Random blogs:

1) The price of wings at Shoeless Joe's on Tuesdays has gone from $0.35 to $0.50. I was so mad I refused to order wings, even though that's why I had come in the first place. I highly doubt it made a difference in the long run, but I felt vindicated nonetheless.

2) Sometimes, no answer is better than a bad answer. No U of T interview for me =(

3) I'm lucky that in my life, most of the troubles I have can be cured with strawberry and banana smoothies and crepes with chocolate, strawberry and vanilla ice cream.

4) Indian leg wrestling does not work when the person you're competing against is a big CHEATER and puts their leg on top of your stomach. Indian wrestling is also difficult when you're sharing the floor with anything possessing more than two legs. Two legs, good. Six legs, bad. More than six legs, evil.

*mmm. mmm. mmm. ahem. cough cough*

To our dear friend Candice (or, as some people happily like to call her - Can):

1. The Facts

- I am evil.

- Troid is evil.

That is all :)

Have a good night everyone! hehe. Oh yeah.

p.s. - we love you Can *muah*

Curse this beautiful weather! No, that's not right =) It should be curse school, finals and end-of-term assignments =) Why is it that it always starts to get nice just as exams start? Why not write exams in Feburary when it's so miserable and wet you'd rather be inside studying than outside frolicking?

Last night I went to the ACSA culture show for the first time. Why don't Chinese people dance? The Philippinos were there dancing, so were the Iranians, the Africans, the Ukrainians, the Indians, the Egyptians, pretty much every nationality other than my own =( Boourns! But despite that, it was a pretty awesome show, made even more amazing by the fact that I knew some of the performers and had no idea that they were so talented.

I also finally took the bus trip up to Cataraqui Town Centre and Riocan for the first time in my Queen's career and realized just how much I've missed shopping during the last few months =)

Lastly, I don't drink very often, mainly because I have a ridiculously low tolerance and because I have the Asian flush. Seriously, I start flushing after a vodka chocolate. Curse that Asian curse! But I am very proud to say that for the first time last night, I drank and didn't turn fuchsia.

There aren't many things in life I regret. Losing my temper too easily is one of them, getting a perm in the 5th grade, and bangs in the 7th grade is another. One of the my biggest regrets is that I didn't start watching Sex and the City until about a month ago. Six seasons of this amazing show, and I only started watching last month. Thank goodness for the miracle that is DVD box sets.

There are so many things to love about this show. But beyond the adorable dresses, and the shoes, and the bags, and their amazing winter coats (why don't I have a fur muff?), the thing I love most about this show is the female friendship. Because it reminds me so much of me and my three best friends and the fun that we have together. In the entire finale episode, the scene that I loved the most is when Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) surprises her friends in a restaurant after returning from Paris, and the four of them just squeal with delight when they see her. That scene brought on the waterworks. It made me want to dig out the Haagen-Dazs, complete with a bag of two-bite brownies, flannel pyjamas, my phone, and a conference call with all three of my friends so we could have a big, fat, girly gabfest =) (Yes! 'gabfest' really is a word! I looked it up on dictionary.com!

One of the amazing things about this blog and others like it, is that it has allowed the four of us to stay in touch with each other better than we ever have before. Although we can't physically see each other, we can be there for all the small moments in life. There are certain perfect moments in my day, like that first cup of coffee, when the only thing that could make that moment more exquisite would be if my girls could be there to share it with me. I think even if no one else I know were to read this blog, it would still be worth it to keep writing, just so my girls would be able to see that I was still ok, still making my way through life, but definitely still missing the three of them. It's been almost three years since I left home for university, but when big things happen, or when little things happen, or when I'm just plain bored and don't have anything to do, those three are still the first people I call, sometimes even before I call my mom =)

The latest installment of my med school admissions saga:

Way back in October when I was applying, I knew that I would have to send transcripts of my first semester marks to each of the schools. And seeing as I'm a fairly absent-minded person, I thought I would pre-order those transcripts as a safeguard against my own stupidity. In other words, I didn't trust myself to remember to send transcripts in January. So in October, I told the school computer to automatically send my marks out for me once my results were in.

Today, I get an email from the University of Alberta. They don't have my marks. They will not consider me for an interview unless I send them my marks RIGHT NOW.

