There and Back Again

School is coming up fast (ending fast, for that matter) and as usual I’m undecided as to what I want to do. I’m two classes ahead, and I already have pretty much every elective I can count. I randomly picked a couple of philosophy courses that I can substitute for other required ones, bringing me up to 10 courses. But there is still the possibility of getting enough math classes to be able to apply to teacher’s college. I can see this turning into one of those important decisions that I make on instinct alone, because my attempts at rationalization in the last couple of months have led me in circles.

Before I can decide for sure, there are a lot of people I need to talk to. I need more information. I need to know if getting those extra classes is necessary for the teaching requirements. I need to find out exactly which third and fourth year courses I’ll need since they were changed last year. I need to see which math classes are offered that I have prerequisites for, and if I’ll need to take more first year courses.

It’s kind of a mess. Especially since I could just decide not to worry about it. That would mean taking less courses during the year, and maybe grabbing a couple in the summer again so I won’t have many to take in fourth year. The plus there would be that I could spend more time with the courses I do have and get better marks for admission to the M.L.I.S. I’m a little anxious on that front. I’ve done alright, but nowhere near as good as I’d like. I guess I can wait and get my last mark for the summer and see what my GPA is then.

I should return the DE tape and pay the business office on Friday. At least that’s something easy.

Completed Sweater

My knitted hoodie is finally finished! I still need to weave in the ends and block it, but it is finished. It looks good, though the shape is a little bulky as of yet. I’ll see if I can get it to shape better when I block it. It feels good to have finished a big project, though really it didn’t take all that long. I still like socks much better. They don’t have tons of seams to sew up.

I mooched toothpicks off of my grandma, so I can finally make the tiny socks for the socknitters pin. I’m pretty sure I’m going to use the leftover wool from my bed socks (if I can find it – the cat stole it) since I really love those colours. I’m not sure about the other sock, but I could try using bits from that wool for it. We’ll see I guess.

I need to make more socks.

Even More Progress

It finally looks like I’m getting the cross-stitch done. I’m not even close, but I decided to start filling in bits of the peacock so that the main areas of the design at least all have something in them. It’s coming along nicely. I’ve managed to lose some floss at some point though, since I didn’t have enough for a couple of the colours that I wanted to do.

The Majora’s Mask one had pretty much been put on hold the last couple weeks, though it’s going to make a come-back now that the sweater is out of the way. After Friday I’ll have a couple weeks to pretty much go craft-crazy.

Vacation

It was nice to visit with my family, though the more I do, the more I wish they lived closer. The weather down there is icky. I hate humidity, and we were pretty much stuck with nothing else all week. High temperatures, humity, smog. The only break was Sunday, our last day there. It makes me glad I don’t live there anymore and can come back up here to more bearable weather.

We went boating/fishing last Saturday, which was quite nice. No one thought to bring bathing suits so we all ended up swimming in the river in our jeans. I stole people’s clothes. Me and Dean have fishing licenses now. I’m glad about that. It’s much easier to renew these than getting day passes everytime we want to go fishing. As well, we can go fishing here and anywhere else in Ontario. Pretty sweet.

I didn’t drive the entire time. My parents cars are either off-limits or scary. But it did give me a chance to see how much better I am compared to when I moved out. The roads around here are a lot more challenging than those. For one they are less linear, plus there is a tonne more traffic and many more lanes to worry about. It seems that almost anyone can get a license. I should be in good shape compared to quite a few of the people at home whom already have licenses. They can’t drive very well. It’s a wonder they passed road tests. There was a lady driving in the Tim Horton’s parking lot across from the train station when we left. She backed up over a curb and scraped the exhaust system. There was a huge scratch on the door of her van too. I think it’s safe to assume that it was probably her own fault as well.

I got to visit with my friends this time, which was really nice. Dean amused them by doing my hair while we watched movies. We mostly talked about crap we got up to in school. I forgot that Amanda moved away for 8th grade. They found out I used to cheat at heads-up 7-up in 5th grade.

I saw my 8th-grade teacher. Pete told him I failed a class. The look on his face was priceless. That was so great. I always liked that teacher. He seemed to have a more realistic take on things than the others. Plus he’s pretty much the only one that didn’t assume my brother would fail from the start.

As usual, my grandma tried to sugar-high me by giving us half the treat-box when we left. I gave most of it to Pete and his friends. Considering she worries about being healthy so much and has a diabetic boyfriend, you’d think she’d realise that there’s no way it could be good for us to eat that much candy in a week. She made us a cake too. It was good, but also really sweet.

It seems that Buster has finally forgiven me for moving out and leaving him behind. I’m glad. I wasn’t sure if he’d ever get over that, considering. Poor cat. He’s still pretty much distrustful of everyone and doesn’t come out much.

Overall it was a good week.

