Swot week...can you feel it??...it is here! -sigh-

What a great weekend!! Had such a good time in PE with my boyfriend and now I have to find a way to cope for 4 weeks without seeing him.. Think I shall be asking my friend who hasn't seen her boyfriend since FEBRUARY!!!! for advice. I do not know how she hasn't gone off of her rocker yet.

I drank way too much Red Bull on Saturday because they were giving them away at Jarrod's university at the box car race they were having. Bouncing off the walls second to none. And now I have a whole week of no lectures, no tutorials, nothing to do except study. All this free time we get given and they want me to study??? Why, oh, why am I being tortured like this.. DC (the file sharing program) is calling my name!! Just want to watch movies and enjoy this free time.. Hehe. So it's going to be interesting to see how i cope with this. Pretty sure I'll be fine, but I don't really trust myself. Haha, isn't that comforting???

Rhodes students are absolute tops at finding new ways to procrastinate and not study. Seemingly normal chores and things become tools of procrastination. Such as:

• doing your washing - great way to get a tiny bit of time out of studying to do something you "HAVE" to do.
• lunch and dinner in the dining hall - you can stop studying at 12 on the pretense that you're hungry, go to the dining hall and sit there until 1:30 or 2 drinking tea and chatting and generally just procrastinating
• cleaning your room - something we used to hate doing as kids, we know find joy in doing, especially in these tiny rooms. Your excuse could go something like this, "I just can't study in a room that's messy or has an unvacuumed floor or that stinks. But now that it's clean, I'll be able to st... Good God, look at how messy those shelves are!! They need to be repacked. I can't work like this!!"
• smoking - for those who smoke, this is a GREAT tool. We can't smoke in our rooms or on the balcony so we have to sit on the lawn in front of the res if we want to smoke. This results in sitting chatting outside and having like 3 cigarettes before you start feeling really guilty and go back inside to study but instead you land up on
• FACEBOOK!! - worst.tool.of.procrastination.ever.

So now that I've procrastinated for the past half hour or so, I am going to go and study! But first I must shower. and do my washing.. Hmm and I'm hungry ;)

Rain. Cold. Sick.

I HATE BEING SICK!!

I'm a winter person and I love the cold but my tonsils are the size of golf balls and I feel like I'm swallowing shrapnel. Every time I need to swallow I tilt my head back and hope that going "Gggghhhuuuurrrrchhha" will magically make the spit go down. Sorry, that's gross, but I'm desperate and now I've got a headache. And I'm supposed to be going to PE to my boyfriend this weekend (if my lift pulls through) and I don't want to be sick!!!!

AAAAAAHHHH!! Thank god I have Sarika. My neighbour over the road (corridor). She is going to town today and is gonna buy me something for my throat :D!!! I love that kid right now. And now I have to go and mission around in this weather too with 2 large lumps in my throat. Joy.

Yesterday I decided to take a "personal afternoon" meaning I skipped 2 (unimportant) lectures and stayed in res after I had come up for lunch. I must've been in res for 15 minutes and the power goes out. While I'm trying to pee. So my plans to finish up on my tutorial work and then watch movies for the whole afternoon went to pot. I slept. From 14:30 until 17:30. The power came back on during that time abut then it went back off after ten minutes. So I woke up and we went to dinner and while we are sitting in the dining hall eating supper, the power goes out. Now one of 3 things can happen in a pitch dark dining hall full of students while it's PISSING with rain outside.

1. Everyone would start stealing food and condiments.
2. We would all just be so unimpressed by the afternoon's shenanigans that we would leave and order Steers.
3. People would start throwing food around.

If you guessed the second one, you'd be wrong. If you guessed only the first or the third you'd be wrong because they started doing both 1 and 3. I got a piece of potato bake flung into my face and about 5 peas to the head, my friend had chocolate mousse in his juice (yes, students were wasting the pudding that we get once a week that you would think is gold when we see it) and my other friend had a pea in his mousse. I would hate to have seen the hall when the lights came back on. All the butter would've been missing and there would be food EVERYWHERE!! So we got back to res and decided that there was nothing we could do there seeing as even the emergency lights weren't working. So 5 of us went out for drinks. As we left the power came on and off about 5 times alternating with the emergency lights. We went to the only bar in town with a generator and power and had a drink there. Being the only customers there that were sober and under 30, we decided to leave ASAP and went to the Rat and Parrot (another watering hole in town) and they had the whole candlelight effort going on. Was really nice and we had another drink there. The power eventually came back on and so we came home because we had work to do.

The second and third years were telling us stories about how they generally have so many power cuts in weather like this during exams that they sometimes end up sitting in the corridors studying under the emergency lights (if they are wowking) with blankets and stuff. Hard times hey.

All in all, yesterday was a complete write off of a day and I feel like donkey's balls right now. Going to finish tying my work and then crash again until lunch.

Wet shoes

So I got caught in a torrential downpour.
Story of my life.
My shoes got soaked and thank god I had an umbrella with me.
Was bitching about wet shoes.
Then went to Journ class and we were talking about the impoverished people in the country.
My wet shoes aren't so bad.
I now have my feet warm and dry and encased in boots.
I am lucky.

Sunshine and slang..

My room never sees the sun. I have a lovely view of a brick wall and the sun never sees my window. As much of a winter person as I am, rooms that are gloomy ALL the time make me gloomy too. I miss being able to lay on my bed in the warm rays of the sun. I'd give anything to switch to the opposite side of res. Would be amazing.

