well then.

the people have spoken. apparently, however, "the people" are two random passers-by to my blog and aja. (if you want to see their pages, check the "w" link in the comments. yay for people commenting! hehe.) anyway, i am no capitalist pig-dog, so... lower-case pretension it is.

laziness always wins because good is dumb.

listening: tom waits - eggs & sausage (in a cadillac with susan michelson)

I've spent the last hour or so tidying up my old pages. Y'know, freeing them of bastard links, bad graphic references, and other miscellaneous loose ends. Instead of working on homework. I'm just brilliant like that.

So I'm trying out this whole "capitalization" thing, despite a complete lack of feedback thus far. I think it's disagreeing with me, because my typing has gone to shit. I have hit backspace so many times now...

No one is at the lab today. It feels like I've been here 20 minutes if I've been here an hour, and I've been here well over an hour. Well. I've been here about two hours and 45 minutes now, because it's 12:47 and I was a minute late. Whoops. Nothing lost, however.

This morning, there was thunder so loud it woke me and two of my roommates up from a perfectly decent 7am slumber. It was cool to hear such thunder, but not cool to wake up. Waking up is lame, especially since I could only really stand to sleep for another hour and a half, but waking up prevented further rest. Grrr.

I think I'll go get a mocha and pretend to write for awhile, then hit up the record shop for some stuff. Alternately, I could pretend that my purpose for being outside in shitty weather is to pick up hot guys. They'll be looking for Iggy Pop records; I'll bump into them on my way over to Tom Waits. Oh, yeah, baby. Vinyl snobs are sexy.

I want more sleep. And lunch. And movies! Yay for video rentals. I am so bored. Stupid homework.

I suck because I experiment with capitalization. This makes me feel twelve. At least I'm not experimenting with proper spelling; god knows I'll never get that perfectly straight all the time.

#n00n is having the drug argument again. How fun.

I think I'll try to spend my last hour at work actually reading something for a class.

i think i just figured out why i don't get a lot of hits: no references to anime. or pictures of anime. or lists of anime that i have watched and followed and now own on both dvd and vhs because they are so vastly superior to your silly anime that's censored and shown on the cartoon network. i guess the real problem is that i just can't care about anime.

when christine made pierogies tonight, she made the fire come, and it scareded me. *big sad face*

now i'm watching an incredibly ridiculous movie, the adventures of buckaroo banzai. john lithgow has *very* bad teeth in this movie. i'm not sure if i'm actually supposed to be able to follow the plot or not. i think i do, kind of, in that sleepy way, but at the same time, it seems somehow unnecessary, because it's just so... so... silly. heh. all of the bad aliens are named john, and all the good aliens are jamaican as miss cleo. movies with no discernible point are cool, as long as there's no blatant attempt to actually have one.

i will sleep when this is over. i have to work at 10am tomorrow, which is lame, but maybe i'll do homework. heh.

it's finally happened. seattle is rainy once again.

and it couldn't have picked a fucking better time (lie). we're supposed to go to the zoo on monday, but if it's raining, we most likely won't go. animals don't like to show themselves when the sky is dripping.

i need to walk to another class in ~45min, then figure out when and how i want to run my other errands. i need snacky foods from tj's, probably some groceries, too... and i'll probably go to the record store sometime this weekend, but that's not pressing.

i need an interesting new project. school is interesting, writing is good, but i'm not really doing shit, and that makes me sad.

yay for being lame.

oh, pop poll:

should i continue being lazy with proper capitalization, or start being good and starting sentences with capital letters, capitalizing proper names, and using the upper-case "i" when referring to myself?

leave a comment.

my fucking alarm didn't go off this morning. i woke up independently around 7:45, which was just enough time to use the bathroom, throw on crappy clothes, eat a bowl of cereal, and haul ass to class. it was not, however, enough time to attend to important hygiene matters like bathing or tooth-brushing; those had to wait until i returned around 9:40. grrr.

the whole lecture, too, the last one before our first midterm, was annoyingly reviewish for me. she was talking about parts of the brain and what they do and her "favorite membrane protein," a voltage-gated Na+ channel, and how it's affected by lidocaine. *woo.* i think i've taken enough psych courses by now that i should definitely have the brain stuff pretty well down; the nitty-gritty of brain chemistry was about all that i hadn't previously understood, and it doesn't seem that complicated in her explanation. ah well. i'm just bitchy cos it was 9am and i felt like i was wasting my time. at least it's interesting, which is more than i can say for my total-fucking-waste-of-time math class last quarter.

