Honolulu AIDS Walk

April 17th is the 20th annual Honolulu AIDS Walk!

This event benefitsThe Life Foundation is a local organization that does amazing things. They're the state's oldest and largest AIDS-related organization and, as such, serve over 75% of the state's people, providing rapid HIV testing, education and prevention programs, and support services for patients of HIV/AIDS. This doesn't just include counseling and medical care, but home care, groceries, and a wide variety of other essential services. They currently serve over 60% of all HIV/AIDS patients in the state including men, women, and children from every income level and ethnic group. They operate an extensive peer-to-peer prevention effort that targets people at the most risk for contracting HIV, offering support and education. They go out of their way to reach people in the community; if you need an HIV test but can't or don't want to go to their office, they will send an inconspicuous employee to meet you anywhere on island for your cheek swab.

I've volunteered for them in the past, and this is really amazing considering that they operate out of one tiny office the size of a small apartment in Honolulu. Now I'm the captain of team Psychic Unity of Anthropology. We're the UH anthropology department's team and, the event being so far in advance, we are woefully short on people and donations.

You can help by spreading the word about the event or donating directly to our team page. I don't receive any compensation for bringing in donations, this money goes directly to Life Foundation programs.

Thank you very much for anything you can give and any efforts to help us reach more people. You are helping us create a safer, healthier Hawaii and for that you have our great appreciation.

Hawaii: Where Every Day Is Opposite Day

I'm beginning to think that people here actually do make an effort to figure out what the best plan of action is, then they willfully do the exact fucking opposite.

I've been suspicious of this for a while now, but this week I really think I've come across irrefutable proof. Monday, January 10th, was the first day of class for all the schools in the University of Hawaii system. The first week to two weeks of every semester is marked by extremely heavy traffic around campus, impossible parking, and lines with waits of twenty to forty five minutes at pretty much every office on campus. The longest and most annoying lines are for student ID validations, textbook purchases, and financial aid office help.

Those first two things are located in the Campus Center building, which is also the student union. The book store is here, along with the ID/bus pass office, student government, university credit union, a major computer lab, all the meeting and conference rooms, the campus copy center, and most of the eateries available on campus. It's a lot of things in a large building.

UH decided that the weekend before class started was the best time to start massive expansion project on Campus Center. They also decided that walkways are for chumps and completely blocked off the entire center of campus, AKA the place with the heaviest foot traffic and the intersection of every path necessary to get from one building to another. For good measure, they also repaved the second busiest walkway on the other side of campus and blocked it off entirely, too.

So now to get anywhere, we have to make massive detours that don't make any sense, and you have to stalk in circles around Campus Center before you can find a way in. There is only one way in now, by the way.

And just in case no one cared that foot traffic was an ordeal, the city also decided to repave the major road that runs alongside campus and in front of all the dorms on the first two days of school, shutting it down. And because they also hate pedestrians, they made it impossible to cross without walking for two blocks in either direction of the major intersection at which we all normally cross.

Hawaii: You Will Run On Island Time Or We Will Fucking Make You Run On Island Time.

In which I misinterpret Alice Cooper

YESSS THE SEMESTER IS OVER I'M DONE FOREVER AND EVER AND I WILL NEVER HAVE TO DO WORK EVER AGAIN AS FAR AS I AM CONCERNED RIGHT NOW OMG.

Time to eat cookies and jump on the bed and stay up AS LATE AS I WANT. HOT CRACKERS I AM SO EXCITED. I think my grade is effed in a couple of my classes I don't even caaaaare. Wait I care a little bit because I just got my Emory info packet in the mail and I really, reeeaaally want to go there but I don't know if I can possibly get in. I think if I don't I might as well go wait tables since there's nothing else I'd really like to do but ANYWAY FOR RIGHT NOW I'M GOING TO EAT ICE CREAMS AND WATCH MOVIES AND SLEEP FOREVER.

