AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

I don't know how I'm going to do this last essay! It's driving me crazy and I just want to be done and I can't pack or do anything or focus and I'm SO STRESSED and AHHHH!!! I know I just have to write it anad then edit it and put in all my Jew references but I can't even work on it for too long or I go insane. Blahhhh.

AIM

I've recently noticed I really can't put up with aim anymore. Too much happens at once and it's so far removed from real life it just makes me nervous and feel fake now. So...I'm sorry if you've missed me because I'm not on ever. For whatever reason I just can't cope with things like that anymore. And, honestly, I think I'm a lot healthier for it. I just wish it didn't mean I had to cut down on opportunities to talk to my friends.

Stolen from Sarah

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - Various Authors
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
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 (hated too much to finish...)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
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 - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (currently reading in spanish, except that I lost my bookmark grr)
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
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
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
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

Only haven't read 56! Yayyy! Sorry the bold is hard to see...

Well, I've been here a month. It's cool and all, but I've been getting more and more lonely and less easily distracted. It used to be when I got homesick I could randomly go hikeand see some amazing nature, but now I've seen everything that's easy to get to. It's not a problem, I guess, and i know other people have been away longer...I dunno.

I'm ok with wanting to come home though as long as I stay active and not in my room. It's just kinda hard when there's nothing to stay active with. And as cool as it is talking to odd crazy men in the plaza, cause they tell me lots of interesting things, I'm not really up to dealing with the creepiness factor that sometimes is included.

Ah well. Tomorrow's Monday and classes and work start up again to distract me. Yayyyy.

On a lighter note, yesterday I was in Cusco and got to see the festival for potato day. There were people dressed like different kinds of potatoes, women carrying potatoes, and traditional dances which involved the harvesting potato motions. This country is awesome.

Gradumacation!!

Everything was really great. All of my family just left, but it was wonderful seeing them again. Both graduations were nice. Not a lot else to say except that it was wonderful and that I was really, really happy to see and spend time with them.

Thank you sincerely to them for all of the food and fun.

Now I'm making my list of what to pack for Peru! Goodness, goodness.

Hey everybody,

I'm officially a graduate of the RC. Both ceremonies were today, but the LSA ceremony didn't mean anything to me really...I kept thinking, "maybe this just won't hit me until I'm gone. That would be horrible, to not be able to truly say goodbye to my friends because of denial!" Then I went to the RC ceremony...

Each graduate had a minute to say something. There were 120ish graduates, and all of them took at least part of their minute. Honestly, it was amazing. Even though they weren't my year and I wasn't in on any of their jokes, it was so personal. The speeches the staff gave were moving and funny. Everything was such a lovely goodbye. Then it hit me. The most wonderful beginning to my college years I ever could have had, where I made my longlasting friendships of college (even if some weren't RC I still made them at East Quad), everything I had become was so shaped by the RC, and the quirkyness that made me finally feel like I belonged somewhere.

When I got out of the ceremony, I just cried. Usually I'm able to control myself in front of other people, but I couldn't help it. And, in true RC spirit, this girl walking past who I didn't even know came over and gave me a hug, and said, "Congratulations."

I love you all so much. Thank you for the difference you've made to me. I could never express to you what everything has meant.

Update: I wanted to put what I said in my speech here, but I was going to dinner with my grandparents and had to go. It's paraphrased, but not changed too much.

"The RC has a magical power. For the class Moral Choices in Context, we had to do a project that would make a change in the world- or something like that, I'm probably misrepresenting it but that's the gist, anyway (<- that was added by the nervousocity). Another stdent from the class and I decided we wanted to make a play group about raising awareness for religious misuse. This wouldn't be attacking the religious or atheists, it's really just showing people how they view religion, and having them think about it because a lot of times people don't. I was a freshman at the time, and really didn't know anybody. The people I found to work with me were incredible, and became some of my best friends. I know that it isn't just the RC, because they weren't all RC- it was just being around East Quad and asking random people to help and finding the most amazing people who were actually willing to help. They were so enthusiastic and so creative that we actually managed to write and perform a whole play together. It was a wonderful experience.

"I think that East Quad must have some mystical power fueled by the RC. Besides this occasion in which wonderful people just seemed to be drawn to it, I have another example. The first time I explored the basement, I went around in what I swear was a circle three times. The third time, there was a computer lab. Thank you."

I miss hiking and rock climbing real bad. I miss having the rush that comes of accomplishing something tangent. I have a lot of intellectual challenges which is great, don't get me wrong, I just miss the open air and getting scratched and mosquito bitten on my way to the top of a mountain where I get to sleep on rocks all night and wake up feeling wonderful. Or something in the water, like white water rafting...just some kind of adventure. 

I get stir-crazy so easily.

Well, I'll get to explore Peru. That'll be an adventure. 

Finals start tomorrow. I apparently have 2. I studied for one and totally forgot about the other. I've been doing homework all weekend, interspersed every few hours with a bit of net surfing.

Ugh, this wasn't meant to be a whiny post. I just wanted to write about the great outdoors:

I'd just love to canoe down a lake by the light of the stars sometime... if only so I can sing that horrible song:P