a heart just can't contain all of that empty space

the title of today's post is brought you by Why Haven't You Just Listened To The Damn Song Yet. alternatively, four winds by bright eyes.

in case you hadn't noticed, i drank a little of this today:

in other words, i wrote another poem (but it was too long to shoehorn into this post so scroll down to read it). today's post was also heavily injected with creativitea, but it requires some explanation.

i woke up this morning with my headphones wrapped around my neck. well, this is according to the momster, who came in to wake me up and ended up detangling me from said headphones while i continued to sleep. once convinced that i wasn't going to become a victim of Death By Headphone (so much less enjoyable than Death By Chocolate), she tried waking me up and apparently received a response of 'go away, ray lamontagne is singing me to sleep.'

she thinks this is endlessly funny; i see nothing wrong with it and wouldn't have mentioned it except that it inspired me to make:

a valentine's day mix

(or eight songs that turn rachel's eyes into hearts)

1. josie - blink-182 
2. i will keep the bad things from you - the damnwells
3. you are the best thing - ray lamontagne
4. you and i - ingrid michaelson
5. on call - kings of leon
6. all i believe in - the magic numbers
7. all the small things - blink-182
8. you've got the love - florence + the machine

if you're looking at this and thinking "one of these things is not like the other", well, just look at the lyrics to josie and then try to argue with me. 

and now for today's store of funny pictures, since i'm still spending too much time on the computer (i think once we're back in school i'm going to just leave my computer off for a week)

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. 

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

reasons why rachel has yet to sleep

1. the interwebs:

(climbing up the walls - radiohead)

2. coffee. and links about coffee. 

(you wanna get me high - the donnas)

3. them things with the words and the - what's it called? oh yeah, paper. 

(bell, book, & candle - eddi reader)

winter is nature's way of saying "up yours"

today's title was taken from a quote by robert byrne. i totally agree with it and, in protest of the untimely snowfall which postponed my american university interview and ruined all my hopes and dreams of getting to a bookstore soon, i've spent most of today imagining that it's summer.

s-la's already posted about our fun-filled friday, so i'll spare you a repeat of all the details. she's not the only one who's been writing, either, but we all know how i feel about sharing what i write with The World. even if The World currently consists of a six people and a few lurkers.

i spent most of today reading and writing and running (and cleaning up my poor, abused itunes library), though, so to salvage this post i'll share a meme that's been floating around the interwebs:

Put your iTunes on shuffle and post the first lines of the first 20 songs that play in a poem. Make the first line of the 21st song the poem's title. 

"where it began, i can't begin to know when"

i was running late for work

i think it's time that i mention

there is no greater love

i like my music loud

the ice is thin come on dive in

are you going to take me home tonight?

in the dream you were

in a car in the driveway the conversation's colors paint themselves on canvas

no mercy for what we're doing

mon amour mi corazon

classic makes perfect in person

the trophy that i made for us

as far as i can see

tough break handjob broke it all in two

the samples won't delay but the cable

please don't go crazy if i tell you the truth

you spin my head right round, right round

once i had a love and it was a gas

free - that's all that she could bleed 

i will keep the bad things from you

wow, the person i snagged that meme from was right - it does turn into a really cracked out poem. i'm okay with that though - mostly because i'm feeling silly today and the internet is facilitating my immaturity. then again, unlike some people i'm still a youthful seventeen and can't possibly aspire to the dignity and solemnity required by adulthood. also that same person should know that the kingdom hearts version of this is halloween just came on and it's amazing. i think i'm going to get back on the treadmill now or maybe sniff around the kitchen for the leftovers from tonight's dinner - thai food, yum. 

greetings from mount cyanide

exams went pretty well - after an all-night study binge, anyway. predictably, the lit exam left me feeling like my hand was about to fall off so after s-la and i went to cold stone - it was a redemptive sort of day, in that she redeemed her birthday ice cream and i used jeni's christmas gift card to buy two of the yummiest, most sugar-filled treats i've had since gingerbread time - i took a nice long nap. and by 'long', i mean i got hom earound 3:30 and woke up ten minutes ago.

