

Last night we had our first real snow. Forget those last pictures I took, that was amateur winter stuff, it hasn't really snowed until you've got at least 4 inches of the white stuff on the ground and everyone is driving in slow-mo.

I love snow, it was so refreshing to wake up this morning and see nothing but endless white outside my window. It's like our bodies are in-tune with the seasons, just like any other biological being, your mentally and physically programmed to expect certain temperatures and sights at specific times of the year. Since December, I have woken up fully expecting a winter wonderland, and it just seems wrong when I see trees budding and green grass instead. It's surprising, and frankly, very annoying! So today, I was a happy caffeine-and-snow-loving gal. A happy caffeine-and-snow-loving gal who had to walk through miles of yucky dirty slush to get to the bus stop. Ok, a quarter of a mile, but still, SLUSH. I loved it!

I got The Da Vinci Code from the public library on Saturday and I'm halfway through it. I was extremely bored over the weekend, and since I haven't gotten any of my class texts, I had nothing to read. Usually, I don't do any non-academic reading when classes are going on because I have no self-discipline and I would gladly use up most of my study time to read the non-academic stuff. No self-discipline right? I haven't been able to put down the stupid book because it's so good! Not as good as Angels & Demons, but there were times while reading this book where I literally gasped out of shock and surprise. The one thing I hate about this book is its cover. It's got that "NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE" text on it. I'll be honest with you, I judge a book by it's cover. I was actually debating whether to get the book or not, but I couldn't find any other cover for it, and I finally gave in. I also borrowed White Oleander, and the only copy of it I found was one that had the movie poster as the cover, grrr. If the text in the book is good, the cover should reflect it, not make reference to its movie, which could potentially suck. Sometimes though, I've picked out books with gorgeous covers only to stop reading the novel after the 5th page. So, I agree, you can never tell what's inside by the cover, but still, they've got to be pretty!

Sophie and Langdon are at the Zurich bank and have gotten hold of the Rosewood box with some liquid thingy inside!
 

EDIT: I forgot to mention, my sister, who goes to a different university, got to stay at home today since her university cancelled all classes due to the snow! My university NEVER closes down due to weather. She's first year, I'm fourth, you'd think I should be getting the break!

Time for a guessing game. What's wrong with this picture?

(Besides the intervals being written backwards? Sorry.)

That was the "bell curve" for an assignment for one of the classes I'm taking (and finishing!) this semester. As you can see from my lovely drawn (omigod how do you spell "graff"?! I'm blanking out... ), more than half the class got grades between 50 and 70, and this is after the professor curved our grades even more. I'm usually not one to share my grades, nor do I care very much what others get, and I don't mean to sound conceited, stuck-up, or uppity, but I am not used to getting grades in the 50 to 70 zone. However, that is the region I got put in for this assignment, along with, as it turns out, many others in the class who usually get higher grades as well. From talking to people in my class, those who usually end up in the high end, got stuck in the low end, and vice versa. And I found this quite weird as the assignment was not hard to do at all. We all voiced our concerns and dismay at the grades to the professor, who had provided an answer key to our TA for grading. The answer key was reasonable and many of us had the same answers, but the grading was still a problem and when the bell curve looks like the above AFTER being given additional marks, something has got to be terribly wrong. The TA, she is terribly wrong. One of the questions in the assignment asked us to voice our opinion, whether we agreed/disagreed with the author's arguments. In her marking, she later explained that we had to have said "I agree with..." or "I disagree with..." in order to get a point. Now she's a Master's student, and we are freaking 4th years, so I don't know when it was acceptable for people that far along in their education to use personal pronouns and phrases like "I agree with the author" to make a point or support your own argument. You're supposed to indicate agreement/disagreement within the text. For example:

"Landsburg fails to see the bigger picture when assuming that his interaction with the environment, such as increasing waste and not recycling, are isolated acts that only impact him because it is an individual preference he has made. " (It was regarding that "Why I am Not an Environmentalist" article)

Clearly, I disagree, yet I got no marks for this because I did not say I disagreed. BS! Clearly, this chick is wacko and I wasn't gonna bother arguing this over with her since she did this to the whole class and wouldn't back down. And the prof backed the TA.

The day we went over the marks was also the day that the professor announced he was going to drop another assignment, meaning this assignment and the previous one had even bigger weightings on our final grade (ie. now 35% each). The only other grade was our final exam (30%), so now most of us were REALLY screwed. My first assignment was really crappy, even to my standards, but it still shouldn't have gotten THAT crappy of a mark. In the end because of this different weighting, I managed to convince the professor to let me do an extra essay which would be weighed into my final grade (ie. 70% divided by 3 assignments), because I knew that ANY assignment I would do would get me a better mark than the last too, even if it was still weighted less. I honestly had no time for this extra assignment and I worked on it two hours into my class to hand it in on the day it was due, but whaddya know, the professor marked it and emailed me my grade, 85%. I'm telling you, this idiot of a TA is a plain idiot! I hope she's not grading our final exams, or I'll wring her neck... (Disclaimer: The last phrase was purely for entertainment purposes, there will be no wringing of anyone's necks. I do not wring people's necks.)

Yeah, I just had to rant.

It was cold, white, and bright...

* York University campus.

That was the title of a presentation going on in a study room at the library, no jokes. Some of the study group rooms look out right into a main hall of the adjacent building, so that one of the walls of the study room is actually a floor to ceiling window, and whoever is in that room "studying" is pretty much stared and gawked at by whoever is passing by in the hallway. I walked down the hallway and noticed at huge bright pink sign saying "Attracting Women 101" and on the chalkboard "class in session". I'm pretty sure the room did not pass fire regulations as it was packed, with very good looking men (puzzling?). I pass by 15 minutes later, there is standing room only, and now they have some females in the audience (attempting to disprove the 101 theories, no doubt). I was trying to take a picture with my camera phone without looking like I was taking a picture (ie, by pretending to talk on my phone), but it wasn't working so well and I gave up, hmph!

I wasn't adequately warned before watching this, but I will warn you. The following video is not for the weak-hearted, it is quite disturbing...

Iranian-American Student Abused By UCLA UCPD With Tazer Gun

I've neglected you o faithful blog. I've been crazy busy...

- annotating stuff on Wikimapia
- making useless things
- café-hopping
- studying French. My prof started instructing us completely in French...oh mon dieu!

Here is a picture from my café-hopping.