Another semester done.

Yep... I'm back home in Middle of Nowhere, VA again... left East Mormonistan yesterday, after sending over half of my stuff home with Mom the night before since I knew we'd be in a rush to leave Friday (since Mom had to work later that night.)

Though in a lot of ways this was kind of a crappy semester compared to the previous three, the last couple weeks turned out so well that I'm not sure whether to consider it my worst semester or second-worst anymore.  It might have actually been better than the spring semester of last year, if only because of how well the last couple weeks went.  Here's what I ended up accomplishing this year...

• Made a comic book in Spanish about Señor Death.  This was my Spanish IV final project, and it turned out really well.  Check out my other blog for links to every page if you want to read it (it's also on Facebook, but... eh.)
• Drew pictures for some of my friends leaving SVU.  Unfortunately not all of them (or even close...) because I was so busy these last weeks, but I did get seven or eight pictures drawn and given to people who won't be coming back next year.  Sorry to the other 16 or so people I didn't manage to get to before then... I really wanted to draw stuff for all of you, but I just didn't have enough time.  I should've started on them earlier...
• Made a Muppet.  A Muppet that looks like my dad, to be specific.  This was a project for my Sculpture class this semester.
• Did a buttload of other art stuff.  Mostly printmaking, but I'm pretty happy with most of my prints from this year (swirly Yogurt Snail, girl walking away from crowd of creepy featureless people, and the watercolored pineapple especially.  The Parupoos were pretty good too.)
• Played Scrabble for 3 hours.  DEATHTANKS: unfortunately not a word.  Yeah, that was random. XD  I wish there were more of those days where you just have tons of time to do random fun stuff with friends, but that hasn't happened too often this semester, between everyone else being busy earlier on and me being busy toward the end!
• Won 2nd place in the Heart of the OHR contest with The K'hyurbhi Lands.  Technically I did this last semester, but the results didn't come out until early this semester, so I'm going to include it here.
• Signed up for off-campus housing.  No more having to put up with 7-8 other guys in the same house! No more 15-minute walk up from Boredom Hell every day! I'll finally have my own apartment, with no RAs breathing down my neck all the time! Oh, and I'll have a mailbox down there in addition to the school one, so I'll be able to get my mail without walking up on campus (assuming it gets delivered to that mailbox and not the school one, anyway.) Again, this really applies more to next year than right now, but... I did the paperwork and such this semester.
• First ever checking account.  Yep.  I now have a checking account (and a debit card to go with it... but no actual checks so far. XD)  There's only ~50 bucks left in it now, but once I get my housing deposit back from SVU that will change.
• Explored odd places in Buena Vista.  I'm guessing I'll have walked pretty much every street in this town by the time I graduate.  This semester, I discovered another whole chunk of the place that I didn't know about before, with roads that go up and down really big hills.  I also re-discovered the spot where you can climb down into this weird little concrete "creekbed" under a bridge (no water anytime I've been there, but I guess it's a flood prevention thing?) that winds around several areas in town.  I had stumbled across this before, but forgotten how to get there.
• Lost 5 pounds.  Not sure how I did it, but apparently I am down to 235 (last time I weighed myself I was hovering around 240.)  This must have been pretty recent since the last time I got on a scale it was during Spring Break, and I was still 240 then.

Wow... that was a great end to the week

Yep... as weird and sometimes crappy as this week has been, the dance last night actually turned out really well!  There seems to be a pattern of dances that I try to ask someone to and then don't succeed in asking (or do and get a no) turning out really good... the Honor Ball last year, Homecoming last semester, and now this year's Spring Formal were all that kind of situation and they all turned out really good.  Lots of goofing off with Ruth, Elle, Michelle, and Clarissa this time, and I managed to ask a bunch of people to dance and somehow never had any problem doing so (I even managed to teach Ruth how to do east coast swing! and waltz, again.)  Took a bunch of pictures, too.  Never felt lonely or left out pretty much the entire time; when a bunch of friends went off to random-wiggle-dance, I just wandered off to take pictures and talked to other people who weren't dancing and there was no problem.  Probably the only downside is that it didn't last longer than it did, since I got there 45 minutes late... but then again, I wouldn't have wanted to miss any of my random Jonzzey's conversations from that day, that Italian BMT from Subway was pretty good, and I definitely wouldn't have wanted to go to a dance without taking a shower first.  So it would've been kind of hard to get there much earlier.  Also, I have a sunburn now, though I don't think it's too bad; mostly on my neck (only hurts if something scrapes it, otherwise just feels hot), though my arms are a little red too.  I should probably have gotten sunscreen on that last Wal-Mart trip... XD