I'm not having a very happy day by the way, in case you haven't noticed. I decided to have a little snooze before lunch (I was bunking my journalism lecture - they are soooo boring!!). So about 30 minutes before I actually have to wake up, i had a repeat performance of yesterday. Someone decides to SCREAM, not just call loudly, but literally shout for her friend down my corridor. And when she doesn't get an answer, what do you think she does?? Yes, she does it again, and louder. The hairs on the back of my neck were sparking, I swear!! Sure, it's not quiet time, but flip, screaming is not inducive to happy people!! Hellloooooooo.. So anyway, that wasn't cool. Instant bad mood. I'm about to go and check my Psychology marks for my first test so that should be interesting. Very nervous!! First university test results.

I'm sick again. There was a bug trapped between my curtain and the window last night when i went to bed. So, I left my window open so that it could free itself anytime it felt like it. Pity it was cold outside and I breathed in cold air all night. Hate having the sniffles!! Had them for like 3 weeks and they finally went away and then that prehistoric insect looking bug thing went and messed things up. Joy.

Ok, what I do when i blog is I sometimes start a post and then have to run so i save it and come back to it later. Which is what I've done today, having to go to a history lecture and all. My mood has improved!! Very happy to announce this. An sms from my boyfriend and an 80% for my first test made me smile!! And of course my earphones plugged into my ears. Those helped. Serious fluctuation of emotions and moods today!! Think I have settled on this one though. Oh, and I solved the problem of no sunshine: I found my old necklace with a sun pendant. Wearing it = constant sunshine =)

So, the Grahamstown slang, as promised.

You have to be careful of your word choice here because there are a few words that mean more than what we are used to. Observe:

• Naps: not considered as the exercise i performed before lunch. Naps at Rhodes refer to something more uh, devious??..sinister??..i really don't want to say sexual although that's what it is. Ah!! Journalistic skill, come on. It's sexual. It means that you are going to some body's res to have a little booty call. We have afternoon naps, morning naps and then just plain anytime naps. I suppose it's a nice euphemism for "the nasty" isn't it??
• Lunge:Ah, to lunge. Not to jump quickly or move in a decisive manner, noooo. Nothing like that, although almost the same. Same same, just different ;). Ok, so, people say "I pulled in to kiss her/him/it!" We say "I lunged him/her/it!" Not necessarily a bad word, but you don't wanna be lunged by that tall creepy guy who tried to get with EVERYONE and succeeded with NO ONE at Friars on Saturday night. The guy you've been eyeing for weeks lunging you is, however, a very good thing!
• Mare: To drink. To party. To get sloshed. To kuier, pola, puza, celebrate. You understand. This happens on Cougar Mondays(will discuss this in a minute), Tipsy/2 for 1 Tuesdays, Wacky Wednesdays, Thirsty Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. Ample opportunity to mare. Also,
• get mared: to get drunk.
  (good god we don't sound like we are a university with very high moral values in its students, do we??)
• Seal Clubbing: the act of hunting first years in order to have naps or lunge them. Mostly a male sport. We will get to the females now.
• Cougar Monday: House of Pirates (a local watering hole) has Cougar Mondays. Its the ladies night. And we (not me) take advantage of this. We are allowed to pick on those yummy school boys or (for the non-first year girls) those naive first years.
• BP run: missioning down to BP (petrol station/cafe) to stock up on neccessary items. Usually food.
• Mission: to go somewhere. To depart from something towards another thing. "Let's mission down the hill to Steers."

Right now though I have to mission to supper as my tummy is not happy with its current empty situation. I know I'll think of more slang as soon as i hit "Post" so expect another tutorial!!

Ciao =)

Starting out...again

So this is my second blog and I'm hoping that I can get it right to actually keep this one going!
I'm in my first year of university at Rhodes university and although I have a ridiculously minimal amount of free time as it is, I wanted somewhere to dump my thoughts. Hence, the creation of this blog.
After having a full night of sleep, which has been reduced from 9 to 7 hours of sleep in the past month or so, I was so on the ball today which was an amazing change from my usual drowsy daze. This place has taught me many things; how to procrastinate, how to walk up a hill really fast and how to fit all of your shit from a 6x6 room into a 3x4 cell.

But the weirdest thing I've learned so far is that there is this magical phase of being tired.
There is no returning from this phase so don't even bother trying.
Your eyes start going squint and get super itchy and then they start closing. You can try and hold them open and listen to your lecturer ramble on about cognitive development and ancient dynasties, but you will then experience another phenomenon; falling asleep with your eyes open!! Yes, it has happened to me and i am not talking crap, i promise you this. You are forced to put your head down on the desk when this happens, even for 10 minutes of the lecture (which usually ends up being the whole lecture) and doze a bit. That stupid journalism assignment you stayed up 'til 3am trying to perfect has really smacked you in the face.
Red Bull will fail.
Energade will fail.
Coffee? Bha!! Will fail DISMALLY!!
Folks, i introduce you to the regmaker!

Bless Adcock Ingram's wooly socks for making this stuff!! 150 mg of caffeine in one tablet?! R20 for 10 tablets. Not bad I say. Specially when I feel like a monkey high on coke when I've ingested just one of these magical pills. My friend said that he took two after a full all-nighter and was shaking like a mad cow in the space of 5 minutes. Not be messed with then, but it's wonderful to know I have these babies there for me when good ol' coffee lets me down..again!

Well, I do have a history essay due for tomorrow that I'm only halfway through so I had better go and do that. Halleluja for having a lone tutorial to go to at 3pm on Fridays! Sleeping in tomorrow 8) so0o0o co0l  8P

Just keep swimming...upstream!!