Actually I can't really get used to being done with work so I got a Chamorro language tape to study before I went to Guam but it's probably the most useless thing ever. It has a dude repeating phrases over and over and telling you to repeat them but it never tells you what they're saying. There's no accompanying book either, so I guess I'm just screwed. Normally I would just get some books but since I've never, ever heard someone speak Chamorro I don't know how to pronounce anything.

I also checked out some books on Micronesian archaeology and got some unpublished research from the University of Guam on excavations done in the area we'll be looking into. What the hell why am I so determined to keep working now.

Universities: Not giving a shit about your flash cards since 1636

So. I saw a pre-health advisor and said "What do I need to do to get into an epidemiology program?" and she was like "Uh go back in time and do a pre-med track?" so I guess that's out.

I've spent the last week gradually coming to terms with the idea that, no, I am not going to be a scientist. I will probably never be a scientist. And while that SUCKS, I guess it makes sense. My advisor pointed out that when I talk about public health I talk about it like a social science, not a lab. Despite my interest in the biological sciences, my performance in the social sciences has always been substantially better. She thinks I might find it difficult to deal with public health in terms of empricism rather than personal interaction, which is partly true. So she showed me what I would have to do to get into a program for global epidemiology and a program for global health and said I should do whichever I felt was better suited, but an epi program means 1) another year of school and 2) that much more loans, which may max me out before I've finished grad school.

She also made it clear that it's very common for people to do a non-science MPH track and then later on their careers get additional education in the sciences. So basically, I can also go back and do it, but I can't undo the time/money spent on doing it now. So I went from global health to global epi and back to global health again, which I guess is okay.

The problem I'm really having is that I had been thinking my whole life that I wanted to be a SCIENTIST. I want to do science! When I was little I was always saying I wanted to do genetic research, or be a doctor, or a biologist, etc. So I am a little disappointed that I finally have to admit that I suck at it.

Spring back

Unfortunately today was the first day back from spring break, to which I say LAAAME. My wonderful, thoughtful, totally not vindictive phys anth prof decided to make our second midterm today at 9am, plus an extra credit paper was due. Before the break he cheerfully told us that we shouldn't worry about the test because the class average on the last one was 77%, and that's great because usually his class averages are more like 67%, so we're doing great! Smile! Yay! There was a big heavy silence before I piped up with "That's a terrible grade, no one wants those kinds of grades!" and everyone else chimed in with "Yeah dude wtf, wtf dude." He seemed confused and repeated that he's not going to grade us on a curve anyway, so whatever. Also, three exams like this one make our entire semester grade. Silly physical anthropologists, you're all so odd.

YES MILANA, I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU AND YOUR APES.

I had library books due yesterday but the library was closed for the break so I had to wait until today to recheck them. They're still charging me a late fee for all of them. It's only 75 cents total so I won't complain, but sheeeesh. Way to be a pain in the ass, library ladies. This is even more annoying than the time I returned books on time but they didn't get around to checking them back in for a few days so they tried to charge me late fees for that time.

Good news, though. I was talking to a girl in my Biomedicine and Culture class (one of the two other pre-med profession people in the class) about how difficult it's going to be for me to get the kind of experience necessary to apply to public health school. Turns out she manages the pre-health profession advising office on campus, and she got me an appointment with the director and gave me a lot of good advice on where to go to get the experience I need. I had tried several times to get that info from the pre-health office before and they'd told me to just go to the public health school's admissions and ask them, which is a horrible idea. I'd also asked the community service office and the career development office, both of which had told me to leave, go home, get on my computer, and search their database for openings.

So this is mixed good news. On one hand, I'm finally getting the information I should have gotten (and tried to get) seven months ago when I started at UH. That's good news. On the other hand, it turns out that I REALLY need to have been working to get the requisite experience for an MPH program starting... Oh, SEVEN MONTHS AGO. Turns out they want you to get work experience while you're an undergrad, not after you graduate. That's the bad news-- whatever lazy chicks had been brushing me off at the pre-health office before quite literally screwed me out of getting to apply to an MPH program on time because they didn't give me the opportunity to get that veeery valuable little tidbit of information. Meh.

