Procrastination Nation

I just got an email from a school group member, and basically she'd done our entire project over reading week, while I was bumming around the Dominican. Normally this would bug me, as I hate feeling useless in a group, but I know in this case we still have work to do on the project and I can make up for it later.

I don't know what it is about this term, but I can't seem to get my act together. I know that I just have to pull it together for like, two months and then it's time to stress about finding a job, but I just can't seem to care about anything right now, other than napping and going out dancing. oh, and my 24-7 addiction to Facebook.

As an example: I had a paper due at 6 pm tonight, in my night class and had remembered around midnight last night. Instead of staying up to write it, I went to bed and proceeded to write it during the day today. I HAVE to stop doing that. so as punishment for being so lazy, I am going to procrastinate a bit more, then do my Advertising Management reading, as well as my Managing Globalization reading for tomorrow. Evil Twin Vicki is being put away until Thursday night, and Good Girl Niki is going to study and behave herself over the next few days. Ladylike and graceful dignity are the keywords, not the Loud Sloppy Mess that I have become.

I will get things accomplished, and go and run on the track at school and be good.

I swear I will.

Sometimes I look at this blog and hope I'm not as self absorbed as I seem. All this blah blah blah about myself seems narcissistic sometimes, but then the other half of me is like "screw that. you are a narcissist and self-absorbed and an attention hog". So it shall be time for a writing exercise: for the next few days I shall write about people I love, and their lives, and why they are awesome.

p.s. - if i write about you, and you read this; don't tell me. i'll just get embarassed.

check it.

so, the Dominican hated me. no, seriously, it did. The day after we got there I came down with a crazy fever, and would get goosebumps and chills unless I was sitting in direct sunlight. I think I'm the only person to come back from the Dominican ever with a cold. It was superfun though, I got a lot of sleep and relaxed under the sun with girly magazines and went out to eat and met new people and all in all, I was really happy with my trip.

this sounds so selfish and spoiled, but next time i really want to take like, a yoga retreat vacation where you eat healthy and wake up early and do yoga all day long. sigh. heaven.

so back to school, and starting to look for a permanent job in this crazy world. i tried cleaning my room yesterday, but it just never seems to get clean. it would probably help if i had a binder for all of my schoolwork, i should really get on that soon. ha. terms almost half over and i still just have papers everwhere.

went out with josh, alana, danielle, and adrian last night. i always forget how much fun i have every single time i go out with them. needless to say, danielle has me swearing to go out with them once a week on her video on her digicam. i also forget how fun it is to take pictures on a random night out, with weird and random poses and everyone else in the bar staring at how weird you are.

embarassing, yet oddly funny.

y'all, i have a confession to make: i cried at the waxer today.

i hadn't been in about a month, and so she innocently asked how my last month had been, and it all came spilling out; the breakup, but what started the tears was telling her my godmother had died. the thing is, i hadn't talked about it with anyone since it happened, and didn't know how much the words would still affect me if i said them out loud. i still think about it a lot, and about how things will be different now when i'm home, and what she won't see.

she was a large part in my life. for example, this easter, my parents will be in China on vacation, and i'd normally go home for a week if i didn't have exams. if that had happened this year, i would have been at their house at least twice for dinner in those 7 days, and i would know if i needed anything, i could just march over and ask.

so i started to cry, sitting there in my underwear, with a lamp shining down on me, and my esthetician trying to hug me, wax in one hand, strip of cloth in the other. the humour wasn't lost on either of us, me laughing and crying at the same time, and her looking at me with the right mix of concern and sadness. the best thing? i didn't feel weird, or crazy; in fact, it only made me feel better.

obviously, with all this going on, i've still been thinking about loss. the hardest part in the last month with w, hasn't necessarily been missing the boyfriend. i mean, i miss that, and the hand holding and the comfort and the snuggling and the sex; but i miss one of my best friends. i miss the person i would call when A upset me, and i miss having dinner or going to drinks and talking, that i would just be completely comfortable with this person. there was an ease in not being conscious of what i said, or how i acted, or how i was sitting, or how i was dressed that day.

