Life absolutely sucks right at this moment, right at this 2:11-in-the-morning-moment. I am not a night-owl, being tired makes me feel a little like being drunk, only without the fun parts. I am slow, I slur, I become callous and stupid and angry and this essay I'm writing is crap I know it. And I don't think I'll be able to finish. Ugh.

Cody and I got into a big fight not half an hour ago as well. Part of me thinks I deserve it; I was, after all, exceedingly obnoxious to say nothing of rude to him. Another part of me wants to scream at him, "You inconsiderate little BITCH! Can't you see I don't give a shit about you, only about doing well on this essay? Why are you talking to me when I have two pages to go? Can't you see I have more important things to do?"

I'm not a very nice girlfriend. I'm really not. I can't fathom putting someone before me out of love, out of genuine generosity. Any sacrifice I might make will come out of guilt and duty and I'll do it grudgingly but by God, I'll do it. I'm not a nice person.

On the surface, life should be going well. I have a job I like, I'm doing decently in school, I'm young and conventionally attractive and I have friends and money saved up and parents who taught me to save but have also made it okay if I don't (which I do anyway) but I'm so unhappy lately. I'm always reminded of something I need to do, and it feels like I never have any free time (plainly ludicrous, I have lots of free time, I just waste it all). It feels like something just got stopped inside me somehow.

I'm tired of being responsible and caring and blah. I know that's what human is about - you know, connecting to people and what not. But right now, I want to march into that bedroom where Cody is sleeping soundly and I want to haul him out of bed and toss him right out of my life and never leave the house again. Be blessedly alone.

My plans never work out.

Is LJ working up for everyone or is it just me? It's arbitrarily claiming that certain pages such as my friends list don't exist, that the internet isn't working, the server can't connect etc. etc. OH GOD DID THEY FIND MY CHILD PORN.

I don't actually have any, just so you guys know.

Life has been really hectic recently - and not always pleasant. I got unpleasantly high a few days ago because I spent the entire day painting the bedroom in my new, basement, ill-ventilated apartment pink. It really improved the room - previously the walls looked like the skin of a teenage WoW gamer: pasty and beige with strange obtrusions throughout. With the judicious (three coats) application of Behr's Boticelli Angel, it looks creamy and rosy and lovely. In an unexpectedly sickening Anne-y outburst, which I blame on persistently collecting vintage Montgomery, I declared, "I want to feel like I'm living in a rose!" whereupon Cody looked at me suspiciously and asked if I'd started painting already. Or, more realistically, if I'd been unable to control my joy and had started eating paint so my insides could be pretty too, or something.

Accordingly, while painting, I texted 'I'm a cupcake pixie in a magical lollipop woooorlddd!!' to him. I'm sure Cody sometimes thinks he's dating someone straight out of The Yellow Wallpaper, especially since I've had several ugly-interior-triggered tempers, one of which involved steadily shredding Margaret Atwood novels and then tossing them around the room to watch the paper flutter.

... oh wow, that sounded crazy.

And maybe it was, a little, but watching the paper swirl and whirl in the air was like being in a snowglobe specifically constructed for the fairy queen's library. Picking it all up was a bitch afterwards, but I can't say I regret it. Tearing up that hideous old book was a horrible act that brought no relief except for sheer satisfaction of destruction, seizing that shredded yellow pile and then flinging it into the air and watching the words rain about me was like the miracle of a storm tearing apart a merciless humidity.

Okay, it was a little crazy. But who doesn't need a little crazy sometimes, when you are otherwise prosaic and constantly ringing up people's groceries?

Please don't ask about the pillow I knifed.

In other news!

I'm worried and sad and stressed and sometimes it feels like I'm climbing the tower of glass. There are a lot of things I still feel I lack and sometimes I feel like I could kill to be able to give the people I care about what they need, if only I knew what it was and who to gut for it.

This all should have gone into my diary, but I can't find it after the move. Also, I don't have a desk presently.

God, this month has been stressful and it's only ramping up as I go along. Exams are coming, essays need to be handed in and amidst all this academic terror, I also have to find a new place to live come May. I'm moving in with Cody and we've a fixed budget of MAX $900, utilities included, plus parking - and preferably downtown. I'm just so STRESSED. I've pretty much been the person calling and arranging viewings because although we both work and are at school, his schedule is way more awkwardly placed. Also, his idea of a decent place is 'someplace I can plug my TV in'. I, on the other hand, am unreasonable in drawing the line at bedbugs. Either way, I'm still busy enough so the only time I check the computer is early in the morning before I head to class so I can see if any new, affordable places have been posted up on the holy trinity of Ottawa real-estate: craigslist, kijiji and usedOttawa, email the landlords so out of the doubtless hundreds of emails they will receive from similarly craven students, mine is at least on top. And I have to sound SANE in the email I send too. Sane. As in, not-on-the-point-of-snapping.

