catch-up

Well, I'm slightly out of money. So in order to feed my morning coffee and cinnamon crispie addiction, today I picked the change up off of my floor and paid for it in dimes.

Yesterday was a day when I kind of felt like I was losing my mind. Does everyone have these days? It's easier for them to happen when I'm alone. Generally, as soon someone else comes by and starts talking to me, I get snapped out of it.

There were a combination of factors that caused my day of insanity. A couple of weeks ago I read Hills Like White Elephants, and I've been reading A Farewell to Arms in small doses. This is my first exposure to Hemingway, and I can kind of see now why Hemingway is the big deal that he is. I suppose that kind of thing is just personal taste, though. Anyways. I noticed that after reading I was getting kind of down. So I shortened to only reading a chapter a time in a sitting, to not get too sucked in. But yesterday, I kept reading, and got amazingly depressed. It wasn't even like there was something specific in the book. Who knows, maybe it wasn't the book. But I had that thing where it felt like my mind was falling apart in pieces, and I was just holding it with my hands wondering if this is what people feel like as their insanity slips away. To make matters worse, since my computer was dead, I went to teh computer lab to get on the internet, but computer labs are not a place to be happy. Sure, the Macs are a happy, clean, white. But when you're depressed it ends up coming across as a sterile, cold, unfeeling room full of white filled with scary unfeeling white computers all in their neat rows. And that's when I put my head in my hands and tried not to cry.

However! Therese hid A Farewell to Arms, and the sun came out today, and everything has been lovely. Haha, I don't know how the clinically depressed manage it, because that is AWFUL. I can't imagine day in and day out being like that. Sorry for the detailed description which was probably none too fun to read.

To make up for it, I present a happy song...which I know everyone knows...but it's been today's happy song.

My computer died a couple of days ago. It took a surprisignly long time to find a Windows XP CD, but Darcy totally came through in the end. I even fixed it all by my lonesome, for which I am very proud. Even though I think that all I had to do really was stick the CD in. :-P Still, though, give me whatever credit you can.

It is amazing how hard it is to get by without a computer. But I made it allllmost three whole days.

In other news:

I signed a lease! Yay!!!! Next year I will be living in this fine castle of a home on Orchard Terrace. It's about half the distance that Xavier Dr (where I lived last year) was from school, which is good, but it's not too close to campus either. I'll be living with the amazing Miss Sarah Furey, as well as her friend (and hopefully soon to be my friend) Stella, who is currently in Halifax but is coming to StFX next year.

A night of substance abuse

University seems to be people sitting around trying to sound smart to other people, when they actually know very little. I'm getting really sick of it.

In a somewhat similar vein, I'm also a little proud of myself. Bear with me here, this is going to sound cheesy. In the last...while (year? half a year?) I've really felt like I'm being myself. Granted, to some extent I have no idea who I am. But whoever this Me is, I feel like I've been doing a good job running with it. I think maybe I haven't been hanging around too much with people who I have to smile at while they say things that I think are atrocities, so I feel like I'm selling out less. Though I suppose you could say that I'm selling out by not sitting around with those people and voicing my contradictory opinions.

Everyone has been talking about Heath Ledger.

I can't decide on a name for my D&D character. I'm a human monk, did I say? I'm so cool.

I had a dream last night where I was running from the cops for smoking weed, and hid in the museum of natural history (which for some reason was more like the Smithsonian) pretending to work there. All teh workers helped conceal me, and let me sleep there, and kept giving me flasks of vodka. It was a very substance abuse-y dream.

short.

crap. I woke up and my left eye has started hurting exactly the way my right eye did before it poofed up into hideousness.

So, Heath Ledger is dead. That feels odd....

Breaking my blogging slump

Cosmopolitan gives out the worst advice. In one of the bathroom stalls (sorry, Anne) Cosmo's 20 Greatest Sex Tips or whatever are posted. One of them is that when you and the man you're in a relationship with go out for dinner or something, you should dress sexy, flirt with other men, and turn heads. I mean, it's one thing to remember that your partner is desirable and feel lucky that they're yours, and it's quite another to have them wreck the relationship by telling other men to "come hither" with their eyes. What happens when those men do come hither?

Freerice.com really is addictive.

