all round the fields of anfield road

i'm cheating with today's title - it's from the fields of anfield road. that's the lost liverpool mention you'll see in this post, though, i promise.

in rachel news...life has been routine. i'm getting used to things, i guess. i'm finally done with midterms (which crushed my soul and left me unable to look at either scantrons or thesis statements the same way again). i finally figured out the real reason that freshmen aren't supposed to take 300-level english classes - it isn't that the work is hard to understand (it's not) it's that there's so much of it. four papers in two weeks. same for the iranian film seminar.

but it's over! i was like this all weekend:

i had a bio lab from nine to noon today. i was going to be sad about it, but it turns out that the professor had to leave for some family emergency or the other at the last minute and left us these as a substitute for the lab we were supposed to be doing (more dna polymerization - yuck):

also, ahahahaha at caitlin in the background

that's right - i got to play with mr. potato head for three hours!

after that, the momster and husband number three showed up for what i thought was going to be a nice, casual lunch/giving-rachel-money/distribution of presents afternoon. wrong. so wrong.

they took me to A Bank. a bank. according to them, now that i'm 18 i have to know how to use them and deposit birthday checks and withdraw my own cash and things. it was horrifying. also, apparently husbands one and two and the momster had savings accounts for me and didn't bother telling me - so there was this whole to-do where they were calling the various Financial Advisers (doesn't that just sound hideously grown up?) and sorting out authorizations and secondary account holders and other adult things like that. i am apparently about to be trusted with my first debit and credit cards since the Great Spending Fiasco of 2008. wish me luck.

the point of this story is that i had to spend two and a half hours in a bank (on a very nice, sunny afternoon no less) being lectured on financial responsibility and how they are putting me on a budget and the dangers of impulse buying and basically being reminded in every way that i'm an adult and will one day have to take care of myself and know how to do things and...

no. just no. i'm freaking out a little. the momster and husbands one through three seemed to get that since there was a general consensus that i looked panicked and so the parental units who were at the bank in person took me to party city and we got my costume (i am going to be a cat since the pre-made disney costumes are either skanky or not very nice looking. we're making better ones over the summer for next year). i was slightly comforted by assembling the pieces of it. i now have a sparkly cat ear headband (and a fluffy version lent by michelle), a leotard, tights, a giant poofy tutu/tulle skirt, cat gloves (one of the hall-es is helping me sew on rubber pads to make them into paws), and a two foot long bendy tail (being sewn onto my costume by michelle). it's going to be great. also, to bring me back from the heights of Mt. I-can't-be-an-adult-I-just-learned-how-to-do-laundry-and-can't-even-drive-that-well-and-sometimes-I-forget-things-like-what-continent-Paraguay-is-in-and-also-my-own-name, the parents let me pick out costumes for them and the dogs, too. the human half of the family is now Minnie and Mickey Mouse. the lulus are going as a banana and a cat.

to conclude this little story: i still have a terminal fear of growing up and a slightly worrying addiction for costumes. also, when these two things are combined, i can manipulate some wonderfully embarrassing halloween photos out of my parents. i really can't wait for this year's batch.

other than that, i've been catching up on my reading and replying to letters. if you sent me anything last month, look for a reply in the next week or two.

just leave my memory away

today's title comes from kill me carolyne by the whigs, a new song gleaned from s-la's music library as a result of music day. oh, music day. it's such a good time. i have the whole harry potter musical now and spanish acoustic songs (they're playing right now)! it's pretty great.

my calc essay turned out pretty great, too, even though i ended up finishing it during early release. that was okay, though, since i ended up surrounded by a bunch (four) other procrastinators also doing their essays. oh, and i worked my procrastination into the essay by talking about how my lack of motivation to do calculus should be taken into account when planning for next year's students. except in snarkier, less sleep-deprived terms.

after that we went to see iron man 2...again. it's just that good.

robert downey jr. agrees

after that we had dinner at california tortilla (still in brambleton, sadly, since the lansdowne one went out of business) and were horrified by the actions of the hooligans and teenyboppers (these are real terms, okay?) who were milling about, stealing drinks and climbing trees willy nilly. it was awful. they were all like five years old and strolling around like they owned the place, or at least like they should be allowed to stroll around at all and not still be strapped to high chairs.

and then came music day. which, in case you hadn't heard, is awesome. music was shared. in a day, even.

