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Be it extremely emotional, controversial, messed up, or whatever, this entry has been password protected.

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So I visited Kyle this past weekend. I took BoltBus there and back. The trip down was pretty comfortable, but on the trip home my back hurt for some reason so it wasn't as good.

Friday I bused down after working at the nursery. The bus stopped at a rest stop halfway through and I got some semi-disappointing potato wedges for 99 cents. When I got to LA Kyle picked me up and we went back to his house, then waited for his girlfriend to come home so we could go out and watch a movie. I picked Nightcrawler and it was surprisingly not terrible. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie in theatres that I didn't have any particular gripes about. Usually the most praise I can give is "It was a solid movie without too many plotholes," but I thought this one was pretty decent actually.

On Saturday we got Indian food and went to Boomers. I'd never heard of Boomers before, but apparently it's a "family entertainment center" that has different stuff to do. We played mini golf and some Korean ripoff of DDR, as well as this game that had 3D, air, and motion effects and something called a panic sensor that's supposed to measure your heart rate as you play. I'm not sure how accurate it was, but it was fun. When I got home I told my mom about it and apparently there's a Boomers up here, but far enough away that my family has never gone (hence my unawareness of its existence).

After Boomers we went back to Kyle's house and I took a nap while he walked his scary dog. The dog is just... too up-in-your-business for my taste. I guess that's most dogs though. I'd rather have pets that will leave me alone. Kyle's dog follows everyone around and also growled/barked at me when I went to use the bathroom. And I think it got dog hair on all my clothes, so it's a good thing my brother isn't home or he'd probably have had a hard time when I got back.

Saturday night Kyle's friends came over for a belated birthday celebration for his girlfriend... They were... interesting, I guess. Made a lot of racist jokes. Everybody but Kyle and I played this drinking game where you watch a movie and put a hat on the corner of the TV, and every time it looks like someone is wearing the hat, you take a drink. They also put another hat on the other side and Kyle suggested that if two people were wearing hats at the same time, people would have to take shots. He thought that was unlikely to happen much but I think it happened more than three times. Probably any movie that has closeups of dramatic dialogue will do that though. We were watching Van Helsing, so... yeah.

Also got pizza from Mountain Mike's. The only other time I can really remember eating pizza from there was when I was editing the literature magazine at my school one quarter, and I thought the pizza was awful then. This time it wasn't, which was a pleasant surprise. There was no unexplained meaty taste on my vegetarian slices, much to my relief.

Kyle's friend group has some weird fursona thing going on where everybody has an animal name. His girlfriend is Dolphin and there's also Bear, Dinosaur, and Penguin. And some guy named Dragon whom I didn't meet. They tried to give me an animal name too but it didn't work out. His friend asked me what my favorite animal was and I told him I didn't have one, but he didn't believe me. Usually people think my favorite animal is parakeets, and that's not unreasonable considering how much I love parakeets, but I don't really think of them as my favorite. If I had to pick an animal to be, I'd be a mantis shrimp because of the crazy stuff their eyes can perceive, but I really didn't want to be named Shrimp. Luckily they didn't push that name either.

Anyway, we all stayed up until fairly late, probably 2 AM, before Kyle and his girlfriend started kicking people out of their house. One of their friends had just conked out on the floor, so they had to wake him up. He seemed surprisingly comfortable considering he was lying on hard tile. To each his own I guess. One of Kyle's attempts to wake the guy up involved smearing peanut butter on his stomach and having the dog lick it off. It... didn't work, I think, but it was sort of amusing to watch in a gross way. They were talking about putting peanut butter on the guy's lips too, but nobody was cruel enough to make that happen, thankfully.

Sunday we got up pretty late because of how long we stayed up the night before, so we didn't really do anything before Kyle had to take me to the station to catch my bus. Got some chatting in though, for the first time in person in four years, and that was nice. We also got to the station early, so we just walked around and talked a bit. I guess that's probably what we'd do if we didn't live so far apart. Just walk around and talk. Maybe eat food sometimes. Normal stuff. I joked that I'd maybe see him again in four years, and he said he hoped it wouldn't be that long. We'll see though, I guess.

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I DID IT. I FINISHED THE OTHER PAPER. I'M DONE. OH GOD I'M FINALLY DONE.

Now to prepare for the trip down to LA... it's almost 4 AM but I don't have time to pack in the morning because I have to work at the nursery and then leave right afterward. Agh. >_< At least the ride down south will be laid back.

So excited for the stuff I'm doing over break aaaahhhh!

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I WROTE A TEN PAGE PAPER IN ONE CHRONOLOGICAL DAY. I say 'chronological' because I started it at like... 7 PM and finished at like 3 AM. Teeeeeechnically I did like... a fourth of my research yesterday, but I didn't write anything out. I actually grabbed a whole bunch of articles but ended up using hardly any of the ones I got yesterday and found like ten more today.

I'd like to thank caffeinated juice for keeping me awake and alert and not giving me panic attack symptoms this time.

