Isn't it purtty?

I just changed my template. That chic black look wasn't working for me. It's no good getting depressed while reading your own blog.

Wooooohooooooo

It's...5:04 am, less than a paragraph of a two page paper, another late night up ahead.
Oh, and I have a nice little "W" on my trascript. My second one of my AU career. My classroom career in Arabic is, for now, khalas, and my attempts at self-learning Arabic, Spanish, and French are beginning, once I get some more books.
...ok, you can stop laughing now. Honestly though, if I can remember anything from high school Spanish and still read Arabic script at the end of the semester, I'll be happy. I don't think people have a full appreciation of what a hard fucking language Arabic is. I mean, just learning the new alphabet and the sounds isn't too bad, it's pretty funy once your mouth/throat muscles adjust. The problem is getting your mind to truly think in two different scripts. Whenever I hear an Arabic word, my mind automatically translates it into Latin script. Like when I said khlas above, that's how I actually picture the word in my mind. It makes learning vocab and grammatical structures a real chore. When I memorize vocab words, it's so hard to associate anything with the word, like I would make flashcards with the English word on one side and the Arabic word (in Arabic script) on the other side, and I would eventually memorize the words, but never truly learn them. So I'm thinking I should really not kill myself trying to pursue Modern Standard Arabic. It's a notoriously rigorous language to learn, and I'd basically be killing myself to learn a language that no one really speaks, except in Arab League summits and on Al-Jazeera. Not only would it be easier and more practical to learn a spoken dialect, it would sit better with me philosophically. I think that's part of the big problem today, we can learn these classical language and all this history and the pillars of Islam and stuff and then we can't actually speak to people on the streets of Egypt, so we really don't get a feel for the pulse of the place at all, until shit goes down and everyone is all like "Gee, why do they hate us?"
Also, I think because I started learning Spanish earlier, and for four years, there's a little bit that's still stuck in my mind, and it's much closer to English than Arabic and there aren't the written script issues there are with Arabic.
And of course, while I blab on and on about learning languages which I will probably never actually get around to learning, I can barely pull off a two page paper in my own language. Go figure.

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrgghh

I'm so fucked.
Ok, allow me to elaborate. I have this problem where I have tons of lofty and ambitious goals, and absolutely none of the motivation and mental mechanics needed to achieve them. This, of course, manifests itself in many little corners of my life, but the one I'm concerned with right now is class.
I'm taking International Environmental Politics, Senior Seminar in Lit, Intro to Peace and Conflict Resolution, and Democracy and Development. (I'm also still enrolled in Arabic, more on this later.) I love all of these classes, all of the topics are fascinating, and yet, I almost cannot function in them. It is almost impossible for me to do the readings for these classes on any given night, and I stay up so late trying that I am almost catatonic when I actually have the classes the next day, and therefore wholly unable to participate in any meaningful form whatsoever.
So I'm trying to mount another attempt to change that now. It might actually be working. I'm looking at this website for my Environmental Politics class that actually sums up economic globalization while avoiding the mind-rotting tedium that's oh so prevalent in the usual scholarly articles that professors insist on inundating Blackboard with. But I don't know what the professor will expect us to know tomorrow, and since he has a nasty habit of coercing participation by calling out people.
I don't know what the answer is. For years and years, and just as recently as...well, today, I attributed it to laziness, manifested in different ways. It's sort of been the buzzword thrown around my head for as long as I can remember. Bright but not willing to work hard, could do better with more effort, etc. etc. Now I've reached a point where I'm asking: what the hell do you want me to do? I've established the fact that I am interested in learning and putting in effort in doing so. If that weren't the case, why the hell would I be double majoring and doing all this random shit?
Times like this, I wonder what I'm doing at a place like AU, and why I didn't go to a more innovative and less traditional college, in a place where the main expectations weren't social ladder climbing and resume building. I think that's my challenge: recognize that I'm different and have different ambitions, and look for ways to act on that. If only I had any clue how to do that.
And now, this reading. I have to get it done somehow, even if I'm still useless in class tomorrow, I want to feel like I went down swinging at least, and tried to read something. Not only do I have to stay nice and perky for three classes (two morning classes and one afternoon block) I have to withdraw from Arabic and also figure out how to deal with another issue, which I won't go into detail with here. (Hint: IT'S ABOUT A GIRL. Happy now?)
This feels exactly the same as the old blog. Except with different font. Hmmm...

Hehehehehe...

Uh oh...I've now created my second online blog/journal/website/voyeaur thingie. No good can come out of this.
I find it funny that I just spent ten minutes setting up this thing at the expense of doing a five page paper or laundry. That could be an indication of what you're in for.