but, i mean, she asked if anyone in the class had ever heard of a lobotomy. jesus. i don't want to know anyone who has never *heard* of a lobotomy --people who do not speak english as a first language and children too young to know better excepted-- considering the amount of stupid jokes about it made in our culture. i mean, i guess they're not insanely common, but you must have heard the word thrown around at some point, right?

so now i have an hour to fuck around. nothing really to do. maybe during the break between poli sci and psych i'll hit up the record store, or, better yet, scarecrow. i've determined that i will rent hedwig and the angry inch (i think it's out now), in the mood for love, and buckaroo bonzai for my weekend enjoyment. failing those, i'm sure the princess diaries will be available, right? *snerk* probably scarecrow's a better bet, because if i take too long, i don't want to have to either bring a bag of records into my psych lecture or run home and then back to north campus. ugh.

ouch for josie.

she has this '86 honda that, up until this week, been parked in front of a friend's house in another part of town because it needed repairs that she couldn't handle at the time. this week, she got it fixed for $250. yesterday, in fact. and she bought a quarterly parking permit ($130) for the garage at our apartments. she was quite pleased with the possibilities of having a car at her disposal.

tonight, she took a friend home. it was about a ten-block drive. on the way back, every time she braked her car, it stalled. so, obviously, it's broken, and she's... not really happy about that, understandably. and now she doesn't know what to do, since she can't afford the $1000 for a new carburator and that's apparently the problem. sigh. hugs for josie. cars are lame. long live public transit.

working on another mix cd. the theme is "hymns and blasphemy." any suggestions?

in the "burn me, baby" directory of possibilities:
-beatles - "rocky raccoon" (y'know, for the repeated reference to gideon's bible.. um. anyway.)
-cat stevens - "morning has broken" (duh, it was in the hymnal my church used. i always liked it.)
-frank zappa - "jesus thinks you're a jerk"
-iqu - "temptation" (works on those very puritanistic values)
-jeff buckley - "hallelujah"
-jeff buckley - "eternal life"
-mermen - "the dying man knows his god" (beautiful instrumental)
-negativland - "pastor dick" (this over "christianity is stupid" because i like the show-don't-tell philosophy)
-nick cave & the bad seeds - "hallelujah"
-nirvana - "jesus don't want me for a sunbeam"
-nomeansno - "jesus was a terrorist"
-ol' dirty bastard - "baby i got your money" (it's just funny)
-patti smith - "gloria" (fuck yes)
-pulp - "dishes" (i am not jesus, but i have the same initials...)
-r.e.m. - "new test leper" (actually caught me at that very vulnerable faith-questioning point of adolescence)
-simon & garfunkel - "you can tell the world" (great singalong!)
-simon & garfunkel - "blessed"
-tchkung! - "born in a barn" (mainly for the bob larsen sample)
-xtc - "dear god" (a little pedantic)

it feels good to be home. sometimes, i think i'm happiest at home. i love going out and i love traveling, but at the end, i just want to be home.

lately, home isn't such a stable place. i don't mean that in the "my mom and dad are fighting" counseling sense, but just the basic sense that where i live is less than permanent. i don't go "home" to olympia much anymore; i'm busy here in seattle too often for that. besides, what was home there, place-wise, no longer is; my parents moved a few miles north in december. i like the new house, but it's not my home. i have a place to sleep there, but it's not my room.

in seattle, i have this apartment, and my roommates are like family. but this will change soon enough. josie and anna are leaving at the end of the quarter for london; christine won't even be schooling in this country next year, she'll be studying it up russian-style; reid is graduating after next fall quarter. for summer, even if i were to stay in steven's court, i would most likely have to move out of this particular apartment, and the month of september would also mean a change in residence. as college students, our lives are naturally transient and constantly evolving, and this includes where we live. this lack of stability is both exhilerating (maybe a slight hyperbole...) and frustrating, but ultimately it's just fact.

maybe the definition of home simply changes with lifestyle. home is where i am.

i am in seattle. i love being in seattle. i can walk almost everywhere; in fact, i typically must walk. i like walking everywhere; gives me calves of death and a strange sense of accomplishment.

but still, sometimes, that sense of the ghost of homes past creeps in... i stand on a street corner, waiting for the light to change, as close to the edge of the curb as possible, without kk there to warn me to step back, he's seen tire tracks on the corner and wouldn't want me to lose my weird, adorable little toes. it is up to my sense of self-awareness and discretion to decide how close to the edge i'd like to stand...

yeah, i think i'm liking the new layout, no matter how random it was of me to change it last night and how very normal it looks. the robot was neat, but it is no more. and i really, really do not care enough to make my own blogger layout.

