A Weekend Unremarkable.

Mundane seems to be the story of my life. I'm probably down-playing it  by saying this... God, okay. I'll rack my brains to think of something interesting.

So, as it turns out, one of my best friends (at one point in time, my best friend, but then we had a falling out a bloody eight months ago. Since then, we have come to a reconciliation but not an actual confrontation of the... "fight") has a girlfriend. I discovered this through seeing his hand intertwined with a girl's - a girl who I've met once in my life, and whose name I cannot spell (Ava? Eva? It's pronounced "Ay-vah"). In any case, I went over to his new house this Friday (he moved away from our neighborhood around a month ago), and between racing against my physic's assignment deadline and eating crappy pizza out of desperation, I noted a hickey-like bruise on his neck. And lo! and behold. It was a hickey. 

Thank you, friend, for telling me about this relationship of yours. I totally feel as though we're as tight as tight can possibly be. (This sentence is delivered with supersaturated amounts of sarcasm.)

It makes me, along with several single-ers, how the hell are we still single? Though, rationality tells me that:

• We've declined several individuals for the sake of retaining the potential of finding that special one. (Okay, maybe this is more like me.)
• We haven't met the one yet. And we're not desperate. And we're not bound to leap onto the first person who makes eye-contact with us. 
• We have school on our priorities list, amongst other things. A romantic relationship would mutate this fine equilibrium of life we have semi-established.

It still doesn't make me, and presumably the others, feel better. 

I'm in the slumps. I want someone to take care of me. My friends are not available enough. I love them, and vice versa, but distance (and apparently, a significant other) sets boundaries. I know that my friends have people at their universities who take care of them in ways that I can't - like buying chocolates, or reminding (and most likely, forcibly relaxing them) about an exam, or doing those random, special acts of friendship. I have no intention of making new friends of this kind. The guilt factor kicks in, where you feel as though you're replacing your best friends. (Imagine having them meet each other on long holidays. Awkward.) But an equal, or bigger, reason why I cannot let someone be close to me is because I can't invest in any more people. By invest, I mean "impart dependence, loyalty and love". I have had a lot of friends who have let me down, and I expect a lot from my best friends. And they expect a lot from me. Being there for more people would take too much out of me - I can help to an extent, but I won't reach out of my comfort zone too much. I also realize that I have to live up to the normal ShufflingHard Standard around my other friends: I have to be mature, motherly, most times funny, witty, the conversationalist. It's tiring to live up to this. What if I don't want to tell you why you're depressed? Or that life will be okay, and that, eventually, our exams are going to be over with? Or that phalanges are the technical and anatomically correct name for fingers, so shouldn't it be spelled filanges (and henceforth, fingers be spelled phingers?). 

You know you're my friend when I ask you for things. I give comfort and friendship much more easily (a shitload more easily) than I allow myself to receive it.

In any case, somewhere in my subconsciousness, I've deducted the solution that meets the criterium:

• I get comfort; someone to take care of me, in ways that my friends from afar cannot.
• I don't make more friends.
• I can be me again. No pretense.

The solution: get a boyfriend!

Bad, bad subconsciousness! I've read in journals that the subconsciousness formulates alternative brain pathways to come up with a solution in ways that the consciousness couldn't. So this is what I get? It makes sense though. I had this problem in the summer, where all the sadness and anticipation of my friends leaving influenced a similar mindset. But there you go. 

- ShufflingHard

The Littlest Ones are Over

My biology laboratory exam is OVER AND DONE WITH! I... am not exactly too thrilled by this notion, simply because there are two assignments that are due tomorrow and I don't know how to do the majority of it. This displeases me greatly. 


I think I'm lactose-intolerant, because my digestive track goes berserk (I'm sure you wanted to know this) after milk and lattés... yet everything is divinely fine with ice cream and yogurt (in moderate amounts). Lactase, oh lactase! Where art thou?!


Time is moving by fast. Tomorrow is the last day of classes for my first semester. This means that 1/8 of my university career has passed  me by. One. Eighth. It's being "celebrated" by hanging out with my two very good guy friends. But oh dear lord, they're bringing their laptops and gaming systems to do something that cannot possibly be fun without drastic sleep-deprivation and/or alcohol (in my books, anyway). I don't really know why the hell I'm going, apart from the fact that we really should meet up considering we're in the same city (a privilege I have that I wish was shared with other friends). They're a portion of those "I love hating life" engineering people. Ugh. 


I'm giving up on PB. It has come to the point where I have to actively restrain from jumping him and asking him straight out, "are you or are you not into me?". It's a bad idea, but really, what are the consequences? It's kind of like stretching an elastic - it's been stretched so far for so long, that if it breaks, you don't care. "It was bound to happen anyway," logic says. But if it happens to retract and become a normal, happy, gloriously un-deformed elastic, rejoicing is in order. But yes, if this PB thing was an elastic, I'm at that point. I'm incredibly good at acting around people who do not know my secret of "I'm acting like I know what I'm doing, you'd believe it if I didn't just tell you I didn't". So, bring it on PB. Snap already.


Time for sleeping! I need it desperately.


- ShufflingHard

It's a school day.

Lacking motivation, I sat around feeling like a useless, counterproductive lump of lump. By "around", I mean school, labs, bus, home and everywhere in-between. Nothing much happened today, I guess. I prevented a friend from renting her boyfriend's house to a potential scam artist. No biggie. Seriously, though. That friend is a little air-headed, in the best sense, so it should be obvious that a person who lives in Benin can't be living in the United States simultaneously. Also, a (second and totally different "future tenant") shouldn't be using his mother's death as an excuse to rearrange the fee-delivery arrangement. Sigh.

I talked to one of the 2 aforementioned best friends in Toronto, which is rare in consideration of how we lack verbal communication in our friendship. I miss her. I miss them.

This random pointing of "which best friend is who?" calls for blognames. I'll think of something clever in the not-so-ungodly hours of the morning (within 6 hours, or more).