That means I'll be trying to get taken on as a full time volunteer with at least one medical center and/or clinic nearby here. After I get back from Guam I'll use the advice I got today to try and get a paid or intern position at a private practice. Apparently the trick is to just keep asking until someone agrees to take you on, which I'm going to hate doing but whatever. I'll have to jump through some stupid hoops if I want to SAVE THE WORLD and whatnots.

SCORE

I got early acceptance into the Guam field school :D WHO WANTS TO GO SHOPPING AT R.E.I.?!

Things-o-rama

I finally turned in my Guam application yesterday and he said he would get back to me today or tomorrow. I haven't heard back yet so I'm nervous. I imagine him sifting through all the work I turned in last semester, shaking his head and tsk-ing quietly to himself as he decides not to let me in.

By the way I'm still spending most of my time hunched over a computer writing about domestic abuse. I have a short paper due this weekend that involves critiquing and attempting to create a feminist ethic for interpreting and responding to sexual abuse, then next Wednesday (YES RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MY SPRING BREAK) I have a 3000 word research project on the use of the idea of mental health as a form of gendered control. So if in the next week you find yourself thinking "hot crackers, I sure am having a shitty time!" I want you to picture the eleven books about systemic abuse I have sitting on my desk, and I want you to picture me reading each one of them and stuffing them with post-it notes instead of relaxing over the only break I will get for the rest of the semester during the only chance I'll have to see my dad in almost a year. Then I want you to think "WELL GOD DAMN I guess my time is not as shitty as it could be!" Because gals and pals this is SHIT-O-RAMA right here, yes it is.

In somewhat related news, pick a monkey and then try to find its family, subfamily, superfamily, suborder, & binomial nomenclature in less than fifteen minutes. YOU CAN'T DO IT, I TRIED. Now do this for every primate at the Honolulu Zoo one after the other. Have fun, kids.

I mostly post at night. Mostly.

I'm baaaaaack holy crap this semester has sucked some eggs. My goodness. I just withdrew from THE JAPANESE CLASS FROM HELL in light of the fact that it was going to cause me to fail all my other classes by being a goddam time vampire the likes of which I have never seen before. That means I can no longer receive back credits which means I just got boned out of 8 credits I deserve for being placed in an upper-level language course. That means I'm not going to be able to graduate on time if I don't load on summer classes. If I had only had a different professor, this would not have happened. I am BEYOND angry about this, so much so that I don't even want to talk about it.

Anyway, I got a new haircut. That's about the only good thing that's happened so far.

My dad is coming in a week, yaaay. Unfortunately his plane gets here right when I have a super important class thing so I can't actually pick him up from the airport, which blows. I wanted to have all my local friends ride along and talk pidgin for only the first ten minutes and then, by our synchronized watches, they would suddenly stop and start talking like normal. I was curious to see if my dad would say anything. Now I don't get to find out, boo.

I was less than happy to find that the medical assistant position that I didn't get last semester is STILL being advertised and it still says they need someone ASAP. It had just been posted when I applied... I almost want to call them and be like BET YOU WISH YOU HAD ME ON STAFF NOW BITCHES AHAHAHAHAHA-- then hang up, but that's not really constructive.

This list goes to eleven

Things I have learned so far this week:

1. Japanese classes in universities are universally horrible and don't actually teach anyone Japanese.
2. I was born to be a medical anthropologist.
3. I never want to work in academia.
4. The university housing office can (and will) give you a roommate without telling you.
5. I am gradually becoming ambivalent to my responsibility to society.
6. No one makes red spiral notebooks anymore.
7. I do not belong in A) churches or B) gyms and going into these places makes me feel like an interloper.
8. My loony suitemate has made it very easy for me to go from 0 to bitchtacular when dealing with people's dicketry.
9. I was not made to get out of bed before 9:30am and taking 9am classes is a recipe for disaster.
10. The cafeteria food here tastes good if you've been lifting weights/running in the hours before dinner.
11. Death metal rooster makes everything better:

Guamarama

Original post about the field school in Guam I'm applying to removed since it has been discussed and we decided that if I get accepted we'll figure out a way to pay for it. I am super freaking excited about this :D

Moldy book smell

So far I'm done with history of anth and archaeology, so I managed to sell my books back for a good price. Now I'll still be spending the rest of the week in Sinclair library, which has a mold problem so it smells like broken dreams and dead unicorns. It's also creepy as shit.

