Continuing with our astronomical theme, we bring you globular cluster M79. It’s a pretty little cluster, about 41,000 light-years from Earth, and one of the few globular clusters farther from the galactic center than we are. It may even have started out in a different galaxy entirely. Why M79? Because it resides in a February constellation: Lepus, the (*shudders*) hare.
(Credit: AURA/NOAO/NSF)
Now that most of you can see these threads before they’re posted, there’s no need to wait. We’ll just pop them up as soon as they’re finished. It’s already February between Europe and the International Date Line.
Kicking off this month, me and my dad are celebrating the end of January and and all of his coldness. To tell you the truth, I can’t wait for winter to end, either. I want to start getting off my butt and go outside for a change!
I’m reading about Stoicism, and it’s a bit weird because a lot of what I’m reading I’ve heard about from discussions with my brother on Orthodox Christianity, and I just sort of assumed it came from the Church Fathers or something. And… it didn’t, apparently, a lot of the time.
I really want to read these philosophers’ original texts now, though. And they’re online, so I suppose that won’t be hard!
What an interesting coincidence, we had a lecture at school just last night by someone called Jules Evans (I think there are possibly articles and/or TED talks by him online, if it interests you) and he was talking about how the Stoicist philosophy is still influential, namely on the development of cognitive behavioural therapy. It was quite interesting to hear about what he called the ‘Four Noble Truths’, which are basically ways in which to apply the Socratic method in order to enhance your whole philosophy of life.
That does sound interesting! The similarities between some Stoic practices and cognitive-behavioral therapy were mentioned a little bit on Wikipedia, but I didn’t look into it further. I’d love to know more about it, though; I’ll have to look into that sometime. I think I really want to read the classical texts before that kind of stuff, though, starting with the Enchiridion. [insert bad Adventure Time-related joke here]
Anyway, I need to do homework now
and keep my own mind in a state conformable to nature.The guy was essentially linking ancient philosophy to psychology based on his own personal experience – he used to suffer from social anxiety, but apparently, reading the Stoic philosophers helped him refocus his thinking, his attitude to life, his relationships with other people, etc.
If I remember correctly, the main points he drew from ancient philosophy:
-accepting that we don’t have complete control over external circumstances (emotional problems arise when we try to control something external, like other people’s opinions about us)
-focusing instead on what we can control – according to Epictetus, our thoughts and beliefs only
-developing these thoughts and beliefs into formed habits, because humans are forgetful creatures who ‘sleepwalk through life’ – something I didn’t know was that ethos means habit (and hence ethics = habit)
My friend who’s a classicist was a bit annoyed by the talk because he supposedly generalised too much about the Greek and Roman philosophers, but knowing much less detail about the ancients I personally thought the main arguments were still quite interesting. And I’ve always been casually interested in psychology so to see the link between the two was cool.
You should defs start with Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, because he’s the best.
Well, I already read the Enchiridion, but I can read that next.
Happy February, and happy Chinese New Year! I went over to my friend’s house to make dumplings and have a party, which sort of turned into a Harry Potter marathon.
GAPAs, thank you for informing me that it is now February. This may actually motivate me into starting a twenty-page research paper that is due on the fourteenth. Somehow, that seemed far less pressing on January 29th.
Good luck with your paper!
I was out in the student area with the microwave and vending machines and some guys walked past. They gave a polite hello before staring at the mostly-empty water bottle, special infuser (which looks like nothing so much as an oversize ceramic thimble), and canister of chai I had set on top of the microwave with an expression of “What are these strange implements and what is she heating in that poor, defenseless microwave?!” It was quite funny.
Also, TRYING A NEW CHAI BLEND. AND IT’S AWESOME.
New favourite tea: Camomile and Spiced Apple.
Yum! We sometimes have Apple Cinnamon tea in the dinning hall, but it goes very fast.
Heh, someone just posted on my school’s fb community offering to sell the rest of a box of tea (with 17 bags left) for $2
I am now the proud owner of an Elven circlet!
Wow, cool! How’d you come by that?
I found it on Etsy.
SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE SPACE.
aka as Luna is going to be checking out the space stuff in Huntsville, Alabama all day tomorrow.
gonna be tons of fun. tons tons tons of fun.
I’m hyper. I spent over 6 hours driving today. So even more hyper. Also, space. Makes me reminisce about how I wanted to be an astronaut when I was little.
And how is it really February? And how are my three weeks on my externship in Florida (which was awesome by the way and so very much worthwhile) over already? Now I ahve to go back to school for the first time since mid November. I’ve been gone too long, I don’t want to go back now.
If anyone is by some weird freak event also anywhere nearby, I vote impromptu kokonvention. Just saying.
Oh man, you are going to have so much fun! They change things around pretty often, so I can’t be sure anything will still be in the same place, but…
Just wait until you see the Saturn V. It is amazingly big. And the Davidson Center is just so nice.
The rocket garden is a fun place to run around in.
Standing under Space Shuttle Pathfinder, that’s pretty sweet.
The museum and how it smells like popcorn– oh yeah, definitely go see a movie at the IMAX theater if you have time, Hubble 3D is awesome and Magnificent Desolation has made me cry every single time I’ve seen it, and even though The Dream is Alive is more than a quarter-century old, it’s still amazing and the Space and Rocket Center is one of the few places you can still see it in IMAX. And the Apollo 16 command module and the piece of Skylab and the moon rock Alan Bean said was his favorite…
And see if you can watch any Space Camp groups going about their simulations on the sim floor, it can be hard to get a good view from outside, but it’s cool to watch.
Basically, you’re going to have a great time.
I plan to try and fit in a movie if I have time. And I saw Saturn V driving past, but I”m sure the awe factor is even more incredible up close (charging my camera right now so I have it with me tomorrow). And also if I have time I’m going to pay the extra $12 for the bus tour, which is an hour and a half, and I guess only at 1pm, so depending on how crunched I feel for time at that point……I mean, it’s only open 8 hours, not very long.
And looking at the website, the simulators look fun, and I’m gonna have to check out the Mars climbing wall (and demonstrate my extreme lack of upper arm strength, I’m sure) and and and
Aw cake, now I want to go back to Space Camp so badly… I’ll see if I can apply to be a councilor this summer even if I’ll be away most of June at field school…
Dear JK Rowling: Please stop trying to ruin my happy memories of the Potter books. I’m happy with how everything went, don’t mar my memories of the books and future re-readings by telling me you wish you’d written major parts of them differently. :/
I really need to read the series again. Because I never really understood Harry/Ginny, but now that Harry/Hermione has come up again a lot of people are defending the former. I’d like to pay more attention to Ginny.
I support Ron/Hermione, though. I think a lot of Harry/Hermione shippers’ perceptions are altered by the movies; Daniel and Emma work together extremely well.
Yeah, Harry/Hermione works better in the movies than in the books. –And I bet JK Rowling’s seen the movies more recently than she’s read the books; I wonder how that’s changed how she thinks about the relationship. Thinking about it that way only gives me another reason to be sure that at this point she has no more authority on the matter than I do.
(Ron/Hermione and Luna/Harry is the way to go anyway.)
ZNZ! *glomps* I haven’t really talked to you in ages; how are you? It’s great to see you here again!
…As for Harry Potter ships, though, I don’t really like Harry/Ginny or Ron/Hermione that much, but I also can’t ship anything else–maybe I’m just uncreative, but my mind immediately goes, “But they don’t feel that way about each other!” Not that I can’t ship non-canon things ever, but usually, there has to be some ambiguity; I can literally read Harry’s thoughts, so I know he isn’t attracted to Hermione/Luna/Draco/whomever, and it just feels weird to speculate otherwise because I don’t feel the need. The thing is, I can get really, really attached to specific ships and read a ridiculous amount of romantic stories about them, but it almost always happens by accident, probably because I don’t care at all about romantic stories in general; I care about individual characters, and once I’ve decided they’re in love, that means a lot to me. Something has to happen to get me to make that decision, though (usually). If a fanfic is well-written enough, I can enjoy a relationship I didn’t previously have feelings about, but (usually) I only ship it within the confines of the story because outside of it, the thing that made me ship it never happened. I’m (usually) not going to be any more interested in other stories about those characters together than I was before.
Harry/Hermione is actually probably one of those ships I would never read, though, because I feel there aren’t enough non-romantic, non-sexual, really intense friendships between male and female characters in media, and there’s plenty of heterosexual romance already, so it just seems… a lot less appealing to me than canon. I certainly don’t have a problem with other people shipping it, though.
…TL;DR, I’m really picky and only read Harry Potter fic if it’s gen or about characters outside the Trio. Unfortunately, it affects other fandoms, too; I haven’t even tried looking at Sherlock fic since S3 came out.
I never paid a lot of attention when reading the books to whether any of the relationships worked–beyond hating Cho Chang with a passion–so I was perfectly content with the relationships as Rowling presented them. When I put thought into the books, into what was to come, it was into Snape’s motivations (starting with that contest in Muse, thank you Muse, you started my theory writing), whether he was good or evil, and if he was indeed “good” (or on the side of the Order), why he did the things he did, right down to his having been in love with Lily (okay, so I guess I did speculate on one relationship come to think of it, because I totally pegged Snape’s feelings for Lily and his having ditched Voldy as a direct result of her death); into what the other Horcruxes were; into Harry being a Horcrux and what his fate was going to be as a result of that.
Now I can’t even here my soundtracks from the movies/think about the books/probably even reread the books, without my brain going and reminding me that Harry/ Ginny and Ron/Hermione is not “real” anymore, because Rowling wants them a different way. For instance, just yesterday, listening to my ipod plugged into my car on my 10 hour drive yesterday, which was playing all my songs (in alphabetical order), it went from AVPMs “Harry” with Ginny singing about her love for Harry, to “Harry & Hermione” from the soundtrack of HBP. Thanks. Rub it in, playlist.
Anyway. I’m annoyed. Because I want to know backhistory and behind the scenes, etc from the books, but I don’t want to know this. And I don’t quite know why. Because it doesn’t bother me when she tells me that she thought about/almost killed a character, but this does. Not because I was involved int he shipping wars, because I wasn’t. I didn’t even know those existed until it was over.
Why did you hate Cho? She’s far from my favorite character, but everything she did seemed pretty understandable under the circumstances…?
Goblet of Fire and OotP spoiler warning, if that is even necessary at this point….it’s been a decade. 13 yrs for GoF.
Because Cho was dating Cedric in GoF, and then Cedric got murdered at the end of the school year (May? June? Anyway, late spring). Cue OotP. Not hardly 3 months later and she’s all over Harry. Her boyfriend just died. Died. It’s not like htey just split up, he was bloody murdered, but she can’t get her hooks into Harry Potter fast enough after Cedric’s death. It never set right with me that Cedric was barely dead before she was all over Harry.
How long had they been dating? three months is a pretty long time in high school… plus rebounding is a fairly common impulse. What, do you expect her to be in mourning for the rest of her life?
I don’t recall exactly, but Christmas for sure, because Cedric asked Cho to the Yule Ball. So 5-6 months at least, probably?
And no, I don’t expect her to be in mourning for the rest of her life, it just always felt to me that no sooner was Cedric dead than Cho was all over Harry, and it just never set right with me because it felt like Cho didn’t care about Cedric at all, because she couldn’t move on to the next guy quick enough. *shrug* 3 months may be a “pretty long time in highschool”, but that’s the age I was when I read the 5th book. I was 13. So I wasn’t much younger than the characters.
She probably still loves and misses Cedric at the same time as liking and dating Harry. You can like two people at once, for different reasons, in different ways. And three months seems like plenty of time between relationships. That’s a semester of college, or a summer, for context.
It’s interesting that you blame Cho Chang for being so unsympathetic rather than J. K. Rowling for portraying her that way.
…And it didn’t work out between her and Harry because she missed Cedric so much. And she was confused and felt guilty because, as oxlin said, she liked Cedric and now she liked Cedric and she felt bad because of the stuff you mentioned. Although I don’t think anyone should ever feel bad about getting over a tragedy more quickly than they expected. I certainly don’t think you should hate somebody for that. Some people get over things more quickly than others, and that doesn’t mean they didn’t care or aren’t a good person. It means they move on quickly. That’s okay. And, like I said, she hadn’t really moved on; she just also wanted a relationship with Harry. I think it’s okay for her to want stuff and pursue what she wants.
To be honest, I… don’t really get what the problem is you have with her? I don’t understand what is wrong with getting into a relationship relatively soon after a previous significant other died. I’d like it if you could explain, because it doesn’t make sense to me. At all. And I really want to understand.
Biblio: I’m really not sure how to explain a feeling. Hate is probably a bit strong a word to have used, but I have always strongly disliked Cho. It always felt to me like she didn’t care about Cedric, like “Who cares Cedric’s dead, I can now have Harry Potter.”
Re: Conversation as a whole: Obviously I’m in the minority here and you guys have never had a problem with Cho. And that’s fine. I’m not trying to get you guys to see her the same way I have for 10 years.
Today we remember the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia, Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon, killed on re-entry eleven years ago on February 1, 2003.
I believe I would like to know more about that…
Wasn’t that the mission that they found little crack in the corner of one of the windows? At least I think that was what happened.
If you mean the mission where an orbiting fleck of paint hit a shuttle window and left a visible crater, no, that was a different mission back in the 80s. (To be precise, it was STS-7, Sally Ride’s first flight.)