- ShufflingHard

P.S. Shit, I totally just missed out on blogging on December 1st. Well, no use crying over spilled...time? I don't know. Happy December!

Burnt Hand and Broken Foot

Accidents are, tragically, superimposed on the everyday life of yours truly. The most recent cases:

1. I went to bed with a sore foot. "No biggie, it'll be gone by the time I wake up. I'll sleep it off," I mused. Day came, and the pain stayed. It's not a sore ankle, I know (due to my experience with sprains and bone-breakage). You know how the lower extremity (the wide part, with the little piggies?) curls upward as you walk? It hurts as I do this. It's a new pain - definitely one to add to my repertoire of body-damage expertise if I was a masochist. I have no recollection of how this injury happened whatsoever. I was hopping up and down the stairs perfectly fine all of last night (until the ungodly hours of the morning - like 3a.m.), and noticed a slight pinch in my toes before I went to (oh, blessed!) bed. I thought it was just a stretch, for I sit cross-legged in my desk chair like a lump for an hour. Yes, as I type, I'm sitting cross-legged (obviously ignoring one of my injury's potential suspects). Hopefully it gets better soon - it takes effort to not limp while walking. These things usually get worse before they get better. What - do you say "Ice, then warmth"? Nah, I don't have ice, nor do I want to bother with that (...yet. We'll see how desperate I become).
2. I walked into my kitchen wall with a full cup of freshy-boiling tea in hand. Good news? It's my left hand, and I'm a rightie. Bad news: it's fucking boiling water. I've also dealt with a great deal of burns (imagine the top side of my hand seared onto the interior of those moving-toaster-things that restaurateurs put breads/bagels/things that need warming up). 

In other news, I've finally found a blog! Albeit it's seven years young, and has undergone publication and production as a movie, it's very clear why a blog had churned itself into so big a thing. Yes, I speak of The Julie/Julia Project. Have I ever mentioned how I love cooking? Well, Ms. Julie Powell encompasses the wit, sarcasm, diligence and crazed-out-eyebrow-raising adventure I vie for in a blog (or anything, really). I quite enjoyed the movie too.

I have much healing to do. Time to go.

Did I mention that the tea is Earl Grey? The best tea ever. 

- ShufflingHard

Warning: This one is of boys. (AGHHHHHH!)

I realized, upon reviewing my last post, that I may have identified my ambiguous problems:
First, the following songs are doing a very fine job of keeping me happy.
So there's no more random, useless, unsatisfying shuffling on the iPhone:

• "Comme des Enfants" - Coeur de Pirate
• "There Will Be Tears" - Mr. Hudson
• "Young Forever" - Jay-Z feat. Mr. Hudson (Just the introduction, I'm afraid. Not too much a fan of Jay-Z.)
• "Lesson Learned" - Alicia Keys feat. John Mayer

Second, I'm empty handed in the romantic department. 

I have the ominous feeling that PhysicsBlond is a lost hope. A friend told me that I think highly of him due to his comparative advantages to the other three guys. I've never had this happen before, in terms of the quantity of the opposite sex apparently vying for yours truly. I'm sure karma will kick my ass very soon, cackling "ShufflingHard, I gave you so many guys to choose from, one after another, all of whom you've rejected. You shall stay alone forever. And never will you get who you want. Hahaha!" If Lady Karma (it's a female, because it's a bitch, I'm sure, with periodic mood swings) decides to do as I predict, I don't know where to begin to justify that it's not fair.

I've dated two guys, one of whom is a jackass beyond all comprehensible belief, and the other... didn't do much. In retrospect, the first one was the first, so the spurred emotion lending itself to be "love" depicted all irrational actions. (Recall that song, "The First Cut is the Deepest" - Sheryl Crow. I had no freaking idea what the hell she was talking about until the break-up happened.) As for the other one, truth be told, I was unstabilized beyond logical repair after the First One, and the Second One was quite the... stable one. He was loyal, he was there. Though, that was all he did - be present. The depth of character and charisma and attentiveness and all that stuff you'd imagine the Perfect Boyfriend to be was not there. I am, unmistakably, a plethora of... thought and emotion messed-up-ness and very few people will see how messed up and "dark and twisty" I am. (Yes, that's a term from Grey's Anatomy.) Both relationships were brief, the more recent one having ended around two years ago, though it seems a lot longer than that. The Second One and I are friends, though just the kind that poke fun at each other occasionally - nothing like the "we dated but realized we would be the greatest of friends" story, nor the "we dated and realized the other is a poisonous snake" story either. Just the boring one: "we dated and now we're friends". You can see the (lack of) faith we had put in each other considering how everything is back to how it was pre-relationship-wise. 

In any case, back to the second (and actual) problem. So here's PhysicsBlonde, planting goddamned trees out in the northern border of nowhereland (also known as the forestry area in the northern part of  my province) during the summer and cares about the sanctity of silence in the library and is cute and reads so many books to the extent that he needs glasses (though he doesn't wear them). But here, I find a problem: he lacks depth. So this reminds me of the Second One. And he doesn't make me laugh a lot, and I need humor. I love laughing, so a guy without humor is like... a hot dog minus the condiments. Yes, it's that essential (presuming you need ketchup or something as much as I do). Also, what makes me tentative about approaching him is the fact that he's never had a girlfriend, and to date, it's apparent that he doesn't know how to act around girls. So why this guy? As I said, comparatively, he's the optimal choice. (Yes yes yes, I know that there are a trillion other guys out there, but he's stuck on my mind and I can't help it. Henceforth, I'm writing about him. You are free to mail me your hair/eyes/whatever body part you've pulled out while reading this to scare the living shit out of me as an act of  vengeance.) How so? See below, for the three other ones' description. (These three are the ones who have been straightforward with their apparent like-of-ShufflingHard.)

Case One: Ginger Head.

