January is...

According to Daily Writing Tips, the email I subscribe to (along with plenty of other things that I barely read), the month "January" came from the Roman god "Janus," who had two faces and could both see into the past and into the future. Hence, Janus was a god of beginnings, and January is at the beginning of the year.

(Unless you go by other methods of keeping track of dates. Then January as we know it is not a beginning. It's just another ordinary month.

Which also reminds me, I realized some days ago that Chinese New Year is going to be on February 14th this year, which is both Valentine's day and the weekend prior to a week-long break. Yay! Extra time to stay up late and watch the annual program CCTV makes in celebration of the new year.)

I only knew Janus from Trickster Online (a MMO), where a special type of monster (called the Nightmare, I think, although I'm not sure now) dropped Janus masks occasionally. They were quite nightmarish to destroy, and I always needed those masks for luck compounding (the explanation of which will probably take forever, so just think about this as a quest of sorts), so I spent virtual days upon virtual days hunting down Janus masks.

It was not fun, to say the least.

I never did, however, associate it with January, even though I write it down all the time. For someone who considers herself fascinated by history and such, I feel sad that I had not known this earlier. Perhaps, then, whenever I went about hacking at monsters with brass-plated discs, I would be able to relate the experience to... a new vision of looking at this world?

Who knows?

So I told Zephy today about my newfound revelation about January and my realization about the coincidence of the holidays.

"Yeah," Zephy said. "I knew a long time ago."

Oh. Well. There goes my amazing (and probably very, very slow) brain-connector-abilities. Which makes absolutely no sense at all, as I was trying to convey a sense of something like an AI making virtual connections within my brain, but evidently it looks better in my head than it does on paper (or the monitor).

Maybe it's the week-long process of cramming for exams. That has got to be the reason why I'm so slow to react to "reality" right now.

I mean, if that were not the case, then something is seriously wrong with me, right? And since nothing can possibly be wrong with me, I blame the exams.

Yeah.

Besides, I took a review "test" for French vocab yesterday, and I got a 48 out of 106. That's a literal fail.

So I guess reality will have to wait as I attempt to steer my ship out of the rocky waters of midterms. Hope to see you on shore later, whether it's because we've both landed at a port or because we've both crashed onto a deserted island.

And I hope you like coconuts. A lot.

Just in case.