circle the drain

today's title comes from the song of the same name by katy perry. it has no relevance to this post at all. it is stuck in my head, though, since this girl in my chaucer seminar was playing it so loudly that i could hear it through her headphones.

it's been a little while since i posted. i know, i know - i always promise to be a better blogger, but...well, there are only so many hours in a day. and, sadly, blogging at 4:35 in the morning (when the original draft of this post was started) doesn't lead to anything coherent. trust me - i just had to delete, like, four paragraphs and a ton of unrelated gifs because of that.

before doing anything else, i guess i should recap my week. let's see...

the hall-es and i have been busy making things. to begin with, we made a master class schedule so we could stop sending out bulk text messages to the effect of "where are you? are you in class? do you want to eat dinner?" and made copies for everyone. it's pretty:

and on friday we made glee t-shirts. michelle and i had club meetings to go to first, so we didn't get started until late friday night, but here they are:

we're wearing them right now, actually, since we just finished watching glee in my room. (it was an awesome episode, by the way. britney spears night!).

the alchy roommate lost her key on friday, so we've been having to keep the door unlocked until the lock gets replaced. it really sucked since this weekend was family weekend and i was supposed to go home friday night. i ended up unpacking all of my stuff and staying until saturday afternoon since i didn't want to leave for the weekend with all of our stuff in the room. i ended up enlisting the hall-es to watch the door so i could go home, but when i repacked my bag, i left my phone charger in the dorm.

since you all know me, you should know what a catastrophe that was for me. two whole days without my phone! it was horrible. on top of that, the momster replaced the house phones with fancy new ones that i don't know how to use, so i couldn't even stay home alone since she was all "no! what if something happens and you forget how to call me?". i ended up going to an open house with her sunday. it was alright. it was in this huge house in arlington - it had six bathrooms and nine bedrooms and a jacuzzi. i mostly sat around reading while she talked to clients. however, i did perk up during her conversation with one family. they were this awkward, horribly dressed group of people that used words like "new-fangled" and "gosh darn" and "modernizated" when referring to kitchen appliances and thought the house was "nice" but would have preferred it if the owners painted the halls tangerine, replaced the beige carpet with a "nice salmon pink", and painted all the bedrooms and bathrooms purple or green. you might think they were playing a joke or something - they weren't. they were actually two million dollar-offering, house-buying serious. oh well. i guess the world needs people with hideously decorated houses as well as nice ones.

after the open house, the momster and i went shopping at tyson's. it was wonderful. there was a giant sale on vera bradley stuff so i stocked up and came away with a free wristlet, a planner (which is ridiculously exciting, since i was completely useless without the calendar in my phone over the weekend). aren't they pretty?

oh, and i got the world's most amazing computer bag. i've been using it every day since i got it. oh, and i started in on buying fall clothes just in time - it started raining the monday after i got back on campus and has been raining ever since. however, the most important purchase of the day came in food form. specifically, this food:

this is a hummus and goat cheese salad. it's got grilled chicken and feta cheese and flat bread and tomatoes and peppers and yummy dressing and is basically the most amazing thing i've eaten in my entire life. in case you couldn't tell, i like food.

since monday, i've been busy writing four papers (four! and one of them is six pages long!), outlining my take-home midterm (two more papers, due next week), and avoiding the Giant Rain Puddle which lives outside the back door of my dorm. said avoidance is mostly occurring through the constant wearing of rain boots (wonderful) and pants (horrific). at least the rain means that everyone's wearing their rain boots and carrying umbrellas. i love getting to admire everyone's cute stuff. the coolest pair of rain boots i've seen so far had a bunch of whales and rain drops and penguins on them. they were adorable.

it's a good thing i've had cute rain boots to cheer me up, since on the health front there is no good news. remember the earring that snagged on my shirt during yoga a few weeks ago? yeah, it was healing fine until it caught on another shirt (same yoga class). so, the momster came down for a visit wednesday (bearing many of the broker open panera sandwiches, some of which i am munching on right now) and took me to the doctor to get it checked out. "checking out" in this case entailed a tetanus and meningitis shot "just in case", since apparently dorms are breeding grounds of contagion and disease and having gotten them done this summer was just not enough to guarantee my health. oh yeah, and there was a flu shot and needle-tastic antibiotics, too. my arm felt like a pincushion. it kind of still does, actually.

