Taking Religious Studies at SFU

During this past Spring semester I enrolled in Introduction to Religious Studies at SFU, where I am still attending. I thought, "hey, I liked Comparative Civilizations in high school, and this is kinda like that. I like studying religion, although I never really studied it to be honest. I will like this course". Well, it was pretty much what I expected. It was very intro, and very basic - the textbook basically covered world religions and that was what consisted of the distance ed course. Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Judaism, Islam...yeah. As part of the curriculum we were also required to read Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins. It's actually still sitting on my book shelf.

With distance ed courses and really long, boring texts, it's really rather difficult for me to wrap my head around them at home as I get distracted quite easily. So obviously despite my attempts to finish all the readings for all 12 weeks, by the end of the semester I had successfully read the first 4 weeks of readings, excluding the novel (which I had read the first 8 pages of out of 400).

By the time exam week rolled around, I had no intention whatsoever to finish those readings. I mean, who didn't know bits here and there about Moses? Karma? The chapter on Shinto was fairly short though just as detailed - but growing up in Japan proved the time spent reading that portion of the text was a waste as it was all everything I knew already anyway. As I figured the primary interpretation of the various world religions were generally all the same, I turned to the one source of information I turn to with a thirst for knowledge - Wikipedia. Profs will tell you and me all the time that Wikipedia is in fact not a reliable source of scholastic information - or information in general, for that matter. But I took my chances and studied for my exam via the site. It was pretty helpful, I must say, though I obviously wouldn't recommend this studying this way for obvious reasons.

With the 2 papers we had to write and the online discussion we had to take part in, I walked away from the class with an A-. I know I shouldn't be proud of this but it did make me pretty happy, as half way through the course I had realized that I was taking an elective I did not need (I miscalculated the amount of credits) thus piling on more readings and papers and exams for myself. The GPA boost did nothing.

Oh, and in case you were wondering how I bypassed the question regarding the novel I didn't quite finish in the exam, make Google (GOOGLE, not like that piece of shit HotBot) your friend if not already (and if even possible) - it works luxurious wonders.

(Ir)rational fear?

I have a fear that is somewhat debatable in terms of whether it is rational or irrational. And that fear is of extra-terrestrials. And I don't mean like the one above whom Drew Barrymore is kissing, I mean like Alien vs. Predator extra-terrestrials. Like zip-right-out-of-your-gut-making-a-bloody-mess-for-everyone-to-see-and-freaking-
everyone-out extra-terrestrials.

I guess this all began when I kept on waking up in the morning to find a small scratch on my nose. This happened several times, it was always around the area of my nose and it was the same brown scratch, always around the same length as well. Just one scratch. I just figured that I must've scratched myself in my sleep, but I found it odd that it was always on my nose and it was always the same depth.

A few days prior to my discovery of these marks on the nose, my dad was talking to me about these sheep on a farm that had been found dead by the farmer one morning, and all he found among them was a small perfect hole in each one where the blood had been assumed to sucked out of. There was no bloody mess like you would expect from a raid of wolves or coyotes, just empty farm animals, all (seemingly) perfect and fluffy on the outside.

So obviously I came to the reasonable conclusion that aliens were coming into my home at night and retrieving samples from my nose, leaving the evidential scar.

Although, I must admit, I have not found any scratches on my nose for the past year and this specific fear has in fact subsided. But it's not something I will forget or pass as an impossible situation. The aliens, they have their ways.

Cosmo obsession

Maybe the word "obsession" is a little extreme, but I am ashamed to say that I am somewhat of a regular buyer of these magazines. Okay, maybe I'm not even a regular - but I do have a habit of automatically grabbing for one whenever I'm dropping by my local London Drugs. Especially if I know I have nothing else to read that night.

I'm not even sure why I don't even have a subscription yet, because I would have saved several dollars in total if I did. Although I'm not even sure why I would have a subscription, let alone read it every couple months when it merely talks about the same subjects repeatedly - reading men and how to have better sex. It's pretty much been the same since I began to read them a few years back, with the exception of its much more graphical nature when explaining sex positions for the best orgasm.

But it's the city girl's bible, the city girl's best friend.

Rants from a sales associate (though not all are fair)

I work at a women's clothing store. So that means I pretty much fold all day, for minimum wage and a 40% discount. I'm usually put on closing shifts, and let me say that I rarely get out on time, cleaning up after everyone, especially during this summer season with the mass amount of tourists on weekends. As a result, on behalf of all managers and sales associates of clothing stores (unofficially), I would just like to let all customers know a few things.

1. You CANNOT place any of our merchandise on the floor of the changing rooms - are you fucking retarded? They are products consumers BUY, with MONEY, ergo you can refrain from throwing them onto the dirty floor you stomp on when you're done trying on the clothes. Dumbass.

