Needless to say, I didn’t expect that I could ever tolerate a boyfriend who smokes. Which I don’t, really. He doesn’t smoke around me and pretends he’s trying to quit. He actually does insist that yes, he is trying to quit and that he doesn’t actually enjoy smoking. Which, of course, means he’s an addict.

For my part, I pretend like I don’t know he’s smoking when I’m not around, which works fine. I mean, if I were going to either live with him, or if I had any plan to marry him when I get older, I’d probably be a little more upset about it. But I don’t really have any control over what he does; quitting is something he has to decide for himself, not for his girlfriend.

Think of the practicality of it; if the only reason he quits is because I said so, he’ll just start doing it again when we break up, which, in no way or form, is any good for him at all. And I think I regard him a little more highly than that.

Although, I don’t know what that says about our relationship now if we’re just playing this “not really not smoking” game; he did at one point give me his cigarettes so I could regulate his intake. Of course, every time he asked for a cigarette I felt like an enabler, a dirty drug dealer huddled in the corner of a high school selling marijuana out of her ripped Jansport backpack.

Anyway, we’re back to square one: a boyfriend who smokes and a girlfriend who tolerates it even though, in actuality, she hates that. The smoking, not the boyfriend. I can generally ignore smoking in other people, but when I have to kiss the guy… well, that gets a little iffy. (Not that I let him kiss me if he even REMOTELY smells like ashes.)

I’ve always wanted to learn how to sew. Actually, I still do. I did make a quilt once, but I gave it to my ex-boyfriend with nary a picture. I guess I could ask him to take one for me, as we are know on an un-awkward speaking basis. And my mother has been getting on me to at least have a record of the things I’ve made. Most of which I have given away.

Back to the point. Sewing machines in dorms are like… a huge no-no. Of course, cranking your PS2 up to the highest volume to play Rock Band at 2am doesn’t seem to be, so I don’t see why I CAN’T own a sewing machine here, except for the fact that someone might kill me. You know, because someone’s crappy karaoke voice is better than the grating sound of the click-click-click of a sewing machine.

Anyway, before last spring semester, I decided I should pick up a hobby. I settled on crochet, thinking that it doesn’t take up much space. I mean, a buy the right crochet hook, yarn that matches the pattern, I use up all the yarn, and move on right? Little storage except for finished projects. HAH.

I didn’t anticipate that one could get addicted to knitting and crochet. My “stash” takes up a drawer of one of my dorm’s dressers and woe will be me when I have to pack that mess up at the end of the semester. Because I wasn’t really careful about storing the yarn, it has become one giant lace-weight/worsted-weight/chunky-weight yarn monster ready to eat me when I decide it’s time to clean.

Not only that, but I have yarn all over my room, to the point that my roommate, no matter how demure and Asian she is, is probably ready to poke my eye out with one of my own needles. And now I spend my time on Ravelry browsing all the yarns and the patterns and wishing I could buy more yarn. OR learn to spin yarn. Actually, my next itch is to start dyeing natural or white yarn and knitting/crocheting from those selections.

So, now, I have a yarn addiction. Which is not quite as harmful as a nicotine addiction, but it does hurt my nearly non-existent college budget. So I haven’t bought yarn in a while. And I’m telling myself I need to finish what I start. Of course, I have this terrible habit of not finishing anything that’s for me. Or, if I do, I don’t like it and I never wear it. Like this hat. Made it, liked it for two seconds after I finished it, and never wore it again.

But, of course, I want to sew again. Well, the onslaught of video game quilts has made me want to show me geekery in some way. But due to the aforementioned fact that a don’t really have a feasible way to keep a sewing machine, I would need to hand-quilt. And if I poke myself in the eye with an embroidery needle, that would hurt considerably more than a poke in the eye with a knitting needle.

In any case, I should finish my scarf first. It’s the My So-Called Scarf pattern in some pretty green and purple and lightish green yarn. I don’t know, but it’s making me happy. I just need to finish it before I return to the other thing which I was making… a sweater. Eep.

As to the scarf making, I made an observation. Somehow, finishing everyone else’s scarf was vastly easier than trying to concentrate on my own. So there you go… my lofty crafty ambitions shot to hell because my limited amount of space (okay, and my lack of an attention span).