the biggest thing is the lack of concern i had in telling him everything about me, and the huge amount of trust i had for this person. i felt like i could say anything to him, and he wouldn't judge me, and he wouldn't tell anyone and that's the only way i can be close friends with someone, to be best friends with someone, is to have that feeling. and now that feeling is gone, and there's stuff that i wouldn't admit to him, or wouldn't tell him because of how it would make me feel. before all this happened, i let myself be vulnerable because i trusted him, and then i let myself be open and honest when we dated because, well, we were dating, and now i feel like i can't be vulnerable or open with him anymore because that would show weakness, and i never want him to see me be weak again.

that's the Valkyrie in me.

random acts of randomness

this'll be as scatterbrained as i'm feeling:

1) i promised brian i'd give the schreibers a shout-out, just to see if they ever read this. if they do, "hi mr. and mrs. schreibs.... welcome to my innermost thoughts. please don't judge me."

2) my to do list is a mile long. in typical niki fashion, i'm ignoring it. maybe it'll just get done on its own.

3) shoutout to lydia as well, if she reads this. i keep starting letters and then losing them. hopefully one will make it's way to you soon.

4) american apparel u-necked tank tops - verdict? awesome.

5) i was in one of my moods today. the one that no one can pull me out of except for me taking a long walk by myself. luckily, i ended up taking a long walk by myself.

6) i'm giving myself a 10 pm deadline to start writing this paper. brand management. w00t.

7) i've decided i like talking to random people i don't know very well about incredibly intimate things. it makes the whole awkward stage of getting to know someone much more intense, but also much shorter.

8) the only thing that made me laugh today was when a friend reached into her coat pocket and accidently pulled out a pair of underwear. i'd done that less than a week ago, except out of my purse.

9) i decided today that i'm going to marry an engineer. i should start hanging around the engineering department.

10) i have a canker sore on the roof of my mouth. it hurts.

11) Dominican. 4 days.

if i get it all down on paper it's no longer inside of me

i miss you. lately it's been catching me in the quiet moments, where everything stills for a moment, and the sun shines in just so, and a memory from long ago comes flooding in.

screwed.

a little story i like to call "There's Five Days Until I Leave For The Dominican and Don't Want To Do Any Work, Despite The Fact That I Have a Midterm Tomorrow and a Paper Due On Tuesday"

the title of the story pretty much encapsulates it.

i have all my shit ready and just already want to be on the beach. focusing has proved to be an incredible task. went out to lodge last night, summer reunion 05. it was fun, because as always, i planned on not drinking that much, and then ended up getting trashed and having a random hour long discussion with a 22 year old boy in urban planning. whenever i made fun of him (which is how i get boys to lllliiiikkke me, with my amazing powers of mockery), he had this cute tick where he'd pull at his emo hair and turn away and then look back at me.

sigh. it's definitely the little things boys do that make me have crushes. drew calls me boy crazy, but there's just all the tiny cute habits that most people have. it's the same way i know i'll be friends with a girl: if she has some weird habit or tick that makes me like her.

i should really make dinner. i ate 12 hot dogs in the span of one day yesterday. yes, i know that's gross. yes, i know that's unhealthy. yes, i know i have to be in a bikini in five days. all of these reasons are screaming "soup and salad for dinner" at me, but i also have a can of chef boyardee, and i'm thinking i really cannot resist him.

behemoth.

so, saturday afternoon and still haven't done a stitch of work. tomorrow's going to suuuck. however, the rest of the weekend? supremely awesome.

on thursday, woke up and went to my first class, which was a guest speaker. now, in university, when there's a guest speaker that i have absolutely zero interest in, it usually means a skipped class for me. i went anyways, and ended up having an interesting discussion about balancing work and a life. he basically said that you just have to be organized, so essentially, i'm going to suck at balancing.

went to all you can eat sushi on thursday night, after several meaningful conversations in the mus office with various people. i love hanging out in there because of the rotation of people visiting at one time. plus, there's comfy office chairs if you're lucky enough to get one of them. reclining = awesome. so after stuffing ourselves with sushi, we went down to the arcade. now there's three awesome games there: Time Crisis 3 (which has replaced 2 as my favourite), House of the Dead 4 (zombie killing), plus this one machine with a boxing ball hanging down and costs one token to calculate how hard you hit it. that thing is adddddictive man... i must have spent at least 5 bucks on it (which is 20 tokens). from the arcade, we went to kafeine to watch a friend dj and smoke shisha. straggling out of there at 1:30 in the morning felt like i was emerging from an opium den in order to drag my ass home in the buttass cold. i promptly wrapped myself in my blanket and fell asleep until noon.