The Columbia disaster was caused by a piece of insulating foam that fell off the large orange fuel tank that carried most if the shuttle’s fuel at launch. The foam hit the black bottom side of the shuttle, near the edge of one of the wings, where there were special tiles to protect the shuttle from the heat that comes with passing back through the atmosphere at high speed after being in space. The impact of the foam broke the tile, making it unable to do its job at the mission’s end, when the shuttle was returning from space.
Kai’s vast knowledge of space voyages just astounds me.
Me, too.
*blushes*
Did I tell you everything you wanted to know?
I think so. If I need more of your knowledge later on, I’ll be sure to let you know.
Ok.
My father was determined to be an astronaut when he was younger, and applied several times. Once, he came close to being chosen, but was eliminated because of his childhood asthma.
I’m told that if he’d made it, his name would be on this list.
It’s certainly possible, anyone active in the astronaut corps at the time had some chance of being onboard, and sometimes the flight assignments take unexpected twists, like Tim Kopra getting hurt in a bicycle accident and replaced by Steve Bowen just a few weeks before Discovery’s retirement flight.
I think I should give credit to XianJaguar on DeviantART. I found my current avatar on her page.
Going to check out the awesome space stuff tomorrow made me reminisce about how when I was little and we use to go to Oregon almost every other year to visit family, my sister would always insist on a visit to OMSI. So I was googling OMSI, and just found out on he Wikipedia page that they got rid of the super awesome incredible surround theatre–basically a giant bubble with the screen surrounding you in pretty much all sides but the floor, only to be replaced with a blah flat screen IMAX. Irony even. Why. Just why. That theatre is har I always envisioned as being an actual IMAX, and the reason that I’ve always been disappointed with any IMAX I’ve seen elsewhere that’s just an extra large screen. I just. Why. Why would they do that. I loved that theatre. And the way it would make my mom and sister motion sick. It was flamablamablous. And they got rid of it.
Awww… I had a similar disappointment with the Zeiss projector at UNC- Chapel Hill’s Morehead Planetarium. They used to use this giant bug-looking contraption that projected space and cool things into the dome, but the Zeiss was getting old and needed specially made parts, so now it’s all done electronically, and hurts my head.
We had a buglike mechanical projector at my High School planetarium that was replaced for the same reason. I do miss it, but they use the new digital dome (and the new marine biology lab) to hold community science nights, which they never did when I went there, so I try not to complain.
Well, I’ve had an eventful twenty-four hours.
After badly injuring my toe and getting a dramatic haircut yesterday, I was dropped off at a sleepover, and we watched Doctor Who and talked, and that was lots of fun. This morning, we painted two boxes to look like the TARDIS, watched a bit of a movie, then went out and tried to sell Girl Scout cookies to basically every house in my friend’s neighborhood. Once we were done with that, my parents came and picked us up, and I went with my friends to an opera, where we met two more of my friends. Then, finally, we dropped my friends off and came home. All in all, more than thirty hours in which I did absolutely nothing routine or ordinary.
My life should be like this more of the time. I’m gonna go out and make that happen.
Go for it!
I just finished watching Mr. Plinkett’s Star Wars reviews for the probably third time. If you want to check them out, they are very good insights into what exactly went wrong, but contain strong language and imagery. Be warned if you need to be.
Anyway, in the Episode III review, he mentions that the red lightsaber was a hallmark of Darth Vader’s character. He only had it because he was a fallen Jedi; it was unusual for Sith to use lightsabers. A similar thing with the Emperor’s lightning–he’s the only one to ever use it, so you’d have to assume he’s the only one who can because of his super evil powers. But then the prequels and to a lesser extent, the EU came along and changed everything.
It’s interesting to think about because I literally never thought about it that way. This was a direct result of my first real exposure to Star Wars was watching my neighbor playing Knights of the Old Republic. He was dark side, so he had the red lightsaber and lightning and everything. And all the dark side enemies in the game also had red lightsabers and lightning. So I assumed that both were “things dark side used.”
I really like the lightsaber as part of Darth Vader’s character. I’m sorry that I never got to experience it like that.
Now I need to watch Star Wars again. Only the first trilogy, of course. It’s easier to think of the prequels as a weird, non-canon side series.
Last night I couldn’t sleep, so from midnight to four in the morning I crept around the kitchen baking cookies.
I think there’s something not quite right with me.
You mean there’s something awesome about you.
You may want to go get yourself checked at St. Mungos. You seem to be showing signs of turning into a house-elf. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course; I’m quite good friends with many a house elf. It just seems that part of the transformation process is a bit… *shudder* clean.
Blarg, I have so much work to do today… right now I’m trying to do this lab report with two other people and we can’t really communicate at all. I’ve worked with one of them before in physics and she’s okay, but the other guy I can’t understand through his thick accent. I know it’s not fair to him, but that’s how it is. I don’t know what he’s saying.
Ugh, I’m sorry about the communication troubles. Is there a polite way to ask him to write things down?
Plus side of having not been able to watch the third episode of Sherlock in the last three weeks (and amazingly not having gotten spoilered), it’s airing on PBS tonight. And I can watch it in my hotel room on a screen four times the size of my computer. XD
Enjoy! Not giving anything away, but I thought this episode was amazing television. I am impressed you’ve managed to avoid all spoilers.
Having just finished watching the episode, I must say I’m quite impressed as well that I managed to avoid spoilers. Literally the only thing I knew about the episode was some guy named Magnussen was making out with some woman in the first 2 minutes (and that wasn’t even completely accurate, just the understanding I had from a text from my ex when he was watching the ep a couple weeks ago and thought I had seen the ep already).
I’m not sure exactly how I feel about the episode as a whole, but it definitely had some good moments.
My stupid printer won’t print.
Mine prints, but the ink is all blotchy (That’s a word?!), and illegible.
It’s like an aprintilypse going on around here. Nobody I know of has a printer that currently works properly.
One of the printers in the computer lab here does something very interesting–it prints backwards. You tell it to print a document and it performs perfectly, except that it gives you an exactly mirrored copy of what you told it to print: text backwards, formatting backwards, images backwards. Everything exactly how it should be, except backwards. I find it rather wonderful and I quite hope they never fix it.
Spoken like a man who doesn’t have to pay for printing T_T
I presume you read your printed readings from that machine with the aid of a mirror?
You could just turn them over and let light shine through them. (Or read them backward — something I’ve never had any trouble doing.)
Physics, maths, chemistry, applied maths.
Physics, maths, chemistry, computer science.
The first list is my dad’s first-year uni courses. The second is mine.
Halp.
The best way I found to escape the horrors of being formed in my parents’ likeness was to turn the tables and start forming them into my likeness. The food they eat, the places they visit, the books they read, both of them are slowly turning into little copies of myself. I was forced without my consent into childhood and I will have my revenge.
Wow, did the Broncos get creamed today. It’s a real same, because all the records they broke for the year don’t mean anything anymore.
I disagree completely. In the end the Super Bowl is just one game out of many that they’ve played. Heck, even today Manning broke another record, for most completions in a Super Bowl. This single game doesn’t define the career of him or of anyone else on the team–it’s just one moment in time for them and it doesn’t nullify everything they’ve accomplished this year.
Well, yes. The records are still broken, I agree to that. But still, all the hard work they went through to get to the big game was pretty much wasted.
So Space and Rocket Museum was fun. Got charged $7 less for admission that anticipated (because online it clearly states that a combo museum and movie ticket is $25, and if you do non combo, it’s $20 for admission, $8 for a movie). I got charged $18 for a combo ticket, $11 for museum admission, $8 for the movie, with a $1 “group discount” for some unfathomable reason, seeing as I was a group of one. :/ But I wasn’t about to argue saving $7 on admission, although I let them rip me off later by spending $30 on the commemorative photo (what can I say, I am apparently a sucker when I’ve been wandering around a museum without food or drink for 8 hours). I figured I saved $7 on admission and didn’t get ripped off at the cafeteria (because I didn’t have time for lunch/wasn’t that hungry despite not eating breakfast), so what the heck.
I also did the $12 bus tour of Marshall Space Flight Center. I was really disappointed that due to mist in the morning, and the threat of rain (which turned out to be not a threat, it started pouring while on the bus tour in the afternoon) that the Space Shot was closed for the day. I’ve ridden similar rides and love love loved it, so that was a huge letdown to see the sign saying it was closed today. It was even raining yet at that point, and I dont’ really see why it couldn’t run even if it had been, since there was no lightning, but whatever. And the G Force was just a gravitron with seatbelts (seatbelts. Seriously. I wonder if gravitrons now come with seatbelts, too. They’re really not necessary……I mean, where are you going to go when you’re pinned to the wall more thoroughly by the G force than any seatbelt could ever do). Although I think it had a bit more centripetal force than your average run of hte mill state fair gravitron. That, or I’m more of a wuss than I was the last time I was on a gravitron, because the pressure on this one, I actually felt like it was really difficult to breath, because it felt like someone really heavy was sitting on my chest and compressing my lungs, and I was actually starting to think if the ride didn’t end soon I might not be able to breathe because my chest couldnt’ expand, and my eyeballs also felt unusually squooshed, and I don’t remember a gravitron ever having that efffect on me. But it’s been about 6 years since I’ve been on one, too, so who knows.
The current temporary exhibit was a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit, which was cool. Across from it was an army exhibit, between the Mars Rock wall and Mars simulator, which was meh. I’m not terribly interested in all the various missiles we’ve developed that we can kill each other with. :/
Saturn V is huge.
I wore my Doctor Who exploding TARDIS t shirt and Star Trek necklace. Got asked by one of the other two people on the bus tour if I was a “Doctor Who fan?”. And the bus driver asked “Is that a Trekkie necklace?” and then interrupted the tour guide to say how one of the ubildings we’d driven past they were devleoping engines or something and using words like “ion [something or other]” that are straight out of Star Trek/Star Wars. And then another person told me she liked my shirt.
I liked the scale that said how much you way on EArth/Mars/Moon, because it weighs really light, even on the Earth line. Because there is no way I’ve lost 13 pounds in the last 3 weeks, if anything I”m sure i’ve gained a few while in FL with the diet of out to eat that I was on a lot of the time, so when it weighed me lighter than I’ve been in probably a year, that made me happy, lol.
I’m glad you had such a great time at the Space and Rocket Center! What movie did you see?
I think the best “ride” at the USSRC is the 1/6 gravity chair, but I don’t know if that’s accessible to non-Space Camp visitors.
Yeah, I wasn’t that interested in the army stuff either. When they gave us free time in the museum, I just looked at other stuff. What was the Da Vinci exhibit like?
The Saturn V is amazing.
I’m glad people recognized your accessories! As you may know, back in the day, the overlap between Star Trek and NASA fans was very famous (the test shuttle vehicle was named “Enterprise” because fans wrote in and asked that that be the case), so I’m sure they appreciate seeing signs that the tradition is alive and well. They probably were talking about ion propulsion, the system the Dawn probe is using to head to the asteroid Ceres at the moment. It’s a system that uses ionized gas to provide gentle but consistent thrust to a spacecraft, meaning that while a voyage may start out slow and take more time, speed builds up over time (because the thrust is always being applied), and eventually the craft is moving at a speed equal or greater to a conventional rocket with less fuel expended.
I think ion propulsion is used in Star Trek, but I’m not sure where. I do know that the TIE fighters from Star Wars are named for their Twin Ion Engines, although they move faster than any ion engine we’ve currently developed (see above), but then, we’re talking about a civilization where interstellar flight has existed for at least 25,000 years, so Star Wars technology isn’t really comparable to our own.
Those scales are the best, although it seems you may have found a way to lose weight even without leaving the planet!
I saw “Hidden Universes”, it was the only one that didn’t conflict with the bus tour (Hubble started at 1pm along with the bus tour, and Magnificent Desolation at 3, when the bus tour ended, so I wouldn’t have had time to get back to it before it started)
The Da Vinci stuff was pretty cool. They had replicas of a lot of his mechanical inventions–armored car, pulleys, things with wooden ball bearings, 8 sided mirror chamber, glider replicas, a cannon, catapult, wooden collapsible bridge replicas, and a section with replicas of the Mona Lisa–what she looks like now, and what she probably looked like when he painted her, color wise
Ion propulsion. Yes, I think that was what it was. That’s fascinating. I am always amazed by the stuff people come up with and invent. And I did know about the naming of the Enterprise, although I had forgotten until I walked up the stairs from the Da Vinci exhibit, and the first thing I saw was–off to my left, and barely in my direct line of site from the stairs–a small little model of the NCC-1701 Enterprise from Star Trek, which had a note below it about how it was named because sTar Trek fans staged a right in. Which was reiterated later by the bus tour guide when he was talking about one of the test stands on the tour.
Yeah. Sadly the scale is not accurate for my Earth weight (or else my bathroom scale is not), but it’s still pretty awesome.
Oh, good, I haven’t seen that one yet.
I’d love to see the da Vinci stuff.
At the National Air and Space Museum, they have the original Enterprise filming model in the gift shop. (Part of their “Social and Cultural Space Collection”, along with several models of astronaut Barbies, an R2-D2 mailbox, old-school sparking tin toy ray guns, a vintage astronaut lunchbox and thermos, the filming model of the Close Encounters of the Third Kind spaceship, and 4500 other objects, which is a curatorship I would live to have.)
Ooooh, I would love to go visit the Smithsonian museums again. I was less than 10 when we went to DC, and about all I remember is Dad wanting to look at all the rocks (and probably the air and space stuff, as well, but I don’t remember that) because he use to be a geologist, and his dad was a geologist as well, so he loves rocks. And planes, too. He actually had a small plane when we were kids.
