que veux-tu

today's title comes from the yelle song of the same name:

warning: i have absolutely no idea what's going on in this video, but i love the song anyway.

other things which i'm listening to:

it's taken me forever, but i finally have studio-quality mp3s of this and every other song they haven't released, which, as you may imagine, makes me pretty happy. 

i got a new phone yesterday! it's just an update of my old phone, and also the same phone that both of my parents have (so telling them apart? basically impossible), but it's still somewhat exciting. 

other than that, nothing too exciting has happened lately. i'm catching up on all the homework/reading i put off this week, so i spent all day reading maigret stories in french, medieval italian poetry (it's growing on me), and a ton of news articles on the wisconsin budget situation/unions. who knew spring break could be so boring? 

oh, and this? this is awesome. go watch it. the end. 

!!!

why, yes, i do already have a post with this title. i don't care. why? because ophelia lives!

that's right - after spending three days constantly attempting to restore it, badgering my friends, roommates, and hall-es to help me, calling the parental units no less than three times in the middle of the night out of despair, and frantically googling every possible cause and solution for her affliction (i even tried doing this hideously complicated series of computer commands, only to be stopped by michelle the hall-e, who informed me that i had been using the wrong disk number and nearly wiped my computer of everything on it) ophelia seems to be working properly. she's syncing on itunes right now, which means i won't have any real confirmation until morning since it'll take all night for my music to copy onto it. i don't care. i'm just so excited. i was really starting to hate seeing that stupid little gray apple logo pop up on its home screen every time i tried to do anything with it.

and on that happy note, i really will go to bed. i'm actually resisting the urge to stay up all night until ophelia is done syncing. be proud of me. and wish me luck - hopefully this will be my last night of curling up to my phone so i can still hear music while i sleep.

with the lights on

today's title comes from shelter by the xx. i don't know why, but i've been listening to them a lot lately. their music is just so wonderful for winter. anyway, have a listen:

it's story time today. highly embarrassing story time, no less. normally i wouldn't post this here, but it's not the kind of story i want the hall-es to hear and i just had to tell someone, so...

before i begin, let's give you a little background information. ophelia the ipod? still dead. since i'm physically incapable of falling asleep without music, i've started using the phone as a substitute. the alchy roomie spent the weekend boy-hunting (i approve, since she found one that looks like benny feilhaber and he lives right downstairs). we heard all about it last night - leading everyone in my room to stay up until around two or three in the morning. not fun, since i had a nine a.m. lab this morning. when it came time to go to said lab, i basically rolled out of bed, pulled on a normal t-shirt, left my pajama pants on, and left, since i had Napping Plans for after class.

this all sounds - well, if not normal, fairly typical for me, right?

well, here's where the story begins:

my naptime got put off until around three today because the hall-es dragged me to lunch and then the mail room with them. by the time i got back to my room, i was dead tired. so i dragged out my headphones, plugged them into my phone, and basically collapsed into bed. however, i only got about half an hour of sleep before s-la's text woke me back up. my reaction was like this, at first, but then i replied:

note: when i post naptime statuses, don't text me. ever. 

after that, still being tired, i tried to go back to sleep. but i was in that half-awake/half-asleep state where my mind focuses on weird things. today's weird thought was: oh my god, i can't sleep with a bra on, what if it pulls an ophelia and tries to strangle me in my sleep? don't say it. whatever it is you are thinking just...don't.

now, we all know that i'm not that coordinated at the best of times, but my inability to control my own hands/feet/flailing limbs becomes downright pathetic when i'm half-asleep. so it should come as no surprise to anyone that i managed to get myself tangled in a mess of my own bra straps and head phones and shirt sleeves and the plug from the reading lamp that's clipped onto my headboard.

confusion. confusion everywhere. 

and, my life being what it is, this would be the time that the benny feilhaber lookalike the alchy roomie was stalking knocks and comes into the room to look for her.

my reaction?

well, first it was this:

and then it turned into this:

again, don't say anything. really.

however, i totally went back to sleep after because traumatic incidents aside, no one is depriving me of my required ten to twelve hours, thank you very much.


also, i entered the bad roommates awards by not telling the alchy about her visitor. and i think i threatened benny feilhaber jr. enough that he won't go blabbing to anyone, either.

in conclusion, my life sucks and conan premieres tonight.

phone blog!

