I should be washing out my spoon, but I can't resist posting some odd sites that I ran across this morning. Check out the Martha Stewart Paparrazzi page. But you know, I wouldn't be surprised if she actually lived like that. And see your Cheese Rating. I'm Kadchgall. It's a hard cheese from Afghanistan made with sheeps milk, or occasionally camels milk and clotted with yogurt. I'm also Friesekaas, a hard Dutch cheese, made from cows milk with a natural, waxed rind, and ripens in 3 to 12 months and flavoured with cumin and cloves. So I'm two cheeses (or is that too cheesy?). Go figure that one out.
Lemming? From all evidence, I'm probably one of them. Judging from the publicity that NaNoWriMo is getting, it looks like a fad. I don't like fads. But when it has to do with writing, well then there's no way I can resist. Blogging is also a fad and I suppose I've jumped on that bandwagon too although I've been keeping an online journal of sorts ever since I figured out how to code a webpage. Then again, in real life, people don't give a crap about what I'm doing. They've never heard of writing a novel in one month. They don't know what blogging is. I'm just one of those students people point out and say, "For the love of God, stay away from that one." If they don't say that, that's because they're too busy running away.
I don't get it. Why do I have to wear three layers of clothes in southern California? Why don't the heaters work? Why are the staff, the paper-pushers, the cleaning ladies, the haughty office administrators who have nothing to do except build paper clip towers getting paid? Why the hell is it cold? I thought I would be subjected to that when I got home (where there is actually a winter) and not here.
And good God, I've noticed today that some people are so whiney they're dangerously straying toward bitchy. Why can't they just go away and leave me in peace?
Am I slow, or is this just a recent development? Yahoo! Clubs is going to merge with Yahoo! Groups. Now when did mergers within entities start happening? It's merger-mania, I tell you. Next thing we'll know, kidneys will start merging with bladders.
I was walking back home quickly, all scrunched up and huddled like an old woman. It's cold and damp. And weird people in jogging shorts and kiddies on wheels squeal past me. My head aches. Too much lab. When is it ever going to end? And I hear the squawking. Looking up, I see a spiny tree with elongated gourds hanging downward like limp male genitals. And on top of the naked branches, there is this black shroud, shimmering. A flock of birds. Crows. Ravens. Arguing. A small microcosm of the world around me, people jeering at each other, not caring. God, the weather is so depressing.
It's gotten way too cold, way too fast. I never want to get out of bed now because the room feels like it's been refrigerated. Why oh why does housing refuse to turn on central heating? And I've got to go to lab tonight, midnight. Oh, my head's going to be extremely sore tomorrow.
I just got my copy of the December Harper's Magazine in the mail. Most of it is dedicated to the 9/11 stuff, but one article that struck me was about the beating of Dan Rather. I was amused because it was all first rate conspiracy theorizing that somehow made a weird kind of sense. I wish I could write a book on that.
So our house has a new guard dog: a five foot tall cactus with shades and a bandana. What will they come up with next, the replacement of security with an army of chia pets?
Had another Thanksgiving dinner tonight, at a professor's house no less. Actually, a bunch of students signed up for it and it was really great because we got to talk to the professor and listen to his stories about the 'good old days'. And we talked about parking structures (how some profs are real egotistical about having their name painted on a reserved spot) and decreasing student health care plans and getting shafted by the administration in general. There was really good food--and talk that perhaps the professors should replace the incompetent cafeteria staff. But then again, nah. Some profs would make rather, er, complicated meals.
Despite getting a bit annoyed at standing out in the rain for fifteen minutes waiting for a bus and then deciding to go back home because it wasn't worth it, I took a perverse pleasure in the weather today. It rained in buckets, drenching everything. Monstrous and encompassing. So why was I happy? Because any wedding-related activity would have been cancelled. No bad music tonight!
Last night I watched Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I was perhaps a little disappointed in the special effects. Maybe watching so many supernatural kung-fu movies desensitized me from the movie's gravity-defying stunts. But the storytelling was exceptionally good. People should go see it just for that.
I'm not quite sure why some of my dreams resemble video games. I don't play video games. But this one definitely had a video game feel to it except for the feeling of actual horrible death.
There were different doors to choose from. I was in a team of people (who I didn't personally know). We picked a door and our goal was to get something (a prize of some sort?) without getting killed by obstacles. We entered the door and found ourselves in an underground tunnel-like place, a lot like tech's underground steam tunnel system--all dark and morbid. I accidentally flipped a switch.