Which sends me into this downward spiral of self-doubt. Was it the school that messed up? Did my transcript somehow get lost among the tons of mail in the admissions office and is it now cowering between the fax machine and the filing cabinet? Was it the computer at Queen's that screwed up? Has my long-standing feud with technology finally come to a head? And worse of all, was it me? Usually the answer here is yes. Did I just imagine ordering those transcripts? While sleepwalking, did I go back online and cancel my order? Did I (as my mother likes to suggest) type in the wrong address? "What is going on here???" - Joe Schmoe

So tomorrow morning, I'm back at Richardson Hall, I'm sprinting up to Princess to Fed-Ex this stupid piece of paper which my entire life now depends on, and I'm making sure I get a confirmation slip. Grrr...

8 days past mid-March and still counting. God's way of teaching me to be patient? Quite possibly =)

By the end of today, I'll be done the majority of my coursework for this year. Yups, no more big projects, midterms or essays now. Just the odd lab or two. It's always a weird feeling at the end of the year. Where did this year go? Did I use my time in an effective way? It's strange thinking that I only have a month left to spend with some of the people I've come to love (Viv, KCCFers, my housemates) and it's strange to think that there's a chance (albeit a small one) that this could be my last K-town month.

Wow, look at me getting all nostalgic. Should stop reminiscing before the waterworks start =) Lol, alright! Back to work now...

I feel old.

Not tired, not sick, not grouchy, not PMS-y, but just plain old.

"Sitting on the sidelines watching the frosh have their fun, want to stay at home and hang with my housemates instead of staying out all night, would rather go for a coffee with one really good friend that force myself to be chatty and perky in a crowd" old.

It's funny knowing that biologically, I'm the same age as many of the frosh, and I'm younger than the majority of the second years. So why do I feel so ancient, so removed, so far away from what they're experiencing and what they're getting out of KCCF? Why do I feel as if I am in some way different from these other people who are physically the same as me, but mentally and emotionally, in a world that is so different from my own. And why does it feel wrong and prideful for me to admit this?

I've discovered that there are a few things that a good night's sleep can't fix. After my Tuesday night blog, I completely gave up on studying for my midterm and went to bed for a good 10 hours. I even left a sign on my door telling my housemates not to wake me up for class in the morning. Come Wednesday, I was feeling so daisy-fresh and the material that had taken me 2 hours to go through the night before was memorized within a half-hour. Booyah =)

Other things going on in my life:

I decided about 2 weeks ago to give up coffee for Lent. For those unaware of my caffeine habits, check out my Feb. 17 blog (those more proficient with HTML than I would figure out a way to make a link to that blog, but I'm not as smart as that, so you guys will have to exercise your wrist muscles and scroll down =) I will admit the first 2 days were very rough...very, very rough. "Can't make it through my first class, caffeine-withdrawal headache, going to hit the next person who tells me that I look tired" rough. But thankfully I'm better now...although I have gone through an awful lot of tea...

I've decided not to go back to the Cogro next year to work. It has nothing to do with Ham girl or Smoothie crew or anything like that, and my co-workers are all awesome. It has more to do with the uncertainty of my next year's plans, and this feeling I have that if I am in Kingston, God has plans for me other than barista-ing.

University admissions teams are annoyingly vague. They like to write things on their websites like "all applicants will be informed of their status as of mid-March". Well, it's mid-March now. In fact, it's 3 days past mid-March and I still don't know! Grr...

This cry of frustration is brought to you courtesy of the Molecular Biology 318 course at Queen's University:

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!!!!!!!!!

Dez's incredibly profound thought of the day:

Why is it so hard to fall asleep at night, and yet so easy when you have a 33% midterm to study for?

I had a big grown-up moment this weekend. I had spent the first half of the weekend acting like a child, and I knew it too. But I couldn't find it in me to overcome this childishness and just decided to hide instead. But today, halfway through second service in Bethel, I realized that I had it in me to be a bigger person. That through the grace of God, I could be more mature than I am, I could be more forgiving than I am, I could just be more. So yes, this weekend for a short period of time, I made the conscious decision to be an adult.

