majutsukai

You know what I just realized?

My last entry in this thing was half a year ago.

And even then it was just a random chatlog dump. It's been nearly a year since my last entry with actual content.

You know what I think? I think life update.

So the schoolyear came and went. Generally speaking, it was a HUGE improvement over the previous year. I was right about risk-taking being the key to building confidence, because on the social side of things, the year went fantastically. Unlike last year, I actually felt sad to leave when it came time to pack up and go home.

Academically, though, it wasn't quite so great. I came to realize this year that I've been setting my performance standards too low-- not just this year, but ever since leaving high school. Letting myself get bored with my classes had a terrible impact on my grades. Unfortunately, it took putting my Major qualifications in jeopardy for me to realize this, and that rude awakening only came about two thirds of the way through the year. I wound up having to retake Phonology in the spring, and I will have to retake Japanese 301 in the fall as well.

The good news is, I picked up the slack, and my grade point average for spring quarter was higher than it has ever been in my life. Including high school. I am absolutely pumped to continue this good streak in the coming year.

Speaking of Phonology, I've made the decision that, in addition to my Japanese major, I am going to attempt a double major in Linguistics. The upper level Ling courses have been such an amazing experience, and have done wonders for my motivation. I'm feeling that same little click that I felt when I began studying Japanese in my first year of high school-- that it just feels right to be in this field.

I'll be doing the Japanese concentration of the Linguistics major, which means that a lot of the requirements will be taken care of just by way of the language courses I would have been taking anyway. In addition to that, it also involves a couple Japanese Linguistics courses that I've been dying to take-- but with the recent budget cuts, these may or may not even be offered this year. I'm told that I can talk to the department head for a workaround in such a case, though, so I'm optimistic.

Summer, though, has been a bit of a different story! I haven't got much to do around here, aside from job hunting-- which, when you haven't got a driver's license or any work experience, happens to be really hard. Doing my best to rectify both deficiencies is my current priority!

My mom got married over the spring. My new stepfather's name is Bob, and he's been an excellent source of support for her, both emotionally and financially, as she's been struggling herself to rectify her unemployment. She's found a few temporary jobs, but nothing permanent yet. I feel absolutely terrible for the financial burden he's signed on for here, considering both of our employment situations, but the man is an absolute saint. I nearly cried tears of joy when I got the news that we finally had medical coverage again. Well... no. Not just nearly.

My happiness for them and my guilt for myself are in an unsteady equilibrium for now. Just another reason for me to sort through my emotional problems and get a goddamn job already, clearly.

But at any rate, wow this has been cathartic. Please excuse the wordspam.

Just a heads up: I'm not going to have internet tomorrow. My mom's taking the router in to her new job so they can secure it. Which worked out brilliantly the last time she did it, what with the whole not being able to access the router afterwards thing. So very excited to deal with that.

Oh yeah, did I mention, she got a job. Through a temp agency, with-- guess who-- Boeing.

Better than nothing by a long shot, though.

I'm happy. Why? After at least two weeks of not being able to use this computer because I thought I threw away the disk and cost my Mom more money on my new computer, I find out that the mistake wasn't mine, and in fact no mistake was made whatsoever. Today she decided to let me on this computer so I could look for a downloadable driver for the sound card. I google my sound card and the word "driver", and I get a help page that says the drivers aren't available for download. Why? Because the card is connected directly to the motherboard in the computer, so the motherboard companies prefer to do the driver business themselves. That's when it clicked-- the only disk that I still had that came with my computer was the disk for the motherboard. So, I dash into my room, grab the disk, pop it in, and a menu comes up, one of the options of which is for my specific sound card. I install it, restart the computer, and am greeted with a very lovely startup sound. I. Am. Happy. ^^

But yeah. After more than two weeks of not being able to get onto livejournal (No internet in my room in either house because my dad turned on encryption on his, and the school computers now filter out lj), I had at least three, probably more pages of friends entries to catch up on. Guhhhh.

I also have an essay to get to, which I still don't completely understand. And I'm in a bit of a tough spot because I promised to make one of my mom's favorite meals, Chicken Fettuccini, tomorrow for Mother's day, but don't have the recipe (long story), and we're going to be going shopping for ingredients tomorrow. *dramatic pose* To the internet!

Also, I left my flash drive over at my dad's, so no Project Oracle this weekend. -_-'