Lit:
First (graded) paper: 95/100
Second paper: 98/100

Psych:
Midterm: 48/50

I would say I am doing well. This 98/100 business is bugging me, though. I understand that my first paper was kind of rough, since I'd never done an explication before, but he didn't give any explanation for the two points off. He just wrote lots of praise all over my essay...

Well I've tried to write the rest of this entry three times now, and I don't know how to do it without sounding ungrateful or condescending or just... annoying. I guess I'll just talk about my day(s) instead...

Yesterday went well! I was kind of tired, but it didn't affect too much. Since I have that gap between my psych class and my environmental studies one, I went to the environmental science building to wait. I saw the guy from my class who gave me a ride before there. He was sitting at one of the tables, so I sat down across from him. We had about half an hour left before class started, and he was writing his paper (due that day, for shame! :P). He was also eating pasta with chopsticks. :S (The guy isn't asian, although that really wouldn't make it less weird anyway) I thought it was a bit odd, so I laughed, and he explained that he had a metal fork before, but it kept stabbing him and poking holes in his backpack, so he switched over to chopsticks.

Well alrighty then, mister. Whatever floats your boat.

He also mentioned that he hadn't seen me at one of the volunteer events. I told him I didn't know that one counted, but he said it did, and then went on to elaborate on how boring and long it was. Glad I didn't go, I guess? Haha, he definitely made it sound like a drag.

Besides that, he asked me if I noticed that another one of our group members seemed to be really into guns. I replied that I hadn't, but I thought that it was because he works in law enforcement.

Yeah, not gonna lie, I found the whole conversation kind of amusing. Just the directions it took... I don't even know. Oh, but in class, everyone liked my cookies! (The chocolate ones I make most often) And one of my group members (the "gun obsessed" guy, who's like, forty and has kids and a wife) said I was marriage material. Ah, if only cookie baking skills really could secure me a husband... Everything would be so much easier. XD

Today hasn't been as nice. This morning I started getting cramps at 3 AM, but it hurt so much that I didn't want to get out of bed. (Plus... I thought I could try to sleep it off) Finally, at 5, I got up and took some Midol. Went back to sleep when it finally started working, and then woke up about half an hour later than normal. I was in a bit of a rush because of that, so I just had a smoothie for breakfast, then got dressed and biked to school.

School... uneventful. We just got our papers back and then... talked about poems, I guess. I was so brain dead I could barely pay attention.

Back home... made another smoothie (with some Very Green powder from Trader Joe's... it gave it kind of a weird smell/taste, not bad exactly, but strange. Blending in a banana fixed it). My brother wanted to try it, despite its green color, and apparently liked it enough to finish the rest.

And now... CRAMPS AGAIN. Blahhhhhhh my 12 hour Midol is wearing off. :( I hate having periods.

Also when I got up at 5 to take the Midol to begin with, for some reason I kept thinking about yamakas. When I wake up I often have one clear thought or song stuck in my head, and today... it was Jewish headgear. If I was dreaming about that, I do not remember at all.

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The title does not lie! This I swear to thee.

BUT FIRST: Look at the lovely things I have been getting in the mail!

:3

I also took some pictures of the yemiser wot I made the other day. Yum yum yum, Ethiopian food.

Here are the ingredients...

Red lentils, berbere, onion, garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Water was also an ingredient, but I think you all know what that looks like. :P

This is the sauce for the lentils...

The recipe I have calls for only 1 1/2 Tbsp of berbere, but I like me some spicy lentils, so I probably use more like 2 1/2 - 3 Tbsp. Possibly more.

The lentils, after being cooked, but prior to being combined with the sauce. Notice how they've lost that bright color they had while dry...


Just added the sauce...


Stirred and cooked for a few minutes.

The lentils have started to absorb some of the color at this point.

Unfortunately I don't have a delicious looking picture of the finished product for you to see. We ate the yemiser wot up so fast I forgot to take a final photo. XP There were some leftovers in the fridge, which I took a picture of, but it doesn't look quite as nice. Slightly revolting to some people, I'd bet.


Do not be fooled by the mundane appearance! I assure you that it is quite tasty. Plus, it's super healthy considering how good it tastes. Lentils are very good for you, and I hear they're good for losing weight... (Probably not so much if you pig out on them like I'm inclined to)

The recipe I used is HERE.

It's super easy to make as long as you don't mind a teensy bit of multitasking (I would recommend using a food processor to chop the onion, by the way). I eat mine mixed with a little brown rice, since injera (Ethiopian sourdough flatbread, spongy in texture) is turning out to be hard to make. I think my experimental batter just needs to ferment awhile longer...

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I seem to be putting a lot of gaps between entries these days. There were times when I'd put up two posts a day, and now it's more like two a week.

