Winter funtimes, baking, romance, and a fuck you.

Internet! I love you. You help me procrastinate. (It is an unhealthy relationship but a satisfying one.)

Today I worked on homework and I started in on making holiday gifts. I am polling my friends on their favorite Disney / Pixar / whatever animated characters, and making them in tiny clay form. Starting off with the girls in the suite - Jen, Brooke, Sarah; respectively, Prince Naveen (in frog form; I didn't actually ask Jen what she wanted but she's a traditional animation major who aspires to work at Disney, and she saw The Princess and the Frog at an early screening and adores it, so I decided to go with him for hers), Stitch, and Nemo. Jen made a cute little fireplace out of a cardboard box last weekend, with painted pink and green and purple and blue bricks and a stocking for each of us labeled with our name and tacked into place. People have been dropping candy and things into the stockings all week.

It's candy cane season, which is the greatest season in the year. While some girls are obsessed with chocolate, I find mint to be my weakness. Peppermint mochas are back at Starbucks, whoo! Hot chocolate, too, that's a good thing about winter.

And my window is still open all the time. I wake up freezing and love it.

Winterrrr.

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I made cookies last night; I found this great recipe for weird little ginger-and-chocolate cookies from a site to which I subscribe. The recipe made like fifty-five cookies, and tonight there are four left sitting on the plate in the kitchen. I guess that means this one's a success.

I really like baking. I like finding new recipes that sound yummy and trying them out. I don't do it enough; I need to bake more, it's fantastic for stress relief.

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You know, that's pretty damned insensitive of you. I know that the foundation sculpture show at the end of the year is judged by the fine art department, and I am not as forward-thinking-weird-modern-artist-minded as the fine arts majors - and frankly, I think it's a good thing that I'm not, because I wouldn't be getting ahead in my career if I were - but I'd like to think I have some chance of impressing. I've barely started my project but I am confident in it, more so than I have been for most of the classwork I've been doing all semester, and my professor knows, even without having seen the finished product, that mine is one he will want to enter into the show. I was actually feeling pretty good until you said to me nonchalantly, "You're not going to win, you know. Last year's winner was a pile of glass bottles glued together." I know I am not going to win. It has been ingrained into my mind almost my entire life that I am not a winner, but that's why I keep pushing myself harder and harder. It makes the victories that much sweeter. Here you are sitting on the side, taking the lazy way out of everything and giving up quickly, and then turning your eyes to me and telling me that I can't make it. What? Are you doing this to reassure yourself that you're not the only loser? Grow the fuck up.

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Although it goes against my logic and my will, I am a hopeless romantic. While I am quick to scoff at sappy love stories, I wish one would happen to me.

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I wish I wish I wish I wish.

Good night.

I am off to find a candy cane just as soon as I've published this post, 'tis the season for peppermint-induced cavities,
Olivia