oh, and i got elected chair of the history committee and co-chair of the publicity/member recruiting committee in circle k (key club, basically). i'm kind of excited because freshmen couldn't vote (you have to have been a due-paying member last year to cast a vote), which is why i ran for both - i figured i wouldn't get either. i tied with another girl for the last committee, but that's okay since the committee is huge and she seems like she'll be fun to work with. it's getting its own tag now since i'm sure you'll be hearing a lot about it this year.

so, i left this post before my chaucer class and figured i would finish it when i got back. however, something Incredibly Wonderful has happened.

as you should know, there was a liverpool game today against utrecht. it started at one in the afternoon. as you probably don't know, my chaucer class starts at two, which gave me barely fifteen minutes during halftime to run to the auditorium and get the game set up (and on mute) in the back row. while i was waiting for halftime to end, i happened to glance around the rest of the room at all the other computer screens on display and saw...

THE SAME STREAM I WAS WATCHING. as in, there was another liverpool fan watching the game. and he's a boy. and he's cute. and he had a steven gerrard jersey on. and is apparently a sophomore and friends with my biology partner. still don't know his name. am still convinced i have met briefly glanced at before being overwhelmed by depression at watching my team draw against a third-rate eastern european side seen the future LOVE OF MY LIFE. why, yes, this does require all caps. baby stevie g and xabeard alonso (circa 2005, also known as the best footballing year of our lives) are up there celebrating this news. however, all of you -- if you happen to see more of this wonderful species of boy in the wild, feel free to tackle them/drug them and mail them to me/offer them my number. in this instance i have no shame.

i'm going to back to watching smallville online and working on my iranian cinema paper. smallville is still silly and unquittable; my iranian film for the week is actually pretty good. i figure it should balance out.

phone blog!

It's been a long day. I drove by myself again, then did some laundry, finished my homework, and went to dinner at the Melting Pot with The Momster. It was great, as usual. We got smoothies at Yogen Früz afterward...which was probably a bad idea since I realized today that I need to start losing the pounds I packed on during AP exams/study binges/being too tired to work out at all. I'll blog for real tomorrow (I keep saying that, I know, but I hope my former life as Macbeth will increase my chances of turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy), but until then here's a fun link I found during the car ride to Reston: now helpfully reformatted into a clicky link

Oh, and forgive my use of capital letters. I'm blogging from...well, just look down since the app is nice enough to say it for me.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Alien Rat Dogs

I am sitting at the kitchen table, sipping my coffee, and lamenting the change in my dogs from these pinacles of furry glory:

To this:

My babies! They've been shaved! How could That Woman do this to us? See if I get her a Mother's Day present ever again. Look how she repaid me - by having my fluffy little munchkin dogs replaced by aliens.

I'm going to go drown my sorrows in frappucino. Excuse the capital letters, I'm blogging from my phone.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

waiting with the wind against your face

today's title is from what? two posts in one day? looks like may is off to a good start california summer by vampire weekend.

i'm sitting here, getting crumbs all over the keyboard, while munching on one of the cupcake's the momster surprised me with. it was really pretty looking before i started eating it - all chocolate fudge swirling frosting and a little cherry on top. i was going to take a picture of it but i forgot because i was a ravening beast consumed by hunger feeling mildly peckish. peckish. isn't that a great word? it makes me think of all sorts of lovely things like charles dickens and shepherd's pie and england and hippogriffs. i think i'll start using it more often.

i'm listening to this really great song called don't be the one by lissie and george stanford. i'd post it here but it's impossible to find on the internet. even the lyrics don't exist anywhere. but it's so amazing that i thought i'd mention it anyway - if any of you feel like listening to pretty folk duets, shoot me an email.

you know what's really cool? synesthesia. i really wish i had it. i think it'd be really fun to see different letters or sounds or smells as colors. that wasn't completely random, either. here, i'll explain my thought process to you:

TEN MINUTES EARLIER:

Rachel places her cup of milk and cup of cake on the coffee table. No, that isn't right. Let's start again:

Rachel places her cupmilk and cup of cake on the coffee table. That's not it either. One more time:

Rachel places her cup of milk and cupcake on the coffee table. Then she flings herself onto the couch dramatically. This is accomplished by flinging her hands out to each side and sighing while she sits down. One of her hands nearly overturns the cupcake. It wobbles precariously, about to fall - but, no. The cupcake is safe. 

