Thanksgiving and Black Friday

Have you ever been so happy, but you don't know why? You feel as if you're on top of the world, but you're not sure what change of events occurred or why you were unhappy in the first place. It's a funny feeling, I'll give you that. It's like your insides were replaced and all of the anguish and pain somehow faded away. I don't think I'll ever know the true cause of this feeling, but who cares about the roots behind it when all you can do is smile?

I'm a wee bit late with the Thanksgiving wishes, but I hope you all had a lovely Thanksgiving filled with tons of food, laughter, and family. <3

I actually still need to upload some more pictures from my camera to my computer so I'm in a bit of a photo drought again.

Until then, enjoy some of my long overdue pictures that I took while I was in Las Vegas! This was taken inside The Venetian, which was definitely my favorite casino. The picture shows the shopping center that was there which featured the streets of Venice. They even had the gondola rides which I found particularly wonderful.

Anyhow, today is Black Friday! If you don't live in America, let me give you a synopsis on Thanksgiving/Black Friday. Basically Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November. It's celebrated in the US and Canada, except Canada celebrates it in October and doesn't recognize Black Friday. But Thanksgiving is a time typically based around giving thanks for what you have and who you spend each day with. Everyone gets off, and it's a time for family to reunite and enjoy a day together. I also see it as a time to watch beautiful parades on TV along with a time to eat tons of delicious food for dinner. The famous Thanksgiving dinner typically consists of turkey, mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, corn, and cranberries, but of course there's always more. ;D

That being said, Thanksgiving is always tons of fun and many great leftovers always come out of it. Every year my family hosts a Thanksgiving party, and this year I spent it watching movie after movie. I ended up seeing Juno, Elf, Kung Fu Panda, and Wall-E. My brain felt like it was going to explode.

And since Thanksgiving is around 1 month away from the holidays, it's typically known as the start of the holiday season. So every year, the day after Thanksgiving is known as "Black Friday." It's basically a day where everything in stores, including TVs, phones, computers, clothes, etc., is marked down. Lots of people don't sleep, or they wake up at around 4AM to go shopping. If you go out to shop too late, everything will be gone! And this year was my first year of actually going out. I left my house at around midnight and came back at 2. Then I went out again at 10 after I slept for a few hours. ;) At midnight there were tons of good sales like buy 1 get 1 free and 40% off everything. I got three sweaters/cardigans for $61.20 which is fairly cheap seeing as they were all $40 at original price. :) I wish I stopped by H&M and Forever 21 though.

(The photo above features my another one of my favorite casinos that was called "New York, New York." It basically mimicked the streets of New York City on the inside, and on the outside, there was a huge roller coaster. I ended up riding it, and it was tons and tons of fun. You could see the city while you were riding it which made it even cooler.)

When I went out at 10, I bought a video camera (that I'll be getting for Christmas!), some sportswear for when the days get colder at track, and a pair of shoes. :)

After that, I went to Emily's house once again to work on our atom hotel project. We basically have to build a hotel for electrons that represents quantum mechanics. It's basically been a huge pain, but we're nearing the end. Maybe I'll take pictures when we're finished.

And after, I went to a sushi buffet with my parents, brother, and cousin. Everything was so delicious there: from the rolls to the udon to the hibachi to the crepes. Mmm.

(This was inside the casino entitled "Caesar's Palace." It was another one of my favorites, too! Inside, there were all of these beautiful structures like this one.)

So, if you went out shopping today, did you buy anything that you really like? Or did you buy presents for your family/friends? :) I didn't buy anything for anyone else as I'll be doing that later in December, but I got tons of new things that I love. I'll most likely upload photos later.

(The streets of Las Vegas/a fake Eiffel Tower!)

Enjoy the rest of your weekend! <3 Bye!

The One That Got Away

When you leave this town, will we still talk? Will we ever see each other again? Will we pick up where we left off or pretend like we've never met each other? You say that everything will be alright, but how can I be sure? How can I believe you after all of these times that you've pushed me down? How can I believe you after you've torn me apart? I can't. And that's what scares me. I'm so scared of the future and all that it'll bring. But this is life, and life stops for no one.

I wish this picture turned out better than it did. It was overcast that day so the colors aren't too great. I might mess around with it later to try to make it better. But the inspiration for this was seeing all of the leaves turn to orange and red and begin to fall. It's autumn's high point right now meaning that it's extra beautiful around here. But soon, the leaves will all be gone, and winter will start. I'm not sure I'm ready for winter coldness. It's already 30-40 degrees around here.

And I'm sorry for taking so long to post again. I planned on making a post sometime this past week, but I've been super busy and exhausted. Plus, I'm too lazy to move my pictures from my camera to my computer which is why this post will ignore the things that happened last week (i.e. my friend's surprise party, my trip to the city, my tennis banquet, etc.). But I'll make a post on those soon, I swear!

On a different note, school is horrifying. The first quarter ended the other day, and I never want to go back there. My grades were terrible compared to last year's. But I know I can still try to bring them up this quarter. I. Will. Do. This.

