Laughter Through Tears

I've been sick since I got back from Atlanta. I'd had the usual allergic post-nasal drip, and then towards the end of our stay it abruptly clouded and I woke up one night with a fever. I went to the doctor and got some antibiotics, because he was worried about me wheezing and how it could turn into bronchitis.

I thought I was feeling better but now suddenly I have chills and a violent cough.

The good news is, Lost Girl is back! :D

There's a heat wave. According to the forecast numbers, it's high, but not astronomically so (30-31 ish?) but for some reason the weather feels brutal. Despite my apartment being half-buried and thus cooler than most, I've had cause to put on my air fan.

Today I did everything right. I stayed indoors during the worst hours, and when I headed out at 5 PM, the sun was low and the worst of the heat was supposed to be over. I put a bandanna and sunglasses on, and I walked in a measured pace, mostly in the shade. I was only out for an hour and a half or less. Yet now I'm completely wiped. Something that should be a painless stroll became a downright chore of a walk.

Not even halfway through July and this summer is already defeating me. Well, screw that. I may not have found the furniture store that I was looking for, but I got peaches, apricots, cucumbers and orange peppers. And candy. I think until it chills a little I just won't go out for longer than ten minutes until after 8 PM (the big drop in temperature is between 8 and 9).

My capacity to lose things, it is pretty much infinite. I lose/break watches with particular severity, especially considering I can only really tolerate a watch if I wear it on a string around my neck. This is because my skin is ludicrously sensitive to just about everything, including most of the middle part of the periodic table.

This makes things complicated, because necklace watches are hard to come by, and necklace watches with decent mechanisms triply so. For a while I was ordering cute Hong Kong made watches off e-Bay. They looked adorable (I had a ladybug, and then an owl) but their durability matched their price. Most of the time my cellphone suffices for time-telling needs, whenever I happen to drag myself away from the computer, that is. Of course, during exams my cell if on silent and in my bag, and I desperately need good time management.

So, I went back to trusty e-Bay. I was going to buy one of the cute watches with the dubious innards and have it gutted by the local watchmaker and replaced with a more effective Japanese mechanism (his idea, via being introduced to him by my father). Instead I found a bargain on a lot of eight proper, honest-to-Florence-Nightingale nurse's watches. Now I have eight multi-colored watches on my desk and I'm debating which eye-smarting color I should wear.

The options (for eternal record): Black (yawn), yellow (a bit much maybe), bright blue, light tealish blue, green, violet (quite bright!), pastel pink, and OMGWTFBBQ eye-smarting hot pink of Barbie and Ken's nightmares. I think I'll save that last one for special occasions.

My brother just had the same realization I had a few years back, regarding the childhood cartoons we watched. He said the opening song to PMMM sounded Israeli to him but of course, it was the other way around. Since the cartoons were dubbed in Hebrew and the books of origin (and thus the names of the characters and places) were all European or sometimes USian, neither of us realized at the time that they were produced and adapted in Japan.

Okay, maybe I managed to figure out Samurai Pizza Cats.

In fairness to my child self, a blonde boy named Nils is maybe not one's first guess for the star of a Japanese show. They appear to have been quite selective about what to import until fairly recently. Some of the shows were also co-productions.

...Wow, I'm checking Wikipedia and it's really almost all of them.

I feel sort of sad for my child self for not knowing these things.

You know how I can tell it's spring? Because I've been sniffling nonstop for three days. I take all my antihistamines, and yet.

I made a bold decision not to retake biochem, even though I got a 66 and it's fucking up my averages (which are not great to begin with). I can only stretch myself so thin before I'm a fool for wondering why everything goes wrong. I have a project in developmental psychology, I have a chemistry lab, I have a seminar and I do still have molecular biology. I feel pretty confident that I'll improve in MB, and that's not for a month, so there's that.

Tonight I have a party. But first, I have to spend all day on my seminar and hope for the best. I was pleased with my output yesterday, but I'm still horribly behind. I also keep forgetting to do important things, which makes me anxious.

The good news is, purimgifts went awesome! I love my treats, and the treats I wrote were also received well, even though mumble mumble I'll talk about it later. There's a whole bunch of fic that I want to write, which is really nice, but now is not the time. Frankly, this weekend is not the time either. I'm not sure when the time will be. Wait, this was supposed to be the optimistic paragraph.

Whatever, I am ambivalent as usual.

Guess who finally got off her ass and mailed her help_pakistan package to its mysteriously patient recipient, four months late.

(It's me.)

My brain is all discombobulated. :| Well, maybe it's the after-effects of my first exam, or the natural effect weekends sometimes have of me. Also I'm reading Hobb's Dragon Keeper which is creating an odd effect as it mixes together with other media I've been consuming lately. And I got some bizarre feedback on anonfic which is also eyebrow-raising.

Anyway I will spend all next week studying, mostly molecular biology, and consequently will probably be tedious as fuck.

Getting out of bed this morning was a struggle. The bus company moved my station so I had a longer walk, although the wait for the bus was perhaps less frustrating because the station wasn't so crowded. I am coughing pretty badly now, but on and off. I should go to the doctor, but I just remembered I've been sitting on a codeine prescription that I never filled, that he gave me for just this purpose. There's a pharmacy pretty close to my place and that should buy me sometime.

Like is so hard, woe is me, etc. etc.

Today in braaains!: leeches and decision making.

I am looking at wall art to decorate my place. I love botanical illustrations so this collection is sort of a jackpot. I also found this hat which is not wall art but damn. Can I justify it? I also want one of Ursula Vernon's prints but deciding which will be hard.

This anthropology and population genetics blog is both fascinating and confusing.

Sea unicorns and etc. I am pretty much addicted to this video and squiddles in general.

Last but not least: I am ludicrous and have not realized that this classroom has wireless until halfway through class.

I'm working on statistics. We're studying two variable analysis, which involves making tables of numbers and then checking to see if they form sets. Series of numbers are the sort of thing I find oddly relaxing, although today it was a setback because I found it easier to fill the table out right than to explain (or understand) why that's the right way. Interactions are also easier to understand geometrically (the two lines are parallel) than arithmetically. Then I start thinking about how I process numbers and I get distracted.

Once, a while ago, I posted (on my old journal) about gender and color coding, and how I thought green was more masculine-coded than blue. Just not it occurred to me that maybe it's because it's farther from pink. This is a weird idea, I guess, and it doesn't explain everything. But, when we were little girls at school we went through an obligatory pink-liking phase and then an obligatory "I am too mature to like pink and purple" phase. During that second one, it was fashionable to like blue, which is the next over from purple. Green is the next over from blue, without veering into the orange-yellow spectrum which was the favorite-color territory of eccentrics.

My brain is a very strange place to live, sometimes.

I have not yet watched the finale of Lost Girl. I was all pumped to watch it yesterday and then I somehow forgot, IDK. Tonight I have to deal with some laundry issues so maybe I'll watch it Wednesday. Maybe if I put it off long enough, this whole finale business will turn out to have been a big misunderstanding, and there'll be a new episode next week.

Anybody have an idea why the AO3 homepage might repeatedly crash my browser and freeze my whole computer? It's weird and annoying.

Today has been Just One of Those Days.