• He stands as though he's a fairy from those Chinese television shows depicting a story something involving energy balls, transforming animals, the general public's ability to fly, and things of the like. The mentioned fairy stands as though she's the most innocent of things, so her body is generally... fuck this. I can't describe it. Here: http://www.illusionsgallery.com/Innocence-L.jpg. Okay, so it's not a picture of a Chinese anything, but you get the general feminine attributes of it. 
• He's... kind of very not attractive. My friend, upon seeing a picture of him, said (verbatim): "I don't know if it's because I just took an anthropology exam... but he looks like an ape." And she was being nice. Yes, nice. Granted, she's right.
• He's incredibly annoying - see the list of "things that bother me" and he does a lot of it. And he's not smart nor studious, by any means.
• The most frustrating thing though, is that he has been the one guy who has shown the most perseverance; offering a free ticket to a concert, offering to buy water when I'm choking, etcetera. (This is his best trait.) I feel like a complete ingrate for being so cold to him nowadays, but I cannot date someone who annoys you. At least, not for the long run. And right now, dating for temporary time periods is not worth sacrificing time with friends and focus on school.

Case Two: Russian Shortie

• He plays around with girls - he knows what to say to make anyone blush, and he knows what to do to make you feel special. He sits with an alternative female at each class, each break, etcetera. 
• He has very, very good grades. (This is his best trait, unfortunately.)
• So when he listed out the reasons why he "liked" me, they were incredibly shallow reasons. My god. Here are some examples: "You are intelligent... You have your own view of things... You are beautiful... You are cute when you are upset... You are funny...." The "..."s represent a written out description of why he thinks what he thinks. It blows my mind (in the bad way) that anyone can write something like this. Did I mention that he talked to me for a week before having this flood of emotion?
• As if the two already-posted reasons of why he isn't exactly the best of the flock, here's another: he still keeps an album of him and his ex-girlfriend up on Facebook, along with a poem he wrote for her. Great. 
• In short, the episode with this guy is the most succinct of the 3 (meaning a total of less than 14 days, from us meeting each other to me saying we're better off as friends.

Case Three: Tall Hottie

• He is attractive. He is tall (6 feet, 11 inches). He has (FREAKING!) blue eyes and brown hair. (Sadly, I think this is his best trait.)
• He is also (here's the kicker for you!) PhysicBlond's best friend. We became acquainted through said best friend.
• Though he's hot and tall and everything, he is so sadly deficient in several fields. Having broken up with his girlfriend of two years a mere 2 months ago being one of them. She was Asian, I am Asian. (Actually Ginger Head has the same problem, only his relationship was one year in length. I don't know how she stood him.) So I can't help but think I'm a good substitute for something crestfallen and broken.
• He dropped out of the province-far university halfway through the semester for no apparent reason. I asked him why, and he claims that his family needs help financially due to his mother's chronic health problem. Though, if that were true, he wouldn't be blowing off his money on a vacation to Mexico, nor would his present income be spent on bars and clubs.
• I think he's a compulsive liar, or he is really, really desperate for attention. For instance, he chased down 2 fourteen year-olds who stole his car, with an umbrella in hand, at 1:30 am on a Monday morning.
• He speaks too well, and he knows how to make me think and feel that I'm that special one. You know, those sweet nothings: "No bad guys to hurt you, right?", "I'll protect you", and strangely, "I want you to be happy, so if you choose PhysicsBlond it's okay, I'll talk to him". [This last bit is not the tone that I'm sure the men from The Godfather speak in. My friend said that he did the whole self-sacrificing thing to be noble. Then the High Road became too strenuous and so he gave up the act, asked PhysicsBlond if it's okay if he asked me out (to which PB said yes, my god, what the Hell.)] If a guy knows how to do this, it means he's had a lot of practice. The myriad of females on his Facebook wall is evidence. And this makes me feel sad - there's no guarantee that he's the actual jackass I make him out to be (afterall, he is PB's best friend. If PB isn't interested, what have I got to lose?), so why not give this guy one date? Conscience and good sense tell me "Hell. No. End of story." *Sigh*
• (After the alleged consent of PB) He has ardently asked me to go on a date with him, repeatedly. After evaluating how I'd relate to PhysicsBlond more than him (considering the prior is still attending a freaking university), and thoughtfully going over the above above bullets, I've reworded "I think it's better if we stay friends" in every way imaginable, short of "You're a douchebag, I like your best friend better, now leave me the hell alone." 

See? In comparison, PB is a thumbs-up kind of guy. Finally, Case Four: PhysicsBlond (PB)

• He is studious and he's attractive when he thinks about physics. He doesn't copy down my work like most of the other jackasses I "help" (or rather, tell them what to multiply to get the solution).
• He doesn't know how to play around with girls, given his nonexistent experience with them.
• He doesn't "want to date" (source: Tall Hottie, not confident about the validity of the statement), and that corresponds to how he has his priorities straight (like mine should be), unlike the other three who appear to want a girlfriend and go about searching for a girl. This bullet is an oxymoron in the context of why he's the optimal guy, I know.
• The process, at this point in time in terms of academic priorities, should be, 1) Meet a person, and uncontrollably like them, 2) Time passes and rationality cannot defeat your infatuation with them, 3) Go about being friends for the longest time ever before the two of you spend so much time together that you're practically a couple anyway, 4) You're a couple now. This should take a very, very long time. Month-wise, not week-wise.
• It's strange, how when I'm with him, I feel tense and nervous and quiet. Like, I'm scared that he won't like me. I haven't experienced this state of hesitancy around anyone for a very, long, long time. By long, I mean "since Junior High School" long. I don't know what this means, because if it's the you-have-a-juvenile-crush feeling, wouldn't I have felt the same way towards Tall Hottie?
• He's soft-spoken, and very down to earth. The backpack that he carries around is the same one his father used for hiking in the 19something's. He carries this iPod-sized radio-frequency tracker device in his pocket, since he gets money from the radio-frequency quality control people for travelling around the city. He uses the same binder from the 10th grade.
• He's not funny. And I'm beginning to see those godforsaken Red Flags (screaming "nooooooo!!!") in a lot of places. This guy better redeem himself before I become an asexual plant.