Hey guys let's go investigate that strange noise.

My computer decided not to connect to the wireless so now I'm here just chilling waiting for Layne to get done with his stuff. I don't have any more finals until Thursday but there are two big bitch finals back to back on Friday. They involve a lot of reading and remembering endless amounts of inane details sooo yeah. But I finished my arch final in 20 mins after walking in late so for the rest of the day I went around going MY DICK VIP. YO SHIT NEEDS ID. But I won't be doing that come Thursday so I better get my giggles in now.

Seriously though this place smells like doom and hopelessness.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone because I am a consumer whore.

I should be studying

I SHOULD, but it's so nice today. I think I will go get Chinese foods. Mmmmm.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone because I am a consumer whore.

My edjumacashin

Long post is long.

The yoo-hoos in the College of Arts and Sciences advising office better thank their lucky stars that I got all the classes I wanted today, because there would have been many flaming bags of dog doo on their metaphorical front steps tonight if I hadn't. They thought it would be a totally rad idea to spread registration out over a full week with one group's registration period opening every half hour from 9am-4pm. The groups are divided by just a couple of credits each, meaning that they spread everyone out so completely that, for example, L and his roommate Don started here the same semester but their registration times were three days apart. FAIL.

Oh and for extra fun they leave a whole weekend in the middle in which no registration periods start but people whose times began the week before can still add classes, so anyone stuck registering in the two days after that weekend are BONED with a capitol F-U-C-K-E-D. Guess where I was? Yeah. I had to redo my schedule four times in the last two days.

Here's how my schedule worked out:
-Physical Anthropology + Lab (MWF)
-Anthropology of Consumer Cultures (TR)
-Intermediate Japanese (MTWF)
-Women and Madness (R)
-Biomedicine and Culture (MW)

So now I'm at 17 credits with a dilemma. I had originally planned out a 19 credit semester with a two credit public health class instead of Anth of Consumer Cultures-- I had wanted to take it but it filled. Miraculously, someone dropped it right before my registration time, so I jumped on it.

An aside: The Arts & Sciences advisors will insist to you that even if a section fills up you can still e-mail the prof and get in 100% of the time. Those e-mails, much like the goggles, do nothing. Most of the time you don't even get a reply. Usually you get rejected. This prof had rejected me for this class already (as an extra student, that is) so I was psyched.

Unfortunately it conflicts with the two credit course that was going to bump me to 19 credits, which is the limit. You have to get special permission to go above that and can't do that until the start of the next semester. Then you have to prove to them that you can take a heavy semester like that, which I'm not sure they'll buy coming from me. So my dilemma is this: Do I wait for next semester to start and try to petition to take another three-credit course, or do I drop my Consumer Cultures course for the two credit class? Two credits are hard to come by or I would just find another one to pop into this schedule.

It's important to note that, even with 19 credits in the spring, I will have 41 credits left before I can graduate and only two semesters left in my four years. Because I transferred I essentially lost a whole semester of credits that didn't transfer over. This means I will have to go to at least one summer session, probably to take something like two or three classes, and then I'll still need to take 17 credits per semester my senior year. I only have a couple of classes I need to take the graduate, it's mostly getting the total necessary 124 credits. I need a minimum of 19 credits in the spring-- I can't just sit on 17.

And no, I don't want to just take another semester. I don't wanna and you can't make me, neener neener neener.

psOH SNAP!!