trust me when i say my laziness knows no bounds.

in the last - oh, just about fourteen minutes - i've managed to reheat and eat two slices of pizza (why, yes, i am feeling healthy today) pull out an old book and curl up on my couch beneath my giant, fluffy purple throw. today's agenda? rereading my way through betsy-tacy, jane eyre, and maybe some t. s. eliot or thomas hardy - one of the latter's poems was on my lit midterm and gave me an itchy feeling to read some more. if i'm still awake after all that, i think i'll continue writing. it's fun to have a story that won't be told until i'm physically typing it out - most of the time i can play the whole thing out in my head and not have to worry about actually writing it.

before i do all that, though, we have three very important things to get through: the daily show, the colbert report, and american idol. i might have to turn idol off when the jonas comes on, though. i'm not sure how i feel about him thinking he can judge other musicians, no matter how crappy.

what am i listening to right now? it's looping between daisy and degausser by brand new. they, along with jesus christ which just doesn't fit my mood right now, are my favorites by them.

also, this may be one of the cutest animals on earth. according to cuteoverload it's called a dik-dik after the noise it makes when it runs, and it's native to africa. according to wikipedia, it's a grazer. feel free to go aww and make smooshy faces at your computer screen:

i don't even know

i probably shouldn't find this picture amusing. i do anyway. moving on, my saturday has been an exciting mix of studying econ, studying calc, studying physics, and - you guessed it - more studying.

since that's all too boring to blog about, i'll just share some of the things that the interwebs invented to distract me from all of that studying.

1. oh, zooey deschanel, never change:

2. first person tetris

3.  3OH!3's new song off tim burton's alice in wonderland soundtrack premiered today. it actually doesn't suck.

4. pretty much does what it says on the tin. or, you know, web address bar. 

5. the old foodie

6. okay, so this one isn't necessarily an internet-related distraction, but it does exist on the internet, so i'll still include it. i finished rereading pride and prejudice and moved onto...idk click the link. and then read it because it is awesome.

let's just begin this post on a happy note

because you know that a first-monday-back-at-school-in-over-sixteen-days post will not be filled with many happymaking facts.

so, fact #1: i am actually ridiculously, unironically happy about the fact that i managed to discover - and fill my itunes top 25 - with bat for lashes and phoenix and the dirty projectors (although this one's only because of mark hoppus's music blog) long before pretentious indie music blogs started featuring them on their year-end roundups.

fact #2: the new blogger dashboard draft thing? is awesome. if i'd had my way if s-la hadn't made me get one of these things i'd still be on livejournal or tumblr, which are both much easier to use (and have communities for basically everything) so it's nice to see google catching up. you go blogger, coco.

fact #3: i've officially completed my reread of the poisonwood bible, just in time for class tomorrow. that makes the fourth time i've read it. the multiple points of view are still so well done as to make you feel you fail at life and/or writing. rachel is sadly still a moron. i foresee this being a fun unit in lit.

oh, and the best news of all? i've got a full scholarship to my preferred tiny safety school. which is, you know, exciting. at the very least i'm no longer feeling super-stressed, so hopefully i'll actually be able to keep my new year's resolution of zen this year.

and now for the bad news:

this writing-a-story thing is highly complicated. i'm afraid i'm going to have to chop a good chunk of what i wrote during my all-night writing binge. i adore some bits of it but it just isn't doing anything to further the plot and if i keep it the pace will drag. oh well. i'm hoping after about fifteen years and compulsive rewriting this might actually turn out decently. like let-people-read-this decent, even. one can only hope.

i've updated the bloglist, too. it's tiny right now - a few of the most recent adds to the old one and two new songs. well, i'm not sure if they count as two separate songs since kid cudi's the prayer samples the funeral by band of horses. i love the original and the not-quite-a-remix, though, so they both went it. also - and you'll probably be able to tell this by the lyrics - both of those songs have been my theme for what little of The Book With No Name that i've written so far. oh and right now i'm listening to holdin' on together by phoenix.

