it's about time. i guess i partially got what i wished for. i really want to see it come down, though...swirling around me in the light of a busy street.

dunno how i got so weather-romantic all of a sudden. i was also thinking earlier today about summer and birds chirping outside my window. you know, we didn't really have much of a summer this year. hopefully we have a real winter. otherwise, what a rip-off...

i think not having room to take any non-science courses directly correlates with my being completely lame and never posting anything.

this will likely happen again, even though sometimes i pretend i'm busy when really i'm just sitting around at home and watch mafia drama versions of super smash brothers .

it's been an interesting three weeks. it spanned my mother's, then my father's birthdays, during which they both got swine flu, in that order. they probably got it from my sister, who had it first. just before that, both computers in my sister's and my room coincidentally had also caught viruses. since some (somewhat pretentious) goofball at cracked.com recently wrote an entire rant about how "ironic" is often a misused word, i will refrain from saying that this was ironic and just call it plain steaming shit-bad luck.

so of course everything got wiped, but thankfully most of my documents were resurrected onto a terabyte hard drive (they make those for under 100 dollars nowadays? this is news to me). the move back is a daunting task i have yet to complete. just imagine one terabyte for a second. it's basically the capacity of one thousand iPod nanos. interestingly, when i turn on the hard drive apparently the sheer mass of circuitry it brings to the table is too much for my computer and my wireless adapter instantly ceases to function. i think it also probably sizzled out my monitor USB hub. fun stuff. this thing's like a freaking black hole.


a black hole named Lacie, i guess.



i always say my life will suck less next semester...let's hope its true this time.


p.s. i <3 you, aarushi_sothere

p.p.s. we were totally the hottest wolf-and-little-red couple out there. and i was sick on halloween, too. tongues out to the rest of you.

I. Cannot. Believe. I. Am. Still. Fucking. Awake.

Dear Biocore lab,

Though previously I stated that I loved you, and though I am not insinuating by any means that it is no longer true, I would like to bring to your attention that I have now spent at least fourteen hours writing this fucking proposal paper about feeding people sugar. I'm glad I've learned so much about the sympathetic nervous system and insulin, but someone really needs to take a good long fucking look at why the hell you are worth no more than two credits.

Yours,

Jason

P.S. Please be a darling and forward this message to every god damned chemistry lab on campus.

[three years ago]

you remember that one musical we said we were going to play in, remember?
        i don't blame you if you don't.

it wasn't a terribly important part of my life or anything.
          but my friend was about to give up playing the guitar part.
                       it seemed pretty hopeless.
we all had work on different days, leaving about one day free for us to rehearse
        i had to ask for a bunch of days off, getting out of work as early as possible to get to practice
                             (only to have someone else be late anyway)
            getting chewed out by my manager for not showing enough respect
        he couldn't read any of the chords and had never read sheet music for guitar so couldn't do the solos either
            i got him to give it one more go, and we went and practiced that day
                      he said he felt better about it.

and then we got cut.

                               just like that.


i don't remember whether i imagined doing this or not, but i believe i returned the score to the director with the first page crossed out with a big black "X" and the words "TACET EVERYTHING" written across the top.

i feel like i'm digging up my past again, and i'm not quite sure what i'm looking for.

I've always wondered what the hell "rolled oats" are...has anybody else? Apparently it's more akin to a steam roller treatment than connoting any sort of roundness. I don't know why i hadn't figured that one out before.

Anyway... I found this on the back of a box of Millville natural Oats & Honey granola:

Healthy Foods Fact or Fiction

Had your fill of high-fiber factoids? Think you've heard the whole story about whole grains? See how much you really know by answering the following questions.

.........

