30% of couples met online according to Time

i've thought as much about work in the past few days as i should've been thinking about it all summer.

so i've decided to use post-it notes and put them around my head-side of the bed to remind me what i have to do otherwise i'll totally forget.

to-do list for tomorrow:
-get early start, which means go to bed soon
-find ways to drink milk before its due date (i am drinking maxwell house instant chai tea latte right now-- so good!)
-buy eggs, other forms of protein (maybe those pre-cooked chicken strips you can put into salad and also some turkey), redhot sauce (which people don't know is actually buffalo sauce, yum) to eat with non-recalled eggs, and random other foods for jason's birthday celebration
-guilt trip parents into giving some of chobani yogurt stash. maybe just buy some of the strawberry kind since that's the best anyway
-pack lunch
-find bike lock holder thing and summon courage to take bike for a spin (but not tomorrow, no time)
-mail Becca's Mad Men DVD back
-go to work in Gilroy lab, fix problems with plants, read more of paper on aquaporins, become intelligent.

self-sabotage

you know it well.

as humans, we know what's best for us.

for example, if i have a big test this thursday (i don't), i know it would behoove me to study. but instead, i often just procrastinate until i near the point of no return.
why do i do this? maybe i like the drama.
maybe the thought of improving my life or myself in some way summons in me a fear of change. maybe i fear that if i get what i want i'll miss something else, or somehow be unhappy.

i'm kind of sick of this self-sabotage thing. too often do i look at life as a win-lose situation... i think that if i gain something, i inevitably lose something else.
i don't know if that's necessarily true.

lately i've just been in this spin where i waste all my time thinking and worrying about my problems and not doing anything (save a few runs) about it. so many things are fixed by taking the initiative, by focusing outward, by remembering the big picture. i'm always apologizing to people, but the person i really need to apologize to is myself. i can't think of life with this "oh what will they think of me" "oh am i doing this right?" mentality. i just have to figure things out by myself and instead of saying "sorry i made you have to do this," i should say, "thank you for doing this for me."

i need to stop thinking about what i have to say and just say it sometimes. i need to feel rather than think.
i can't just worry about whether or not i have what it takes to make someone care about me. i just have to be someone who i would want to care about.

and who is that person?
that is someone who is kind and selfless. someone who is courteous and gentle. someone who takes pleasure in simplicity, but appreciates and comprehends complexity. someone who sees beauty in roughness and reality. someone who is just friendly. someone who will do something even if the end-result is not clear. someone who is strong enough to ask for what they want. someone who sings to himself despite not knowing the words or the melody. someone who doesn't mind spending a day alone. someone who is innately curious. someone who reads. someone who believes that people are inherently good. someone who believes in love. someone who is content with waiting for what they want. someone who makes the most of things. someone who sees the value in others.

i'm gonna work this new attitude.

does it bug anyone else that...

quaker's steak and lube has the word "lube" in the name and the menu boasts of different types of LUBE you can LUBE up your sandwiches with? cute, but kind of sickening, which kind of goes for the whole place. i got the sauce that was 10X spicier than regular hot, and it wasn't that hot, so pat on the back for my spiceholding capabilities.

sorry for the asinine, boorish commentary, but i paid $4 (for an iced chai) to get on the internet and out of the heat today and I'd like to get my money's worth from this "free" internet. there ain't no such thing as free wi-fi.

so i've grown to really enjoy having the two-roomer to myself. i walk around in my underwear and listen to music whenever i want and boil eggs all the time, having extended my bedroom to include the whole apartment. i watch a ton of daria, but i've finished it as of this morning... also, my bike is in the apartment because i don't want to teach myself how to use the big scary Kryptonium lock yet so i have to step around it to make coffee. as everyone knows, moveout day is in 2 (two) days and cohabitation will commence yet again with becca & connie... two of my best friends, strong women who are very, very different. naturally, i'm really excited to see how this goes. i just feel like it'll be really interesting.

whoa, i've been writing this for a while.

yesterday night, becca and i met michael moscovitz (princess diaries, anyone?) or his real self, robert schwartzmann of rooney. this is the man whose voice narrated each and every heartbreak i've had since 7th grade when i bought their CD. we were at the rooney concert, which was chock full of girls like us, who love boys who sing about breaking girls' hearts. robert totally gave us hugs. good ones, too, that he initiated. point for team beccaarushi. that looks funny.


don't tell me not to live, just sit and putter. life's candy, and the sun's a ball of butter.
don't send around a cloud to rain on my parade!