friday afternoon, i went shopping for a bathing suit for the dominican with courtney. needless to say we had an interesting talk session over dinner about various people in our faculty. i love courtney for a lot of reasons, but two distinct ones: a) she rarely complains about anything. she's the most positive, funny, perceptive person, and b) she's incredibly intelligent. we found our bathing suits at bikini village; mine is camoflage with hot pink roxy symbols. i love it so much i wore it around the house for a couple of hours. then brian arrived to visit. it's weird because whenever he visits it feels like he still lives here, and that he never left. i supposed it's due to the fact that i talk to him almost every day for at least an hour online, so he's constantly filled in on my life and as a result we went to dinner and made fun of people walking by, since we had nothing to talk about ourselves.

slept in until three pm today, which i hadn't done in like, 5 years. i have never been capable of sleeping in that late, but didn't really want to get out of bed this morning. also, i'm usually woken up by a reasonably loud household, but leela and alison both were out of the house early, so i've had the house to myself all day, which means lots of loud singing and dancing to the scissor sisters and madonna.

going out with danielle and alana tonight, which i haven't done probably since brian was here. they're always sweet enough and amazing to invite me, but due to my recent bouts with heaving partying on thursday nights, i haven't been able to go out the rest of the weekend. tonight, it is all going to change. i have my outfit planned, my hair and makeup will be done, and i am going to dance my ass off, and feel like crap all day tomorrow.

then a week to get through, and i get to tan on a beach in the dominican.

sometimes i love being a girl.

she always used to say/"life's a dirty business so just be a prick/

alanis morisette irony alert: i love calling myself a bitch, but as soon as others perceive me that way, my feelings are hurt.

it might seem like a dream/but it's real to me

i can't seem to shake this cold that's been in me for the past month. i thought that it was just stress from the beginning of the month, and then carnival, and then the w mess; but it's not going anywhere. i've been sleeping as much as my body dictates, and taking multivitamins, and going to the gym and eating lots of fruits and veggies. and nothing happens. hopefully by the time grad trip in the dominican rolls around, the sunshine and hot weather will blast it out of me.

i'm still loving the gym. i think this is the longest streak i've ever had of going almost every day. i love that hour of just pushing my body a little more than i normally do. i caught up on all my ad management reading yesterday, today is brand management and tomorrow is managing globalization and my ad management paper.

days are just flying by lately. i have to stop by the career centre at school to get my CV looked at so I can send it out to a bunch of PR and marketing firms in the upcoming months. i think it's going to be hard, so i'm trying to psych myself up for some more disappointment.

right now, though, i just can't wait to be sitting on a lounge chair, by the beach, in 30 degree humid weather, with Elle and Vogue magazines and being so warm that i forget what it's like to live in Montreal in the winter.

In the Skin of a Lion

"he undresses and climbs into the bed where there is the smell of her, where he is unable to sleep... he knows he doesn't have long before he loses the exact memory of her face. his mind moves closer to the skin at the side of her nose where the scar lies. she was always too conscious of it, a line she assumed unbalanced her face. how can he evoke her without this fine line?"

remember this:

Petite Cherie, the story of the theme might go like this: life is tough, mean, and a lot of fun, if relentless - a big joke on you most of the time, but it's great, especially in the telling.

we go deep/and we don't get no sleep/cause we'll be up all night

whee. good day today. i love when all the stars align and you just have such an incredible day.

we're going to tokyo tonight for a friend's birthday, but it's the first time all four of us have gone out together with no responsibility. i'm not condoning binge drinking in any way, but i want one night where all four of my girlfriends are properly tanked and just have an amazing, sloppy, bizarre night. it's weird, because we rarely have those at home since someone has to drive, but here, we have even less of them because someone always has to study the next day, or doesn't feel like getting drunk, or doesn't have the money. except for tonight, and so far god's on my side today so i'm hoping the trend continues.

in the next blog: why my day today was so good including gym time, a contact for jobs, and sleeping in, and anything tonight has to offer that rocks my socks off.