Still Singing Newsies

Today has been a good day. I went to work, fooled around and ate a bagel, froze as I ran errands for the office, went to class, got out early, came home, wrote a paper, went shoe shopping (and was successful!), ate a delicious dinner prepared by my roommate, went to class again, came home and was entertained by the dancing antics of my roommate's boyfriend, watched Newsies again while having my hair straightened in possible preparation for the formal tomorrow. We'll see if it remains un-greasy enough to warrant letting it stay straightened and unwashed. However, with such a full day, I'm pretty exhausted, and I need my beauty sleep because tomorrow's also going to be a full day.

I must get up early to write another paper, go to work and school till five, then go home to try and make myself look pretty, go out to dinner with my date (I know, I have such a hard life), plus dance. A tortured soul, I am.

I think I may sleep in on Saturday, though.

This being the last day of November, I feel like I should remark somewhat on the NaBloPoMo experience. I'm amazingly proud of myself for missing only one day, and I feel like I managed for maybe 3/4 of the time to write something worthwhile, or at least interesting. As my readers, you may feel differently. We'll see. I kind of liked having a reason to look back on my day, though, and reflect upon what I do with my life, even if the results weren't very user friendly. I almost definately will not keep up writing every day from now on, but perhaps I shall do it more often than in the past, as it's a good way to sort out all the messy thoughts that clutter up my brain. It's been a good November.

Here's to December, being non-stressful (please?) and fun and full of holiday cheer.

Consumed by Shame, Again

I can't believe I missed a day! And so very very close to the end of the month, too! I am really too upset by this to actually say how much I am upset by this.

But such is life. I've been on a slight musical kick the past two days. Last night I randomly picked Guys and Dolls off the bookshelf and started watching it all by myself. By the end of the movie, most of my roommates were out there watching with me, one of whom had never before seen it (!). I am very glad we watched it. And then all day today I was humming the songs. That is, until I borrowed Newsies from a friend, and we watched that. Tomorrow, and tonight, I will be singing "open the gates and seize the day; don't wait around and don't delay! Nothing will break us, no one can make us give our rights away. Oh coooome aaaand seeeeeize thuhhh daaaaaay!"

Who knew that I'd be asked to watch a disney musical for a sociology class? But really, it makes total sense; unions and labor relations and all that. Very Marxian.

*Whimper*

I'ma warn you all now, so you're not surprised. I have four papers due in the next four days.

In other words, I will not be writing a lot of stuff here during the coming week. I'm sorry, because I know how much you all love hearing the tedium of my life in general. Don't worry, though- I'll be back and better than ever, in maybe, seven days from today. Because I just remembered the term paper that's due on Monday, as well. That's five papers in a week. I know I'm a wimp, but you'll just have to suck it up and wait out my busy spell.

I'd Like to Buy the World a Coke

But barring that, it's also fun to make the world some cookies, and keep it company. Tonight we mixed up a batch of peanut butter cookie dough, and trundled off to three of our favorite guys' houses, spending about twenty minutes at each house. Twenty is about the right amount of time to stick the cookies into the oven and bake them, take them out, let them cool, and most importantly, visit with the person the oven belongs to. I highly recommend this practice, as it's much more friendly than doorbell ditching pre-baked cookies, and you get to randomly surprise people by showing up on their doorstep with a trayful of cookie blobs. Who wouldn't want to open their front door and find friends and food standing on the other side?

Thanksgiving

Here's an abbriviated list of things I am thankful for this year.

• the weather? It's currently less than sixty degrees outside. Perhaps by Christmas I will be able to wear a sweatshirt outside all day long.
• my sister? She's amazingly cool and nice. She bought me a shirt because she felt pity for my brokeness.
• my parents? They're cool too. They gave me some helpful spot cash money to alleviate some of my brokeness, and they also have humored me all weekend long with the stuff I want to do.
• my roommates? They make me happy. They invited boys over tonight, and we watched Robin Hood and ate 60 chicken mcnuggets and talked a bunch and I got one high-five and two hugs goodnight.
• the boys we had over? They created a wonderful and varied conversation, and they knew when to leave to make them missed, rather than annoyingly overstaying their welcome.

Maybe Someday You'll See Them

Today being the day after Thanksgiving, I had the day off work. And school. Just like every other student in America.

