in the morning at the top of the stairs

today's title comes from casimir pulaski day by sufjan stevens. i'm not listening to it right now, nor did i listen to it at the top of the stairs, but it was playing this morning. now i'm listening to stephen fry read some of oscar wilde's short stories. i don't normally like audiobooks, but i'll make an exception because...stephen fry. it makes me do this:

i've been pretty busy lately. i got into my first (minor) accident wednesday night. i got lost trying to come home on a back road from ashburn and ran into a gate at the alien testing facility janelia farms. i hate that place. there's a key-card-swipe/security gate thing and it shuts automatically if you don't have the key card. and it's on a one way street. i slammed on the brakes pretty quickly but there's still a tiny dent on the car. oh, and then i got to back up for a half a mile. so that? that is just one of the many, many reasons i hate driving.

after that i went home and did homework until 4 in the morning. oh, i hate school now. i can't wait until it's over. well, i can't wait until the part of school where we're still doing work is over. i don't mind all the free periods where we just play board games and cards (i learned two new games today and failed miserably at both of them). that was all i did today, since the momster surprised me by picking me up at 12:30 so we could get lunch and go to borders. well, i went to borders - she just did boring work things.

i feel like i'm slowly becoming nocturnal. i end up napping for an hour or two when i come home, staying up until 3 or so, and then catching a few more hours of sleep. actually, i guess that isn't really nocturnal. semi-nocturnal? i don't know. i still feel a little loopy.

i've got to go finish doing my laundry (that's right - i'm still working my way through the piles that built up during AP week) and throw some clothes in a bag for our s-la/meggo/jenibean weekend.

oh, and let's switch things up today. instead of posting songs, i'm going to share something even better: robert downey jr.

i was made for sunny days

today's title comes from the song of the same name by the weepies. it's both true and cheerful, so have a listen:

inspired by banana's adventures in driving, i decided to try and get over my fear hatred mild aversion to driving. i was semi-successful. i ended up driving (alone!) for a significant amount of time doing errands for the momster and taking the dogs to the park, but i still hated every minute of it. at least when i drive alone i don't have the momster cringing and shrieking about how we're both going to die. it's hardly encouraging, and it's not like i do that to her (except for when it's deserved - and when she is driving with one hand on a coffee cup, another hand on her cell phone, and no hands on the wheel i think i'm justified in shouting a little).

in case you were wondering, my mongol eyes are gone. i had to sleep with an ice pack on my face (all night! and the stupid thing kept melting and waking me up so i'd have to go refill it and barely got any sleep at all and probably don't make any sense and gee, i'm really not living up to yesterday's promise to blog coherently today, huh?) but it all worked out in the end.

you thought it'd be another gif, didn't you? ha, i'm full of surprises, okay?

i started to solve my hard drive space issues today. i've got to back everything up first, which i'm doing in stages since copying everything to CDs is going to take days, and after that i'm going to move most of my tv shows and movies (but not skins - all four seasons of that will stay on my computer forever) to one of the desktops in the house or an external hard drive - and then i'll have space for more music! i had to move a bunch of music from my computer to the momster's earlier this week since i was down to less than 1 GB of space, but i've started bringing some of it back. i still can't believe i took gogol bordello off, just four days after i blogged about them. don't worry, though - it was an accident. i meant to move the goo goo dolls off, instead, and then i found out during music day that i'd messed it up and was just like

it's really been a good day for Compy, actually. i cleaned up her widgets, too, and loaded a few new program icons in, too.

we've only got one more song for this post. and i don't care if it's technically a spoiler, i've been listening to the leak of this all day:

the scene: a city after dawn

today's title comes from in sleep by lissie. i posted about it a little while ago. if you don't remember it, go youtube it, i'm blogging from my phone.

while researching clips for the awesome, no really, i'm actually excited for something school-related, isn't that weird? film studies project i'm doing in lit, i came across a veritable gold mine of late 40s and early 50s educational films.

