I am now an alumna of UCI.  I hold a B.A. in anthropology and European Studies (with an emphasis in medieval studies) and I don't know what I want to do with my life or with careers or anything.

Whatever.  I'm done with undergraduate studies and it's a kind of bittersweet feeling, personally.  I spent three years at community college and three years at UCI and I'm just going to miss that feeling of being a student.

Although I do know I want to go back for grad school in the way-off future, hopefully (maybe for something medieval?  It is a favorite subject of mine...although I wouldn't say no to a language program, preferably in Russian, or IDK.  I'll deal with that in the future).

These past few weeks have been hectic for me and so I just haven't updated a whole lot.

The important things that happened:

-I finished my European Studies thesis!  It's called 'From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Geoffrey Chaucer: The Political Portrayal of Knights and Chivalry in Medieval Literature'.  I must admit that I didn't see the paper to be ending up the way it did when I started thinking about the thesis--I mean I knew from the start that I wanted to focus on knights in medieval society, but the fact that I ended up analyzing how knights were represented in literature was something I honestly did not see coming.

I kind of blame the professor who guided the whole seminar for leading me down the path of analyzing literature.  Seriously.  Because otherwise I wouldn't have even looked at literature at all.  And I did.

The paper is far from perfect, but it's my own paper and I got to shape its argument and battle with it and have writer's block over it and I'm proud of it.  (I swear I had writer's block!  Seriously.  My original argument: Chaucer's represenation of knights and chivalry is different!  And then one night I had an epiphany and the argument became 'knights and chivarly were portrayed for political and ...

Last week I went to see it at midnight on Wednesday night.

And there weren't a whole lot of people in the theater.  Really.  There were more people around for The Avengers midnight premiere last year than there was for the Star Trek premiere this year.  I wonder why that was.

Anyway, because it was midnight, and I usually have a bad habit of conking out half-way throughout the film (or, well, I was close to just closing my eyes and sleeping because I was exhausted), this first (notice how I said first) review will entirely be from my limited consciousness perspective.

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Because I haven't updated in forever since April, this entry will be mostly about things I did in April.

Los Angeles just seems like a completely different country compared to Orange County.  First of all, there's the problem of traffic, which I battled with for the majority of the time I drove in LA yesterday.

Anyway.  On April 21 I went to see Whose Line Is It Anyway.  I had a ticket and everything and the line was rather long, but I was hoping I would be able to get in to see the show.  To make a long story short, I didn't (kind of-ish).  Apparently they ran out of room so they moved all the people who wanted to go to the overfill room to the overfill room, which was just another room.  It was from that room that me and a bunch of other people saw the show being taped.  We saw it on TV screens.  Needless to say, it was a bit of a downer.

(And, also, it's a common thing for TV studios to give out a bunch of tickets for TV tapings because they want to get a full house?  IDK.  Their logic, while quite logical--they want to make sure all seats are filled--is, at the same time, quite illogical, because there were people there who were hoping to actually get into the taping room and see it live and not from the overfill room.)

So anyway, fast forward to around 10 PM--3/4 of the people who had been in the room already left, so it was just me, a group of four people, and two other people.  Then this guy comes in and says they need two people, because apparently there are two empty seats, and they need those filled for when they film the audience (IDK--something like that) and, considering how I was just the one person in my group (I'm suddenly reminded of the Muppets song Me Party--wow), I said I would go.  Because why not?  I needed a change.

So I got to be in the same room as the WLiiA cast for about fifteen minutes.

Overall, if I had the opportunity, I would probably go again, but I would get to the st...

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These are graphics I made for a challenge for Deep Blue Sea.  Feel free to skip.  Or you can look at the prettiness (half-prettiness.  As usual, I procrastinated on doing this challenge because of school and life and so some of them aren't my best.  Especially the wallpaper).

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Guys, finals are over!  I only had three finals (well, technically, two--the third one was a paper and I had to turn that in on-line).  Two of them that I had to take in class were scheduled for 8 AM and that just annoyed me.  I commute to school by bus so when a final or a class is scheduled at 8 AM I have to catch the early bus, and it takes me a super long time to actually wake up in the morning so I get up earlier than is probably needed because I just like taking time to get ready to leave.