Not like every other student in America, I spent the day taking pictures with various cameras- a fisheye camera, two pinhole cameras, and my trusty old digital camera. We got some pretty cool shots with the fisheye, as well as some truly mediocre ones, and we had mixed results with the pinholes. It was great fun taping towels and blankets over the door and windows of the bathroom to create our very own darkroom, and the little red lightbulb gave it the mark of authenticity (also the mark of being able to see what you're doing. A darkroom is, to put it bluntly, very dark). It was pretty nifty swishing the pictures around in the various solutions and watching them develop, and I hope someday to create more focused pieces. This being my first experience with this type of photography, it took several tries before my pictures came out recognizably, and even then they weren't very well composed.

Fortunately, I get to try again tomorrow.

(props to my mother, who is posting this for me, as I'm separated from computers that get along with blogger right now)

Home For the Holidays

I've got a lot to do today, between cooking the turkey and visiting with my family, so I'll make this short.

Happy Thanksgiving.






















You didn't really believe I'd cop out that easily, did you?

All of my roommates left yesterday for their various homes and celebrations across this great state, leaving me to sit around and twiddle my thumbs all alone last night. What to do when you're all by yourself for an entire night, you ask?

You get in your pajamas at 7:30, watch chick flicks until midnight, then play online games until 4, so you'll be in your best shape when you get up at 8 to go to your parents' house.

For reals, though- Happy Thanksgiving!

Proof of the Sadness of My Life

I have a job. It doesn't pay terribly well, and I only get 15 hours per week, but it (hopefully) pays the bills, and it fits my schedule.

My job is kind of boring. I go in at ten o'clock, pick up a bunch of manila envelopes, walk around campus for an hour delivering them to various buildings, then sit around and file for two hours. If I'm lucky, the administrative assistant that I work with will order zucchini sticks and share with me.

Today, I had an invitation to deliver to the president of the university. Top floor of the admin building is pretty posh, let me tell you. And the secretary? When I gave her the envelope and told her who it was for? She said, "I am happy to receive it for him."

So cool!

Christmas List addition

Two more things that would make my life better if I had them:

Body Butter, the orange-smelling one

a Vaccuum. One that really sucks.


I spent the evening doing this thing that other people of the female persuasion find "entertaining", or "addicting" or "fun." I shopped with some friends. Rather, we wandered around the mall and touched a lot of clothes without any intention of buying them. The point being? I don't know, I really don't. Some things about women I really don't understand at all. Shopping makes me grumpy and tired, and when you add that to the fact that I was grumpy and tired already by three in the afternoon, that makes for a very grumpy and tired me at eleven o'clock after shopping for two and a half hours. However, because we stopped at the Body Shop, my hands smell very nice, and I remembered how much I like things that smell nice. So, if you're wondering what to get me, quit wondering and start buying things that smell good. I will like them.

Now for some bedtime advils.

I've run out of interesting post titles

I've hit the wall. I've been doing pretty good about having interesting things (well, interesting to me, at least) to post this month, but tonight, I've got nothing. I think it may be because I've done so much actual talking to real live, present people today that I'm all conversed out.

But tomorrow I get to go shopping! At the mall! Cross your fingers and hope I don't buy anything.

Sorry, Dad

As we drove through the burgeoning dusk, searching for the bus yard, I got the grand idea to call my mother and see if she knew what street it was on. My dad picked up the phone, and there was, unfortunately, static. He didn't hear all of the words that I said, so I decided to explain things in painful detail, so that he could deduce from the context what I was talking about, in case he missed some words. This led me to say the following sentence:

"So, you know, school busses? Those things that little kids ride to school? I'm trying to find that place where they keep those school busses, like at night. Get it?"

I'm pretty sure he thinks I was trying to be condescending and rude. Dad, I didn't mean it like that. I love you.

Music Video Madness

Last week we made a music video, and it ended in tragedy.

Today, we salvaged what progress we had made before our last effective save, and worked for another six hours straight, and created an even better video than we had made the first time. That's right, folks. Our video is complete. It is on a dvd, with a menu screen that looks darn professional if I say so myself (which I do).

If you'd like to see it, and are in town (sorry, Uffish. Maybe at Christmas?), feel free to set up a screening time with me. It'll take about six minutes of your life, unless you're like me and feel the need to watch it at least three times in a row. If so, it'll take around 18 minutes of your life. If you want the full movie experience, you can bring a bag of popcorn and pop it in our microwave.