i know, i know - that doesn't sound all that interesting. certainly not good enough for an entire blog post (because i am, of course, a blogger of High Standards and only post about meaningful things like makeup and robert downey jr. and hair), but...well, just watch them. you'll see what i mean.

for example, there is the classic Boys Beware, which takes care to warn teenage boys of the dangers of hitchhiking. the 1950s sure must have been a nice time. nowadays most people aren't allowed to hitchhike because of the possibility of being kidnapped, raped, or murdered. back then the only danger was that you might meet a sick, diseased... homosexual. that's right. back in the 50s the biggest danger to hitchhiking teenagers was this:

anyway, here's the clip:

there's a companion video for girls, too. don't worry - girls, beware isn't about our risk of being killed by an angry lesbian. nope, it's about our risk of being killed by, oh, just about everything else.

after watching that you might be wondering why it was that just about everyone in 1950s america wanted to murder women. it's probably because of little films like this, which "educated" the modern man on how to deal with women.

there are a bunch of other clips in the related links on the side. watch them all when you have the time - they make for really fun car viewing.

oh, and in case you didn't notice, this is my hundredth post of the year! woo hoo!

look for another post from me later tonight - i'm going to go eat dinner and plan my lit and calc essays now. oh, and watch the daily show (don't worry - i know it's on right now, i've got it recording), the colbert report, and glee. i'm so excited for glee, it's a little unreal. the previews last week made it look like this episode is going to be hilarious.

oh, and while i'm sharing links i found in the car, here's one that left me a little horrified and a little hysterical. i love cracked.

under marble movie skies

Today's title comes from Daniel by Bat For Lashes. I probably blogged about it last summer since her album, Two Suns, was one of my favorites last year.

In case the capital letters weren't enough to give it away, I'm blogging from my phone. It's been a while since I did this, but I felt a pressing urge to blog triggered by Lulu's attempted suicide that wouldn't let me wait until I got home.

Caught that, did you? Yeah, my genius of a headphone-eating dog got her leash tangled around the backseat of the car and then she jumped...and didn't quite hit the ground.

That's right: I am the proud owner of the only dog in existence that tried to hang itself on Route 7.

Don't worry, she's alright. I did a quick dive to the backseat and detached her from her leash, but not without flashing possibly every car on the road today. My life - it's occasionally horrible.

Proof? I decided to pick up a Calculus review book after all. Of course, since my dogs had just demonstrated a strong desire to play My Chemical Romance and cry tears of emo blackness before killing themselves (I might be hyperbolizing. Might) I had to wait in the car with them while the Momster headed into Borders to pick up our books. Before she left I asked her to check if they still had copies of Fight Club since I still don't own it. What did she buy instead? Three Calc review books (three!), Calc flashcards (and considering the giant flashcard project we have due on Wednesday, this is highly, highly ironic), and Garnishinh For Dummies.

...no, I'm not kidding. Garnishing. Not even Cooking For Dummies. What are we going to do with a book about garnishing food? We can barely work the oven!

My life is occasionally ridiculous. At least I get to comfort myself with frappucinos.

Oh, and I made a new sleep/nighttime playlist for the summer. It's 33 (hopefully familiar) songs long. Anyone want to guess what's on it? Whoever gets the most gets...well, I don't actually know since this is the Internet and all. But something good. Really.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:Fort Evans Rd NE,Leesburg,United States

but the clothes i wore just don't fit my soul anymore

today's title comes from the gaslight anthem's new album. i'd share it with you, but it hasn't been released yet so i can't find a decent version on youtube yet. there's actually a lot of songs i've been saving up to blog about, but - well, let's just say i have a love/hate relationship with leaks, okay?

the love.

and the hate.

random tangent: i'm watching the colbert report right now and wow is damon from the gorillaz hot. now i'm glad i really liked plastic beach. oh, and his accent's great, too. it reminds me of cook from skins. also, he's not a record company-produced robot. we love him, right? yeah, i thought so.