Any eligible Christian guys out there should head over to my friend Viv's blog (use the link on the right-hand side of your screen!) and check out her newest personal ad written by yours truly =) For fun, try and catch my grammatical errors (or not =)

I desperately need a life =)

A friend of mine really hurt me yesterday. At least, I thought that he was a friend of mine. See we were very close when we were in high school and we haven't spoken much since we've come to university. Over the summer I tried to mend this riff, but my friend just didn't feel it was worth his time and effort. Then last night, he heard some gossip that indirectly involved me, and which was a very sensitive issue for me, and out of nowhere he messaged me to get more information, after not talking to me at all for the last 6 months. And yeah, it hurt knowing that the only reason he would message would be to pry more information out of me.

I don't really know what my thoughts on this are, I just thought I'd get it out there.

My life has been pretty boring lately, with the exception of my Queen's Meds Interview which happened yesterday. It's funny how seemingly obscure, annoying little incidents in our lives can actually turn out to be a huge blessing futher on down the road. Last Sunday Vivien and I decided to throw frosh girls' meatfest. Because every year campus crusade throws a meatfest, and of course, only the boys are invited. Boourns, I can eat steak like no man =) Anyways, so we decided to have our own meatfest and asked all the frosh to RSVP by Thursday. Only 6 frosh responded. So we only cooked for 6 frosh. Sunday night at 5:00, Vivien calls me and says "Dez, there are now 18 frosh coming. What should we do?"

Silly, silly frosh. Why don't they ever pay attention to the RSVP??? Frosh, I'm too old to deal with this kind of stress! Luckily for the frosh, I happen to buy in bulk (something my mother has instilled in me) and I happened to have 16 chicken thighs in my freezer. Luckily for the frosh, Jon's Deli does pre-marinated steaks, Vivien has a pair of rollerblades, and both me and Viv own Foreman Grills. So in an hour, we managed to more than double the amount of food we had originally with a minimal amount of chaos and confusion and lost tempers.

Now for the second part of this story. Luckily for me, one of my interview questions was "give us an example of when you've dealt with a stressful situation in your life", and this was the stupid story that I decided to tell and was able to show how it was a paradigm of how I would deal with any kind of stressful situation, first by determining what resources I already possessed (16 chicken thighs, Foreman Grills), second by figuring out what resources were available in my environment that I could utilize (Jon's Deli). Luckily for me, God is taking care of the bigger picture, and the small things which I don't even realize are significant at the moment, come back later on to remind me that he's taking care of me, and taking care of my future =)

Why is it that people think that because I stand on the opposite side of the service counter, it gives them a right to treat me like crap? Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on customer service. Salespeople are taught slogans like "the customer is always right", and somehow that justifies customers treating service staff like slaves. Admittedly, I'm a little biased on the issue. But here's two Common Ground scenarios I've had to deal with in the last while:

1) Ham Girl
The first time I met Ham Girl, she wanted double the ham on her sandwich. My supervisor explained to her that each sandwich only gets two pieces of ham and that if you want more, you have to pay. She says "oh...but I really like ham". Yeah, well I really like Kraft Dinner and I don't ask you to put that on my sandwich.

The next time she comes in, she wants a ham sandwich. But she wants us to go through the package of meat, and select the two biggest pieces of ham in the fridge.

The next time she comes in, she wants a smoothie, but extra thick and filled to the top. You cannot have it both ways. To have a smoothie extra thick, you cut down on the ice. To fill it to the top, you add more ice. It's one or the other sweetheart.

2) Smoothie Crew
A group of about 10 comes in the middle of a rush. They all order different types of smoothies. At the 5 min. mark, they start complaining that it's taking too long. Now, I don't have a problem with this. I can understand you probably have better things to do than stand around the coffee bar. What bothers me is the method in which they chose to complain. I'm sure there are better ways to get your point across than to yell "Why the f*** is this taking so long? What are you, retarded?"

Trust me, that is not the best way to get the service staff to speed up. It is in fact a shortcut to the barista not putting the lid on your drink properly so you will spill it all over yourself when you take a sip. (Nb: this is not something I have actually done)

So what's my point? In our society, we've been brainwashed into thinking that because we pay for things, we're the equivalent of God in the eyes of the service staff. This gives us the right to yell at people for not being fast enough/forgetting a drink/mixing up an order/not giving correct change/not making things exactly how we like it. That is so far from the truth. If you're not happy with what you've been given, that's fine, but the quickest way for you to get decent service from your waiter/barista/sales clerk etc. is to treat them like a human being!