Keep this kingdom free of hassle

Playing poker and reading poetry.  It's so hot, I shower a few times a day, relishing the cold water and never wanting to come out.  I put a million pins in my hair, all piled up on my head.  Eating Starburst.  I can open them with my tongue.  I don't usually though.  I stack folded wrappers.  Suited connectors are overrated.  Fold them in the sb with a sigh.  I should have liked to have seen the flop.  Reading random poems at plagiarist.com.  Here's one about November.  Another is about Igor.  Death.  Cigarettes and last kisses.  And the sin of self-love possesseth all Shakespeare's eye.  I finished reading JPod today.  It was disappointing.  A watered down Microserfs with an air of indifference.  Started reading Mansfield Park while sitting on the counter in the kitchen drinking a mediocre syrah.  It's cooler in the kitchen than in the living room.  I'm doing laundry.  I change clothes often.  I hate the heat.  The mugginess makes me cough.  I want my rain back.  I feel confident than if there were a war between myself and the sun, I would come out slightly scorched, but victorious.  After all, I have heart. Which, if I am correct trumps a photosphere any day of the week and twice on Sundays.  Which one do people use more, I wonder: "If I am not mistaken" or "If I am correct." Is "if I am correct" more in the realm of certainty? Someday I think I would like to have enough money to design my own house.  I think it would be very nice to have a house perfectly suited to one's own liking.  It would just be more comfortable.  The fan stopped working on my computer.  There is a strange plasticy smell coming from it as well.  Like Roundup.  Or Petroleum.  I fear it will explode at any moment, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a full recovery sans any work on my part.  I really need to get a new power supply sometime.  Drat me.  I should have long ago. 

Water, Helen, water!

Went to see Superman.  It was all right.  Not really great or anything.  A bit plain.  It really should have been about 15 minutes shorter.  They could have done that easily.  And Lois Lane should be less wishy-washy and more of an intrepid reporter.  Kevin Spacey was the best part of it, of course.  And I liked that they used the old music.  Good stuff.  I like the bring your own bucket 50 cent popcorn thing on Tuesdays.  Why? Because 50 cents is way better than 4.50.  I mean, really, how much do they pay for that popcorn?  Pennies.  Little shiny Abe Lincolns. 

I was very grouchy earlier and unhappy with things I need to do, and Steve put Star Wars toys on my mouse pad.  It's really hard to stay unhappy when you have a little power droid that you can make walk about saying GONK.  And a Jabba and Salacious Crumb to taunt people with (Salacious Crumb always reminds me of my sister Scarah).  Yoda is just sitting on Jennifer Garner's head staring at me like 900 year old green freak that he is.  Ahem.  And Han is still frozen in Carbonite.  It's his lot in life.

Today I started reading Douglas Coupland's new book, JPod.  It's very... Couplandy.  A little too similar to Microserfs, but I love that book, so I don't mind.  I'm hoping it gets a little more interesting.  I don't mind unbelievable and cute premises, but I would like for something to happen.  Making up weird characters is all very well, but if they don't do anything, they're just fun on paper.

I haven't read the chapters for tomorrow's class yet, and it's 1:30 am.  I haven't chosen my topic for a speech yet either, and I need to by 11.  Public speaking is awfulness.  I hate summer. I say that a lot, but only because I really mean it. I'll be happy as a clam in fall once the rain returns. But summer... you walk around in the blazing heat and then have to blather in front of others while trying not to look like a bungling idiot.   I should go read so I can go to sleep.  Sleep wouldn't be half bad.  It might even be half good. 

/end blog of nothings

2:11 Addendum: I thought of a topic. I can sleep now.

The proof is in the pudding

I feel disgusting.  Tired.  Hot. Sweaty.  Fat.  Stuffy-nosed.  Headached. You name it. 

School started today, which was fine, albeit too hot outside.  Steve got sunburnt.  I wear sunscreen winter, spring, summer, and fall, so I do not usually have that problem.  School will proceed at a brisk pace for the next month, and then a new class next month, and one that runs through all three sessions as well.  That's such a muddled sentence, but in short, things are moving.  In that casual dreary way summer has. 

I held the ladder earlier while Steve picked cherries out of one of the cherry trees.  They are tasty.  We got a little strainer full.  Most cherries are up a bit too high for climbing.  Hard to get to, especially considering the uneven terrain and the grass as tall as I am.