"Woe," Rachel says. "Woe is me. I'm on my deathbed.  My deathcouch. Alas and alack, that I should meet my demise on such an unpoetic piece of furniture."

"You're dying?" says Character Who Only Exists For Exposition. "You look very healthy."

"How can you say that?" Rachel says, with more dramatic flinging of the hands. 

The cupcake wobbles some more. It can tell that this is going to be a very long scene. Cupcake hopes that it's getting paid overtime for putting up with this sort of abuse. 

"I'm dying. Dying. My life is almost over. I'm nearly eighteen. I'm going to have to be an adult and make money and have a job or at least go to college and not have a Momster getting me surprise cupcakes while I'm out walking the dogs. I'll be too old for that. I think I feel a wrinkle forming."

Rachel flaps her hands around. This time the cupcake doesn't escape unscathed, although Rachel does stop flailing long enough to suck the icing off her finger. 

"It's not the end of the world," Character Who Only Exists For Exposition says. "According to movies all you do in college is get drunk and become an underdog who morphs into Amanda Bynes and steals Sara Paxton's boyfriend through sheer pluck and cleverly timed bouts of clumsiness. You even get your own soundtrack!"

"But I'll have to do my own laundry," cries Rachel. 

"You already do laundry. You're doing laundry right now," Character Who Only Exists For Exposition says. "Maybe you should quiet your fears of leaving childhood by doing something impossibly juvenile."

"You're stupid, Character Who Only Exists For Exposition," Rachel says. "Go away now. No, wait - Your name is sort of weird. Are you Native American?"

"Why does everyone always ask me that? I'm Canadian, geez." And with that Character Who Only Exists For Exposition disappears in a cloud of Deus Ex Machina. 

Rachel sighs dramatically and waves her arms around some more. Then she looks back at Poor Abused Cupcake and Innocent Cup of Milk. 

"Well, it wouldn't hurt..." she says. 

FIVE MINUTES LATER:

Rachel is still blowing bubbles in her milk. Poor Abused Cupcake wants you all to know that this is because she is five years old and easily amused. 

The End. 

did you like my story? i know, i know, it was a masterpiece. i even used capital letters! and i almost managed to reread it for typos, but i got distracted by my cupcake and the prospect of blowing even more bubbles in my milk. i forgot how much fun that was.

i think that's all for this post. i'm going to bed in like two minutes - i need all the sleep i can get, since tomorrow is going to be one long study marathon. oh, i can't wait until AP week is over.

jumping jehosaphat (dear god, hope you got the letter)

while bored out of my mind last week, i started a read-through of the bible. and by "read-through" i mean that i've been flicking it open at random and reading a passage or two. it's funny how, in my rash youth (two months ago) i might've found this to be unbearably boring. strangely enough it's now pretty interesting reading. perhaps Operation: Read Instead is working?

i mention this, as you might have guessed, to explain today's title. today's random biblical passage came from 2 Chronicles, specifically the parts detailing that lovely creature jehoshaphat and his dealings with the moabs and the ammonites and then all the tedious bits about him sending forth the messengers and what have you to splainy the law to people. having just come off a weekend-long sherlock holmes bender which encompassed a reread of a study in scarlet, the sign of four, a scandal in bohemia, and the red-headed league i'm afraid that i wasn't able to take much moral or intellectual improvement from 2 Chronicles, beyond observing that jehosaphat must have been one Swell Dude.

however, my literary and biblical adventures did manage to bring the phrase 'jumping jehosaphat' to the forefront of my mind (oh, to live in doyle's london, and have irritable constables uttering such phrases all the time) and, when combined with the fact that my latest musical find has been a collection of sarah mclachlan's b-sides and rarities - including the wonderful 'dear god', which comprises the parenthetical half of this post's title - at least gave me something to snicker at. perhaps i'll improve my mind tomorrow.

correction, i will definitely have to put off any hopes of intellectual improvement. i've used up all of today's allotment of Thinky Thoughts on laughing at this video:

and being blown away by this one. it's tik tok! with a ukulele! and a decent singer! who's an australian japanese/irish person! my mind is so blown all i can do is use exclamation points! like this! !!!

oh, and i have come to a decision. most of you know that i'm fourteen songs away from having thirteen thousand. actually, i hit the thirteen thousand song mark after lunch with s-la, but then i had to go through and cut the songs i didn't like anymore, so...12,986 it is.