Unfortunately the da Vinci stuff is only there through March…2nd? I believe.
The Rocks and Minerals halls at the National Museum of Natural History are awesome, everybody goes in to see the Hope Diamond and then leaves and complains that it’s tiny, but there’s so much else to see that’s so cool. Just in the same room as the Hope Diamond, there’s a giant sheet of copper that 3 million pennies could be made from, and this amazing wind-sculpted sandstone thing that looks like a sculpture but is totally natural. And they do have huge gemstones that are as big as people expect the Hope to be and even bigger. And the meteorite room is awesome.
Pooh, I miss DC.
I LOVED THAT ROOM
I LOOKED AT EVERY SINGLE GEMSTONE AND ROCK
my parents were p tired by the end of that aha. my sibling and I always read like. every sign/info plaque all the way through. Museum outings were all-day events in my family.
And they have rocks you can pet!
Rocks that purr?
In their way.
I suppose that on a geologic time scale, purring could be hard to detect. The interval between vibrations might be longer than a human life.
(Posting that comment made me think with a smile of Jade the rock fairy, one of my favorite characters in that fractured fairy tale we wrote together all those years ago.)
“This is an emergency, I’m a projectile!”
Wasn’t she fun? I enjoyed writing her dialogue.
I love petting meteorites.
Passed my UEoD&D (ultimate exam of doom and despair)! And the prof made me an offer: I can hand in some work for extra credit to raise two of my grades. So I’m back on track academically and have survived a semester with nearly twice as many credits as suggested. Best part: tomorrow is the first time since september that I can sleep in without feeling guilty about not studying!
Hurrah, good for you!
Congrats!
I wonder if the fact that I can count the fandoms I’m currently active in on the fingers of one hand means that I’m becoming boring…
I wouldn’t say so– multiple fandoms can be hard to keep up with (well, they are for me); I always think it’s more fun to be into a couple of things at a time and be really into them.
What ZNZ said. If you still like the subject, you’re still a fan, how much and how you want to show it just changes from time to time.
In middle school, I had a huge polar exploration phase and read everything I could find on the subject, and then from 8th grade until I went to see Race to the End of the Earth at the Museum of Natural History at the start of senior year, I kind of drifted into being into other things. It didn’t mean that I didn’t love polar exploration anymore, I was just doing other things, like watching COSMOS. But once I went to the exhibit, I remembered how much I’d loved this stuff, and I bought a shirt and a book on Scott and Shackleton that I read pretty quick and I’ve read a lot of other books since and done some art and writing about the subject. (And I hope there’ll be some tasty new books for the hundredth anniversary of the Endurance expedition this year…)
I had a similar drifting away with Everest, but now I’ve read “Into the Silence” and I’m reading “The Conquest of Everest”, and I want to check out all of the other books about it at the bookstore when I’m done, because I remember how cool this stuff is. I always have loved Jurassic Park, but I never thought to search for things about it on the External Blogging Site until the 20th anniversary re-release.
So at the moment, I’m active in the polar exploration and Jurassic Park fandoms (there’s not really a Mount Everest fandom for non-climbers, at least not that I know of, but I still do post about it), but if I’m not by this time next year, that’s okay, I’ll still have my books and fanworks sitting on the shelf, waiting for another re-emergence whenever it comes.
Personally I think too many fandoms take up too much time.
What fandoms are you a part of, exactly?
Well, unfortunately for me, I can’t
So…. What does that mean about me?
Three years ago, I saw Eric Boe go up on Space Shuttle Discovery’s last flight, and today I met him in person and heard him talk at BU!
Second snowday in a row tomorrow for my campus. Tomorrow is also my first day back at school since November. And is also the first day of my emergency critical care rotation–which, of course, means that I have to report in even though campus cancelled classes. So all of my college town, excpet a handful of people, will be enjoying snow day part 2, and I’ll be spending a 12 hour shift cooped up in a windowless building taking care of emergencies/critical patients. Which I don’t mind having to go in, I’ve been off for almost 3 months, but I’ve got the feeling it’s going to be *really* slow, which is good for the animals, but I don’t do well with long shifts if they’re not busy, so I”m probably going to be going stir crazy.
Creepy or just overly friendly:
Apparently while I was gone, according to my flat mate, a “new neighbor” at our apartment complex came by to introduce himself. Came by and was all hey I’m [so and so] blah blah blah. Came by a second time and asked her if she had a car, he was going to the store, did she need anything? Came by a third time and left his number for us if we ever need anything…..
Creepy, overly friendly, or crushing on my roommate (which she finds weird because “he’s like really young. a lot younger than me, and I think I even look like I”m a lot older–she’s 27, she doesn’t look so old i couldn’t believe a freshman hitting on her).
I’m now singing with the choir for fun, because I totally needed another thing to take up 2 hours of my Tuesday evenings, plus performances. Right? Right.
In other news, I wore a white dress all day, ate multiple meals (two involving tomato-based sauces), drank tea and coffee, worked in the archaeology lab and managed to get NOT A SINGLE STAIN on it. I am SO proud of myself. Also it fits really well and I got it for free, and I think my outfit today was super cute even though I’m feeling kind of meh.
My stupid video won’t upload.
I got back in touch with two girls former friends who changed schools. We’re the same age and going to uni this year so we’re mostly talking about that. T still lives in the area and I messaged her because she wasn’t replying to M and M asked me to say hi myself. I messaged N for the first time in months because… she equivalent-of-pied a picture I posted on the infamous social media site, then I went to her profile and people were congratulating her on her weird-Queensland-ATAR-equivalent, which was in the top band. Probably a low percentile than mine, but way above anyone I’m friends with. (She also went to a highly-ranked school (and nondenominational Christian, so probably expensive) and settled in, so I’m glad I didn’t become jealous of her too.) Anyway, that feels like such a shallow reason, although it’s probably because I’ve always been lonely as The Smart One (not that I’d ever make myself average for anything a mere mortal could offer!)… *goes to TVTropes to search Token Minority* Oops.
I had my first appointment with a psychologist yesterday. The irony of my taking this long to see a professional about my anxiety is not lost.
Hugo Weaving is in the Cloud Atlas movie. Hugoweavingisincloudatlashugoweavingisincloudatlashugoweavingisincloudatlaseeeeeeeeeee.
</ end ramble
I swear I did mature things like cook dinner and tidy my room today! Really!
Snow day!
Me too! Since I have 8am class today, this is the best day of the week for a snow day!
Question: can you give yourself a snow day if your work doesn’t require you to leave the condo?
Answer: yes.
Have been awake half an hour. So far, have banged my funny bone and spilled hot coffee on myself.
Maybe I should just go back to bed.
Ugh, my sympathies.
How relevant a reference is “And that mustache dude, super-shifty, dude looked like Aldrich Ames.” in a conversation taking place in 2004?
I don’t know. I didn’t know who that was until I googled him.
Ames was briefly notorious after his arrest in 1994 (his picture was on TV and on the covers of all the news magazines), but I think that by 10 years later most people had forgotten what he looked like and even exactly what he did.
Have signed up for emails/alerts from Robert’s employers. This will keep me up with what the AAAS is up to! Anywhere else I should sign up for email alerts from/look into?
Two kittens were on a roof. Which one fell off first? The one with the lowest mew!
What is your favorite nerdy joke?
Writing “if this looks blue, you’re going too fast” in red marker.
My fellow Latin nerds, is the following grammatically correct?
“Cogito ergo lego.”
If it is not grammatically correct, how can I write it so that it is?
I don’t see any problems. Just to be sure–what are you meaning to say?
“I think, therefore I read.”
Yep. Spot on.
Thank you. I’m glad my grammar hasn’t gone as far downhill as I was worried it might have!
So in addition to all the star trek posters i got at christmas and don’t know where to put them (my walls are covered), my ex just stopped by with a Sherlock poster he saw at the poster fair on campus “because he saw it and thought I’d like it”. So now i have an awesome Sherlock poster to find a home for.
I heard that Leonard Nemoy was having trouble with his health. Mostly because he smoked when he was younger.
Nooooooo.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Which yes, probably is due in large part to him having been a smoker, although genetics can also play a role.
I heard that earlier today, as well (oddly enough, on the sidebar on facebook, where it has started taking to displaying “trending topics” which scarily have had two relevant trending topics so far and I think facebook is stalking me again. Because Cumberbatch on Sesame Street and Leonard Nimoy are definitely topics that pertain to my interests…..).
So, I have a job. Which is awesome! The problem is, I’m supposed to be making an Android app, but it’s very hard to do so when I can’t get the cellphone emulator to work. Blargh.
I’m in class now, so can only talk in bits and pieces between taking notes, but:
-If your job is to make an Android app your company should pay for at least one Android device to test on. I understand that this isn’t an ideal world and not all companies will do that. But it’s a million times faster to test an app on a real device, and it’s something you really should do if you’re an Android developer, and so I think it’s worth asking about.
– I know this sounds basic, and a little like I’m not taking you seriously. I’m sorry about that! But — have you tried closing anything else nonessential that might take up RAM, and opening the emulator, and waiting for at least five to ten minutes? It’s… pretty slow…..
-Are you using Eclipse as your IDE? I use Eclipse and might be able to help if you have specific problems. But I’ve heard that Android Studio, for example, is better.
-I heard from someone at my hackerspace the other day that the Android emulator was now available optimized for Intel architectures, instead of directly emulating the ARM architecture of a phone. Meaning that if you have an Intel-based computer (most computers, these days) the Intel-optimized emulator will run much faster than the default one. I don’t know where to find this, but I assume it’s searchable, and maybe knowing that it exists will help you along your path.
Well, they gave me a Galaxy Tab 2 yesterday, so that solves my problem! And I am using Eclipse, which is wonderful, because it does so many things for you. So I have put together an app with lots of empty pages, and all I have to do now is fill those pages with content!
Sounds fun! Good luck with your job!
Yesterday I gave a presentation in class and my teacher kept me after and said nice things to me for like, ten minutes. That was really nice and I still feel all glowy.
(also, I’m here. Hi!)
Posting from History of Math. We’re talking about Platonic solids. Every time someone says the word “dodecahedron” I get so uncomfortable.
Fortunately, it’s not a word you tend to hear very much out on the street.
Same thing happened with me in tenth grade chemistry all the time! Luckily I haven’t had to take any chemistry since.
Watching certain episodes of COSMOS must be awkward, then. (It feels so weird to think that we’ll have to say “Cosmos 1980” and “Cosmos 2014” to distinguish them starting next month. But for now everybody know I mean 1980.)
And reading The Phantom Tollbooth! (and in that Dodecahedron is the name of an actual character.)
I played the Dodecahedron in my 8th grade school play. It’s how I got this name, actually.
OH that makes sense. That’s awesome!
Ugh. So I slept terribly last “night”. Which is really frustrating, because yesterday I slept fantastic, most solid 8 hours of sleep I’d gotten, from 10:30am to about 6:15 in the evening. And yeah I took a nap around midnight last night, but at 8am this morning when I tried to go to sleep, I felt tired. But I didn’t sleep good at all. I was waking up every 1 to 2 hours, and not sound asleep at all. *sigh* Hopefully I sleep better tomorrow, because I’d really like to be awake and functioning Saturday night when I’m in the ICU for 12 hours working.
I hope you get some good rest.
Watching the Parade of Nations on the opening ceremonies. The ornate headpieces worn by the women carrying the signs with the names of the countries remind me of the Gallifreyan helmet things the Time Lords wore…..
I’ve sort of promised these three Youtubers that I would write them a fan fiction, but I’m stuck at one part… the first sentence…. And I feel very very upset, because they are like… the three that really got me started into making my own LPs (I can’t believe that I gave them credit for my junk) and I really don’t want to keep them waiting long….
I almost always have scenes from the story going through my head, but… the part where I have to get the scenes developed into words, that is kinda my barrier at the current moment….
As of last weekend I am done with all of my college applications!
…now to wait…
Congrats! Where are you applying, if you’re not sick of that question?
Ten schools. Ugh. My top choice is Brown but that’s kind of a major stretch. I’m hopeful but not terribly optimistic?
Good luck! I hoped for Yale or Wesleyan and didn’t get in, but BU has been very good.
You’ll be challenged and happy wherever you go! Good luck!
BROWN IS SO GREAT IF YOU GET IN WE CAN HANG OUT AT ADOCH AND IT WILL BE SO GREAT
!!!
So I learned Harold Edgerton (awesome MIT photography inventor guy) is buried in the cemetery on Mount Auburn Street near where I was a few weeks ago. When it’s warmer, I’d like to go leave flowers and photograph the cool Egyptian-Revival-style entrance to the cemetery and then go for one of those great wraps with the garlic sauce at the Armenian/Lebanese market nearby. Kokon?
I am envious of my dad’s skill on a guitar, but I’m scared of asking him to teach me, because I’m scared to play. I’m not sure why…
Robert’s advice: Overcome your fear, and learn as much as you can.
Don’t be afraid, it’s great to know how to play an instrument. (I wish I’d learned when I was younger, although there’s no reason I can’t learn now.)
It’s never too late!
(I recently started learning the organ and it’s a lot of fun.)
*organist high-five*
*high five*
I don’t know which instrument I should try to learn, though. I guess a guitar looks pretty simple, there’s only *looks up* six strings to keep track of, flutes look too complicated for me with all of those keys…
I was in the same situation as you, and my friend who plays violin suggested I try piano first. All of the notes are arranged in a line, which is helpful for learning how to read music. A little over into a semester into piano lessons, and it seems like that was good advice. It kind of depends on having access to an instrument, though (my school’s music building has several pianos in practice rooms that are open to all students, which is wonderful). My friend’s other suggestion was guitar.
