Bricks

My replacement high school class ring was finally shipped and arrived at my parents' house late last week. It's nice to be able finally to close the door on everything from nearly a year ago. When I sat down to type this, I glanced over at the boyfriend's iPod and although muted, it was on "Jane" by Ben Folds...it's been silently working its way through Ben Folds Live - another irony as it was my "Get Over Tom" CD.

I was hoping to go home this weekend and get my high school ring, as well as my CMU ring, and a few other things I'd like to keep close, but I'm not sure if that's going to happen. If it does, it'll make Thursday an even longer day and I'll come back to CMU on Saturday.

I realized the other day how often February has been a strained month for my relationships - it was when "that thing" happened with Charles, when I broke up with Matt, when Tom broke up with me. I'm guessing there are a number of other factors that could be correlated to produce a nice profile of how I'm affected by - lots of things - blahblahblahblah...not sure where I was going with that.

Spring break is going to be REALLY nice. I looked at my homework schedule last night, and I'll have from 20 Feb - 20 March to do one CS project, until 29 March for another one, and beyond those I'll just have some graph theory work and some reading to do for the IR classes. Really what that means is that a) I won't have to drag a laptop to Germany and b) I'll be able to do the other stuff on the plane and won't have to actually be working on homework the whole break. And after spending Freshman and Sophomore years that way - it's going to be perfect.

Changing the subject -

I had a conversation the other week with another female engineer who remarked about how much easier it is to be friends with guys, especially at CMU, than it is to be friends with girls. We laughed a bit nervously as we agreed, and then tried to figure out why it's so. I have some thoughts, and they all go along the lines of females being much more competitive and territorial, and that it's easier to see other girls as being little more than competition for EVERYTHING - grades, mates, etc.

I'm not arguing that the girls are MEAN to each other (far from it, in fact), just that I haven't witnessed as many of the deep friendships between girls as I have between girls and guys, or even guys and guys. It brings up an interesting, probably not entirely accurate, hypothesis about innate gender differences. I'm also not saying that a girl's place is to make babies and stay in the kitchen, but I wonder if there have been any studies of the social relationships among and within the genders, particularly in a field like engineering. I've seen many people say that girls seem a lot more driven and determined, but why would that even be so?*

Hm. I had a conversation with another female recently about friendship, and she was talking about how she's not really close to anyone she went to high school with, and doesn't really have - any - super close female friends. I didn't perceive that she felt like she was really "missing out", or felt "friendless" or un-wanted, but sometimes it really does seem like females tend to focus a lot on the pragmatic aspects of life and that, while ideally friendship is tied up in everything, sometimes it seems like the close personal relationships take a bit of a backseat, even unintentionally.

More to say, but not without pondering first.

* I'm leaving it as a rhetorical question for the sake of not alienating ALL of you, heh.