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.

Wise words...

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.  - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Is it because I'm white???

I hate living in a country that will forever be obsessed with race. No matter where you go, people will say that they aren't racists but everything they do relates back to the racial ideologies that have been conditioned into us simply because we live in South Africa, even if we grew up in the post-democratic version of it.

We had a house meeting tonight with the Vice Chancellor of Rhodes because of our naming issue. I'm assuming you want the short story to this saga. So, in 2009 this residence was opened as New Residence 2 and the students have the privelege of suggesting a name for the res to the Naming Committee. The name the students back then came up with was Jean Sinclair (click on her name if you know nothing about her). She was basically against any form of oppression against a certain group of people ("non-whites" and women) during apartheid (click on that word if you live under a rock and don't know what that means). So, she rocked. But the naming committee rejected our name because they want more diversity in the names of buildings. Which is all good and well. So we had the VC telling us all this tonight. But we are still without a name.

Rhodes was one of those universities that only accepted white students during apartheid and is known for that. This is not the case anymore though and that reputation of "the white university" is slowly starting to fade. So most of the buildings names are named after white people who did good in the country and helped develop our country and lead us out of apartheid. But this is a "problem" because there aren't any black hero buildings. Except Chris Hani house and Nelson Mandela hall. No Indian or Coloured people who did good. No black people.

And I understand that we need more diversity in the naming of our buildings but it bugs me so much when you realise how much race actually matters to people. Race is not meant to exist. Your culture exists and that is what is meant to matter to you. It's like the crap that happened during apartheid is being cast on this generation to fix and I know that what happened back then was ridiculous and that it should never have been tolerated AT ALL. I am glad that I was not around during apartheid because I would've hated my counrty so so so much and would have tried to assassinate people or some such thing. It was a sick place to be. The thought that someone could believe that just because you had more pigments and maybe believed different things than you that they could be regarded as the scum of the earth.

I want to cry every time I think about it and I'm ashamed to be associated with the group of people who implemented this system. It is disgusting.

I hope I am alive to see the generation that is not concious of "race" and that a hero is a hero and the race of that hero doen't have to be considered. Black or white, Indian, coloured, Chinese or Spanish. Male or female.

Free Time...Whooot????

Got a bunch of free time on my hands and feeling guilty coz I'm not spending any of it on my blog.. Well, I should be spending it on studying, but hey. Really.

I will make time for this contraption in the very, VERY near future!! Promise.

Oh, watch No Strings Attached. SUCH a cute movie!! As if my advice isn't good enough, Ashton Kutcher stars in it. And he plays a romantic. Whoooot. Watch it.

Peace.

Something to look at...

*my blog does a spin and curtsies, showing off its new dress*

You like, yes?

I was browsing arb art sites earlier and Deviant Art always comes up. I have always used this site for art projects and the like and I think it's really cool. You can find everything from crafts to photos to fine art paintings and computer generated art there. Found some cool stuff there, but I'm not going to post all of it tonight. Just one relevant one if you are ever left wondering about the title of my blog:

I think that it is so true. If we can't appreciate the little things, I think we would all be positively insane by now. The world is filled with depressing things and if you don't know how to see the silver lining or the small beauties that are never too far to find, then you are going to be a very sad person.

The small things will become the big things once you realise that they make you happy.

Random pics I've had on my mind lately...

been missing my roxy pups..love this photo of her <3

meeting the most awesome band EVER
and having them sign my tummy.
amazing!one of the small things i will always
cherish.SUCH AN AWESOME BAND!!
Prime Circle baby..

Library blog...oooh yeah!

I just remembered that I actually have fish to feed. Down there. At the bottom of this page. Click in their tank and feed them (because I have just discovered that I can do that and I think that it's AMAZING!! so I am instructing you to do it too. Now.)

I'm sitting in the library (which is ridiculously huge and should not be called a library. Should be called something more majestic sounding) trying to write a paragraph on the book we are doing at the moment in English, Jane Eyre, and failing miserably because I don't have my book with me so I thought I would come and converse with myself and the interweb (Die Antwoord represent!!) instead. Don't know if we are allowed to blog here (thinking face)...Facebook is off limits though. The lovely person next to me doesn't seem to know though...*peering over the partition*

SO, Jane Eyre. Great book which i finished just yesterday. I wanted to climb inside the book and just SLAP the hell out of Jane sometimes, but then she got better. She had a lengthened and serious case of P.L.O.M's (Poor Little Old Me) disease for a while, but then she got better :). It's really well written and if you enjoy Romantic literature, I suggest that book. I'm not such a fan of the Romantic period, but I won't deny that that book is a decent read. Next: The Great Gatsby! Don't know what I'm in for though. Some people love it and some people hate it.

Exams are starting soon. Bleh. I am going to become a recluse hermit. Fun.

Ooh, I must run. Almost late for my next tutorial. Shart!!