Piano, guitar, or a wind instrument are going to be easier to learn than one of the violin family. I think the important thing though is probably to make sure that whatever instrument you pick speaks to you, that you like its sound, because if it doesn’t you’re not going to want to practice.
I’m curious about why you say wind instruments would be easier for a beginner to learn than bowed instruments. I mean, from what I’ve heard, it’s difficult to even pull a sound out of most wind instruments, whereas on a violin it’s not that hard to get some sound on your first try, even if it’s awful.
Maybe I’m misremembering/underestimating some aspect. Or were you thinking of some particular wind instruments? I’d definitely agree that recorders and so forth would be easier.
Excepting the double reeds, probably, it’s much easier to get a basic facility on a wind instrument – they’re easier to hold, a lot of aspects are more intuitive, they’re easier to get a decent sound. If you start someone on clarinet and someone on violin, the clarinetist will be way ahead at the end of a year. After five years might be a different story.
Huh. I never would have guessed.
I don’t know what the reasoning for this is, but I’ve heard that the clarinet is quite an easy instrument to pick up.
this year’s official Olympic crush: Yuzuru Hanyu.
He’s just so cool sigh
So I went back to the School of Education library and read the rest of “The Mad Scientists’ Club”, and I don’t think you could write a book today about a bunch of kids trapping the mayor and police chief of their town between floors in a dumbwaiter for a whole night as part of a prank without there being some kind of outcry about encouraging disrespect for authority.
Deep in the wilds of the internet, there is a forum I frequent. It has enough members that there are regular meetups in major and minor cities throughout the US, Europe, and a few other places. I lurked for the better part of three years before commenting — that’s less creepy than it sounds in context, I promise! — and planned to organise one in my city that hopefully wouldn’t suck. I’d never heard of an active user in my city, and most people are open about that kind of thing, but I figured a few people would turn up even if they were 30-year-olds or something.
Someone else beat me to it. Specifically, a pair of students, one of them an established user, at my university. It’s this coming week, O Week, at one of the relevant nerdy clubs’ events. My age, similar subjects…
I can’t remember the last time I was that pleased to be wrong.
(Well, technically I’d rather have been powerful enough to assign a higher probability to established-user living in my city from the rather incriminating thing he said on a post I read once (also not creepy in context, really!), but “I can’t remember the last time I was that pleased to receive a piece of new information that also happened to prove me wrong” doesn’t sound as good.)
And as seen by my gravatar when it appears, I accidentally a new fandom.
I follow two Homestuck liveblogs (that is, people reading Homestuck and writing about their reactions).
And I keep forgetting that they’re both younger than me. One’s in high school and the other is in middle school (???). I guess I expect everyone to be older than me because it used to be true, and now it definitely isn’t.
AND OH JEEZ I’M TWENTY I FORGOT THAT WHAT THE FRIGGIN’ AAARRGH I THOUGHT I WAS STILL NINETEEN NINETEEN WAS OKAY TO BE BUT TWENTY IS NOT OKAY
It’s 4:30 I should probably go to sleep now I can’t spell anything correctly.
Yep, I was in a chat with some of my friend’s gaming group and they mentioned that two of them were freshmen… I assumed they meant freshmen in college, but it turns out they meant high school… they were younger than me (only by a year, but still)
Also, yes, I get this sick thrill out of vicariously rediscovering Homestuck through other people’s experiences. It’s glorious.
I’m used to people confusing archaeology and paleontology, but I just heard someone say “paleontology” when they meant “(forensic) pathology”. (I helped them sort it out. One must support one’s sister fields.)
Ah… Staying awake when you’re not supposed to. Carefully sneaking your DS out from under your pillow, making double sure that the earbuds are plugged in, so as not to wake your dad who is sleeping just across the room with the epical game music. Trying as hard as you can to muffle the ‘click’ sound the DS makes when it opens. And then have gaming dreams the rest of the night.
Just finished laying out this month’s issue of our school newspaper. My headline for an editorial about Sochi is “Not Putin’ Up With Russian Homophobia.”
I’m very proud.
That surname does lend itself to puns– Metro Boston had a letter to the editor published under the title “Putin on a bad show”.
I’m really excited for when you’re a famous journalist.
Want a taste of Wisconsin weather? It is -21 degrees right now! Not joking!
No thanks!
My trig professor always pauses in his lectures to talk about things that, while math related, might not be 100% on topic. Today we were discussing radians, and his most memorable conversational tangent was about how he wished he could teach using tau instead of pi. His lectures are always more conversations than anything else, so it turned into a huge (albeit short-lived) class discussion about tau and why radians work the way they do, etc. He actually managed to make it as interesting as one of ViHart’s videos.
Are all mathematics professors this awesome?
No, but I’m glad that yours is.
Sounds like a wonderful professor! I’m envious.
He sounds like my Coastal Ecology teacher.
My math professor is trying to make hats a trend. He wears a hat to class everyday and counts how many of us are joining in.
He also frequently starts sentences with, “So a [such and such descriptor] matrix walks into a room and says…”
Besides those quirks, he’s also really good about running with the good questions people ask, even if it’s not what he meant to teach that day, because we inevitably understand something better and think it’s really cool. I like him a lot.
Do any of you know Voltaire? (The singer.) Particularly his song “When You’re Evil”? It is good.
Voltaire is an amazing human being yes. Also I need to meet his accompanist and learn how they violin so menacingly.
Yes! I looked him up to begin with because of stuff Randomosity’s said here, actually. He’s awesome, and I love “When You’re Evil.”
I asked this on the last thread but wasn’t able to get an answer– I know we had a discussion of George Mallory’s disappearance on Everest a few years back, but I can’t find the thread it was on– when was that?
Was this the one you were thinking of? https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=8160#comment-392207 (The conversation actually starts with a comment you made up thread but it was sidetracked by a long discussion of Google.)
Beat me to it.
Ah, NOVEMBER 2010! I knew it was in 2010 or 2011, but for some reason I thought it had been in the spring. Thank you!
Funny that we got through that whole discussion without mentioning the topic had been covered in Muse in January 2002.
Just finished Polly Shulman / Pollyhymnia’s latest book The Wells Bequest! It was very good. I really like the two books in this series (What can I say, I’m a museum nerd.) The first book is The Grimm Legacy if any Musers wish to check it out.
Getting back on day shift schedule rhis wednesday after having gotten myself onto a nightshift schedule last Thursday is really going to suck. I literally have 24 hours between when I get off my shift at 8am today and when I have to *start* a shift 8 am Wednesday. I think I’m gonna just try to stay up as close to 10pm tonight as possible. *sigh*. Could I just stay on nights? Because its great. I can go out and buy dinner food first thing, instead of fast food only having breakfast food. Which is yucky. Anyway. Yay nightshift. Boo day shift
R.I.P Shirley Temple.
It has occurred to me that some here may appreciate/be interested in/be appalled by a formal announcement that, as of this past Saturday, I’m not a kid. I’m a shark. Or possibly a mythical creature known as “an adult”. Which one is yet hazy.
If you’ve become a shark, you should start losing and regrowing teeth again, at a pretty rapid rate.
{Gingerly prods teeth.}
I really really ought to already know this, but– what happened to the Rants and ‘Plaints thread? I didn’t find anything when I searched, so: is that not a thing anymore, and if it is a thing how can I find it? It’s been a Day, and I really need that thread. (This is exciting; I feel like I’m a neophyte all over again!)
Are you logged in? It is only visible if you’re logged in and it should be on the front page then.
Oh, no I’m not, I haven’t got an account! I should probably get on that. Thanks!
Recently, R&P and R&R have been hidden from the general public so that, in the event that we make MuseBlog searchable again in order to possibly attract new posters, people’s private things aren’t out there for everybody. If you look up the “What’s Next?” thread you can find all our thoughts about this.
Welcome back, by the way!
My ex-mother thinks Disturbed is satanic
So I dreamed last night I saw serving ice cream at the Explorers’ Club, that was a pretty fun dream.
I dreamed I was the singer for Megadeth. I even had Dave’s voice. But I was me, because I still felt so feminine.
o_O
I met someone with a digeridoo today!
When you have a book character that has two names, which name do you refer to him as?
Why do they have two names? Are they interchangable? If not, how are different names appropriate do different situations? Which name would the characters present be most likely to refer to him as? Which would be least confusing to the reader?
Oops, maybe I didn’t explain this well enough.
When the character is young, his name is Adrian. But, when he grows up, he changes it to Adin. I’m just wondering which name I refer to him as when I’m talking to someone else about him.
What name is he called by for most of the book?
Well, it’s kinda neutral. Even after he changes his name there is still someone who calls him by his original name.
I’d call him whatever he calls himself at whatever time the story is describing.
So I’ve been thinking about interrailing around Europe for two weeks this summer with my best friend (who moved to New York from Hong Kong). It’s sort of a stereotypical pre-uni rite of passage/gap year tradition, but I think it is a fantastic way of seeing many amazing places that I have yet to discover, and I know it would be so much fun to do it with her – I haven’t seen her for about a year.
The problem is, her parents don’t really want her to go to Europe (although she and I will both be 18 by then…) – and then the other thing is she feels a bit bad about pressuring them to let her go because she won’t be paying for it herself. It’s a legitimate concern, although they’re not at all poor and interrailing is quite cheap as holidays go. And it’s possible I may end up going to see her in the States for those two weeks instead.. But travelling around Europe by ourselves would be so much fun, I just know it. But I don’t know if there is a way to persuade her/her parents to come around to the idea…
Maybe they would feel better if you guys came up with a specific and detailed plan for where you’d go, how long you’d stay in each place, what you would do for food and transportation each day, how much of a budget you would need, what you would get out of the experience, and so on. In my experience, parents are impressed by planning and how it shows maturity and thought put into what you want to do.
Another possibility is for her to offer to pay at least some of the way by herself, if that can be done. Again, that shows her parents that she’s serious and willing to invest herself in the trip.
Curses to snowstorms and sci tests that aren’t cancelled because the university doesn’t close for ANYTHING – though they shut down their own campus shuttle service because it was dangerous to drive *gripe gripe*
The reason this is really bothering me this time around (vs the other four times we’ve had snow this month) is that I really needed to get home this weekend for my best friend’s bridal shower.
The good news is that I am currently on a train home. The bad news is that is cost an arm and a few fingers for the train ticket, when I had already paid $ to move my bus ticket from today to Friday, in the hope that the buses would run, but the news that the buses would be running Fri came far to late. So I have spent an awful lot on travel for this one weekend. Argh.
A work study paycheck from the school library would be really nice right now…
In Method and Theory class today, I compared the attitude of continuing archaeological inquiry with the knowledge that some details can never be known to not being sure which of two rooms something is in but knowing it is in one of them being better than not knowing where it is at all. Everybody said it was really deep and that they were sure it was a reference to some famous philosophy concept, but that they weren’t sure which one.
“What’s that a reference to?”
“It’s a reference to how I lost my hat two weeks ago somewhere in this building and I still haven’t found it.”
So I had bought some astronaut ice cream while I was at Huntsville. Finally got around to trying it today (although I’m pretty sure I’d tried it before as a little kid). And…….I think I would starve as an astronaut. At first I couldn’t decide if it was good or disgusting, but…..definitely decided it was pretty yuck by the time I finished. And looking at all the dried food packets and stuff while I was at Huntsville…..I wouldn’t survive as an astronaut. I’m too picky an eater, and have too sensitive a gag reflex when it comes to certain consistencies, etc.
Unrelated: FOX is airing all the episodes of “Almost Human” (that show I really love with Karl Urban) all out of order. It’s like Firefly all over again, except that Almost Human has episodes that are just stand alone enough that it’s not gratingly obvious. But it is messing with the character development. And I’m afraid they’re not going to renew the show.
Fortunately, real astronauts don’t eat that ice cream anymore (unless they want to and ask for it, I guess.) Did you try the freeze-dried apple cinnamon slices? Now those are tasty.
A lot of space food today is similar to Earth food, but a little more difficult to prepare and eat because of the packaging and the requirements of microgravity. “The Astronaut’s Cookbook” is a great book about it.
It’s a good thing NASA doesn’t make them eat it:
(Actually, I kind of like astronaut ice cream once a decade or so.)
This should be enshrined in the SSSS Hall of Fame.
Hello, MuseBlog! How are y’all? *tips hat*
Finally posting after agreeing to do so a month ago… terribly sorry about that.
So college applications/portfolios/financial aid/interviews are done, as are finals. I applied to nine colleges, six of which are in California; two of those are not-so-safe safety schools, which worries me… maybe I should’ve applied to more than four UCs?… On a somewhat-related note, I’m a National Merit Finalist, though I still haven’t quite figured out what exactly that means.
I’m still busy with my artbook project, as well as being an artist/writer for an e-zine, but I’ll try to check in more often!
Also happy Valentine’s/Single Awareness Day! Swalot surprised me with some paper cranes yesterday, he’s as cute as ever~
Love you all <3
Congratulations! Those are some very big life steps, way to go. If I remember correctly, being a NMF means you don’t have to do anything additional (the SAT stuff and essay was for Semifinalist, correct?), they might give you money, and you get to put a cool-sounding thing on your resume! Very spiffy.
Hey I’m a finalist too! Congratulations
Happy Valintines day. Time for everyone to confess their crushes!
