We're sitting in Camille's room talking and there's music blasting from downstairs.

"Is there a party going on beneath my ass?"-Florian

After we sufficiently made fun of him, he said, in a perfect fake French accent, "I am sick of the party beneath my ass! Ze party must stop. NOW!"

I don't think this is funny to anyone but me, but future Elaine is going to think it's hilarious. He also had dinner at Professor Uhden's today, and upon seeing her black cat, said, "Aww.. it looks just like my cat!"
"Oh. Do you have a black cat as well?"
"No, but it has the same shape.. like.. with a tail and everything."

Oh Florian.

"Our Gardens of Luxembourg are bigger than Luxembourg! No one even lives there!"-Florian, the Frenchman

"What's a bro? Are they actually brothers? Wait. What? Oh. So like KINSMEN!"-Florian

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!!!

And by everyone, I mean the like... three people.. who read this thing. :) And the world in general!

I am currently in the kitchen, having peeled (or as I like to say: shaved--I feel like Sweeney Todd) three bags of potatoes. We're (Javi and I) boiling yams and potatoes at the moment, so I have a break. I feel really strange making the meal, but I suppose it's fun. Yay!

Our full menu consists of:
-Turkey
-Cranberry sauce
-Yams
-Mashed potatoes
-Gravy
-Stuffing
-Corn
-Caesar salad
-Apple pie
-Cherry pie
-Chocolate cake

A full day of cooking, here we go!!
As I do every year, now is the time to make the "Things I'm Grateful For" list. :)
-Awesome food
-All 10 fingers (thus far; *knock on wood*) after cooking for almost a whole week
-Florian: For being the most amazing, kindest, happiest person in my life and always making me smile no matter what. My favourite times include just being in my room, with Florian in his natural habitat on my bed with his poetry, and me at my desk doing work. No one else (except perhaps Shayne) is quite as snooty about literature as he is, and it's amazing. We can wax about Keats for hours, and then fight over Dickinson vs. Keats. Yesterday morning, he banged on my door for four minutes to wake me up, and the only reason why I didn't just kill him was because when I finally opened the door, he apologized profusely in his hoarse, sick, but cute voice and said, "If you want, you can do this!" and promptly hit himself in the head like you would an alarm clock.
-Shannon: Oh roomie mine (once a roomie, forever a roomie), thank you for making so much effort to stay close despite not living together and me always being busy. I still heart thee, and you're like a sister. I'm sad when I don't see you every day, but when we don't, there's always a billion things to tell you. And I'm so glad you're on newspaper now!
-Camille: First of all, thank you for all the coffee! And I don't think I could have survived (though not sure I'm through yet) logic without you tutoring me and keeping me awake with the note-passing in class. But more than that, Camille is always there to listen to me, lie on my bed talking about boys till 3 am on a school night, freak out over Asian boy on Glee, listen to my sleep-deprived rantings ("I'm the Pope!" and "I'm so cool I can drool ice") and tell me I'm so amazing my name should be Grace. :)
-Javier: For spontaneously creating awesome things out of my hair from just bobby pins, for always trying to take me shopping, for dragging me to Starbucks, always dancing in the kitchen (and everywhere else), talking in the baby voice, analyzing anyone and everyone's style, giving awesome advice, speaking in Spanish, and being uno de mis padres.
-Ethan: VE DAY!!! Oh Sparkles, my Tuesdays and Thursdays would be nothing without your retirement home hours. Hehe. Thanks for always looking so happy when Robert and I turn up at your room, for talking about movies no one else has heard of, for wearing a fedora, for lending me your jacket, for adapting Keats on Facebook, for being the person who always asks me how I am and genuinely listening, for agreeing to see "Bright Star" with me even though it didn't work out, and for being the only slightly normal person I know.
-Southies in general: Jaclyn, for being consistently neurotic and psycho whenever I actually see you and for "giggedy giggedy." Robert and Brian: You two are insane. Puns, D&D, "Ethan, you have two choices," all those things I've never heard of that you talk about, etc. Robert, thanks for keeping me awake in history, and having the second most beautiful voice since Jesus. :) Jorge, for the crazy laugh and for being absolutely adorable. Simon, you're insane. Enough said.
-My newspaper staff for sticking through it despite all the bitching and late nights
-All my SoCal friends who I know I'll have a blast with when I get home in a month! I love that we sometimes lose touch for a while, but when we get back together, it's like we haven't been apart.
-Shayne: For everything that I know about linguistics now, all the paper editing, listening to me complain about opening the scary Evergreens, for being one of my best friends.
-My dad for being amazing, for thinking he speaks French, for teaching me Chinese, for randomly singing, and just being crazy.
-My mom for being insane. She just is. But I've (kind of) come to terms with it.
-Amherst College: For providing me with the means and the ends to an amazing education at a most beautiful place filled with beautiful people.
-Emily Dickinson: For not throwing her fit and collapsing her ceiling while I was in that room
-John Keats: For filling my soul with beauty and light
-Danny the Penguin, The Authority, and Dotty: for always being squishy and cuddly
-The Chinese Lady at Val: I know her name, but I feel like she's more recognizable this way. For always greeting me with a smile at Val, for fussing over what I eat, for already having cucumbers ready for me to take away the Friday before break, for driving us back to Newport with our groceries after bumping into us at Big Y
-Professor de la Carrera: For employing me and for jumping up and down like a five-year-old and hugging me upon seeing me. There's nothing more touching.

