easter

Wow, this was a uniquely crappy easter. When I wandered around the dorm around dinner time, I happened to see Meredith and friends coming home from some easter thing. They had pretty white skirts and easter colored tops on. Then the second floor lounge got converted into a really nice eastery looking dinner place with table settings. I wish I did something today.

My brother spent the day with my mom at home. My dad spent easter alone. My grandmother (yia-yia) recently came back from the hospital so didn't really feel up to hosting greek easter this year. I miss this times when I'd wake up to see easter bunny footprints leading to my easter basket. I miss jelly bean hunting at my grandparents house and all the greek easter stuff. I miss chocolate egg hunting at my aunt and uncle's house. My mom did send me some easter stuff in the mail though. She's sweet like that. ^_^

Some things just happen to work out well for some people without any effort at all. This is great when it works, but the first few times it doesn't you're just left sitting there sad and confused. I think now that I'm getting older, less of the old holiday stuff just happens. The quality of everything has gone way down. Christmases are not as fun or energizing, as people no longer enjoy the effort required to trim a tree or set up decorations. Thanksgivings no longer involve a big family get-together, as some people have died, some people have broken up, and some people can't be in the same room with other people. Everyone's just getting older in my family with no new youth to make everything automatically energetic and fun.

So I guess what I've got to do is figure out how I can make things work out since they're no longer working out on their own. Getting dressed and going to church would have been good today. I'm sure there were easter things happening on campus I could have gone to. I should have looked into them. You gotta be active and try to figure out what you want and how to get it. Planning is important when you want to make something better for next time. Who wants to stay unhappy?

Bed time.

(no subject)

Today was mostly a fun day. I woke up, went to psych where we talked about cults for a while. Then I came back to my dorm and listened to a ~2 hour NPR special on the Jonestown cult back in the 70's, where the psycho leader got over 900 people to kill themselves. (http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1509317) Wow, was that powerful and scary. Over the whole program, they get you to understand the extreme complexity of the social situation the Jonestown members were placed in. You understand why they're saying they want to kill their family members, why they're willing to die, why they're willing to live in the jungle 250 miles away from civilization. You understand how their entire frame of reference was shifted by this one man so that most people did this under "free will." To them, their actions made sense. But in the end, one crazy man got hundreds of parents to feed their children kool-aid laced with cyanide before drinking it themselves. Worth a listen to if you're interested in social psych and have 2 hours free.

Yeah... It's a bad thing to lose critical thought and give your mind to someone else's keeping. Doesn't matter if you're talking about a cult, religion, a shrink, a doctor, pseudoscience, our president... You can get screwed really quickly if you let someone start manipulating you, even if they're not doing it on purpose.

So then I was going to go to a really cool sounding lecture on the shape of space: "During the first half
of the presentation, computer games will introduce the concept
of a "multiconnected universe". Interactive 3D graphics will
then take the viewer on a tour of several possible shapes for space.
Finally, we'll see how the latest satellite data are providing
tantalizing clues to the true shape of our universe."

it was at 4pm. I got very pissed at myself when I woke up an hour late from my nap and missed it. :-( I need more sleep.

Oh, and I did something different and followed an online banner ad today. The quiz it sent me to says I have a 139 IQ. ^_^ I wouldn't really trust it though, and IQ doesn't really mean a whole lot anyway. But it's always nice for someone to tell you you're above average, even if it's just a website that's trying to make you feel good about yourself so that you'll buy a personalized 15 page test results report for $14.99. ^_^

Aww well. Time for homework, then daily show, then bed.