so, in the spirit of my dwindling enthusiasm for education, let's do a little quiz, okay? for eleventy bajillion points, answer the following:

1. Who skipped school today?

a. Rachel

b. Rachel

c. Ra- Give it up, already, we all know it's you and why would you miss another day of school when the only real classes you had were econ (easy) and gov (laughable)?

d. Lady Gaga

2. Why did I skip school?

a. You're a lazy brat. 

b. You listened to too much Lady Gaga and started swanning around the house in a Kermit the Frog outfit screaming, "I'm a free bitch, baby!"

c. You were forced to by The Momster.

d. Someone offered you crack, but you could only pick it up at 11 a.m. in a shady alleyway in D.C.

3. Why did The Momster make you skip school?

a. She decided to schedule her annual psychotic break for April this year.

b. She needed a partner for a Beegees-themed 70s disco dance-off. 

c. She got fed up with your college-related indecision and made you visit UVA (which you already rejected) and UMW in one day. 

d. She decided to trade you for drugs and/or real estate deals. 

you know how people always tell you to pick C if you get stuck on a test? well, i hope you picked C because that was the answer to all three oh-so-difficult questions.

basically, as of 8 a.m. this morning, i still hadn't made a definitive college decision. like 99% of me was all for going to UMW and keeping the dent in my strictly-limited-to-60k-we-can't-give-you-everything-rachel-be-grateful-already college fund pretty small but that pesky 1%? well, that 1% was sitting there going "but you like william and mary", "there's a banana at william and mary", "you stayed up all night and occasionally studied things for four years so you could get into william and mary".

yeah, i know. that 1% - she's a troublemaker.

after explaining this to the momster, her genius solution was to road trip to UVA and UMW - i still don't understand why UVA was included, maybe to serve as a see-you-already-made-one-decision-now-do-it-again example? idk, i'm just bitter she refused to drive to william & mary since banana and gina were both there today, but i guess it wouldn't have made much sense since i've seen that campus like four times now - and then make me choose. and the UMW campus is pretty. so it wasn't that hard of a choice after all. but then the momster decided that she couldn't take the risk of me changing my mind in the next week, so she made the deposit directly to the admissions office and paid for housing.

to sum all that up, the momster is the kind of cray cray that makes lady gaga look sane and i'm officially enrolled in college.

anyway, during the twelve hours i was in the car today, i spent a lot of time staring out the window in sulky-yet-alliterative silence listening to my ipod. after listening to my newest songs a few times, i ended up switch to the 100! playlist and listening to it on loop, because as much as i love new music - well, the top 100 songs made it there for a reason, right?

anyway, it got me wondering - what do all of you listen to? i know that most of us don't listen to the same music, so i really want to know what's in your top 25. or if you're too lazy to comment with that, then what are your top 5 most played songs, at least?

on the way to cassadaga to commune with the dead

today's title was, once again, stolen from bright eyes' song four winds. in case you couldn't tell, i really like it. go listen to it or i will cut you.

oh, and in case you were wondering, one communes with the dead via pictures. be warned, there will be a lot of them in today's post. i wish i could create a nifty little sign to warn you properly. it'd be all fancy and yellow and have lots of stick figures spelling out 'hit the back button' a la YMCA. after seeing this picture, though, i'm afraid that no sign i create will ever measure up:

i really have nothing to blog about. no thing. all i've done is put the emergency groceries away - doesn't it seem like everyone and their mother went grocery shopping today? - and watch my snow fort melt slowly in the sun. thankfully nature is going to rebuild it for me since, you guessed it, we're in for more snow tomorrow. to which i say:

in case you were wondering, a good portion of this post will be pictures or links. this is mostly because, as a result of the snow week, i've spent an unhealthy amount of time on the internet. pity me. 

as a result of my boredom i even offered to drive myself somewhere. me. driving. voluntarily. 

in case you were wondering why this is such a novel event, my native american name is actually Fears Car Gets Crushed. 

and, of course, after bravely attempting to overcome my fear of the car, the momster's reaction went like this:

and then my face, it did this:

and then for the rest of the day i was about .00092 seconds away from becoming this person:

okay, that's all folks. i'm off to watch david letterman and curse all of jay leno's ancestors and descendants for removing coco from my television. 