Okay, I'm done my ranting. I'm deeply, deeply sorry for having you endured reading this. I'm sure you skimmed some/most parts, and if you didn't, you have amazing powers. Either way, you can take up my offer of scaring me shitless with whichever body parts you have pulled out while on my blog page. Bombs or other nuclear weaponry will suffice if body parts won't be mangled with. I do not guarantee that this is my last ramble with boys, but I will try as hard as I humanly can to not concentrate an entire blog on them. Tell me I'm not crazy?

If any of these many guys ever find this blog, I'm in for a hoot.

In other news, I have class tomorrow. It's not going to be a fun week. Finals in less than two weeks. Yay. Watch me die.

- ShufflingHard

"I hope you understand your truth and beauty is like a thousand reborn stars."

Death is on my mind today. I apologize for being morbid, but I can't help but feel this. Upon opening my Facebook, I saw that my brother has joined a group of his friend's passing. I clicked on the page, wondering "Was it cancer? Was it a freak accident?". The page didn't say. I think, that maybe, the terms that Death has drawn up around an individual's passing dictates how the rest of us mourn. Maybe. This boy, my brother's friend, as it turns out, is also one of my closest friend's sister's friend too. Small world. My deepest condolences to his family, his friends and everyone who has had the pleasure of meeting him. I can't be categorized in any of the said groups of people, but I empathize for them all. I know how such a Facebook group can retain the rawest of emotion, the unmasked and spontaneous aspects of mourning. I know this through my 4th year university cousin, Supernova (there's a song by Mr. Hudson of the same title, but my cousin had the name in his email address a long time back). He, and his older brother, lost their mom around a year ago. Such a thing is unfathomable to me. Supernova lost one of his best friends around two years ago. If I were him, I wouldn't know how to breathe, let alone smile or do all the other things he does. He is only four years older than me. I don't know how he does it. What I regret is that I can't help him - who am I to try to help? He hasn't told me any of his thoughts directly - I know these things through following his blog and following his Facebook groups. I have no expertise, no experience and very few and uninsightful words of comfort; I would be just another person who tries. I've never lost a best friend, I've never lost a loving parent, I've never experienced a death of someone close to me, let alone two. Supernova's friend's tribute Facebook group is never left untouched. If you read what is posted on the wall, you will see that every other week, a friend says "Missing you", or "Never forgotten", or something of the like. Just from seeing others' turmoil from so impersonal thing like a Facebook group, forces you to know how good people go and how unfair life is. It's hard not to believe in God when life presents itself this way. When all is said and done, everything is useless and empty when you realize that everything has already been said and done. Nothing more. I won't live a less moral life, nor will I be less kind or empathic a person. It's just that I don't know how faith works for me. You can hate me, anyone can really, for saying this, but I suppose the God who made this world the wonder that it is, who programmed our brains and cells to be have enormous potential and capabilities - enough to create Rome, and the empires, and extract glowing genes from jellyfish to put into cancer cells, and build machines to investigate the existence of parallel universes, would understand how I am confused over something so significant. You can't just join the nearest church to your house. You can't just follow what the majority of the population is following. You can't instinctively follow what your parents or friends follow. It's about you and your supposed salvation. Having been a child raised in an agnostic home (my mom used to do the annual incense and Chinese praying thing when I was young, but life became progressively more and more busy and the ritual transformed into a routine revolving around a special dinner), my morals, goodwill and outlook on the world is based on everything nonreligious. "Treat others the way you want to be treated" - my mom and teachers, equates to "Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You" - Matthew 7:12. This rule of ethics is not so much religious, more so rational. I guess religion has never played a role in my decision-making, and I'm not a bad person, so there's little incentive for me to go on a religion hunt. I don't want to lay inches away from death and use religion as a way to comfort myself, either. It's hard enough to believe that "everything happens for a reason", let alone "God intended for that to happen". Too many bad things happen in this world for me to not be resentful and angry at God. But I also know that it's beyond coincidence that humans have the incredible ability do what we've done and are continuing to do - searching for religion being one of them. So I'm torn in-between. 


I've been listening to this all day:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaUI6Tvd1sA


- ShufflingHard


P.S. An add-on to my previous "what bothers me" list: People who use the word "gay" or "homo" as an adjective to "stupid".

As Promised, the next-but-actually-prior-post.

Being a blogger, it's an automatic given that I appreciate blogs. So, I went searching for other blogger-bloggingtons who are like me, whose pages I can relish in our commonality and grin at how I understand their subtle, quirky sarcastic remarks about something completely and utterly (in)significant. However, I come back after searching the www.blogger.com world empty handed. I never knew that so many people liked posting pictures of their children, or the fact that so many bloggers are family-having-with-a-life-and-look-at-me-with-wisdomous-reminiscent-eyes people. Don't get me wrong, I understand that blogging (why do I talk about blogging so much? My God, I annoy myself.) is an incredible release of everything and anything, but really? You would think that people past the age of 25 would have figured out their lives, and that this muddled up thing called adolescence would be the more common thing that needs (the much, much needed) figuring out via blogging? Cute kids, lovely family portraits, etcetera. I envy how you have your lives all set in neatly, kind of. (I'm deathly scared of ending up not being happy. And until I figure out what kind of picturesque future I will attempt to attain, I will gladly worry about nothing more than exams, friends, boys and maybe some other things…like…making my hair shiny…? Pst, last bit was a joke.)

But I'm still very unhappy about not finding other sarcastic messed up people. I'll continue the search on another day. Or better yet, why don’t you fellow-sarcastic-messed-up people follow me and make the connectingness-ness between us more efficient?

Although I'm not American, I listen to "This American Life", a radio program depicting various aspects of the "American" life. I like it, I'm not American. It's clever. The episode at hand? 88: Numbers. It's interesting. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1277

What would your life look like if you quantitatively documented your daily life, then graphed it? 