Anyhow, Thanksgiving's on Thursday! I'm so excited that the days seem to go by even slower than they did before. Thanksgiving's a time of happiness, family, love, friends, food, shopping (Black Friday!), and so much more. I can't wait to sit down and have an amazing Thanksgiving dinner then stay up late/wake up early to go Black Friday shopping. :) If you live in America, what are you doing for Thanksgiving? And if you don't, do you wish you celebrated Thanksgiving?

Alright, well I need to go study! SAT IIs are coming closer, and I haven't even started studying yet. :(
And if I don't come on here before Thursday, I hope all of you have a wonderful Thanksgiving. <3

11/11/11

Even though it's 11/11/11, we shouldn't be too caught up in all of its glory. What we don't realize is that each day won't occur again for another 100 years, not only special days like 11/11/11. We can't ever get back yesterday, and soon enough, today will be just a memory, too. But the important thing is to just remember to take each day and life it to its fullest. Take a risk, go on an adventure, stay up until 4AM watching videos when you have school the next day. Do all of it, and think of more. Simply live, enjoy, and sit back for the ride.

Happy 11/11/11! I've been waiting for this day for over three years, and now that it's here, I'm not exactly sure what to think. I adored writing the date today on all of my papers--the unity of the numbers made me smile, for really no particular reason. But me being the superstitious person that I am, stared down the clock endlessly until it struck 11:11:11AM while in physics class. As soon as it did, I gave a little smile and made my wish. I hope it comes true. I really hope it does.

I want to keep this post short as I have pictures and a whole rant to write, but I want to keep it for the end of the weekend/early next week. I think it'll ruin the mood now, and I have a friend's surprise party tomorrow and a tennis banquet on Sunday, so the post should be more interesting than most of my posts here now. But basically to sum it all up, junior year is tiring. The end of the first quarter was today, and let me tell you, this is not exactly how I wanted to finish, grade-wise that is. But I'm promising myself that I'll try harder, so I hope things work out in the end. And other than that, I bought a few new things that I want to share. But I'll save all of that for later. (As a spoiler, I bought two beautiful, beautiful books today. I'm $30 less rich, but it was so worth it. I can't wait to read them.)

I hope you all had an amazing 11/11/11. :)
Have a wonderful weekend!

Haikus and Halloween

I scare myself sometimes with my thoughts. I think of such unhappy things that I start getting the chills and feel the need to just sit down and take some time to cry. The unpleasantness that my mind undergoes affects my entire soul, filling my eyes with hate instead of love and fear instead of strength. I wish that these times would go away. I wish that I could wake up and realize that all of this was just a dream. All of this pain, this sorrow, this difficulty, all of it was made up. I wish that I could just find my way out of this nightmare, for the nights are beautiful, but the mornings lead the way.

I am so into writing haikus lately. I feel my mind thinking and breathing in a 5-7-5 meter. You probably think it's weird, but it makes me happy, for some odd reason. I used to hate writing haikus because of all of the restrictions, and now I feel like it's a sort of puzzle, testing my abilities to manipulate words and meanings into such a small margin. About the picture above though, please excuse it. First off, I'd like to move "broken chains fall down" up to the top of the haiku, and then this was all just a really quick test to see how it'd look like if I were to scan in some images. My scanner's not yet connected to my computer though.

So this past Monday was Halloween! (It's literally felt like ages ago, no joke.) I was super lame and dressed up as what I did last year, but to tell you the truth, I wasn't even planning on going trick-or-treating until a few hours before I left. I ended up being an M&M. :) I only went with Emily because everyone else ditched us. Yes, long story short, our group of 8 became 2 in a matter of 30 minutes. So cool.

But it's okay because we were out for a few hours and had a lovely bonding experience. Just kidding, it was actually freezing outside and our hands were about to fall off from the cold. But overall, it was really fun.

I also got some UNICEF money so that made me happy. :) Basically every year, I go trick-or-treating, and while I go, I ask if people want to donate to UNICEF. All the money goes to charity which is really nice. :)

Other than that, the rest of the week slowly tore me apart, piece by piece. I found myself staying up late again, and this morning, I took the SATs. If you don't live in America, the SATs is this test that basically tests your knowledge. It's basically essential at this day and age to take the SATs if you want to get into college. If not the SATs, then the ACTs, though the SATs are more national. Just an FYI, the SATs take 4+ hours to finish. So by the time I was finally done the 10th section, I wanted to scream with joy. Such an amazing feeling when you put your pencil down after that final question. :') Too bad I'll most likely be retaking them in January or March. Fml.

But I have so much homework to do that I haven't already done yet. Tomorrow's going to be brutal, but I'm sure that I'll somehow manage to get through it (AKA I'll stay up until 3-4 to finish everything). In the mean time, I'm extremely exhausted and worn out from this whole week, so I'll leave this at that.

Have an amazing rest of the weekend!

Don't forget to turn your clocks back tomorrow morning. :)