BlogPress

so today i got this handy dandy app on my phone which lets me update my blog a little more easily. we'll see how that works out. it'll probably be a lot easier than my previous method of updating via iPhone, which mainly involved opening up blogger, switching to HTML mode, and copying in any pictures or videos i wanted in.

strangely, i just misspelled wanted and my phone's autofill dictionary suggested that i meant to type sanhedrin. what, exactly, is Sanhedrin? Someone google it for me since i can't quit this app without losing everything I posted.

what am i listening to? the well and the lighthouse by arcade fire. it's good music for waiting in parking lots, which is what i'm up to right now, since the momster is taking the lulus fir their rabies vaccinations and i didn't feel like waiting in the vets office. basically, this will probably be my only opportunity to blog today and I felt like I should seize it.

i have a feeling that sentence was horribly convoluted. oh well, it's been a long day.
buzzer club was fun today. the muslim student association was meeting next door, though, and they were so loud we had to shut the door. gee, way to show some courtesy guys.

a lot of people wore purple today. it was extremely happymaking. candy canes if you get that reference! here's a hint:

also at lunch, my friend katrina was talking about how she can read tagalog more easily than spanish, which reminded me of when s-la and i tried to speak tagalog. meggo, i hope you get us another pamphlet - s and i need to perfect our newspeak skills. oh, and why does autofill recognize newspeak but not ryro or muggle or funner? silly autofill. you need to get with the grammatically incorrect times

that's all, folks. let's see how this works out.

edit: eh, i like posting from the phone. uploading pictures isn't as fun, mostly because you can't upload straight from flickr, and then you'd all have to miss out on little gems like this (the ipod home screen in cupcake form!)

the story of smooshy smooshy face

This is Lulu.

She will eat you.

No, really. And then she'll go after your dearly beloved Notebooks, Potters, and Pencil Cases.

Don't expect to survive.

(New blog in approximately 15 minutes. In the car now. Not bad for pictures taken on my phone last night, eh?)

and now for the important things...

and we all know what important things i'm referring to, right? right. because we all know that i would only ever use my precious subject line to refer to midtown, their songs, my ongoing devotion to them, and/or current project to keep reviewing their albums in order to get you to like them.

today we're covering album two, aka 'living well is the best revenge'. it's kind of ironic that i'd be covering my least favorite of their albums on my least favorite day this month, but...oh well. although you should understand that my least favorite midtown album is approximately equivalent in terms of musical love/squee factor with my second favorite kings of leon album (only by the night, in case you were wondering), just to keep things in perspective. i just thought i should share that since i realized today that since most of you have met me in the midst of one of my overexcited, new-band-discovery periods (and it doesn't really matter if that band was cutie and co., panic!, cobra starship, or better than ezra because that initial period of excitement is pretty much the same no matter what), you probably haven't really been exposed to my love of all things midtown yet. mostly because that was always in the back of my head, just below the beatles and just above britney spears, but never really something i felt the need to fangirl over (well, until now, obviously). and now that we have some context for this, onto the review.

well, okay, it's not much of a review because i'm not much of a reviewer. my main problem with this album is how overproduced it sounds. also, gabe's vocals on a lot of these songs seem different to the other albums (or even his pre-vocal cyst stuff with cobra). his voice isn't necessarily bad, not at all. more like generic. he sounds like every other singer in a pop-punk band (besides tom, who will never be equalled). like i said, overproduced. the good? just about everything else.