...i know, i know. s-la and i are extremely creative namers. is namers even a word? i'm too tired to look it up, but safari isn't putting a little red line under it so i'll assume i can use it.

we watched our sophomore english project on macbeth, too. we recorded one of the acts. i was macbeth and s-la was lady macbeth. oh, and we were both murderers and witches and a few minor characters. leanne was banquo and every other character. as you can imagine, our acting skills were phenomenal. i don't sound monotone at all and it certainly wasn't strange to have a cross-dressing macbeth (i spent the majority of the project in tunics and dresses). at least steffi's editing was great - we had the coolest soundtrack. the bloopers and credits were the best part, though. for some reason meggo is credited as our hair stylist. the rest of it is a jamboree (oh, that's a fun word) or spatula-flinging, cheese it-eating, word-forgetting mistakes. oh, the good old days.

in other news, the momster transitioned between her rightful title (the momster) to That Woman and back several times today, mostly as a result of tiny, but highly annoying incidents. and then she and her assistant decided to have dinner at 9:30 (she's cray cray, okay?) while i was at s-la's. it was thai food and they remembered to bring home a meal for me, too. so clearly all is forgiven. the moral of this story? my heart will always be won via my stomach. that should probably worry me. one day i will have Moral Fiber (i think they sell it in pills at the grocery store, but the momster told me only old people use them and she wouldn't buy any) and will attempt to resist the lure of food, but until then...bring on the pineapple fried rice.

less exciting is the return of the mongol eyes. i can't even blame s-la's cat this time, since they didn't set in until i got home. the momster suspects that it just happened because i didn't take my allergy medicine today and it was finally nice out, but that doesn't explain why it looks like someone punched me in the face. seriously, the swelling - it's horrible. i look deranged. however, i'm heavily medicated now (but not the fun kinds; i kind of miss dr. cray cray. i've always wanted to try those crazy pills that let you hallucinate things, but during the lit and both econ exams i sat right next to the poster in the health room that tells you all the bad physiological effects drugs have on you so there's one dream deferred until...forever, actually) so hopefully it'll be gone by tomorrow morning. and if not, well...i guess i'll just become a hermit. i've always wanted to be one.

you don't get any youtube links today, since i'm dead tired right now. you can probably already tell that, though. i've got a feeling that there are typos and nonsensical sentences and horrible grammatical errors all over this post. i'll try to make it up to you tomorrow. maybe i'll even use capital letters! maybe.

slow night, so long

today's title is from kings of leon. it's one of the good songs from before they sold out and became all pearl jammy. is it sad that i preferred them as musicians when they were drunk, drugged up, and whoring themselves out around england? because i totally do - their music was just so much better then.

it has been a slow night (and day) though. i've mostly been doing homework and last-minute scholarship applications, with occasional breaks for snacking or running or heading down to the grocery store to buy more ice pops. i know, i know - my life. it's terribly exciting, right?

so i guess this post is going to be more of a link/picture/music post than anything else (since i'm doubting any of you wants to hear the story of the little old lady in line behind me at harris teeter and her conviction that the 'teevee', pronounced with extreme emphasis on the 'e' sound, lectured the cashier about the importance of triple-ply toilet paper).

to begin with, while googling around for reviews of the last and latest johnny cash album, i came across this and it made me smile. he was pretty awesome, right? which, naturally, leads into the beginning of my homework playlist: god's gonna cut you down.

i studied for calc a little, drafted my poisonwood essay, and then took a break to watch the unseen skins vignettes online and catch up on reading the music director's blog, now that i've watched all the way through the fourth season. among other things, i realized that eyes as candles by passion pit and dog days are over by florence and the machine were both used in one of my favorite episodes. in other words, they became songs two and three on today's playlist.

after skins, i finished studying for calc and started doing more scholarship applications. that got tedious fast, though, so eventually i wandered back to tumblr and found a pretty amazing this, which is stark sands' cover of outkast's hey ya. i thought it was so amazing that i wasted a good half hour of my day finding a download link for it - which, let me tell you, was not easy since it's not even available on itunes.

insert a break for ice pop shopping, showering, and dancing around the house to she's lost control by joy division and skream's 0800 dub. and, i'll admit that those songs don't really go together except for how much i love them both. that and you can't really listen to either of them without wanting to move.

then came a few hours of uninterrupted work, after which i rewarded myself for my wonderful display of concentration by looking at funny pictures:

then came dinner, catching up on my emails, and blog-reading (speaking of which, hannah got a blog, go follow her). i still haven't turned my phone back on, though. strangely enough, i've been enjoying the silence. 