And besides, even though the dance itself ended at 11:30, the random goofiness didn't! I ended up going up to the Lofts with a bunch of friends and we sat around talking, listening to random music from several people's phones/MP3 players, playing with balloons, and just generally goofing off for another hour or so after that.  I added so many things to my random quotes list last night... XD

Also, it turns out that the girl I tried to ask ("tried" because I ended up freaking out really bad when I tried to call her, to the point where I couldn't quite form sentences...) didn't actually get any of the three text-messages I sent her after the freakout, so... she had no idea what had been going on until I explained it to her when I bumped into her at the dance.  The version of my explanation in text-message form was a lot more awkward and filled with repeated apologies, so it's probably better that I ended up explaining what happened in person instead of her having to see those.  She didn't seem too freaked-out by the whole thing, and we ended up talking a bit and dancing once, so I think that whole situation turned out better than I was afraid it would earlier this week (my first thought when I don't get a reply back from a text-message is always "she reacted badly to something I said and is ignoring/avoiding me," made even worse by the fact that I didn't see her all week... what actually happened was "her phone is being weird and she never got that text." XD)

Roasty weather

We've had a lot of it lately.  It's been in the 80s the past three days.  And, surprisingly, I haven't been miserable; it's actually been kind of nice most of the time, though I do get really overheated and worn out if I have to walk a lot out in the sun during the day in this kind of weather.  It's easier to deal with when the wind is blowing, at least, and it cools off at night and becomes really nice walking-around-outside type weather.  Too bad everyone's so busy with homework lately, or I'd probably end up asking some girl to go for a walk around the area with me sometime.  Might still end up doing that, depending on how busy I am next week, since I won't be quite as homework-overloaded as I am now (at least, if I make some progress on my Printmaking stuff before this week's over... still no ideas yet, unfortunately.)

Yesterday was a pretty good day for the most part... until the very end.  I pretty much screwed up then... there's a girl who I've been thinking of asking on a date or something for a few weeks now, and last week she actually asked me if I had asked anyone to the dance that's coming up yet.  Which was especially weird considering that this was almost two whole weeks before the dance; she's asked me this in the week immediately before a dance before, but never that far ahead of time.  So I kind of interpret that as a "hint" she's trying to give me, like she wants me to ask her, and several other people I asked about it agreed.  Then the problems start.  I don't see her at all for two days at the start of the week after deciding that I will actually try to ask her.  And then, late at night on the second day, I try to call her and ask her that way.  And... it just doesn't work.  I get way too nervous and start freaking out and am unable to even form complete sentences.  I can't even explain to her what's going on, and I definitely can't manage to ask her to the dance in that state, so eventually I just end up hanging up the phone and wishing I had never tried.
And then it gets worse.  She sends me a text message asking if I'm okay, I guess assuming that I called her because something was horribly wrong rather than the call itself being what went horribly wrong.  I basically tell her that there wasn't anything going on before, and that I was going to try and ask her to the dance but I'm terrible at doing that and I freaked out and couldn't get words to work.  And... no response.  I never got another message back from her after that.  I mean, it was pretty late (after 12:30) by then so I thought it could just be that she went to bed, but... all day today, still no response.  And I haven't really seen her or talked to her at all since this all happened, so I don't know if I messed up and freaked her out with all that or if she's still okay with me after it or what.  I mean, I'm definitely not going to be able to go to the dance with her at this point (first of all, it's pretty much already Thursday and the dance is on Friday so it's pretty much too late to ask anyone; second of all, when something goes that badly the first time, I don't try it again), but I want to at least explain the situation better than some dinky text message could do and make sure we're still friends and she hasn't been scared off by that.  I don't know, I might just be worrying too much about nothing, but I can't help it.