I hung out with my friend last Saturday in order to celebrate St. Patrick's Day a day early, because she worked on St. Patrick's Day.  We watched the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera--I've already seen the film before, although she hadn't, and so it was her first time watching it.  Then we watched The Great Escape, because she said she hadn't seen the film in a long time.  We both fangirled over certain actors and just basically were amazed at how many amazing actors were in the film XD (no, really, that's what we did).

On St. Patrick's Day I went out to a local bar near my place and I had an Irish car bomb drink to celebrate.  Then I found out I was basically drinking the drink all wrong because I opted to pour the shot glass of whiskey (was it whiskey?) into the Guinness.  Apparently people actually dump the shot glass into the Guinness.  Oops.  Well, I have plenty more St. Patrick Day's in the future to drink an Irish car bomb the correct way.

Then I found out that Richard Attenborough was in a 1947 film called Brighton Rock.

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I've been meaning to post since the last time I posted (which I think was March 1) but life really did get in the way.  So in this post I'll give my thoughts on the last two episodes of Top Gear and the last three episodes of Being Human.

The Top Gear Africa adventure was amazing 0_0 and I loved that we got two episodes.  It didn't live up to the Vietnam special, IMO, but I'm extremely biased because that was the first episode of TG I ever saw so it kind of holds a special place in my heart.  But I think I did love the Africa special more than the Middle East.  And maybe possibly more than the other African special they did.

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Whose Line is going to be back! :D \o/

According to numerous articles, and Colin on Twitter (and Wayne and Drew as well), and this article as well, and this is like Christmas.  It feels like Christmas.  It's a surprise I wasn't expecting at all.

But the most important thing is this: Ryan and Colin are back on Whose Line!

(I really do need better WL icons.)

Oh my god school's been keeping me busy.  Basically, last week it was midterms week--I had two midterms that week, and I had another one this past Thursday, and I've been trying to concentrate more on not procrastinating and studying for tests and so I basically ignored updating my LJ so I could focus on school.

But now midterms are all done so I can have fun and reply to comments \o/

I did drop the comparative literature class a couple weeks back (well, it was during week 2 so it wasn't a couple weeks back)--I didn't really like it, and I didn't need it at all, and I didn't like how the majority of the students in the class were either whispering to each other or playing with their cell phones or not paying attention.  Also, I kind of want this quarter lighter because I know next quarter I'll have this upper division writing class for European Studies and I'll be probably busy with that class.  (I think.)

Another thing that happened this month was the grad expo.  I had the chance to order my cap and gown and all the tassels that go on the cap (I ordered a social science and a humanities one--even though I'm pretty sure I'll only be walking in one of them, because as a double major in different schools I can't walk in both the school of social science and school of humanities.  From what I've read so far on this website about commencement and walking).

I also ordered my class ring :D it looks so pretty (I can only assume) and I can't wait for it to get here so I actually hold it in my hands and (probably) wear it.  I only say 'probably' because when it comes to jewelry I'm crap at wearing them.  I have a ton of earrings that I only wear during special occasions that I don't wear the rest of the time because I just hate how they feel on my ears.  The only jewelry I actively wear--sometimes--are necklaces, but they have to be ordinary looking type of necklaces.  If they look too fancy, then I don't wear them.  If they look...

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Top Gear is back!! *flails*

It was wonderful to see the show back on TV (well, laptop. I live in America and I know BBC America will air it on Sunday-or is it Monday?-and they've been excellent at running new episodes in their entire length and, okay, sometimes they show The Shining for some insane reason, but they've been good lately. Although they still haven't shown season 3 of Ashes to Ashes and I doubt they ever will. TL;DR I hate waiting for British TV shows to air in my country).

Okay, back on topic: Top Gear. Amazing :D

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Seeing Harold and Maude on the big screen was perfect.  And the Cat Stevens songs were just amazing.

This was originally going to be a much longer post but I'm kind of tired and I don't feel like typing out a longer post and I just wanted to say how awesome it was to see Harold and Maude on the big screen.

So I saw Looper last Saturday and I'm getting around to typing up my thoughts now.