A spider of enormous bulk has just eluded me.  Frell! The baleful, horrid arachnids in this house make me miserable.  Last year it was awful. (It was ghastly!  Well, it was just ghastly!)  Especially when I was reading The Dark Tower and right during the description of the spider, I  looked up to see a large one of mournful countenance, yet seemingly alarming intent (for he moved swiftly towards me) staring at me.  I try to keep my Shaq shoes handy for killing them, but sometimes they're too quick or too far from the last shoe fall.  I hate spiders. They are disturbing in every way.  From their scurring little legs, to their round bodies full of some poor creature's bits and blood.  And what's even worse is that I am the one who usually has to kill the spiders.  I have no liking of killing, but I have even less liking of worrying constantly about spider attacks whilst visions of sugarplums dance in my head.  So I lift my giant shoes (that hurt my heels and go unworn) and smash them upon the unsuspecting (not bloody likely!  they're sentient, the rat bastards, or at least, they are when I let my imagination get the better of me!) sons and daughters of Arachne.  It's very sad when the longest paragraph you've written in the day is a diatribe on a dislike of spiders, but god damnit, I just wish the fuckers would go away, ya know?  I must have been wretched in a previous life.

Tonight I shall not be caught by the heat like last night.  Staring at the clock until 5 in the morning.  No, no, tonight I will drug myself to sleep, ensuring at least, that I fall asleep, even if I do not stay that way.  Maybe the magical ventilation fairies will remodel the house while I am asleep.  I doubt it will happen, but you never know.  These are crazy times we live in.  People buy Cher cds.  Hippos are on the endangered species list.  And the Beavers just won a national title.  So ventilation fairies?  Not so far-fetched.   

Building dams and such

The Beavers just won the college world series!  They have heart.  :)  Won 6 elimination games.  A silly error in the 8th on NC's part cost them.    The Beavers haven't won a national title in anything else besides the one time in the 60s.  Cross country.  Pffft.  Anyway, yay Beavers. They r0x0r the b4s3b411.

No alarms and no surprises

As disappointed as I am in the Mavs, I still am very happy that Gary Payton and Alonzo Mourning got rings finally.  They've both been so close for years.  And Gary Payton is the biggest star to come out of Oregon State, I suppose.  Or one of them, anyway.  Chad Johnson is pretty damn good, but that's apples and oranges.  Hippos and kittens.

Steve is home from playing poker, and I am glad.  The house is too big and quiet for one person for a long time.  Watching Stephen A. Smith's show and listening to music.  The Beavers beat Rice.  Huzzah for them.  They need to do it one more time tomorrow night.  They can, of course, of course.  They are Beavers!  Industrious!  Perpetual Halloween!  They were in the top 10 on Sports Center, too.  Numbers 8 and 1.  There is something very happy about seeing the Beavers on the top 10.  It doesn't happen often.  And that pitcher from McMinnville was great.  Good things do come out of that crummy town. 

I read The Living End yesterday.  Вчера я прочитала книгу "The Living End." (During the basketball game.  It's a pretty short book.)    Maybe I'll start The Natural tonight.  I also checked out two more Saul Bellow books yesterday at the library, although one is rather thick and I'm not sure if I'll even read it right now.  I'm in a short book kind of mood, so I have a little stack of The Harper Hall trilogy sitting here ready for my consumption as well.  Sometimes you need a little dragons and music different worlds.  I find that one just isn't enough.  There's only so much New York City, Chicago, and Paris one can take before they want to jump out for a while. Even imaginary and fictitious evils have more allure than those people encounter on streets far too similar to our own.  The Living End was very amusing.  Heaven was the funniest part.  And oatcakes. 

Steve bought Zelda Windwaker the other day, and now I get Zelda music stuck in my head.  The US plays Ghana tomorrow at 6:30 in the morning, but I'm not sure I'll be awake for it.  There is a small possibility though, as I woke up at 6:20 this morning for reasons unknown.  I thought it was 8:20, however, because I'm blind, of course.  Then I opened Stever's phone to turn off the alarm I set on it (I like waking up to Harry Potter music) and discovered it was in fact 6:20.  It's hard to tell these things when it seems like it's always sunny outside, and four hours is two hours is six hours. 

I watched Howl's Moving Castle the other day.  Another gem from Hayao Miyazaki.  It's cute, even if not quite as spectacular as Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke.  I love My Neighbor Totoro, too.  Miyazaki is quite sappy.  Everyone is always falling in love and escaping fates that aren't that bad.  They're very happy movies.  And well made.  Spirited Away and Mononoke are still the best though.

What if I'm a mermaid?

Pitseleh

A little Elliott Smith.

"i’ll tell you why i don’t want to know where you are
i got a joke i been dying to tell you
a silent kid is looking down the barrel
to make the noise that i kept so quiet
i kept it from you, pitseleh
i’m not what’s missing from your life now
i could never be the puzzle pieces
they say that god makes problems
just to see what you can stand
before you do as the devil pleases
and give up the thing you love
but no one deserves it
the first time i saw you i knew it would never last
i’m not half what i wish i was
i’m so angry
i don’t think it’ll ever pass
and i was bad news for you just because
i never meant to hurt you"

Counts the waves that somehow didn't hit her

It is a Wednesday evening.  Here is something of a haiku:

I have spent today
trying not to think of you
but it's not working

We are quite a bit more than the sum of our parts.  And as Dorian Gray (but Milton first) says, "Each of us has heaven and hell in him." Lord Henry asks, "What have we to do with a soul?" Basil might know. Dorian pays.  Henry, Henry, Henry pulls out some paradoxical witticisms and we all try to focus our attention while inwardly yawning at his hypocrisy.