Then we realized that to defeat the obstacles, we had to be experts on South American mythology. And since none of us knew any South American mythology, we struggled to open the door to get out of the game. That's when we began hearing buzzing approaching us from around a bend in the tunnels. Flying monsters apparently derived from South American mythology were coming after us. If we didn't open the door, we would all be toast. That was when I woke up.
This morning I went to do some last minute shopping for Thanksgiving. I'm going to attempt to make a vegetable quiche. Not quite sure if that is completely good thing considering I'm also cooking for other people besides myself. And on my way back from the supermarket, I saw this guy with two tiny dachshunds waiting at the curb. When the light changed to "walk", those dogs began running the opposite direction, yapping at a larger retriever a couple yards away, and pulling their surprised owner along. That just made my day.
Last night I also saw Final Fantasy and was particularly surprised by its strong new agey spiritual message. And the ending looked a lot like Titan A.E. Hmm, it could have been a lot better of it really was fantasy. And speaking of fantasy, finally listened to the LOTR:FOTR soundtrack and was rather surprised that Howard Shore had it in him to produce some wonderfully lyrical pieces. But I'll also try not to listen to it too often until the movie comes out. I reserve final judgement until then. So what do I think of the Enya end title song that everyone seems to be bashing? Sounds a little generic and commercial to me--I'm glad it's in the end titles and not within the movie.
There's something both refreshing and bittersweet when the holidays arrive. There's no more classes, but then in the back of your mind, you know the holidays themselves won't last forever. I went shopping today. There were weird people on the streets, like characters who stepped out of some fairy tale in their fluffly bright dresses. Or people who look like they've stepped out of a seedy movie like some old woman I saw who wore a sparkly silver turban and cape as well as some blue slippers with her purple pants. Brings to mind the Millikan Man who also wears a turban (either pink or purple), a really short skirt, and panty hose. He says he's trying to dress like a Renaissance man. I think he's cracked because most of the time he raves about how Caltech stole all the royalties from his physics invention.
Something is wrong when dining services make students bring their own cups to dinner. Evidently, over 700 glass cups are missing and they think we're hoarding them all. I don't think so. Have they ever heard of glass breakage?
I feel like the wimpy plant I saw today leaning out of a kitchen window. My brain fried, my heart relieved that I didn't fail the midterm. Or maybe I shouldn't have gotten up at 4 AM in the morning to finish work. Whatever the case, I'm really tired, run down like those old clunkers that people insist on driving down the freeway in the middle of rush hour traffic. The term has run me ragged and I am ready for sleep and mind-boggling vegetation.
They should fix the sprinklers. The water keeps on spraying on the walkways and not on the plants where they belong. Also found out today that my favorite music video site Launch.com has been taken over by Yahoo!. How sad. But on the other hand, one less password to remember.
Okay, so I've been debating with myself whether or not I'm a writer. Yes, I've got the drive to write. I try to write every day if I can help it. I even write when I can't help it. Sometimes it's a compulsion--but it's strange, I've never felt like I was cursed with it. I've also submitted things to places, but so far haven't gotten published. So does this make me a wannabe? A poser? A fake? I play at everything else, but I don't want to play at this too.
Do I have to say anything about the wedding people again? Well, they're playing that YMCA song. Doesn't seem like wedding music to me. Anyway, I was stuck in lab today (again), but I did manage to get off campus a little while and catch Harry Potter on screen. Unlike some rabid non-fans, I for one, have read the book and was impressed by the special effects. However, I was left wondering if this is only going to come out like The Neverending Story was to the eighties. But I'll have to say, sorting the first year students into the four different houses with the sorting hat was just like sorting first year Caltech students into seven different houses with Rotation. Weird. I wonder if J.K. Rowling ever looked up Caltech and copied off its unusual housing rules.
I also saw a weird woman who was wearing all mismatched clothes: green-black plaid overshirt, white shirt underneath, jeans a few inches too short, yellow socks, and copper colored heels. And while I was out, I decided to browse at Barnes and Noble and guess what I found. The third book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials Trilogy was out in paperback. I can't wait until I can find time to read The Amber Spyglass.