The scarf was easy to make… I recall making this in October on a plane ride home to Hawai`i. The woman next to me thought it was absolutely fascinating to watch me make knit and purls… instead of sleeping like she probably wanted to be doing. I mean… it’s a five hour plane ride and she was intently watching me! I was a little freaked out. Some part of me was convinced (convinced!) that she would, at any moment, rip the knitting from me and proclaim, “No! This is how you do it.” Scary.

Anyway, enjoy the picture of my sea green ‘n blue too-short magic scarf. Here is a close-up of the stitch pattern, although it does little more than confirm that not every picture I take is a mess.

Oh, I almost forgot. I should do the “this was made in” type of information. So here goes. Caron Simply Soft in some kind of blue and some kind of green on Size 11 needles. I’m not really sure because I have this really bad habit of throwing away yarn wrappers. This will one day come back to haunt me like Marley’s ghost (except, you know, tangled in thousands of yards of yarn rather than rattling chains), and I will wash something that will be torn to pieces in the laundry.

Knitting and crochet. Yes, I have all but accelerated myself into the grandmother years. I jest, of course, before the Stitch ‘n Bitch ladies come to break down my door with fiery conviction.

Other things have happened, too, in such a whirlwind fashion that I have a hard time grabbing hold of it myself.

The boyfriend of four years is no more. Actually, I broke up with him in May because I decided that I actually couldn’t ignore his annoyances any longer, especially the ones that would get angry at me for NOT wanting to participate fully in his MLM business. Why I didn’t mention this earlier is beyond me.

I found many friends this semester, but most of them are Korean… as in, from the continent of Asia, not Korean-American. I love them dearly, but I found they have a penchant for gossip, so telling one of them something in confidence inevitably meant they would all know. I hadn’t realized this before.

Ironically, I now date a Korean.

I miss my panda friend, but I do little in the way of trying to hang out with her. This possibly makes me the shittiest friend alive, so I have no reason to be griping about it.

That has been my life in a nutshell. Stay tuned for further programming and (possibly?) a facelift. Does this place need it.

Is there anything wrong with school? No. It’s just that the off-time (i.e., summer) feels like breathing fresh air after you’ve been walking through the over-polluted streets of L.A. Or something like that. And I’m mentally preparing myself to leave again, back to Indiana (which, of course, means leaving Hawai`i), back to the Midwest where I have no hope of seeing the ocean (or a mountain, actually) for another three months until Christmas.

I always wonder at the people who say they’re homesick when their home is just a drive away. Whereas, I have to catch (at the very least) three planes to get to my college, then I have to bum a ride off one of my friends (or pay a taxi driver), and then I’m stuck. Stuck in a dorm room. Thank goodness I have friends in college. If I didn’t, it would be almost unbearable.

Sometimes I wish I could just stay here, at home, and not go back to college. But that, as they say, would be impossible. I know that I need to grow away from my family, from my home. But when you trade in nice breezes and family warmth for flat plains and a shower you have to wear slippers (i.e., flip-flops) in, it makes you wonder. Thank God for friends, right?

So I threw out the Jack/Lizzy thing and now, in the face of the release of the third movie, that particular post has one of the longest comment threads. Some people like to point out that they aren’t, in fact, the perfect couple in the face of Disney. (Will and Lizzie get married and Lizzie says she pretended to like Jack to kill him or something). Well, alright then. But they still would have made a good couple, even though Will has a better heart or whatever.

What amazes me is how that little post managed to gain so much attention. I’m figuring people just wander over here by a search engine, which I’m not complaining about. But I have a lot more thoughtful posts than that. Hmm… maybe my next post should be about cute dogs. Then I will definitely get some attention. What do you think?

I shouldn’t be complaining so much. Out of the six classes I had, I only had to sit for two finals. One class had a take home essay, another had us performing a play that we wrote, I didn’t have to take my psychology final, and the fourth was an on-line exam. But the take-home final was killer, the play had our group of four meeting every other day for about two weeks, and the on-line exam (which was supposed to be open book) was hard because my education textbook was in storage.

Finals brings a lot of unnecessary stress to the real world, leaving the blogging world rather barren. On top of finals (I don’t know why they expect us to do all of this in the space of two weeks), we have to pack everything and leave our dorm room rather pristine. Luckily, I had all Wednesday to pack (last Wednesday), but I also had to put things in storage containers because I live so far away from campus.

