uj ev 2006

in some few hours, i will celebrate the 6th anniversary of my sleeping through the grand "millennium new years". hehe. or perhaps 2001 was the real millennium, but what i mean to say is tonight is new years eve! p,m,j and i are back in budapest following a pretty decent week in mezoszemere, though it was by no means an easy trip. i can only speak for myself, but i feel that my view of mezoszemere is quickly changing. for much of my life it has been a bit of a utopia, you know. i still love going there, but the truth is that i am far too overemotional to deal with so much sickness and contemplations of elderliness. even my wonderful dog morzsi is not allowed to grow older without "oooh poor morzsi...he doesn't hear anymore...he's old now too...please don't die before me now, little kutya...etc, etc." that all doesn't make me so happy. i just feed him szaloncukor and lots of other things that make him happy. anyway though, being sad is no way to ring in the new year, so i will try to relate happier things...
today i finished reading anna karenina. i've been slowly reading it for about two months now, but only in the last 10 days have i really had time to immerse myself and read to my hearts content. i really enjoyed the ending, and the moral of happiness. poor anna though, really. haha i get emotionally involved in books, its sort of funny. it can be stressful!
i have much to be thankful for, as i look back on 2005: general success (although in the words of the horse in animal farm "i will work harder") at bowdoin, healthy p,m, and sister, great adventures in various parts of the world - from szemere to the bay of funday and all the way home to seattle, happiness in the success of my friends, a very different perspective on college tuition thanks to syntagma and my great-grandfather's foresight,the opportunity to keep correspondence with friends all through the world, studying, climbing mountains, watching lions...oy. i am amazed by my friends! i am thankful that we got to spend karacsonyt with nagymama, horvath iren, and misi bacsi. i do not take it for granted, and i know things will change. anyway, not that i think lower of all the rest that i'm thankful for, but i'll stop now. :) i'm excited for 2006 - another semester at bowdoin, iceland over break with p&m, brunswick in the summer (if all goes well) lots more bowdoin nerdyness, driving (what??? a chen driving???) adventures with friends...and if all goes well, the list continues.
the picture is a pseudo-quasi (john :-P) tribute to anna. it's the opera house in budapest. so beautiful. they always have a big new years celebration. i think i'll either be sleeping, or almost sleeping. who stays up till midnight anyway? that was so 2005. on that note a few of my many resolutions:
1. to learn to accept being wrong (particularly with mama) more openly
2. to read 12 books from my ever-growing list of books to read (papa suggested that i buy them all and send them to school... hmm... trying to imagine how i'd fit in my room after that one!)
3. to be more like j (n.b. but not in all ways... only in the good ways... and in this way, there's no question of the shadow-living that people like to place on little sisters, but rather the recognition that emulating people who are successful in ways you admire can't be all bad.)
4. *********gpa (imagine whatever you'd like there.) teehee.
5. a great resolution: to sleep more. or more generally, to consider more thoroughly how what i do/don't do affects me... oy vey.
6. to drink more tea.
is it sad that i am severely censuring myself right now? hmm. i just realized that i'd persuaded myself not to write one because of the fear of what others might interpret it as. on that note...
7. a wonderfully overwhelming, and perhaps impossible resolution to stop fearing things that are unfounded...stressing about things i can't fix...worrying about how others interpret things. aaah.

i love you. i wish you the most WONDERFUL, HEALTHY, HAPPY, SUCCESSFUL, SUSTAINABLE, EMOTIONALLY FULFILLING, HUG-FILLED, CONTENTED, new year. it is fitting i think that levin (or tolstoy rather) left me contemplating happiness on new years eve, so that will be my continual quest for 2006 and hopefully beyond. i leave this way-too-long-little-blog with a favorite quote of mine from our dear angel clarence (it's a wonderful life)...