((I’ve long had a secret crush on MuseBlog. Shhh! Don’t tell anyone!))
((What she said.))
I’m an aromantic asexual, which means I don’t experience sexual or romantic attraction at all, so I have nothing to confess.
And you?
Not sure I have any actual crushes right now, but as usual, I am really grateful for the existence of several people, including: my Allosaur, the really cute people in my history class, and all of you. ♥
Catwings, anything to confess?
Spock. Very definitely Spock. And maybe a tiny bit on Chris Pine. But nobody actually in my life, lol. I don’t have time for that
I don’t have any crushes, and personally I’m trying to make Valentine’s over into a GOSH-I-LIKE-PEOPLE day. In which spirit: I’m grateful for my MB friends, my not-MB internet friends, my rl friends, my math teacher and my religion teacher, the woman who used to be my counselor and now stays home with the cutest baby in the literal world, my parents, and my brother. <3!
And I’m grateful for you, and everybody else on MB!
I’m glad you have a good religion teacher now. I remember you saying here that the one you had at that time was awful.
I’m grateful for you as well! And all of you. And my parents, my brother, my other Internet friends, my RL friends, my kinesiology teacher, my parents, my brother, my former geography teacher, and people who make awesome art.
Oh yes, the awful religion teacher is well and truly gone. (He went to go look for Noah’s ark, the finding of which would prove Christianity and probably also young-earth creationism. YEAH. I don’t think he’s found it; also, in retrospect I’m not sure why Noah’s ark would prove Christianity rather than Judaism, but. Watch out, atheists.) My new one is a treat, and even more of a treat by contrast with what I used to have.
Given that nobody else has been successful even after all of the searches there have been, I wouldn’t hold my breath… It would be interesting if the expedition he was part of interpreted the “mountains OF Ararat” correctly as meaning just someplace in the Turkey-Armenia region and looked on some mountains other than Mount Ararat itself, though.
I mean I rather assume that with all the other wood being so waterlogged they’d have probably taken apart the ark apart and made things out of it. (And, anyway, even the young earthers admit that wood rots, don’t they?)
Oh, I agree with you, it just bugs me that all of the attention focused on Mt. Ararat itself is because of that mistranslation.
you’d think that much concentrated animal manure would leave an impact, though
Actual little crush that I keep not getting around to an R&R post on, on a senior (sighs) in band. Also still weird breakup feelings a little.
Um, I might regret saying this, but I have actually kinda grown a crush on my own book character.
Well, today has been… Underwhelmingly good, and overwhelmingly bad. If that makes sense.
-A
Roses acquired: Nine.
I am !!!!!!! thrilled about this, to be clear they’re all from friends except the ones from my dad but I feel immensely warm and fuzzy. And question for everyone: Is it acceptable to bake for someone in thanks for a friendship rose? I feel like it probably is but there may be nuances I’m unaware of; I just really want to do something nice, and baking is the only thing I can really do.
I don’t see why baking something would be a problem. I mean, if y’all are comfortable enough with each other a friends for flowers not to have any sort of weird nuances, I don’t see why baking in return would carry any!
But I dunno if I’m the right one to weigh in on this, given when my ex told me he had a present for me a week ago (turned out to be a Sherlock poster) I was reading all sorts if things into it and agonizing over whether I’d been going off mixed signals and he whether he was trying to get back with me romantically. I’m still trying to navigate platonic relationships. :/
That is adorable and I am very glad, though of course unsurprised, that you got roses.
Baking is acceptable in all situations and it is absolutely acceptable here!
Ah, Friday, another week survived!
Today, I was waiting for an audition for a play, and this girl I’d been wanting to get to know better because she seems interesting, and she’s really nice, and I get the impression she likes me a lot, was also waiting, and it turns out she really loves Harry Potter, but she hasn’t read the last 3 books yet, and I told her she could borrow my copies, and she seemed really happy about that, but when I went home, I realized that my copy of the fifth book… doesn’t have a cover.
My mom says this shouldn’t be a problem? I just… don’t lend people books very often that are that badly off. It was my brother’s before it was mine, and we’ve both just read it so many times–it’s my favorite Harry Potter book, because it introduces Umbridge and Luna, and we get to see Bellatrix for the first time. Although I guess that gives me something to talk to her about! And she likes Star Trek, too, apparently, so yay.
I mean, last night I was crying primarily because I keep messing up social interactions and not making friends, but… this is someone who really seems to like me and actually has stuff in common with me, and she’s in my grade. So that’s a good sign, I think.
I… may have thought more about her today than the play I auditioned for, actually.
…I checked my email since writing that, and I apparently got the part I was reading for in the audition! So that’s excellent! Today just went really well, apparently! I don’t even have to go to callbacks! This makes me really happy!
Do you want to get a library copy instead? Or maybe buy another from a bookstore?
I would imagine anyone who loves books would understand one not having a cover.
Agreed.
lies on the floor
not facedown like usual this time.
now I have to lie on the floor on my back every day. multiple times.
I’ve had back pain for ages (I have bad joints in general, knees have been giving me the worst problems, but all my knuckles/toes/ankles crack all the time, at least once an hour), but lately it’s been worse
I had a hard mattress at home that didn’t help, I have a softer one here that also doesn’t help. Sleeping with a pillow under my ribs/stomach used to help but not enough anymore 
None of the various chairs I sit in for classes or my desk/table chairs at my apartment or couches help ieurgbinas;kgberg
It’s my lower back mostly. I try to keep pillows behind it or balled up sweaters but it’s been getting worse this year I think, although I’ve had this issue for a couple years. But being in the low 20s and having the joints of someone 10+ years older when one of my 2 biggest fears is growing old/losing body function is not fun at all
otherwise things have not been so great for me and I may post stuff on that later but I don’t really have the energy for it right now
That sounds serious, have you gotten help?
JADE I LOVE YOU SO MUCH
I HOPE YOU FEEL BETTER SOON
(hugs)
it’s really scary to feel your body falling apart on you – I did something to my ulnar nerve and so haven’t been able to control my pinky / ring finger this past week, but it’s almost back to normal now. But it sucks and it hurts. Have you ever tried something like biofeedback? I’ve been working with it some recently and it’s really helpful for relaxing muscles you didn’t realize were tight. Also maybe get one of the postural pillows and carry it around with you for chairs? or something?
Oh no, I hope you feel better soon!
Has anyone else gotten a truly ridiculous amount of snow in the past two weeks?
Six inches two Wednesdays ago that never melted, then probably about a foot and a half Thursday into Friday (which canceled all my classes on both days). My car got stuck in the snow on our driveway last night when I was halfway into a parking space, and now refuses to move in either direction. It’s snowing again as I type this.
Yup. The snowplow piles are taller than me.
Boston is like that at the moment.
Truly ridiculous for Georgia is like two inches, but that was enough to shut school down for most of last week.
Not as bad as you have it.
Dad brought home a bag of grapes for me, and I laughed so hard at this, I cried.
Dad: *Sets grapes on the table* There…
*Bag knocks over a couple things, while dad makes the usual funny surprised noises that he does*
Me: *Sets grapes back up*
*Bag knocks over a Pringles can like it was made of rubber.*
Dad: *Grabs Pringles can and pitches it into the other room* There!
SFTDP, only a minute later:
Dad: *Goes into the other room to pick up the Pringles can to throw in the garbage.* *Bends over to pick up something else on the floor,* *Drops Pringles can,* *Stands up and stomps on it.* It’s possessed!
Ha!
I just got tickets to one of the Welcome to Night Vale live shows! There are advantages to living in a metropolis, I guess. I’m extremely excited about this! This has been a good past couple of days.
Congrats, I hope you have fun!
Happy Galileo/Shackleton Day!
(I don’t know if this is too location-specific but) I’m playing at the Portland Jazz festival in March and oh my god I’m so excited. I’ve never played at a venue that big and it’s going to be really cool. I think most of my bandmates have done this kinda thing before but I haven’t so I’m probably going to be wandering around big-eyed while they handle everything calmly, haha.
Congrats!
I spent my day dressed as the Eleventh Doctor, selling Girl Scout cookies outside a comic book store. Got a lot of people wanting pictures with us and our TARDIS, and sold a bunch of cookies. Great fun.
Great idea! I saw a Girl Scout on campus the other day. Smart girl.
I have a friend who is not very interesting to be with. She is way too hyper, exited, and energetic. As opposed to my slow, non-social, quiet personality. She loves talking about things I’m not very interested in, like, how many times this kid at school picks his nose in a day, the way the thread on her dress is loose, and the details of her last shopping trip.
She loves pink, falls head over heels at the slightest mention of LotR. The only thing we really have in common are that we’re both girls, and we both listen to metal. And, whenever I start telling her about somethings I like (Forest walks, new books I read, all my interests,) she says nothing else but “Cool!” and “:)”. Maybe a “Neat!” or two.
She believes everything she hears, and does everything she’s told to do….
I’m not really a fan of this person, and would really really like to meet other people that have more interesting things to talk about other than the last time she got a F in math class…. But she’s also a really sensitive person, and I can’t just come out and tell her, or she’ll burst into tears.
She also doesn’t use proper grammar.
I don’t know what to do with her…
If you can limit the time you spend together, maybe try doing that? If she asks you to go with her to do things you’re not interested in you can be straightforward and say “hey, I’m really not interested in going shopping/whatever activity, but maybe one of your other friends would enjoy that?/maybe you should find someone who would like that more than me.” If you two do like the same music, try to turn what conversations you have to that, maybe you could go to a concert together or something, but let her know that you’ve got other priorities and want to have friendships with other people that focus on those priorities. It is fair for you to tell her you have other friends, or want to make other friends, it is fair for you to tell her that you are offended if she totally blows off your interests, and it is fair for you to cut her out of your life if she refuses to back off if you’re polite about it.
If you’re not interested in any of the things she’s interested in, and don’t like her enough to be interested in things for her sake, then why are you friends?
We kinda discovered each other when I was writing. She read things of mine, and really liked them. She’s kinda hung around me since. She had interests that I had at first. Now, the friendship is kinda boring.
Where did the links go, and is it still possible to see the cephaloblog?
Done! I enjoy rereading SquidBlog every now and then.
Thank you very much for that!
I really hate it when I think I remember that something exists, but I can’t find it anywhere. Once upon a time I’m pretty sure I remember reading an article about a company that made workwear that was started by a group of women in various construction/heavy duty jobs that were disappointed by the lack of female-oriented work clothes, but I can’t find anything online anywhere, and it’s really frustrating. Now I’m wondering if I just made it up. :/
I came across several by digging through a search on “workwear women construction,” though some seem to have come and gone. One called Doe Work Wear was written about in 2009, but its site is “offline.” FR Workwear for Her specializes in flame resistant work clothes. CharmandHammer, based in Apex, NC, specializes in safety gear but also carries some clothing. Eve Workwear in Australia has a small line.
The weirdest feeling in the world, is when you bite on an ice-cold grape with teeth that you’ve just had worked on by dentists, and you just feel the cold, you can’t really feel the texture of the grape, and (especially if you’re distracted, like I was) your brain is like, “What he heck is in the mouth?! It’s SQUISHY!. and for a spit second, you think you’ve just bitten into a bug.
I dreamed a Dear America book was published that was very similar to one of my dumb 11-year-old stories except better-written, and I was trying to get a moment to read all of it to see how much it actually had in common, but other things kept getting in the way.
I dreamed that I was in the army. With characters both from M*A*S*H and Combat. (Some old wartime television shows.) And we were kinda hiding out in this old inn, and I was awake for some reason, and I realized I didn’t have any shoes. I didn’t want to wake up the Captain, or Margaret Houlihan, so I went around and asked everybody except them if they knew where my shoes were.
I have the beginning of the story written down, and the scene that gets the plot going written down. All I need are the parts in between.
If someone had been kind enough to let me know when I was just a little bitty kid in grade school, that being a veterinarian requires SO MUCH talking on the phone, I think I would have chosen a different career path. Maybe stuck with my aspirations of being a train engineer (I think I scrapped that idea when there was some big Amtrak crash? Woah. I just googled Amtrak crashes. Was I really 3 years old when there was a ginormous Amtrak crash and I changed career paths? Oh my god. Somebody really should have told 3 year old me that the odds of dying in a train crash as a train engineer, are far lower than the odds of having to call someone in the veterinary field. As in, one is super uncommon, the other happens ON A DAILY BASIS. *whimper*).
So anyway, if someone ahd told me there is so much phone calling and so much paperwork back when I was still malleable, totally would be doing something different with my life. Instead of spending 2 hours after I got off school doing my least favorite thing in the entire universe (second only to being swarmed by spiders. Or ticks). And the paperwork. So So much paperwork.
But phone calls. If you dont’ know me or have similar issues….it sounds silly, but I have like a seirously pathological aversion to talking on the phone. I dont’ even like to use the phone to order take out (I’d much much rather do online ordering, even if it takes longer). I will go to almost any means to avoid ahving to call someone, and delay phone calls in my personal life as long as possible. If I know I ahve to make a phone call, I sometimes get all nervous and jittery and *shudder*.
So yeah. Days like today, kinda wish someone had told me when I was 3ish that if I switched to vet med, I’d have to do so much talking on the phone. I’d be a train engineer right now, instead. Or maybe an astronaut. I think that was on the list at some point. Or something involving animals that requires less telephoning.