Okay, on to better news.  There were actually people around on campus tonight.  Seriously.  All this semester nobody seemed to ever be around, and tonight I kept bumping into tons of people I knew just hanging around at 9:00, 10:00, 11:00... pretty much whatever time of night I happened to be wandering around.  Bumped into some people studying on a picnic table outside the library, then a bunch of the girls from the Library Mods hitting a volleyball around in the field there (I joined in for a while), then some more hanging around just sitting in the grass somewhere, and finally there were some more people in the art building working on a Senior Show project.  Actually got to know a new person there tonight; I think I've seen her around once or twice before, but never really talked to her until today.  She also gave me a ride down to Carriage, so I didn't have to walk all the way down for once! That's always good.

The dreaded Mormon Douche

I guess you could see this as a heads-up to all my female friends here at SVU... a description of the dangerous subspecies of human known as the "Mormon Douche," found on some other blog that I randomly stumbled upon when searching random things on Google.

Yep... though their natural habitat seems to be the Provo, Utah area according to this article, there are definitely guys like these here at SVU.  Don't be the girl who falls into their douchetastic trap and ends up being "Ex-Girlfriend #25" or "Girl He Groped On A Date #58" (or worse, "Unhappy Wife Who Finally Realized How Bad This Guy Is #1.")

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In other news... recently the weather has gotten insanely hot around here (upper 70s to low 80s) and finally the air conditioner has been turned on at my house.  There are also ants everywhere.  I ate at the Amish Cupboard for the first time ever yesterday (had a pastrami sandwich, chips, and a chocolate soda.)  I finished my Yogurt Snail prints, but now I need to come up with an idea for the next project (so far, I have no clue.)  I also finally have an idea for the musical instrument project for Sculpture class--a pan flute type thing made from empty bullet shell casings.  I have a huge box full of them back home which I'm getting my mom to bring over to me, so that should work.  Maybe I'll make more than one if I have enough shells to do so.

Two posts from the past two weeks

Yeah... not sure what the heck is going on, but I haven't been consistently able to post stuff on here from my laptop since the twenty-somethingth of March.  Because of that, there were two posts I was going to put up here that refused to go... I saved them in a text file, though, and since posting seems to work fine on the school's computers (just not my laptop...), I can still post them now.

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Last Wednesday's post (can't remember what the title was.)

...and it feels like I've accomplished basically nothing this whole semester.  Well, except for making a Muppet version of my dad for Sculpture class, that turned out pretty well.  Other than that this has pretty much been a "dead" semester, living down at Carriage (aka Boredom Hell) and being so far removed from all of my friends most of the time, very rarely having anything non-school-related to do (and being invited to non-school events almost never, with only a few exceptions so far... even less than last semester though), having less time to actually talk to my friends than ever before (mostly due to not eating in the cafeteria as much plus different schedules... thankfully there's at least one pretty much guaranteed time when I bump into a few of them every week, but still!), and of course failing to even make any real attempts to ask girls on dates or anything.  Every time I've even considered that as a possibility something comes up to throw it all off... either everyone I try to ask is too busy on the day I ask about (this has happened to me two or three times this semester), or stuff comes up that keeps me from asking, or I just don't ever see the girl I'm trying to ask on dates, or there's some issue (like "she's disappearing in a month or so") that keeps me from even considering it as a possibility for fear of it actually going really well and then... we never see each other again, as will probably happen with most (if not all) of the people I've met here when I'm finished and move back to Middle of Nowhere, VA.  Sometimes it's not even a specific problem at all, it's just that I just can't manage to actually ask in the first place, as always.  I just feel like if I don't even up having a girlfriend by the time I graduate here, I probably never will, because I have no idea how to go about meeting people back home or finding the time to actually talk to someone on a regular basis without the convenience of everyone being within a mile of each other due to school.