"Remember George: No man is a failure who has friends."

garrrrr.

so no picture today. right right. 9:30ish pm on friday. things are moving along, and i don't see how. haha. today klingle's paper was due... oooh painful, that was! i'm actually sort of bitter. i've been working on that smelly paper all semester, quite literally. and it came down to my submitting a blech not happy paper at 4:58pm when it was due at 5:00pm. it's just sad when you know it's not good, and yet... you just have to turn it in. anywho. klingle's a tough grader, so i'm not holding my breath for a sunshiney grade in that class. too bad, i really enjoyed it!
anyway, so i'm sitting in the cafe, type-typing my law final. that's not progressing so much, but what can one do. all i know is that it has to be done before 6:30am, because it's due at 9 and i won't be here to submit it. whoa. so chuck called me a few days ago to remind me that the annual christmas bird count was on the 17th, and for obvious reasons (like i love birds, and would hate myself if i didn't go) i said yes. haha. well... now the 17th is tomorrow, and i have this law final due. yikes. not quite what i'd been hoping for. in terms of time management/allotting the proper amount of time for things... i suck.
but that will be fun - there should be some sweet ducks left over, maybe an eagle, a dunlin or two. we'll see! shoot. i just remembered that i don't have binoculars. ooh pickles. haha it was funny, i asked chuck what i should bring and the first thing he said was "a lunch." that's funny only because chuck is the sweetest little old man and everyday on kent island he would pack a hobbit-esque wooden basket with sustenance for petrel path. chuck's awesome.
11 days till jchen's 22nd birthday! it's amazing how time flies. all i can say is i'm reaaaaaaaaaaaaaalllly excited to see her in 3 days!

almost there!

i can't believe that i'll be done in 5 days. it is really insane. despite the crazy work, these last four days have been awesome. sunday night a plethora of dear friends came over to my apartment for a random holiday-ish gathering. haha i'm still a bit in shock that we actually pulled it off, considering how little planning and how much baking went into it. so the 10th i think, dawn and i were sitting in the cafe being stressed out little college kids when she remembered that she'd won a pie in a raffle. soo we decided to collaborate on a holiday gathering (because she couldn't eat the whole pie herself, after all...) i had soo much fun making stuff for it - thumbprint cookies and macaroons, cheese, crackers (i didn't make those, but still... i got to lay out all the little crackers on top of eachother) dawn&kelly got wine and it was altogether awesome. haha erica and heather dressed up, which was sweet. little snowflakes.
that same day, mr barrett came over for dinner. it was so nice to see him again! kent island seems like so long ago, and yet talking about petrels and redstarts, sketchy resident scientists and the beatles made me feel like i was actually there. :) haha i'm just going to keep talking about all the wonderful non-academic things i've been up to. it really makes me sound like quite the slacker. i promise i've been furiously typing in most of the minutes where i'm not baking/hanging out with lovely friends. teehee. actually, i've been having a great deal of difficulty concentrating for any extended period of time, which has made writing term papers a bit of a challenge. hopefully that'll change soon.
yesterday was quite possibly one of the best days this semester. not only was i relatively productive work-wise, but i (finally!) washed my laundry. haha. klingle and connie had their baby, which is so wonderful and so sweet (made me happy). i guess lots of lovely things happened yesterday. the best part for me though was cooking dinner with john. i can't really express how happy he makes me. i guess the warbling ant of happiness says it all. :-)

"precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness."
-nietzsche :-)

(cartoons = http://www.lastlemon.com/dailydose/daily.htm ... amazing!!!)

peanut plays water polo!

i am slowly becoming one with this couch. Just to describe the scene a little... i'm wearing red pants, a red shirt, sitting on a couch covered with a red (and black) pattern... next to me are sprawled books and articles, carrots (funny story about the carrots) and various other papers. I'm a living mess right now :)

so the carrots... basically i'm a wee bit obsessed with carrots, but my current carrot bank is a tiny bit old i guess. some of these carrots are just inedible. so on one side of me i have the carrots that haven't been tested yet, nicely organized in a little bowl (pretty normal huh?) and then next to the bowl are the carrots that have failed to live up to the ability-to-chew quotient and so have been relegated to sitting on the couch. it's a little gross actually. haha. i think my room is pretty gross at the moment, actually. it's funny.

soo yesterday was a rough day. i really wanted to see chronicles of narnia so it made me pretty sad that john/erica/etc went and saw it anyway. haha but john, in his infinite sweetness has assured me that he'll see it again. i don't know though. that was a pretty traumatic experience. haha i can only equate it with playing tag with my sister and our neighbor's grandson. i was around 4 and they were probably 6 and 8 or something. arg. haha ok that makes sense in my head. basically it's the feeling of not being able to do something you really want to do... like tag your sister, or watch a movie. but instead, either your legs are too short to run after them, or you have papers to write. meh. haha. now i'm thinking about judy the dry. who ties earthworms to trees anyway???