ugh, i have to go back to my homework now. i'd rant about that, too, but gina and jenibean have both done a better job of that, so just read their posts instead.

here, i'll leave you with something vaguely inspirational. or i assume it's inspirational since when i look at it now i mostly just laugh uncontrollably, since when i was a tiny wee widdle emo rachel and had a myspace and a xanga and still had an aim screenname to post away messages to (oh, the bad old days) this was one of my deep and insightful posts. it's good to know that, no matter how old and grown up you may feel, some things never change:

we don't need no education

well, we might. just maybe. but we certainly don't need to finish senior year and the mountains of homework that i have to finish before this break ends. why can't we have another snow day or three? i'm going to die before this ever ends. die. my brain is no longer equipped to do school-related things.

oh well. in times of trouble i guess it's always best to turn to audrey hepburn.

i've been trying to ease myself back into the world of academic thought via the interwebs. in other words, i've been going through my usual list of links and not the crazy batch of OMGCUTEFLUFFYANIMALS that comprised the bulk of my googling over break. here's my favorites so far:

1. 'don't overuse commas. think of the poor children who have to go to bed each night without any.'
2. malcolm gladwell and other writer-type people discuss the effects of religion on writing. and make it interesting.
3. articles like this should probably discourage me from journalism. should.
4. no list would be complete without the onion. or a mean girls parody.
5. ...or cute fuzzy animals. just one though. really!

i'm listening to the greek version of i won't say (i'm in love) from the hercules soundtrack. thank s-la for that one, because it is ah-mazing. it even made it onto my ^^ playlist, which, as you can probably imagine, is huge. also, it's a great playlist to blog to since every song is happy. you know what isn't happy? yesterday's UVA admissions blog proclaiming 'happy deadline day!' even though i'm done applying i still wasn't happy about january first. i wonder if i'm just going to hate new year's day for the rest of my life - it seems highly likely right now. i'll probably end up hating april-whenever-we-get-our-rejection-letters day, too, but i don't feel like dwelling on that right now. after all, i have cookies and wake up by arcade fire just came on the ^^ playlist. life is good. until monday, at least.

time to go back to homework. if you're reading this you probably should, too.

so this is it

this will probably be my last post of the year. of the decade. 2009. it's pretty fitting that i have nothing particularly profound planned for it. i'll leave that to the real bloggers out there - you know, the ones who craft pretentious countdown lists and call big yellow taxi the worst song of the decade (what, did you magically forget about creed and, ahem, 'birthday sex'?).

instead, you'll get to read my impressions of sherlock holmes, which s-la and i went to see today. it's a short review. actually, it can be summed up in one word: awesome. seriously, go see it. also, hans zimmer needs another couple of oscars to go along with the nine billion i'm sure he already has because the score to the movie is great, too. i'm actually blogging to it right now. (currently listening to: he's killed the dog again).

after the movie, s-la and i headed to borders. it was an interesting trip, best told in pictures. to begin with, we spotted autographed copies of leviathan by scott westerfeld. s had been blogging about it forever, so i won't bother, but i'm half way through it right now and it's amazing. also, the cover is really pretty. there were autographed copies of uglies and pretties, too, as well as robin wasserman's book 'hacking harvard', but we already have those so there was no point in buying them. well, besides the fact that i'm greedy and like staring at the pretty autographed pages.

so that was the Good. after it came the Funny and Truly Horrifying.

the Funny was unintentional - at least, i hope it was - and actually quite juvenile. someone shelved copies of sarah palin's new book 'going rogue' in the lesbian and gay fiction section. see? it's in the middle of the bottom shelf, in case you were wondering.

the Truly Horrifying, however, was - well, truly horrifying. i have pictures of it but i refuse to post them, mostly because i don't want to remember the awfulness of the experience.

as those of you who frequent bookstores already know, the twilight series gets an obscene amount of floor space relegated to it. entire bookcases and displays are devoted to it. the entire franchise has tons of useless, tacky memorabilia scattered around bookstores everywhere. in other words, the youth of the nation? it's doomed.

