don't ever look back

i am watching darren criss sing teenage dream on glee right now. my life is complete.

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.

with no shadows on your doubts

today's title comes from devil in the details by the ambience affair. it's amazing. i got it off of this month's indie/rock playlist and am completely in love with it. so, naturally i went a-looking for the rest of their songs and found them to be equally amazing. also, their lead singer personally answered a lyrical question on yahoo answers, which i find pretty endearing. anyway, i'll just post the song so you can become obsessed with them, too.

and, yes, part of the reason i'm posting the music video is because i think it's incredibly cool that they didn't use a video camera to make it. whatever - i'm easily amused, okay?

since s-la has already blogged about it, i'm not going to bother recapping our fun-filled, backyard hair-dyeing adventures with jenibean and meggo. instead, i'll talk about glee.

i know what you're thinking: "not this again." but hear me out - tonight was the lady gaga episode. gaga. and it made fun of twilight. repeatedly. all while promoting a message of tolerance, family togetherness, and the importance of hot outfits. what's not to love? i can't wait until next week's episode. the previews made it look insane.

speaking of things that are insane, the momster has been gone for the last few days. she's in las vegas at a business conference, leaving me all alone for days. five of them, to be specific, since she comes back late tomorrow night and left on sunday. i'm still bitter that i didn't get to go with her, but leaving school for a week when we only have, like, two weeks of classes left seemed like a bad idea.

now, we all know that i'm not the most...practical of people. i'm not all that great with the whole self-sufficiency thing. never fear, though - i made myself checklists of things i need to do so i don't die or get kidnapped or starve or something. also, the momster and several of our nosy neighbors have been calling constantly. as you can imagine, that got annoying pretty quickly, so i've stopped answering the phone. they'll get over it.

i've been loving having the house to myself. it's been nice having everything so quiet. i think it's a sign of how nerdy/lame i am that the craziest thing i've done in my four days of alone-time is reenact the risky business pants off dance off around my house. for those of you who don't know what i'm talking about, here's the clip:

okay, so i lied. i couldn't help it. risky business had tom cruise in it, and there's no way i'm putting him and his crazy scientologist face up on my blog. it's not even a real word, let alone a religion; safari keeps putting a little red line under scientologist. besides, i love scrubs.

oh, and in musical news, christina aguilera's album leaked. i might be jumping the gun a little here, but based on my first few listens, it's pretty awful. at its best, it's a lady gaga rip off. at its worst it turns into a watered down version of britney spears' worst songs. no wonder she cancelled her tour. how did she spend four years working on this? back to basics was so good. even her greatest hits album had amazing remixes on it. it's like she regressed...into jessica simpson.

and in linky news, if espn covered sports like this i might actually watch it. or at least know what channel number espn is.

other than that, my week has been pretty boring. mostly all i've been doing is playing card games and apples to apples in class, wandering around the school getting up to shenanigans that i'll tell you about after graduation (if i remember, which is doubtful), and actually learning new things in physics. like i said: boring.

and now i'm going to do more boring things: feeding, watering, and walking my dogs. they're like plants but cuter.

sit and contemplate your day

today's title comes from brand new colony by the postal service, also known as one of the ten songs guaranteed to turn me into a gibbering pile of mush. congratulations, ben gibbard.

i'm just playing on the computer until glee starts. american idol is on mute in the background so sometimes i look up and catch the top three making funny faces. i started my reflective essays for lit, too. and by "started" i mean that i haven't actually written anything yet - but i reflected! oh, yes, i reflected my butt off but not really, i'm still doing yoga and squats for that and now i can't feel my legs and discovered that i don't actually know how to reflect. at first i thought it would be a little like meditation, so i waited until no one was home, put some music on and plopped on the couch, waiting for thinky thoughts to come to me. unfortunately the only things that arrived on the thinky thought train were song lyrics and random things like "gee, all the toes on my right foot look bigger than the ones on my left foot if i turn my head just so and squint a little."

i could have put that in my essay, but i've got a feeling that tonight's gonna be a good oh dear god i'm quoting the black eyed peas, where did my life go wrong? that my teacher would have been all:

so i decided to cut the music and actually use my brain...it was hard. i think it might have atrophied from disuse since i've been afflicted with senioritis for several months. hopefully i reached some conclusions that'll make for a halfway decent essay. and if i haven't, well...at least i have videos of cute kittens to keep my company. like this one:

See more funny videos and Cute Animals Videos at Today's Big Thing.

while i was wasting my life doing homework and looking up cat videos and waiting for glee (which just started - neil patrick harris is singing on my television screen!) a trailer for freaky friday came on. i'm not actually sure why, since lindsay lohan is about as relevant as swiss cheese at this point in her coked up career, but it was still there. somehow or another it got me thinking about th-- oh my god. neil patrick harris and shue are singing dream on! 

