It's been an endless pile of homework ever since school started. Four out of five of my classes assign one or two really long readings for every class. All of my classes are at least 1 and a half hours long too. One of my classes has an essay due every week. My schedule isn't the greatest. I have one class in the morning, and then three hours later I have my only other class of the day. So I have three hours in which to bum around campus. I usually spend it in a cluster studying for the next class.

The classes (other than the heavy reading load) are not bad, except for my Chinese class, Popular Culture in China. We have a reading for every class, and we also have a quiz in every class. Except, on the first day, the professor told us that we would have a POP quiz ONCE a week. Also, the first reading was not on the syllabus, and it didn't come with a vocab list. Therefore, everyone failed the first quiz. She just brushed it off, saying, "Oh you can drop your two lowest quiz scores." That does not help when we can't make up missed quizzes! I almost missed one because I had an INTERVIEW. Usually professors are understanding when you're really sick or have a career opportunity to pursue, but she just laughs it off, always repeating, "You can drop two scores." That also does not help when you misinform the class about the frequency of quizzes. I kept not studying for the second quiz of the week because I kept thinking, "We're only supposed to have one a week," only to be surprised by a quiz the moment we arrived in class. The one time I DID study for the second quiz of the week, it was called off because we were watching a movie. The readings are getting really hard too. The one we had for today had 60 vocab words (the last few averaged out around 30), and besides the given vocab words, the rest of the words were really difficult too. The quiz policy is really unfair. Grading for other things seems harsh too. We gave a presentation last week, and the professor did nothing but compliment us on how well we did. We got our grades back, and all our scores averaged around 91. What did she take off for?! She said something about our accents, but come on. One member of our group is not majoring in Chinese and just taking it for fun, and the other two of us speak Cantonese as a first language, so it's hard for us to grasp tones. And a white guy in our class also got a 91, and his accent is really much worse than ours.

Other than that class, I'm doing fine. I'm wondering if I might have hypersomnia, because I can't stay awake in class no matter how much sleep I get the night before or how interested I am in the course content.

I'm taking a figure drawing course this semester. We get to stare at a different naked person for two hours every week.

Outside of school, I'm the graphic designer/de facto graphic designer for FOUR different organizations, which is a little hectic. I have two posters due next week, aaahh! Good thing David bought me Adobe Design Suite CS4 (for only $120!)! It feels really good to have legal Adobe software, and it doesn't crash anymore! And of course CS4 is just so cool looking.

On Fridays, I tutor Mandarin at a high school in Squirrel Hill called Taylor Allderdice High School. It's really fun and I enjoy helping the kids out. Okay, I've only been there once so far, but I like it so far! The only problem is the high school schedule - their day starts at 7 something! The Chinese periods are 1, 3, and 4, but I asked my advisor to let me just teach during 3 and 4 so I could at least wake up at the still-indecent-but-not-outrageously-so hour of 7:30 (as compared to 6... ugh!).

We got a pet bird! We had a bunch of different name suggestions for him, the most memorable being Hobart shortened to Hobo, but in the end Mike suggested the name Buckbeak, and it stuck. I got him addicted to the Harry Potter universe, haha.



It's a fitting name, is it not? He totally looks like he could tear Malfoy's arm wide open. We've had him for a month now, and the only thing we've gotten him to do so far is sit still for a really long time in one place, and sit on a finger when prompted (sometimes). My biggest issue with him right now is getting him to eat fresh produce in the form of veggies or fruits. He only eats seeds, which is not the healthiest diet. He likes when I sing. He seems really paranoid and/or timid a lot of the time, which is problematic.

So, right now in Pittsburgh, the G-20 is going on. In case you haven't heard, this is when leaders of the 20 richest countries in the world get together and chill out and discuss global issues. There are a ton of protesters in the area right now, though I'm not sure what they are protesting. I've heard that some of them don't even care about the world leaders, they're just here because they know they'll get publicity from being here with pickets and banners. Some of them are protesting big business. Some of them are protesting that these 20 countries control 90-something percent of the world's wealth. Whatever they're protesting, it's really annoying because there are 2000 police stationed in Pittsburgh right now. They've come from all over the place to help out for G-20. It's really intimidating seeing a gaggle of police officers wherever you go in Oakland. It's also been quite dangerous. Some of my friends went to the protests just to observe, and apparently a lot of people were standing around doing nothing when they suddenly got tear-gassed for "refusal to disperse." What's wrong with standing around doing nothing? Some of the blog comments I've read say that some riot police dress up as protesters and start a riot in an otherwise calm crowd just so the regular police have an excuse to start beating up on people. I can't swallow that one, but admittedly, it's pretty weird that the police were beating up random bystanders.