Oh, how times change.

Things are quiet around here.

No I will not explain that picture. It needs no explanation. NONE WHATSOEVER.

I made yemiser wot again today, and it was yummy. Took some pictures, but as you might recall, my external hard drive crashed a few months ago (man I have NOT been on top of this...) and I have nowhere on my primary computer to store them. I can, of course, transfer them from my camera to the computer in the front room, which is the sluggish ol' machine I used to obsessively surf Nutang with, but seeing as I am not often in that room anymore it takes a bit more effort on my part.

And we all know that I am a lazybones. :(

Sidenote: I just Googled "scour" (habit; sometimes words you've learned purely from context mean something totally different than you expected) and laughed because I am immature.

scour Noun /skou(ə)r/

1. The action of scouring or the state of being scoured, esp. by swift-flowing water
2. An act of rubbing something hard to clean or brighten it
give the floor a good scour
3. Diarrhea in livestock, esp. cattle and pigs

That last one is just so non sequitur. I mean, it's also bathroom humor, but mostly I was caught off guard. And apparently being caught off guard makes me laugh.

---

I had a dream that I was trying to escape from home, so I went into my bedroom, which was also apparently the bathroom, and tried to close the door so my dad wouldn't see me leave. It wouldn't shut all the way, so I pretended I couldn't do my business without proper privacy, and pleaded with him to help me close it. He wasn't falling for it. I packed my bag anyway, and then realized that I had boiled some lentils for yemiser wot, and contemplated finishing cooking before leaving. For whatever reason there was a lot of pressure to leave as soon as possible though, so I just ran. The streets outside were bordered by jungle, and deep trenches ran down the middle of them. Wooden bridges ran over the trenches, but you could easily fall in if you tripped, since there were no railings down the length of the gashes in the ground. It was all very tropical and humid.

I ran down to the end of the street, where a large rounded dock stood. The jungle did not thin out as it approached the grey ocean, instead ending in a solid wall of dark green and brown at the shore. It was two stories high, with balconies like a motel.

---

Probably one of my greatest, if rarely thought about, ambitions is to accurately portray a scene from my dreams in visual form. Lately, since I've been remembering so much more, the urge to share has been increasing. People tire of listening to these things though, and I think it would be more meaningful if they could see what I'm talking about.

Maybe one day.

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Like a dead star I'm burning out
And I scream in the vacuum

As the title implies, I've been listening to Splitsville recently. Definitely not my normal fare... I'm not too big on pop from the past few decades. Pandora introduced me to their song "Aliceanna"(CLICKIES!) though, and I thought it was great.

The excerpt above is from "White Dwarf", another song of theirs I like. I find the accompanying video a little tedious, but at least you can hear it...


I had a dream that I was sitting in a sparsely furnished cafeteria with a very high ceiling. It looked kind of like this, except with actual people instead of fiery splotches, and everything was farther apart.

I was sitting at the table, looking around. The employee behind the counter was making a pizza. All the ingredients were on one half of it, and he was rolling some from the filled half to the empty one. The pepperoni were stuck together like paper cutouts. Once everything was laid out, he began to press down on the top of the pizza with his palms, and then for good measure he got up on the counter and stepped on it a few times with his shoes. I was rather affronted by the unsanitary action, and glanced around to see if anyone else was seeing this.

My brother walked over, and I asked him if he had ordered a pizza. He said no, and I told him that was a relief, because the guy behind the counter just put his shoes on that one. I said that it was gross, and I thought it was good he wasn't going to eat it. We were getting along swimmingly in the dream, so there was a sense of camaraderie.

---

I tried making yemiser wot (the spicy Ethiopian lentil stew) today. It turned out pretty well! I thought I added a little too much salt, but everyone said it was good. We had to eat it with rice because the injera I'm trying to make needs a few days to ferment. (Side note: I'm trying to find other recipes to use teff flour in, since it would be a shame to let it go to waste. Found one for teff pie crust, so I'll update you guys on that if I make it)

I'd like to start cooking more again. So many things to try!

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Last night I dreamt I was with a group of kids - preteens in a building I used to live in. Something bad had happened in my old room, so we weren't supposed to go in there. One guy, ignoring the warnings, went in anyway, and he didn't come back.

The rest of us waited around for a little while, then decided to go look for him.

When we opened the door the room was dark and full of raw meat.

---

Yesterday I dreamt that I was employed in Hell, which looked more like a collection of old southern farm properties than flame-infested caves.

I was seeing a guy who had, for whatever reason, an unacceptable ethnicity. He was supposedly black or Indian, but he looked vaguely Spanish or Hispanic in some way. I had two sisters who were very racist, and he had two brothers who were as well. In order to evade them we had to walk in a strange dance-like pattern that, in the dream, I described as "circles". You had to take two steps forward, then one back to the right, and then one to the left, and so on. If one of the pairs of siblings caught us they would undoubtedly kill the partner whose race they hated.