It has only just now ocurred to me that the game I have been waiting to play for months-- no, YEARS --has been out for two and a half weeks and I have yet to even look at the case. This is madness, you guys, on Spartan freaking levels. I have been waiting for a new Phantasy Star Online since the Dreamcast network went the way of the Virtual Boy, if you catch my drift.* And who is to blame for this? Why, it's Dr. Geoff White, professor of Pacific cultural anthropology. And for this offence I will leave a flaming bag of dog poo on his metaphorical porch. The bag will read "PHOTON BLAST"

Oh man if I can't feed my mag fluids to make it evolve into two wing-shaped devices that float behind me in PS0, I am going to be SORELY disappointed.

Speaking of nerdy video game times, L and I found copies of Kid Pix, The Incredible Machine, and The Amazon Trail at Goodwill today. YES HE WENT THRIFTING WITH ME, u jellis bbs? And hells yes I use Oxford commas. Anyway we got Amazon Trail and played it. Hit the slow one! Noooo that's a log! AAH THE HARPOON BROKE.

I had thanksgiving dinner with L's family. I think it was the first time I've ever had thanksgiving without my mom's family. They brined the turkey and put it in this kooky kamado grill that looks like a depth charge and it was GOOD. The rest of the food was all local, which was weird as hell but interesting. As it turns out there is no variation of sweet potatoes that I can eat without feeling like I have a mouthful of damp, half-dissolved sugar. L and I also watched Jackass 2 and discussed how much we do/do not want to try to avoid an angry bull on a giant seesaw.



*You know, since the VMU went the way of the console cartridges.

P.S.
I posted this with my newfangled iPhone. Haw haw.

More srs bsns

Okay on a more serious life update (which I guess is what I'm supposed to be doing here, not ranting about zombies or WoW but OH MAN YOU GUYS SHOULD PLAY ZOMBIE PANIC--) I have a new beef.* And you might be wondering if he suggest shopping and offers to hold my purse. Well, my friends, he does both of those things. He's local so he's chill and awesome and he plays WoW with me and today he helped me find resource materials for a research project. Happy Blossom :D He's great, you guys would like him a lot.

I'm also settling on medical anthropology after taking just one course on it this semester. I had solid anthropology courses, actually, and that's the one that really got me. The same prof only teaches one or two medical anth courses a semester so hopefully I can get in for at least one each time. He's really nerdy and cool and he's done field work everywhere which is great for a subject like this. Mostly he talks about when he was in South Africa or Australia but it's also come up that he's done work in various parts of the Pacific as well as Canada, China, and some other places that I can't remember off the top of my head

Goal at the moment is to get a job after graduation with the CDC in Atlanta as a public health analyst and then after a few years apply for the MPH program at Emory for Global Epidemiology. That means more biochem and microbio coursework now, eeeek! And it means I should probably be taking a language like Hindi since I want to intern at CHRP in India but I can barely fit the classes I need into my schedule with how booked up the classes are now.

Which reminds me, there is the potential for a strike at the university this academic year. I hope they do and I hope it forces the disgusting admins to do their damn job and stop trying to ream the uni for their personal benefit. I also hope it works quickly because seriously I NEED to get all my credits for every semester. N-E-E-D. If they strike and bone us out of credits it would be almost exactly the same as if they didn't strike and let the admins bone us out of credits... I hope they remember that.

*If you are still unsure what I mean, this is a nice internet thing in which we take words and make them abbreviations like "bf" and then we start writing that instead of the word. Then one day we get bored of that and we start writing words out of the abbreviations as if pronouncing the aforementioned acronym, and then it's "beef." I am going to say "beef" instead of "boyfriend" forever, by the way, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Wowcrafty

Yes, yes, I did it. After watching my friends play World of Warcraft for five years I finally decided it looked fun enough to actually pay for it. What was the tipping point? Well, next week I have two ten page papers and a ten minute presentation all due within two days of each other, so I had to find a new way to procrastinate.

No really I actually just like to play video games when I have a lot of work because taking a half hour screw-around-on-Facebook break is not nearly as relaxing as a half hour kill-monsters-with-a-sword break. Games make you stop thinking about all the things that are worrying you as soon as you start playing so they work great for me at de-stressing. Ahhh.