I don’t know much about veterinary medicine, but I’m sure you have options that wouldn’t involve much telephone time. You could do whatever Temple Grandin does, or go into research, or perhaps work for a zoo. If you were on the staff of a large institution, I assume you wouldn’t have to deal with a lot of different clients.
Even at a small practice, I’d bet the overwhelming majority of phone calls are made by support staff. That’s been the case at every vet I’ve dealt with over the years. Robert’s mention of Temple Grandin reminds me that I learned a lot from her (from reading about her many years ago in Oliver Sacks’s An Anthropologist on Mars, though her problem was automatic doors, not phones) that helped me learn to manage my own telephone aversion. Believe me, I’m very familiar with the jittery nervous *shudder*. Not silly at all.
39℉ right now!
Warmest it has been here in this year so far!
Last night it snowed at least six inches, and since I walk to school at like 7am I had to wade through it. My pants got wet.
Now, it’s 33 and sunny, so a lot of it is melting. There are puddles three feet wide everywhere – on top of the snow and ice. I am never leaving the house without rainboots again, am I.
I HAVE JSTOR ACCESS. The greatest thing. ♥!
It is!
This morning, I had the backpack which has served me well for more than a year, the iPhone that has served me equally well since the summer of 2011, my student ID, and a wallet containing my debit card, Charlie Card, and membership cards to the Museum of Science and New England Aquarium.
Tonight I have none of those things because my backpack was taken from the archaeology waiting room while I was talking to my advisor in his office. The campus police are looking for it, and I’ve cancelled my credit card, deactivated my phone, and contacted the MoS and NEA about getting those cards deactivated and replaced. Tomorrow I have to go to the Terrier Card Office, campus Bank of America office, and then the Apple Store (once I actually have a debit card again so I can go to the ATM so I can have money for a cab…)
Today was supposed to be a good day…
And they don’t even make 4Gs anymore, so I can’t get an exact replacement… grumble grumble… At least a 4S will still be the same size and use the same charger…
My red-and-black fingerless gloves got me everywhere, they got me through the cancellation of Constellation, they got me the chance to meet Dava Newman, they got me published in Muse, they got me to ISDC, they got me to NASA Headquarters on the day Curiosity landed (and got Curiosity safely on the ground in Gail Crater)…
Now I just hope they can get back to me from wherever they are…
Today I’m still sick, and was reduced to sobbing twice by 4pm, at which point I got a phone call from my mom informing me that my grandmother passed away early this evening. Needless to say, more sobbing has ensued, and I’m a chapped, blotchy, snot-filled mess with no motivation whatsoever to read Aphra Behn for class tomorrow, much less start on those papers I should have started a week ago at least.
This is the grandma that greeted me one Thanksgiving with “what’s wrong with your face?!” and the one who my mom was constantly fighting with, and I’ve got a lot of really conflicting emotions about her passing, but mostly I’m just really, really, really sad.
I’m sorry for your bad day and your loss, Fiddler. *hugs and squids* If it would help to type out those conflicting emotions (even if you delete them right away), we’re here to listen/read.
I’m so sorry, Fern. *hugs*
I’m really sorry, Fiddler. I know loosing a relative, plus being sick, is not easy.
I really hope you feel so much better soon!
I’m so sorry for your loss, Fern. *hugs*
(hugs) you are loved
I’m sorry Fiddler, the loss of a relative is the worst, and being sick on top of it… ugh. *hugs and warm fuzzies*
Fiddler, I’m so sorry. I hope you’re taking good care of yourself and know how much we care about you.
Oh, babe. I’m so sorry. {Squish.}
This week has gotten off to a busy start. It started off with an exam, and I’ve had a whole bunch of meetings and just one thing right after another. Tomorrow is more free. Ish. Which means I’ll finally have a chance to do applications and schedule more meetings and yay! Not yay. Yeah.
Also because I’m taking a PE class this semester I have to go to the gym regularly for homework. So I’m spending an hour or so between classes there. Instead of doing something else.
I started crying in computer lab today and I’m not sure why.
I didn’t mean for that to be such a depressing post. What good things have happened?
Well, the weather’s warmed up and is expected to be in the sixties all week. I’m being productive even if that means stressed out. I went to a slam poetry thing this evening. Which is part of why I came back to my dorm so late. Also, does it count as fun if you just end up more exhausted at the end?
Ok derail depressing stuff again. I ate at the school cafeteria again when it was at full working capacity for the first time this semester. Food I didn’t have to cook and an unlimited dessert table. Mmm.
Yesterday I got my driver’s license!
Uh-oh! Keep your eyes on the lookout when you’re driving! There’s a new driver on the road!
Congratulations, Choklit!
I’ve spent the day hoping we’ll run out of something so I can drive to the grocery store all by myself. So far, no luck.
Hide all the paper towels.
Eat all the peanut butter.
You say that as though it hasn’t already happened.
Come buy me more peanut butter because I am dangerously low and california –> Ohio is a LOT of driving practice!!
Jade: What about from California to Wisconsin?
Choklit: Come over and buy me a McDonalds!
Does one need a reason to eat all the peanut butter?
I have a book, chocolate with ginger, and a giant mug of Yorkshire Gold. Now I miss England.
I’m flying back to the US today for my wedding. Eeeeeeek!
Save us a piece of wedding pie!
I shall!
Aaah! Happy wedding, Groundhog!
Oh, my gosh!
Have a beautiful wedding! I hope you both live your happily ever after.
And by ‘your’ I mean both of you!
Gosh. All the best of luck, and I’m so happy for you! ♥
Best of luck!
I guess that prediction somebody made a few years ago came true…
Which prediction?
That we would see a MuseBlogger get married in the near future.
Ah
Wow, congratulations! Much happiness to both of you and all your loved ones!
Congratulations! That is so exciting (and simultaneously terrifying, I am sure)! I wish you and your fiance all the best! I’m really happy for you.
So many congratulations!!
Oh my, congratulations! I wish you and your loved ones the very best!
Congratulations! That’s so exciting, I hope everything is wonderful for you.
Oh my gosh, congratulations, Groundhog!
I have -1 messages in my inbox…
Has anyone tried the various options for customizing one’s iPhone icons? Are they safe? I just really don’t like the look of the iOS 7 icons.
So the snow is finally starting to melt here, I’m starting to feel happier, I actually have a roadmap for the next two months, and I still have no idea if I’m going to get that England trip in before the end of my gap year. Also, I need a job.
I can’t find the second CD from the Pimsleur Spanish set I checked out from the library. Worried about that.
I had a huge revelation last week that I am actually much more interested in international relations than science, but I still want to do programming, so…? Does anyone know of a job that combines IR and Comp Sci?
Whatever. I have a university Library card (but due to errors, it’s from when I was taking a class during high school, but it still works, so yeah…) and a thirty ride bus pass. I’m set until admissions come out in somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks.
Also! I starting taking drawing classes, and I’m doing amazingly well from starting from nothing in September.
Brainstorming from a Google search:
Programming international journalism websites
Georgetown has a Science, Technology, and International Affairs major that “equips students with the tools they will need to understand and address the complex issues related to science and technology (environment, health, energy, security, and development) that are interwoven with the historical, political, economic, social, and cultural concerns of international affairs”. There’s some ideas for how science/technology could combine with IR. If you Google it, they have subcategories for Environment and Energy; Business, Growth, and Development; Biotechnology and Global Health; and Science, Technology, and Security.
International Cybersecurity would actually be a really important intersection.
Another site suggested that intelligence communities are increasingly interested in international expertise + computers.
Low points of the day: crying multiple times, getting behind in work hours because I left early, weird kind-of argument with my friend/roommate
High points of the day: going hiking for 2 hours, avocado burrito + margaritas, having almost normal interactions with roommate/friend (despite weird earlier kind-of argument thing)
So I guess it was about as successful of a day as I’ve had in awhile. I’m also proud of how well I managed to draw dry-erase marker tattoos on myself with my left hand.
I just have one of those faces….
I have people coming up to me all the time, saying things like, “You look tired,” or ” “You look depressed.” “You look sad.”
I mean, I knew my face was homely, but not that homely.
I think you’re committing a non sequitur. Beautiful faces can look tired and sad, too.
That doesn’t mean you look homely!
I’ve had multiple teachers ask me if I was alright before. Apparently my default look is one of upsetness?
One time in my classical mythology class in undergrad, I was listening to music on my iPod (and the song title had “into” in it, which I misread as “Ianto”, a character in torchwood (a tv series I watch) and I was starin off into space thinking about ianto’s storyline) before class started and the teacher walked halfway up the auditorium (a small one, only about 100-200 students tops) and asked me if I was okay. Because apparently I looked really sad
And then once in my second year of vet school, I was sitting at my spot on the front row, and was taking a nap before class started with my head Rested on my arm on te table. We’d had a huge exam that morning, and I was severely chronically sleep deprived. And the teacher asked me at leat three times after I woke up before lecture started if I was okay. Even after I reassure her yes I wa fine just tired because we’d had an exam, she was all are you sure? Are you sure your okay?
Don’t fret too much about it. It doesn’t mean you look homely! Just look at it this way–it means people care about your well being.
((At least you haven’t ever beenmistaken for a 15 year old when you’re almost 24….that happened to me when I was in Florida, and dressed up wearing my slacks and dress shirts I wear when in on clinics at school. Awkward))
I get the “being mistaken for way younger than I am” thing too, it’s so awkward. In the past six months, I’ve had five different bus drivers offer me a children’s fare.
I was studying outside the other day when I noticed a few of my friends asking a woman walking by if they could pet her dogs. That seemed like a good study break, so I got up to join them, said “hi” to the owner, and started talking with my friends. The woman interrupted, “Excuse me if you get this a lot, but how old are you?” “I’m 18,” I said, “turning 19 in a week.” “Oh! Sorry, I thought you might be one of those prodigies who goes to college at 13 or something!” Though I didn’t take it as rude, and I really don’t mind looking young, is it actually more likely that a young-looking girl at a college is a 13-year-old college student rather than a young-looking 18-year-old college student?
Any suggestions on how to murder a printer?*pats printer*
Nice printer, nice functional printer. I mean okay, first you crash, then you have no ink, then you have some internal error, then you run out of paper, but we all have off days and I think we can totally work it out if you would please, please spit out my *pied*-
wait I think it’s working!
Have you thought of calling a technician? Or, better yet, do you have a relative that knows a thing or two about printer-anatomy?
Does your school have a Tech Support service or office?
The printer’s at home- so that would be me and google. But it ended up working so I’ll
not try to print anything else until my dad is backcount my blessings.Spent 19 of the past 36 hours in a car.
There’s such a weird disconnect about it being warm enough to have my coat and sweater open (and people to be jogging in short sleeves), but there being snow on the ground and the river still being frozen over. There were people with short sleeves just sitting on the snow like it wasn’t snow.
Another day dressed as Eleven, selling cookies. Further refined my costume, which is pretty darn good now, except that I forgot suspenders. It’s mostly not a big deal, except that halfway through the day, the girl dressed as Amy got cold, so I whipped off my jacket and gave it to her. It felt like a very Doctor-ish thing to do, and that pleased me immensely, but it meant that my lack of suspenders was obvious.
It’s really great to have a group of friends I can do stuff like this with.
I wanted to buy some cookies from a group of Girl Scouts who were selling them at the Student Union, but I missed them yesterday and that was the last day they were here.
If you’re free today, you could probably find a group at any supermarket or grocery store, and if that doesn’t work, see if anyone you know has a relative in Girl Scouts. We’re still allowed to sell them for the next week or so, just not at booths.
I spent today flipping carpets in a fancy hotel for really rich people to look at.
Also, I just wrote out what I want to write about in the paper I have due Friday, got a handful of book titles to check out and request inter-library loan on, and have glanced over some online sources/articles, and I’m at the point in paper-writing where I’m like “yeah let’s DO this thing, it’s gonna be GREAT!” except I haven’t actually read said sources and books yet, and I haven’t started actually writing the thing, which I know is the horrible part and will most definitely take a million times longer than I want it to, regardless of how wonderfully done my “things to write about” notes are.
Ugh.
And tomorrow I’m working again for most of the day, so I need to be actually effective with the time I do have. On the other hand, $12/hour doing brainless and only mildly physically taxing work is a pretty sweet gig, even if it means my weekend isn’t super restful.
Would this be a good place to share my new roleplaying character that I’ve just invented? Because, I think you all would like her… and I feel like I should share her with someone besides my roleplaying group, which is a whopping one person.
Also: You know, that girl I was talking about a few days ago? The one who says she’s still my friend, although I didn’t want her to, and didn’t know what to say to her to make her stop following me? I just heard that she’s going to be moving away soon. Possibly to another state, so… that saved me some confrontation time….
Sure, I’d like to see your character.
I hope nobody minds long descriptions….
Name: Atsoukou Kenlinana
Age: 18
Birthday: April 10th
Hair Color: Blond
Eye Color: Yellow
Top: Light green sleeveless turtleneck, with small one-shoulder chest cover
Bottom: Dark green pants
Shoes: Dark brown boots
Arms: Same color sleeves as shirt, just the shoulders are not covered, and they are not connected to the shirt. Also has dark brown fingerless gloves
Other Features: Long ears, and huge black wings
Weapon Choice: Silver bow, and sapphire arrows. (Entire bow is made from silver, and the string is silver-colored. Arrows are made entirely out of sapphire, and is finished by Raven feathers) And Onyx Sword. Entire blade made out of Onyx – the demon’s ore. Hilt and handle are made from snakes that have been turned into jade stones. Also, a golden rope
Powers: Can summon storms, and create mini-tornadoes in her hands to trap foes inside of
Personality: Can be extremely fierce when picking on her friends. You cannot easily annoy her, unless you stray to that particular subject.
