wartime oscar party drinking game!

before the ceremony begins, everyone must pick winners in every category. WRITE THEM DOWN. there may be a PRIZE at the end. from jesus. or a fairy. or a genie in a lamp. at any rate, your wish must be for WORLD PEACE. if you are too drunk by then, you can always wish for whirled peas. even jesus will understand.

here are the times you get to increase your sloshedness:

-every time your selection wins a category, take a drink.
-every time someone expresses anti-war sentiments in their acceptance speech, take a drink.
-every time someone expresses sickeningly patriotic sentiments in their acceptance speech, take two drinks. you'll need it.
-every time your selection loses a category, take a drink.
-basically, every time something happens, take a drink. i mean, for chrissakes, you're sitting at home on a sunday night watching a stupid hollywood awards ceremony with absolutely no bearing on your life, desires, or anything, and there's a fucking war on. get drunk and wait for the fairy to come grant your wish.

you may want to choose a french-manufactured beverage. and eat french fries. and french toast. and CALL THEM THAT because that's the best way to chortle heartily at all these small-minded, america-loving yokels, right? wear duct tape for solidarity, too, cos surely that joke isn't old yet at all.

and with that...this nihilistic little entry is over.

hey, y'all. well. i've just eaten a bowl of wannabe thai hot and sour soup that was missing some crucial element (my own fault), finished a cook's tour which made me want to go to vietnam, and our country is finally officially at war with iraq. i suppose it's about time i weighed in on all that.

since i'm clearly concerned enough to have gone to a war protest, stuck a little linkydink to not in our name on my navbar, and am writing this stupid entry on my boyfriend's old laptop which has a keyboard of doom (besides which he rearranged the keys themselves while cleaning them out of some bizarre sense of whimsy) and i can't tell you how hard it is to type clearly with havingto hit backspace every few strokes, you might have gathered that i'm none too pleased with the idea of war. it's true. honestly, i'd have to say in my heart of hearts i'm a total peacenik hippie, a pacifist, i do recognize on some level that it's possible war is "necessary" at times. sometimes there is justification, eventually, for our atrocities. sometimes, through all the bullshit, there is some truth. i just don't believe for a second that right now is one of those times.

yes, saddam is a "bad guy." but then...so are a lot of people we're not bombing. so are we. this was, in many ways, our own making. i'm not even going to get into that now, but it's my understanding that we totally trained and armed these people who are now our terrorists. and now, we are being told it's a clear-as-day issue of who's right and who's wrong in this mess, and we're gonna be the heroes who fix it. no fucking way.

even if i felt that getting rid of saddam was justified, i'd still be certain of our magical power to completely botch the job. our track record for "installing democracy" isn't a very good one; we're just going to end up with another government we can't stand, politically, in 15 years or something and have to bomb the shit out of them again and the regular people of iraq we supposedly want to help are just going to get continually fucked over and over again.

so what should we do? that i don't know. the world is a big and scary place full of problems i hope i never personally have to solve. but i don't think this precludes me from saying what i think is wrong. i don't believe there are any true solutions, but should someone have them, by god, may they work out.

besides, what the hell is the internet for if not exercising our dwindling right to free speech?

anyway, that's all i have to say. this is wrong. so very wrong.

time to get away from this keyboard of doom.

there is a library tech who works downstairs that everyone working behind this desk fears. she walks by and snipes at us if someone at a table not exactly in our immediate viewing range has an open bag of m&m's. i have been told that having a cup (with a lid) on the desk, which is specifically permitted by library rules, "sets a bad example for the patrons." she has also freaked out and been the cause of a mandatory closing and emergency procedures training session (which i was unable to attend thanks to a class i hated that i skipped anyway due to feeling like ass, ha ha), much to the eyerolling disdain of my boss and coworkers. sometimes she is friendly, in her way--and everyone is not sure how to respond.

yesterday, she left a canister of cookies on the desk with a note reading, "happy tuesday from (name)." it's still sitting there. i'm not sure that anyone's eaten them. she walked by earlier and asked if we had eaten any of the cookies she left yesterday, then shook the canister and made a mock-surprise face upon realizing there were some left.

i am pretty confident she wouldn't, say, poison cookies, but i would be surprised if they were good.

that, and i don't typically eat things people bring here. it just seems weird. i accepted a coffee from my boss once, a liquery chocolate from a former coworker (which i ate under the desk), and i've brought my own homemade christmas cookies (which ARE good) to share, but otherwise...nothin'.

anyway.

goodness, i'm hungry. what else.

the other night, kevin and i went to carkeek park for the first time. the moon was full and bright and the tide was out. we walked on the rocks and sand. there is a strange pedestrian bridge crossing the railroad tracks to get to the beach, and i had the thrill of standing there as a train approached from the south. what a rush! it was apparently too dark for pictures, though, so we went back yesterday during the day. it was a gorgeous day. here's a fairly large photo of me on the beach, so you can see the day, the park, and my stupid haircut all in one shot. oh, and we got to stand on the bridge for a train again, this time coming from the north. woo!

then we went to value village in greenwood because i wanted to thrift. i bought a little chopper/blender for $10 and a big red hardside samsonite suitcase for $8. kevin got very bored and bought a bunch of weird crap, including a gigantic candle that he claims smells nice but every time i try to smell it, i'm overwhelmed by this moldy scent. it's like eau de thriftstore x10. anyway, i wasn't terribly impressed by this value village after spending about an hour perusing every section. the only value village i have truly loved is the newish one in lacey. goodwill remains cheaper and therefore a better place to buy copious amounts of weird tshirts, dishes, pillows, and other miscellaneous scores, even if the thrift store dust and smell makes me completely brain dead exhausted after awhile.

