highs and lows

the past few weeks have definitely not been my finest time at UQ. i'm not sure whether it's due to an incorrect dose of thyroid medicine or the fact that d-day is rapidly approaching (23rd birthday... which means i will be SEVEN years older than some of the students here) or overall dissatisfaction with mean girls, drama and excessive drinking, but i am ready to just hurry up and graduate and do something more meaningful with my life. most people revel in routine and the comfortable--i'm learning everyday that i could not be more opposite.

on a high note, classes are going substantially better than last semester!! it makes me sad to know i most likely won't spend my career out scuba diving anymore, but in the present, graduation actually seems like a possibility now that chemistry is out of the picture! whoooooo! i'm taking a cool creative writing class and a wayyy less cool "fundamentals of writing" class, but i have an amazing tutor. it's a lot more daily work than last semester, but one of my finals is writing a short story. pretty sweet.

on another high note, an american exchange student, an english exchange student and i just booked tickets to spend a week in new zealand in june! thank god... it had been a while since i was plane-ticket-less/upcoming-destination-less and it was making me severely crabby. we're flying into christchurch, renting a car and hoping to get in snowboarding, hiking around milford sound and... well, we'll pretend for my mom's sake that we won't be skydiving. hot air ballooning and street luging are pretty high on the to-do list as well. you only live once, right? i'm trying to convince aaron, another american girl, to spend a long weekend scuba diving and sandboarding with me on stradbroke island during our mid-semester break at the beginning of april. all i know is that i need to get out of brisbane for a while or i'll go completely insane!

i'm still trying to plan out what i'll be doing during our "winter" break in july. hopefully a job will materialize soon (yet another low of the moment... have spent hours job searching to no avail) so i can fund an adventure of some kind that does not involve teenage girls and union college. i was searching online and found a volunteer program where you live on a sailboat in greece and track dolphin pods. i've realized that prostitution and/or drug dealing may not be beneath me if it means getting on that sailboat :) i was really hoping that i could do 2 more semesters at UQ, then a year abroad and then finish my last here, but i just found out that i have to stay here for a total of 2.5 years before i can study abroad. that's 3 semesters longer than i've been anywhere else, so it seems a bit daunting.

this week is crazy busy with lots of assignments/papers due, college idol on wednesday night, dinner with carolyn on thursday and going out for my birthday on saturday (we're pretending i'm turning 21), but hopefully that will be enough to distract me from the gutting email from the study abroad office and unemployment woes!

'i watch the stars from my windowsill. the whole world is moving and i'm standing still.' --the weepies

'she told him that she believes in living bigger than she's living now, but her world keeps spinning backwards and upside down... she said he said live like no tomorrow. every day we borrow brings us one step closer to the edge. where's your treasure, where's your hope if you get the world and lose your soul?... life's more than fame and rock and roll and thrills. all the riches of the kings end up in wills. we got information in the information age but do we know what life is outside of our convenient lexus cages?' --switchfoot