Déjà Vu

How stupid are some people? Seriously. I was in my Language and Religion class, and the girl in front of me was playing on Facebook the entire time. At one point, she took the "Could You Pass the U.S. Citizenship Test?" test. Watching her answers, I almost burst out laughing during the lecture. Here are the ones I remember:
- the Constitution was written in 1776
- the First Amendment guarantees the right to happiness
- there are 3 Supreme Court justices total
- there are only 10 amendments to the Constitution
- the president has the power to declare war
I about died. The test can be taken here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13442226/. I got 85% correct.

Besides learning how stupid the girl in front of me was, I also learned some other useful facts in that class. One was that Madonna went to UM for one year, but she is not an alumnus. Another one is that dissertations in Europe previously had to be done in Latin.

And another lovely quote from today: Schwitzer Deutsch ist keine Sprache, es ist eine Halskrankheit. "Swiss-German isn't a language, it's a throat disease."

I've been experiencing a lot of déjà vu lately.

Hannibal apparently means 'Baal is gracious'.

Persian (aka Farsi, aka the language spoken in Iran) is an Indo-European language. Languages like English, German, Latin, and Greek are also Indo-European languages. I would've never guessed that Persian was that closely related to English. Granted it's not like the relationship between English and German, but it's more closely related to English than Finnish or Turkish is.

I watched The Cider House Rules tonight, and I thought it was pretty good. But I think they could've found someone better than Tobey Maguire. He looks a little doofusy. In my opinion, Elijah Wood would've been a better fit.

On Sunday night, the Food Network's TV program Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives featured a restaurant in Ann Arbor: Blimpie Burger. I live just down the street from that place, but I've only been there a few times and one of those times was today. The food is incredibly greasy, but it definitely tastes good. And it was really fun seeing it on the food channel. Half of the face of one of my roommates was on TV. She was rather excited about that.

Let's see... what else do I have to say? Classes: boring. Apartment: smelly. Sleeping: wonderful.

My lips are chapped, splitting, and in pain. My throat has been sore for the past few days. My skin is dry. My contacts need to be switched out.

And I have a comment. One of the roommates complained that there were only ever show about doctors and that you hardly ever see pharmacists on TV. Seriously. How in the world would anyone make an entertaining storyline around a pharmacist except when a character of a show just happened to be one (like in Desperate Housewives back in the day). Pharmacists work in Wal-Mart. You don't see TV shows and movies about Wal-Mart employees, do you? No, you don't. Maybe someday there will be a documentary about pharmacists, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Sick as a Dog

I've been home since Friday night. The weekend was going normally. Home and such. And then on Monday morning, I woke up at 6am feeling incredibly sick. My stomach was, to say the least, not happy. I spent some time in my parents’ bed, and all I wanted to do was talk to my Nidhal. As the morning wore on, the flu-sickness got worse and worse. Sometime during a particularly awful episode, the palms of my hands started to itch. The itching spread quickly, and soon I was insanely scratching about 90% of my body. Looking in the mirror, I noticed that my face and ears were beet red.

I retreated to my chair downstairs, where I talked/moaned to Nidhal on the phone for a while. Even though I was covered with three heavy blankets, I was shivering and trembling. The itching continued and eventually encompassed my feet. But by the time that Nidhal had to go to work (around 11:20 here), the itching had stopped completely. As the day continued, I slowly began to feel better. The hours between talking to Nidhal and taking a shower were really the transition time. I was finally beginning to not be in agony, but there were still periods of stomach disturbances. Around 3pm, I took a shower and I think that really helped. After the shower, I was feeling quite a bit better, and I was certainly less afraid to sip my water and 7up.

I talked again to Nidhal from 4-6pm, and I think he was relieved that I was feeling better and could carry on a normal conversation without moaning. During our first long conversation, my mother told me to quit talking like I was because the poor guy is all the way in Germany and was going to think that I was dying. After my conversation with Nidhal, my parents and I watched The Lake House, during which I ate two popsicles. Then we watched Deck the Halls (chosen by my mother) and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you like the stupid annoying holiday-themed comedy. …And that was yesterday. Today hasn’t been too bad at all, except that now I kind of have a headache.

I don't know when I'll be going back to Ann Arbor. Tonight is a possibility, but more likely it will be tomorrow morning.

Days of Blah

This week has been less than lovely. Meh.

Beki is visiting from Wisconsin, and that is quite fun. Alex, Beki, and I walked around Ann Arbor and watched a movie last night. Today, we had breakfast at Amer's and then I went to class. Afterwards, Beki and I spent a while at a used book store. I didn't get anything because I didn't have a ton of cash on me, but I did find some interesting linguistics books. I might buy a couple later on.

