Only two more weeks until it’s time for finals! I had a pretty normal week with some fun moments and a lot of work done.

Tuesday night I had my Psi Chi club meeting and then I went and played some board games in the bridge lounge. We played Wingspan, which is a pretty fun game about collecting birds and building a wildlife preserve to collect points. Somehow I haven’t lost in the six or seven rounds we’ve played over the semester.

I really enjoy these moments with friends although recently I haven’t had a chance to get them as often. The late nights in Sto-Jo are always pretty chill and a pleasant way to get away from the stress of the semester.

I hope to take time and savor the last few weeks here before the summer strikes.

Hey! This blog includes major spoilers for the ending of Dance Dance Dance. I want to talk about the results of the murder mystery, the resolution of the characters, and the meaning behind the narrator’s vision of skeletons. If you haven’t finished the reading yet, then I would highly suggest not continuing forward.

The Night Belongs to Us – J Edward Neill

This last reading section was crazy and mind-twisting, although not entirely unexpected. There are still so many questions left with the ending, and I’m not even sure whether or not the narrator is alive.

Last time, the narrator got a vision with 6 skeletons in the room, relating characters that would or have died in the story. His old friend the Rat, Kiki, Mei, Dick North, Gotanda, and one more. It’s unclear to me why he is being shown these things and how each of these deaths connect. Dick North seems to have died in a random accident, and we still really don’t have solid confirmation for the murder of Mei. We can now be pretty sure that Gotanda killed Kiki, himself, and could have killed Mei, but Gotanda was never in Hawaii to have any connection with Dick North. Really the whole meaning of Dick North’s death is lost on me, maybe it shows the fragility of life and how even those who seem like good people can be gone in a moment.

The narrator’s ending was also left unclear. Was he the 6th skeleton? Perhaps the 6th skeleton was the sheep man, or are those two the same thing? In a much more tragic way, it could be Yumiyoshi, who steps into to the wall from the darkness as he wakes up. If this were the case, he would be left even worse than where he started with truly nobody left for him. My conclusion is that both him and the sheep man are dead as the 6th skeleton, one and the same.

I still can’t wrap my head around how it is almost the end of my freshman year. It feels like it was so long but went by so quick at the same time. These next few weeks I feel like are going to drag as I do not have much work currently and only have 1 in person exam on finals week. As much as I like the no work, it would be nice to have some to do to help pass the time. I have been watching S.W.A.T on Netflix recently to pass the time. Hopefully the weather finally stays warm, and we do not get too much rain so I can enjoy being outside these last few weeks. It is going to be so weird to go home and not see my friends every day, I will definitely be making trips this summer. It does seem today will be the last of the cold hopefully. I still don’t understand how it is 36 in the middle of April like come on Ohio.

I am excited to go home this weekend and get to spend some time with my family as it will be the last time I go home until I move out. My whole family, which isn’t very big, is coming to celebrate Easter at our house. I do not get to see my cousins very often as they are younger than me and still very busy in high school with sports and traveling for sports. It is always a fun time when we get to see them. Besides lunch on Sunday with them, the rest of the weekend I plan to relax. I am getting my nails done Friday and that’s the only thing I have planned for the weekend. My sister is coming home too which is nice since I do not see her very often either. This is an old picture of my family but like I said we are pretty small. 

Going home this weekend is the last that I am going home until my dad moves me out. That is insane. All I keep thinking about is that I have an Anatomy and Physiology exam next week, then the following week I have a lab practical, after that are my two in-person finals… and then I’m done! I feel like the spring semester goes by way faster than the fall semester. I checked the weather this morning and saw that after today, it is going to be in the 60s and higher for the rest of the semester. That is so exciting! I can’t wait for summer, lying by the pool, and spending time with my friends back home. I will probably be making trips out to Ohio to visit some of the friends that I’ve made here, or maybe they can venture into Pennsylvania. Here is a picture of my stepdad cleaning the pool.

I’m excited to go home on Friday to spend the weekend with my family for Easter. I know we are having dinner with my grandma on Saturday night, and then my dad is making another Easter dinner on Sunday. Though next Tuesday I have an exam in a class that I am borderline failing, so I need to be studious when I go home. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, I do not seem to study so well when I am at home. Maybe since it is supposed to be nice, I can go sit outside and study without any distractions. I’m always excited to see what my friends get in their baskets. I’ve never gotten a basket, so I enjoy seeing what other people get. Here is the Easter Bunny that never pays a visit to my house…

This month is full of birthdays for the people around me—two of my older sisters, one of my younger brothers, and my friend Samya all have birthdays this month. So this vacation is also kind of a birthday celebration for all three of them. My brother’s turning 18, and I already know he’s finna turn up while we’re down there—he’s been talking about it since December when we first found out. Samya and my brother actually share the same birthday! So for Samya, me and my friends planning a birthday dinner or some cake for her before she heads back home to celebrate with her family. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on in the middle of all the studying I’m doing for finals, and I’m really thankful for that.

This is the week I go on vacation with my family, and I’m so excited! That also means I want to have all my work done before Wednesday so I can really relax. I can’t wait to see what we end up doing down there. I know we’ll be going to the Great Wolf Lodge, and you’ll definitely catch me in the wave pool and floating around the lazy river. My family also loves checking out everything on the strip, so I’m excited to see what my parents have planned for us.

So much has developed in my lab recently, and I’m loving every minute of it. I feel so engaged in the science and I get to help the graduate students to make what I feel is a very meaningful contribution.

Throughout this semester, I helped with what was originally one study, but now has turned into three. The most meaningful of these to me has been TEA-REx, which explores neural synchrony in parenting, comparing collaboration and competition. The doctoral student who designed the study has been working on this for over a year now and in a few weeks on the 26th I get to be the one other person to help run the very first lab visit and collect our first data-points. This week, I ran a mock-visit with two graduate students as volunteers to practice the protocol and prepare for the real deal. Although I am apart of BE-RAD, this study is uses the Casto Lab space, and if there are any psychology/neuroscience people reading this, I would encourage you to check out her lab! There is a good chance she is looking for summer/fall undergraduates, and you get to work with a combination of the sciences, particularly with the fNIRS device.

Frontiers

I’ve also been helping with another study called FISH, which is a pilot study and a segment of the Student Life Study here on campus. This one is much more simple than the other two and has undergraduate freshman performing a conversation task with their parents and friends, as we monitor them for changes in their behavioral and biological synchrony. I also helped another graduate student with a literature search for a paper they were writing and am currently pondering how to create a questionnaire to monitor specific parenting styles.

Yesterday was Palm Sunday, which means of course you and your entire family have to eat ice cream “Palm Sundaes” for dinner… We stole this tradition from another family we’re friends with and I had a lot of fun customizing my own sundae to perfectly match my taste.

My Sundae started with a chocolate bubble waffle and Graeter’s Midnight Snack ice cream, which has chocolate covered pretzels, peanut butter cups, and brownies mixed in. On top I included fresh strawberries, whipped cream, and of course a frozen Reese’s™ Thin Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup.

My dogs even got their own special sundaes with Ben & Jerry’s dog ice cream topped with whipped cream and a peanut butter filled pretzel bite!

Life’s short, have ice cream for dinner.