so that was my day, as told by ginger through pictures, music, and occasional capital letter-free text. here's hoping tomorrow will be more interesting. and by 'more interesting' i mean 'interesting in a good way and not in an i-failed-calculus-and-forgot-my-lit-homework-on-the-kitchen-table way'. 

it's getting tragic now

so today's post has actual points and topics and things, but i thought i'd just start off with a question. you know when you're dunking cookies in milk and the cookie breaks off and sinks to the bottom? yeah, that just happened to me. three times in a row. and the momster was just in the kitchen to give me a weird look for getting a fork out to fish my cookies off the bottom of the cup, so i think i'm going to have to resign myself to losing those three cookies forever. my woe, it's a tangible thing.

(standing in the way of control - fat segal)

topic the first: life sucks. then you go to yearbook. and slit your wrists. today was pretty awful as far as deadlines and homework are concerned. our yearbook spreads are due wednesday and gina and i have...nothing, actually. well, we have our stories (i finished mine today), but that's just about it. i have this prediction that most of this week is going to be spent on yearbook things. yippee.

(as serious as your life - four tet)

don't worry, this post has happy parts. like this:

this, in case you were wondering, is the cast of skins. it's a show on the e4 channel in england which the momster bought to cheer me up because operation: read instead was kind of killing me this weekend. it's not a show that would ever be on american television (and i do mean ever, since the fcc would possibly implode if it had to deal with the things this show gets up to), so i'm not counting it. don't judge me, i need some form of outlet.

(star guitar - the chemical brothers)

remember how i said that the secret life of the american whatever is the most unrealistic, pointless excuse for a television show i've ever seen? well, think of skins as the answer to it. they have real problems! and those problems aren't usually tidily resolved at the end of the episode! people screw up and are different and look healthy and...i love the british. i really do. everyone but steffi needs to start watching skins, like, right now. (s-la, sorry, but they're so far from g-rated that you'd be better off staying away)

(totally wired - the fall)

also, the music is awesome. i love that their music directors blog about their song choices - it makes finding things so much easier and the things they have to say are pretty interesting. i never really thought about why television shows use the music they do. actually, all the songs i listed today came from my brand new skins playlist. 

(up where we belong - joe cocker)

so that's all for today. i have to go do my lit, physics, and calc homework. what joy. 

"stay yet, illusion, stay a while"

i reread marmion today. i did a few other things, too, homework being chief among them, but this was easily my favorite activity. oh, i can't reread it without being warmed by the names of 'the mightiest chiefs of british song'. i will confess to being unimpressed by ivanhoe - hey, i'm a child of the 90s, okay? i expect my medieval stories to have a little more action and a little less 'rebecca the jewess' - but marmion never fails to make me thrill all over, as anne shirley might have said.

in case you couldn't tell, i'm in a distinctly literary sort of mood. blame my lit homework. i've been rereading the book of genesis in poisonwood for references to colonialism. you're all highly imaginative, i'm sure you can figure out how fun that must have been.

never mind. i just got linked to this in my email and my literary frame of mind has been entirely dispelled. look at the seal's little face! and the happy frolicking penguins! it's like happy feet came to life and this is the post-production cast party. all the pretentious lead actor/director/executive producer penguins are out of frame, though - they didn't want to be caught on film drinking champagne and consorting with that ridiculous seal.

so i'm watching harry potter and the goblet of fire right now (although 'watching' is a rather loose term for it - one could just as easily argue that the tv is on in the background and i'm paying attention to every sixteenth scene which plays) and have reached two conclusions:

1. rita skeeter is one fierce bitch. she and lady gaga would probably get along famously. also, her glasses make my day and i want a pair just like them. 
2. robert pattinson was actually mildly attractive at one point in his life. i suppose all the blame for his subsequent uglification rests directly on the shoulders of stephenie meyer. i wonder how she sleeps at night. oh, right - by having creepy dreams about sparkly teenagers getting it on in a meadow.

in music news, i'm currently listening to mowgli's road by mariana and the diamonds. it, like everything else she does, is fabulous. i finally listened through nme's radar 2010 mixtape (it's available for free download here), paying especial attention to obsession by mariana and the diamonds since i already liked her music and it'd just been posted on another blog i follow as part of a playlist. in other words, i had high expectations of the song and wouldn't have been all that surprised if it failed to live up to them.

it just cracked my top fifty on itunes with 96 plays. in other words, go listen to it. i've even put it on the bloglist just so it'd be easier to find, so no excuses, okay?

to round up all mentions of anything remotely music-related (you can come out now, s-la) this makes me both sad and gleeful. sad for the obvious reasons of "ew, plagiarism", and gleeful because now i have a comeback for when people go 'you don't like owl city? wtf is wrong with you?'. oh, and i've been looking for a reason to use the word gleeful today.

i still have homework to finish up, so i think this post is going to be a little shorter than normal. i was going to blog about this, but i think i'll just let you read the book for yourself and draw your own conclusions. i found it pretty interesting.

