Wow, last night was great fun! My parents had their annual Christmas party, and I got to bartend with any friend I decided to bring over to be my co-bartendress. I brought my friend, Jenna, whom I met in Physics lab...she's awesome. We had a lot of fun learning how to make drinks (most of the people showed us how to make their drink) and talking to people as they came through to get their drinks. My parents have some very cool friends! My dad's friend Coe used to be a bartender, so he showed me how to do the "one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four" to know that you've poured an amount equivalent to a shot, and how to put ice first, then the hard alcohol, then whatever else goes with it (unless it's just something hard on the rocks.) It so happened that every time I forgot to put in the ice first and then the hard liquor, Coe just showed up to laugh at me for messing up again. It was entertaining. He was really nice, though...said all the sweet stuff in the end that I was a great bartender and all that good stuff. Which is funny...cuz by the end of the night, some people were so sick of waiting for me to figure out how to make their drink that they just mixed their drinks themselves. LOL. I served such a purpose.

So I was ready to go to bed after all the chit-chatting, but then my sister and her friends were hanging out in my room (cuz my sister's room is such an obstacle course, there's no way for more than one person to hang out in there) and I had fun hanging out them. We ended up hot-tubbing and staying up till four. Wow, so much for getting into a reasonable sleep schedule for break. Oh well. I was already thrown off from not sleeping during finals. So I am still just starting from scratch with the sleeping-on-a-schedule thing.

So I woke up this morning around ten, and lounged around chatting online with my college buddies--I am not gonna lie, I miss them! And then I went upstairs and hung out with my mom and her writer buddies while they had their Holiday Lunch. They are such an animated group...I love them! I guess it's almost a given that I'll click with other writers, because we all have that imaginitive edge to our personalities and, for some reason, I've noticed also have the same sense of humor. I'd be interested to know as to why that is.

Then, I went to the mall to do some Christmas shopping and I stopped at the pet-store and went over to the little area where they have all the puppies customers can pet and play with. Today, they had golden retriever puppies! They were precious! And for some reason, when I saw the tiny little puppies who had just been introduced into the world, I realized how insignificant in the grande scheme of things the current not-so-fun situation with grades I'm going through is. I mean, seriously! Life is so precious. There is so much to it. Seeing little puppies and how curious they are, how innocent, unjudging, and open to making new friends...it made me realize that success is, well, only a piece of life. But if you look at it, innocent curiosity brings about a larger amount of success than discipline.

Just like children. They have the ability to pick up a language so much faster than adults, to pick up new social cues, and to be open-minded to new concepts. I am aware that part of that is biological, but I think part of it also is a state of mind issue. I have a very small fragment of a memory when I was very, very small--still in a crib. All I remember was my observation of everything around me. And what I saw was so much more vivid than anything I see today, because I was so curious, fascinated--and aware. More aware than I ever am today. As an "adult" or "young adult," I have so much swimming through my mind, and such a multi-tasking level of awareness, I can't possibly just look at something, and for my mind to be totally quiet. But that level of awareness is powerful. It's what helped us learn how to speak, to behave in a way that is societally acceptable, to relate to other human beings. And to learn that if you lean backwards you'll fall, and if you throw a rock on the floor, it just transfers energy to the floor and remains on the floor, while dropping a rubber ball on the floor will just cause a change in directional momentum of the ball and it will bounce up. It's always amazed me how incredible our brains are...while it may take several moments to calculate how long a thrown ball will be in the air, or how fast one has to go to beat their little brother to the jar of cookies, our brains can visually assess the situation and figure it out almost instantly. And so much of it we take for granted--we didn't know these things when we were born! We LEARNED them!