Overall, nothing has happened. I took my french 101 exam on Tuesday, and I think it went alright. Then today I had the chapter 4 test from french 102. Great. I think they both were ok.

Moo. I don't know. Mmm, cow. Even better: deer.

I found a bunch of music on my computer yesterday that I didn't know was there. Exciting!

That's pretty much everything. Except apparently there was a murder near campus last night.

I'll probably be coming home Friday afternoon if the weather cooporates.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

That is such a good book!

I had some strange dreams a couple nights ago, and two of them contained Lyne. In the first one, I was at some local (Au Gres) show/program/thing, and various people or groups were performing in the high school gym. The only group I remember was a group of children singing. I think in my head they were Christen and her classmates, though I think they were younger than their current age. The children were led and instructed by Lyne. I was surprised at how well they sang. The other dream with Lyne had to do with lemonade.

In my French class, there are people who remind me of characters from movies. There's one girl who is kind of small and has long, curly red hair. She reminds me of the annoying, inexperienced, new lawyer in Two Weeks Notice. Another girl reminds me of the unpopular girl who couldn't speak French in the version of A Little Princess where the father actually dies. I think that is one of my favorite movies. I'll need to find it on DVD. In my opinion, it's better than the version where the father is only missing in action.

My mother's birthday is in a couple weeks, and I need to think of something to get her. Last year, I had boughten so much stuff for her in Germany that I was able to simply label some of that as birthday presents. So now... what to get my mother?

I reserve the right to be cranky.

Despite the professor's disclaimer about not being able to remember his students, he recognized me and another girl in the class and knew that we were in his class two years ago. The class this semester is called Language and Religion, and it sounds interesting. I don't know if I'm going to keep it though. I don't need it if I keep what I already have, but I would like to hear more on the topic. My ideal solution is to go to the lectures but not actually be a part of the class.


My first class this morning was at 8:30. It was definitely not pleasant getting out of bed at 7:30am. But because of its early time, the class only has 16 students in it (normally there are 30-40). And the professor gave us chocolate. He seems nice. I really couldn't concentrate though because I was tired, cranky, and just out of it. The class is called Aspects of Meaning, which is basically an introduction to linguistic semantics. I already had a semantics class in Germany, but the department wouldn't count it because they want the students to take semantics, phonetics and phonology, and syntax at UM. So I'm taking it again, and I hope I have an advantage. I am one of two seniors in the class.


I am also hoping to have an advantage in my German class (history of German). It's the same number (326) as the German classes I had two years ago and it's a linguistic themed class. So I should be fine. The one drawback is that I recognize someone in the class from my syntax class last semester. I didn't not like him, but I'm definitely not fond of him. The class seems interesting though.


French is French is French is French. There's nothing interesting there. The kid I despised from last semester is of course in my section. I despise someone new now though. I don't know his name (and I don't really care), but he puts such a thick fake accent on everything and it drives me nuts because I understand him worse than the instructor who barely whispers.


That's all the complaints I have for now... besides complaints that aren't safe to be written here.


My neck still pains me at times.

Sickness and Such

And it's 2008. Nice. Nothing really interesting. Just stupid classes again. I don't even want to talk about that. Ugh. Classes. I've had so many issues with getting classes this semester. The one class I really wanted won't let me in. And that just screwed up everything.

On Tuesday, I was sick. I had a cold (or perhaps the flu) that manifested itself in the form of fever, fatigue, stuffy nose, and weakness. That lovely sickness was complicated by a neckache problem which was causing headaches. The cold/flu has pretty much diminished (and was quite mild anyway), but the neckaches and headaches are still going strong. I went to the doctor on Friday and was told to take two Advil four times a day (breakfast, lunch, dinner, and before going to bed).

I finally did the majority of my unpacking today (after being quite lazy watching JAG and Stargate). Some of the stuff were things I had never unpacked from Germany.

Stargate is a very good show, and I'm terribly sad that the stupid Sci-Fi channel didn't let them do an 11th season. The last episode left a lot of storylines hanging, but that was kind of nice, in a way. ...More like real life. They're doing a couple TV movies to finish it off, apparently. When I was watching the last episode, I was thinking, "how in the world are they going to defeat the Ori (the bad guys) in this last slot of time?" And I kept thinking that right down to the last second, only to find out later that there was a little more coming. It was just like when I was reading The Lord of the Rings. I thought there was just The Fellowship of the Ring and that The Two Towers was a completely different book. So towards the end of the book and right down to the last page, I was thinking, "how in the world is Frodo going to get to Mordor and destroy the ring with so few pages left?" only to find out that there were two more parts to go.