My boyfriend and I decided to road-trip for our second anniversary, and we made the journey from Texas Tech University in dusty Lubbock all the way down to the very tip of Texas at South Padre Island, enjoyed the beach for four days, and then headed up to Houston for two days of shopping before heading back home to DFW. It was an incredibly fun way to spend the week, especially since the rest of our summer is going to be consumed taking physics I/II (oh the joys of being premed ). But here’s some of the highlights of the trip:

#1 - My GPS system is very very weird. It likes to take us on the scenic route (apparently taking long detours through the countryside is the faster way to get somewhere) and at one point, completely changed its mind about the direction we were taking and spun us 360-degrees (but at least it shaved off thirty minutes on the arrival time!)

#2 - On our first evening at the beach, we were taking a stroll in the sand and looked up to see two seagulls on top of each other. At first I was like, “Huh, what are they doing - OHHHH. Oh my god! Look! Seagulls humping each other!” Lol.

#3 - We decided to collect these tiny clam things on the beach (still not sure what they’re called) and the boyfriend bought a butterfly net to scoop up and filter huge chunks of sand so that only the clam things would be left. And it was really awesome, because we ended up finding all sorts of cool things along with the clams - tiny spiral shells, a hermit crab, and even a few fish!

#4 - It is a VERY bad idea to wash said clam things in scalding hot water from a hot tub (which of course we did, being the smart college students we are), because apparently we cooked them instead. And our car smelled like cooked oysters all the way from South Padre to Houston

#5 - It is also a very bad idea to not check your pockets after dumping your beach findings into your shorts. We couldn’t figure out why there was this fishy smell in our hotel room for a couple of days until we checked the boyfriend’s swimming shorts and found a random dead fish in his pocket. Stinkiness!

#6 - The boyfriend is a blanket hog/kicker. I kept waking up in the middle of the night to find a foot on my back and one time he even pushed me right off the bed in his sleep. Grr! Don’t worry, I’ll get him back for it (that’s what Sharpies are for, teehee. His body will be my new art canvas )

#7 - No sunscreen = painful sunburn. Very stupid of me. I didn’t wear sunscreen on the second day (although I did slather it all over myself on the first) and spent two hours exploring the isolated north end of South Padre Island. My shoulders were red and raw and painful to the touch the next day. The boyfriend ended up turning orange, haha.

#8 - Snorkeling in South Padre just doesn’t agree with me. The mask kept ripping out chunks of my hair, the strong wind kept shoving currents of ocean water into my face and nose, and I almost ran into a jellyfish. But the water was beautiful and I saw hermit crabs and cool yellow striped fish!

#9 - There are some very stupid birds out there. On the way up to Houston, we saw two birds just standing in the middle of the highway. One saw our car coming and flew off like any other bird, but the other just stared at us and BAM! Feathers went flying everywhere I was on the phone at the time with a friend from UT-Austin and he told us all he could hear in the background was, “Oh shit! Did we just hit that bird! Oh my god, you killed a bird!”

#10 - Houston is horribly confusing to navigate. I can’t count how many times I’ve made a trip to Houston and gotten lost. Last time, the boyfriend and I tried for two hours to find a building we later dubbed the “Vanishing Aquarium” because we could see it from the highway and then couldn’t find it once we got into downtown. Not to mention Houston drivers are incredibly obnoxious and rude and apparently blind (because one almost smashed into my car coming off the ramp and didn’t brake until we were frantically honking at them). And I thought DFW drivers had road rage.

But even with all the craziness, I loved the roadtripping, the awesome king-sized jacuzzi suite at La Copa Inn with their complimentary happy hour (free food and drinks) and breakfast, the random nighttime wake-ups, and especially the beach. Nothing beat swimming in the ocean, getting a nice tan, collecting cool shells…can’t wait for the next time <3

Finals are over! Well, for me, anyways. I had my chemistry final yesterday (ugh), Abnormal Psychology today (very easy) and I finished revising my critical analysis for my honors English seminar! I’m sad that my freshman year is over; it’s been a long and strange year at times but I love college and now I don’t want to go home

I spent most of yesterday watching a J-drama, 1 Litre of Tears, and I absolutely loved it. I could not stop watching, and I saw all 11 episodes in a 48-hour span. It was so incredibly sad at times, and I found myself crying during several scenes, but it’s such a beautiful drama that’s all the more poignant because it really happened. It’s a true story based on the life of a girl named Kito Aya, who suffered from a disease called spinocerebellar degeneration, where your neurons decay and die and you slowly lose all motor function. Eventually, you won’t be able to walk, talk, or write, and there is currently no cure for the disease. It’s a rare disease but such a cruel one: even though your body is physically failing, your brain remains intellectually intact. Imagine having a perfectly capable mind, full of thoughts and all the things you want to say, and unable to express any of them because you can no longer move your lips correctly or even hold a pen in your hand.