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

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

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Alien Rat Dogs

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

To this:

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

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

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

i will never have children, or: two tales of bad parenting.

it's been a while since i blogged. sorry about that. these past few days have been eventful. s-la, meggo, jenibean, and i went to see alice friday night. it was awesome. johnny depp was predictably unfortunate looking but the CGI and alice's costuming fully made up for that. helena bonham carter kind of stole the show, but that's to be expected. and i just got home from a birthday party/sleepover at jodie's, so that explains last night's missing blog. i'm not going to elaborate on either of those events, so if you really want details you should badger s-la to blog about them.

because you (all eight of you) are such conscientious followers of my blog, i'm sure you're wondering what prevented me from blogging thursday night or saturday afternoon. surely i was spending all my leisure time cackling away about your rachel-blog-deprivation.

well, if you thought that, you'd be wrong. i now present to you two tales of epic mommery. be warned, they aren't for the faint of heart.

let's begin with thursday, shall we?

on thursday i received a text from the momster asking me to go with her to her office and do real estate things for her since her assistant was out. i, being the wonderful person that i am, agreed. however, instead of going directly to her office her client texted and said she wanted to meet us at a bar. okay, we said. so we went to the bar. and then the momster realized she needed to pick up extra pens and things since, you know, they aren't really supplied in bars and restaurants, so she left me to order some snacks and headed to staples - where her client called, changed her mind, remembered that she had to be at some play for her kid in an hour, and asked the momster to meet at the office after all. crunched for time, the momster left staples and went to the office - leaving me, a platter of the best wings i've ever had, and my annotated copy of the poisonwood bible alone in a bar. alone.

it was traumatic. did you know that people hit on you at bars? even when you're munching on wings and reading your book and clearly projecting the 'i'm underage, go away' vibe. some of those people were old! like mid-twenties old. and buying drinks. and not even the happy, fizzy coca cola-type of drinks. it was horrible.

i'm thinking i shouldn't have yelled at the momster about it, though, since now she's on this 'my one and only child is going to college' bonding kick. we spent all of yesterday shopping. my feet and arms felt like they were going to fall off by the end of it. and then we left the mall too late to come home and still make it to jodie's on time, so i had to buy a new toothbrush and set of pajama bottoms and sleeping bag. that sleeping bag is the silliest thing, it's huge. at least it doesn't resemble my old sleeping bag - that one's shaped like a coffin and 'contours to the body' according to the north face sales people.

anyway, the bonding lead to me basically getting an entire spring wardrobe. here, check out the bounty:

in case you couldn't tell, the rainbow bra was my favorite purchase. getting it was awful, though - it involved seeing a librarian in victoria's secret. buying things. i can't bring myself to elaborate any further.  

we ended up getting manicures, too. the woman who did mine was pretty cray cray - all she did was grunt and move my hand and watch the chinese drama on the television behind me. she did an awesome job, though, so now my nails look like this:

i don't have a weird number-shaped birthmark on my hand, either - i wrote someone's locker combination on my hand in fine-tipped sharpie and now it won't wash off. i scrubbed and scrubbed with the little heated towels and in the shower yesterday and it just wouldn't go. i guess i'll just have to wait for it to fade. 

and just to round out this little trio of grainy iphone photos, here's lulu. i think she looks like a squirrel in this picture, what do you think?

i tried to get cookie to pose, since he's the nice dog, but he doesn't like cameras. oh well.

i'm listening to four winds by bright eyes, mostly because s-la said she didn't like it. clearly s-la is a deranged cat-lover with catastrophic brain damage since all sane people like the song.

a series of unfortunate events

and i don't even have the benefit of having my misfortunes narrated by lemony snicket. if i could just go through life with a snarky, possibly british author detailing my every move i have a feeling that i'd be a much better person. or at least a more self-aware one.

even if the one and only, most perfect ruler of the universe neil gaiman were narrating my life, today would still be enough to make me depressed. you see, a catastrophe has befallen me - a disaster, a calamity, un contretemps, and other-synonyms-for-Something-Really-Bad-which-i'm-too-lazy-to-look-up-on-thesaurus.com.

in other words, my ipod broke.

