"There is a crack in everything -- that's how the light gets in"

CURRENT FAVORITES:
( Cut because there's quite a bit here... )

* A belated welcome to meganeha!  Hope you enjoy your time here!  :D

* I've gone through some severe burnout this past week regarding schoolwork -- I know I've said it a lot these past few weeks, but I really can't work up the motivation to do anything anymore, and right now I want nothing more than to spend a week or two sleeping in, spending most of my time alone, and doing nothing but relaxing.  I wish I could find a way to make what I'm doing right now challenging in a good way, to make things be interesting, but this semester has really worn me down and doing those things seems utterly pointless right now.  Today someone posted this quote on Facebook, which may or may not have come from the Buddha: "If your passion does not include yourself, it is incomplete."  It certainly explains a lot regarding how I'm feeling with what I've been studying the past few years; I chose my major because I thought it would be a good and important thing for me to do, not because it's something I really really wanted to do.

It doesn't help that I feel like, in the way one can overpractice playing an instrument or learning a sport, I've done so much work as a college student that I think it's starting to negatively affect what I've been working so hard to improve on, such as writing better papers, participating in class discussions, and pulling my weight in group projects.  (And this is after I found out this week that I got a really good grade on my latest paper for the ES seminar.)  Fortunately, next week should be better -- the final product for our ES seminar group project is coming along nicely (it helps that we don't have to conduct surveys or use GIS software like the other groups), I don't have anything due for this week in geology, and the only thing I have to focus on is the GIS final project due in a month (ugh, don't want to think about it D:), so I can definitely try to take it easy as much as I can.

* It should be quite obvious that I'm very, very disappointed and saddened by the results of the midterm elections on Tuesday.  I mean, Marco Rubio?  Rand Paul?  Prop 19?  Losing Russ Feingold, Alan Grayson, and Tom Perriello?  John Boehner as Speaker of the House?  Congress was bad enough as it was the four years Democrats had complete control (thanks to being bought out by corporations just as badly as the Republicans, pandering to the more conservative members just to get more votes to pass legislation, and sticking to a belief about how politics ought to work in this country without seeing how politics do work here), and now it's going to get so, so much worse.  The only good things that came out of it were a.) most Tea Party candidates lost, and most of the Blue Dog Democrats lost as well (I'd rather have an actualfax Republican than a Democrat trying to pretend to be one), and b.) there's a good chance this can be Newt Gingrich and 1995 all over again, where the House screws up so badly in their first term that they have to temper their far-right impulses.

At least the voting in Connecticut didn't turn out too bad -- we still have a Democrat in the Senate (I shudder to think what would've happened if that former CEO of a pro wrestling company won instead.....DX), my Democratic congresswoman got re-elected easily, and we finally have a Democratic governor (even though the Republican candidate is protesting the results and refusing to concede, even though it's very clear he lost -- the race was close, but not that close).  And even though our town's Democratic representative in the state legislature lost, he's been replaced by someone we sorta kinda know through Cub Scouts (back when I was active in it in elementary school)?  Interesting.  And Vermont didn't do too badly either.  Apparently New England (with the exception of New Hampshire) seemed to have the only good results that evening.  Everywhere else, though.........-_-;

I plan on doing a linkdump sometime later tomorrow/today with some of the more enlightening and thought-provoking Wednesday-morning quaterbacking I've seen around the Internet, especially because I haven't done one of those in a while.

* This video pretty much sums everything I've been feeling about John Stewart and Stephen Colbert's rally in Washington last weekend.  I really don't like Bill Maher at all (him being Islamophobic and sexist and all that), but when he gets it right, he gets it right.  ^_^;  He explains very well some reasons why I don't like neither Stewart nor Colbert -- while they too say very insightful things that cut through BS effectively, they propagate it themselves with their smug, holier-than-thou "all sides are just as bad" nonsense, which is a total misuse of their political capital (and yes, they do have political capital, regardless of the fact that they're comedians) and only encourages cynicism and staying at home with a thumb up your butt rather than voting and actually doing something to cause political change.  (Plus, Stewart and Colbert aren't all that funny, hipster -isms aside.  I actually laughed at Maher's rant, and that's saying something.)

And speaking of Keith Olbermann, who was mentioned -- now there's another guy I don't like all that much, but I feel horrible about because of his recent suspension from MSNBC for donating to Democratic candidates -- which may not even have been against the company's rules.  Yeah, I'm pissed.  >_>;

* In other things that have been going on this week: I had two interviews over the phone, one involving a potential job for a student-run book buyback organization during finals week (that would compete with the college bookstore in that respect), and another involving a potential internship in January for Animal Planet in New York City (which came completely out of the blue, and something I'm definitely sure I messed up on......:PPP).  That was certainly interesting, and I really hope both work out!  *crosses fingers*

* I was supposed to go to a conference on Native American issues this weekend at Harvard, but once again it fell through.  We were planning on going for months -- and then nothing happened the past two weeks.  Everyone just got really busy and couldn't put the time in to devote to planning, we couldn't find anyone able and willing to drive us there and back, and out of the three people from our college (other than the board members of VIP) who signed up to go, two backed out at the last minute.  We were supposed to have a meeting this weekend on how to plan these things better, but that didn't materialize either.  It's quite apparent that the current president of VIP doesn't care all that much about leading the organization and all that -- I mean, yeah, he does all the things he has to do as a president of an organization at this place, but that's all.  He's not nearly as charismatic or enthusiastic about what he's doing as the previous two presidents -- though this should've been apparent when he enlisted two friends of his who weren't in the club last year to be on the board.  Ugh.

* Anime club this week wasn't too bad; we may or may not be dropping Highschool of the Dead from our lineup, which is certainly fine by me.  :D  It also looks like we're replacing it with one called Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World (a.k.a. Kino's Journey), which looks like is going to be very good -- I can't wait to see more!  (The only shows we're watching that I care about are that one, Durarara!!, Planetes, and RahXephon; I've pretty much given up on Full Metal Panic and Kare Kano being any good.)

* A linetest from the Avatar: Legend of Korra miniseries (the sequel to A:tLA) coming out next November.  It already looks SO GOOD, and I can't believe I have to wait another year for this to come out.  *is really, really impatient*  XDDDDDDDDDDDDDD

* Other than going to a lecture on zombies sponsored by the Film & Media Culture department (which I would've understood better if I had read it on paper), not much else happened this week, and next week looks to be more of the same.