2. To truly be considered "whole," grains such as wheat, rice, oats, and corn should be referred to in the list of ingredients as:

(a) partially hydrogenated
(b) saturated
(c) whole
(d) bleached


ǝןoɥʍ (ɔ):ɹǝʍsuɐ

boy, i feel like my molecules are slowing down. this is a multifaceted statement, primarily demonstrating how FUCKING COLD it is. i woke up this morning and swore it was negative two degrees in my room. partially my fault, of course, for choosing to live in a converted enclosed porch of a bedroom, but it's pretty much like this throughout the interior of this frigid apartment.

being a wisconsinite, of course i remember a few snowy Halloweens in my life, but never has it been so consistently cold the entire year...it was even cold in august this year. not cool. and the temperature has been just high enough that it hasn't actually snowed for real yet, which is such a cop-out.

in other news, i've been feeling a little dead to the world as well - lack of motivation sums it up pretty well. i look back upon last fall and shake my head in wonder at how the hell i managed to run a weekly radio show at 6 in the morning.

oh well, maybe getting a space heater would solve this problem. at least i'm not like david who sleeps until 7 in the freaking pm.

oh yeah, i had an amusing dream but i think i'm feeling too sluggish to accurately record it all. it involved something about joining the cross-country team and barely making tryouts, changing my name to something -otos and pretending to be greek, pretending to come from a hometown which rhymed with my name, and being embarrassed that my little sister, somehow in college already, could row faster than me (probably true).

this post is probably boring as hell. just letting you folks know i'm not dead, i guess.

1) Even if a psychic implored me to go to a party at Lucky where people shout things off the 11th floor balcony, I still wouldn't listen to them.

2) I am currently dating somebody with a clashing astrological sign, and I love her dearly.

so i started this dream diary thing a year or so ago. i would wake up in the morning and write down everything in gory detail in my black "x-treme notebook" (i don't remember where i bought this and why), and transcribe it to computer later.

stopped doing it when i didn't have dreams due to being exhausted climbing around yellowstone all day for a family vacation, and then wrote a little more.

then, it was put on a longer hiatus when i went back to college and stopped dreaming altogether due to crappy sleep habits. i'm hoping to resurrect it now and also start sleeping better. starting...tomorrow of course.

and since i'm such an exhibitionist, i've decided to upload the old entries, as well as make them public. actually, i just find my accounts of my dreams very interesting, and sometimes completely out of the blue, since i often forget that i even wrote some of them in the first place.

you can find it by clicking on the "somniloquy" tag...or going here. happy reading!

- it means 'i care' in some nonexistent tongue.


i wish i could learn to speak it your way.

Earlier this week:

I've moved into my apartment on State Street for good. 623 State Street, #3 is the address, right next to the amazing Mediterranean Cafe. Incidentally, the cafe is 625 State, and I had mistakenly been telling people this was my address for over a week ("oh, I live on 25 squared! ha ha!") so hopefully now nobody will be confused anymore.

It's a pretty sweet apartment but the fact that it's like 500 years old kind of shows. There are layers of paint so thick that some doors won't close, and my bedroom is actually an enclosed porch with two gaping portholes that open into our living room.

It also gets pretty cold and noisy at night because I think the windows leak everything. But that's what I get for living so cheaply and so close to campus on State. But luckily, we found an old electric heater left behind in the closet, which apparently works. Maybe I'll invest in some earplugs on finals week. I put some curtains on the window frame and found an extra door in the hallway, and propped it up against the empty door frame. But the hinges on the door open backwards so I can't really install it unless I want a solid wall in my way.

But David summed it up pretty well: "You can make so many dramatic entrances and exits now: jump through the window on your way to bed, and knock down the door in the morning shouting 'I'm READY!'"

Sunday, August 30:

Me: "Hey...you know, what if Harry just fed Tom Riddle's diary to the basilisk?"

Annie: "Yeah, and then, after Voldemort's shadow was done exploding, he could pretend to be him by using Parseltongue, and convince the basilisk not to kill him!"

Me: "The basilisk doesn't look that smart anyway...oh no, except then Voldemort would win in the end, because they wouldn't have a Goblin sword with venom on it. So they would've just thrown away the locket and said 'ahh, screw this!'"

Annie: "Oh yeah..."

Dad: "Yeah, why didn't he just do that? Harry Potter makes no sense. I can't believe I watched that."