Tomorrow, from 11 onwards, I'm going to be going to see at least five apartments, all of which are on the higher end of our price range. Today we went to see an adorable apartment, very affordable at $700, plus $50 utilities. It was a small, white, dollhouse-esque place, in a fairly good location (not downtown, but near a fantastic bus-stop). Two other people wanted it for sure, plus one other person coming to check it out tomorrow, and we put our names down so the tenant would pass it on to the landlord and then we'd each go in for an interview. At the very idea, I was ready to cry with misery and shaking fear.

Tomorrow, Cody is going to call a real-estate agent for a two bedroom apartment ($880, not including utilities), which would be in the perfect area for us at least.

I know other people manage to find places to live eventually 'n all and I know logically that I'm not going to be forced to live out of Cody's car while my shredded books serve as a pillow, but STILL.

And then I fail my classes.

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Hello my name is Peony and I never update my lj.

PS: Alex is my favourite person ever.

I lol'd. I haven't done a character quiz since... (do character ratings count?)... 2004/5?

We're going back to Malaysia this summer because my grandfather has cancer. That was really hard to type. In between bouts of crying, I think about the shopping and feel like a callous brute. Thinking about shopping has stopped working though. So mostly I just cleaned up my room and cried today.

I've got to stop skipping classes.

So today I cooked!! That really deserves less exclamation marks, I mean, I cook enough these days that it doesn't warrant freaking out and compulsively checking to see if the smoke alarm will work when worse comes to worst. Though I've come a long way from frying bacon and eggs (correct verb might be burning), everytime I try out an actual recipe and succeed, I feel awfully proud. Today's designated victim was sweet and sour chicken and it turned out fantastically! The sauce was thick and delicious and not too sweet (which I hate), stirring the browned chunks of chicken into that shining, fragrant pool was extremely satisfying. I cooked a large batch of it, so I can survive on the leftovers for several days more, thus negating further effort! Hurrah! Unless Cody comes over and eats it all, in which case I will have to murder him, strip him of his flesh and sweet'n'sour that.

Whenever I cook, I have to have background noise and it helps if there's a suitably domestic movie going on (Julie and Julia is a huge favorite, and so is Kiki's Delivery Service. Also, maybe disturbingly, Coraline). When I made sushi, I watched My Neighbour Totoro and got so into it I seriously contemplated getting a cute apron. You know, like a wall-hanging. (Sushi turned out fairly well, by the way, but I made the rice layer too thick. Either way, it beats being a numbnut who pays over ten dollars for six pieces).

I want to try baking more, but I'm not one of those people who sticks things in ovens and then can leave them alone. I like my cooking like I don't like my relationships: controlling, sometimes overheated, constantly stirred, always where I can keep an eye on it, and quick. Sticking a roast chicken in the oven is practically long-distance to me, I can tolerate it, but barely.

Speaking of tolerating, relax. Domestic housewife puttering about post is at an end.

Let's talk TV instead!

One of my Gender Studies classes is circles around pop culture. It's one of my favorite classes; the professor is wonderful and quirky and funny and has the cutest smile in the world (crush what crush), the material is thoughtprovoking but still entirely relatable.

One thing I love and hate about that class is that it forces me never to be a blind consumer, even on days when I desperately wish I could just be one. (See: Gossip Girl. Haters to the left) Even without the course though - yeah, I really just wanted to brag about my class which I am extremely, extremely happy I got into because it's very popular and the room capacity is at bursting - I'm fairly certain I would have been able to find Glee problematic on my own.

Most - when I say most, I mean Alex - of you have had to deal with my alternative rants and fangirling about Glee. I admit, a lot of the reason I want to keep on with that show is because it's got a huge, active fandom and I missed that. But since Harry Potter and perhaps Saiyuki (which I don't count because I wasn't online-active), I haven't been able to wholeheartedly adore any source material. Unconsciously, when I first watched Glee, I was hoping for that and I was severely disappointed.