Racing the Clock

I’m in the process of converting and burning six seasons and two movies of InuYasha for a friend. Most of which has been done in the last week. I need to finish by Friday, and man is it getting close. I still have most of season five and all of season three to go. This last has been causing me some problems because of using strange new surround-sound versions of .aac and the fact that the files were saved in .mkv containers. I should be able to finish before we leave, unless anything goes wrong. We shall see.

Ramblings

Since the midterm, I’ve been working on my cross-stitch and sweater quite a bit. I now have one sleeve and the hood to go before finishing, and have started an entirely new area of the cross-stitch. I did break a needle, and another is almost broken. I need more, but everything closed early yesterday and I missed out.

Soon I get to go venturing for The Art of Breaking and see if there’s more needles at Zellers so I won’t have to go all the way down to Michael’s. Lazy, I know.

I want to read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. We’ll see if that happens before Friday.

We had sushi yesterday, but it wasn’t as good as it usually is. Weird. Wasabi is goood.

I’m hungry and I sleep too much. I want cheese.

Kitty loves me. All it takes is for me to look at him and he starts purring. He’s going to be lonely as hell when I move back to Waterloo.

I need to start packing. I don’t feel like scrambling trying to decide what to bring home.

Stupid senseless stress

I need to learn to lighten up. I tend to do pretty well with morning exams or afternoon ones, but when it comes to evening ones I drive myself crazy all day worrying about them. Most people say they get nervous during exams. For me that’s not the case. Once I’m in there I’m perfectly calm. It’s the anticipation that I can’t take very well. At all.

Today I have managed to give myself a nasty headache which so far has only gotten worse. The closer it gets to 7pm, the more upset my stomach gets. Pretty sad really.

Studying Fun

It’s amusing when ethics discussions come up in class, how someone always points out that we all act in our own self-interest, whether we consider that to be selfish or not. Today I came across an interesting point along the same lines in my readings, this by Harry Browne:

Everyone is selfish; everyone is doing what he believes will make himself happier. The recognition of that can take most of the sting out of accusations that you’re being “selfish.” Why should you feel guilty for seeking your own happiness when that’s what everyone else is doing too?…
To find constant, profound happiness requires that you be free to seek the gratification of your own desires. It means making positive choices.
If you slip into the Unselfishness Trap, you’ll spend a good part of your time making negative choices—trying to avoid the censure of those who tell you not to think of yourself…
If someone finds happiness by doing “good works” for others, let him. That doesn’t mean that’s the best way for you to find happiness.
And when someone accuses you of being selfish, just remember that he’s only upset because you aren’t doing what he selfishly wants you to do.

Though most of us don’t like to be viewed as selfish, Browne has a very valid point. You can’t go around spending your whole life doing everything for the benefit of everyone around you. All that results in is making yourself miserable. I’ve tried it, and while it sounds good in theory, doing what is best for others in every case can only end up with hurting yourself. However, I do think he’s wrong that you should also always do what will make you happier. As with most areas of life, there needs to be a healthy balance between the two.

James Rachels makes another valid point that deriving happiness from helping others does not necessarily make one selfish:

Why should we think that merely because someone derives satisfaction from helping others this makes him selfish? Isn’t the unselfish man precisely the one who does derive satisfaction from helping others, while the selfish man does not? Similarly, it is nothing more than shabby sophistry to say, because Smith takes satisfaction in helping his friend, that he is behaving selfishly.

I suppose if you were doing things for others to gain something for yourself besides happiness (using them as a means to an end, as Kant would say) in that sense you would be selfish. But doing nice things because you like to is not in itself a negative thing. It all comes down to perspective.

Restless

It’s been a strange day, in that I feel motivated but haven’t really done anything yet. I need to do laundry and tidy up some of the stash that has been accumulating around the house, as well as make lunch and decide what I want for dinner. There’s quite a few sections of reading that I still need to do before making study notes for my exam on Monday. It’s funny that these are the ones I haven’t read yet, since I know from watching the videos that it’s all philosophy of religion (one of my main areas of interest). On the plus side that should mean that it’s pretty much all review and I won’t have to learn much.

I want to make a new theme for the site, since this one is pretty much like the other one I had. Other than the colours and images I didn’t change much. I even used the same dimensions for everything so that I wouldn’t have to mess with the CSS. The plan is something violet, but not overwhelming and tacky (as I am wont to do). I’ve got a couple books from the library on web design and CSS, as well as accessibility and cutting down on loading time and such. Especially since I’m on dial-up here it’s becoming important to set things up so that it loads efficiently.

I have learned something from looking at other people’s sites. Almost everyone uses white space. I have also learned that I don’t like doing that for my own sites. I understand that it’s good for things to be open for readability, but I like colour too much to do leave so much space “blank”. Of course, I do have another idea for a theme using plenty of white space and a lot of colour if the violet one flops. Considering I’m making these as I learn it may take a while for them to be implemented, but they will be coming at some point.