But anyway... I've finally went to the school nurse about the mysterious stomach pains (which twice led to barfing, but thankfully that hasn't happened again since), and she thinks it sounds like either something acid reflux related or gallbladder problems.  Which is kinda scary.  I really don't want to have to go into a hospital somewhere and get part of my body cut open and removed.  I'm already going to have to get those annoying wisdom teeth out before too long, the last thing I need is more surgery on top of that.  BUT... it seems like it might not be the gallbladder after all, since she mentioned that fried food, acidic food, and spicy food are all on the list of things that aggravate it sometimes and even now, six or seven hours after those yummy shrimp chimichangas I had at Don Tequila for supper, I haven't felt even the slightest hint of those stomach pains coming back.  This is actually the third day in a row that I haven't had them, so hopefully that's a step in the "not having this happen anymore" direction.

I did buy some random acid-reducer pills at Wal-Mart in case it really is acid reflux; if this happens again anytime soon, I will start taking the pills and see if they make any difference.  I'm not sure if I even got the right sort of thing (there were probably dozens of different antacids/acid-reducers/etc. in Wal-Mart... they pretty much had their own half of an aisle), but they were fairly cheap and there's supposedly only 8 pills in the box, so if they're the wrong kind or I don't need them it won't be that much of a problem.

 I randomly bought the Adventure Time video game today.  Somehow the price was down to $19.99 already (from usual 3DS price of $39 or at least $29, I'm assuming) even though I'm pretty sure it just came out very recently... I guess maybe they just didn't mark the price up super high like most games do to begin with? But anyway... it is indeed somewhat similar to Zelda 2, which one of the creators said was a major inspiration on the game's design in an interview (it has the overworld map with "floating shadow" random encounters, side-scrolling fight/dungeon areas, and ability to do a downward attack from midair and bounce off of enemies that way, plus a simple level-up system.)  Kind of easy so far, but most games these days are, so that's not too surprising (and being as hard as Zelda 2 would just be kind of ridiculous.)  And of course, it's pretty goofy so far.  The Ice King has strapped weapons onto random forest animals (including a chainsaw bear), the Hot-Dog Princess has revealed that she has creepy semi-sexual fantasies about walking on Jake who has turned into a bridge, and somebody stole Princess Bubblegum's pantyhose (...she has legs? oh wait, they show her in pants occasionally... but with the dress you really can't tell!)

Oh, and I ended up randomly seeing part of the Hobbit movie several days ago when some people here at my house were watching it.  Haven't seen the first parts of it (and I'm not sure exactly how much I missed), but I did see everything from the last bits of the troll scene to the end of the movie.  It still seems weird to me that The Hobbit is getting split into three movies... I'm guessing the other two are going to focus more on the Mirkwood part (second) and the Smaug/Lonely Mountain/big final battle (third), with extra scenes added in so that both of those can be a full movie on their own... but it still seems weird.

I can't remember if Radagast and his bunny-sled showed up in the book or not.  I'd think I would remember that if it did (I mean, he drives a freakin' bunny-sled!), but it's been so long since I've actually read The Hobbit that I don't remember 100% for sure.  I should probably read through it again at some point.

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Yesterday's post (title was "I hate compliments.")

Yep.  I hate compliments.  I hate giving them, I hate getting them, sometimes I just wish the entire concept of randomly saying something nice about someone else (usually their appearance) would just crawl in a hole somewhere and die.  Half the time they're fake anyway.

But yeah... when I try to say something nice to someone it usually comes out wrong, if I'm able to say it at all.  When somebody else compliments me on something, it's usually something I don't care about (like a new haircut or some pointless thing like that) or something I don't think is very good (like some of my projects for art classes...), so my response isn't what they're expecting (if I don't care about the thing they're complimenting, why would I have a positive response to that rather than a "don't care" response?) and sometimes people get really weird about that.  So either way, whether I'm on the giving or receiving end of a compliment, it turns things weird and uncomfortable, way more so than they should be.

Bleh...