never meant to start a war

today's title comes from jordin sparks' battlefield, as seen in this:

joanna the hall-e posted it on my wall on facebook. i think it's hilarious. ophelia the ipod is still dead. i'm still working on papers. life seems quite dismal at the moment. also, i have jane austen postcards. they're very limited in number, though, so i'm still trying to figure out who to send them to. currently, i'm leaning toward sarah-with-an-umlaut, since she was able to respond to the hall-es and i texting her harry potter pickup lines with a few of her own, and that kind of dedication deserves a reward. we'll see, though.

also, the real madrid copa del rey game was hilarious. see for yourself why:

want to live in a fantasy?

surprisingly enough, my silversun pickups kick hasn't ended in the twelve or so hours since i last posted. this post's title comes from:

so right now i'm midnight munching on one of the two dishes i actually know how to make from scratch - stuffing. yep, glorified bread and seasoning is my specialty. i'm sure you're all surprised. i even got fancy and added broccoli to it. this whole quest i'm on to attain a few basic survival skills seems to be going well.

like s-la, five is my new favorite number. it's nice to see your hard work pay off, you know? or, in my case, it's nice to see my serious dedication to caffeine in all its many forms pay off. it's all the same in the end, right?

i watched the espys on espn for the first time ever. yes, i was only watching for the usmnt. and, yes, i'm aware that the link i just posted leads to stu holden's twitter (look, i'm even linking it again - just click it already) and not the usmnt's website or twitter or blog. the twitter is better, okay? it's got pictures.

i've got a highly shameful confession to make now...i'm in love with the twilight movies' soundtracks.

take a deep breath and reread that sentence. yes, i said the soundtracks. there's no need to worry for my soul/sanity/sudden loss of intelligence. look, i can even form semi-complete sentences! capital letters, sadly, are still beyond my power.

some of you might already know about my sad, sad predilection for indie-but-not-really bands. i try and try to hide it but...well, i figured now was the best time to come out about it. hopefully these two songs will sway you to the Dark Side:

i picked these two songs because they're from bands that i've previously pimped on this blog, but i've actually liked a lot of songs from these movies. just the songs, though. oh, and the unintentional humor. watching kristen stewart try to show emotion is definitely better than 99.9% of the shows on tv right now. however, i would like to recommend recasting taylor lautner and foot-face pattinson with a pair of soccer players. none of them can act, either, but at least their abs look better. feel free to make player suggestions in the comments and make them spanish because the fewer players they have for euro 2012 the more like germany is to win.

and -- oh, fine. i've tortured you with enough horrible twilight-related things. here, have another poem:

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

-- yeats

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.

things i learned today

1. spill orange juice on your jeans in the car
2. show up at school two minutes late
3. forget what day the juniors have sol testing 

in other words, i woke up half an hour late this morning, rushed through a shower, grabbed a glass of orange juice on the way out the door, and attempted to towel dry my hair with a wash cloth in the car. 

sadly, even with all of these sacrifices to my morning routine i still ended up at school at 9:02, two whole minutes after i was supposed to be in class. so i went to the attendance office for a pass. and found out that, as a result of the stupid juniors and their stupid writing sol, my lit class had been moved to another room, which - of course - no one knew the location of. you see, our lovely main office only kept a record of which stolen classrooms the oh-so-precious baby juniors were supposed to report to, not where the Displaced Seniors were supposed to go. 

so i spent half an hour chilling in the main office only to learn that my lit class had been relocated to the library. 

there's a three word phrase that sums up my reaction to this statement but it's a little profane so i'll stick to the acronym: fml. 

there, i'm done being bitter and whiny. someone sent me this link today and i thought it looked pretty cool:

Adobe Photoshop Cook from Lait Noir on Vimeo.

you know what else is pretty cool? 

reverend and the makers. they're a band out of england, they toured with oasis (before the brothers gallagher decided to pull a mean girls and have a girl fight with each other), and spend their time being awesome and making music. see?

other things i liked today? 

also, i'm incredibly thankful for operation: read instead. before giving up the telly (ha, british people have the best words) i used to watch the daily show all the time and now i'm glad i can't anymore since i found out at school today that rpattz (you might know him as eddie c. from Those Crappy Vampire Books, or merely as FootFace for the strange shape of his head on tabloid covers) was on last night's episode. whew, that was a close one. i might actually have been tricked into watching FootFace simply because his interview would've been sandwiched between my two great comedian loves - jon stewart and stephen colbert. 

dear world...

homework sucks. i really don't want to go back to school tomorrow, especially since i've somehow become nocturnal after not waking up before noon for the last week and a half.

on a happier note, i'm going to have, like, a four-hour day between the delay and d-lunch/early release. so i think i'll just pull an all-nighter, come home, and nap.

i'm listening to little lover's so polite by silversun pickups. it's pretty good.

