"There's a shortage of perfect breasts in this world. It would be a pity to damage yours. "

Hey, there.  I will reinstate the trend where people post on time, albeit barely.  I wrote this a long time ago but just got back from a showing of The Princess Bride <3 (That's what my title quote is from btw)

There is a lot I can talk about but I will be focusing on the latter half of my week, mostly because Wednesday and Thursday were two of the longest days I’ve had since arriving at AU.

A few announcements: (A) I had a paper and two midterms this week.  Those numbers are misleading because they are small numbers and do not convey the Goliath-esqe amount of effort involved. (B) Happy your-birthday-is-a-week-from-today, Derek.  Hopefully you get lots of nice presents. (C) My parents have requested to see more pictures of me, and since they pretend to read this blog, I will include those here.

The beginning of the week involved a lot of APO events (you guys know that’s my frat, right?  Right.).  I will gloss over those. This week is Chapter Pledge Week, so we’re picking people to be our “Big” which is basically a mentor and someone who decorates your room and gives you stuff in secret for a couple weeks and then you have to guess who they are in a giant Revelation event.  A lot of pressure.  I do like some potential Bigs.  Let me put it this way: one girl complimented my hair.  MY hair.

My week also included a lot of procrastination by talking to Devin on Skype.  But if you had a boyfriend with stars in his eyes like mine (Figure 1.1), you’d do the same.  Wouldn’t you?  Just too hard to resist, honestly.  Thankfully because of the time difference I also managed to fit about three to four hours of studying or paper-writing a day.  Often more.

1.1: I have identified several constellations.

2.1: This is what the library looks like before 6 AM

Wednesday was the craziest day of all time.  I woke up at 4:51 AM sweating.  Too many covers and too many degrees (it was too hot, okay) combined to form an evil so evil that I got up at this god-awful time and took a shower.  Because Wednesday was the day of my first midterm, for Cross Cultural Communications, I decided “hey, I’ll get some studying in before the test!”.  Since my roommate was sleeping, I decided to go to the library (Figure 2.1) since it’s open 24/7.

2.2: This is me falling asleep while studying.  ME.

In retrospect, I probably should have just gone to the communal study room.  It’s about 30 feet away from my room.  However, I didn’t do that.  After existing at the library for about half an hour, I realized how tired I was and that I wasn’t learning anything (Figure 2.2).  So I went back to my room and promptly fell back asleep, ignoring two alarms and waking up 7 MINUTES BEFORE MY MIDTERM STARTED (Figure 2.3).

2.3: Another picture of me when I was afraid I'd miss my midterm. Not Emma Watson.  Me.

I made it on time to my midterm, then had Spanish then had Leadership Gateway, managed to fit a financial aid appointment in there, grocery shopping, emailed a guy about interviewing for a job at the library (!!) and then went to an appointment at 7 o’clock about Critical Language Scholarships.  (This is really cool, and I was trying to think of who would care about this.  Probably just Nicole.)  Basically if you are taking or want to take any of 13 languages (Arabic, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Chinese, Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu) you can get a scholarship from the State Department to go to a country that speaks that language for 8-10 weeks in the summer.  They pay for everything.  Housing, airfare, visa, food, intensive language instruction, cultural activities… you even get a stipend intended to allow you to buy lunch but it ends up being enough for other stuff too.  Anyway if anyone is interested the website is CLScholarship.org.  It seems pretty fucking awesome to me.  Maybe not.  What languages, if any, are you guys (besides Nicole) taking?

3.1: The interview went well.

Thursday I finally got an interview for a Library

Reference desk position.  I’ve been trying to get a Federal Work Study job for weeks, and finally I got an interview.  Not to spoil the story, but they emailed me 15 minutes after the interview to tell me I got the job (Figure 3.1).

4.1: Cool tree!

4.2: WTF are these?  So cute!

I’ll end my post with some pictures about how: (A) fall is here (Figure 4.1). (B) I like fuzzy pink plants (Figure 4.2). (C) My amazing shoes perfectly match this shirt my stepmom got me (Figure 4.3).  The last picture is just for my parents but all of you get to see it.

4.3: Emma Watson.

5.1: Snap-tea!

OH ALSO I created the best mechanism for all time.  I only sort of have a microwavable mug (it’s my roommate’s) so I yesterday I used a glass Snapple bottle (microwavable) for my hot tea.  Thus Snap-tea was born: it not only warms your hands while you’re walking to the library, it looks snazzy (Figure: top of blogpost).  And the best part of all!  The worst thing about tea is that you have to get up to throw away your tea bag eventually, or else your tea is too strong.  Well, Snap-tea avoids this with a handy dandy “cap” (patent pending) that perfectly holds your tea bag when you’re done with it (Figure 5.1)!  This is especially handy for lazy people like us and for college kids like us that may study in the library where trash cans are sporadically placed.

That’s all for this week, folks.  Love you all!

-Rachael