2. When you are finished trying on clothes, you absolutely do NOT leave them in the goddamn changing rooms, especially if you have just finished trying on 15 tops, unless you happen to be one lazyass pig. This goes with hangers as well, for those of you that think that leaving hangers in the rooms is okay because we associates apparently don't mind leaving the hangers in there and letting it pile up through the day.

3. Does our store look like a gas stop to you? Our store is not a place for you to leave your half-consumed fraps on random shelves and counters in the store. You do know you're lucky that we are allowing you into our store with that shit, yes?

4. If we tell you we do not have it, for the love of god, we don't have it.

5. When you ask us, "do you work here?", it just makes you look like an idiot especially when we are wearing our staff tags and we happen to be organizing a certain rack of clothing. Do you seriously think a customer would be doing both of these?

6. It also makes you look like an idiot when we have to ask you not to sit on the merchandise/tables/ladders, when we have a perfect bench just few feet away.

I mean, I get it. You're shopping, it's your day off, you're on vacation, yada yada. But it seriously takes no effort at all to abide by the 6 points mentioned above. Being a customer and shopper doesn't give you the right to be a lazy asshole.

My love-hate relationship with horror flicks.

I have one. Yes. I love watching horror movies all the time, whether it's after seeing an attractive trailer for one at Cineplex or randomly finding one on Movie Central when I simply have nothing better to do. But seriously, with my imagination I should stop for my sanity's sake - recently after watching the movie The Strangers, I had a lot of trouble closing my eyes in the shower, let alone to wash my face as I was afraid of The Man in the Mask appearing in my bathroom. Yeah, just popping out of nowhere. Y'know, just standing there, waiting to smash the glass door encasing me to let either Dollface or Pin-Up Girl stab me to death.


I know what that sounds like, but it is what it is. It's either this or having the girl from The Grudge going through my hair with her pale hands without my permission. For days after watching the American adaptation of The Ring, I was worried I was going to see her just pop up somewhere - even outside my window (and I live on the 18th floor in an apartment - and I don't think we ever saw the girl fly). I know it sounds unhealthy, but I swear I am sane and I do not suffer from any panic or anxiety attacks of any kind. Mostly it's the J-Horror flicks that do it though. I mean, come on, how would you end up if all you ever saw whenever you closed your eyes were pale Asian girls with long black hair crawling on the floor toward you as if she has just suffered a major accident causing all these weird angles in all her joints? Not pretty.

(There would have been more pictures, but I just couldn't do it. I don't think I have the courage to place pictures of Sadako/Samara on my blog. Ever.)

I am not PC savvy.

Although I really wish I was considering the recent conditions of my laptop during the past few weeks. In a nutshell, like the naive and careless owner of this Gateway laptop that I am, I had let my computer become super-duper-foot-shoved-up-ass infected with all sorts of nasty pests. There was definitely some adware lurking here and there, as I continued to be bombarded with sudden popups on Internet Explorer while browsing on Firefox. I had of course come to the conclusion that uninstalling IE from the system would do the trick, but surely enough, I was not correct. Furthermore, I kept on getting these error messages that would not go away along with Windows disallowing me from turning on my automatic updates.

Thus I had set out to download any anti-virus program I could find to quickly scan my computer to retrieve my free and undisturbed use of my computer. I first went with Norton's, I'm not sure exactly why I had went with that choice in the first place, but I went ahead and downloaded and scanned the system as soon as it was installed. 25 hours later, the results show 15 threats and over 400 infections. I'm not too keen on what that means precisely, but I know enough to know that that's not so good. Did it fix the problem? Nope. And what's worse is (and this is the worst) I later find out my browser is failing to load all the biggie (and super vital) websites - Hotmail, Google, Blogger (explaining the gap between updates), Livejournal, Yahoo!, you name it. This is where I somewhat began to panic because I depend on Google a HUGE amount as a visual art student. It was during this time that I had to use HotBot for a search engine and my boyfriend's PC to check my email. So after the failure of Norton, I went and downloaded AVG, avast!, and AntiVir, yeah, all three of them, as one after another failed to remove the one pest that banned me from using Google. It was one of the three that finally did it, and alas, here I am.

Getting my laptop infected was a scary thing - I didn't want to turn to getting it reformatted again as I did last summer, with my mom finding out and getting angry with me for downloading so much crap (which is of course true). And not being able to use Google would have been a somewhat life-altering situation when the fall semester rolls along, as I would have been forced to retort to staying in the studio late to use the mac lab in there for my googling luxuries. I love that studio, but I would rather not spend any more time than I have to in a place located in the middle of hobo town. Not something I looked forward to.