I feel like I sound like I'm bragging (because I am), but this video is seriously hilarious. And the content has inspired the S.O. of one of the stars to hunt down and beat another of the stars. I hope I'm there when this fight occurs, because it promises to be at least as funny as the video itself.

Required Dance Talk

Him: so, what are you studying?
Me: sociology...
H: so, that's like the study of groups of people, right? So you could tell me, theoretically, why we're all here, moving rhythmically to music and being forced to make small talk?
M: yes. It all has to do with totemic clans in Australia, who come together in effervescent rituals every once in a while, to gain a greater feeling of community. When they come back from these rituals, they're all pumped up, but it only lasts so long. Then they have to go back and have another ritual. If you're really interested, you could read all about it in Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which explains it in more detail. Like 500 pages more detail.
H: ...oh.

Wintertime is Pajama Time!

My roommates love it when I come out of my room in the morning. You should love me too.

Busby Berkeley Dreams

How many of you have seen Oscar? The movie with Sylvester Stallone?

If you've seen it, I'm incredibly mad at you for not having told me how hilariously funny it is. Why have I never heard of this until now?

My life has been so empty and meaningless!


In other, less astonishing news, my arm is feeling less sore, so I can no longer claim that I am dying of tetanus. This is a good thing, although less fun for getting sympathy. Can sympathy work retroactively? Please send me sympathy for last night, when my arm was hurting really bad so my roommate gave me a long massage. The massage was so long, however, that she forgot why she was giving it to me, and tried to massage (rather, squeeze really hard) my arm. Whereupon I yelped so loud that her boyfriend, on the phone with her, remarked on how she abuses her roommates.

Xylophone

My car and I have been through a fair amount together during its short five years of life, and she hasn't come out of everything unscathed. I list here, for your reading enjoyment, the short and sordid history of Stacey the WonderCivic:

-fall 2002, I think: a truck I'm parallel parked behind backs up and munches the hood of my car. The driver takes responsibility and offers to pay for repairs, but under the condition that we take it to a certain body shop way downtown because he knows the owner and can get himself a deal. The body shop takes a long time, then tries to give us back the car when there's obviously a big crack in the windshield. They claim it was there before, we tell them it wasn't, they call the guy who hit my car to get his permission to fix it (?), he calls me fifteen minutes later and yells at me over the phone. We eventually get the car back, intact.

-sometime after that: as a new driver, I run over a curb at a gas station, and get a scratch along the side of the car.

-summer 2003: driving home from work at 3 in the morning, I notice that my driving feels.... lumpy. I pull over to find that I have a reeeeaaal flat tire. Being the wimp that I am, I call my dad and demand that he wake up, get dressed, and drive out to help me fix it. He complies, and my first tire-changing lesson is held in a gas station parking lot at 3:30 am with a very tired teacher and an equally tired, but less groggy, student.

-winter 2005: somebody leaves a light on inside the car overnight, and I get to watch my friend give me a jump in minus 30 weather.

-also winter 2005, multiple times: I foolishly drive into various drifts of snow, and require the assistance of passersby and passengers to push me out. The last instance was particularly exciting, as I parked on what looked to me to be the side of the road, but was actually a ditch, filled up level with the street, with snow. Dismay set in as the car noticably sunk several feet. 9 in the evening, on a lonely street, with no shovel. A few cars pass, and finally a kind-hearted guy in a truck pulls over and tows us out. I vow never to get stuck in the snow again.

-april 2006- there are a few here
:somewhere between Saskatoon and Calgary, the weatherstripping on the right side of the windshield comes loose. Superglue does not help.
:Vancouver, a few days later. We wake up to find the keyhole of the driver's side door munched up, the bike-holding part of the roof rack (as well as the bike itself) gone, and the little triangular window on the back right door smashed in. At least the thieves didn't smash one of the bigger, openable windows. How thoughtful they were.
:oh yeah, and they spilled coffee on the floor of my car, so for the rest of the trip it smelled like stale hazelnut. (not so bad, actually)
:somewhere just south of Pescadero, CA, we stop at a gas station. The driver of the car accidentally scrapes the side of the car along a blue pole. I hope people think the blue streak is really just artistic pinstriping.

I feel a little nervous, because it's been six months since anything really happened to the car. That means that whatever's coming up next is going to be really bad. I bet I know what it'll be, too. Aside from some monumental crash, somebody's going to try and break into it again, and ruin the lock on the passenger side door, and then I'll have no way of getting into the car, save climbing through the trunk. That'd REALLY give me and my car some character.