Here's an example of how hokey and general horoscopes are. I got this from Infoplease.com:
The Sun is in Scorpio and the Moon is in Sagittarius. Been locked up for too long? You're ready to break free. Travel not only looks like fun, but it's practically mandatory. Are you entered in some kind of race this weekend? You should be.
See? I could apply the locked up part for midterms just being over and the race as the novel writing thing I'm doing this month. Other than that, it's just fluff catered to the ignorant masses.
The head waiter declared anarchy today. That resulted in flying projectiles ranging from rolls and ice cream to hot coffee and ice. Exploding ice cream was also interesting to watch as well as falling light fixtures. Most of the time, I watched amused on the sidelines as people declared a snowball war (without the snowballs) and did horrible impressions of other people. And afterwards, I was completely deflated as I realized that my whole being was saturated by uncuteness.
I have no idea why I fell asleep in class today even though I got an ungodly amount of sleep last night. And when I walked back from lecture, I saw the walkway lined with Chinese trinkets and photographs. Evidently it's International Week and I didn't even know it. It's sponsored by the Chinese Club which I think is run by a bunch of elitist busy bodies. I despise elitism--makes me sick to the stomach to think that people group together to exclude other people. And there were boxes of Krispy Kreme lying around. So I stole a donut.
By the time six o'clock rolls around, I'm pretty much exhausted and hungry. Yeah, it's like some sort of terminal disease where you run down like one of those wind up clocks. It's just that I get a bit irritable--the sky is dark and my body is thinking, time to go to sleep. But I'm probably not going to go to sleep for a while. At least not while I can get donuts at midnight. Just too bad they don't have strawberry donuts (they're out of season), but some people have put forth the alternative of milk-flavored donuts.
I like the word autoclave. It's sounds like something a guillotine would do to somebody's head. But no, what it really does is kill bacteria. Anyway, I was walking about in the afternoon and saw some grandparents with little kiddies. Aww. How cute. It possibly brought up some deeply buried maternal instinct. But then of course, it must have been the eyes. I read somewhere that large eyes in proportion to the head (like in babies) makes it seem cute. So maybe I should doodle some wide-eyed cats. Funny how cats seem to invade everything. I was listening to the frenchie prof dawdling about smelly cheese when I suddenly got this picture in my mind of everyone in the classroom being turned into their cat equivalent.
Although tiring in its intensity, orchestra rehearsal is always fun. The cellists are usually rather self-important, but today they were joking about bringing origami and wax and even possibly fire to the Louchouarn piece we're working on called "Time Pieces". I think I'm beginning to understand it even though on the surface it just sounds like everyone is playing random notes. When we play it in December, it'll be the first time that the whole thing will be played ever. The composer will even be there--so if you want to see a real live composer (Louchouarn I mean, not the conductor--he's totally different), come hear us play! Some other stuff we'll be doing is a Robert Schumann piece--Symphony No. 1 or "Spring" and an Aaron Copland piece called "Lincoln Portrait" which in my humble opinion is an absolutely gorgeous piece. Incidentally, I'm also working on a Clara Schumann piece in a trio. She unfortunately was overlooked because of her (crazy) husband Robert.
Someone randomly asked me if I ever woke up and asked myself why the sky is blue. The answer is no, but I was wondering about soul mates. Now I'm not the one to believe that there are soul mates. People can try to convince me that they are soul mates, but I won't really believe them. I want tangible evidence. If there really are things such as soul mates, what would be the implications if you found out that your soul mate had the misfortune to be born ugly? What would you do then? (I ask this because there are a lot of shallow people in the world. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you've left your head buried in the sand for too long.) I think there are compatible people for any given person, or you could be serious duped by pheromones.
Last night I've been fiddling with the webpage and just decided to chuck all the old stuff out. Nothing much to see. Just moving along. Also it feels weird going to lab at one in the morning. Especially if there are other people working there. Just like the day except no light! And I should be in class right now, but it got cancelled. Yah! I also love watching trailers. Go see the Movie-List. I haven't seen many lately, but once you get going you can't stop (unless your computer tells you your virtual memory has gone down the tubes).
Formal dinner. The only difference between this and a circus is the clothes. There were people wearing napkins on their heads. Beer masqueraded as water bottles. And the three Johns brought their own salad, cheesecake, and two lobsters named Terrance and Phillip who've been broiled in a pot with a u-shaped bottom. The dinner utensils of choice were mallets, scissors, and wrenches. Think I'm kidding you? Just wait until you see the pictures.