I had a dream last night that I was just walking through this parking lot next to my dorm (St. Ninian's parking lot) when my back started hurting, I fell on my knees from the pain and these huge wings ripped through my skin. For some reason I knew it was really dangerous that I just got these wings, so I tried to fly away, but I was all clumsy and bad at it, and while I was in the air I heard a gun shot and felt a bullet explode into my head. At which point I came to on my knees in the parking lot in pain, and felt the wings rip through again, and again tried to fly away, but I was shot through the heart and fell. At which point I came to at the same point, just as I was about to get my wings. This time I succeeded in getting away, and Ben K helped me on this underground railroad for people with wings. It's really hard hiding those things under a coat.

I know this is totally Archangel from X-Men. But it was awesome actually feeling the wings and controlling them and feeling how strong they were.

Well, I totally failed at doing any work today.

May I add that my wings were gorgeous.

A pictorial brain and behavior lab

For my Brain and Behavior class we have a lab once a week where we study a sheep brain. We make various cuts and talk about the structures and functions. Really it's not much of a lab at all. It's short, I never see any of the structures that I'm supposed to, and we just sit around chatting.

Therese really doesn't like having her photo taken. Posing behind a piece of paper was a nice compromise though, I thought.

Darcy and Therese really didn't want to cooperate. So instead there's a stuffed raccoon in the center of this photo. Thanks. :-P
Somehow we got onto the topic of a Sesame Street creature thing. I'll admit, I don't actually have that much Sesame street knowledge. But Darcy and Therese were discussing it, and based on their descriptions, it sounds like they were actually talking about both Honkers and Martians. I did my research. They mentioned a phone sketch and going "yip yip yip," with weird big mouths, which means definitely martians. And then they mentioned noses that honk and weird ears, which means honkers. So Therese drew her Sesame Street creature. Darcy agreed until she drew the ears.

So, honkers + martians = what we were talking about.
















Therese masterfully makes another slice. Darcy normally wouldn't want to man up enough to actually touch the brain, but since I wanted to take photos he sacrificed himself.

Brain!

I like this photo.

An Overdue Entry

Girl who talks on MSN at four in the morning with the BEEP sound turned way up high: You are evil.

Girl who bought a new LLBean backpack over winter break: I really question your taste.

I hate those really low ankle socks. I don’t know if there’s something weird about my heels or something, but they won’t actually stay up. I just end up walking with the sock on the front part of my foot and stepping on the back.

Well, in general I’ve been in a pretty weird mood for the last…oh, …well basically since I’ve gotten back to campus. I’ve been speaking much less than I normally do (which isn’t really that much to begin with), and it’s surprising how long you can go without someone noticing that you haven’t said a word. Really. Anyways, I think my verbal silence has been extending to my blog. I’ve started at least five entries, but none of them made it beyond my browser. So, sorry for the lack of posting.

I watched No Country For Old Men online, really surprisingly high quality. Good movie. Not for those who have issues with watching people killed. I won’t be giving anything away by saying that there’s a murder in the first three minutes of the movie, and I think that might have been my favorite part of the whole thing. It was intimate in the creepiest way possible. The whole movie, I felt like a spectator seeing things I wasn’t supposed to, intruding on other people’s business. And Tommy Lee Jones was surprising; other than Men In Black I hadn’t really seen him in anything…I think. Anyways, I’d give it a watch.

As you probably guessed given the lack of recent gross pictures, my eye thing got better. Thank the lord (I love irony). I stitched a sock (a very clean sock) together to make a warm compress with rice. It’s not too ugly, and it worked really well. When did I do this? I did it while I was watching OSU play LSU. And I don’t really have too much to say about that.

It’s funny how everyone misses out on some snippets of knowledge, and they are in complete ignorance of their mistake. And how this can last for so long. I have a very intelligent professor who continues to use phenomena when what she means is phenomenon. Just small little things like that. I think we continually embarrass ourselves throughout our life until our pile of things we were screwing up but didn’t know about until someone calls us on them pile is diminished to a very small stack. At which point we’re old, and people are too embarrassed for us to let us know about a word we’ve been mispronouncing our whole lives. My notable examples: awry, hearth, Yosemite, chasm, + many more. In fact, feel free to point them out in my blog. Unless you think it’s a typo. I let typos run pretty rampant in here.