i am just now remembering something very weird that cracked me up, and it's all kevin's fault. the other night, he recalled a news story he read about three people in africa who, in the name of $30, chased a cell phone lost in a pit toilet and never came back up. i said that was very sad, dying in a well of shit trying to retrieve someone's cell phone for a fucking $30 finder's fee. then he said to think of happy things, like my little pony...in a pile of shit. this killed me. it became ever better when he suggested we make it a flash animation or something, starting with the sad story, then saying something like, "that was crappy... now here's something happy." ever better? he didn't realize his pun at first. oh, i have the "my little pony" theme song/jingle stuck in my head just thinking about it.

last night, i was kind of bored and after dinner and reading yet another chapter or two in the exciting a cook's tour, i took a walk from kevin's house to downtown ballard, where i bought a couple cds at sonic boom i'd been meaning to pick up. they had a lot of new vinyl. i want new vinyl! i will have to compile a list and go back and decide what i want. i should do this in olympia, too, because phantom city (the record store in the front of dumpster values) also has good vinyl for sale, and at prices that don't make me totally unhappy.

too mcuh babbling? yes. too much babbling.

yeahhhsss. i am home. i am so tired. the weekend has been long and all i wanna do is...

blllaahhh, i wish i hadn't eaten a bunch of peanut butter cookies when i got home.

anyway. i am tired as fuck. long weekend.

i did write an entry earlier detailing my exciting goddamn weekend of stuff, but blogger ATE IT (as mentioned below). fucking blogger. fucking internet exploder. this doesn't happen in mozilla!

mozilla, by the way, seems to display the gasworks picture with a couple pixels of black background between it and the white space. oh well.

kevin had a fucked-up migraine on friday, so after work i went to bartell's and bought him some travel-size eyedrops and a tablet of aleve. by the time i got back to my apartment, mom and koko were parked outside. they came inside while i got my stuff together and we headed to ballard so i could bring kevin the stuff. then we headed to wallingford, hoping to eat at the afghan place, but were unable to find parking, so mom got on the slow-moving freeway and got off in the international district.

koko suggested the purple dot cafe, a hong kong style restaurant. it was very yummy. we had four dishes to share--chinese broccoli with garlic, clams with black bean sauce, tofu and pork, and a very eggy fried rice covered half with a creamy sauce and shrimp and half with a sweet and sourish chicken and onions. i adored the broccoli. i probably ate half of it.

saturday, mom and i left around 9am for portland. first we went under the morrison bridge to eat at a place my coworker recommended, the montage, but found it closed. doh! so we went to our favorite nearby junkstore, city liquidators, and browsed and consumed celebratory free coffee and donuts for awhile before going to southwest portland. we ate at a place called in good taste, which was a little bistro a couple blocks from powell's. we had tasty sandwiches and a friendly waiter.

powell's was fun, of course. i got diet for a small planet and a cook's tour, which seemed like a suitably amusing and interesting combination to me. mom got me a copy of nosh magazine, which is vegan/environmentalist and a little incredulous to me. she also bought paper doll books for her friend's little girls, picture books for my niece, and entertaining magazines for her old friend's birthday. we then set off to another part of town to surprise said friend and her family and ended up spending an hour there before we all had to leave for our respective dinner plans. that family now has a dog, two cats, two turtles, and ten guinea pigs. it's crazy.

then we went to my brother's house in beaverton. i wrote earlier explaining all the relationships therein, but blogger ATE IT and i am too tired to explain again right now, but anyway, we met his friend's new bride, fresh from cambodia, whom the other women already dislike (woooo), ate dinner at a chinese buffet, and spent time with my bratty 2-year-old niece, who likes to ride her bike around the house and hit for no reason. she did call me "auntie," though, and played with me, which was amusing.

this morning i woke up before the others and read a cook's tour for awhile before mom left for church. made coffee, ate special k, showered, etc. very exciting. mom came home and took me to the asian store on the westside--picked up some chinese broccoli, among other things, yum!--and then burrito heaven, cos it really is heaven. then we picked up paul's girlfriend, sara, and went home, put all my shit in the van, got koko, and headed for tacoma.

my aunt met us at the university of puget sound, eventually, and we all sat together for paul's performance as part of the all-state music concert. orchestra played first. it was very long, though pretty, and the room was SO WARM and the bleachers, as bleachers are wont to be, were SO UNCOMFORTABLE. the announcer was crazy about making people clap for so many reasons every few minutes if possible. then the choir sang. i fucking hate choir music. i'm sorry, but it just bugs. so. much. i mean, i have heard people do awesome things with it, but generally? it sounds boring and unemotional and just like a sea of voices being perfect and perky and enunciating more than the song deserves. anyway, this was no exception. finally the band played, and they had several pieces and i really have no opinion of them at all. all of the guest conductors received plaques from the students to thank them, then they all talked about how great the kids were and how great washington is and how they love visiting and thanks to the organizers and thanks to everyone, ever, alalalalala thxbye. i am very tired and just thinking about all the clapping makes me more tired.

anyway, now i'm home, and i am so tired i almost want to cry. i wish i had energy to do SOMETHING, cos 8:30 is way too fuckin' early to sleep. oh, and i chopped my hair pretty short on accident, but it might look ok. there is a lot of stuff going on, i guess, just i am super fucking tired right now and all i wanna do is wake up enough to spend time with kevin but i don't think that's happening. wah!

ohhh my fucking god... i just spent freaking half an hour writing about my weekend and blogger fucked the fuck up the second i hit 'post and publish.'

arrrghhh.

anyway, mom's home from church, i will write again LATER.

fuckyoublogger.