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.

ask your friends

so today i went to the mall. i got a little christmas shopping done. got a little rachel shopping done (no shoes, sadly, although you can see a few of my favorite goodies above). it kind of made up for the fact that i still haven't slept since tuesday night (woo hoo all nighters for lit essays!) and had to sit through the most boring, repetitive physics class ever today. calc and lit were kind of awful too. they were just so boring. it was all 'review this' and 'work silently' and 'don't collaborate on your loved one projects'. eurgh.

luckily, my day started to look up during early release when sarah and i went on pandora to listen to music and i mentioned that cartel's new single had been coke's open happiness free download of the week last week. some kid we'd never seen before started talking to us about cartel and then the beatles and sarah's inexplicable love of warren zevon and other random bands and introduced us to the pretty lights. if you click the link it'll take you to their official website where - get this - all their music is available as free downloads. all of it. free. honestly, between this and empires and s-la's christmas song of happiness i'm just drowning in free music this week. (it hasn't quieted my hopes that random library/early release kid will turn out to be my One Friend Of Indie Music Hookups)

i'm actually listening to the pretty lights right now. they're kind of techno. slow, though. i don't know how to describe it, really, just that they've got a lot of synth and syncopation and their really ambient and some of their songs are just perfect as background music and some of them have just made me want to get up and dance or run on the treadmill. so whatever genre they are, that's it. seriously, go check them out.

hmm, i think i'm going to have some oreos and milk and go to sleep...at like 6. no, wait, that's just too pathetic. so let's revise that to 'i think i'll have some cookies and milk all santa-like and resolutely stay awake until a more respectable hour like 8:30". yes, that seems much better, doesn't it?

also, gina wrote a poem! go look at it.

so buzz, buzz, buzz, doc there's a hole where something was

i'm a busy little worker bee today. i'm thisclose to being done with college applications. i don't even care about getting in anymore, just as long as i've applied. news from yearbookistan is bleak - we've still got a ton of work to do. hopefully i can finish my tech supplement, review my common app, send in my sat scores, and do my physics homework in time to plug in Science Kid's quotes. thank god for gina/yearbook editrix of doom. she is my first person of the week, even if she does make me do all of the awkward knocking/pulling people out of class. that's all for now. look for real blogging after all my work is done.

oh, and i have my favorite drink in the world again. too busy for pictures.

what's on the ipod right now? something is not right with me by the cold war kids. it seems appropriate.

here, have a cute wallababy. looking at it made me feel less stressed (for like a second)

i'm a busy busy bee

homework. calc quiz tomorrow. play tonight. trying to write my yearbook stories. they're quite awful. and i don't have the quotes page for one, so there's just like giant, all caps, insert quote heres in the middle of it. my music of the moment? i'd start a revolution by aimee allen. it's such a throwback song - it was the soundtrack to my first myspace page, way back when people besides musicians and companies still used myspace. here, have something that made me giggle.

nothing you can do but learn how to be in time

a commercial came on with all you need as love as its soundtrack. the original (well, it was remastered but still the beatles) and not one of the crappy pop covers commercials always play. it was pretty happy-making.

cookie's christmas shirt is pretty happy-making too. it even has a little green hood! less happy is the fact that he had a bath five days ago and is already messy. silly doggy, does he have to roll around in the grass outside?

i presented my government project today. it was surprisingly easy to do even though i hate presenting things. speaking in front of the class is never fun, why do teachers make us do it?

i'm avoiding my calc homework now. i started it, so never fear that i'll, like, flunk out of school now (is that even possible? according to my guidance counselor the only graduation requirement i have left is gov). i'm just putting off finishing it because it is long and evil. EVIL. here's how i've procrastinated so far:

i made a decision!