i guess things are going well today, except that my wonderfully silly neighbors are screaming and running around upstairs. it's a bit hard to concentrate. the paper is going well-ish. hmm.

jchen called this morning from london, along with the rest of the family. i read them the sonnet i wrote as the invitation to tomorrow's holiday gathering. my cousin dylan particularly liked the bit about the cheese. i like poetry. it makes me happy (most of the time). i can't wait to see j. and on the way back from europe we get to pretend we're hungarian tourists again - and only speak hungarian until the last 5 minutes of the flight to annoy the steward people. teehee.

ooh i bought THE best christmas present yesterday!!! only i'm afraid it won't arrive on time. :( i'm not really sure who all reads this, so i won't say much except that it's really old (101 years old, to be exact) and REALLY amazing. haha do you ever get that feeling where you'd just like to keep the thing for yourself? yeaaa... this is one of those moments. but i think the person (haha i'm not even saying he/she. pepito the incognito mosquito. how secretive!) will like it... so life is good.

finally... i asked j if she took peanut (the little dog in the picture) with her to europe. and no, she didn't. but the funny part was the story she made up about why peanut didn't make the trip. apparently, he's gone and joined the water polo team and has to get in shape to go to aruba or something like that. if i get around to writing more children's books, i want to write one about a water polo playing dog... just imagine!

hepa-hupa

it finally snowed today! quite a lot of snow fell, actually. i think it's about 7 or 8 inches. it's seems so strange that seattle and brunswick are pretty much at the same latitude, and yet the weather can be so different. anywho, the snow made me really happy.

overall today was a beautiful day. i woke up early so i could bake stuff for a fundraiser some of my friends were doing to raise money to go to peru. if i decide to have a bakery/bookstore, i don't think i would be half unhappy. :) i went to boho to read/wake up, then euchre with lovely people. only bad thing was that about half way through euchre i started feeling nauseated. i don't know what's wrong with me, but it keeps happening and is rather disconcerting. hmm. but otherwise it was a fun friday morning.

i guess i'm sort of in a blech mood right now - for one thing i'm working on a paper that has been the bane of my existence for several weeks now. i'm just not happy with it. i've also been in a bit of a bad mood recently because my whole family seems to be done with everything and off enjoying themselves in europe. i'm bitter that bowdoin holds us here so long. i keep getting happy emails of "arrived safely, doing this and doing that in blah blah blah". under usual flavi-circumstances i'd be elated to hear that everyone is so happy, but for some reason i'm the scrooge. or maybe i'm just in a bit of a marvin mood. who knows.

i guess in life i'm too passive. i don't want to step on anyone's toes. i like happy people and i'm generally happy. tonight at 9pm i feel like i'm the anti-flav. too bad.

as an explantion of the title and picture, my mum always says "where there's a hepa there's a hupa" which is pretty much the equivalent of where there's an up, there's a down. i guess the best way to proceed through those not-so-fun hupa times is to just be positive and look forward. or i could just keep saying hepa-hupa in my head. it's making me pretty happy right now. :) the picture is the olympic mountains in the winter from http://www.nps.gov/olym/wic/gallery.htm ... pretty good example of hepa-hupa eh?

11:11pm addition. bork bork. i just came back from an extended mental break excursion to the cafe with dawn. made me soo happy. i love mental breaks... and dawn :)

Aaah! Christmas!

Such a good day today. I finished my last three classes of the semester. Woonderful! I'm sitting at Boho, drinking wonderful coffee, listening to wonderful drones of conversation (and silverware!!! i love the sound of silverware!) My favorite (only?) philosophy professor just came in, so obviously I said hi. Haha, I've never actually taken a philosophy class, but in es 101 we had three teachers: a chemist, a political scientist, and a philosopher. What a blast. Anywho, he's recommending a few books to read over break. I'm really excited!

It is going to snow any time now. It is such a happy state, you know? You can smell the snow in the air, but you don't need to worry about falling on your bottom. (Or ripping your pants, scraping your hands, ahem... oh that was gravel. nevermind) :P

So the baristas at Boho are great guys, and every time I come here I either provide them with a random fact, or a word of the day. Today I wasn't prepared with either, but I do have a joke that I've promised to tell them once traffic dies down a bit. Haha I even got one of them interested in the Prime Number Shitting Dog. (Excuse the language, you know I don't usually swear. That's the actual name of it!) Anywho, they are a cool bunch. Ach. I love jokes. Today before policy I learned a new duck joke, and three about grapes. It was blissful.