At four in the morning I got to listen to a drunk girl insist that she could do a forward flip, four or five guys telling her not to do it, and one guy trying to restrain her from it. She wanted to do the flip in the middle of our narrow hallway, very much constructed out of hard concrete blocks. While drunk.

Another girl in my hall came back from winter break engaged. She’s a first year, and she won’t be coming back to university next year. It makes me sort of sad. I don’t know this info from talking to anyone, only from sitting in my room while a group of them stood right outside my door talking loudly about it. :-P (Did I already talk about this?)

Well, I think it’s time to go to bed at nine pm. Sweet. I’ll try and see if I can find Juno to watch online first, though.

Oh, one more thing. I saw Breakfast at Tiffany’s once when I was…quite young, don’t really remember how old. And I remember thinking, “That’s fine, but I don’t really get it.” I just watched it last week, though, and I really liked it. I’m glad that now I understand at least why it gets all the attention it does.

Gross Eye + Knitting Mishap

I'll start out talking about my knitting, since it's less gross, and I wouldn't want to deter people reading just because of the ickness. I was working on this hat for....someone...okay, it was Julie. And I knit it on circular needles at first. That was my first time on circulars, and it was a success. However, I needed to switch over to double pointed needles for the decreasing. This would also be my first time on double pointed needles. I waited until I got back to Antigonish and had my Stitch 'n Bitch books to look at. But she seems to assume that switching over to double pointed needles is pretty easy, 'cause there was only a written description, no illustrations. Anyways. I sat and read and thought about it and didn't begin until I thought I had a handle on it and wouldn't screw things up. Sure enough, I had knit one row, looked back, and saw that I had done exactly what everyone warns against with dpns (double pointed needles): I was knitting the hat inside out. Argh! Oh well, I needed a thicker yarn for the hat to look nice anyways. So I've ripped it apart. But here is a photo, just so you know how nice it was. You can really fly on circular needles, though, so it won't take too long to do again.

So, I woke up this morning, and to my horror, my eye was even bigger. I'm going to make a little rice baggy so I can really warm compress the life out of this eye. It's amazing how well the whole warm compress thing works. I sat with a tea bag on my eye for like twenty minutes this morning, and now it doesn't look that bad--just slightly red and poofy. What frightens me is when web sites say things like 25% of cases resolve themselves within two months. Two months??? Oh, and that they just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger over a few weeks. If this is how this looks on day two, what would I look like on week two? Can you see the horror in my eyes at the thought of this eye? Go ahead, call me shallow, but this is gross and I want it gone. Luckily, the thick frames of my glasses go right across my upper eyelids and my hair falls over that eye. Yay!!

Grossness + Weirdness

So, I woke up this morning, looked in the mirror (eventually), and went YEEP! Because my right eye was all red and poofy and droopy. I emailed Dad this photo, he emailed me a link to eye thingies, I looked at it and concluded (as he had) that it was a chalazion. Which makes me happy, 'cause that means it's no biggie. I'll just drink a lot of tea and sit around with teh tea bags on my eyes at least four times a day.
Well, I just tried my first teabag. It turns out that Cardamon Cinnamon burns like hell--should have seen that coming a mile away. Hopefully green tea will be more soothing. Oh, and I completely admit to photoshopping a zit out of that photo. I apologize to those fans of nitty gritty reality, but I just didn't want a huge close-up of a zit there.

Hmm...just pressing my eyelid to the hot rim of the cup seems to work well. Steam...

Using the end of your fork, because you don't have a knife and can't really be bothered to get one, because you have the end of a fork: Classic.

Please note the raspberry jam--delicious.

And no, I did not smooth that peanut butter neatly just because I was going to take a picture of it. I am tragically fastidious in my sandwich preparation. Eventually gets very annoying to anyone around me, I think. Though, hey, I have improved.

But I do so love slowly, evenly, and neatly spreading things. Peanut butter, mashed potatoes, mayonnaise, cream cheese, etc.

What I Learned Today

Never deviate from your usual peanut butter. Even if it looks just as branded and so you think it will be as sweetened and salted and as not natural (that natural peanut butter is gross, I'm sorry Jennie and everyone else), you will end up disappointed and with an entire jar of peanut butter that you don't reaaaally want to eat.

Raspberry jam is fantastic. Eat more of it.

