There are more people on campus who know me than who I know

Today is a day to honor the Pleiades, the seven daughters of Atlas (dude who holds up the sky on his shoulders) and the nymph Pleione. They were placed in the sky as the constellation that we know as the Pleiades.

All the Pleiades were important to lineages. Maia, the eldest, was the mother of Mercury/Hermes, the messenger god, by Jupiter/Zeus. Zeus also banged Taygete who mothered the first of the Spartan kings, and Electra, the mother of the ancestors of the Trojans. Meanwhile Poseidon bedded Celaeno and Alcyone, who was the grandmother of Orion (the constellation), and Ares made Sterope the ancestress of the royal families of Elias and Mycenae.

This part of mythology always reminds me of the Biblical/Judaic "begets." You know, so-and-so beget so-and-so, on and on.

Anyway, the last of the sisters, Merope, married a mortal (as opposed to just shagging a god without the whole marriage thing) and since it's a big no-no on Olympus for an immortal woman to marry a mortal man (but immortal men can marry mortal women all they want, that's fine), she was later so ashamed that when she joined her sisters in the sky she hid her face, which is why we can only see six of the seven Pleiades stars with the naked eye.

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Now, for the great revelation... I wasn't lying yesterday. It wasn't really a prank. I just wanted to see how many people would believe it was a prank if I mentioned that it was April Fool's Day. I confused my sister so bad that she's still not sure if I'm lying or not.

So, unless I'm getting pranked myself, by Bisobrina, I really am related to Mary Boleyn, and thus am descended from aristocracy.

Okay, see, I had this great prank all planned out, practically written already, except that the premise of the prank was that I was going to be all crazy uber-excited because some guy had randomly asked me out and I had a date for a change. I had two ideas to choose from-- one, have a random meet-cute in the dining hall or something, or two, have someone on Facebook hunt me down and ask me out.

Except the latter really happened, so my prank was ruined. But considering that something so radical (well, to me) that I thought it would make a fairly out-there April Fool's entry ACTUALLY HAPPENED, I'm not complaining. Then as I scrambled for an alternative Bisobrina called with a story that kinda sounds like something I would have made up anyway if I were a lot more creative. So I figured, why not?

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Blackboard wasn't working today (surprise, surprise) so I couldn't get into my UNH email account. Normally this would be just an annoyance, but I needed to know where the Bio review was tonight. Unable to discover this, I was forced to just go over to the building I knew it to be in and hope I saw someone I knew.

I didn't.

So I wandered over to the other place I thought it might be, the normal lecture hall, and there I ran into a girl I knew from class, with the same problem I had; we wandered together for about fifteen minutes before finding the room and realizing that it was empty and dark. Clearly, he had canceled the review without warning us... great...

So I'm on my own for review.

Because I SO needed this.

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WOOT! I totally had my first encounter with an internet troll today!

The only reason this is noteworthy at all is because hey, it's never happened to me before. I don't tend to get involved in controversial debates online. But yeah, someone picked up on a comment I left on someone else's blog and came to shoot insults at me, clearly just trying to make me upset. To which I say, uhm, that little trash can is there for a reason... I'll just delete the comments, over and over, and I don't get upset about it, because whoever is writing them clearly needs to express themselves and can't manage to do so in any other way than to insult random bloggers over the internet. Perhaps they should turn it into a career and take up political talk radio.

People insult me to my face and I laugh it off. Why would I care if someone insults me over the internet? Besides, I've been called a lot worse. I mean, in my childhood, I was regularly called ugly (still get called that), fat, smelly, hairy, deformed, degenerate, a wuss, a freak, a weirdo, a loser, a moron, every other word you can imagine for moron, and pretty much every variation of the above. My own mother used to only ever give me backhanded compliments. You have to get a tough skin in my family or you wind up with the self-esteem of a slime mold.

(I do not have the self esteem of a slime mold. I have the self esteem of a three-week-old grapefruit. It's very different. Actually, right now my self esteem is more comparable to, say, a female ginkgo tree, in that I know I'm important to the propagation of the species but most people don't want me around because my decaying leaves are terrible stinkbombs.

Metaphorically speaking, of course.)

So I plan to revel in the insults. My alternative is to care and thus either go cry in a corner or unleash my secret horde of undead zombies to track them down, and the last time I did that I got in trouble with the police for corpse neglect. I always forget than even zombies need feeding...

I'm just kidding. I don't have a secret horde of undead zombies. I don't have a secret horde of anything repetitious like that. I have a secret hoard of candy and Ramen noodles but I don't think that's the same thing.

I'm sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drugstore

It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

That might be because they couldn't reserve a room in the Bowels of Hell on such short notice, but meh.

I think I at least will not have to retake the entire course. This is good.

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I was going to go to the review session last night, but one of the TAs, an older graduate student who used to teach high school, was running it. After the first half-hour, I realized he was still talking about "positive study skills," the major one being "start studying well in advance."

Uhm... this was the night before the exam. And the UN's been cracking down on the unauthorized use of plutonium in my DeLorian.

Anyway, I left that review, and studied on my own until the Chem fraternity's tutoring session. That was a bit more helpful, I'd say. Except the guy helping me was cute, and consequently distracting. But I was proud of myself, because I stayed mostly focused and there were only five babble-moments when I couldn't get my mouth to work right.