1 Litre of Tears (1 Rittoru no Namida) is based on a book of the same name, which is basically a compilation of all the diaries that Aya wrote, from the time of her diagnosis at age 15 to her death when she was 25 years old. She wrote everyday, without fail, until she could no longer hold a pen. It’s both very touching and very sad to read some of the entries, and realize how entirely normal she was before the disease struck her, and to realize what a courageous spirit she had while she fought to live. Time is a very precious thing to patients with spinocerebellar degenerative disease: you go to sleep every night, wondering if when you wake up in the morning, you’ll still be able to walk or even swallow your food without choking, and Aya talks about all the dreams and hopes that were shattered by her illness. The book was published in Japanese, but I found an English translation online, which you can read @ http://www.xanga.com/onelitre.

But I definitely urge you guys to watch this drama, and don’t worry, even though it’s in Japanese, it has subtitles (cause I sure don’t speak Japanese). I promise you’ll cry, unless you have a heart of stone, and you’ll realize from watching Aya’s struggles that even the worst day you might have is nothing compared to what she went through. It was a reminder to me that to waste time might just be the worst sin of all, because all of us only have so much time to make our mark on the world, to experience hope and fear and joy, to love and be loved.

I recently became a fan of Stephenie Meyer’s book Twilight. It’s a pretty recent book, written in 2005, and it’s been popular for awhile now but I never got around to reading it until just a few weeks ago. It’s really sad, I used to be one of the first to read the newest and most popular young adult fiction among my friends. I just don’t have the time for it anymore And I think I lost part of my enthusiasm for series after reading the final two books in the Harry Potter series. I’m a die-hard HP fan but I absolutely hated those last two books. Thank god for Fanfiction.net and the other fans out there just like me who hated the way the series ended and wrote their own personal interpretations in some of the best writing I’ve ever read.

But I fell in love with the Bella/Edward love story after reading Twilight. I drool just imagining what Edward Cullen would look like in real life. Talk about eye-candy And that sensous, velvet voice…oh Bella Swan, you are the luckiest girl in fiction ever. And then Stephenie Meyers had to ruin my fantasies with her sequels, Eclipse and New Moon. WTF?!! Why must you introduce a love triangle? And turn what was a perfectly lovely novel about love and immortality and free will and gorgeous vampires into a freaking soap opera that involves a deadly feud between werewolves and vampires?

And don’t even get me started on the whole Bella-Edward-Jacob thing. Jacob was totally cool in Twilight but he turned into a stupid cocky jackass in the last two books that makes me want to punch him in the face. And Bella is so stupid: why would you even bother with a smartass, immature idiot who thinks of the whole thing as a game when you have this perfect, angsty, greek god look-alike practically wrapped around your finger. Gaaahh. It makes me angry. I’ll probably read Breaking Dawn, the last book in the series, just so I can get some closure and see if Ms. Meyers actually writes the ending that should happen (if Bella gives up Edward for Jacob, I will burn that book!)

What really started me thinking tonight was something my boyfriend told me. Apparently, his English class got into a brief discussion about global warming this past week, and the teacher made it known that she believed it was all a conspiracy and lies cooked up by someone. Maybe it’s just the liberal streak in me, but I really don’t know why people are making such a huge deal about global warming these days, as in, “oh no, global warming can’t possibly exist!” Seriously? I’ll admit, Al Gore’s “documentary,” An Inconvenient Truth, was cliched and unintentionally funny at some points, but at least it helped to promote awareness about the issue. And all the scientific data is there to back up the statements. And no, global warming is not something new nor is it something people just made up for the hell of it. It’s a natural process that’s been happening for billions of years and years; the Earth has always gone through alternating periods of ice ages and global warming.

The problem today is that all the human activity in the last two hundred or so years - starting with the Industrial Revolution and coming right up to the present-day “let’s make nuclear bombs and spill chemicals into rivers and drive around in big ol’ Hummers” atmosphere - has accelerated the warming process. And scarily enough, past data has indicated that there’s always an intense warming period right before the advent of a new ice age. Now, I don’t know if we’re headed into the next ice age, Day After Tomorrow-style, but either way, does it really matter if global warming exists or not if it helps to promote environmental consciousness? What could possibly be wrong with wanting people to care more about the environment?