i saw steffi did a post about twilight i thought i'd share something that made me laugh. i really hope google never reconsiders their search suggestions:

great satan's gone, the whore of babylon

today's title still stolen from bright eyes' four winds. also, it is actually appropriate.

apparently cambridge university is going to teach twilight in a children's literature course. it's going to be featured alongside, among other books, harry potter.

once again, bree van de kamp says it so much better than i ever could:

so this is it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

busy day today

movies with the other half of the group today (oh scheduling conflicts...). then stephanie's birthday party! which will be awesome because she is awesome. i know, i know, you're all astounded by my eloquence.

going to hit the shower now. will write a stephanie bday post when i'm out. also, i'm cheesesballing today!

until then, here, have something that made me laugh.

you're chagrinning my dazzle, yo.

"you stayed out till 10:30 to see that croissant movie? i thought you were doing drugs or something."

the madre, circa ten minutes ago

tonight i went to see the croissant movie (idk, it's my mother, okay, she has strange names for things).

the good:

1. taycob is still pretty. and muscley.
2. the ab pack (see above, re: pretty and muscley)
3. the soundtrack
4. bella's "i'm in labor. no, really" screaming fits. you can just tell kstew is practicing for breaking dawn.
5. new director doesn't believe in blue filters. you go, new director coco.
6. alice.
7. alice's wardrobe.
8. jasper. his funny faces and accent would be so great given screen time.
9. basically every non-bella-shaped human. seriously, for all that they're given, like, a cumulative three and a half minutes of screen time, they all come across as totally awesome. i think tyra would approve. it's probably because they "smile with their eyes"
10. speaking of humans, the ones in the audience weren't so bad. there was one annoying girl with her phone out, but steffi got her with a mini-reese's wrapper, so that was okay. and we had a little boy yelling out things like "oh my god, it's just a movie!" and "kiss already!" (for the jacob and bella scenes) in our row. he was adorable. and also provided me with entertainment of the "s-la is a pedo" variety when she yelled back "i love you, little boy!" (after the first statement).

the bad:

1. rpattz. his makeup is awful, and they only bothered to cgi his abs on for the one scene. during the rest of his shirtless stint in the movie it was all scraggly chest hairs and flab and paleness, oh my!
2. bella. normally she would've topped this list, but in her scenes with jacob she managed to enunciate, finish sentences, show flickers of personality, and finally stop blinking so much. also, the screaming really was endlessly entertaining.
3. edward and bella. their scenes together were not only painfully awkward but aesthetically disappointing after nearly an hour of the ab pack. also, in edward's presence, kstew turns on her incessant blinking switch again.
4. jasper has two lines. two! travesty much?

all in all, not as bad as i was expecting. it definitely didn't produce the hilarity twilight did. and it gave us the ab pack, so i'm pretty happy.

also, it gave me an excuse for a g.n.o. there were five of us at first, then i convinced jeni to crash. mostly it was an excuse to binge. we worked our way through almost two bags of mini-reeses, dinner at california tortilla, and dessert at johnny rockets. i'm thinking that makes this night a win.

and in honor of the movie (and because i'm too tired to actually have music on...i think i'm going to sleep soon, actually. yeah, i know, i'm a rebel), here's the song of the day:

poetry post

...well, in mini!form. here's two poems that have been stuck in my head lately.

1. The Gates of Damascus by James Elroy Flecker

Favorite line: And God shall make thy soul a Glass where ten thousand aeons pass/And thou shalt see the gleaming Worlds as men see dew upon the grass.

2. Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

Favorite line: Herr God, Herr Lucifer/Beware/Beware

Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air

i'm listening to ray lamontagne right now. his voice is so interesting. i kind of wish he'd tour with brendon urie from panic! at the disco so they could form, like, a cracktastical supergroup. i don't know who the other members would be, though. suggestions?

am watching charlie and the chocolate factory now. this new version is so much darker and creepier (clone!oompa loompas!) than the willy wonka version. damn you tim burton for ruining my childhood dreams of living in the chocolate factory. (but yay for producing alice!)

new moon comes out this week. i am simultaneously amused

when eddie c. met buffy

so, despite evidence to the contrary, i am alive. busy, but alive. and, best of all, since we have a yearbook theme and all the people i babysit or dogwalk for are finally home, i actually have downtime. 

which involved seeing harry potter and the half-blood prince. only once (so far). and loveloveloving it. it's actually probably my favorite of the movies, but i'll fangirl about that next post. right now, i just want to post one little thing:

in other words, why joss whedon/buffy summers totally pwn stephenie meyer/eddie c. 

also, cobra starship's new single hot mess? totally frigging amazing. i've only had it for the two days since i got back from gettysburg and it's already cracked my top 25 on itunes (hello, 66 plays, soon to be 67)