anyway, i've been thinking of instituting some sort of posting format to this blog. i'm not sure how i'd do it, though. i'm torn between having a designated day for everything - like a Music Monday and a There's Nothing Alliterative About Today, Let's Just Post Random Facts Tuesday and a What Is Your Life? Wednesday and so on - or just having a specific format of post and having them alternate for whenever the topic comes up. like when i really want to obsess over an album or artist, then i could do a music post (and only a music post, with none of the random asides that i normally include) or when something really weird happens, i could do a OMG I HATE MY LIFE post or...well. you get the idea. or, you know, i could just keep on posting the way i normally do stream-of-consciousness at its less-than-finest. thoughts? i am a creature of indecision, i need advice.

oh, look. pictures!

somewhat relevant pictures, even!

robert downey jr.'s awful pretty:

anyway, i'm officially No Longer Sick. well, except for the burn but that's an entirely different matter which i'll talk about later. right now i'm just going to revel in the fact that i can run and jump and play and eat in public and without feeling like i'm dying a slow death due to bubonic plague.

gee, that was an oddly specific description, wasn't it?

anyway, i headed out with the momster to the reston town center yesterday. after all, i need shorts. we ended up having lunch at la madeleine, where i had the great misfortune of encountering someone who both hates lettuce and wanted to order a salad without the offending vegetable in it.

i know.

i then had the even greater misfortune of receiving this horrible series of text messages from someone whose latent sense of shame has caused them to ask to remain anonymous. i still hate you.

Note: Text messages transcribed verbatim, except that I wrote out the words for characters since it would've been more than my nerves could handle to seriously type "b4" in place of 'before'.

The Devil: Can I call you strumpet?

Me: BITCH I WILL CUT YOU.

The Devil: :( It's a compliment of your hooker/strumpet legs. 

Me: Hooker legs are not happy things!

The Devil: I'm sure you'd fetch $2000 more in a human trafficking auction. See, they wouldn't want me so then I could sneak in and bust you out after we get the money but before you're raped. 

isn't that just the most awful thing you've ever heard? i was beside myself with :O face. no, really, i cloned myself just so me and my clone-self could make horrified faces at each other and fully convey our horror. (oh, and just in case you didn't get it from my oh-so-convoluted explanation above, under new blog format #1, this, and related events would all have to wait to be posted until What Is Your Life? Wednesday, and in new blog format #2, the texts and other weird things would be one post and a little bit later there would be another post for the pictures and youtube videos, so you'd be looking at multiple - but shorter - posts a day, i guess)

today i had another mini-adventure when having lunch with s-la, travis, jason, and patrick. we had a nazi waitress and played apples-to-apples, but if you want details you're going to have to harass s-la since i'm all blogged out.

anyway, i'll leave you with one last video. s, in case you couldn't tell, this is one you should watch. it's vampire weekend's song ottoman (aka the song currently playing on my itunes):

walked and crawled on six crooked highways

today's title is adapted from a hard rain's a-gonna fall by bob dylan. i've been loving my classic rock playlist today.

so day one of operation:read instead has been allowed me to realize that gandalf was right:

in other words, i've been attempting to study calculus and/or write my yearbook story for the last four hours. see gina's post for details.

don't worry, though, i've given up on my oh-so-brief attempt to be a decent student. i've more or less resigned myself to failing calculus - my highest calculus-related aspirations at the moment are to get a c and pass so i don't have to take the exam.

while i was in the library today, attempting to figure out my lit homework with helena and alina (oh, the rhymes), i realized something sort of disappointing - most people my age have vocabularies gleaned directly from the thesaurus app on their iphones. now, that's not to say that my vocabulary is Too Cool For School (and, yes, that phrase needs to be capitalized, it's just that awesome), but at least i make an effort. for example, i actually read the books we're assigned in english and i do not complain about the instructions on our homework assignments including too many 'big words' (the 'big word' in question was incredulity. as in: imagine my incredulity when i realized people that stupid actually exist)

(now playing: icky thump by the white stripes)

this blog has been pretty picture-heavy lately. now, part of the reason for that is that i had lots of time to stock up on amusing pictures during the snow week, but there's another reason: tumblr.

in case you missed the news, i started using my tumblr during winter break 2.0. and that's great - i have actual followers and everything (i'm one away from fifty followers; someone sign up and follow me, geez oh man) and i've missed how much easier it is to share things that i like (and god knows there's a lot of them) but i feel like this blog has been suffering as a result.

like, we all know that i have this tendency to obsess over things. i mean, there's a reason that ashlee simpson's song little miss obsessive is the twenty-first most played song in my itunes library. i can't help it if the lyrics speak to me! (okay, i've just been dying to write/say a sentence that pretentious - it's been a life-long goal) i've also got a healthy appreciation of good pop music, so that didn't hurt my love of the song one little bit.