(Though, if we're going to be fair, it's not really that unusual for me to be awake at this hour anyway)

And I'd like to vehemently not thank disgusting tea-based natural energy drinks. I got two caffeinated juices and a tea-based energy drink from Whole Foods and the latter was so disgusting. It was like sparkling Chinese medicine. Brought back flashbacks from when I had bronchitis for over a month and my dad wanted me to drink some awful tea that I could only bear to ingest by adding a huge amount of honey to each cup.

Maybe I can do my entire other ten page paper tomorrow. And by "tomorrow" I guess I actually mean "today" since it's almost 4 AM and all.

It'd be a holiday miracle!

(My papers aren't actually due until Friday and Saturday, but I'm going to visit my best friend this weekend and I'm leaving on Friday, so I have to do everything by Thursday T_T. It's killing me to get stuff done in time, but at least once this is done I'll be on break and free for a month)

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Next to the 30s, the 60s might be one of my favorite decades for music...

This is one of my happiness days
So very fleeting are these moments
And so, what my heart says, I will obey
This is one of my happiness days

I know that my feelings tomorrow won't be like today
But that comes tomorrow, and that's when I'll borrow today
Whenever my moments are sad, I will remember
My happiness day, my happiness day

Very relevant sentiments...

---

I'm starting to feel like maybe I don't like being someone who's just convenient to talk to. It's kind of annoying when I'm having a conversation with someone and then they just stop responding for hours and when they do say something (if ever), it's only because I've prompted them, or it's just about whatever they're doing, with no acknowledgement of the time gap. I guess it's like, why are you even talking to me if you don't care what I say? And it's not like I don't forget to respond myself... but I do try to apologize for it and give a reason usually... Unless the person has fallen asleep. So mostly it's annoying if the person intentionally leaves without saying something, I suppose. It's fine if people are busy or something but I really wish they'd just say that or say they're leaving or apologize for an hours-long delay in response instead of just ditching/ignoring me. Ugh. Sometimes I feel like I get taken for granted in that respect. I think the people who keep doing this to me really just don't realize they're doing it, but it's thoughtless. I know it's probably not that they really just don't think I'm worth the time to type out "hey, sorry, I was ___" or "I'm going to ___, be back later," but it still irritates me a bit regardless.

When this kind of things happens I don't feel motivated to put effort into talking. It's probably petty... being like "if you're not going to try then why should I?" -Sigh- I'm just tired of feeling like I don't matter on a day-to-day level to some people.

There are a few people who do this when I'm talking to them and I'm wondering if I should bring it up directly or just try to think through it and be more okay with it...

---

"We all know people in whose company we would prefer not to go shopping, not to visit a museum, not to look at a landscape, because we would like to keep these things undamaged. Just as we all know people in whose company it is pleasant to take a walk because the objects encountered come to no harm.

Summarizing: A word, a look or a gesture can brighten things or make them gloomy. The person with us is not an isolated individual, next to us, who throws words in our ear and who remains foreign to the objects around us. He is the person who is either with us or not with us and who makes the degree of togetherness or distance visible in objects, concretely and in reality."

A passage from one of my books on phenomenology...

I'd like to be the person who brightens things.

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Hmm... Postsecret linked this article about money being able to buy happiness, if you spend it on experiences rather than stuff:

Using Money to Buy Happiness

I guess it makes sense. I think going out for food with people I like makes me much happier than getting new clothes or random things. Even comic books, which I collect, don't have much of a lasting impact on my happiness (although I wouldn't say they're not worth getting-- part of why I collect them is because I like to have something physical that shows my support for an author). It's a relatively small thing, but eating out with other people is one of my favorite things to do, I guess. It's not really about the food itself-- I don't care to go out to eat if I'm by myself, after all-- it's about sharing food with someone else and hanging out and having a nice time.

I won't lie though, I have a lot of stuff. Part of it is just the way I was raised, I guess. My whole house is cluttered with the junk my family has collected over the years. I also have a lot of sentiment attached to my possessions. They're like memory repositories... That particular characteristic of mine sometimes worries me, since it's related to hoarding... but I think I'm okay about getting rid of stuff.

When we were cleaning out our house to put new carpet in, my dad decided to get rid of a lot of his old science fiction anthologies. I grew up reading those and when he asked me if I wanted to keep any of them, I quickly grabbed a bunch of them. I was surprised that he didn't want them anymore. He said that he thought it would be better to get rid of them though, and that he wanted to donate them to the library of one of the local schools so that children could read them. After that I felt kind of guilty for wanting to keep them, as if I was depriving future generations of the stories in them. I put some of the books I had taken out back into the donation box, but I did end up keeping the ones that had stories I knew I might want to reference in the future. I often think about the sci fi short stories I read in my childhood and it absolutely kills me if I can't figure out what they were. Having the books around is sort of a security against that.

Okay, gotta work more on my assignments now. Only... twenty more pages to write... plus an unknown number for one final...

-Cries-

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