History: Was once a Spirit Guardian of the Temples of Ijin-Kana, but a force, known as the ₳naikai turned her human, and sent her soaring into outer space, where she would suffocate and die. She landed on Earth, and is now in the first Egyptian Dynasty, worshiped as a god for her amazing weaponry, and powers.
*——-*——-*
When *you* are picking on her friends…
So I maxed out my public library card.
Better start working my way through these books…
Maxing out your library card is one of life’s small pleasures.
I’ve never maxed out a library card, but that’s wonderful. I didn’t realize it could be done.
I did go the the library today and found a book ENTIRELY BY MYSELF, from looking it up on the online catalogue to walking through the stacks and locating the physical copy. This is totally basic and I shouldn’t feel so proud of myself, but weirdly for having spent so much time in libraries I always used to be baffled by quite how the dewy decimal system worked, and I used to usually not be looking for a specific book, so I’d just browse until I found something interesting, or I’d have to order it inter-library loan. Also that’s embarrassing and shows how much I use JSTOR and google books for my research…….
But anyway, I actually libraried today and it felt good.
Eek, you’re lucky, you actually have all of the books at home.
I ordered some books, and it was a two-par series. It’s like a little cliff hanger thing at the end of the first book, just to top it all off. I got part one safely under my pillow, but, some idiot had the bright idea to have both parts in separate libraries. AND, someone else had the book checked out. So, I had to wait a week or so before the other dude returned the second part. Then it was in transit for a day, and they just got it in to my library today. BUT, I was busy today, and by the time I was free, the library was closed. So, I have to wait until tomorrow to find out what happens next….
…That rant was way longer than I meant it to be… wow….
Just be glad it was only a week or two you had to wait! I had to wait 3 years for the fifth Harry Potter book, to find out what happened next (and 2 years for the 6th, and then another 2 for the 7th).
it makes a couple weeks not seem so bad!
Oh, God, how did you live?!
Fortunately during the 3 years between 4 and 5 I was not yet obsessed. Between 5 and 6….I think that’s when I started my Harry Potter trivia game. No, hang on, that’s definitely when I started it.
Between 6 and 7, I started writing theories and stuff about Snape, Horcruxes, RAB, etc. And continued working on my trivia game.
It was surprisingly not as hard as one might think. Although I certainly did start countdowns to the release dates of 6 and 7 quite a few months in advance (as in, from the moment a release date was announced…..)
I’m like the black sheep of Museblog.
No, you’re not!
I have zero motivation to do anything productive.
I’m thinking about tattoos again.
I’ve stayed up late enough that I’m hungry.
Karen is packing up stuff and I don’t like it. It’s got that weird moving vibe, and the room is going to feel very empty come Wednesday. One one hand I’m thrilled to just have a complete field day to sweep everything and clean things, on the other hand I just feel awful in general about all of this and it’s complicated and bad.
I’m really going to need to talk to my professor about an extension on this paper. I think that roommate drama + death in the family is legitimate cause for me to have gone into shutdown mode last week, and therefore legitimate cause to request extra time for this thing.
Meanwhile, I should really start on the other paper, but see item one.
All I really want right now is to have someone hold me while I sleep, and maybe recite poetry with me.
I’ve been memorizing poems lately, it’s surprisingly calming.
These have been thoughts.
It annoys me when people purposefully write “what” to mean “that”, as in “things what can kill you”. It doesn’t look funny, it just looks dumb.
That’s Cockney.
(There are Harry Potter characters who talk that way.)
Oh, is it in imitation of that?
I’m pretty sure it is.
I thought it was just another form of “typing with bad grammar to be funny online”, since I didn’t see any other imitations of Cockney speech in the typing, but you could be right.
If you were to say to the offender “I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique,” I wouldn’t be surprised if en promptly rattled off the entire Monty Python parrot sketch.
He’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible! This is an ex-parrot!
What’s better? Someone with a really cool personality, but isn’t much on looks. Or someone with like, the equally cool personality, and who is also really cute looking?
I don’t think either is better than the other. In the pages of a novel or comic book, the really cool person who is also really cute/good looking is generally adored and followed by others, and could either end up as a major protagonist or antagonist, depending on their inner character. But that character could also be “too perfect”; the “flawed” character who is cool but doesn’t have the looks I find has great potential to be an amazing character. In real life, whether someone is really cool or good looking or both isn’t what really attracts me to the person – it is their inner character – their compassion, that they don’t put others down, not self centered, etc.
As a character for a story, I would perhaps try out both versions and see which I think works better in the context of my story.
Today at work my friend and I discovered that there are two banana boxes (we use them and xerox paper boxes for storage) labelled “skulls”, and filled with a variety of fake and real skulls. No real human ones though, as it’s apparently illegal for us to have those (also there’s only been one burial excavation, back in ’86, and I think the body was reinterred.)
But anyway, the back room is super creepy already, and that was a delightful find.
If you have a front desk, you need to keep those boxes on it.
Years ago, while I was walking downhill on Wisconsin Avenue in Georgetown, I noticed a man pushing a cart in the opposite direction. At first I thought he was selling melons, but then I saw they were human skulls. I asked where they came from (India) and who bought them (medical students and a few warlocks). I guess someone must have collected them from Parsi funeral towers.
Where do you work?
The archaeology lab at my school.
This semester, I’m working in the school library (Federal Work Study is awesome!). As in any library, there are those rolling stools that one uses to reach the top shelves. I was pushing the stool with my foot to the next shelf when I suddenly realized: these stools are shaped an awful lot like Daleks… *pushes stool with foot and watches it glide forward* …and it moves an awful lot like a dalek…
No, I do not have an eye stalk sprouting out of my forehead now, but I’m on my guard for any transformations.
*of the stools, not of me.
So I was skimming through one of my emails that I get from yahoo that send me news articles about Harry potter/jk Rowling, and saw a line that said something along the lines of “Daniel Radcliffe, 24 year old….” And I immediately thought “What?! He can’t be, he’s not that much older than…..wait. OH MY GOD. I turn 24 in a month.”
24. I’m going to be 24. This is…I just keep getting older. The number keeps getting bigger every birthday and its increasingly more terrifying a number each time.
I just wanna be a little kid with no responsibilities again. Heck, I’d settle for being a teenager. I mean you have almost no responsibilities at that age, too
How about a not-overwhelmingly-demanding job that pays you enough money to live on and allows you to have fun in your spare time? That’s better than being a kid or a teenager, I’d say.
For that matter, how about adventures? Kids don’t really get to have them. Adults do.
Really, being a grownup is much nicer than many of you MBers seem to think.
I just want to get to the stage of being an adult where i can afford to hire someone to clean everything for me.
Yes. So much yes. Even better if they cook for me, too.
so far with the “adulthood” thing I’ve mostly I’ve gotten anxiety about the future and persistent joint pain
thank you, degrees that generally require 4+ more years of school to get a permanent sort of job in either field
Sadly that would require a change in career path which is not really feasible at this point…..
((Don’t mind me. I’m tired and grumpy. Being back on normal people schedules of working during the day is killing me))
I think our problem lies in finding that not-overwhelmingly-demanding job that pays enough money to live on.
Aye, there’s the rub. But it can be done. It helps to be in, or to be able to move to, a place where there’s a lot of money sloshing around.
Mm. I just had a fairly fun and undemanding, while still fulfilling, job that payed a very good amount of money to live on. It was a contract position, though and, while they appreciated the work I was doing, in the end there wasn’t enough for me to do anymore. Now I have to find a new job. The area I currently live in is a city but a city of only 200K people or so rather than the area where I grew up (the Twin Cities area in Minnesota), which has many more. I made the choice to live with my friends from college, which has been fun. Job hunting sucks, though.
idk I think a lot of it is like. I’ve just been so conditioned my whole life into the whole “go to school get into good college get a good job in releted field that you love” mindset/plan for how things should work and just. Deviations from that were treated so negatively??? Like. “If you do x, if you don’t do x, you might not get into college” and that was always presented as such a horrible possibility. And then 4 years and a lot of money later there’s so much pressure to make it worthwhile, because otherwise what was any of the point?
“You’ll get stuck with a boring desk job you don’t love” was such a threat in the school system, like maybe no one ever said it outright but that was the insinuation from teachers and parents and just people in general. And actually yeah I DID have teachers that said that kind of thing outright. And it was so ever-present that even though I know there’s nothing actually objectionable to desk jobs/jobs that don’t necessarily require a lot of degrees, it feels like setting for that is “failing” in some way (when it is really not at all). and maybe there’s adventures, but first, there’s a whole lot of Worrying About The Future.
I just feel like 80% of my friends are unhappy most of the time and everyone I know my age is always stressed/afraid about the future. Every time I think someone’s got their life together and I get to know them better it turns out they’re actually also a mess and panicked. I go to one of the top colleges in the country with students who all work super hard and are involved in 300 extracurriculars and are generally ranked among the “best and brightest” in our generation, but the school decided not to publish the results of the mental health survey that was sent out last semester because apparently the level that everyone here is Not Okay At All is that bad.
Like I know everyone who gives out advice earnestly means well and wants us all to be excited and happy about our future, but there’s a quote I read in high school that has stuck with me since because it described the situation so perfectly: “We were the generation who was told ‘You can be anything’ and heard ‘You have to be everything.'” And now everyone’s so exhausted and finding out that it’s not actually possible to do everything anymore, and that is not something we were ever taught how to deal with.
/negativity. yeah. sorry.
So many of you seem so afraid of the future and of making even the smallest mistake. That’s not the best recipe for success, in my opinion.
A friend of mine decided to take a course called something like “Ice Skating for Adult Beginners.” In the first class, the very first thing the instructor did was to make all the students deliberately fall down on the ice. The idea was that they were sure to take some tumbles anyway, so they might as well get it over with at the outset and learn that it’s not fatal and how to pick themselves up and get moving again. If I were designing a curriculum for Muse Academy, it would definitely include a lower-level class in “Controlled Failure.” In my experience, supple, resilient people are generally happier than brittle, perfect ones.
I wonder whether we’re repeating the mistakes of the 1950s. Then, too, there was a big emphasis on educational lockstep as a recipe for success. And the result was a huge backlash in the 1960s: Flower Power, “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out,” the whole 1960s counterculture scene. I keep expecting to see that repeating itself, too. Maybe it will, once the economy improves to the point at which people can scrape out a meager living by selling incense or making sandals.
I think the economy is a large part of it, too – we know that our chances of getting a job are a lot smaller than they were twenty years ago. College tuition has risen so much that a lot of us have taken on a ton of debt, and you need a job to be able to pay that off. That, combined with the “do what you love” mantra that was hammered into us (and which I think is an awful thing to follow), is a lot of pressure. There’s also I think been a shift toward making one’s life entirely about one’s work – take, for instance, companies such as Google that try to set it up so you never really leave work, and when you identify your sense of self with what you do, failure at your vocation means failure as a person. For me, personally, that’s something I struggle with – I think partly because as a musician, you put so much of your own self, of your feelings and your thoughts, into your music, and then you get told it’s not good enough, repeatedly.
My college has 450 students, grads and undergrads. We don’t have a cafeteria or doctors or academic classes (we get those through an affiliation with a nearby university), but we have our own counseling staff.
I agree. “Follow your bliss” is an appealing mantra, but I’d say that something like “Make yourself useful” is a better guide to life.
Hm… I’m beginning to think that what young people nowadays really need is a great big spa where they could decompress and not have to meet anyone’s expectations for a while. Except that I’m not sure you’d know what to do there. Osmotic shock might make you explode
In my cell biology class this semester, we get to do an independent project on succinate dehydrogenase from black-eyed pea mitochondria that we isolated. My roommate (who is my lab partner) and I came up with a really cool idea that involves bunnies eating birch trees, because we found a study* that shows that a chemical called papyriferic acid which is produced by juvenile birch trees inhibits succinate dehydrogenase in snowshoe hares, rats, and mice, but most of all in snowshoe hares, which is probably a defense by the tree to keep from being eaten. We were naturally wondering whether plant enzymes would in any way whatsoever be inhibited by a chemical that definitely inhibits certain small mammal enzymes. There is genuine curiosity, and we could have cute illustrations bunnies (not pink, don’t worry) on our presentation slides! Unfortunately, it seems like papyriferic acid is going to be really tricky/impossible to get, unless we extract it from birch trees ourselves.
I really wanted to do a project that would actually let us learn something cool about the way things work (like bunnies eating birch trees versus black-eyed peas not eating birch trees), and now we don’t know what to do.
*”Inhibition of Snowshoe Hare Succinate Dehydrogenase Activity as a Mechanism of Deterrence for Papyriferic Acid in Birch”, if reading about bunny enzymes sounds like your thing.
The opening of the Brahms c minor piano quartet 3rd movement is quite possibly the most beautiful two minutes of music I can think of (seriously, go listen to it. It’s mindblowingly, heartachingly beautiful. actually the entire piece is, but the cello solo grabs me every time). However, I cannot find a recording that plays it as I want to hear it and it’s driving me crazy.
Fauré’s 6th nocturne is in a similar vein of beauty. I like Hamelin’s interpretation.