(neon bible - arcade fire)

the song changing gave me time to realize that i'd started veering off onto a tangent. good work, arcade fire. 

anyway, what i'd been getting at (before ashlee simpson took over this post) was this: should i confine my obsessing to tumblr? should i go back to letting a little of it trickle over here? because my life, it's not even a little bit interesting except for the next thing that i'm about to post because it is hilarious

(time has come today - the chambers brothers)

today i'm bringing a new feature to this blog. it'll (hopefully) be a one-time only type of deal. let's just call it Texts You Don't Want To Get From A Friend While Standing Near A Family of Four In An Elevator:

friend: omg, i took a nap before going to work and i had a dream that i was having a threesome with freddie mercury and johnny weir.

me: wtf?

friend: brb, bleaching my brain out. it was so weird. johnny weir was straight.

 yeah, my reaction went a little like this:

and, oh hell, we'll throw in another picture or two just for kicks (after all, i need to free up hard drive space).

and i'm singing "snow-oh, snow-oh"

okay, so the title of this post may or may not have been inspired by this forever the sickest kids song. whatever, the point still stands. and the point, in case you were wondering, is that it's snowing and, according to weatherbug, will continue to snow well into the night.

in other words: no school. i'm pretty excited. like, my face right now? it looks like rahm emmanuel's face in this picture:

and along political lines, i'm watching the daily show right now. normally i record it and the colbert report and watch them in batches, but i just finished my daily current events websearch and watching last night's episode of countdown with keith olberman (the current one is recording), so i felt like getting to see a slightly snarkier take on the news.

since i just finished my webhunt - i do this once a day, usually, and it sounds a lot more intensive than it actually is, since i more or less just click my way through my top sites and bookmarks - i thought i'd share some of the things that i found interesting.

this just made me laugh so hard. 

and this? this made me want to run and write and laugh and sing. some pictures are worth a thousand words but this one needs just one: inspire. 

and this just makes me want spring to come faster. 

currently listening to: icarus - white hinterland

we interrupt this broadcast...

or we would have, but glee was just too awesome to miss. seriously, show, how am i going to get through wednesdays without you?

today's post is dedicated to Notey. you may be wondering who Notey is. or why it gets capital letters when nothing else does. well, to answer the first question, this is Notey. see? over there on the left?

isn't Notey pretty? clearly the prettiest notebook in the world. and the coolest. how many other notebooks are ninjas?

that's right, i said Notey was a ninja. need proof?

AHEM.

Notey is a communist (ninja) notebook. in fact, it's the kgb agent of notebooks. s-la and i share her, and after being parted for ages, she's finally been returned to me...full of a bajillion pages of notes. and pictures! there's loads of pictures! over five pages! i'm in awe of s-la's printer.

notey is full of pictures and drawings and quizzes and lyrics and four-dollars-that-i-used-as-a-bookmark-on-the-way-home-from-the-dry-cleaner-because-my-mother-forgot-to-go-even-though-i-texted-her. there's other, less frequent visitors to notebookistan, too, like lyrics quizzes and mini-pictionary and lolcats and guest writers (and maybe a mix cd, not that i made one or anything). like i said, coolest notebook ever. and it helps since i never see steffi anyway (except when i crash her spanish class...it's a good thing i'm in yearbook and used to teachers thinking i'm obnoxious/wishing i'd quit interrupting their class or i'd be worried her teacher would try and kick me out or something). Notey and i think that everyone should have a notey (but not a Notey) of their own. who wouldn't want a notebook this awesome?

so i have to go do homework now, but before i go, i'll leave you all with my song of the moment. it's midnight land by empires - and if you go to weareempires.com you can download it and the entire rest of their first album, howl, for free. oh, i love tiny unsigned indie bands. never stop just giving your amazing music away, empires.