Two Kinds of People

I sat in urgent care for two hours today, reading Where Angels Fear to Tread and getting stuck by needles. You'll all be happy to know that I will not get lockjaw as I got my tetanus shot, and hopefully neither will I get the flu. They give those shots out there, too. The process had me talking to five different people- two for check in, then an initial nurse to ask me what was wrong, then the doctor who also came in and I had to tell *her* what was wrong, too, then a final nurse who actually administered the shots.

The nurses were both pretty indifferent, except the second nurse gently mocked me for coming in for such a tiny cut. Tiny yes, but created by a nasty piece of rusty metal that's been sitting in our backyard for a long long time. I'd rather not take any chances.

The doctor was very nice, and she had an interesting trait for a doctor. Her hands, when she grabbed my foot to examine the wound, were warm. Warm hands! On a doctor! I figured with how nice she was and how warm her hands were, that she must be an alien spy pretending to be a doctor.

All in all, it was a fairly good two hours- I got through four chapters of my book, and got both shots I wanted, and the whole thing was just a $25 copay. For some reason I thought that I would have to pay for the shots as well as the base fee for the visit. Maybe I should go there every year for my flu shot, instead of the clinics that charge you $30.

I Shatter

The day of the colossal disappointment that was our music video, I did something stupid. I did something that requires action on my part to make me not die from it.

(Ok, really, not so bad. I just ripped my toe open on a rusty piece of metal, and since it's been forever years since I had a tetanus shot, I'll need to find a doctor sometime tomorrow to get one.)

The really annoying thing about this, more annoying than hurting myself, more annoying than having to go to the doctor and get a shot that will hurt, according to my nursing student roommate, is the fact that shoes are going to be difficult to wear for the next week or so. Because my toe hurts, a lot. Normally, I'd just wear thongs all week and there'd be no problem. Normally, I wear thongs all year long anyway. However, the job that I got? That is so convenient because it's right on campus so I go there, then stay on campus for school right afterward? I can't wear thongs there. This means I have to wear things like tennies, or like mary janes, or things like something else that encloses my toeses, something that will hurt to wear. And I'll have to wear them all day, every day.

My life is really tough, I know.

Yeah! Oh, Yeah!

The day began with me squinting, rolling over and turning off the alarm on my phone and rolling back over for another hour and a half, at which point my roommate told me I was a half hour late for the activities planned for the day. I squinted again, but rolled out of bed nonetheless.

The day ends with me blogging. And with my roommates angrily doing housework. Not angry so much about the housework, but angry because the ten hours we spent working on conceptualizing, filming, and editing our music video today came to naught.

It was a work of art. We had spliced it together so well that the music and the lip synching were completely in exactly the right place. The visuals were inspired and stunning. We had gone through countless costume changes and filming locations. We had learned on the spot how to edit using iMovie. We had made it so perfect and beautiful and we were PROUD OF OUR CREATION.

Then, as we were moving the last audio clip to its place, the last click of the mouse, the public computer we had been using, and saving to, crashed. Well, no, it didn't crash, it just froze completely. And freezing completely means restarting, and restarting means everything we had been saving was gone, because it was a public computer that doesn't keep stuff.

Fortunately, we still have all the original film, so we can still make the video some other time, and it'll take less time because we know better what to splice together, etc. Unfortunately, the talent show we were making it for was tonight.


This experience has taught me three things:

1. Always find a permanent place to save stuff to, because you never know when the computer's going to hate on you.

2. I really don't get upset by things easily, even when they're things I ought to get upset by, like wasting an entire day.

3. My roommates really DO get upset by those types of things.

Or Gesticulate

Life goes on much as usual, and with Homecoming season upon us, I realize that I've never really been a part of the school community. I only went to homecoming once during high school, and pretty much never during college. I am going tomorrow, however. I'm going to obtain a free hot dog, and watch the floats, and then I'll probably run away in a fit of discomfort when I realize that I'm at a giant social event that I have no real reason to be at, aside from the fact that I'm a part of that society.

If you were Emile Durkheim, you'd probably be muttering to yourself that I'm a prime candidate for suicide (aside from the fact that if you were Emile Durkheim, you'd be dead). (And french).

