A Little Birdie Told Me

Tomorrow is the first day of classes for spring. A few resolutions/wishes for this quarter:

1. Explore new places to study. Like the above location. It's the arboretum that surrounds one side of my college campus and it's a pretty popular place to study for law students (more incentive to go). Currently, my only experience with this location was a birthday picnic for my ex. But, I digress.
2. Stick to a study schedule. Heh, we'll see how this will turn out.
3. Continue going to office hours that have a large attendance. I find it really beneficial (and motivational) to feed off other people's questions and observations. One-on-one meetings with the prof. serve a whole different purpose.
4. Get more involved. I ambiguously toned that on purpose. What I hope is to find something that I will thoroughly enjoy, instead of mindlessly collecting extracurriculars.
5. Continue being open minded. I know that not everything is going to work for me, but I only know this from trying them out. I would have never guessed that salsa classes would be so 'meh' for me. But I haven't given up on finding my outlet for dancing.
6. Pack my own lunch (and breakfast and dinner) more often. I've given too much money to my university already, don't need to keep contributing by buying their overpriced food.
   

Anyways, something I bought yesterday: 3 gold bangles + one silver birdie from etsy seller allison mooney. I've been meaning to buy some bangles. I've always like the little twinkling sounds they make as they move about on your wrist.

Quarter End Review

Another quarter has passed and a new one is about to begin in 3 days. I've learned more than I expected this quarter. Fell in love with physiology and more in love with gender studies (unfortunately fell out of love with chemistry).

This quarter's grades: 2 A's ...and a chem.

Lessons learned from this quarter (A lot of these are pretty "duh" but I needed to experience it for myself.):

• Don't be afraid to dispute exam/hw questions with professors. There's nothing to lose if I have the goods to back it up.
• Textbook only helps if there's something I am grossly confused about (or is specifically required). Otherwise, don't bother with it.
• All nighters don't really work for finals. I just end up all panicky and anxious. So... stop doing this.
• Office hours are a nice place to meet cute, smart boys.

Next quarter's classes, all upper division again:

• Excercise Metabolism
• Introduction to Nutrition and Metabolism (an online class!)
• Motor Learning and Sport Psychology
• Gender and Sexuality (anthro approach)
  
  

I'm pretty stoked to have classes that might have overlapping material (the two metabolism classes). I enjoy having the opportunity to integrate similar material from different sources. And I never thought I would be taking an upper div science course online, I wonder how this is going to work. I'm kind of liking the idea of getting to stay home, away from the spring rain, with a nice cup of team, sitting in on online office hour chats. Also excited to take another class with my women's studies professor from last quarter. She has renewed my faith in my ability to write in-class essays.

I know all this positivity and optimism is gonna be gone by the 3rd week of school so I'm going to bathe in it while I can. Yay school.

Tan Tan Men

Met up with a friend for lunch. We went to eat ramen at this little japanese place downtown. I have never ate ramen outside of home before. It was raining but people were still waiting outside for a seat so the place must have been good. And it was. I had a small bowl of Tan Tan Men and a side of chirashi. After our meal, she had to pick up her brother from work but since we were early we killed some time by getting froyo.

I always add gummies to my yogurt because I can't say no to candy.

The froyo places back home are so different from the ones at school. I guess since the demand is lower here, the quality is lower as well. The fruit pieces were huge in comparison to the ones in Davis, like 5x bigger. It just doesn't feel the same plopping one-two large chunks of fruit into your cup instead of that the nice toppling spoonful of bite-size pieces. My guess is that the owner is trying to make her customers add on as much ounces that they can to their cup. A lot less fresh and a smaller selection of toppings too. It was also 43 cent per ounce here versus Davis's 34-38 cents. Expensive.

Cardigan: From China Shirt: Plain white tee, F21 Pants: Mossimo/Target Scarf: Claire's

Lucky Chambray Dress

Did some shopping over my spring break back home. Haven't shopped for clothes since winter vacation. I saw this embroidered chambray dress (below) at Lucky Brand during the Christmas season and totally loved it on the mannequin but for the full price of $119, I passed. Fast forward 3 months and it's on sale for $30. Yay.

From site.

With a skinny belt.

With a bejewelled leather belt.

Also found some nice pieces at Banana Republic (below). The sale rack was stuffed with clothes. I was chatting with a friend from SF and she got some good deals as well. Also found out that BR offered 15% off discount to students off their full priced items. Neat.

Shirt: Banana Republic $13 Jeans: Banana Republic $17

Finals Week Entropy

1:00 pm

1:00 am

Notice the post-its migrating up my wall.

Eggs in the morning

Suffering for vanity. Burnt my forehead this morning with the curling iron. My roommate can hear me scream from the living room. My first curling iron burn, I tried to remember what my mom told me to do to put on burns. Egg white. I called her just to make sure. After scolding me for being clumsy, she confirmed that egg white was best, no cold water (oops). Immediately put the egg white to prevent air bubbles and scarring. Funny, cause on the episode of Doc Martin I watched last night, when a cook accidentally stuck her hand in boiling oil, he asked for cellophane to wrap around the burn to prevent air bubbles. Both serve as a film to prevent air from entering, but egg white has the added benefit of scar prevention (couldn't find any scientific backing, but whatever my mom still knows everything).

Histamine

What a glorious day. Why? Well I have been dreading getting my paper back for my Arab gender class since the day that I turned it. I felt that I completely missed the mark on this one, focusing too much on analyzing each individual movie and not enough on the patterns. I honestly have no idea how I wrote 12 pages when the minimum was 8, and still feel that I didn't hit all the points I wanted to. But I literally worked up to the last minute I could for the paper (because I didn't sleep at all) and there was no going back. It was the longest paper I ever wrote; with the bibliography and 5 movie reviews we had to include, I could barely fit it into my report holder.

Anyways, fast forward 2 weeks to the last day of class, the Professor started calling out names, some warranted a "Nice job" others - "good work'. I didn't hear my name called the first time, cause I was grouching my head down low in nervous angst. On the second "A-va!", I mustered out a meeble "here!" and she excitedly said "Terrific job!" with one of her big smiles. I looked down at my paper in disbelief. An "A"? My hands shook at the thumbed through my paper, thinking that they made a mistake. But nope, just a "nice work" comment from my T.A.. I texted my roommate my news and my disbelief to which she replied, "I TOLD YOU SO". This paper has singularly teared down and rebuilt my confidence. I don't know what more to say but "game on" for the final.

After class, I checked my e-mail and saw that there was an announcement from my physiology professor. My complaint about a incorrectly written question did not fall on deaf ears and two answers for that question would be accepted. Again, yes I do feel vindication. How can I mark a statement that stated Histamine stimulated the release of both HCL and pepsinogen as true when I was taught that only the former substance is released? When I brought this up in the class's chatroom a few students agreed and followed my suggestion to email the professor. I made sure to include two printscreens of his lecture/book that showed that histamine only stimulated parietal cells and not chief cells.

Hmm, I hope I don't come off as a petulant child to my professors. I just want all the points that I deserve.

And finally after all my classes, I went with some friends to the dining commons for Harry Potter night. It was so cute to see all that freshmen, even saw a few parents. The food wasn't as great as I remembered it to be, but definitely felt some nostalgia. All in all, an awesome day.