Anyway, what children have that a lot of us don't is that fascination, that curiosity, and that awareness. Which really, to me, is experiencing life to its fullest. To appreciate what it has to offer without attaching some tag with an intrinsic value. Really, isn't that all success is in this society? How well someone does...the level or prestiege of your school, the grades you achieve, the degrees you get to attach to your name, the job you get, the amount of authority you have within your job and how many people work under you, and the money you make. Not to say that working hard for something like that is a bad thing! I definitely think working for oneself to enhance opportunity and ability is a beautiful thing! I guess what I'm realizing is that I'm attaching too much intrinsic value to my life right now. I mean, the intrinsic value can be a limiting factor from time to time, but I need to focus on the fact that I am seeking knowledge and a means to expand my opportunities and abilities to make a positive difference. I may have messed up, but I am still doing GOOD. I need to keep doing good. If I keep doing it, and I look at those poopy intrinsic values as feedback as to the amount of improvement I need to show as far as learning and understanding goes, then I will do well in the end. I know I will. I have to have faith in universal truth! Because I definitely believe in it!

And wow, that was quite the tangent. I guess in the end, I realize that I need to focus more on being my curious self that is enthusastic about learning and obtaining new information about this amazing world of which I am an amazingly lucky inhabitant. Life is beautiful! Even if the tags suck. Even if sometimes it's hard to understand, and the books don't make any sense, and the professors just won't help. It's okay. Because all I want is to understand, and if I am patient and persevere, I will.

I can't believe it's December 15th! One week till my birthday! Hehe.

Anyway, finals are over. And I must say, that was the crappies freaking semester ever. Never in a million bajillion years will I ever think about taking Calculus, Physics, Chemistry and Biostatistics at the same time. And I need to figure out something. Because I have never, ever put so much effort into school before--and never, have I ever done so poorly! I am sick of feeling stupid! Either I hone my study habits and it works, or I quit and decide that I just don't have the brains for this major.

In the meantime, vacation! I guess I just have to try and forget about the shitty semester...I mean, at least not dwell on it. "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it." Definitely don't want that to happen. But I don't imagine stressing about it is going to help at all. It's over. There's nothing I can do. Failure hurts. But...maybe I should think about Thomas Edison and what he said before he succeeded as well. "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

So...what does work?! Dammit! I want to know! Or I want to know what will work for me, cuz...yeah. This sucks!

Anyway, yeah, break! I am definitely going to read for some fun...and it has been requested that I mention what I intend to read. Let me be honest, though. What I intend to read and what I actually end up reading are a little different. Or maybe a lot. I don't know. We'll see.

There's a Michael Cricton book I've been wanting to read...I really enjoyed Timeline, so I wanted to pick up something else written by him. I also want to read The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I started it up at CSU, but if a student recalls a book, the borrower has to return it before the initial due date, and that happened to me, so I couldn't finish it. Boo. She is such an eloquent writer. The first "entry"...I'm not sure what to call it because I don't think it's an entire chapter...is so beautiful. Tragic, of course, but I didn't know anyone was capable of using the English language like that. I was very impressed.

I haven't read The Da Vinci code yet, and I have been informed time and time again that it is a must-read. So if I get the chance, I want to read that.

I want to read a nonfiction something about microbiology/infectious disease. I need to remind myself why I started all this crap in the first place. There is a reason I'm doing this! Not because I was initially pre-med, or because I wanted to get into vet school. NO! I was in it because microbiology was fascinating to me! When I took it in highschool, I loved it. Look at my blog archive from my sophomore year in highschool! http://jessnpenali.blogspot.com/2002_05_12_jessnpenali_archive.html

Which is another reason I'm kind of devastated by the way this semester went. It's not the microbiology that's stopping me...it's all the shit I have to take in the major that ISN'T microbiology. Screw it! SCREW IT!

Anyway, I would lik to read all those books. I probably will only get to some of it, though, and I could also stumble upon something else to read that'll distract me. But oh well. Reading is fun. If I get distracted, so be it! I'm not dead yet...I still have tons of time to read.

Now time for some unpacking. I'll be on to gush about my winter break reading sometime soon...