In brief:

This is the last semester of undergraduate for me, as well as the first semester of graduate school. I'll graduate in May of '08 with a M.A. and officially attempt to be a grown up.

As of early January, moved into yet another new house. This is the fifth place I've had to move into since I started college in fall of '03 (yes, I'm counting my parents' house in Memphis, where I evacuated to for Katrina, because I had to officially move in and live there for that entire semester).

My roommates just got a dog. We named him Dante, after the street we live on. He's part pug, part something else, absolutely adorable, even though he pees everywhere and breaks skin when he bites (which is all the time).

My friends (her: I've known since I was eleven, he: I've known since the first night I was a freshman at Tulane) just broke up. They've been together on and off about three years, and we all assumed that they were going to get married. Apparently, not the case. She's not taking it well, and I'm torn between comforting her and reliving all my past breakups. In turn, this has made me fiercely contemplative of my life as a whole. Never really a fun thing.

I turn twenty-two on March 5. How the hell did that happen?

A week later is the three year anniversary of my current relationship. This is not an exciting thought. It hasn't been for a long time. I'm somewhat under the impression that I've wasted the entirety of my college love affairs on one person who really doesn't care for me all that much and I, in turn, don't care for either. On a good day, I love him, but it's been a long time since I've had a good day.

I saw Prince in concert in Vegas for New Year's Eve. Really, how can anything else this entire year top that?

We woke up on Wednesday morning to a mouth-watering Indian buffet in the Garden District of New Orleans and ended Wednesday night with a freshly prepared banquet of Chinese goodness at my parents' place in a ghetto fabulous part of east Memphis.

This is what I ate on Thanksgiving: roasted duck, soy sauce chicken, honey peacan shrimp, seasoned snowcrabs, mushrooms and scallops, hawaiian nut squid, fresh greens of endless assortment, sauteed fish, and Baskin Robins ice cream cake.

This and only this is the reason I absolutely adore coming home for the holidays.

My cell phone no longer works. I will be buying a new one when I go home for Thanksgiving. Until then, email at jqiu@tulane.edu will be the best way to reach me.

Stupid shittyass ESPN sports show featuring stupid shittyass loud as fuck horrible Cowboy Mouth on my fucking quad while I'm in my fucking class playing their wretched music and making their wretched sports announcements and talking about stupid fucking football when all I want to do is to BE ABLE TO HEAR MY FUCKING PROFESSOR WHEN SHE SPEAKS.

And Brad Pitt's going to be filming a movie down here. Or already is. All I know is that they're going to be creating major traffic problems right by where I always drive.

Goddamn famous people.

On Saturday, September 16, the world premier of All the King's Men will be held at McAlister Auditorium at Tulane University.

How utterly fucking badass.

Political drama is always a good subject for an interesting discussion, but there's something especially enthralling about southern politics. We seem to cultivate levels of blatant corruption and criminal behavior that could be construed as bad taste by the rest of the union (not to saying that politics on any level are clean, the south just has a bad habit of not being able to hide its misconduct and scandals). Ah, Louisiana. From our current mayor, who is the only politician I've heard refer to Air Force One as a pimpmobile, to "Dollar Bill" Jefferson, the Congressman who had the National Gaurd fly in to specifically check on his house in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (because God knows that we didn't need them doing more beneficial things, like, say, oh, I don't know, keeping entire neighborhoods of people from horrible watery deaths)-- not to ensure that the house was there, but as we all know now, to make sure that the thousands and thousands of stolen dollars he had hidden in his freezer had gone untouched.

If anyone is interested in sordid political stories, read up on the Long family. That Louisiana political dynasty has volumes dedicated to it, and for good reason. They were about as ridiculous as they were amazing. And if you're not inclined to be the reading kind, go watch this movie when it finally comes out. It's supposed to be rockin'.

Jude Law, Anthony Hopkins, Kate Winslet, Sean Penn, and many many many other talented and beautiful faces will be partying down on my school's campus on two days. Unfortunately, I was not quick enough to snag tickets to the premier, so I'll just hang around outside and stare at famous people for awhile. How strangely exciting. Somewhat amusing, too, considering that our auditorium has the shittiest seats and speaker systems known to man. We are not a classy bunch, no we're not.

Other news: I'm still alive and managing. Updates pending.

Happy Katrina Birthday! Wheeee!

Go national disasters. It's your birthday. It's your birthday. Boogie down. Oh yeah.

Whiskey nights, the kind that hit you hard in the back of the throat and burn all of the slow long way down. A metallic taste under the tongue and a constant drench to the skin. New Orleans, New Orleans. Bayou blessings and thunderstorms that shudder the sinking ground. There's such a stink to it, vices turned virtue, and all I think about is how for the first time in a very long time, I feel like I've come home.

Love that isn't quite a lie because it was never really love.

Distance does not make the heart grow fonder, but rather, makes the mind go blinder. What you cannot remember seeing, you cannot remember abhoring.

I feel like this is a theory I can use to every possible aspect of my life right now.

Awkward is:

my mother stumbling across several empty bottles of wine hidden in the back of my closet, my blaming their existence on my friends, and theensuing conversation of whether or not it would be rude of her to request that my alcoholic friends not treat my bedroom like a bar.

It's funny that it's moments like this that I feel like my life has changed the most.

I want to make myself fall in love with you.