---

Several days ago I had a dream that I was a little boy going to therapy. I kept having flashes where I saw my own gravestone. After the second time, the gravestone had my name as well as the name of my child and grandchild on it. I realized that I was not young at all, but in fact old or dead, and the trauma of losing my child had caused me to revert to a childlike state.

Later, I was with a friend (this time I was myself) in the backyard of the therapist's office. It looked just like my backyard with no plants. He suggested we dig in a part of the dirt, so we did, and uncovered a bottle of children's vitamins. Seeing this, he became horrified, and explained to me that the therapist had been feeding him such supplements to keep him from aging, so that he would have to go to her forever (she was a children's therapist). Following this discovery, she walked out toward us with a calm, slightly resigned face. She told us that we could never tell anybody what she had done, and advanced on my companion.

He climbed into the rusty shell of a car near the spot where we had dug, but she went in after him and grabbed his arm. I, on the outside, could only watch in horror.

She held in her free hand a stapler. "Oh, staples can't kill him," I thought to myself with a bit of relief. Then, as if to defy me, she extracted a staple about the size of a large nail and began to stab him in the back. I screamed, but stayed put, not knowing what to do. He struggled until she stabbed him in the back of the neck, then went slack, with a dazed look on his face. She stabbed him once more, and he collapsed.

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I saw some ducks hanging around one of the fountains at school today.


I don't know how they got there, but I thought it was cute. There was a male and a female, and they were just walking around. Later, when I exited the library (about forty five minutes after?), they were swimming in the water, just doing what ducks do.

Despite the cuteness, I was somewhat worried that the water wouldn't be healthy for them to be in. It looked like they were drinking some of it, and it probably has chemicals in it to keep anything from growing in the fountain...

Also saw a guy in class who has this adorable little peach-fuzzy goatee type thing on his face. It's like he glued a duckling to his chin. XP (He's got pretty dark hair, so it's more noticeable that his facial hair is so light)

In less fuzzy news, it would appear that another pair of my earphones broke. Bahhh. My SnuggBuds lost sound in one side pretty recently, and now my nice V-MODA ones have gone the same way. D: I still have the pair that came with my iPod way back when, but they're not as good as the ones that half-died on me.

Oh yeah, and I was reading The Scientific American Mind and there was some stuff about how gazing into the eyes of someone of the gender you're attracted to, even if they're a stranger, can greatly increase your sense of intimacy with them. (It's gotta be a mutual stare though... otherwise you just look threatening)

Makes a lot of sense, I guess. I kind of want to try it out, but I don't think there's anyone I can test it on. :P

---ADDITIONALLY!---

I realized that the mustachioed fellow in my last entry looks like a certain webcomic character... CLICKIES

And lastly, I had a... sort of a nightmare... that Alice found quite amusing. Would anybody care to read about it, or should I not bother?

---Edit---

Ehehehe

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I think that the Mills Brothers' version of this song is my favorite. Other singers may add "style" or "flair" to things, but when it comes down to it I really prefer... well... singing in tune with the music. Kind of why I've been so disappointed that I can't find any videos of Shirley Bassey singing "For Once in My Life" where she doesn't take extensive liberties with the tune. X| I guess once you're famous enough you don't have to pay attention to background things like that.

It's pretty windy today. My hair suffered for it. Although I really want to donate it, I'm starting to feel really bad that I haven't taken great care of it, and I'm wondering if I should just chop it off and start over. :/

People I have seen recently:
-Asian dude at the farmers market with three layered popped collars
-Guy in my psych class who randomly started looking completely shocked (he was just staring into nothingness and suddenly went wide-eyed several times)
-Red haired man on bike with a beard like John Muir's

-This dude and his majestic moustache:

I wish I could have gotten a better picture of it for you, but I think you probably get the idea at least. He was actually on the side of the cement plant that's been... polluting, I guess, but I must give him some credit for cultivating that thing. ESPECIALLY since it's completely white and his hair isn't. (Wtf?)

Yesiree, the wind is blowin' somethin' fierce out there.

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Apparently I forgot I had a body yesterday. I mean, this has happened before, since I tend to get wrapped up in my thoughts easily, but it's not usually... a big deal...

I don't think of myself as being a human, or a girl, or even a physical entity.

Not sure what I think of myself at this point. A moving presence that makes observations?

I forget I'm part of the world.

---Edit---

Found this mildly interesting, mais que pensez-vous?

CLICKIES

A bit odd to proclaim that, I think, but I suppose it is an icebreaker.

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