Sooo Patrick Stewart in A Christmas Story. Two of the best things in the world: A Christmas Story... and Patrick Stewart. (whoa. you didn't see that one coming, eh?) It's a testament to Picard's, I mean Stewart's talent. He's awesome.

Time to go write papers. Though class is done, the semester certainly isn't.

Wo ai ni. Szeretlek. etc. etc. etc. :-)

wonderful life...

it's tuesday, the 6th... that means that i have 14 days to finish all the massive amounts of papering. what a blast! :) but i'm not going to discuss much in the way of stress/academics today. well maybe a little.today i am most happy. haha i won't complain, because yesterday was one of the most stressful on record. it's good to be almost too relaxed today.

yesterday was our mock trial for environmental law. it really came down to the last minute for me. i had class from 8-930...then i went to the library... class 1-4...then back to the library. when 5:30 rolled around (the time my group had decided to meet) i wasn't done with the powerpoint i was using during my technology related testimony. ach. sooo finished that and ran to meet up with the group. the trial started at 7:30 and took three hours. hokay. so just yesterday i spent 9 hours on ONLY law. haha. but it was sooo fun! the trial itself was great, but we were surprised by how unpersuasive florida power and light was. basically, we were the natural resource council of maine and they were a big smelly electricity company who didn't want to clean up. (obviously we were on the easier end, considering that it was environmentally nerdy students fighting environmentally nerdy students, but anywho)

it was really stressful, preparing for the trial. but when we were actually there, i looved it! anyway, enough about that. it was great.

today during my three hour history seminar i came up with a fabulous idea for the holiday gathering i've been pondering but not planning. (lack of time and stress and all...) there are too many people who i'd like to see to have a dinner...and i don't want to have a generic college "party" because that's not really the flavi way. soo, i've decided to have a selection of three movies and who ever wants can come, can come to which ever one they want. obviously the focus isn't the movies necessarily... cookie baking/decorating, wine (dude, i'm 21 in 4 months. haha mike made fun of me yesterday for saying it was my 20 and 2/3 birthday), etc. reading too. it would be so fun if people wanted to just be here in a cheerful well-christmas-lit setting, reading! :) i hope this will fly with those invited. otherwise i'll be doing this on my own. i think it'll be awesome. and noonie: on your behalf "it's a wonderful life" will most certainly be one of the options. maybe "elf" and "polar express"... i haven't seen either and i'm thinking of giving in and watching polar express. it's all john's fault, really. :P

anywho. such happiness. i can't wait for break, and yet i'm sad that i won't see certain people for quite a while. c'est la vie.

ps i heart holly. she is in love with a president (in mexico, not THE president) AND a school teacher. BRILLIANT! :) i can't wait till those lovelies get back. i miss them soo much!

ach.

i don't have a picture to justify my current mental exhaustion. boo. if i did have one, it would be a scan of my brain with a piece of swiss cheese superimposed on it. that's what i feel like. i went to bed last night at 4am, got up at 9 (not bad eh?) and have been working in the tower pretty much since then. it's darn cold outside - i walked to the union to get a wee bit of oxygen (and coffee) and i nearly froze. blech. welcome to maine winter eh? so my paper for green injustice is not being very nice to me. i'm never really happy with what i write. i spent nearly an hour on the phone with my wonderful father discussing my thesis and arguments. it really helped a lot. too bad the draft of the paper was due about a week ago. c'est la vie. tonight is the junior/senior ball. yea, not going to that one. infact i'm not doing anything fun (that i know of) except for sitting here and writing. w00t.
haha this is a bit depressing eh? i'm trying to think of something fun or happy to write, but i'm not coming up with much. our mock trial for law is on monday (one more thing to stress about), klingle (rightfully) wants my draft NOW and i'm not done, and on top of all that i'm just a wee bit sleepy.
oh that's a happy thought: i'm thinking about going to iceland for spring break. random, yes. but it would be so awesome. anyone interested in coming with me?
oy. on that happyish note, i should get back to work. nice little break this was. what i would do to be quasi-vegetative for a bit and watch a movie. maybe tomorrow.