Of course, this list is far from exhaustive, and life has never been better, no matter how stressful, so I'm grateful for all of it! Happy Turkey Day! Our turkey is about to go in the oven!

I really need to update more, especially now that I'm on break.

I'm currently taking a break from doing Chinese with my dad because he's talking to some guy at Home Depot. Haha.. So I don't get to read Trotsky's autobiography aloud to my dad on the phone for a few minutes. Whoopdie doo!

I've cooked four meals in three days thus far. I feel very accomplished. And I've fed 5-6 people each meal. It's amazing. This has however, made me realize that I never want to have more than two children. Cooking for six people is ridiculous. It takes forever. This morning, I made French toast and I spent an entire hour doing it, piece by piece. Imagine if you had to cook for your husband and four kids every day, three times a day. I'd go crazy. Even though I feel really accomplished that people are actually liking (I hope) my food, I could never be a housewife. I just couldn't do it. I feel like the days are so short when you have to be in the kitchen at a certain point. So limited. So restricted. But anyway, I've made: French toast (this morning for brunch.. first time ever, so I'm glad it actually turned out okay), tomatoes and eggs noodles, green onion Chinese pancakes with cucumber salad and string beans with potatoes, and rice with cucumber salad and potatoes with peppers tonight. Yay Chinese food! I keep having to call my mother to ask her what to do. Javi's the dessert master. He's made apple pie, carrot cake, whipped cream, and chocolate mousse all from scratch thus far, as well as feeding us omelettes and pasta with pink sauce. Yum yum. If it didn't take so much time (and effort to go grocery shopping without a car), I'd eat like this all the time (and get really fat.) We're going back to the grocery store tomorrow to get all the Thanksgiving dinner ingredients. Thursday is going to be interesting... Elaine is going to be in the kitchen from sunrise to sunset making Thanksgiving dinner. I really feel like a housewife. This is not okay. Back to being a crazily stressed out "intellectual" and newspaper editor.

Speaking of newspapers, I'm going through all the articles I've ever written to compile 12 for the LA Times to apply for their summer internship. Given that The Student really isn't the best paper ever (I'll be the first to admit it), I don't know what my chances are. I look back and miss the Oracle a lot. Sigh. Such precision and efficiency. I did a search of all my articles today. It's kind of ridiculous how quickly I can pump out news articles nowadays. It's really nice in that I don't have to spend much time at all.. 30 minutes.. but it's also sad because I think it takes away a lot of the craft and the artistry that goes into it. I don't write articles because I want to anymore, but because I have to, because the paper needs them asap.

Florian and Javier are the cutest couple ever. They're so adorable I just want to hug them, which I do, all the time. But it's nice in that I don't really ever feel like a third wheel. We've got a nice dynamic. Florian and I were meant to be soulmates, Javier and he are adorable, and Javi's very good about including people. We watched "Mulan" last night. Florian hadn't seen it before, but Javi and I went crazy singing and reciting along. I love Shang. :)

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

I know too many music majors. When I use "too," I don't mean it in a derisive way. It's just very strange and disproportionate to the population in general. But yes. People are starting to declare their majors, and it's freaking me out because I really don't know if I want to do English or history. I want to do literature, damn it, but the English department is too Anglo-American for my tastes. So I'm going to declare European Studies at some point, and then take an English class next semester to see if I really do want to do it, and go from there. Schedule for next semester is starting to look like:
-Readings in European Tradition II
-Major British Writers: basically a class on Romantic poets (I'm listening to 'Ode to a Nightingale' at this very instant.)
-The Post-War Spanish Novel
-French 3

SO much reading. And all my classes will be Monday, Wednesday, Friday, which will make those days very interesting and draining. But I think it'll be okay because I'll love all the reading I'm doing. I'm done with ridiculous classes that I have no interest in and am only taking out of this inexplicable masochistic desire and an insufferable inability to contradict my parents. That's probably not true, but still. I like to believe it. Mostly because I have a logic midterm tomorrow. Not okay.