Love In The Asylum

From an email I (and everyone else) received today from the university admin:

Dear Student,

I am writing to let you know of important changes in health insurance offerings for students and their dependents, effective September 2010.

Cardinal Care student health insurance plan:

Cardinal Care will be more affordable -- its cost will go down 4% to $3072 per year.

A new insurance carrier, Health Net of California, will provide the medical benefits.

Benefits will remain comprehensive, with the same access to Stanford University Medical Center.

Transgender surgery will be covered for the first time.

I didn't know that my university insurance didn't cover that in the first place, and I don't know what motivated the policy change. But it's nice to think I go to a school that makes efforts to try to support its students and make more choices available to them. Especially since the next email down was a list of tips for trans allies from the queer/feminist studies mailing list. 

So, I guess today was the last time I'll see Roy until Christmas, since she's leaving for Indiana and her scary engineering school on Wednesday. And it's just...really, horribly depressing. All my friends are leaving, or have left - Al's in NC, Roy's leaving, Envy's back in school. It makes me think about how much things are going to change now - we won't see each other, we're going to get different friends, new interests, new lives. We probably won't ever be close the same way we were this year. I know it has to hapen, but still, it's hard to deal with. So I am not even going to think about it for the moment. I shall focus my mind on utter inanities instead.

Al and I had some random conversation yesterday about what kind of animals we would be. I'd kind of like to think I'm something really cool, like a jungle cat or something. If I'm really honest, though, I think I'm more like a labrador puppy - loud, messy, and overenthusiastic, with a tendency to get into everything and get worked up over nothing. Kind of annoying, but still loveable. I hope. Dunno.

While Roy and I were out, I bought a new manga, Black Knight. Totally BL porn, and quite lovely, really. I hate manga that have a wonderful, interesting plot but you can never get into to it because the art is so bad or weird that it keeps distracting you. A lot of the BLU yaoi stuff is done in a veeeeeery shojo, angular, long and slender style that doesn't appeal to me at all - Junjo Romance being a prime example. I guess for all my yaoi tendencies, I really am a shonen girl at heart; I like lots of action with my sex, a real plot, even if it's silly, and a simple, less exaggerated art style. I think that's why I prefer the early Gravitation volumes to the later ones - the mangaka's style changed a lot, and I preferred the earlier stuff with the more "normal" character designs. But Black Knight looks good - pretty, not too girly artwork, and it's about a prince and his bodyguard, so there's plenty of action. We'll see.