it just occured to me that i should have at #6 on my list below, that is, the talking heads. i mean, i enjoyed them before, but i wasn't, like... into them. so, to be fair, there's that.

i may be stuck in some figment of the past that never was part of my objective reality, but at least i'm not obsessed with cramming people in a phone booth like josie is. oh, how that girl longs for the '70s.

i miss tchkung. and jason webley. i miss concerts in general, but especially theirs. i miss a lot of things.

real life people are funny today. i talked to my boss for a weirdly long amount of time this afternoon, just talking about bad movies and things. he's a strange guy, but in a good way, i think. at the very least, a very good person for whom to work. he's convinced me that i need to rent buckaroo bonzai.

i tried the new "coastal mexican" place at the husky den today. it wasn't bad. i had two tacos with chicken (the steamed corn tortilla variety; they had some fakey-seeming mexican name for them that i don't recall) that were yummy. good, fresh pico and yummy chicken. my only complaint is that the beans and rice taste like total ass. they should just have plain black beans, or even ones seasoned and recooked in some fashion, i don't care. black beans are king of the bean world. but anyway, their beans and rice, not good; tacos, good! yay. i still contend that a burrito heaven would do nicely in its place, or, hell, anywhere within easy walking distance of me. burrito heaven is my basis of goodness for (mostly inauthentic, but still fucking yummy) mexican-style food. i've probably ranted about bh's goodness somewhere online before, but let me repeat: grande celestial on whole wheat with chicken, black beans, brown or spanish rice, pico de motherfuckin' gallo, cotija, cabbage, and some goddamned guacamole, if you're up for the extra $1.48, will be the death of me. good god. i can taste it in my mouth now. IN MY MOUTH, as mike would say. but mike did not try bh because i did not drag him to olympia! sigh!

god, i could so totally go to olympia just for burrito heaven.

it's just a magical process there. you say what kind of dish you want -- grande burrito, a small burrito, taco, tostada -- and, for burritos, choose tortilla color: white (flour), brown (wheat), green (spinach), red (umm..i think it's sundried tomato), or yellow (chipotle). then meat: chicken, beef, pork, or none. all but the "none" option are nicely marinated in yumminess. then the simple choices: black or pinto beans, brown or spanish rice, jack or cotija cheese (though they tend not to specifically offer a choice anymore, i know the cotija exists), lettuce or cabbage, pico de gallo, hot sauce, and guacamole or sour cream for an extra charge. gee, i haven't been there enough times to memorize the spiel, have i? noooo. i only filled up one customer appreciation card...

tomorrow is a quesadilla night. i'm gonna make the chunky salsa to make it more interesting and delicious--black beans, red onion, and tomato. it's mad yummy, especially when grilled on the george foreman instead of just pan-fried. mm.

i like food way too much. i try to like the healthy aspects in conjunction with the unhealthy ones, though. fresh veggies, mm. beans! and whole wheat stuff! mm. yeah. i'm obsessed. it's sad.

i think josie and i should have an iron chef competition, actually. only, y'know, with relaxed rules so we could consult a cookbook if we needed to or whatever. and we'd probably need to know the theme ingredient beforehand so we could properly shop for ingredients. but the rest of the harem could be our judges and tell us whose cuisine reigns supreme. that would be elite.

i wish there would be some kind of peanut butter sandwich on iron chef sometime. then when they show the dishes just before the judging, there'd be that announcer describing the dish in flowery language, talking about how the peanut butter perfectly complements the bread or something. then some vapid young japanese actress would pick it up with chopsticks and take a bite, saying how much it reminds her of her year in the united states and how the chef has really captured the essense of american cuisine with this dish. an older guy would say he thought it was too salty.

oh my fucking god, did i just voice an iron chef fantasy? turn off the tv, emily, and slowly back away...

hmm. maybe append nick drake and blondie to my list of wanted vinyl... more talking heads and r.e.m. as well.

wow, i'm so stupid. i just deleted whatever i had of my entry. duh.

i think i was just talking about silly weekend plans and how glad i am to actually have a few. not very exciting, though. rent a movie, record shopping, going dancing, going to the zoo with the harem. fun fun.

i have nothing to say right now. that's sad. maybe i'll write more later. i've been prolific lately, so perhaps it's simmering down.

there have been a few somewhat commercially successful and still critically lauded artists that i remember hearing years ago, but still failed to jump on the bandwagon until i was much older. i've always found this sad, but what's strange is my mind's way of making up excuses for not getting into them sooner. i guess this is kind of my "year of 2001" list, if i must have one, and since i just thought of this, i must.

music that somehow didn't stick with me until last year

1. aimee mann - i'd heard the magnolia soundtrack and loved it, but still failed to buy any cds. she didn't come to me until i really needed her -- coping with a breakup. i'm with stupid became my life soundtrack. there is no good excuse for not noticing her sooner than this.
   