favorite song: like a movie. the lyrics in this are great and it's such a great car song. in case you couldn't tell, that's pretty high praise from me (especially since there are days when it feels like i was born with a car seat welded to my butt).

other highlights:

1. get it together, for the intro, mostly, but also because after dances i like to put this song on while i'm in the bathroom and listen to gabe saporta tell me to 'take off your makeup, honey' while i'm...taking my makeup off. i don't know, i'm easily amused, okay?
2. you should know. this is definitely a lyrics song to me. i don't know enough about music to comment on the arrangements on this song beyond saying that it sounds like a simplified and slowed down version of blink, but the lyrics and gabe's voice on this (which is less polished than on the rest of the songs) filled all of my 'reasons i like midtown' ticky boxes. besides, what's not to love in a song that's telling us that 'it's safe to fall if you just trust the ground you stand on'?
3. become what you hate/in the songs. okay, so these are two songs, but i like them both for the same reason, which is that they're all about midtown's record label (which they left after this album). it's fun for context/being spitefully happy that they ditched drive thru records in time to make 'forget what you know' independently (and awesomely, without any of the crazy 'sound like bands X, Y, & Z' directives that had to be responsible for this album).

so that was 'living well is the best revenge'. stay tuned for 'save the girl, lose the world'.

try to forget about living the good life

so today was just all-around awful. lulu (satan in pekingese form) chewed up my copy of the loved one, the book we're reading in lit, and since i'm going to need it tomorrow (it even says so on my teacher's website, all ominous and official warning-like), we went out to borders in sterling to get another copy. only it was sold out when we got there. and according to the salesgirl, it was also sold out at tyson's, alexandria, georgetown, manassas, winchester, and every other borders on earth. so then we went back to the car, called barnes and noble, and found out that we'd have to drive all the way to manassas to buy their last copy - which, thankfully, they put on hold (under the name lulu satandog, but, hey, people should know better than let me have the phone unsupervised). so, you know, i got to suffer through a lovely drive to manassas circa rush hour - although it was nice and eight o'clockish when we headed home, so that wasn't so bad. the manassas barnes and noble was good for one other thing, too. see that thing on the right? happily entitled 'nightlight'? yeah, that's the official printed parody of twilight. i started reading it in the store and it was pretty funny - i didn't buy it, though, i saved my/mi madre's book money for j. d. salinger's zooey and franny, which i started and which is wonderful. mostly i'm amused by the fact that there is an actual market for twilight parodies - if there even are official harry potter parodies they aren't on an actual display (like 'nightlight') and definitely didn't come out so early. think about it: harry and co. have been around for over a decade and twilight came out in what, 2006? and it's already spawning parodies. i feel like this is the beginning of the universe righting itself.

other things which i found today include:

...well, i'm not actually sure what these are supposed to be. they were just part of the random silly things i bought at target today. while there, i also bought these:

'these' being, respectively, another one of my favorite drinks of all time and my new favorite throw/blankie (since i've finally gotten around to replacing the one i left at meggo's freshman year and never brought home again...speaking of, i think blankie and breadroll deserve their own blog post, m). i just love target. you never know what you'll find there.

and since this post is getting kind of long, i'm moving the midtown review to its own post. read/comment on this for the next ten minutes or so. and maybe listen to breaking by the all american rejects while you type like i am.

adventures

so today i discovered the wonder that is this:

in case you didn't know, this is the peppermint mocha frappuccino, aka the combination of my two most-ordered drinks at starbucks (java chip frapps or a peppermint mocha with an extra espresso shot because the original has no caffeine at all). it's my favorite drink of all time. just so you know. and since starbucks is open on thanksgiving (and this year we don't have to visit the indian half of the family in long island because i have cheeseball/project/college application duties) i'm going to beg for an early morning pick-me-up on thursday.

i'm listening to never knew by the rocket summer. it's awesome.

surprisingly, discovering a new drink wasn't the most exciting thing to happen during early release. neither was taking pictures of the cafeteria and watching gina complete her awesome infographic for yearbook. nope, the most memorable event of all came in between those two. specifically, while on the way to starbucks.