Anyway, I went to bed really early- 9:30- on account of having to wake up at the ungodly hour of 6 AM to shower/dress/eat/panic before the test at 8. It's weird getting up that early, because no one else does; the halls are empty and silent. The halls aren't even empty and silent at 1 AM around here. I was first into the shower; this wasn't actually a good thing, because it's not like it's been cleaned since November anyway and the water was COLD even though it was the shower that normally scalds me. I had to let it run for like five minutes.

I think I impressed Loquatia with my ability to get up that early. She was definitely expecting me to hit the snooze until at least 7. She doesn't believe me when I tell her I used to get up at 5:30 every morning for high school, and have not always been the lazy slug-a-bed she knows now.

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I'm beginning to wonder if I'm in the wrong major. No, I haven't been listening to my mother, you'll know when that happens because you'll start hearing news reports of ham and feathers on plane windshields. No, I have decided this because I was studying Chemistry, specifically tetrahedral-shaped molecules, and all I could think of was the ancient weaponry that they used to throw down in front of war horses- the kind where a spike would always point up, and the horse would step on it and be unable to continue. Please compare:



And while this helps me remember tetrahedral shape, if you can't study Chemistry without thinking of ancient weaponry, it might indicate an underlying problem. Oh well. I don't intend on majoring in something useless, like history- that's what minors are for.

(This explanation always irritates my English-major mother and German-major father, which is why I say it so much. Mind you, they're both computer programmers, thus proving my point.)

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Okay, I have issues coping with stress, of any kind. My grandmother's the same way, as is my mom. We all developed our own way of dealing with it- my grandmother tries to be strong for everyone else and confides in her sisters, my mother bottles it up inside, and I used to hurt myself or loose myself in a fantasy world. Now, I still use the fantasy world more than I should, but I talk about problems, or write about them. I share them. And since I've learned to handle stressors, mostly through communicating and complaining, and trying to find productive ways to solve my problems, I no longer need to be medicated.

But the thing is, this approach I have makes me see the world of blogging/journaling a little differently. There's this site, Trainwreck, that chronicles the worst blogs and journals on the internet- the mommy blogs, the self-involved-my-life-sucks journals, and the people whose lives are trainwrecks- so bad you can't look away. Normally I totally agree with them 100%, these people are losers. BUT. There's this mommy-blogger who's been on it a lot for bragging about her "incredibly precocious" kid, and she was up on it again- but this time they were ragging on her for complaining about her new kitchen not being all she'd hoped for, when she posted pictures and it's a pretty sweet arrangement. One commenter complained: "[B]ut [I] have to tell you, you complain a lot for having such a BITCHIN’ KITCHEN! B-I-T-C-H-I-N. and [I] can say that, because [I]’m from the 80’s. But what most disturbs me, is that you have so much (healthy, intelligent son, nice husband, nice standard of living) [and yet] you rant so much. And the things you rant about are that you’re son is so smart,(though you’re really humble) is beyond his grade level in intelligence, and that you have this new kitchen you didn’t [initially] want that you have (Sweet Jesus! You have a Wolf range, for Christ sake! AAAAAAAAhhhhhhhh!). ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! If you weren’t so spot on on most issues, [I] would just hate myself for reading this blog! [I] kind of feel that you don’t have a grasp on world issues and what’s going on around us ([A]fghanistan, [D]arfur, etc)."

Uhm, yeah. Okay. So she's a little self-involved. So she complains. But we can't all think about the horrors of Darfur and the civil unrest in Afghanistan all the time. How many times have I talked about Afghanistan? I mean, that doesn't make me less of a person, I just a)don't want to insult anyone by sharing my most likely naive views of the world, and b) have other, more immediate concerns.

Because Darfur is horrible and I'd love to do something to help, but let's face it, it doesn't affect my everyday life. I will wake up tomorrow and I will think about packing to go home, and my mythology test, and the final paper on x-ray crystallography I need two more pages on before Sunday. I'm not going to think about genocide (Probably. Never know). That's not because I "don't have a grasp on world issues." It's just because that's not my life. And I have a pretty wonderful life, I mean, I have problems, but I'm from a well-off family and I never really lack anything I need. I've been sheltered from the world's problems due to location and my community, and I have a wonderful family and a nice standard of living. So... I can't complain? I'm supposed to take all those little things that bug me and bottle them up inside? The whole point of having a journal and a blog is to be able to share the things that are weighing on my mind without needing an actual confidante, who I'd have to like, rope and tie and hide in my closet next to that cowboy I caught my sister for Christmas (oops).

So I won't read that blog because I think she's insufferably proud of her kid, who seems pretty average, maybe a little smart. But I still think that it's unfair to criticize her for complaining, no matter how well-off she is.

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I know it's supposed to be embarrassing to wind up as a trainwreck, but if I ever wind up there, I think I'd have to be kinda proud that they thought I sucked that much. Besides, I'd probably get a lot of readers that way. Even if they are laughing at me, not with me.

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But there was a paper thing I was supposed to be working on... and a test tomorrow... and I guess I'm supposed to go contemplate mass genocide for a while, too...