Discovery

I have found that it is completely impossible to try and write a report while sitting in the lobby of a public building. Even if your intentions, like mine, are pure and good and focused on finishing the paper, five minutes after you sit down you will be accosted by some friend who has no regard for your worthy intentions. Once you finally push them away like very persistent gum off the bottom of your shoe, it will have been a half hour and you will be forced to pack up and move as your ride will have arrived to pick you up.

coming soon: Part II: why it is impossible to write a paper while sitting at home when all of your roommates and some of their boyfriends are watching a movie.


*I know I'm post dating this, but it's only because that's when I actually wrote it. For some reason unknown to man, I hit the "save as draft" button instead of the "publish post" button when I finished it, and then slammed down the screen of my laptop in a victory over being awake. Then I freaked out this morning when I opened it back up and found the wrong results page. But such is life.

And now, a word from our sponsers

milquetoast.

Seriously, what genius came up with this word? Oh, alright. It was Harold Webster, and it makes complete sense. But still, I'm truly amazed that this term came to be a bona fide word, a word that people use if not in daily speech, then at least in bi-annual speech. You should all use this word tomorrow, and report back to me on how it went. This word needs a lot more exposure, unlike words like bling and ....

and...

well, frankly, I'm too tired to think of another word that bothers me enough to viciously attack it. You'll have to use your imaginations on this one. Sorry.

Yo, Empress

It's been awhile since I've seen you. Perhaps we could get together, I dunno, saturday at elevenish? I'll be on campus at that time, because there's a hot dog with my name on it from my work. I guess I'd understand if you were busy, though.

You see, gentle readers, I'll let you in on the secret: the empress has a much better paying and much more busy work life than I do. I sit around stapling papers for people for three hours a day, five days a week. The empress, on the other hand, does a good deal more work, harder work, and at stranger hours than me. It is for this reason that she can afford to live in the cute, cute house that she does, with the porch and the claw foot tub and the random hole in the closet to hide mexicans in.

On the subject of great music, however, I would like to direct you people to The Magnetic Fields. Finally, some cool and funky music that I did NOT get from the empress! It's truly amazing. I've been making my way through this album, and there's some gems on it. There's some other songs that I really don't know what to make of, but the good ones make it totally worth it. Where else will you get a cd of love songs that includes "(Crazy for you but) Not that Crazy," "Busby Berkeley Dreams," "I'm Sorry I Love You," and "Love is Like a Bottle of Gin?"

My favorites so far? "Long-Forgotten Fairytale" and "Washington, DC."

I only love old people when I can mock them

As my mother can attest, I am not a fan of the elderly. They are generally poor drivers, obnoxious shoppers, and confused and selfish voters. We do have two old old people who live on our street, and I like them both because I know them as neighbors who wave to us when we leave for school and arrive at home, and let us borrow their can openers and stuff. They are friendly and nice, partially because they're downtown old people and not snobby suburban old people.

A n y w a y,

The other day I walked by an old man who was near the university (I was walking around delivering inter-campus mail for my employer) who had just gotten off his bike and was speaking on his cell phone. He was telling the person on the other end about his day: "I went to the coffee shop and read the newspaper for a few hours, then I got stuck on one of them suh-dookies for another hour. You know, those number puzzles? Suhdookie."

Three posts in one day! It's like some sort of record!

Really, I just wanted to show you all the creativity of Hunca Munca. We got to the store too late on October 31st to purchase an actual pumpkin. They were all gone. Instead, we did this:



I love Hunca Munca. Her gourd looks evil and cute.

Office Job

I've discovered a few perks of working in an office full of academic advisors. One of the perks is that they don't have a whole lot of work for me to do, so they encourage me to take my time on every project I do. I thus get to spend long amounts of time sauntering about campus, delivering "urgent" envelopes to various buildings.

Another perk is free and easy talking with advisors. While they are technically not supposed to advise me because I'm not in that college, one of the advisors has taken something of a liking to me and we are going to get together this week to talk about stuff. She happens to have done her undergrad and graduate work in my major, so I'm going to pick her brain a little bit.

As we were setting up my appointment with her, she stuffed a cd into my hands, telling me to borrow it and listen to the music, because she thinks I would like it.

I like my job.

Rawr!

I like this seal a lot, partially because it has an excellent motto, and partially because it's a big bear looking for someone to eat.

As a side note, but still related to the NaBloPoMo topic, when I signed up, I had not considered the fact that my site would be getting more traffic than usual and thus more comments than usual. This is an interesting feeling, knowing that at least two new people have found something worth commenting on within my feeble attempts to blog well. Encouraging? Very much so.