And this is my attempt at a more serious and detailed review rather than just saying, 'It was awesome!'
[Looper spoilers]
First, the storyline.  The film is set in the future (2044, I believe) where there are people called 'loopers', who have the job of killing anyone sent from the future back to the past.  And the system works well, until there's the problem of 'closing the loop', where a looper must kill their future self (basicaly, they get paid lots of money and get to retire early whilst knowing that in 30 years' time they'll be dead).

I kind of liked the idea that the future in the film had people who had 't.k.' (telekinesis--like Professor X).  The first time it was mentioned you just wrote it off in your mind because you just think, 'Oh, another element that makes the future in the film impressive' but it's used later as a major important plot point for a character, so I liked how it was used in the film.

I also liked the idea of time travel and people coming back from the future into the past.  There was a scene where this one looper failed to close his own loop and his future self was wandering around without a clue of what to do and gradually you see him start to become disfigured--you realize that his past self is basically getting tortured/killed and you see the ramifiications of that in the future person, and so to see that was actually quite interesting.

(I must admit the concept of time travel still makes me think of Back to the Future, but the way the writer for Looper handled it was a very refreshing thing to see and reminded me, on the most part, of Terminator, in regards to time travel, although it was much more complicated in Looper.)

I really liked the atmosphere of the future--it reminded me more of Bladerunner than anything else, with the idea of the future being exactly like our w...

Pictures! \o/

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I'm back from Vegas.  I actually got back on the 15th and I'm just getting around now to posting about my vacation there.  I had a really great week there.  Also, unlike the actual Vegas Vacation movie (which I really don't recommend because it was the only Vacation movie starring Chevy Chase that wasn't written by John Hughes and it was extremely un-funny), I didn't gamble away all my money :P but I did win some, which I'll explain further in this post.

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I had a plan to re-watch the first episode of Buffy season 4 whilst going to UCLA in an attempt to see if I couldn't spot places they used for the episode.

Which, you know, I didn't ever get around to doing because I was so busy but now I'm re-watching it (I'm using that term loosely--I may fast forward through the episode because I've already seen it so many times and I just want to see the parts of UCLA they've used).

So far I've spotted the main area of UCLA, a corner of Ackerman Union, Bruin walk (I think that's what it was called), the long walk up to Powell Library, the interior of Powell Library (which looks even more amazing in person), and the exterior of Royce Hall (which was right across from Powell Library).  I'm amused that the large bear statue was hidden from view by a construction screen (otherwise it would have been seen).  Which, IDK, maybe that was the point: to hide it?

I just find it amusing to just watch it and be all like, 'Hey, I walked those steps before!  I've walked in the library before!' (Had to anyway, because the class had been held on the third floor of the library).

So, yeah, I'm amused XD

the only thing UCI has going for it is that the exteriror of the library was used in the film Poltergeist in a quick, single shot, and in this one Planet of the Apes film all these apes ran around the social science area.

There's a person in my neighborhood who has an Irish wolfhound.

If you've never seen an Irish wolfhound in person, they're basically huge, gigantic dogs.  Almost as big as a small pony, I think.  (IMO.  I'm not exactly sure.)  All I know is that they're very big.

(What's more amusing is that the person also owns a small tiny dog, so he walks this Irish wolfhound and a small dog and it's just amusing to see the two dogs walking next to each other side-by-side.)

If you need a size comparison, this is a picture of me and an Irish wolfhound (which my brother took when we went to this Irish festival/fair in June and they had a bunch of Irish wolfhounds there).

I just can't imagine owning an Irish wolfhound.  They're so large and big and if you have one you can't leave any food on the table or else it'll eat it.

So, yeah, I just like how my neighborhood happens to have a person who owns the dog. 

In other news, I got a B in my Russian class.

Which I'm extremely happy about.  In order to make the class fulfill the language requirement I had to have gotten a C or better and, you know, I got a B, so that basically means I'm done with my language requirement and I can focus on taking more important classes this upcoming year (which will hopefully be my last.  It actually has to be my last--as a transfer student I had three years to complete any majors and this upcoming year will be my third year).

A couple days ago I re-watched the film Jaws.

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