firsts and seconds, hours and days.

i have so many different things to blog about and most of them are unrelated so i have no idea how i'm going to get it all down without writing too much or being too incoherent! i'll try, and i'll go in chronological order so there'll be some rhyme and reason to my rambling.

last week i talked to two different people, one about how isolated he felt from everybody else, and how people who he thought were his friends weren't being there for him. he said i was the first person in a couple of months to have taken the time to talk to him and to ask how he was doing. the other person i talked to asked me if she was a bad person for not missing her family. she spent most of her childhood living with her aunt and then her grandparents before going back to stay with her parents as a teenager. she said her parents were hurt and asked her why she didn't miss them, and she asked me what it was like to miss my own family. i haven't completely processed both conversations yet, but they gave me a lot to think about.

on friday i went for the halloween dance thrown by the international student association. esh, bryan, sean and i dressed up as bumblebees, with sean as our drag queen bee. =) it was fun watching the thriller dance and finding puke on the dance floor, but there were two other things that affected me more. one was that it was my first second with my friends here in eugene, especially sean and bryan. almost every other (major) experience i've had here so far has been a first... and i suppose it being my first second also makes it a first, but it was incredible to think that a year ago i had my first halloween, first met romandy, had my first ethnocentric friday and first danced to soulja boy en masse, among other things. the other thing was bryan pointing out that this was going to be our last halloween at the u of o. i haven't completely digested both of these reflections either.

on saturday, we had a cocktail party at bryan's, which i really enjoyed too. i can't remember the last time i wore a dress two nights in a row! there was lots to laugh and talk about, and i like that there was a balance of gravity and lightheartedness that night. on sunday i went to watch the last ever staging of telling that sean was a part of, which is a play put on by veterans about their experiences. it was my second time watching the play, but i was even more affected this time than the last. i don't know why, but this time it struck me even more that this was what sean was getting himself into... and i felt both proud of and worried for him. i can only imagine what it must have felt like for family members and significant others of people who have enlisted. and for the people who have enlisted themselves.

on monday we had our first full rainy day here. it poured, and it was very cold. i made it for my first class, and then i had to rush to register for the graduate record examination (which is basically the sat for grad school) in the one hour i had between classes. there was some complication with my registration and it took longer than i expected so i decided to skip ballet, since getting this done was more important than getting to use my ballet shoes again. despite me starting to work on my grad school applications what seems like very early on, i have somehow managed to land myself into a very stressful time crunch which i can only blame my pushparatnam genes for. anyhow. i got myself all worked up about grad school stuff and started looking up information and ended up running late for econs. i was halfway out the door when i realized that a) i had forgotten my laptop charger so i had to run back upstairs, b) it was raining very heavily, and c) i really, really did not want to go for class. so i went back upstairs, watched a bit of desperate housewives online, and had a nap. i don't think i had skipped a class intentionally before this, but as sean pointed out rather depressingly, i skipped class for school-related matters, which makes me feel both better and worse at the same time. i'm really glad i did it though. oh, and i'm sitting for the gre next friday - i feel unprepared, but as prepared as i ever think i'll be. we'll see how that goes.

the highlight of today was the announcement of the election results. although i am not an american, i'm psyched to have been here to witness the election of obama as president. i wish i could've watched cable tv the whole evening to have seen the unfolding of the events every step of the way, but i had class and by the time i got out obama had already won. still, i got something out of tonight's class that almost made up for it. i'm happy for obama, but at the same time, i have a lot of respect for mccain and i admire the elegance he showed in his concession speech. i also recognize how this is a mark of how far america has come, and rather significantly in a time of sobriety for the country. it will be interesting to see how things go from here in the states... and also back home in malaysia. it's exciting to see how much more involved my generation has become.

now for bed.