oh vandy

can i just say? i have the best friends in the entire world. like ever.

oh my god, everybody’s so nice to me, i’m going to cry. i can’t believe how nice everybody is. you all have no idea what those facebook messages mean to me. i mean, just to take a moment out of your busy lives just to post a message on my facebook to say happy birthday, it means a lot to me. really. i woke this morning to all these wonderful people who show that they care enough to write something. even if facebook did remind them. even if they had nothing better to do. even if they haven’t seen me since high school. it still means a lot.

my first birthday party was when i was 16. i invited my closest friends (yvonne, aileen, shang, and yuan) over for dinner, cake, and a girly sleepover (thanks yuan). i still remember that old house and how happy i was. it was my first real party with real friends (that is, not just my parents and me). then there was that time when my dad gave me my first cd player. i was having an awful day and i thought everybody had just forgotten my birthday and was thinking about how worthless birthdays really were when my dad surprised me. i cried. and then there was that time when yvonne and shang surprised me in my own kitchen with the help of my parents. i cried then too - shocked at how much they cared about me. those were precious years. i think i’ll always remember birthdays like that. some mundate pseudo-holiday that if celebrated in excess makes me feel humiliated.

most of the time, on my birthday, i think i don’t deserve all that recognition just for me. what did i do? nothing! i was born! that wasn’t even MY doing! everybody appreciates me everyday when they say hi to me on campus, when they call me up for dinner, when they come and visit my morgan, or when they ask “how are you?” but all the same…it’s nice to for people to show that they really do care on the day it matters the most.

It’s a new year and I’m still living with old habits. There’s something about a new year and a new semester that makes one dearly want to just break out of those horrible habbits that dragged one down (it must have something to do with all those “new’s”) but yet at the same time, there’s something very lacking. Like I needed a new year to make me realize how bad my old habits were? Am I only going to have one epiphany per year?

I’m going to get my hair cut. And colored. Or something. I hear that girls get their hair cut whenever they want a REAL “change” in their lives. I’m not sure about the coloring, but I want something very drastically different. It’s going to be very expensive. And it’s going to be very fabulous. And it’s going to be the first real “salon” that I’ve been to (um, all those Chinatown / China ones definately do not count, considering I could barely communicate what I wanted to have done to my hair). Something to motivate me (eg: you spent so much money, don’t blow it). Something to remind me that I am a beautiful, young, single woman, that I am motivated, and that I will reach my goals. Something to shout at me when I look in the mirror to say, Don’t ruin it this time, Lily.

But it’s like that commercial for this thing that helps you quit smoking…all those attempts before were simply practice for your real attempt:

Now.

check that I’m alive.

- I’ve watched so much football this vacation…good grief. And incidentally, every single team I’ve rooted for lost every time I watched (holy shit the Pats better not fucking lose to the jaguars this saturday…*sigh*). My picks are basically based off of who I already know, heh…The Pat’s old coaches all seem to go to the college level or something. I rooted for Notre Dame against Ohio too (sorry kevin / zhou / ppl from ohio) but I lost, so it’s all good. I hope our current coach doesn’t leave anytime soon…that would mean I’d need to wait like, 10 years for new england to be good again, heh. I finally went to nfl.com to look up the football rulebook and read the beginner’s guide to football and now I know like, what a linebacker is (well, vaguely anyway). Wahoo!! Yeah, okay I’m a dork and I was bored. Shuddup.

- Christmas just keeps getting better and better each year even though I get less presents and it’s less ritualistic/fun. This year, my cousin and I watched 3 movies in a row. It was pretty sweet. I wish I had a movie buddy like him at Vandy. First, we paid to see King Kong and we were pissed off that we had the big screen at the Loews at Boston Common because we had planned to just stay in the same hallway all night, but anyway…King Kong (I cried), then we saw Chronicals of Narnia (which was pretty god awful, btw), and then we saw Fun with Dick and Jane which was actually pretty funny at 1am in the morning. It was really a pretty ridiculous comedy playing off of the cut and throat nature of the corporate world. I also saw Memoirs of a Geisha (sans cousin)which was definately a cinematic pleasure to see, but I agree with the critics, just ringed kinda hollow.

- New Year’s was pretty awesome. Seeing old friends and having fun with Yvonne. It was really, I dunno, refreshing to see people I hadn’t seen for 2 years. We missed the ball dropping because somebody set the station to MTV, but I wasn’t really that excited to kiss Yvonne, despite her extreme sexiness, hehe.

- Something about winter puts me in this lazy lazy stupor. It’s getting really annoying. Does this happen to other people besides me? I should specify, it’s more like winter break puts me in a lazy lazy stupor. No school work, no deadlines for at least a month, and then there’s the fact that I don’t have a car so I don’t go anywhere during the day, so basically…I just sit at home in my sweats and um, do absolutely positively nothing. It’s nice when you’ve had a rough semester, but it’s gotten to the point where I can’t sleep at night because I have so much pent up energy that I didn’t use during the day! It’s times like these when I know…I need to get back to school.