Hemingway in the Rain

    I have recently developed a crippling addiction to StumbleUpon and now waste more time giggling at funny pictures and anecdotes than anyone, I mean anyone, ever should.
    Today I "Stumbled" into a list of the "Top English Language Fiction of the Twentieth Century", supposedly compiled by Stanford. It was a list of books that are, frankly, mostly the type of book that is so boring that the reader is left feeling as if only they were smarter they might have understood and enjoyed it more and therefore walk away gushing about the complexities and nuances while in reality not understanding them at all. To be fair they did have a few jewels in there like The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood (my all time favorite author), Winnie the Pooh, Watership Down, Corelli's Mandolin, everything George Orwell has ever written, and Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver. However, I was hugely disappointed to see the disgusting abundance of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway littering the top ten with their pretentious rambling (fine, I'm a hypocrite, sue me).
   Take it from someone who can understand them, they're not worth it. What is the point of fiction? To entertain. True it is often used to project the author's views on society but the central focus should always be to entertain. Now I challenge anyone to try and make it through an entire volume of Hemingway without wanting to shoot him yourself by the time you are finished. If you manage it then you are a more patient soul than I.

I'm Feelin' Weepy

    Since I am leaving for the Philippines on Saturday and my Best Friend is set to leave for Hungary right before I get back and just left for Seiku for the week, today was most likely the last time I will see her for a year (unless my mother actually pulls through and we go to visit her during spring break).
    When we were little we always used to talk about how strange it would be to live so far away that to talk to her face to face would take more than a couple blocks walk and now it's happening about eight years before we had anticipated (assuming we were to go to college together and get our first studio apartment together (yes, I still have the floor plan we made in 5th grade)). So as she was leaving we hugged super awkwardly (neither of us are people who hug very often, maybe it's because we developed most of our aversions together) and I'm still sort of teary eyed.
   Love, love, love that girl. Definitely going to miss her the most.

What I'm Watching Right Now

My friend sent me this video link and while I'm still signed on I thought my hordes of imaginary adoring fans should check it out. (It's about Glee).

Bad Habit

I have this horribly bad habit of reading the comments at the bottom of the news stories I read.
Just now I was reading an article about the BBC which, in the comments, turned into an argument about how the liberal news networks have been pushing lies to the public with such "europhile" tactics as giving all distances in kilometers and treating global warming as a real, current news issue.
So liberals are horrible people for telling the truth and using local measurement systems instead of a confusing, outdated system that is only really used in one country?
Well I guess I'm glad that those seem to be the worst of our problems. I'd hate for my political beliefs to be associated with baby killing... oh wait, never mind.

Wow, it doesn't seem real that the end of the school year is coming up so quickly. I only have two weeks to bring up my grades and only 3 weeks until I leave the country for the entire summer. Goodbye chilly Washington, hello monsoon ridden Manila. Maybe I'll actually be productive this summer?