I’m no tree-hugger, but is it so hard to get up your lazy butt and toss something into an actual trash can instead of just leaving it on the ground? Or collecting your empty water bottles in a bag to recycle? How about car pooling or god forbid, even biking (especially since people are getting so fat in this day and age, why not save the environment and lose a few pounds while you’re at it?) It will not kill you to try any of those, I promise you, because I do all those things myself and I’m one of the laziest people you will ever met. I’m the girl who will lay there and contemplate if I really need to use the restroom, just cause I don’t want to leave my warm, fluffy bed, so if I can find the will to do the things that I mentioned, so can you. So all those whiners just need to shut up, stop complaining about left-wing conspiracies, and actually care. Cause, you know, we all have to live on this planet, and it’d be nice to keep it green and pretty instead of turning it into some apocalyptic wasteland. My thoughts for the night…

So I’m currently sitting in a hotel room in Abilene, Texas, munching on cookies and desperately wishing I had some real food to eat. We’ll be leaving to head back to Lubbock tomorrow morning, but it’s been a rather interesting weekend, to say the least. I had no idea what this trip was going to be like: I’ve never actually visited Abilene (I usually just pass through it on the way to somewhere else), I only knew most of the other Honors students in passing since I’m a freshman and the majority are juniors or seniors, and I’ve definitely never presented a paper at a conference before. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised and had a pretty good time and enjoyed myself

#1 - I’ve gotten to know some of the students and the advisors a lot better (the Honors advisors are actually pretty laid back and fun to talk with and not as scary as they seemed)

#2 - The Honors College shelled out and placed us in a really nice hotel - MCM Elegante Suites - because they thought the official conference hotel was really dinky and had bad reviews, including roaches in the bathtubs (totally eww). I love Texas Tech’s Honors College

#3 - However, our group was pretty horrified to walk into the hotel lobby and find this huge monument of the 10 Commandments just sitting there. Dead silence, stares, and finally someone sighed and said, “Only in West Texas.” No kidding. And apparently the city also has a law about no buying alcohol after midnight. Not that I drink, but that’s a little on the restrictive side, don’t you think? People are going to do what they want, and they’re going to get liquor one way or another if they really want it. And I thought Lubbock was bad; I didn’t realize Abilene was so conservative

#4 - The conference itself: eh. We brought one of the larger groups; most of the other schools were smaller and religiously affiliated, but there were a few students from Texas A&M and UT-Arlington. And I had to question some of the presentations for things like unoriginal research topics, misspellings and grammar errors (this from a creative writing major!), unpreparedness, just stuff that didn’t seem very professional.

#5 - One student from John Brown University (which I had never heard of before this) discussed a paper he had written called Uncommon Decency: Religious Opposition to Literature from the Puritans to Harry Potter. He mentioned how he works for Focus on the Family, and how he brought a Harry Potter book to work to read but slipped a Chronicles of Narnia cover over the book so his coworkers wouldn’t say anything. Rofl. I liked his presentation, but my group and I were just amazed by some of the questions he was asked by the audience. One girl actually asked if J.K. Rowling was, and I quote, “out to taunt Christians.” Hello, J.K. Rowling is a Christian herself, and even if she wasn’t, the Harry Potter series is not out to promote witchcraft or devil worship or whatever kind of stupidity the evangelical Christians want to throw out there. Another man was like, “So how should evangelical Christians read then?” Wow. Just…wow. It was really ridiculous stuff. I was very impressed by the student’s handling of the questions, though: he was very diplomatic and thoughtful and objective. I probably would have been really sarcastic and irritated but I can’t stand that kind of ignorance.

#6 - We went to Buffalo Gap, which is a historical village just outside of Abilene, but instead of being forced to go on a walking tour with the rest of the conference, our lovely and gracious Honors advisors took our entire group to the Perini Ranch Steakhouse and told us to order whatever wanted. Have I mentioned how much I appreciate the Honors College? I ate a hamburger steak, garlic bread, Cowboy Potatoes, and strawberry shortcake, all sooo yummy. And I had some leftover steak and stuck it in a to-go box, but then I forgot to take it with me, so now I have no midnight snack. Sigh.

#7 - We attended a talk by David Leeson, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a totally awesome speaker. He was very honest, very passionate, and I loved his photos. And now I want to see his movie, At War, which is being released April 30.

Sigh. It’s been a wonderful getaway for two days. But it’s time to go back to homework and exams and essays tomorrow. Wish me luck as I head into the end of the semester of my freshman year!