I'm totes switching to Bank of Amer before I go to Chicag

It's sort of good to be back at Smith. Flora is pleased at least, as soon as I put her in her home crate she started eating like she had been starved. So the hunger strike is over I guess.
I had an awkward conversation with my rugger-housemate last night. I think she probably was trying to convince me not to quit, but all she did was reinforce that I'm making the right decision. I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think "It's true that you don't play A-side, and everyone on Board is mad at you, and the team just isn't a good fit for you, but...you shouldn't quit..." is a very convincing argument. I know the team doesn't like me, I didn't need her to come to my room and keep me from my homework so she could tell me. It's sort of hard for me to believe that she was actually trying to convince me to stay, it sounded an awful lot like an argument to make me quit.In either case, I'm going to talk to the crew coach today to figure out some logistics.
I love my Learning & Behavior Change professor. I've loved him all along, but today he told us that since we only have two weeks of classes left he's going to classically condition us like Pavlov's dogs. We're going to get warheads candies at the start of every class to see if we'll start salivating when we hear a wrapper crinkling. I don't ever want to not be in his class again, I don't care what he's teaching.
So it turns out I was mistaken, and I won't be ready to leave by the 14th. The 14th is the kickoff of exam week. It's a slight bummer, but I think I'll live. Three weeks isn't a very long time. I can do this standing on my head. I'm going to finish up my Nutrition project tonight, and start catching up on some psych reading. I'm just taking things as they come.
I wish it would snow...

Sunday

I have a new goal. I was reading the Times this morning (I read the better part of it and not just the Style section, so it took AGES) and I saw an article about children on Broadway. This of course made me think of Camp Broadway and the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. I love running the Turkey Trot, but I also love the parade, and since they happen at the same time I miss stuff. So my new goal is to run the race really fast to maximize the amount of the parade I get to see. I strongly suspect that either Tayler Swift or the cast of "Glee" will be in it this year and I don't want to miss that. This means I need to get fast. I've been better about working out lately, but I bet I can push myself harder. Erg club will help. I think I'll call my friend Lindsay about working out too, it's way easier to push yourself when your gym buddy is training for a marathon and has perfect six-pack abs.
Rugby banquet is in a week. I made my Little Sibs' vessels last night. They look ok. Pretty good considering my lack of arts and crafts skills. I think I'll put baggies of sugar cereal in them before I present them to my Littles. I know H. likes Lucky Charms so much that she mentioned her fondness on facebook. I don't know what T. likes, but she's pretty easy-going and responds to any friendly gesture with almost painful enthusiasm.

Nutrition & Health

I don't really read the fine print. Or, in some cases, the normal-sized print, since I thought Nutrition & Health was a two-credit class, when it is in fact four. I would think to myself "Wow, this is a lot of work for two measly credits.", but no, it's a real class. I'm doing well, it isn't an issue of grades, but it was a surprise and it made me feel silly when a classmate pointed out my mistake.
As our big project for the semester we're analyzing our diets. It's kind of fun, and I usually write down what I eat anyway, but it makes me kind of self-conscious to think about my professor reading everything I eat. I love sugar very much, and Smith only enables this love, so my diet is not always so healthy. Plus, I grew up in a family of secret eaters, and so I'm sort of uncomfortable with the idea of anyone knowing what and how much I eat. The obvious solution is to just lie, but that's stupid and defeats the purpose of the project. We enter all of our foods into this website and it analyzes it and tells us if we need to eat more or less of something. I don't know if people know this about me, but I am a milk fiend. Sugar and I have an open relationship so that it can include milk. I drink more milk than anyone I know, and yet I am apparently not getting enough dairy. The idea of drinking more milk makes my stomach hurt. I love dairy, but I'm kind of dairy sensitive, and so it's extra frustrating to be told that I need to eat more of it. I also apparently need to eat more grains. And meat. I eat too much fruit, but not enough vegetables, and I have so much sodium in my diet but I don't know where it's coming from. It's not like I salt everything. N. used to salt EVERYTHING; her dining tray was always covered in salt that she refused to throw over her left shoulder, but I almost never add salt to food. This project is interesting, but it's making me obsess over food and I even weighed myself today which is never a good idea. My goal for tomorrow is to eat more vegetables.

Other Blogs

I'm of a mind that it's ok to seriously dislike someone based on their blog. A blog is pretty much a public journal, and so it should be able to give you some insight into their personality, and thus giver readers license to dislike the author. And a blog that a person updates every day with weird excerpts from books and articles and pictures of dead birds and naked women (possibly naked self-portraits) is intolerable. It just fills me with irritation. And I know I don't have to read it, and maybe this person is actually insightful and interesting and I'm just inclined to dislike them for my own (insane) reasons, but I don't think so. I think she's probably one of those evil pretentious people that you sometimes find in small, Northeastern, liberal arts colleges. I just wanted to put that out there since it has been bothering me all day.
In other news, we finally met our chickens for Learning & Behavior Change. They're actually kind of ugly since they're going through that tricky phase of growing up where they lose their fluff but don't have enough feathers to look normal, but they're also kind of cute. They're nice to hold for sure, and now I want to spend every class in the animal lab. That isn't how it works though, and today and I trudged into the classroom I thought to myself "I wish we were playing with birds again today." Much to my surprise, when I got to the classroom there were two bright green parrots! It's one of the few perks of having purely decorative ears that I sometimes get nice surprises like that. Of course my professor had mentioned that we were going to be visited by trained parrots, but who listens? It was a very fun class, and made me want to make friends with people who own parrots, if not actually get one myself.