The Week When Friday Arrived On Sunday

This entry is late due to the fact that recently I’ve started to get tired a lot faster than before.

On Friday I spent my morning trying to contact fellow humanities students to see if they had any business at the university that day. I didn’t have any classes but I wanted to sign up for the hoodie of our archaeology organizaion, which I’ve been wanting for a while now but couldn’t afford before. Unfortunately, seemed like no one I knew had to go to uni on Friday, no one had classes or any business there at all. This meant I would have to go to uni just to sign my name on a piece of paper. This would be far less annoying if I didn’t far enough to either have to spend an hour walking one way or riding two busses. This simple trip would hence take at least an hour. Well, I did it anyways. Took me well over an hour but at least I managed to sign that paper.

After I got home, I got on my lap top, but for some reason it decided to shut down Windows. This is not the first time my lap top has been acting up. Mind you, this is a new lap top but it didn’t take 6 months till I had to take it to repair. Well, I got it back a couple of months ago and recently it’s started to act up again. It constantly required me to do start-up repairs. It was unusual but I thought nothing of it, computers act up every now and then. After the Windows shut-down it told me to restart my computer, I did so…only it wouldn’t start up. It required to repair start up once again, only this time when I hit enter to do so, it wouldn’t perform the task. I tried and tried and tried for hours and hours and it just wouldn’t work. I tried everything from system restore to diagnostics. I even called my uncle, who is a bit of a computer geek, but seemed like he was at a loss too. He suspects my hard drive’s a goner. I gave up on my lap top on Friday night. It wouldn’t run Windows at all, hence I couldn’t do a thing on it to try and repair possible problems. It’s days like these that make me wish I had gone into computer science instead of archaeology and anthropology. I have a really burning desire to understand these machines - I want to know how to program, code from scratch, and twiddle with tech stuff like those wonderful tech savvy nerds that can build a working computer in 8 minutes. Unfortunately, I’m nowhere near to that. I can’t tell anyone what could possibly be wrong. I think I’d do better at analyzing medical conditions than I would do trying to analyze what’s wrong with my god forsaken lap top!

I’m now using my old desk top till I get my lap top fixed (thank god for two-year-warranty). It’s a pretty useless slow piece of crap but I can get online on it. That’s the thing I want most out of a computer. I miss my wonderful lap top but hey, at least this piece of crap start up. Although, at first it wouldn’t, which was a point at which I was about to throw a hissy fit. This lovely computer suddenly claimed there was no operating system installed on it! It was like it had caught the stupid from my lap top! Luckily I got this bastard to work. Otherwise I’d be staring at the ceiling and sleeping all day. I’m not even kidding. That’s what I did when my lap top broke the last time and hadn’t realized my desk top would actually still work. I just stared at the ceiling, bored out of my mind and then napped a couple of times during the day. All of my entertainment and work is on the computer. I’m pretty dependent on these little machines. But I digress, after I got my old computer set up, I rushed to the bus stop.

My pal would be picking me up from the bus stop. We were going to our mutual friend’s and her boyfriend’s house-warming party. The two have known each other for only two months and already moved in together. In her speech at the party, my friend did mention that it was a short time, she knows it and she knows that people have been raising their eyebrows at it. Honestly, before this I hadn’t even really thought about it. Mind you, I’m always the pessimist (or realist, however you look at it) and I will think about the worst case scenarios. I’m the one shaking my head when a 19-year-old gets married or gets a baby before getting a steady income going, before getting through their education. But this time, I hadn’t even thought of how it was really too soon to move in together for this couple. I still don’t seem to think it was too early. I seem to be in a constant state of shrugging it off. It seems that like them, I’m going with the flow and seeing where the road will take them. I really don’t know why I’m not bothered with my pessimistic thoughts in this particular instance. Maybe it’s because I saw the change towards happiness the guy caused in my friend? Maybe it’s because I had already talked to the guy before? Maybe it’s because he seems like a nice guy? Eh, I don’t know. And honestly, I won’t even bother mulling over it too much. I’ll just be the depressing couples’s counsellor for someone else at another time and place. xD