be amazed with me. no, really, indecisive is my middle name (i wish. the real one is too horrible to ever be typed or acknowledged), so me coming to a decision is pretty momentous. well, alright, it was mostly a decision made via text message conference but it still counts. i've gotten pretty used to blogging every day, even if it usually is something inane or rambling, and i think it's a habit i want to keep up. i definitely don't have enough time to really write until after the homework/holiday/midterm storm passes, so this'll be a good way to stay in practice. i mean, now that i know i can blog for a whole month, i might as well try to keep challenging myself - maybe for december i'll try to blog something, i don't know, focused. but never fear, there will be plenty of silliness, too. like this: the daily mash. did anyone else know about this site? because i just found out about it in lit today. it's hilarious. like the onion only even more sarcastic (i blame their britishness).

listening to turn up the bright lights by better than ezra. realized a few moments ago that, despite my love of her clothes and singing along to her songs at dances, i don't actually like katy perry's music. let's all be sad now. or horrified. horrified would be especially appropriate considering things like this.

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.

get tied up in your day (let go and walk away)

so today was a busy day. been checking all of my college application essays and starting the tech application (due january 15! you go VT coco), did some of my homework, discovered my favorite lunch in the whole world (cherry tomatoes, asiago cheese, extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper, and toasted wheat bread), and wore my new ankle boots to starbucks to pick up my favorite drink in the whole world (see below). here, have a picture of my new boots. they're purple and fantastically comfortable. and pretty. did i mention how pretty they are?

oh, and in my brief fit of productivity today i managed to start writing the short story that's been floating around my head for a while. i probably should have held off on that until i have the time to finish it/outline/develop theme and motivations and other Important Literary Things that will prevent me from becoming SMeyer, but i just couldn't resist. hopefully by the time i get back to it the intro will still look okay. otherwise i guess it'll be rewrite time.

what am i listening to right now? the saints are coming - u2 feat. green day. just finished listening to thou shalt always kill (dan le sac vs. scroobius pip). it was my homework song of the day. for future reference, never listen to that song while trying to work. catchy beats and the most argumentative lyrics (no, seriously. i get that it's supposed to be all hipster ironic or whatever but "the beatles? just a band. the clash? just a band." are not lyrics to derive equations to) made concentration impossible. hence my current musical/blogging wind-down.

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.

itunes update

so i've been trying for the longest time to get to 7000 songs. and by 'trying' i don't mean that i was too lazy to buy or download music, it's just that i couldn't find enough music that i actually liked (my itunes library is selective, okay, it's only got the stuff i actually like).

and then i discovered phantom planet.

now, you might be wondering why i say 'discovered' when do the panic's been on the playlist for this blog for the last two weeks and everyone and their grandmother knows the theme song they did for the o.c.

but by discovered i mean i actually listened through most of their albums on youtube and liked it. a lot. i would get into them after they already broke up. at least i have all their albums/covers/acoustics/b-sides to keep me company. oh, and in i-tracked-down-this-unreleased-song-ask-me-how news, kings of leon has a b-side called woo hoo. it's great.

oh, and i'm done with my gothic novel introduction! it is silly and THISCLOSE to being a parody.

what am i listening to right now? raise the dead - phanplan

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.

new layout! (the sequel)

so gina's pretty, pretty layout inspired me to get moving on making my own little bit of the blogosphere a little prettier. hence the new layout. (and the music, because, really, by now we all know that i can't work without a soundtrack). i'm thinking i'll change the playlist up every week or two. or maybe i should just leave it? i don't know, i'm a libra - being indecisive is part of my astrological makeup.

and just to get all the music-related news out of the way, here are the highlights of my day in musical form:

ke$ha - tik tok : on the treadmill, the beat is amazing. i refuse to like her on principle, though. any one who spells their name with a dollar sign is just asking for mockery, even if her producer does get snaps for catchy beats.

a blue christmas - a fine frenzy : okay, so this is kind of cheating since it's an album instead of a song. but it's a holiday album by a fine frenzy, who i adore, and it was good company during the wilds of detention. nothing cheers you up like holiday songs. (speaking of, am i the only person who's been blindsided by thanksgiving being so soon? i feel like halloween was just yesterday. clearly my age is catching up to me)

veronica sawyer smokes - afi : in the car, on the way to starbucks. i don't know why, but this is turning into one of those songs that makes me feel like car rides. it's kind of strange because the lyrics are completely unrelated to car rides or driving or anything but the kind of emo-pop that afi seems to have turned into.