let's preface this by explaining that my mom answers her phone and texts while driving. a lot. and she usually reads them out loud to me because she's afraid she'll get distracted and misunderstand something and reply wrong to a client.

so, while on belmont ridge road my mom starts reading me a text. stops. stares at her phone (while on the twistiest, turniest, most median-lacking road in the county...i thought i was going to die). and then starts flipping out...literally. she was flapping her hands everywhere and babbling in indian. it was highly entertaining. and while flapping/driving she dropped her phone between her seat and the gear shift so i fished it out and read the last text.

which, you know, was seriously dirty in an 'i'm going to quote low-quality porn at you' sort of way and from a number not in her contacts or immediately recognizable to either of us. so once she calmed down she took the phone away and replied back with a poorly-spelled variant of "who are you? where did you get this number?" and then we were at starbucks and she got out to go get us coffee.

she left her phone in the car, though, and a few minutes later it started ringing. and since i'm always supposed to answer her phone in case it's a client having another OMG moment, i

picked it up. and it was Dirty Text Guy. here's a rough transcript of our conversation:

Dirty Text Guy (DTG): Hello? Is this Barbara? I just texted you, I'm so sorry if this isn't the wrong number, do you know Barbara?

[DTG speaks really fast. he sounded pretty nervous, too]

me: ...This is Rachel. I got your text. You know I'm 17, right? So you might want to quit quoting porn at me because that's just really creepy.

[and, okay, i know the text wasn't to me, but i just couldn't resist. messing with people is so much fun. besides, it's really better that he got me on the phone and not the madre, because during the flap-her-hands-and-ask-Jesus-why-these-things-happened-to-her routine she was totally squawking about calling the police and tracking down the 'indecent person']

DTG: ...17. I'M SO SORRY PLEASE DON'T CALL THE COPS ON ME I DIDN'T KNOW.

me: ...okay. You might want to go get Barbara's real number now. Is the Barbara you know Barbara [insert-last-name-here], because that's my neighbor and she's married and that's just really creepy.

DTG: ...OH MY GOD.

End Call.

and in honor of my little misadventure in messing with inappropriate texters, have say anything's hilarious new song. the title kind of speaks for itself.

dear world...

today my butt nearly fell off. no, really. we drove for, like, three hours (well, okay, there were tiny, tiny breaks for things like doctor's appointments and grocery shopping and shoes) and my butt has been left behind in fairfax county. i miss it very much.

in case you couldn't tell, i'm feeling silly today. i'm taking a break from studying for an econ quiz i'm making up tomorrow. oh, blogger, how easily you distract me. well, actually, the neverending car ride was good for homework purposes. i finished my re-read of the loved one for lit (time to do those questions over break) and all my other homework, and now all i've got left is econ and calc extra credit.

paper bag records is celebrating its seventh anniversary with a free covers compilation to download! it's pretty rad. my favorite song off of it is actually playing on my (7065 songs!) itunes right now. it's josh reichmann's cover of bat for lashes' daniel. bat for lashes, in case you couldn't tell, is actually natasha khan (i'm kind of loving all these one person 'bands' that are springing up) and she wrote the original song about the karate kid. since you'll get the cover for free anyway i'm just going to post the original video (which i think is pretty cool - spot all the karate kid references!)

so in today's news, there was a fire drill today. only it wasn't a drill. i'm kind of fuzzy on the details, mostly because it was raining and i was cold and trying to sneak out of the parking lot, and therefore not paying attention. the main point is that we got let out of school to wallow in our own freezing misery during eighth block aka early release time. i'm still bitter about this. not only did i not miss any classes (like, say, the calc quiz i took earlier), but i had to stay and be "accounted for" when i wasn't even technically in school to begin with. lesson? never stay at school longer than you have to, even if you're doing it for homework-related purposes.