CDSM #8??? All the feels

So since I have no idea what to write about I'm just going to write.

This may get a little personal but sometimes you need to.

There seem to me to be some people in the world who just get it. I don't know if I can explain further than that. I don't think I can explain or define what "it" is. Some people just seem to get it.

During high school I was lucky enough to be super involved in a theatre group full of such people. I came in extremely shy and slightly depressed and came out confident and more talented and creative. It did wonders for me and I was definitely missing something these first two years of college. I love my friends here and my roommates but that bond was missing.

But I was lucky enough to get into an a cappella group here this past week who also seem to get it. Only a week and I feel like I'm part of a family again.

These are my thoughts on this:

1) In most new social groups, you are assumed to be an outsider, you are assumed to be uninteresting, you are assumed to be unremarkable and unattractive, and you have to prove that you are a good person who is fun to be around and has good ideas and a rich life. In these groups of people who seem to "get it", everyone is immediately welcomed. You are innocent until proven guilty, so to say; you are accepted for who you are before they even know who you are. It seems hard to find people like this but people like this are amazing. I feel like nerdfighters can be like this too (I mean look at this blog, prime example!). It's just so positive and heartwarming and I wish the whole world was like that (echhhhh listen to me)

2) Both of these experiences I have had were with performance groups. My second rehearsal experience with my high school theatre group was fight choreography - not fight choreography, no, Gigi-gets-beat-up-violently choreography. When you're part of a performance group you are immediately thrown into very close situations (both physically and emotionally). With live performance especially, you're constantly creating, and relying on each other to create. You almost have no choice but to be family when you're always working together to try and make something beautiful.

I dunno. I'm just really really happy.

To give you some fun treats (and to show you why I am SO FREAKING EXCITED TO BE IN THIS GROUP) here are some videos from the weekend for your enjoyment. That is me running sound in the first one (us newbies only performed in a couple of the simpler songs).

BEDA #18 - My Birthday!

Yesterday I turned twenty!

It was overall a very unexciting day. I had class all morning, work all afternoon, and a fair amount of homework to do after I got home. But I will share a few highlights.

Highlight #1: Right before I woke up in the morning, I had a dream that my boyfriend had abruptly turned into a psychopathic serial killer and was out to murder me. It was incredibly vivid and pretty horrifying. But I was incredibly relieved when I woke up.

Highlight #2: I got a midterm back that I did very well on. This was a relief since almost the entire class did horribly on the first one (myself included). I was particularly glad because the data problem, which is worth a lot of the test, seemed to me to be able to be reduced further to fewer underlying representations, but I made the judgment call that it would be strange and wouldn't work too smoothly so I stuck with three. And that judgment call was the correct one!

Highlight #3: My boss at work made me brownies! They were delicious. Additionally, I spent the last hour of "work" chatting with my boss and my coworker. I actually lost track of time and clocked out late.

Highlight #4: I am not sure if I've mentioned this before but I'm currently the co-Editor in Chief of a campus publication called Vagabond. We publish student and staff works written in languages other than English, as well as visual art. We are all new to the group (long story) and really haven't known exactly what we were doing all year. However, WE ARE FINALLY GOING TO PUBLISH. We actually have a layout to be printed and distributed. It's going to be pretty fantastic.

Highlight #5: I went to a new pizza place with some of my friends last night. It was rather Italian in that you purchase a personal pizza that's made in front of your eyes. It was both delicious and relatively inexpensive and I will definitely be returning in the future.

Highlight #6: After we got back from pizza my roommates and I ate some mochi and some mochi ice cream (of which I definitely prefer the non-ice cream sort) and these waffly things called "butter cookies". I also got a Toblerone and a laptop case.

Highlight #7: My boyfriend gave me sunscreen for my birthday, which was exactly what I wanted and asked for. It's getting fairly bright outside and I am fairly pale (and moley).

Overall it was a pretty good birthday. My top birthday activity of choice is just hanging out with people I like. And I got to do that quite a bit! Now it's time to feel slightly old but not THAT old.

Also...does anyone else have a problem with writing the date on their birthday? I kept wanting to write 1993 on things. It was a bit frustrating.

Gigi: An Introduction

A wild newbie appears!

Hello, all :) My name is Gigi. Nice to make your acquaintance.

I'm a semi-small-town girl from a semi-large-small city in Yolo County, California. Yearning to get out and away, I graduated from high school in 2011 and moved my life all the way out to the bay area to become a Linguistics student at Cal. Or, rather, to become an undecided and indecisive student at Cal. The Linguistics part came later.

As one might guess, I currently live in Berkeley, California. It's certainly an exciting place to live. There's always something going on; whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know. But the most beautiful part for me is this: if I take a walk East for fifteen minutes or so, I reach hills where I can hike to the top and see the whole bay. And if I take the bus West, I can sit at the marina and enjoy the silence and the ocean. It's easy to get away here.

If I'm being perfectly honest, one of the first things that drew me to studying Linguistics was that Cal only requires eight classes for the major. This means I have space, I have time, I have freedom to study a lot of different things. And I've so far been taking advantage of that time. This semester I'm taking one Linguistics course, one Italian course, one course about insects and one on written musical harmony. Variety is certainly the spice of life.

And if I'm being perfectly honest, that wasn't the only reason I chose my major. I took my first foreign language in high school: Japanese. Three years straight of one subject and I loved it. Language is beautiful. By learning (a little bit of) Japanese I opened myself up to communication with almost 130,000,000 new people on the globe, and that's just counting Japan's population. So now I'm learning Italian as well, and planning to pick up Japanese again next year. To be fair, though - Linguistics is not a study of foreign language. But a love of foreign language was what led me to it. And though I'm not very far into the major, I'm loving it so far. Two of my (legitimate!) sources for the homework assignment I just finished were Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and Urban Dictionary. It was about the historical semantic change of the word 'wicked'.

Career-wise? I'm going to become a librarian. I decided this last year pretty much on a whim, and after volunteering at a library and talking to some people, it seems like a better and better idea all the time.

Things I think are wicked cool: Books (kind of a requirement for a would-be librarian). I just finished At Swim Two Birds, which I highly recommend, and I'm currently slowly getting through Ulysses, which was forced upon me by my boyfriend, but which I am so far enjoying. I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan. I haven't read anything by John Green yet, unfortunately, but it's coming! According to my parents, when I was little I would sit in my room reading for hours, and then come back out and ask why nobody was paying attention to me. So I suppose attention is another thing I like. 

I also very much enjoy cats, a "like" that I'm sure many others can relate to as well. I doodle at times, so those may show up here. And as with anyone, I love music, and some particular favorites are Pink Martini, Aqualung, Tom Milsom, Alex Day, Andrew Huang, CAKE, POTUS, Don MacLean, and Talking Heads. I also enjoy making music; I'm a decent singer, I can do some basic guitar and uke, and I recently bought a pennywhistle, which I've quickly learned has one setting: obnoxious.

Fun fact: one of my thumbs is a hitchhiker's thumb and one is not. So I am not perfectly symmetrical. Oh well.

I'm very much looking forward to this. New experiences, new people, new opportunities! New = good :)

DFTBA!
Gigi