2. ben folds five - when "battle of who could care less" was a single, i was in high school. i heard it on the radio, LOVED IT, taped it, and made my friends at school listen to it. they were...unimpressed. they made me rewind to that fucking sublime "date rape" song again and again. anyway, i had collected the self-titled album on mp3 awhile back, but it wasn't until last year sometime that i had most of the rest of the stuff. i tend to listen to unauthorized biography of reinhold messner obsessively. i blame gabe and kevin for talking about ben folds a lot on irc.
   
3. bjork - there is literally no excuse for me not liking bjork earlier, but now i do, so yay.
   
4. pj harvey - i actually borrowed to bring you my love from the library a few years ago, but i didn't really get into it. stories from the city, stories from the sea totally rocked me when i finally heard it, though.
   
5. dj krush - mm, pretty. actually, didn't even hear of him until i saw scratch, which i don't think has been released anywhere but film festivals yet, which is sad because it is super cool. but yeah, that's how sheltered i am from hip-hop culture: i had to hear about dj krush from a documentary film.
   

well. that's five. i'm sure there are more that i may blog about later. not my most interesting musical selections, but still very very yummy.

time for clothes and class. *yay.*

many, many thanks to offie! for fixing blogback for me! i love you, offie. :)

i'm trying out a new layout for the main purpose of having links to people on the side. i'm still way, way too lazy to make up my own design. maybe i'll do that at work one day, except there is no photoshop on that machine. argh! i can..umm..make some graphics and manipulate the html or something. i dunno. i'm very out of practice on this; i just want to write, not geek. how sad is that?

of course, it still needs tweaking. i need to put the sitemeter and blogback shiznit back on here because it makes me happy even though it seldom gets used. and if you think you need to be on my list of other blogs/journals, email me.

it's unfortunate that my belief in irony doesn't really work when taken in vain. somehow, and maybe this is just my western culture bias showing, but "oh, god!" has a much greater impact than "oh, irony!" not to mention there is no "jesus fucking christ!" in ironicology.

things i still want on vinyl:
the clash's london calling
tom waits
the kinks
muddy waters
more jimi hendrix
more vinyl in general, it's so pretty :P

i spewed out a little fantasy on irc last night. i should've copied it elsewhere, but failed to do so. it went something like this:
in my next apartment, i want to have my stereo set up somewhere that will not cause it to skip at the slightest movement in the room. there should be a very comfortable easy chair, positioned between two large bookshelves overflowing with books, movies, and other interesting media, next to a small endtable on which my cup of tea rests. scattered about the room will be a few candles which, on certain dark and stormy nights, will be the only illumination in the room. on those nights, muddy waters will occupy the turntable, volume turned way up, and i will occupy the chair, pleasantly and lazily enjoying the rain, the music, and the tea. it's not too much to ask, is it?

the library is busy this morning... oh, i guess it's afternoon now. and i'm completely stupid today. whee. but tonight is gilmore girls, and i think it's one of the episodes i missed earlier this year, yay! and josie gets to watch it with me now, even bigger yay! and i signed up for karate! woo! all these sentences beginning with conjunctions are lame, huh? yay!

the weather is continuing in its self-destructive dry pattern, refusing to rain or cloud over completely. for most, this seems positive, and while i am enjoying it, i fear the summertime. every year, we get in trouble with our local water and power agencies because our skies didn't produce enough precipitation the previous winter to keep us afloat, so to speak, in the dry northwest summers. if we have a beautiful but dry winter, followed by a beautiful but dry summer, where's the rain for which this region is so well known? (obvious answer: fall and spring, but often it's not enough. it's never enough. it rains all the time and it's never enough. heh.)

water politics somehow seem like something with which i should be better acquainted.

someone at work has been being special. sometime friday, or even possibly thursday, someone scrawled on the monitor of the win98 box: "liberate me from the bourgeois hands of this money hungry faux-capitalist paradise." we are amused, but perplexed. today, two yellow post-its are attached underneath the old message, telling a strange tale in red ink and lovely hand, complete with multi-hued fire drawings at the bottom of the whole thing. when i came in, i stood reading it for a moment, when paul came over and asked what was so interesting. he read it, saying, "someone must've been bored." heh.