A Day of Traveling

Well my friends, yesterday was rife with blogging material. What does that mean? It means a lot of crap happened. I think that's my first time using the word "rife" in text and not just speaking. Hurray!

Happy new years, btw.

So, first off. Plane to DC: delayed. But not insanely. Just enough to make my tight layover tighter, especially considering I had to take a shuttle. A note on the shuttles at IAD: They are amazing and weird. They remind me of the sandcrawlers (had to look that name up) on Tattooine. Everyone is probably completely used to these things, but I had difficulty not laughing with glee while I was on them. That's not true. I had difficulty not shouting at hte guy driving it to get going, or I was going to miss my flight. Anyways, shuttle....or sandcrawler?
So, I slipped into my gate just as they were announcing the final boarding call. Yay! But it turns out I needn't have worried, because we ended up sitting there for an hour while some glitch with the computer system that keeps track of the bags was worked out. At this point, I was getting kind of worried about missing my bus (but not that worried, 'cause there was another two or three hours after the 5:15). So we got in to Halifax, and I thought, "I can make this fine, just zip through customs and on we go." But no, I got randomly selected for the bag check where every tiny little thing is taken out of your bag in a haphazard manner (I had to not cry out as my knitting projects and all yarn were tossed carelessly to teh side with stitches falling off of needles everywhere and the yarn getting into a tangled mess).

The unsmiling girl who was taking care of this destruction actually managed to wedge open a bit of that ancient rolly suitcase, and lo and behold, what did I see but an old dart from the blowgun from Brazil from....what is that...twelve years ago? Oh how I loved that blowgun. I managed to keep inside my squeal of glee and not say, "Hey, that's a dart from my old blowgun from Brazil!!" To a casual glance it just looks like an old, gross, one-sided Q-Tip-->
Plus, it was wedged in teh weirdest place. Actually, if I had to try and get drugs across, I suppose that is where I would try and put them. She ought to have been more suspicious, perhaps.

Anyways, so while she was tearing my bags apart, the bus left. So I went and bought a ticket for teh 7:45 to Antigonish, but the guy forgot to give me the actual ticket, which I realized while I was eating perhaps the foulest burger ever imagined. So after amazingly not dying of food poisoning, I went back and hoped that he remembered me, since I didn't have a receipt or anything. He acknowledged it was his fault (yay!), and I proceeded to finish The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.

Bus ride, couldn't sleep, nice bus though. So, 10:30pm and I was back on campus. It was quite cold and snowing heavily, so I was happy that I decided to wear my snow boots and that I knit that hat last night and then didn't give it to Julie that morning. I dragged my bags through the snow to my dorm...which was very locked. I went around to every sneaky door I could try, and everything was locked. So I left my bags outside teh door while I went on a hunt for a place to stay. I ended up outside Tim's house, and only one roomie was home, but he was fine with me staying. So I walked back up to campus, and dragged my bags back down to Tim's place (my hands are blistered from carrying them).

Everything has worked out fine since then, except that their wireless was kept secure, and I didn't want to bother Brock about the password, so I didn't have any internet until now. And now I am sitting in the students' union building feeding off campus wireless. And getting calories from a Pepsi which exploded when I opened it, making my hands and therefore my keyboard and touchpad three times as sticky as they were, Ben K. Now you can whine about how sticky and gross it is.

So, that was my day of traveling. I'm happy it's over. And I hope I can get into my dorm tonight.

Golden Compass spoilerness

So, the Golden Compass. I finally went and saw it. The best part of the movie was all the awesome knitted clothing, which I think everyone and their mother was staring at. I plan to make a Lyra hat. Have to find hte thickest wool known to man and then knit with three strands of it held together to get that thickness.

I almost feel like not even bothering to write about hte movie itself. I was so disappointed. I went in with really low expectations and left with those low expectations disappointed. I thought everything was way oversimplified, both the plot and the relationships between the characters. Not to mention the way they chronologically tweaked everything around made it pretty illogical/silly the way things played out.

Ben K would tell you that the book was just as overly simplistic and unoriginal in its ideas, but don't listen to him. He doesn't know what he's talking about.

I guess this doesn't actually spoil anything plotwise other than that the movie sucked. But that's probably not a huge surprise to anyone.


Well, I'll publish this despite not having actually said anything.

Time to board the plane! (I'm in the airport.)