I do not like June.  It's heat and sticky clothes and hair. The sunshine so mocking, waiting to freckle and brown.  I am all for Fall. Winter. Anything of the cold and rain.  I like bundling up, staring up at the rain.  I like dripping wet, blustering winds, and dark ominous clouds that seethe Beethoven with every inch moved across the sky.  I like skies the color of funerals at dawn. All white and gray and coughing up nostalgia like phlegm from overwrought lungs. June is a row of memories, some ending happily, others, seemingly bound to a fate we know could have been averted. ("Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself.") He colored his life with ugliness near the end, but I will not forget the kindness and the reverence for the things I held most dear.

It is the nature of memories to be idealized.  Some of them deserve it. Others deserve the villainy of our imagination and recollection.  They deserve the hard, sharp words we throw at them, like concrete bricks stacked in a row just waiting for us.  There is a clarity to memory that we rarely find in life.  And Walter Pater would agree with me (as though that makes it so!), that we change what we see and experience.  We shape and mold it with our minds, our personalities, our desires.  We compromise.  Demons become butterflies.  Hatred, a dull ache. Sometimes we change memories completely.  An act of quiet, individual syncretism, for our own benefits--for others' benefits.  It is an injustice to all, regardless of position.  It is the very small price we pay for the stillness of the Dead.

A 20-gallon brass syringe filled with holy water

It's the end of my first year of college.  I've kept my silly little 4.0, gotten 47 credits, and can move on to unpleasant summer classes involving health and public speaking, two things in which I have very little interest, if any.  There will also be the film class.  That's always fun.  School was pretty much as I expected it to be and a welcome break from working jobs I hate.  I should probably still try to find a job around here somewhere though, as finances shall be tighter in my second year.  I will be busier as well.  I should go to the ESA meetings, and I will, if I can ever remember to do so. I'm still horribly reclusive.  It's easier to be such when you live with someone who is as antisocial as you are.  Despite that, I have met a few new people whom I like a good deal, and even a few who seem very talented and interesting (I do so like people who are good at what they do). 

I learned a few valuable things in school this past year.  Here is a short rundown. 

• The higher you go in the library, the cleaner the bathrooms. 
• Foucault's birthday is October 15th.
  
• Those roundy prison things work because someone could be watching you at anytime. 
  
• The Yanomamo in South America are getting wiped out by our diseases. 
  
• Hitchcock's films are more important than his moments, and Orson Welles's moments are more important than his films.
  
• Panda Express is tasty at times, but neither cost efficient nor hair-free.
• Russian parties involve sitting and eating and drinking and talking for hours.  (And if Americans are there, watching them throw up when they try to keep up with the Russians drinking)
• Modernism was a movement of momentousness
• Oscar Wilde deserved better.
  
• It's hard to believe anything that you hear.  They say the world is round.
  

I cut the back of my knuckle on a can of corn that I was washing out this morning.  Corn and I have never been on the best of terms.  I don't mind it in the form of popped or crushed into meal or chips or anything like that, but by itself, it's quite disgusting.  And this nemesis still thwarts me with sharp little metal shards on its can.  You haven't heard the end of this, Corn!  You lily-livered, detestable, vegetable (and yet a wonderful fuel source.  Yay ethanol).

My glasses make me feel less like Tina Fey, and more like Dr. Pamela
Isley (Not like in the comics. Like in the movie.  Before
transformation).  Egads.

"I really don't care and neither does he
If this hotel melts into the sea
Polished and so rare, this is the way that we see.
The coldness helps, it's our favorite remedy."

5 years

Happy Birthday.

Yay

I am done with finals.

May cause drowsiness

Coca~Cola Blāk is awfulness. They learned nothing from Java Cola and its not-a-minute-too-soon demise. I wish Crystal Pepsi would come back. I'm looking at types of pepsi on wikipedia. There are ever so many I would like to try. Unfortunately, I'm not in Thailand or the Philippines... those lucky bastards.

My glasses are finally done, and I am wearing them. Scholarly! Click to view them. It's very odd having glasses to wear after only wearing contacts for the last four years or so. I don't look quite right. I still prefer contacts. You see better and they're comfier.