I suppose it can be linear - time passes, age increases, and everything else is pretty much constant. This is probably true for one's pre-20's. School, the opposite sex, maybe part-time work. What else..? Confusion, for sure. That's all I can think of. (This is the most boring kind of life-graph because I'm living it, and everything is casually unremarkable.)

Then there's the parabola, the upside down U type. Actually, maybe not - we enter our "prime" around the age of mid-20's to x's (x is always changing, thanks to people like Ellen Degenres and magazines with aging editors); this age range is definitely not the midpoint between one's birth and death. So the graph is slanted towards birth. Time is graphed against... productivity? *Time passes and ShufflingHard is thinking hard.* I don't know how else to describe it - what's the word that encompasses the creation of a family, the embracing of another person, the mental and physical capacities to freaking go to work for a paycheck (hopefully it's a happier life than that, but on a down day, this kind of thought crosses your mind). Being young means escaping dependence - dog eat dog, everything is about my world. Being old means something else – I don’t know what it is, so I won’t pretend that I do. Cells degrade, retirement settles in, time continues moving forward. So yeah, a slanted-to-the-left, upside-down U.

If heaven is all it's cut out to be, it should be a horizontal line. Perfect, unchanging, with everything constant. Maybe it's really a dot, a singular point - time doesn't matter in heaven; it's not a variable. Whatever, I can't think anymore. It's a dot. (Wow, I just described heaven as a graph. Calculus is on my mind, evidently.)

What about the universe? A blank page of non-graphness? Or would it be a dot as well? Surely the haven that the Almighty has created for loving, good and deserving souls should be more substantial than all the empty space between the galaxies? I would love to ask my Russian math professor, but I'm scared to. I’m not fond of looking like a crazed out nutcase, or being an insightful suckup with “real world” application questions. Maybe you can, then comment below. I like comments. They make me feel warm inside.

For lesser things, like actual life, try this:  
http://lifehacker.com/5242319/six-easy-ways-to-graph-your-life. I just googled "Graph life", and this popped up. Nothing spectacular guaranteed, proceed at your own will.

I realize, after typing and retyping a still-non-existent sentence, that I'm hesitant about writing about The Boy. I don't have anything else to call him, apart from the Blond (sorry, but it has a poor connotation associated with it. I do like blonds though, as you can tell). Maybe PhysicsGuy... PhyGuy? It sounds like airplane in Chinese, or Phylum in Biology-speak. PhysicsBlond? My goodness, it’s totally counterintuitive. I like it.  Okay, so PhysicsBlond it is, and PB for short (also, if you add "&J", classic sandwich right there). Did you just notice that? This digression from my hesitant-issues to PB(&J) and how I changed the entire context of this paragraph into something humorous, something that can't hurt. I do this, a lot. Self-preservation. Maybe it's too early - I'll just leave my issues with this guy with his blogname. Apparently, it's all I can handle.

What bothers you? I know what bothers me, and I wonder if I'm this bitter, bitter person who cannot stand people. (Even though I'm a people person - I love them, in general. They give you energy.) For example (a very deliberate sample of all things agitating is listed below, to show the extent of my bitter/non-bitter-ness):

• People who replace actual English words with "words" that are phonetically correct. See "now" and "noa". Reading it is like swallowing a tennis ball. You feel it go down your throat and towards your stomach, just as the "words" translate into from its horrendous wrongness to its intentional meaning. Tennis balls, moving. UGH! Note: The words bother me more than the people, but not by a lot.
• People who do something thinking someone is watching them. Okay, they're not wrong - I'm watching them. But what they did not expect is that my brain is exasperatingly frustrated. You're not in a photo shoot, nor do you look casual enough to pull it off. Stop it, get over yourself. I restore inner-Zen by looking at the next-nearest, lifeless object.
• Negative people, who love pushing all the complexities and strenuousness of their lives into your face as if we have some sort of "Who's life blows harder?" contest. Okay, you win. Shut up. I'm glad your life sucks, because you deserve it for loving the life-blowing challenge so much. Guys in engineering are like this, the majority of them anyway.
• My life doesn’t suck more than yours. This is how I vent, so I’m venting (as opposed to being healthy and running like a mad bird to blow off steam, or being stupid and doing drugs).
• People who look down on you based on your appearance. What? I wear typical Hollister and TNA hoodies, wear light makeup and I talk a lot, so I’m automatically a B-C average student? I’m enjoying the time I have during this year of university to treat myself nicely. Not to be a hypocrite (though I am, who isn’t?), but people who show up on campus looking like they’re about to march into Paris and flaunt their stuff bother me too. If the avoidance of any of these people (in any of the above bullets too) is necessary, I recommend you stuff your backpack and books and face into a cubicle. The world transforms into a scribbled and doodled-on cheap, mock-wood container.
• People who don’t reply to your texts, or take 200 times longer to respond than you do for them. Makes you feel desperate and compulsive (which I may be).  I’m suffering from this right now, as I type. In fact, I’m pretty much always experiencing this. With PhysicsBlond. He told me about his grandfather’s passing today. He confuses me. (And I love his eyes. And smile. I feel like I’m an 8 year old girl.)
• People who are not aware of the sanctity of quietness in a freaking library. Put your stuff down on the table gently; don’t be stupid and please use another force apart from gravity to set things down. Don’t talk like you’re the funniest person on the planet, either. I’m sure no one cares that something funny happened sometime and it’s completely coincidental but it could only happen to you because you’re you and you think you’re special like that. I’m listening, and I will glare discretely.
• Lots of other things.

To counter these shortcomings of everyday life, I have learned to “balance” my mindset using Happy Triggers – an overly simplistic self-made term of mine that describe what little things make me happy.