for those of you unfamiliar with her, this is ophelia the ipod, looking annoyed. i can only assume she's annoyed with me since there is no other reason why she refuses to turn on after a whole day of being charged while i was at school.

i am, as you can imagine, distraught. my suffering was only compounded by the momster refusing to drive to the apple store to get it fixed until this weekend. i will admit that i reacted poorly to this news (there was shouting...and stomping, slamming of doors, and pointed blasting of music through my subpar computer speakers to prove a point, mother. i'm beginning to suspect that i have a tendency to melodrama when i'm annoyed)

you may now be wondering how i can reflect on this calamity-catastrophe-contretemps so calmly. shouldn't i still be screaming and threatening to throw my life away and become a crack addict if my ipod doesn't magically resuscitate itself right now?

of course not. the momster's not even in the house anymore and it would be an utter waste to do all that yelling without an audience. also, she went grocery shopping and i'm very, very fond of whole fruit ice pops and pound cake, so she's temporarily forgiven.

in all seriousness, i calmed down once i realized that i still had my phone, which, once i removed all the apps, bookmarks, and about 90% of my contacts, can now hold around 3,000 songs.

so then came the tedious song-selection process - it's something i had to in a relatively calm state of mind. so, armed with my pound cake, coffee, and 100-calorie sandwich (i made it myself, though, so who knows if it really is or not), i got to work. the smart playlist that resulted is...interesting, to say the least.

and, in case you were wondering, i decided to exclude my favorite/most played artists and songs. if i'm going to be without an ipod for the next two weeks or so, i might as well spend it listening to relatively new songs, right?

oh, and just for kicks, this is the 100-calorie wondersandwich. i came up with it (and by 'came up with' i mean that i figured out how much of each ingredient to use so everything would total up to a hundred calories) over the weekend while i was trying to think of the perfect bite-sized snack food for when you're sick of junk food. enjoy yet another grainy iphone photo:

oh, and in case you were wondering, i'm listening to hometown glory by adele. i love this song, but the end of cassie's episode on skins made me start playing it on loop all day. 

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!)

stories from sat-subject-day (it's the new saturday)

so last night lulu (short for lucifer, even if her papers call her chocolate chip) ate my headphones. she didn't swallow them, so at least we don't have to take her to the vet again, but my poor headphones are lying in a mangled little heap in my trash can - but not for long, since the cleaning people are puttering around upstairs and will probably be emptying it out soon.

i took the SAT subject tests again today. lit had more olde english. u.s. wasn't bad. i got to realize that i've forgotten all world history halfway through that exam. also, the room i was in had the most annoying motivational posters i have ever seen ('failure to plan is planning to fail'. 'destiny isn't a chance it's a choice'. 'the longest journeys begin with one step'. 'it's not where you're from, it's where you're going', which is actually not that bad since it was ella fitzgerald who said it, but the rest - and the whole wall was full of them!) and pictures of really creepy cats all over the walls. not the cute kind i've been posting, but like, chubby, furry ones with crazy eyes. it was quite disturbing. that so wasn't the worst part, though.

to start with, i forgot my wallet at home since i got mi madre to drive me (thereby not having to find a spot in county's tiny lot to park). luckily, i didn't need any id since the proctor knew me (and has been the proctor for every AP test i've ever taken, what's up with that?) and the other proctor-people roaming the halls said collegeboard would take that as confirmation. so at least i got to take the stupid test. what joy.

and after the test (see above for commentary, i'm not a big fan of being chronological today), i tried to call the momster to get a ride home. of course, since loudoun county high school is like nine thousand years old, there wasn't any reception in the building. not even right next to the windows. so i stepped outside - where i miraculously had all five bars, not even six inches away from the inside of the school - and called. the momster left the launching pad. and i tried to go back inside - out of the snow - to wait. only to find out that all the doors were on, like, automatic lock since SAT testing was still going on. so i got to huddle in the snow while i waited - here's the view from my cozy little niche of death, doom, and post-testing depression. it was cold.

and then i got home and found my headphones. see, we came full circle. look at that narrative style.