s-la and i got to witness this firsthand in front of one such looming display case of twilight-related junk. amidst posters of robert pattinson's slightly constipated scowl and stephenie meyer's comic book (no, i am not making this up. she has a comic book devoted to her life. please share in my unmitigated horror - at least the review is funny) was a mother and her cute four- or five-year-old daughter. who she led around the display case going 'what's that?' and waiting for the response 'it's twilight!' and teaching her to recognize bella swan. now, i realize this isn't the most popular opinion to have, but i think that anyone who can really, truly like and appreciate twilight to the point where you desire to teach your poor, impressionable child about it is sick. sick and twisted. even twistier than that last sentence and all of my late night mixed pronouns. like i said - Truly Horrifying.

i cheered myself up by having thai food and looking at fun quotes on flickr. this one? this is my favorite.

i feel like it's something we all need to try and remember. and, hypocritical as it may sound, since i did just regale you all with a paragraph of epic judginess up above, i really do think we need to forget about what people might think and just go for the things we want.

i write. i like to write. it's pretty much the only reason i've continued blogging after november ended. you know what i don't like? i don't like showing what i write to other people - and i really don't like the wait in between giving someone something i've written and receiving a reaction. somehow my mind manages to conjure up visions of secret writerly-rachel hatred. it's disturbing, to say the least. i mean, i have issues letting people see my college essays and those aren't even being judged (primarily, anyway) on literary ability.

i guess that's the real point of this huge, meandering blog post. i'm spilling my most random, rambling thoughts onto this page and you, whoever you may be, will eventually read them. judge them. get to know me from a few disparate thoughts on twilight and midtown and life as i know it. here's hoping it's good reading.

i guess i'll see you in 2010. it's been a fun eight months of blogging, though. and, well, i'm thinking this quote expresses everything i've been trying to say for the last three hundred words in much more concise terms:

well, i could just blog about my day

but that'd be boring. basically it was: christmas shopping, manicure/pedicures with the momster, more christmas shopping, grocery shopping, getting cookie a new sweater vest, and shoveling out the driveway because the plows finally came through and dumped a bunch of snow against the sidewalk/mailbox. see? boring.

i've kind of been on an inspiration kick lately. i guess that's good, because when i go through long periods of fangirling/obsessing over random things it's generally followed by extended periods of writing - which, you may have noticed, i just haven't felt like doing after the last few months of nonstop school/college/soulsucking writing i've been doing. so just to clear things up, these aren't my views of the year, they're just things that i've found during my daily internet/iphone wanderings.

examples include the prompt of the day at one of the writing blogs i follow. (actually, it was the prompt of the day in, like, november - i just haven't been checking it since, well, see above for the reasons i haven't been writing, you lazyass).

no retreats, no regrets.

oh, and remember that story about the world war one soldiers who had the truce at christmas and couldn't fight against each other? i always thought that was lovely, and then i got to see the history channel's documentary on it, which was amazing. i'm thinking this goes on my list of things to look up in 2010 (i would start in on it now, but i'm having such fun rereading othello and plowing through my stack of victorian-era research books in the car...they make me want to write a steampunk story). also, i like how this is flickr's idea of a relevant photo for world war one. aren't they cute?

other things which have been making my fingers itch for some post-its and a pencil so i could start outlining include this song by the be good tanyas:

really, i would've loved this song just for the lyrics well it's times like these i feel so small and wild, but the whole thing's just so happy and folky and summery it makes me think of sunshine and flip flops and forgetting everything i've ever learned.

i finished season three of the tudors, today. well, all except the sixth episode, which itunes replaced with the first episode. i wrote them an angry email (thankfully attributed to my mother, who one expects that sort of thing from, since the account is under her name) and ended up getting the whole season refunded and a promise that they'd get on uploading the right version in the next two weeks. aw, isn't that sweet of you, apple? this is why no one likes PCs. you can't imagine their customer service people are justin long.