Digression #1: Oprah totally made the symptom “balance” a part of every female’s problem across North America. “Why are you gaining weight?”
“I don’t have balance in my life.”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
“My lifestyle isn’t balanced! I’m always juggling.”
“Why are you having relationship troubles?”
“I’ve lost balance between being who I am and who I try to be.”
Ms. Winfrey has a lot of influence in her hands. Maybe she should use another word for people’s problems, and fast. But honestly, when in your life was balance every maintained? You were a child – no responsibility equates to no balance. Then you were a student – maybe, on average, things were balanced. But knowing my life, priorities change on a weekly basis – trying to preserve equilibrium is not the same as achieving it. Then you are an adult – kids, spouse, chores and work equate to no balance. How is life ever balanced? Someone, if you can, enlighten me.
She’s retiring in 2011, apparently. What oh what will happen? *Mock gasps.*

They’re completely random, and I post them up through Twitter. Life is about the little things, right? You don’t recall what they are unless they’re happening in front of your face. I tweet at least once a day (thankfully I haven’t been enough of a pissed off grouch to have skipped a day… yet). Not to confuse this term with the term “trigger-happy”; this refers to checkered-shirt wearing hillbillies who drive 1940’s trucks. I’m stereotyping in a humorous way, so you may laugh. A couple of my most recent Happy Trigger tweets are, “Christmas in a cup; Soy Chai Lattés” and “Cute outdoor inflatable Christmas Santas/snowmen”. 

This also makes me happy, in spite of the general loathing towards ice-cold, indifferent, multi-million corporations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC1j5QHMM8k&feature=SeriesPlayList&p=CDC355952AC0FA80

It makes me want to like Blackberrys, it’s so good. But I shall not deviate from my loyalty to my iPhone. Most of my appreciation of the series of commercials (it’s more like a show, really. You wouldn’t know what is being advertised until you see that logo at the end) is because of the Beatles. “There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.” Love it. Upon writing this paragraph, I became intrigued by the origin of Blackberry; this led to some googling and eventually directed to me read up on the origin of Apple as well. First: the blackberry console looks like a strawberry, with its buttons resembling the fruit’s exterior seeds. Strawberry was tossed out the window and was replaced with Blackberry. Apple, on the other hand, was (apparently) considered to be the perfect fruit (…okay there, Mr. Jobs) and to be an awesometastic record label company. There was also something else related to Isaac Newton, but I forgot what it was and I’ve already satisfied my curiosity and I’m too lazy to correct myself. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to, and you risk being corrected humiliatingly by others if you regurgitate this information, but you will find similar information if you googled what I googled. Be proactive, click: http://www.cojoweb.com/ref-origin_of_company_names.html.

Digression #2: Microsoft word needs to update its vocabulary database: every word google-related is underlined in the red squigglies, and according to dictionary.com, it’s a legitimate word (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/google).

Okay, so I have a confession: I like the covers from the Across the Universe soundtrack than the actual Beatles. *SHUNS SELF*. It’s horrible, it’s evil, and it’s enough for me to want to go rip all my hair out while listening to the actual Beatles and screaming “I am wrong! I am wrong! I love you!”.
I’m sorry, I really am. But if you like light-roasted coffee, and if you use granulated sugar in said coffee, and if you like bananas or milk, and white bread and Miley Cyrus, you’re pretty much my version of wrong-wrong-and-should-be-beaten-ShufflingHard to you.

You know what I’ve never understood? This: the small sized cup for coffee. Not the cup itself, just its size. You would think that people need a caffeine fix – dirty, fast, hard. This requires more than a pitiful 200mL, right? Maybe individuals are short on cash, sure. And maybe they’re incredibly desperate for caffeine so they go out of their way to supplement a night’s loss of sleep. I suppose it makes sense, for both people to buy it (wimps) and for companies to sell it (capitalistic maximizers*). It’s just incredibly nonsensical.  It’s almost like McDonald’s/other greasy company selling individual fries.

It’s snowing outside for the first time this winter. It’s grey and cold and gusty and my goodness, it’s just ugly. Another confession: it’s making me feel wonderful. It’s as if my troubled insides were translated into a physical aspect of reality – something qualitative, and not escapably* ambiguous. So right now, I look outside the window and I’m alleviated. Maybe I’m being sadistic and I find a pleased ShufflingHard at others’ obvious and blatant (I hear people swearing) misery. It’s a combination of the two, more so the first thing than the second. Remember, I’m a people person – I derive a lot of energy from those around me. I’d like to think that I can be an awesome diplomat. But I’m from Canada, so we’re usefully neutral in most things anyhow. Plus points for the potential-diplomat-career path.

I think that’s all I have to ramble on for today.

-ShufflingHard.

*Not an actual word, unless you consult wiktionary.

Hot Pot and Drunk Texts

I think my brother is, secretly, a nerd. He asked a family friend for a book by Stephen Hawking: "A Brief History of Time", and he proceeds to rent out "The Universe" DVD from the nearest community library. The DVD is a series from the History network. Is my brother destined to outreach my accomplishments? I'm kidding (for I am not a believer of fate). I feel resentful of my awards because I don't want to feel that he is less than me. Our superiors, especially our mom and grandparents, tell him that he has to be "as smart as your sister" more often that either of us would like. I hope he will be blossom as the inert smartie he is during high school. He's a peculiar boy. He drinks black tea, hold the milk, just sugar. He has incredibly expensive glasses, but he never wears them. He's tall for an Asian guy - he's already just as tall (or taller) than my guy-friends at present, and they are five years his senior. He's very funny - the funniest person I know. He's going to be a heartbreaker (if he isn't already). Oh dear, a heartbreaker in the family. Wouldn't it be awesome if he turned out to be this funny, physics major guy who makes girls fawn? We'll see how that goes.