Monday, August 31:
David and I almost kill ourselves trying to install a door with only the material from two doors with backward hinges sitting outside our hallway. Actually it was mostly me because I'm the only one crazy enough to attempt these small-scale renovations with no power tools (or fresh screws, for that matter). Two hours later I actually had a door on my frame with a doorknob which actually worked! No easy task...for a guy who burned the guacamole...this is quite a big accomplishment.

Tuesday, September 1:"
I may be in the third decade now but I'm definitely still eighteen at heart...

Wednesday, September 2:"

Oh looky me, a bunch of class reading to do, and lagging from 4 days of not quite sleeping 8 hours. And I'm up at midnight printing out posters and posting on LJ. Go college habits! :)

Oh, but this little PosteRazor doohickey is quite useful! It cuts up an image into however many sheets that you can print and glue together, and includes an adjustable overlap between sheets (absolutely essential). But I can't believe anyone would pay 20 dollars for this when this freeware one exists...

I've got a girlfriend who will give me things like handmade pdf booklets and "digital vinyl" mix CDs, a sister who will tell my mother that it's okay to make me a pink ice cream cake, and parents who will get "happy birthday" right on the first try.

Who could wish for anything more? :)

last night i woke up at two a.m. with a start, thinking "oh my gosh, i just turned twenty!...oh wait."




a couple of hours later, i had an interestingly detailed dream in that small pocket of sleep between my preemptively waking up before the alarm clock, and my dad making me get up (because setting your alarm for 9:30 on a work morning is actually slightly ridiculous):

I walk into the crowded guys' locker room and look for the shower. It's actually just crowded because it's so damn small - about the size of a bathroom. In fact, the two showers are all in toilet-stall-style enclosures. I lock myself into one as a fat guy with glasses disappears into the other.

The steam evaporates off my skin as I slowly realize that I'm completely naked. Seeing as I'm in a shower, this would usually be okay, but I also realize that I haven't brought a change of clothes or a towel to the stall. It either doesn't make sense to me to put on my dirty clothes when I'm soaking wet, or I didn't bring any old clothes in the place (that or they mysteriously evaporated while I was in the shower).

So I walk out into the locker room buck naked and dripping wet, and down the hallway where several folks give me dirty little looks. I'm a little embarrassed by this, but for some irrational reason it's trumped by the embarrassment I feel when I walk back into the locker room and pass by a muscular, buzz-cut white guy talking to an asian guy, both naked. They don't even notice me, however, as I walk by and throw my huge, fluffy towel and a change of clothes into the shower stall and turn on the water, getting everything all wet. Maybe I swore at myself before waking up or maybe I didn't, but the next thing I know, my dad wakes me up and asks if I need to take a shower.

not that I'd usually call attention to it, but I don't think I've had another naked dream for as long as I can remember.

i am waiting to begin presenting my first ever powerpoint for non-classroom purposes. even though the audience is three people, i'm still pretty jumpy.

i can probably say thanks partly to this thermos of earl grey tea with three packets of sugar.

...i'm also really bad at bluffing.

zomg, i'm not even being sarcastic!

http://www.chinesetopinyin.com/

i'd been messing around with an old musty chinese dictionary i think i might've been allergic to, but this is so much more efficient and helpful for everyday use considering my needs. to think it required only a simple google search. i might actually learn how to write chinese now!

i wish, though, that they'd use intonation marks instead of numbers.


EDIT: nevermind, i found that too. :)
http://www.chinese-tools.com/tools/pinyin.html

i am now the proud owner of one beautiful spanish-born, shanghai-raised acoustic/electric guitar.