things i like (fall 2010 edition):
casual friendships. hanging out during the day with nochem hanging over my head. going out to lunch with checca. non-deep conversations. not worrying. falling asleep on a bare mattress with daria. combining words. being happy with myself. the strokes. rooney. the shins. i gotta learn how to write songs like these people. things, like friendship or thinking for example, that are free, but super awesome quality anyway. knowing in my heart that i've got it going on.

things i don't like.
the fact that my id talks before i can stop it, and then my superego has to step in and explain that my id is overactive, and it never makes it better. my beloved 80 gig iPod may or may not be slowly nearing its inevitable end of life. stupid blogger won't let me move around my cursor without use of the arrow keys. moving & everything associated with it. the feeling that i'm not being productive when i could be. oh well. falling for someone even though i should know better.

i wake up every evening

"I'll always be honest with you-- painfully so. All I ask is that you're honest with me, too."

i suck at posting.

i say this not because i haven't posted in a while... it really has not been that long. i say this only because i always start writing a post and then abandon it halfway through either because i'm not sure i want everyone i know to read it or because it feels half-baked in some way.  (also, half-baked ben & jerry's is overrated. yeah, i went there.)

i'm thinking it's better when i'm stream of consciousness anyway.

one of the best things in the world is hanging out with my family, especially my little brother. but i don't know that i can really handle being at home anymore, if not only because there's way way too much food in this place. for breakfast, i ate 3 eggs, half a bowl of cereal (the rest of which i pawned off on chet as any good sister would) while watching fareed zakaria GPS and then reliable sources. fareed zakaria ROCKS, he is very good at interviewing people and getting real answers out of them. he's one of those people that stops CNN from towing the bipartisan line by just getting out the facts. that's because he just really knows his shit about foreign policy. he talked to john kerry and the ambassador from pakistan about the state of affairs regarding the Taliban and the Pakistani govt and got kerry to say that the republicans are putting a huge block in Congress against anything left and it just straight-up sucks more than it ever has before and it's allowing people like China to get ahead on things like carbon credits-- something that's just going to make them even more powerful than us as a world power.

then i went and took a nap and did ochem on chet's bed while listening to his music, (which is just kind of a mix of soundtracks to tv shows and random musical numbers from musicals and beatles... the kid has pretty good tastes in that i don't have to switch the song very frequently). it was the first of two naps. i woke up because my dad had randomly decided to make mango lassi (it's essentially a mango-flavored indian yogurt smoothie) and bring it to me, because it's only like, my favorite indian beverage. so i drank a glass of that, but then papa decided it wasn't mango-ey enough, so he made me another glass. so that was post-breakfast. later, i was called upon again to eat the aloo ki sabzi, which is only my other favorite indian dish in the whole world, which according to my dad is the "uttar pradesh comfort food."
so that was my lunch-ish.
after that, i got distracted because chet was playing the glee soundtrack over the bose system, so naturally, there was a singing-dancing interlude before mom started getting stressed that maybe the neighbors/golfers could hear us because the windows were open and made us turn it off.
chet is like, one of the only people who understands how fucking wonderful a release it is to have a musical interlude. i miss this at college. no one likes it when you sing at college! (except for the gilroy lab.. they've been pretty understanding of it.)

so i went and wasted time on my computer for two hours, but got told i was beautiful/respectable, so that was cool. then i ate again. this time it was beef soup that was too bland so i added salt and crushed red peppers liberally. mom tried to tell me not to put salt in it ("maybe you should try not to....") and then just trailed off because she realized what kind of poor taste decision she was expecting me to make and how she herself would not have been able to follow it. my mom's a doctor so she's just trying to prevent us from all getting hypertension. (but she's also an indian cook, so she realizes how necessary salt is.) apparently, it's a problem for indians because our food is so damn salty, but it's not as big of a deal because in india people sweat a ton more to compensate. this was kind of my dinner, so i ate a yogurt (chobani, holla!) and a chocolate skinny cow thingy.

then i studied again, but had to use the computer, which means i talked to jason more than i'm really supposed to, and then printed off more ochem stuff. then chet and papa decided they wanted to go canoe-ing without me (well, they decided they wanted to go canoe-ing whether or not my studying schedule would make it impossible for me to go) so the whole family left as i studied ochem further. to wake myself up, at this point, i felt really tired. i started to look for ice, because i didn't want to make myself boring coffee, but then found frozen raspberries, and then i got really excited and made myself a raspberry-pineapple-orange juice smoothie. then, as dessert, i had a shitty cold coffee, because our ice machine sucks.  (smoothies consumed today: 3)

 so then i did more ochem, and then i finally gave into tiredness and took a nap, knowing my family would wake me up when they got home. they brought me my favorite type of salad from culver's because they felt bad for me... the strawberry fields salad. (favorite things consumed today: 3)

and now i'm here. gotta go do ochem.