you're a god - vertical horizon: my ipod was on shuffle while i wrote my essay for lit. it begins with i've gotta be honest/i think you know/you're covered in lies and that's okay. in other words, my essay was doomed from the start. i'd just like to thank subconscious lyrical influences and not my own lack of ability as a writer.

fellowship of the nerd - fall out boy : for while i was changing the layout. i'm just ridiculously proud of having tracked down this song.

and right now? the leaks of lady gaga's fame monster. go ahead, judge me. i don't mind. it's catchy. and i have this theory that listening to pop/dance/club remixes makes me type faster just to try and keep up with the beat. if only i'd had that theory back in the good old days of honors biology science fair projects. it would've been a lot more fun than sponges.

that's all for now. gina's posted a pretty nifty poem, though, go check it out. it gets bonus points for being based on walt whitman. who = love. just so you know. (even if he was a little overly fond of male anatomy in some parts of song of myself. we can forgive him, right? yeah, i thought so).

also, i read over some of my posts today and i realized that i'm totally and completely boring. mostly life right now is school/homework/college applications/cheeseball/music. hopefully by the time thanksgiving rolls around i'll finally be free of some of that. and if that doesn't happen, you'll at least have twilight movie-going shenanigans to entertain you.

until then: here are the things that distracted me from homework today.

oh, and be warned:

Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

detention?

detention. as in, i had my first one today for the oh-so-badass crime of accumulating three tardies in a semester.

yeah, i know. i'm such a rebel.

so my first experience in detention. it was interesting. and by interesting i mean it was mindnumbingly boring. because, really, all you do is sit in the main office and read for forty-five minutes. man, i can just feel the guilt and remorse, like, soaking into my soul.

except my soul feels a lot like my stomach, and guilt feels a lot like hunger.


i have an english essay to finish. i'm halfway through right now. i've just got my paragraph on point-of-view and the conclusion to do. it's pretty sad, but it took me at least forty-five minutes to start the essay, just because it's been so long since i've written anything that wasn't a short story or college essay or blog post. in other words, i no longer know how to write.

...way to fail, self.

i'm listening to living in the sky with diamonds by cobra starship. it's fun. i'd post a youtube link, but you can just help yourselves since i'm at school right now.

by the way, this is gina. she's interesting, go follow her.

blah.

doing homework. whoever invented calculus should go die. actually, they're probably already dead, so yay, but i still have homework, so boo.

speaking of things that = boo, this is my last day cheeseballing this week. was up at five to walk him and finish homework. oh well, at least that means more time to run in the morning.

i'm reading middlemarch right now. it's amazing. the characters are all so lively, and i just love celia. dorothea is more than a little annoying so far, but even she has her endearing moments. it's so strange to think that it was a serial story first - why don't newspapers print stories like this instead of yet another round of "miley-paris-angelina wore-this/sang-that/dated-so-and-so".

here's my song of the moment. i've been playing it non-stop all week. and yes, it's a cover, but not one you're likely to recognize (your parents might - mine did, but then, my stepdad was a big kate bush fan back in the day)

happy veterans day!

so it's 11/11 (make a wish at 11:11 kids!), aka veterans/remembrance day. having obviously never served in the army, i'm going to leave all the serious reflections on this to older, more experienced, or just generally more eloquent people than myself.

that said, being a huge fan of both l. m. montgomery (oh, anne, how i miss you) and ernest hemingway (is his great-granddaughter really an abercrombie model? because that's just weird), i've got to say that this holiday always makes me feel like curling up with a nice stack of books and just reading for hours. (in case you didn't know, this is because veteran's day was originally called armistice day and was created to celebrate signing the armistice that ended world war 1, something that both l.m.m. and old ernie focus pretty heavily on). it's a sad sign that reading (for pleasure and not school) has now become a completely self-indulgent activity. oh well, one day i'll be done with homework and college applications and the like, right?

i've been pretty artist-centric this week in terms of music. been listening to a lot of the smiths and brand new (because they are both awesome). i've played the new onerepublic album through a few times and i'm at least in like with every track, and completely head-over-heels for over half. cheryl cole's new album (or, well, new to me because i'd never known anything about her besides how huge she was in the u.k.) 3 words is lots of fun, too. the new lady gaga single is fun, too, but a little more lyrically different compared to her other stuff. it sounds that way to me, at least. it almost reminds me of that song by rob thomas and santana (smooth), where he keeps listing the girls' names. here, have the new lady gaga song:

and since that probably seems as annoyingly catchy to you as all of her songs seem to me, have something a little more normal (and lyrically wonderful):