It's Good to Have Roommates

I live with four other girls, in a house (a cute little brick house! with a black fridge and a black oven!) near where I go to school. We have a backyard that is full of unintended and untended grass, four frighteningly large anthills, two bikes and sometimes a cat. Our neighbors to the south and west are very old people who we assume have been living here since the dawn of time, and our neighbors to the east appear to be a houseful of college boys. They have two cute black puppies (we play with the puppies through the fence and I am tempted to feed them bacon), and a clothesline that once had about ten pairs of jeans on it and nothing else. I wish I had taken a picture. All we know about the neighbors to the north, who are across the alley, is that they have two dogs that freak out whenever we take our trash out to the giant trash barrel in the alleyway. The neighborhood isn't the best, but we really have it good here. I've written about some of my roommates previously, and tried to think up witty names for them and failed. I will try again tonight.

The Desirable One: I think I'll stick with that name for her, because it is pretty fitting, and because any other names I think of for her end up sounding disparaging when I really don't mean them to be. No, she's not ditzy and blonde. She's great and hard working and quite smart. In fact, I'm pretty sure everybody in our house is quite smart. She helps me try to sort out my feelings (she and Io are both very verbal and into talking things out, a thing that until I moved in I had never really considered doing) and sometimes gives me hints on how to flirt. She is also great because she and I share a room, and when she studies she often just sits there and watches the chinchillas watching her.

Hunca Munca: she isn't a bad mouse at all, but I expect that she would like the way the name sounds. She is probably the roommate with the most personality, as evidenced by the night when she found out she passed the Bar and pretended to get drunk by swigging sparkling cider from the bottle. We have pictures to prove it. She's also quite the hard worker, even though she creates time to say and do the most hilarious and outrageous things. Her fiance, whom I will call Tom Thumb for convenience, is very quiet but if you catch him at the right moment he is also quite funny. I almost wish they weren't getting married, so I could have her as a roommate for longer.

Io: no, she is not one of the moons of Jupiter. She is, however, a lot like me, both in personal history and personal opinions. This is one of the reasons I like her, although she sometimes confuses me because she's much more opinionated and sensitive of those around her than I am. We generally get along very well, which is funny because when I was considering moving in, she was the one part of the household that I wanted to avoid. That first impression of her was soon dispelled, and I'm so glad that I got to know how great she is. She also gives great massages.

Roommate X: she is the one who is very often not here, but somewhere with her boyfriend. She misses a lot of the goings-on in the house, but then again, she's having tons of fun with her boyfriend. It's really kind of a toss-up. She does have the parental hook-ups, though: they're the ones who signed the lease for the house, and when some old lady they knew died, they got her recliners and sent them along to us, as well as some old lady jewelry and scarves and even two pretty pairs of white gloves. I feel a little guilty for being happy that somebody died.

4 Days and I'm already tired

Ok, so NaBloPoMo is a little harder than I thought it was. Perhaps I would do better if I had Maggie's book...

Ooh, ooh! I got it! I'll write a list of things that would make my life better. Things, that could possibly be purchased as gifts for holidays?

-No One Cares What You Had For Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog
-some albums by Iron and Wine
-some albums by Death Cab for Cutie
-tennis shoes of some sort that are easy to put on and take off
-a mini stapler
-some jeans, but I probably should get those for myself
-a dignified fleecy zip-up sweatshirty thing that I could wear to church and not be embarrassed of
-a flyswatter
-a ticket to europe or canada
-my own copies of: Star Wars original trilogy, Pride and Prejudice, Breaking Away, A Room With a View. I'm sure this would make my parents happy cause I'd stop stealing their copies.
-a Slippery Splug

You probably think I'm really trivial from what I write here, don't you?

But I really do, you know, think about stuff. Like today? In my sociology of families class? We watched an episode of Frontline about reproductive technology, and ethical questions and problems it creates. Like, how much genetic engineering is acceptible before it's eugenics?

Deep stuff, baby.

Know What?

I don't like being tricked. I am much more likely to give you something if you ask for it straight out than if you try to trick me into giving it to you. Case in point?