While we're on the subject of family, the three of us (the potential heartbreaker plus my mom) had hot pot. And, more importantly, we were watching Russell Peters while doing so. Yes, my Chinese-foreigner-to-North-American-culture mother was watching Russell Peters. The experience was ridiculously funny because there I am, laughing with my brother at the comedian, while my mom watched blankly at the television as the jokes and racial references flew past her head, one after another. This made me laugh more, considering she was tolerating her kids acting like chimps and the fact that she doesn't understand the comedic content (and didn't request a change of channel). Rarely within this one-hour show did my mom smile and laugh along - this was the best part. My brother and I were naturally already laughing, and we would notice our mom, and laugh harder at how our fob mother understood this brown guy. My mom has been in a good mood lately - last night, the city had a freezeover. Snow turned into rain and this slush mixture covered the streets. Then everything froze. Most public transit buses stopped running (as I found out through a girl talking on her cell phone, about how my bus couldn't drive up a hill along its route). Thank goodness I decided to conserve my phone's battery and stopped listening to music, otherwise I couldn't have eavesdropped on the girl and her conversation. A prolonged delay of overwhelming disappointment would have been the result, having already waited at the bus stop for over two hours. In any case, my mom had already been stuck in traffic for two hours when I called her for a ride. As the roads would have it, it took her another four hours to reach me. Then it took two more hours to get home. Normally, my mom would have been the Grump from Hell after such an ordeal. The happy part: she wasn't. In fact, she was still happy and talkative and jubilant. You don't know my mother, nor will you ever know her completely (Jesus, even I don't), but this is a rare, rare occasion when my mom isn't frustrated about something or other. (Running a business is stressful, so she comes back home sometimes and doesn't say a word until the proceeding day.) I'm like my mom in a lot of ways, but this is something I don't want to be.


Digression #1) Remember Alfafa from The Little Rascals? You know, the kid with the greasy hair that was shaped like one of the teletubbies? Look how he turned out: http://www.youngmalecelebs.net/galleries/hall/Hall002.jpg.
My oh my. I had no idea that he was older than me until a three minutes ago - I guess I watched the movie several years after it was initially released, so it was intuitive to believe that I was older than these munchkins. Okay, so Bug Hall (what kind of name is that, anyway?) isn't all to attractive, but come on. Who would have thought the bug-eyed (no pun intended) child would turn out so nicely? He could have turned a lot worse (it's not pleasant, click on your own will: http://community.livejournal.com/howtheylooknow/185685.html?page=3).


I actually wrote out a blog yesterday, but apparently, I can't just copy and paste content from Microsoft word into the new post thing. Will solve matters at the next earliest convenience. 


It's a bad sign that the best joke a guy can come up with is "What's black, white and read all over?", right? (Answer I came up with was either a newspaper, or a bleeding penguin. I was right.) But then again, the best one I could think of was "Why did the cactus cross the road?". (Answer: Because it was stuck on the chicken.) In any case, this guy shall be called PhysicsBlonde. The derivation of his blogname will be revealed in my next-but-actually-prior-post.


Drunk texts are some of the funniest things. The sheer lack of coherence and absence of the belief that there is a necessity to conserve personal thoughts is funny in of itself. Here are some that I have sent (verbatim):

• What does cool mean' I'm at wales getting cheeseckae. Waiteeswes are slow!!! Hahaha no, sobre likeness is the only lileness.

(Later that night...)

• It's reallybexpensive xhhesecake! Haha lady gaganis on! 
• Don do anything bad lady gaga? Something about amazon
• No rushie:bad stuff lol
• Uggggggggggg chheesecake bad ideasaaaaaaaaa

My favourite is the one about Lady Gaga. I think I heard her come onto the music player at the place we were at, and I was excited so I told my friend. And I got bad, expensive cheesecake. 

Here are a few I've received from others:

• I was kicked on kick a ginger day and my parents are astronaughts. (For the record, no, they're not astronauts.)
• Lol cleverly discugsed... My favorite animal is a moose and my favorite holidy is x. Lol i like moose and x.mass cause i can ski.
• Im witha friend.. its rly funny becus he rly likes me (For the record, the texter is a guy.)

That's basically all the funny ones I have (from the total of five incidences of either my receiving or sending of them). I'm not a partier, though it's the funnest way to blow off some steam from school. So whenever an opportune weekend or holiday rises up, and if my wallet permits, off my friends and I go. My immediate group of male friends, meaning the ones that came from my High School, do not enjoy the nightlife. My other group of male friends, meaning the ones that I have met during university, are. But I'm hesitant to bring the latter group out with me and my girlfriends because, well, apart from me, they have very little in common. Plus, do I really want to be inebriated in front of semi-friends? No.

I want chocolate, but I don't have anything remotely close to candy in my house, unless you consider peanut butter a good substitution (ew, no).

Okay, I shall go check up on that next-but-actually-prior-post.

Wishing she had time to do more blowing-off-that-steam,

-ShufflingHard

"Would You Like to Donate a Douchebag?"

The funniest thing happened today. The kind of thing that happens in sitcoms or romantic-comedy chick-flicks or so-stupid-your-bone-marrow-is-leaking-through-your-nose guy-flicks. My girlfriend and I recently incorporated the word "douchebag" into our vocabulary recently (after the two of us Wikipedia-ed and Urban Dictionary-ed its meaning). She is an internet geek, meaning she can recite anecdotes from MLIA, FML, that sort of thing. Apparently, you can Google "googlegooglegoogle" and have three Google search engines pop out on a single browser. She told me this, and she was excited. Yeah, an internet geek.


In any case, she told me that she Googled "(enter her boyfriend's name here) is", to which I completed her sentence "a douchebag?". However, before I finished the mentioned Google search, two guys wearing cyan Unicef t-shirts came up to us and asked "Would you like to donate-". Yes, the culmination of the guys' sentence with mine is the title of this blog. Needless to say, the order of the events was extremely spectacular. The two Unicef guys laughed with us and walked away, pretending to sob. I couldn't redeem myself, nor could I explain what happened, for I was gasping for breath between gusts of laughter. They were cute for having done the pseudo sobbing thing. Don't worry though, I did donate actual cash afterwards (Whoa, I just realized that I can type afterwards with only the left side of the keyboard!). There's pretty much one of the funniest things to ever happen... in recent memory, at least. There was also the time in High School when I grabbed a 2L bottle of coke and gulped it down too fast. It started fizzing in my both, out my nose, and I had to spit a hell of a lot out. It landed in a marvelous shape. If it was abstract art, it would have screamed "splattered out from your face". All this happened in my chemistry class, minus the teacher, NOT minus the people. Fantastic. Oh yeah, I don't like carbonated beverages for this reason.