To me what makes the opening of the Brahms special is the sense of yearning combined with an innocent hopefulness. It’s so vulnerable, but so tender at the same time. It’s constantly reaching – the intervalic leaps followed by falls, the mixing of major and minor thirds – it keeps striving for something it just can’t have, but somehow it’s not agitated at all and it just feels right. And then when the violin enters and ends up playing in sixths with the cello it’s so sweet it’s almost unbearable. Brahms told his publisher it was based off of the Werther story, about someone who commits suicide for unobtainable love, and I think there’s an autobiographical quality about that that the music reflects. I like the Faure, but that seems more typically contemplative and to me doesn’t have the same tug on your heartstrings.
(and I do like a lot of recordings of it. Beaux art trio is good. Just none of them are the one I dream of)
One of these days I’ll actually start that eating better thing I’ve been meaning to start when I get some time….Meanwhile I will continue to lie to myself that eating 10 tacos from taco bell is a well balanced meal (hey, it has lettuce!) and that not having breakfast or lunch makes it justifiable….
((I scared the heck out of one of the employees manning the drive through window a year or so ago at taco bell, when he tried to talk me into the 10 taco grande meal instead of the 8 tacos I was ordering, because it was cheaper, and I assured him that yeah, I knew it was cheaper, but I couldn’t eat all 10! and he just gave me this bug eyed look and was all you’re eating all of those yourself?! I can’t eat that many…..And this was a larger guy–not fat, but bulkier. And I assured him that yes, yes I was eating all 8 of those tacos myself…..))
I have just learned the easiest part of any Megadeth song in three minutes.
I finally got around to telling dad that I wanted to know how to play guitar. And he got me coasting at a nice pace. We sat down for about an hour, all while playing the guitar. The only problem that I see at the moment, is the fact that my hands are so small, it’s hard to actually fully play some chords.
I don’t know any full song. I just know the first 18 seconds of one.
KaiYves,
Have you heard of SeaOrbiter? It sounds like your sort of thing:
www . kisskissbankbank . com/projects/the-eye-of-seaorbiter/
Oh yes, I picked up some flyers about it at the NASA HQ library on one of my post-internship visits, either February 2012 or sometime that summer. It could really be an incredible project if they can find the funds and build it– like a Jules Verne adventure in real life. Certainly I’d jump at the chance if it all came together and they had a call for crew members whose requirements I met.
I just registered to vote!
I just opened a checking account. I think I might be almost an adult, and I’m curious who was foolish enough to allow that.
Think of it as another step toward world domination.
In fact, whenever you find yourself doing something that seems worryingly adult, try this: steeple your fingers and say “MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” You’ll feel better, I promise.
I already feel better. Also I have the urge to do something significant with my newfound adult priviliges.
It took me about six months to realize that once I had my own checking account, my parents didn’t have to know what I was buying.
Exactly!
although last time I checked my parents were supportive of my plan for world domination
Of course that only works if the billing address on your checking account isn’t your home address where your parents live….who open your billing statements from the bank when you’re gone at college 9 months or moer out of the year.
Which considering that even if neither of my parents are listed on the checking account (and I honestly don’t remember if either are), any money I currently have in that account was funneled in by my parents since they’re paying for the entirety of my college education and all associated expenses incurred once all my own money had been put toward college, etc, I really can’t be all that upset about it. It’s irritating sometimes to know they’ll likely see if I decided to spend some $$$ on some frivolous thing or spent a bunch of $$$ on fast food, but since it’s technically they’re money, they do have the right to take issue with how I may choose to spend it…..
This for me too, but my dad also has my online banking password (so he can move money around as needed–so if I have less than 5 transactions a month, he can just shuffle money back & forth between checkings and savings so I don’t get a fine) and stalks my purchases hardcore. Once I went to a movie and bought a ticket with my debit card & a couple hours later he texted to ask what I’d seen.
BUT, I don’t really mind, and it meant that in August when my identity got stolen & someone bought $120 worth of things from two dollar stores in Texas, he noticed the same day and we were able to freeze my card really quickly, which was good.
My mom sees every purchase I make with my credit card, so I can’t donate to charities online, which really annoys me sometimes.
I’m in pretty much the same boat. I have this “college checking account” where it’s jointly owned by my parents and me, so on my online banking account I can only see the checking and my parents can see everything. I do understand that it’s their money. But it would be nice to be able to buy myself a Christmas or birthday present that I actually want, since I’m 99% certain that my parents would refuse to buy it for me.
I just did too! After like five months of waiting. Now I can actually buy stuff.
Well, once the debit card comes, but still.
Ugh, it’s been a crazy week. But at least I have a few more hours of freedom before I have to write an essay tomorrow and go on a field trip to Chinatown on Sunday.
Oh hey, I never posted that post I wrote about my birthday on Wednesday? It was pretty good, I got to ice skate and my aunt sent a care package with fruit and nut mix, and my copy of “The Rape of Europa” came in the mail.
Wait. They’re making a Jurassic Park 4? How did I not know this? Did I know this? I have the oddest feeling I feel like I may have known this and forgotten that I knew this. I also have the feeling it won’t be very good because they’ll make the dinosaurs way too CG and they’ll be so real looking CG that they look fake instead of the really good dinos they had in the original JP movies. Or maybe I just thought those were awesome cuz I was little. I dunno.
Anyway. 2015. Huh. That’s…..Actually I’d rather not think about just how soon 2015 really is.
Hey. Whadda you know. I did know this back in September, apparently (https://musefanpage.com/blog/?p=13414#comment-478137). And then sometime since then forgot I knew this. Wow, was September really only 5 months ago? Woah. Being in the classroom and not in clinics/off block doesn’t seem that recent.
I wonder what other extremely important things I’ve forgotten that I knew? (Because obviously the existence of things like movies I’d like to see are extremely important).
I just hope they give them feathers. That’s all I want from it really.
It’s a pity none of the adults from the original movies have been asked to return, seeing the kids grown-up would be cool, though, and incorporating the things we’re learned about dinosaurs since 1993.
PSA: I really, really don’t give a *beep* one way or the other about Sarah Palin. And I really don’t particularly care if other people hate her or if they love her. But the whole VP thing was SIX YEARS AGO. So a) when discussing the fact I”m from Alaska, to be quite honest, any mention of Palin whatsoever was old by the time my first semester of college was finished. Much less 6 years later. And b? If you’re going to insist on bringing Palin up twice within 2 weeks of being on a clinical rotation together? 1: Telling someone who doesn’t know me and only just learned i was from Alaska that I am personal friends with Palin? Just makes you look like an idiot, thanks. And my response of “NO” in a tone suggesting you’re an idiot? Does not actually indicate anything in regards to my political leanings. I am just setting facts straight before this other poor kid who barely knows me actually believes you. So when you say that you can tell my political beliefs from that and I prompt you with a “What?” in a tone that clearly says answer-at-your-own-peril-because-you-are-about-to-shove-your-foot-so-far-down-your-throat, answering with a look that questions why I”m questioning what your conclusion might be and saying “Not retarded” and suggesting that anyone who likes Palin and/or is republican is retarded? Thanks. I mean, you know, who doesn’t want to be told their grandmother is “retarded” because she happens to be republican and love Palin [again, personally, me? I really couldn’t care less one way or the other]. and insult my whole family since most of them are republican leaning (even if many of them happen to dislike Palin).
And also? If you’re going to bring palin up again a week later? And sit there making snotty comments? At least get your facts straight. Please. Contrary to popular belief, Palin NEVER BLOODY SAID that you can see Russia from her house/backyard/what have you. She said that “They’re our next-door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.” WHICH IS 100% TRUE, thank you very much.
So really, I don’t give a cake what you think of palin, but if you want to bash on her (despite the fact that that is so 2008), at least come up with something legit to do it about. Instead of a comment she never actually said. Especially when you then devolve into a rant about how she doesn’t believe in tectonic plates blah blah blah? Where are you even pulling this cake from?
God. I have half a mind to send the moron a link to the Snopes page debunking his rant from today on the whole Russia thing, except that I really have no desire for him to think I spend even one second of my time thinking about him or anything he says on my down time. Because he already a) annoys me very muchly and b) is actually kind of creepy with his need to pat you on the shoulder and stuff when he greets you or rest his hand on your shoulder while apologizing for a certain challenging case you ended up with. Because quite frankly, I don’t mind touching. But him touching my shoulder just made my skin positively crawl. *shudder*
Pet peeves questions:
1. What do you do in Alaska?!?! Well, gosh. Let’s see. What do you do in this state? Your home state? That state a couple states over? Yeah. You do all the exact same things in Alaska. It’s not a different world. All the things you might like to do? We have and do too. City person who likes bars/shopping malls/movie theatres/whatever the cake you do when you hang out in a city? We have them in Alaska. We have restaurants and bars and shopping malls and movie theatres and all of that. Maybe not as many, maybe smaller scale, and sure, there’s tons of little itty bitty super rural places that don’t ahve any of that, but you’ve got towns like that in every state.
Country person who likes hunting/fishing/hiking/camping/swimming/whatever? Yeah. We got that too. And YES, thank you, we do go camping in Alaska. Don’t give me a horribly bug eye look and an aghast Camping?! in Alaska?!. yes. What, do you think there is snow all flipping year? Obviously unless it just happens to be your thing (and mind you some people do do this, although I ahve no desire to), you don’t go camping in the winter. And you usually try to avoid camping on chilly rainy days. You usually aim for nice beautiful sunny weekends to go camping. When it’s in the 70s or low 80s. Can’t really get much nicer than that for camping. So YES. Camping. In Alaska. And there aren’t even any damn ticks to worry about.
2. Is it dark all winter? NO. Only in the very northern most bit, where to be quite honest hardly anyone lives. We probably get a good 6 hours or so of daylight on the darkest day. If I were to make a guesstimate. Because to be honest I really don’t pay that much attention. And a horrified look and a “WHat do you do?” is really not an endearing response. The same things you’d do if it weren’t dark. What does it being dark ahve to do with anything? Pretty much anything you would normally do when you get done with work? You can still do even if it’s dark. and if you work a fulltiem job, let’s be honest. In the winter, you spend most of the daylight hours busy at your job anyway.
3. How do you sleep with all the light in the summer? Seriously. It’s really not hard. If lightness makes it hard for you to sleep, just buy some blackout curtains. or one of those thick plastic curtains that you can pull down and blocks out most of the light. I mean, honestly? If you live in the city (my apartment, for instance), there’s so much damn artificial light pouring in the windows, it really doesn’t matter if it’s dark outside, it’s still light in your room. SO if that’s a problem for you, you’re screwed anyway. (Personally, it’s not a problem for me. I can sleep in broad daylight if I’m tired. I do also have one of thoe plastic curtain things you pull down that blocks out most of the light back home in my bedroom, too).
4. Is it like on [insert cable TV show set in Alaska here]? I watch that show all the time, is that really what Alaska is like?! I really wouldn’t know. I haven’t watched any of those shows. Not the one about fishing in the ocean on the boats, not the state troopers one, not the ice road trucking one, not any single one you mgiht possibly be able to think of that involves Alaska. I don’t have cable. Even if I did? Probably not what I’d be choosing to watch. So really, I could even begin to tell you if that’s what it’s like.
5. It’s so cold! How can you stand it being so cold! It’s not that cold. I mean, yeah, it can get really cold depending on where you are. yes, my first Christmas break in undergrad, we had 2 weeks of -30 (yes, negative) (which was highly unusual, mind you. We usually only have a random day here or there that’s that cold), but overall? It’s probably anywhere between -20 to 20 in the winter. And as for how you deal with it? Well, the same way I deal with the unbearable heat in the dead of summer here at school: I only go outside when absolutely necessary. I go from heated building to car (and freeze my butt off while I”m waiting for the heat to kick in), just as in the summer down here, I go from gloriously air conditioned building to sizzling hot car and pour gallons of sweat while waiting for the A/C in my car to evaporate it. Except it’s a lot easier to throw more clothes on and stay warm when it’s cold than it is to strip clothes off and cool down when it’s hot. There’s only so many clothes you can take off and not get arrested for public indecency. Not to mention, even stark naked, 90+ degrees with ridiculous humidity is still miserably unbearably hot.
6. Penguins? Did you really, really, really just ask me about penguins? And you’re in veterinary school? Really? Like, seriously, really? I can’t even believe I’m dignifying this with a response. But no. Penguins are in the south. So no, I have not ever seen a penguin (except at zoos and stuff. Maybe. i dont’ even know).
[/rant
Ugh, sorry you have to deal with that.
I might be moving into the apartment-style dorms (which I’ve wanted to live in for awhile) next fall; one of my friends texted last night asking if I wanted to room with him. So that’s cool. I’ve been wondering what I’m going to do about housing, since I’m roommateless, and I’m getting tired of living in the dorm I’m in (it’s one of the older buildings, and while I really like having my own bathroom, I’m tired of the tiny rooms, thin walls, and weird hallway smell). The Village also has private bathrooms, and, even though it’s further away from everything, it’s also got a kitchen and living room area in each suite, so…..I should see about getting a bike.
The kalends of March are come.
Aye, Random Thread, but not gone.
(Which is to say, I have things I want to talk about but I’ll wait for the March Random Thread to be posted.)
Took a break from my essay to read the March issue of Smithsonian, which came today. The cover story on Michael Rockefeller’s disappearance is very well-done and it seems to me at least that the author has hit upon the answer to the mystery, although it’s admittedly a topic I had heard of only vaguely until now (by which I mean through one brief mention in the screenwriters’ commentary for Night at the Museum and reading something online once while looking for something else), there may be holes in his solution that would be obvious to anyone but me…
But what got to me is… dang, the poor dude was only two years older than I am now.