I don't do this all the time, but when conditions are right, I have been known to give a few bucks to the bums on the medians, and more than once have I unloaded whatever change is in my pocket to the random guys who ask for it downtown or on campus. I even felt a little guilty one day not long ago because when I pulled my fistful of change out of my pocket for the bum next to the market I saw a lot of pennies in the mix. "I hope he isn't offended that I'm giving him a bunch of pennies," I thought to myself, right before I realized, "dude, he's the one demanding money fromm *me*. Anything I give him is more than what can be expected."

I did studiously avoid looking at him as I exited the market a few minutes later, just in case he was upset at my contribution.


On to the trickery, then. The other day (Halloween, in point of fact), I was accosted as I chained up my bike outside the building my classes take place in. Well, no, not really. I had locked up my bike and had returned to the sidewalk and was just standing there looking at my phone because somebody had called me. As I was standing there, some guy was walking by, and said, very much in passing, "do you have a lighter?" He was holding a cigarette. Naturally, I said no, because I really didn't have a lighter.

He continued walking, then stopped as if an idea had occurred to him. "Hey, do you want to vote for me?" Umm, yeah. I love voting for people I don't know who ask me for a light. I told him that I didn't know who he was (mistake number one! I should've just said no, and walked away), so he launches into this spiel about how he's in a radio personality class, or some crap like that, and he had to get voted for so he could win a trip to Paris and like his weight in beer or something. If I had been in a hurry to get to class, or to get anywhere really, I never would've let myself get conned into sitting down to listen to his scheme. However, I had an hour to kill, and was still busy looking at my phone, so I wasn't really paying enough attention.

He led me to a curb and we sat down and he pulled out this documentation ("to prove I'm legit")(cleverly in a little clear holder that also contained a baby picture?). At this point I finally began to realize that something obnoxious was going on. Then he pulled out another clear holder that had a little schedule of magazines I could suscribe to. "Just point to a magazine that you don't hate and I'll tell you how cheap it is!" At last, the lights and alarms in my head were going off in full force. I'll have to change the batteries, though, cause they took way too long to get started.

When the stupid me realized that he was just trying to con me into purchasing magazines that may or may not actually be sent to me, magazines that I don't want in the first place, I began to make my apologies and tried to excuse myself from the conversation by telling him (truthfully) that I was beyond broke right now, so I couldn't even pay for the magazines. Either he didn't care or he didn't believe me (likely, since I was dressed rather nicely that day in my expensive new attire purchased for me by my parents), because he started pleading with me, saying I didn't even need the money right then, they could defer payment, and it's really lousy of me not to even give him a chance. I explained as I handed back the magazine schedule that I did in fact give him a chance by listening to all his garbage. Then I noticed that only one of us was engaged in the act of handing back the magazine schedule. He refused to take it back, ignored it quite unashamedly. I finally laid it down on the curb next to him as he outright swore at me in a frighteningly passive aggressive manner.

I wish I had slapped him or something, instead of meekly walking away.

Heigh ho, Heigh ho

For the past week and a half it's been "off to work I go," which is an excellent idea, as my bank account contains approximately $50. Huzzah! I'm broke!

Good thing I've got a credit card! Hopefully I'll be able to scrape by on my fifty bucks for the next couple of weeks before my first paycheck comes through. I'm not really the type of person that enjoys living in debt.

Mom and Dad, I'm not asking for money from you yet, but be aware that there is a distinct possibility of that in the next week or so. Just so you won't be taken by surprise.

***

In other news, I'm feeling halfway productive tonight because I washed the dishes! I cleaned the kitchen! I even went so far as to put my laundry in the washer. Whether it subsequently gets put into the dryer is yet to be seen.

To reward myself, I'm blogging while watching some of the five hour Pride and Prejudice. How's that for a fun evening?

Which reminds me. I took the Jane Austen Heroine Quiz this morning. Partway through the questions, I'd say, four questions in, I realized that I already knew who I was going to be because of my answers. That's right, I'm Catherine Morland. You know, from Northanger Abbey?

I never really intended to read that book, and didn't expect to enjoy it much even when I found that I had to read it for my Jane Austen class in Parts Unknown.

However, after reading it, I realized that a book doesn't need to be well known or widely liked to be an entertaining thing to read. I liked it a lot, and because of my surprising enjoyment of that book, I thought to myself, "Self, perhaps I'll like Emma as well when we read it for class, even though I hate the movie and I've never been able to get more than three chapters into the book because it makes me claustrophobic."

I was wrong. Turns out that you can still dislike books that other people love, just as easily as you can like a book that nobody else wants to read.