There's something wrong with me, mood-wise. I know this because I'm super annoyed at my music library. Pressing the 'next' button, song after song, translates into "ShufflingHard, something's wrong. You're not fixing it. You don't know what it is. Finding the right song isn't going to change it. You're crazy, but continue trying to find a tune or lyrics that remedy whatever." It feels like I'm going crazy. Doesn't that happen to you too? Something is wrong, and you need to fix it. Right away. You push everything else in your life aside, may it be chores, or doing work, or organizing anything, or working out, until that something is fixed and corrected? The catch is that you don't know exactly what it is that is bothering you. So, in reality, you have two problems: the problem, and not knowing what the problem is. 


For now, using shuffle on my iPhone will suffice. As for the other thing that clearly eating away at me, I don't know. 
Maybe it's because I'm stressing? I do have a load of finals in two weeks. Maybe it's because of a boy? I am crushing on this super-oblivious-about-girls guy. He hikes, he applied for a job where he will be planting trees outside the city for the summer, he longboards (my God, isn't the the sexiest thing ever? Urban surfer. Hell, yes.), he's good at physics (something I hate with every biology-degree-directed-cell I have).
Maybe it's life? I am worried that my degree will end up nowhere, and I don't know if I should pursue a combined degree in hopes that I will enhance my chances of finding a successful career, or if that is just a waste of time (and money) and that I should sit down and find out what I really want, then pursue it. But wait... I've already done that... I guess, my fear is failure. My degree will be useless if my plans go astray. I'm scared as shit. 


It's incredibly hard being scared as shit, while working your ass off getting a degree that you're hesitant to graduate with. (Yeah, so what, I swore. I'm freaking shuffling through my music, so I don't care.)


-ShufflingHard.

The First One

Like every other (sane) person, it would be optimal if this blog was epic. (Ew, hate that word by the way. Oh, and I use a load of brackets.) The problem with that is, I don't know how to go about doing that. After all, it's just me. I'm listening to this Korean Band and Phil Collins on iTunes, and I've sneezed five consecutive times within the past ten minutes. I'm not enviously standout-ish, no matter how I much I try to be within the parameters of still "being me". I'm not normal, by any means. But then again, I've met only a handful of the 6.8 billion people out there (quoted by good old Wikipedia), so who am I to average out what personality complex is the norm? Whatever, I'm beyond average. You believe me. You don't have a reason not to. (Unless you're a paranoid "internet is evil" hater. Then maybe you need to go kick the internet's ass.) 


So, whenever I read other blogger's blogs, I have this visual of who I think they are. My mind's eye makes them perfect. "Oh, that's soooooo (blogger)!", I'd often think, as if they were that friend I've known since the 5th grade, who pretended to be allergic to peanuts in order to leave the lunchroom early so that he had first dibs on the school swings. I don't know a kid like that. You probably knew I didn't (recall the quickly diminishing genuineness MLIA and FML).


Here are some things that are true. I hope they justify your image of me to be something kind of remotely similar to who I actually am.

• I'm an average college student. School kicks hard. Grades kick harder. The lack of motivation takes the superlative: it kicks the hardest. I'm suffering from the last symptom.
• My two best friends are either across the country, or in a whole freaking other country altogether, for their ambitions and studies. I stayed at home, and I give that tilted-head-and-stretch-a-smile when people ask me where I'm attending. I justify that it's a good school, in my mind. Easier to get a higher GPA, less competition, no residence fees. (My head then snorts "yeah, mom's still here". And I heave a sigh, and ignore this facet of reality.)
• I know college boys are crazy. I strongly believe that I was somehow sheltered in my group of asexual friends all throughout high school, and I was overlooked everywhere. Now, not so much. Guys are stupid to begin with, but once they want a girl, they go bonkers. They shall stay anonymous, for the sake of their "manhood" and the existence of their balls. I doubt they'll ever find this blog site though.
• I wanted to be an artist up until middle school. Now, I aspire to have a career in the medical/psychological/pediatric field. Yay.
• At present, I can't stop listening to Anberlin's "Inevitable". 
• I love Christmas. If you want to get into the holiday spirit the fast and cheap way, go shopping. As soon as you enter the profit-hungry institution (the mall), you'll be smothered in green and red and gold and silver and trinkets and the "must haves" for gift giving and etcetera. You will covet over many materialistic objects. But you will be submerged in every remotely related to the holidays, overhead music and everything. If you use public transit to arrive at said mall, you may encounter a musician who plays age old carols with guitar cases open. 

• I swear. A lot. In fact, throughout this (and every future) blog, I force myself to not. Why? I don't know. There's a better way to convey a feeling than the general "Fuck!", "Shit!", or "FUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK!!!". Right? Right.
  
• I like bran muffins. Shut up. 
• I thought I had a unique name. That is, I never met anyone else with the same name as I did, until one day, I met an Amish girl with said name. Yes, an Amish girl, tight-bunned hair with the scarf thing, wearing those tan patterned one-piece dresses. Now, I have to deal with another girl with said name whose friends talk ceaselessly during my physics class. I do not enjoy hearing my name being whispered because it just feels weird. Like a bug flying around your head, or a spider trickling up your spine. For those of you who have this problem every day (so it's not really a problem now, is it?) and want me to shut my trap, be quiet. It's a new change, okay? YES, I know there are 6.8 billion people out there. Isn't it okay for that comforting childhood conviction "You are special" to ring true sometimes? It took longer for me to have my name swept underneath me. If this hasn't happened to you yet, lavish in that fact. (Don't be tempted to count how many people show up under the Facebook search of your name. It's an ugly site.)
  

These are the few things I can come up with within the time being. I find myself believing that rehearsing a presentation is very important. So I shall do that. See, first blog: so not epic.





-ShufflingHard



P.S. My name isn't actually that unique, apparently. Shut up, girl in physics. It's momentum, it's not exciting.