Of course, the wonderful thing about Glee is that everytime I think something along the lines of "Although boasting a cast that is diverse, in reality I feel that Glee offends me more simply because their tokenism becomes more obvious when characters like Quinn Fabray and Noah Puckerman (love the former, tolerate the latter) get more development than characters like Tina Cohen-Chang or Mercedes Jones who have been advertised as mains from the get-go. I could count the number of lines Tina and Mercedes have on both my hands and maybe one foot. Tina doesn't even get any real episode, hers is squished in and revolves around Artie's and OH MY GOD I LOOOOVEE THIS SONG DON'T STOP! BELIEVIN'! HOLD ON TO THIS FEEEEELIN' oh goddammit."

One day I will get my PhD. When I am not so easily distracte - shiny.

"Dear ÜberAsian:
I'm sorry I have to ask this. I'm a 19-year-old white guy at UC Berkeley, and I notice all my white friends get really nervous when they have a class with a lot of Asians. Some of them even drop classes because they believe having a lot of Asians in a class raises the curve. I don't want to generalize, but I have noticed many of my Asian friends have excellent GPAs as well. I'd like to know what gives Asians such an edge in test taking. Is it the low-fat diet? Some special studying technique? Please help me.

--Steven Wajoharsky

There's an easy answer for this Steve. It's in the name. Have you ever noticed that Asians generally have pretty short names? Lee, Lai, Pak, Park, Kim, Tran, Hsu, etc. By the time you've bubbled in the R in W-A-J-O-H-A-R-S-K-Y with your No. 2 pencil, an Asian is already on problem 15."

Why hello there, procrastination.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Fuck me, were you boring)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Yeah, yeah, I fucking love Little Women okay?)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (It's required by law and the way I dress that I love the immortal Alice)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (Nobu was a hundred times sexier than the chairman. I fantasized about him)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (God, the book was bad)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (And wrote fanfic!)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding (Yeah, I know. Shutupokay)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White (God, this was boring)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Man, I don't read as much as I thought I did.

So, I spruced up my journal a little bit and then heartlessly razed all my more meaningful and hilarious (to me anyway) user-icons in favor of candy-colored Marie Antoinette avatars. Apparently, the only way to make me forget gross historical inaccuracies is to make everything so ludicrously pretty and frilly and colorful that I am drugged and numb - "French Revolution? Wut-wut?"

I've gotten a new job, by the way, so some of you can stop sending me links to fast-food restaurants that're hiring. I say 'new', I really mean, 'I waited a month to tell you guys because I know you'd laugh at how I'm moving up in the world and no, it's not the sex trade'. I'm - wait for it...

A TELEMARKETER.

Only not really because I'm technically called an 'information gatherer' or some such nice sounding name, but in reality, it adds up to me calling people up and them telling me I ought to be ashamed of what I do. Honestly, and strippers think they have it tough. Not that it's not a decent job though - I get to make my own hours, the pay's alright and I don't have to move beyond punching out numbers on a phone and twitching uncontrollably as some old lady makes me repeat my introduction about five times before telling me that back in the OLD days, telemarketers had the decency not to call on SUNDAYS.

I get to go home this December 6th too - proper food, here I come! Living as I do, gloriously lonesome and very, very cheap, I only buy the very dregs of the sales bin at Superstore. I wince at the sight of food in the dustbin, it is only society's rigorous conditioning that prevents me from pulling out that perfectly serviceable pancake nestling in between those cardboard boxes. Several friends, bless their buttons and boots and various winter paraphenalia, have offered to take it out to dinner and I intend to hold them to it and occasionally grind their noses INTO it.

Naturally, all this happiness comes at a price and you can't get to heaven without facing Apollyon (was it Apollyon in Paradise Lost that was the place with lions? I forget) - I've an essay and an exam to get through, as well as general packing and making sure I don't lose my plane ticket. Something that is all too likely to happen, unfortunately.

Veering away briefly from frivolity - though normal programming will resume in just a minute - I'm actually a little scared of going home and finding that my place has closed up. I certainly don't expect things to stay the same, and I've been good about keeping contact but... things have happened that I haven't had the chance to take part in - things have changed and I've had no part in changing them - I've changed, fanned out a little more, grown a little sadder and maybe a bit wiser and a lot foolisher. I can't imagine not fitting in with my family, but what if?

I miss you all, you non-updating bastards. I hope you all take care. And drop me a line so I can stalk send you Xmas cards.