i had a very productive half-hour between my poli sci section and work today. i accomplished three of the four things scheduled for my breaks today: one, register for karate at the ima--yoga was filled up by 10am, eep--two, pick up my paycheck from the 10th, and, three, get a cup of tea. perfect friggin' timing. sigh. i even ate a balance bar on my way to the ima. yummy chocolate-minty semi-nougaty goodness. all i have left to do after work is eat lunch. yay lunch, yay for cold mac'n'cheese with peas. i am so hungry and i have to wait until 2 to eat. rrr.

i wonder if i'll ever bother to capitalize properly in this blog. i'm good over at the harem, but here, nah. proper grammar is for chumps!

i've been thinking lately that, while i don't believe (nor disbelieve) in god, i do sometimes suspect there is a greater force at work on the earth. that force is irony. irony is neither wrathful nor loving; it does not wish to extract worshipfulness from all, merely revenge for existing. someday i will write a big long pretty essay about irony and its mysterious ways at work in my life, but not now.

today is another beautiful, cold, partly cloudy, dry winter day in seattle. these clouds of various shapes and colors are quite visibly drifting across my field of view--the top half of my small bedroom window.

each day, i learn at least one day. i try to make note of it in some fashion, whether only mentally, telling another person, or writing it down somewhere. today i learned that squirrels make very weird noises, like croaking birds. we are not slaves to our squirrel masters, but i heard one in a tree walking home this afternoon, looked up, surprised at the sound, and said, "i didn't know squirrels could do that!" it was that peculiar. i should learn not to find squirrels peculiar at all, since they are our masters and everything.

i need to go run some errands, but first, a quote from the big lebowski:

"say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, dude, but at least it's an ethos."

this song gabe sent me, "sunrise, sunset" by bright eyes, has a tempo like it's pushing towards a climax, but not quite reaching resolution. i am not quite at the analyzing-lyrics stage yet, but for now... the tune itself has meaning to me. pushing to climax. makin' me think.

my roommates are so, so weird. they're in the living room, giving each other buttrubs. yes, buttrubs.

i have been thinking a lot lately about my living situation for the summer and next year. the plan thus far has been to secure a three-bedroom place, probably north of here by about ten blocks, for the summer, living with at least one temporary roommate, then plan on living with josie and at least one other predetermined person in the fall or whenever people return from abroad. i'm just... reconsidering, i guess. i'm not sure exactly who i want to live with, and i'm not entirely sure i want to live with josie. i like josie; she's a good person to live with and we have a friendship and so forth. at the same time, she sometimes has this very... negative energy, i guess. it's some of the things she says, the occasional general attitude that you'd probably most readily attribute to pms. she also likes to party, and i don't really want to have the party central apartment again next year. i don't want this to be a knock-on-josie entry or anything, but i'm feeling slightly negative about the idea now. i'll probably change my mind soon.

some things i do know: i want to live with other people. living alone is probably more isolation than i need right now, though i definitely need my own room. i would kind of like to live with a male friend, if compatible living arrangements can be made. i want a place i can furnish and decorate better than this current place, which came with useable but not very... well, not very interesting furniture. i want my double bed back. i want to go shopping at goodwill. i want to continue living in the u-district. i want bookshelves for movies and books on display. i want to get a disc changer for my stereo and have it set up in a part of the living room that won't be horribly disturbed by foot traffic and use it often. i want people to feel comfortable hanging out.

i dunno.

tomorrow is another 8:30 class, and i feel like i've had no real weekend. i didn't do shit, which sucks. last night i was just whiny and had some conversations about religion and bodily functions and cutting my hair and josie's last name and sex and that sort of thing, which were alternately enlightening and amusing. because of work, i missed seeing my mom yesterday morning when my brother was in tukwila for a bass lesson with spencer. because of work, i didn't get to sleep in saturday or eat lunch today. because of work, i was robbed of 8.5 hours of prime music listening. because of work, i had an amusing conversation with gabe. because of work, i saw a lot of my jittery-but-amusing coworker and classmate greg. but hey, i got paid. yay. i didn't do a lot of homework, though. only wrote one response paper and collected the data for the projects in section. woo.

i need to make all my roommates watch and understand why i fucking love harold and maude.

now i'm listening to a band to whom kevin pointed me, butterfly jones, "anywhere but now." it's nice.

[ymmy] if i were a floppy disk, where would i be?
hehehe. sammy is a silly man. i spend way, way, WAY too much time online.

space ghost: coast to coast defies description. it's that good.