i'm listening to Tom Gable = OMG TABLE by the sandwiches. it's accompanied by the cleaning people speaking spanish and the vacuum cleaner's whoosh noise. my favorite drink in the world is too cold to keep my company, but i've got her warmer cousin Peppermint Mocha instead. peppy wants you to know she's just as photogenic as the other members of the starbucks family. see? she takes good pictures. those effects are courtesy of the yearbook camera, which i used during lunch on friday to get stalker pictures of people eating and didn't get to return afterwards - luckily, i remembered to sign it out, so it's okay. i never got to see cory or gina friday, though, so my science lab story still reads like a schizophrenic choose-your-own adventure story. '...and among those devoted few, students show their love of science in different ways. INSERT NAME HERE is one such student. He is so excited about working on his science fair project that he decided to spend his study hall conducting his experiment on IDK LOOK AT THE QUOTES in the technology education lab. "BLAHBLAHBLAH SCIENCE BLAHBLAHBLAH quotes"' so, basically, i'm either going to have to finish this in yearbook on monday or the 'it happened in the lab' spread is going to the yearbook's first game of mad libs.

my song has changed. every band in the usa by the fold. i really hate the original, but i somehow can't get enough of parodies and covers. miley cyrus has great songwriters.

also, i just realized this is the first snow of the season! yay! it makes christmas feel so much closer. i can't wait. i want antlers.

i'm a slave to technology

so i forgot to turn my phone off last night (and pause the song that was playing, so mgmt's electric feel is now my number two top played song) and had no battery this morning. i spent the whole day at school simmering in a mild state of panic at my lack of phonage. and, yes, i am fully aware of how pitiful that is. let's just blame steve jobs, okay? clearly iphone come equipped with a secret chip which recalibrates your chi until it's automatically thrown off balance when there isn't a working phone within ten feet of you. or something.

so it's friday. the lady who does our laundry is here, so i'm going to nap and wake up to freshly wandered pjs. it's exciting. i should probably finish my favorite drink in the world first. (i'd have taken a picture but i just started drinking right away and now it's half full and kind of disgusting looking).

i'm listening to antonia (acoustic) by motion city soundtrack right now. last night on the way back from the play (which was awesome, if a bit trippy and confusing) i was talking to s-la and reached this wonderful conclusion: everyone should have one friend who has, like, amazing taste in music and listens to everything, regardless of genre, and keeps an eye on the indies and will pass on the good songs/artists/bands to you, and has so many songs that when you tell people they have six bajillion songs the truth is, it's closer to seven bajillion. everyone should have that friend, but none of us do. i wish i had a friend like that! think of how much good music i'd be able to listen to if i had someone to find stuff and pass it on and bump up my music library! me and s-la would be in musical nirvana (hee, puns). it'd be great. so if by some chance you're reading this and you fit this description, leave a comment - i welcome strangers with good music! (well, only strangers who aren't strange. creepers, begone!)

oh, and speaking of the play, it really made me want to reread as you like it, which is what it was based off of. meggo and i read it together when i first moved to lansdowne, way back in freshman year. touchstone was our favorite, but celia was pretty cool, too. who's your favorite? what's your favorite shakespeare play? enquiring minds want to know.

also, this is why french is the coolest language. and the cutest!

phone troubles

sorry kids, no midtown post today. i accidentally reset my phone's settings on itunes (that'll teach me to pay attention to what i'm clicking on) and now it's resyncing all of my contacts, texts, and music from the backup file (or itunes, but that's just the music) and it's taking forever. you might think that's an exaggeration, but it's not. i've just been sitting around watching maid in manhattan and sipping on my favorite drink in the world (pictures pending...they're stuck on the phone still) watching itunes tell me it's only halfway through syncing my music. if only the momster would let me leave the house without my phone. she won't even let me walk to cheeseball without my phone, let alone drive. what's going to happen in the whole ten minutes it takes to walk up the street and hang a left? nothing, that's what. i mean, i live in lansdowne, land of nothing ever happening. clearly i would be fine. silly parental paranoia.

after my phone finishes syncing we're going to pick up our christmas tree! i can't wait. it's also time to pull my little purple plastic tree out of the closet and set it up in my room again. oh christmas, i've missed you. also, i got my first anonymous commenter yesterday! let's all be excited.

i'm listening to i hate christmas parties by relient k. i've been going through their holiday albums today. you shouldn't though - it's midtown for you or our friendship is over. no, really.