The house-warming party itself was really fun. It was drinking, eating and talking. Sure there was music, but it was so quiet compared to the jolly conversations going around. There were quite a few of us who didn’t drink, which I was happy about. I don’t drink, and I’m always more comfortable talking to sober people. This is because when they are sober, I’m more familiar with their thought world, I know where they are at, I know they will have some recollection of our exchange. When a bunch of archaeologists, anthropologists and geologists get together, I’ve noticed there will always be rather interesting conversations afoot. I reckon the most interesting conversation of the evening was when I, a couple of students and my B.A. thesis counsellor (yes, we invite even the teacher types to parties, hehe) got into a discussion of determining gender (mind you, not sex, sex and gender are not synonyms) from archaeological remains and how much of it is guess work. The main point was that today, even professionals who have delved into gender archaeology, professionals who are feminists, seem to make interpretations based on 50’s idea of what a woman’s position and job was, not just 50’s but AMERICAN 50’s for some strange reason. While we’ve made great progress in equality, people still insist on using and fitting the mold of 50’s American housewife onto a body from, say, Finnish Iron Age. They will look and look and look for evidence in the body that they could use to prove this “fact”. The crude stereotypes of modern gay men are also projected onto these ancient remains on the side. One finds an ancient grave that seems like the grave of a woman, but woops, there’s a sword in there. A woman couldn’t have possibly had a sword in times we know nothing about, no Cherie, this must be a gay man! No. Just no. Wrong focus, in a wrong way, and wrong projections. I think my thesis counsellor said it rather well: “I’d sure hell like to know how you can tell what hole they liked to tap when looking at just their bones.”

*Cough* I won’t go too deep into that bucket of a rant. The evening went well, but something was left bothering me. We were describing our traits and discussing people’s conceptions of each other and I said that no matter how much I talk, people still describe me as the quiet type. Most often I really am but among friends I’m not. Yet, even these people who I’ve rambled a lot to describe me as a quiet one. Well I mentioned this and another person said to me that she thinks I’m rather annoyingly loud. Which made me go “huh?” in my mind. It kind of hurt me but I kind of wonder when and how have I been annoyingly loud. Yet again, this was a person who’s not really hung out with me besides that party and I did laugh loudly and speak loudly because, well, otherwise I wouldn’t have been heard and I was laughing loud because…we were talking about pretty hilarious stuff, like a whale species that has a 3 meter long penis, how that thing could crush an inflatable boat, and how that would be the most ridiculous death ever: getting swung by a giant penis. I tried to stop thinking about this description of me and my loudness but I really couldn’t after I got home. I just had me pondering. I really do not think I’m loud. I talk amongst friends, sure, but otherwise I’m quiet, painfully quiet and awkward. I guess I should just shrug this off.

As the evening progressed, some people started getting drunk and tipsy. One guy apparently started to try and grope the friend who gave me a lift to the party. This girl is the innocent type, the good girl, a romantic, so I don’t think she was particularly comfortable with this experience. And this guy is a guy who, during last year’s Halloween party, while drunk, also tried to grope and get it on with the friend whose house-warming party we were at – she was not happy about it either. Well, luckily our male friend was with this innocent girlfriend of mine and actually got the guy to back off. After the party three of us left together and discussed the incident outside. I made sure my gal pal was okay. I think her romanticism is slowly dying, which I find rather sad. During the same friend’s house-warming party a year ago, the girl’s ex made a pass at my friend while drunk. It was uncomfortable but the guy was hurt because he had gotten dumped. The guy did apologize to her the next day when he had sobered up. But my poor romantic gal pal told me how this was the first time someone of the opposite sex had shown interest in her, told her he liked her, and it happened in these crappy circumstances from a drunken ex of her friend’s. She had been imagining a more romantic instance; naturally she had wanted it to happen in bright circumstances and all. Now with this other drunken incidence, she has started to think that no one ever shows her interest in that way unless they are drunk. That’s just sad. And it kind of makes me want to slap the guy who started groping her even more. I’m not one for romantics really, intimacy kind of scares me, and I’ve pretty much decided I will not hunt for a guy (or a girl) - I will remain dateless for the rest of my life if it comes to that. But I still feel for my friend who does care about this stuff much more than I do.

Well, after the party I got home, around midnight. I immediately started to try and write this entry but I was very tired and my mind was buzzing with all the stimulation it had gotten during the party, all the thoughts and feelings. I just couldn’t get myself to write, no energy and the second I typed something I felt like I had thrown up on the screen and had to get rid of it. On Saturday I was still feeling rather blah about writing a blog entry I knew would end up being long and messy. I guess I didn’t get good enough sleep since my eyes were hurting like hell. Not to mention I had to conjure up the energy to go shopping for pants since my only pants broke on Thursday. Had to sew up another pair so I didn’t have to go out naked. Going to shop for pants has always been very troublesome for me. I’m a big woman, I’m not a stick like the clothing industry seems to think everyone these days is, or at least should be. It’s bit of a hell to shop for anything really. Not only are clothes tiny, they look ridiculous! I can’t help but to wonder where all the normal non-slutty and non-ridiculously-tight clothes have gone. I don’t even shop at stores usually filled with that sort of stuff, I shop at super markets! But even those are filled with that stuff - luckily at super markets there’s usually also at least some clothing for the bigger people. Few times I’ve also discovered normal looking shirts. *deep sigh* Clothing industry, the bane of my existence.

Well that’s about it for me this time around. What did you guys do during the weekend? What are you up to? How are you doing?