...okay, it's done. i just lost my train of thought, but i'll leave that paragraph as is so that you can all appreciate my difficulties in focusing long enough to do anything productive. aren't you all amazed that i've almost successfully graduated from high school? 

here's another random thought: if you switched bodies with someone like in freaky friday, would you think of the mouth on that body as yours? i know that i would, but that one scene from the movie (also known as the only scene that i remember, since the rest was a horrible mess of lindsay lohan - who can't act - and chad michael murray - who's like 30 - pretending to be high school students) where the mom-character and the daughter (who were otherwise so forgettable that i don't actually know their names) are driving somewhere and the mom-in-daughter's-body says something about not letting the daughter-as-jamie-lee-curtis eat french fries since they'll go from her mouth to jamie lee's thighs. 

that whole paragraph was one rambly stream-of-consciousness way of giving you all homework. someone tell me if the fact that disney and i agree that even if you were magically transported to a new body, your mouth is still, well, yours makes sense. i got into an argument over the phone with a non-blogger-who-shall-not-be-named about this, and i want it settled. 

so i just looked away from the television screen for like three seconds to finish that sentence and the momster walked in and turned it off. apparently she thought i wasn't watching it. can you believe that? it's glee. and she turned it off right in the middle of a neil patrick harris scene! 

i'm going to stop blogging and protect my right to the remote now. wish me luck, kids.

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:

you know those rainy days ain't so bad when you're the king

today's title comes from fans by kings of leon. here, listen to it, it's one of my favorites.

i'm home now, and i'm pretty much killing time until glee comes on, so i thought i'd blog now.

nothing very interesting happened today. i woke up (late, as usual, so yesterday's straightened hair didn't get to make a reappearance), made coffee, went to school, played apples to apples in econ, sat around and talked in yearbook, went to lunch, mooched a bag of frozen strawberries off of jennifer (she brought them in to make punch for her spanish class), and went to gov to watch the world's most boring civil rights movie ever. seriously. i didn't think it was possible to make me hate thurgood marshall but that movie managed it. oh, and then i tagged along with the momster to do Mysterious Real Estate Things (organize papers and look up numbers) and possibly accidentally flashed half the cars on route 7.

gratuitous robert downey jr. gif is gratuitous

just kidding about that last one. well, sort of. basically, i wore two bras today (i felt like bean, it was fun), and then on the way to starbucks (half price frapps! i had three, so it might have cancelled out, but whatever - at least when i work for the momster she buys my coffee) i was like "hey, the momster's office has a gym attached, maybe i can work out" and blame the caffeine i've had seven cups today proceeded to do the good old sleepover/locker room wiggle to pull it off. so, really, i probably didn't actually flash anyone today, but according to the momster i got several strange looks from people on the road.

and here, have some pictures of the alien rat dogs. they have to wear sweaters when we walk them now since otherwise the cold makes them shiver.

look at my little baby aliens

doesn't she look like brain from pinky and the brain?

i like to think of this picture as cookie mourning his lost fur

glee just came on, so that's all for now. how can i resist rachel berry butchering the climb?

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.

"I mean a girl just can't go to Sing Sing with a green face."

today's title comes from breakfast at tiffany's, both the movie and the novella. it's been my obsession of the day. i promised myself i wouldn't read any of the books i got on friday until after AP exams were over, but...

yeah, i couldn't hold out. and breakfast at tiffany's technically isn't a book - it's a novella. so i've read it three times now. it's that good.

like, i've always loved the movie but i always thought that most of holly's charm was due to her being played by audrey hepburn. she could make anything seem glamorous. so i figured that i was watching the movie and enjoying holly's character more because i'd already seen (and enjoyed) audrey in other movies.

the other movie. with bonus atticus finch gregory peck.

since i've read the novel(la), though, i've kind of had to revise my thinking a little. i always knew that truman capote's story would be darker than the film since...he's truman capote. i've read in cold blood and the flower house and a few of his other short stories and i know that he's a lot grittier than the happy ending/hot male lead hollywood adaptation. so i was prepared for that aspect of the story, at least.

i didn't expect it to be so interesting, though. like, the story is darker and holly golightly is disturbed and flighty and complex and fascinating. so, so fascinating. i don't want to spoil anything for you (because you're all going to read it, okay? every last one of you. it's short, so no complaining). and then you'll watch the movie, because who could resist this?

i know, i know. anyway, i'm sure you'll all be pleased to hear that ophelia the ipod is healthy and has all her songs back. it took three hours, but it was worth it.

glee is on now, so i'm going to leave off here. sue sylvester is so awesome.

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.

blogolating

hmm, so nothing much happened today. worked on my college essays (they're really awful, i'm giving it a week and then i'll go back and revise them into something less terrible). found some music. read a little more potter and am working my way through oryx and crake by margaret atwood. it's such a good book; her writing's so lovely and atmospheric and creepy (well, it is about the apocalypse).

oh, and my preorder on itunes for the glee soundtrack downloaded today, so my ipod is basically the happiest thing on earth (see what i did there? with the glee and the happy and the punning? yea? yea? ok, i'll admit it, i really am this lame)

and aladdin's playing on tv right now, so i'm just going to go watch that.