It's also irritating to hear sirens so often. I thought I moved away from that already. This summer I lived down the street from the biggest hospital in the area and had to deal with tons of ambulances zooming by at all hours. Now I live in a Squirrel Hill neighborhood and we have been hearing firetrucks and police go by all the time.

Oh well, the one plus out of all of this is that all my Thursday classes were cancelled, because it was too much of a pain for the professors to travel to and from campus (and find parking) due to all the temporary traffic regulations, road shut-downs, and taking over of parking spaces.

In other news, I finally gave in and I have started playing Guitar Hero/Rock Band. Before this month, the only times I've played were one time at Chris's house, and a handful of times at Best Buy. I was initially too snobby to pick up a pretend instrument, then too shy to pick up a video game controller. It's fun! Our housemate Alyssa worked at EA this summer, so she can probably get us a heavily discounted Beatles Rock Band. How exciting!

Aaand one last thing. We've been using a 25" monitor for a TV, but last week Mike saw this really good deal on craigslist for a 46" plasma for only $500 or something like that. He bought that TV and didn't know what to do with the 25" monitor. I said I would like to use it, so he helped me set it up in our room and... Oh my god eyegasm. It's so big and beautiful and clear! My old monitor is (of course) smaller, and it was also darker, and my laptop screen is absolutely deplorable when it comes to graphic display. Ever since we've set up the new monitor, I have barely left the room.


Yeah, it's wider than my keyboard, bitches. Originally we wanted to dual monitor it, but we actually didn't have room on my desk... hahaha. Right now my laptop is under the keyboard, and it is a little uncomfortable for my wrists. It would be nice to have a little shelf to put the laptop in to make setup and removal easier, but for now this will have to do.

One more plus of this is that the monitor, since it doubles as a TV, has speakers, so I don't have to deal with shitty laptop speakers anymore either!

So beautiful... I can't wait to start drawing again.

Life is so good with (legal!) Adobe Creative Suite CS4. David is NUMBER ONE!

When I came home for the Independence Day weekend, I borrowed a book from Winne. I couldn't finish it before I returned to Pittsburgh, so I brought it to Pittsburgh with me. Around the same time, we decided to take advantage of a deal at Victoria's Secret that offered 5 panties for $25. We wanted to split it so I got 3 panties and she got 2, but of course you can't split where you ship an order. I decided to have it shipped to me and I would mail her the two panties after I got them. I finished the book pretty quickly and I figured I should mail the book and the panties together to be efficient. I went to the post office, carefully tucked both the book and the two panties (still wrapped in plastic) into a padded envelope, and mailed the package home. Over the next month, Winne kept asking me when her panties were going to arrive. I kept telling her that I had already mailed it and all she had to do was wait.

I got home last week and saw the book that I had mailed sitting on the desk. "Where's the underwear?" I queried. "What underwear?" Winne said. "It never came."

"But... I mailed it with that book."

...

We are very creeped out.

We just moved into our new house! The move was fraught with difficulties. Most of my stuff is in school storage so I only had to pack my own clothes and the miscellaneous junk that my former roommates left lying around (darn you guys! I hate throwing things away so I had to keep the junk). However, Mike and Erkan had tons of things to pack, ship, and sell. Erkan just moved to Oregon and he decided to schedule his flight for 8 AM on the day that Mike and I were scheduled to move into our house. Thus, we stayed up for a really long time on Friday night moving into the house early so that Erkan wouldn't miss his flight (we needed his manpower). We also had to move at night because the truck that we rented (the only one available for like 20 miles, and it was freaking expensive too) was only available til 8 AM as well. ALSO, we weren't allowed to move in until 5:30 PM on Friday. Yet we had to move out of our old apartment by 12 PM. And of course it had to rain all day on Friday. Mike and Erkan did most of the moving because I had to go to work but I was still exhausted after being awake so long on Friday.

Then we found out that the former tenants of our new house had turned off the gas. This meant that all weekend we had no hot water to shower with! Brr, cold showers. Luckily, the upstairs tenants hadn't turned off their gas, as we discovered last night. Tomorrow the gas company is going to swing by and turn on our own gas for us.

We have no Internet at home. I am typing this up in a cluster at school and the a/c is really powerful and my hands and brain are cold (which is why this post is so discombobulated) so I'm going to stop typing now.