And boy, did I have a lot of things crammed into little corners of my room. I felt that as soon as I packed my drawers of clothes away in my suitcase, I had another pile of clothes next to my closet. I feared I would not have enough room for my things. Turns out, I didn’t. I donated a pillow, a lamp, and some miscellaneous clothing to charity. The mastermind behind Residence Life at my college decided that moving out time was the prime time to put up donation boxes; they were right. The boxes were filled with clothes, sheets, and pillows that students couldn’t find a way to bring home.

So, finally, I am back in Hawai`i in my slightly less messy household writing on a desktop instead of a laptop. So, have a happy summer vacation everyone. And I promise the upkeep around this place will be much better now that finals are o-v-e-r.

But it’s scary. It’s different from assault or the kinds of violence you’re always warned about. Don’t walk outside alone late at night because a man might rape you. Don’t listen to your iPod when you’re outside jogging by yourself because you’re distracted and someone will take advantage of that. Don’t walk around in the big city when no one’s around to notice you. That all makes sense.

But what do you do about something that’s completely random, completely life-threatening, and (sort of) unheard of? Do you suddenly become overcautious? Or do you try to continue living your life? I’d say you continue doing what you were doing in the first place, but how cold is that? Not even a thought to the people there, broken pieces of families and friends lying on the ground of a linoleum-tiled classroom that is, at best, supposed to provide learning and, at worst, boredom? “At worst” shouldn’t ever have to be “and maybe we’ll lose a few students this year.” No, that shouldn’t be it.

And talking about it won’t do much, anyway. The man is dead. But aren’t there other people who would, for some twisted reason, kill so many others? Do they live nearby? What do we do about it? What can we do about it? Perhaps this helplessness is something that we need to learn to live with.

Why would we want to do that?

Perhaps you expect me to say that BU rejected me. They didn’t. I was accepted with a (albeit a bit small) scholarship. I could have been sloshing through half-melted snow before flying home for spring break, but I decided against it. I actually chose a smaller, unknown school that offered me a full tuition grant. Yes, money was an issue. I couldn’t have my parents up to their noses in my tuition debt when they are still paying off a house in the middle of a state with exorbitantly high real estate prices.

But do I now regret choosing a smaller, unknown school over huge Boston University? Not so much. I have some great friends here, the education is actually not second rate, and the food doesn’t make me want to puke. In short, I don’t feel as if I’m missing anything from avoiding the A-List college. Would I have had the same experience? Definitely not. If I had gone to BU, would I have ever wanted to even consider what my current college would have been like? Probably not.

However, this college has made me realize that name and rank on some arbitrary list isn’t everything. So to all high school seniors who are biting their nails–don’t worry about it. After all, you can always transfer out.

Before you rip into me about my absolute lack of knowledge about poetry, I don’t usually go this much into depth when I analyze a poem. Think of the single line of poetry as a jump off point for this post.

Negotiations and love songs are often mistaken for one and the same.

This line comes from a Paul Simon song called “Train in the Distance.” This is, in fact, one of my favorite lines from any Paul Simon song. Why? I actually didn’t know until I decided to sit down and write this post. The line is actually quite clear, if a little vague in its actual intention. I think, though, is this: what we believe are confessions of love are actually negotiations to keep us tied down to the place we are.

The mistake that I usually make with this line is that I believed the person who is masking the negotiation as a love song knows of his deception. Of course, this isn’t always the case. Couldn’t someone convince himself that he could not live without another simply because he has grown comfortable in his current state of affairs. Could this person fool themselves into believing that they are, in fact, madly in love with another? It is probably so.

But what, then, are love songs? Love songs are sometimes pleads, other times praises, other times filled with confusion centering around another person. Could a love song be about something mundane? I’m not sure if the world would enjoy that, or even consider it a “real” love song. After all, we want to be filled with passion and desire for the rest of our lives; we simply don’t want to settle into marriage and then think of our spouse more of a “friend” than a “lover.” Or worse, we resent them for the rest of our lives. Neither is particularly romantic. So we stick to love songs that make fireworks and bunnies and kittens in open fields. Or something like that.

Perhaps, though, love songs can be deceiving. Is romance a measure of passion in a love song? Maybe not. True love doesn’t need fireworks that make you see various cute animals all of the time. Well, not for me, anyway. Just some of the times. So perhaps the negotiation that a passionate love song makes, the one that is mistaken for true love, is no more real than the love between actors on the big screen.