as for the tudors, i'd explain why i like the show so much, but having just finished a picspam of Certain Characters and/or emmy-winning costuming in the notebook-who-shall-not-be-named (why, yes, i did just watch harry potter), i'm kind of tired of splainying. besides, who needs reasons to watch a show with him in it?

what am i listening to now? tourist by julian casablancas. full disclosure: s-la's blog inspired me to put him on again, since before this i was listening to the mission "m is for milla mix" by puscifer.

this didn't really have any inspirational value. i just found it on flickr and was amused.

soul is boring - spirit flies

today's title is gleaned from michael mcclure's poem 99 theses, as i'm far too unoriginal to come up with anything myself. no, really. today i haven't done anything that could possibly be construed as productive. i've just been reading and running and listening to music. it's been another slow day, just sitting back and finding things that inspire me. like this:

in keeping with that theme (and having decided my life is too boring to blog about) i've decided to blog about other people. or, rather, to blog about random things that caught my eye on the interwebs or idiot box today.

starting with this. could they really not come up with any better descriptor than 'jesus-era'? geez, time magazine, follow my example - on days when your creativity seems sapped, turn to better writers. but thank you for letting me know that this is on youtube, since now i'll have something to watch on my phone in the car:

the economist is doing much better, having produced articles like this (and to think the british say we're the uncultured ones) and, which would've been highly appreciated back in the days when i had current events to do and couldn't think of global topics.

random fact of the day: typing in theone.com redirects you to the daily record's home page. how did i find this out? i tried to get to the onion's homepage on my phone and accidentally hit enter too early.

other random fact which wasn't quite interesting enough to be the official random fact of the day: i enjoy all the editorials calling the 'double-ohs' the decade from hell. for my commentary on the 'double-ohs', see above, right around the part where i advise people lacking in creativity to look to more eloquent sources. as for calling this the decade from hell...well, seeing as this is the first full decade i've been alive for (sorry, nineties, if i had just come along two years earlier i could pretend to be an expert on you, too), i'm not going to make any judgements. however, can a decade which gave us the end of the harry potter books and the beginning of the movie franchise be all bad?

...never mind. clearly this was bad enough to erase all the good done in the last ten years.

i've been reading a lot of poetry lately. this is one of my favorites. go check it out.

i'm in hardcore christmas mode right now, so i'm listening to the sixpence none the richer version of it came upon a midnight clear. sadly, it wasn't available when i was putting together the holiday blog playlist, so you'll just have to find it for yourself since youtube refuses to play it.

ooh, ooh! breaking news: keith olbermann just declared 'death panel' (first used by sarah palin) to be the lie of the year. share in my amusement. cable news never stops being funny.

this blog has gone on long enough. i'll restrain myself and just post one more link.

have yourself a sandinista christmas, guys!

this picture isn't related to anything, beyond the fact that there's roughly eighty three feet of snow on the ground and i really wish my backyard and/or town looked like this instead of the mess which it currently is (way to fail, snow plow men).

so today i was the laziest i've been in ages. no homework, no college applications, no...anything, really. it felt amazing. and since winter break is sixteen days this year, i'm hoping that there'll be a lot more days exactly like this one. why? well, there's a poem which describes what i feel a lot better than i ever could. it's called blues by elizabeth alexander:

I am lazy, the laziest

girl in the world. I sleep during

the day when I want to, 'til

my face is creased and swollen,

'til my lips are dry and hot. I

eat as I please: cookies and milk

after lunch, butter and sour cream

on my baked potato, foods that

slothful people eat, that turn

yellow and opaque beneath the skin.

Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday

I am still in my nightgown, the one

with the lace trim listing because

I have not mended it. Many days

I do not exercise, only

consider it, then rub my curdy

belly and lie down. Even

my poems are lazy. I use

syllabics instead of iambs,

prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme,

write briefly while others go

for pages. And yesterday,

for example, I did not work at all!

I got in my car and I drove

to factory outlet stores, purchased

stockings and panties and socks

with my father's money.