Unfortunately when I went to the store on Tuesday to actually buy the discs (their online payment thing wouldn't work for some reason and no, I have not ever felt more embarrassed in my life than when I went to a mall to buy Warcraft) I realized HOLY CRAP IT'S NOVEMBER 10TH PHANTASY STAR 0 COMES OUT TOMORROW.

And by tomorrow now I mean TODAY.

Guys I have been waiting for Phantasy Star 0 like honestly since the Dreamcast went defunct and you couldn't play Phantasy Start Online with it anymore. More rationally I have been waiting for it since last winter/spring/whenever exactly it was that they announced it was coming this fall. And then I moved here AND I FORGOT. That's exactly how awesome it is here.

But the short version of this story is that I didn't actually buy PS0 (OH OH I JUST GOT WHY THEY NAMED IT THAT. PSO, PS0. AHAH.) because I figured I did not need TWO games right before three Great Grandaddy projects were due. I will reward myself with sweet sweet Phantasy Star goodness as soon as my last paper has been turned in, though. Oh maaannn it's gonna be so great. I'll have WoW on my netbook and PS0 on my DS. I WILL HAVE AN MMORPG WITH ME AT ALL TIMES. Oh goodness I can go to the beach and play an MMO and I won't even have to pick which one. That's a horrible idea on the one hand and yet SO GOOD on the other.

This is excited Blossom.

Oh SNAP

Okay okay so I have a class with a bunch of the UH football players, right? They were traveling last week so the two guys I know needed to copy some of my notes and I was supposed to meet them so they could make the copies tonight. We met at the library and I cracked some jokes about the game last night and they got pissed and PICKED ME UP and were telling me to say that again or whatever. But then they fumbled me so I got away.

Just kidding, they didn't do that. They're great guys. Seriously though, Denver Broncos.

Homecoming, hooray

I didn't get to go to the homecoming game tonight because I had promised one of my friends I'd go out to dinner with her since it was her birthday. We got to the restaurant only to find a TV right in front of where I was sitting with the game on... :D We won but I still felt like I was watching some kind of special ed little league game a few times. They kept pitching the ball out of bounds and into the damn benches.

Yeesh.

I couldn't stop thinking of the Denver Broncos:

It was just ghastly

So Isaac and I broke up earlier this week. I guess he finally realized I didn't have any intention of changing my plans again to move to somewhere he wanted to live and then I realized he had no intention of ever living anywhere other than NYC. So yeah. I imagine he will tell his Ivy League friends about it kinda like this.

In similarly lame news, I am getting the worst breakout I have ever had in my entire life on my cheeks right now and as it's healing it's leaving behind little marks. The kind of little marks that do not go away for a good year and even then require extensive chemical peels to remove. This is an unhappy blossom. Sad face :(

In happier news I'm going to see Where The Wild Things Are tomorrow (yaaaaay) followed by yakiniku for dinner (yaaaaay) with Ikemen buddy (yaaaaay) and two people I don't know, one of which is visiting from Japan. He's begun trying to convince me to do an ethnography of some kind of intense nerdy subculture like LARPers or furries with an emphasis on participant observation. He says, and this is a direct quote, "it really speaks to the tension between the nature/culture divide and the problems people have when other people transgress it." He says I should be a mongoose. THIS IS HOW WE ROLL IN ANTHROPOLOGY.

We've also spent the last week staying up most of the night and commiserating each other on our various midterm projects and his thesis. We have two classes together so a lot of that is "Man, can you believe this class? Man. This class. Geeze." Before our History of Anthropology midterm this morning we pledged psychic unity of study guide information. ANTHRO HUMOR.

He's been working on his thesis outline for like two months solid now. At some point tonight he realized that he was actually putting like five times as much detail as was necessary into the outline and could have had it finished a few weeks ago. He found this out as I was doing the third draft of my study guide for my History of Japan to 1700 midterm. And the road to perfection is strewn with our bodies.

Fantastic morning

Imagine, if you will, that you have been working on a very important presentation that makes up about a third of your grade for a class you really like. It starts on Monday at 11:30am and you are the only person presenting that day.

You wake up and the clock says 11:28am.

This is not a good start to the day.