I awoke this morning at 5:11. It was still dark outside. It's the worst time of day. The final at 7:30 in the morning went fine. Then I sold books back and bought the books I needed for summer. And then this and that and this and this and oh my how boring. Putting off studying for Russian. This time tomorrow I shall be jollier. Until then, I'll stick with dull and procrastinating.

Ben Roethlisberger isn't very bright.

Your face looks like a casserole with teeth

x-posted to myspace, land of gl00m and d00m.

The lovely sentiment in the title of this entry comes courtesy of Miss Kelly, who I haven't talked to in ages but rather miss.  Once when I was ever so sad at some silly horrible thing someone said to me, she told me I should have told them that their face looked like a casserole with teeth.  I think of that now whenever people are assholes.  I miss her.  I wish she had not fallen off the face of the earth.

I have finished all of my English finals. They were quite unpleasant, to say the least. So now I'm drinking some blind moosie, watching Harry Potter numero uno, and celebrating being over half done with the evils that are finals. In just a few days I shall have a whole week to sleep excessively, clean the house up a bit, and read to my heart's content. Maybe I should go visit people.  There are many people I haven't seen in forever, and that's a long time.

My fall schedule is well set out, but unfortunately Russian was not fitting, so I replaced it with Math. I'll have to take the second year of Russian a year from fall. That disappoints me, and I hope I do not forget everything, but I have other things that are equally important.  I shall miss my sleepy morning Russian class where we spend more time talking about Soviet Russia and selling jeans for 400 dollars than we do learning the language. I love the plodding but still educational pace.

Yesterday I started reading Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellows.  Schwester Scarah was right, I do enjoy it. It's a fun book. First Saul Bellows I've ever read. Bit behind the times, I'm sure. Here is a tasty little excerpt for you to munch your meow face on:

"As I stood on my head, I knew (I would know!) that there was a sort of theoretical impulse behind this grotesqueness too, one of the powerful theories of the modern world being that for self-realization it's necessary to embrace the deformity and absurdity of the inmost being (we know it's there!). Be healed by the humiliating truth the Unconscious contains. I didn't buy this theory, but that didn't mean that I was free from it. I had a talent for absurdity, and you don't throw away any of your talents."

Rest in peace, Gyorgy Ligeti

'Space Odyssey' Composer Ligeti dies

"Composer Gyorgy Ligeti, who fled Hungary after the 1956 revolution and gained fame for his opera "Le Grand Macabre" and his work on the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey," died Monday. He was 83."

"He was one of the few avant-garde composers who found his way into the modern program," Ferguson said. "He was fascinated by patters, but at the same time created wonderful atmospheres, such as in '2001: A Space Odyssey,' or in 'Clocks and Clouds.'

"He reintroduced techniques of polyphony out of the tradition of Bach and Palestrina with a playful and innovative sense of sound. He developed a new sound — cluster sound — which fascinated Kubrick and propelled Legiti to the top of the great composers of the second half of the 20th century."

An excerpt from his 1966 work "Lux Aeterna" was used on the bestselling soundtrack for Kubrick's "Space Odyssey," winning Ligeti a global audience. Kubrick returned to Ligeti in 1999, using the composer's Musica Ricercata II (Mesto, rigido e cerimoniale), as the theme for what turned out to be his final film, "Eyes Wide Shut."

Language is the liquid that we're all dissolved in

Nothing terribly interesting is happening here.  Finals next week.  Monday should be the worst.  After that just a slow humdrum of finals that culminates with Russian and me pretending to be a waiter suggesting foods and also listing what one needs to make either hamburgers, pizza, or salad.  Russians consider salad to be tomato, cucumber, and sour cream.  Of course they have their own word for sour cream which is not like ours.  It is so special it has its own word, not a construct.  Not a type of cream.  That's just how important sour cream is.  Whoa.  Like I said, nothing terribly interesting happening here.  (Вчера мы с моим другом Виктором ужинали б ресторане.  Я заказыбала мясо с картофелем и мороженое. blah blah blah)

I got a stress ball yesterday.  I had to tell them one way I cope with stress.  I considered saying I have rampant promiscuous sex and drink till I pass out, but I figured they wouldn't see the humor and give me the ball. 

I went to bed around 2 and got up at 6:45, and I'm feeling a bit tired.  Steve isn't going to school today, which tempts me, but Я знаю что я должна ехатъ на лекцию.  And so I will. 

Douglas Coupland has a new book out that I want to read.  I don't want to buy it, but I might end up doing so.  That often happens with me and books.  Waiting is difficult.  Not when it's some shit like The Da Vinci Code.  I was more than happy to wait years until it made its way to paperback, but this is Douglas Coupland, not some two-bit fucker with a penchant for cheap tricks and "clues."  Miss Scarlett.  In the conservatory.  With the blood of Christ and a cilice.  I knew it!  I totally knew it!

I'm breathing you in and I'm breathing you out...

Nanobyte

I miss my cat.