To think, in childhood I missed only

one day of school per year. I went

to ballet class four days a week

at four-forty-five and on

Saturdays, beginning always

with plie, ending with curtsy.

To think, I knew only industry,

the industry of my race

and of immigrants, the radio

tuned always to the station

that said, Line up your summer

job months in advance. Work hard

and do not shame your family,

who worked hard to give you what you have.

There is no sin but sloth. Burn

to a wick and keep moving.

I avoided sleep for years,

up at night replaying

evening news stories about

nearby jailbreaks, fat people

who ate fried chicken and woke up

dead. In sleep I am looking

for poems in the shape of open

V's of birds flying in formation,

or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

what am i listening to right now? 1 John 4:16 by the mountain goats.

that's all for now. i'm going to sleep, and am hopefully not going to wake up for the next twelve hours.

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!)

want to hold a mirror up to the world

what's on the ipod right now? antichrist television blues by arcade fire.

so, the blogging is occurring a little later than i originally intended. among other things i had some cookies and milk, prevented lucifer the smooshy faced dog from eating the christmas tree, and discovered that the song i'm currently listening to is actually about joe simpson. in other words, today has been productive.

so you know that quote from 'the perks of being a wallflower' about wanting to feel infinite? the picture up there? that's one of the things that makes me feel infinite. here's another thing that does. it's amazing how we can become so preoccupied with our own petty concerns that we forget that there can be things and people and places in this scary, beautiful world that are just completely beyond our own lives. i mean look at that girl. she doesn't need to feel infinite, she just is - infinite and self-contained and capable of remembering the difference between right and wrong even when she's surrounded by people who can't say the same. every once in a while, you see something which reminds you that there are no limits to the human condition beyond the self-imposed.

to see examples of self-imposed limits on human growth, see this. same website, and an example of the worst parenting since jon and kate plus 8 went off the air. hmm, maybe arcade fire will right a song about them next? we can only hope.

also, to continue the 'do i want a kitty or a tiger or a pony or a puppy or...' debate, maybe i want a kitty after all? if i got one i could do this!

sick III (it's like the new saw)

jay-z had the death of auto-tune. pete wentz and mark hoppus had the death of the emo swoosh. and i? i have the death of my immune system.

it's been a long, complicated process which involves five one (1) missed week of school, three hundred thousand seventy-two (300,072) makeup homework assignments, and two (2) used boxes of tissues. combine in a blender and hit puree. should result in grumpy and/or sick rachel for at least seventy-two hours.

...or three weeks. because i'd thought i'd been getting better, but then came the sneak-attack of (highly awkward) coughing in the library.

in other words, my immune system is conspiring to turn me into a little old lady who whines about her health and has long, poorly-timed coughing fits in public places. what joy.

here's my flikr photo of the day. this time i'm including a (rough) description of my thought process as i found it. it went a little something like this: isn 't it pretty? and purple? it makes me wish i could play guitar just so i could have a neon purple one. and, okay, so maybe guitars like that don't, you know, exist. but i would find a way. it could be like spiderman, where the guitar gets bit by a radioactive spiders...if a guitar could be infected. so maybe it'd be like batman, instead, where the guitar works on developing near-superguitarish abilities to avenge the death of its...nonexistent guitar parents. hmm, maybe it's just a lost mutant guitar trying to get back to the xavier institute of other neon glowy guitars (and butterfly worshippers). and, yes, i do recast inanimate objects as comic book superheroes. doesn't everyone?

oh, so you remember that essay i was working all yesterday on? it turns out it wasn't due until 9 p.m. today. as in, i turned it in (via turnitin.com, land of self-explanatory web addresses) a full 24 hours (and change) early. oh, self, when will you learn to quit resisting procrastination? it always helps in the long run.

the new my chemical romance cd is going to have a song called black dragon fighting society...how did it take me so long to start liking this band?

what am i listening to now? er, actually? ke$ha. i found her old eps on the interwebs. they're fun. and i think, $ and all, i like her after all. dang it.