Freedom...kinda

Hello, friends! I am in a fantastic mood today :-) I had my last exam last night and now I'm free to be confused about the rest of my life. Ahh decisions, how I both love and hate you!

In other news that some of you may already know, but I'm planning on cycling around Ireland when I go to visit. I was talking to girl in one of my classes, because she's planning on cycling around Turkey with her brother and friend this summer, about the merits of cycling as a form of travel. Now I'm fully motivated that I should do the same for Ireland. Granted, I'm not the best cyclist (mostly because I often forget that I own a bike and hence never use it), but I calculated how much I would need to do each day for the rough route I want to take. I would only need to average 42km a day. So I figure, I've hiked that far in a day, I must be able to cycle it with some training.

And thus begins the long distance cycling training plan that I developed for myself based on the information Google provided me :-) If you'd like to join me in my quest for numbing my bum to the pain that is bicycle seats, I'll post each week's plan on here. Although there might be mid-week changes if I was too optimistic in the beginning. So here goes...

Week 1
Sunday - 20 min
Monday - 30 min
Tuesday - 20 min
Wednesday - 40 min
Thursday - 20 min
Friday - 50 min
Saturday - 20 min
Sunday - 1 hour :S

Alice

I went to go see Alice in Wonderland tonight as a break from not getting any studying done. It's funny how movies can affect you in ways unrelated to their plot (or maybe that's just me), especially when you go see them by yourself. I don't usually feel affected by movies more than acknowledging an overall sense of "like" or "dislike". And I would like to point out that the fact that Alice made me think more than just that doesn't necessarily mean that it was a particularly fantastic movie as the last movie to do this was Space Chimps (although I did like Alice).

When I left the movie theater I felt as though I had gone down the rabbit hole, too. Everything seemed fake; surreal. It was all too perfect, all too strange. The flowers were plastic. Houses were too skinny or too short. Even the moon didn't really exist, just a silhouette sprayed onto a dark canvas. I was dreaming. Watching myself. I was spinning and walking and standing perfectly still. I was watching clouds change shape two feet from me as I lay on a carpet of grass infected with buttercups.

I wanted to do exactly what I wanted to do and new that I would, despite not knowing what any of that was.

Maybe I'm just feeling particularly introspective tonight, but that 10 minute walk home made me feel less terrified about graduating with no plans.

Fa...bulous

For the past month or two I've felt that I over use the word fantastic. It's gotten to the point that the word has lost all meaning to me...like cool or sustainable. The worst part is that I can no longer use the term for its true meaning (ie. unbelievable or within the realm of fantasty) because people don't get that I've switched meanings and it results in a good deal of explanatino to get my point across. Unfortunately, you can't very well downgrade from fantastic. You can't just switch back to your monotonous life before fantastic and walk around saying things like "That movie was good. The character development was really nice." It just doesn't work. Doesn't have the same umph.

The thing is that I only seem to notice the overuse when it's too late. I'll be at my fourth fantastic of the conversation and something will click. It's as if my brain stem, as well as controlling my subconcious processes, has evolved to take on the additonal (get it?) task of tallying my fantastics. Once it has reached its fantastic capacity it causes all speech to stop and the rest of my brain begins the intimidating task of thinking of a replacement word. However, riffling through the lexicon of my mind takes a bit of time and, generally, I've already made it to fa- by the time we need to look for another word... Another word equivalent to fantastic and starting with fa...

Fabulous! Now there's nothing wrong with fabulous. It's a good word. I like it, but when you start to replace your overuse of fantastic with an overuse and kind of forced sounding fabulous, it doesn't always come across the way you would like. For example, describing a movie like Greece 2 as fabulous has a vastly different meaning to describing it as fantastic.

And thus lies my dilema: which is better, being the irritating girl that overuses fantastic or being strangely homophobic?

,KDJ;F GO9E

I just finished my thesis!!!!! YAY! Now I can get back to more important things like updating my beloved blog and planning my trip to Ireland, which I just realized you don't know about, but my parents are sending me to Ireland for as long as I can afford to be there as my graduation present and now you're all caught up :-) Oh and I cut a good portion of my hair off...now you're really all caught up.

Time for celebratory cake!!!!

I saw a girl waiting for the bus

She was sitting on someone's lap.
At first, I thought they were a monster.