I think my presentation went horribly. I could feel the dean glower at me the whole time. Afterwards, he gave some criticisms which I thought were well founded. One of the students (how would you call a college aged teacher's pet?) gave some unsolicited opinions which were rather self-righteous and hypercritical. I felt completely numb afterwards, sucker punched in the stomach and head mashed in. I'd like to think that I've become better at accepting failure and rejection since living for over three years in a punishing academic environment, but that doesn't make it hurt less, especially when a negative jab comes from a place that's totally unexpected.
Four hours of uninterrupted sleep. That's pretty good considering I'm doing a last minute presentation. Anyway, I'm usually an optimistic person so I think I can wing this even though most of the time I probably won't know what I'm talking about. So I was pretty much absorbed in working on this in the morning until I finally checked the news. Boy is this a bad time for that to happen again. I know that most Techers are too self-absorbed in their homework-laden worlds to take much notice (hell, I'm one of those guilty of self-absorption most of the time), but right now I have more than a few future scenarios running in my head, none of them pleasant.
I've been wasting time reading random blogs and personal websites and have encountered several things which I have issues with: alternating upper and lower case, intentional misspellings (i.e. 2 for to, u for you, etc.), and god-awful layouts. Now the last point is moot since it concerns my personal opinion, but the former two could be easily rectified. Just how hard is it to write correctly?
And did I also mention that today was Veteran's Day? A commemoration to those who fought and the armistice that ended World War I. In Canada it's called Remembrance Day and you get to wear little red velvet poppies that you could pin on your shirt. *sigh* I miss those. The big 11/11 is also Annual World Run Day--but I'm a lazy bastard to do anything of the sort. Several years ago while flipping through various folklorish books, I came across a weird superstitious holiday called Hollantide that originally fell on the eleventh. And don't forget those silly horoscopes. Just look what The Onion had in store for me:
You will score a major victory at work when you're able to produce documentation proving that the appropriate person has died and made you God.
Whoohoo! How'd they know? My name even means "goddess" in Greek!
So this morning I mostly window shopped. Since dad was visiting, we went to this Asian grocery store and dad bought some dong quai for mom. I remember mom always trying to make me drink it. I never noticed any benefits anyway. And at the same time I was looking at the ginseng for sale, and boy is that stuff expensive, even American cultivated ginseng. Also went to a Chinese bookstore, didn't understand a thing in there, but that was all right. Bookstores are my friends, even if I can't read the language. Just something about ink and paper, I guess. For lunch I had rice and cow tendons. That's right, cow tendons. First time too, but I don't really have an opinion on them except their rating would probably be around where dong quai is. I went to a couple of used bookstores too. I just wanted to go to get high on old paper fumes.
And speaking of being legal, I got some alcohol--simply because I could and I liked the crazy bottle it came in. It's Mateus Rose imported from Portugal, but after searching around, I found that being in possession of rose wine makes me horribly unfashionable. Oh well. I think I am unfashionable to begin with anyway.
As usual, it was a little depressing waking up to a day when you realize there's a ton of work to do and the interesting dream you had the night before completely escaped your conscious mind. I did attempt a pseudo dream journal during the month of August where I made up a bunch of supposed dreams, but I never kept up with it, especially since it involved me actually doing writing and making up a new web page every day. This is easier.
And then it hit me. Today is my birthday. I'm legal in every way that counts, including having the right to get inebriated. But I have a personal preference for not downing the alcohol. I've got too few brain cells to spare considering most of them went bye-bye yesterday while I took the biology GRE exam. However, caffeine is definitely the way to go. Check out the reviews at BevNET for non-alcoholic drinks. I got e-cards from people. That made me cheer up a bit.
Oh yeah, I said before that I wasn't going to post that often, but hey, I'm on the computer a lot and I love spewing the contents of my brain all over the place for the world to look at. (Exhibitionism, *sigh*) Anyway, I just had to say once again, I hate wedding receptions. They're doing it again. Bad wedding singers. Bad music. Just one of the reasons why you should not come to Caltech.
Er...a blog by any other name is still a blog. Nevermind. I usually have something to rant about so might as well do it the easy way sooner or later. I'm not going to start posting here regularly until December though. That's probably when I'll actually stop procrastinating and get my own domain name and transfer this over. At the moment, you can read my pain here: writing sya. I'm also currently writing for NaNoWriMo so November will be pretty sparse.