( have a look-see )

i'm really glad i decided to go along with the plan to take to the streets with my grandparents' birthday cash, bless them, and shop around the music stores in shanghai, which, by the way, are all concentrated on one street by some bizarre anomaly of economic theory. we arbitrarily wandered into a store labeled something like "international music", or something to the effect of requiring the salespeople to greet people in both chinese and english. and indeed, we were met by a guy named kevin who was super short, had a sleekly brown-dyed bowl of hair which completely engulfed his face, and asked me if i spoke english, in pretty damn good english. *sigh* i guess i'll always look like a foreigner no matter where i go.

i'm still very pleasantly surprised at the ease of which we got such a killer deal. i'd gotten used to all the haggling in chinese markets but it seems like the prices just talked themselves down this time. this solid-top acoustic with a piezoelectric pickup wound up in my hands for 2350 renminbi, which is in the neighborhood of 350 US dollars, along with the locking hard shell case, three packs of strings including a sweet set of 13's, a strap and all that junk.

lastly, i have to share the story of the hapless european couple (still of unknown origin, though my sister thought they sounded spanish) who came in in a state of emergency after having left their guitar in the trunk of a taxi. they basically just kidnapped the most decent-looking cheapish Yamaha for a pretty good price and ran off, but not before i overheard some of their conversation in various shades of colorfully-accented English.

"This case is scratched! Can we have another?"

    "..."
           [in chinese] "OK, I don't feel like going downstairs again, let's just give them a discount on that case..."

   "All right, how about you take that case and we'll give you a discount?"

"Yeah-eyah-eyah!"

well now...all the fun that remains is for me to get this baby hauled over to america as a paticularly large and cumbersome carry-on. hopefully i don't leave it in the baggage compartment of the plane...according to the experience had byaarushi_sothere and her friend on their DC "road trip by plane," lost stuff on airplanes is even harder to track down than stuff on taxis... i'll probably end up hugging it to my knees on the last flight again. see you folks in a couple of days, most likely. :)

( more eye candy... )

not like i hadn't been getting fat already, but this china trip cannot be good for my health.

today: dinner at szechuan-style restuarant. for those who don't know, szechuan food is basically a spiciness overload. i especially liked the part where they brought out the gigantic bowl of fish soup and it was a deep crimson color thanks to all the chili oil. and as with all good chinese diners, of course, they had to bring out dessert about 6 times before the meal was actually finished.


tomorrow: we are having dinner at haagen-dazs. i do not know how this happened.

some notes cobbled together from my emails to my blog-inducing significant other:

anji is the place they filmed the last scene of crouching tiger, hidden dragon with the bamboo forest.

wow...i'd expected to be staying in a tiny little mountainside hotel again, but once more this china trip has fooled me with its poshness...we are staying in positively the fanciest hotel i've seen the inside of in my life, courtesy of the folks at my dad's old college where he went to guest lecture (just like last time in huangshan, yellow mountains).

for example, it has a computer. and two decently sized beds. and a flat screen tv (which is very shiny just like everything else). and it also has a bathroom window which looks into the main room (useless, i suppose, except for couples with a taste for strange games...)

and a sign that says "no smoking in bed please..."
   *sigh*

today we visited two pretty awesome sights in the city of Anji...which is more of a city than huangshan was, so i suppose i should've expected this hotel business. this place is basically known for its bamboo forests, which are a pretty impressive sight to behold, especially in the foggy but refreshing rain that was falling today.

anji is not only rural, it's also slightly elevated so the weather today was sublime compared to the muggy smogginess that has been shanghai for our stay here, even though we got pretty thouroughly soaked multiple times.


( a picture is worth... )

the rest of our anji trip was cool, but not as cool as the first day. i'd thought we were staying longer than we actually did, and it took me a while this morning to realize why we were packing up when (i thought) we'd just be back at the hotel again tonight. heh heh. so we really only had time to visit a "bamboo museum" with pretty much every species of bamboo known to man (as well as all its uses) today and see some pandas, which was totally worth it. actually, the pandas were pretty lame to watch cause they'd just been fed and were being even lazier than usual but they're freaking pandas, so it's okay. and also i now have a very amusing video of a panda eating rather clumsily (which i imagine is just how they go through all of life). did you know pandas are territorial? the people at the park had two pandas but they had to be in separate enclosures or i suppose they'd start swiping at each other with their clunky, oversized paws.


( see more... )
so now we're back in shanghai where it's been raining for about a week straight...not that i mind at all- this has been the least hot and humid china trip in my life (not counting the winter stay of my early youth). it's hard to believe we're just going to chillax for 4 more days and then head home!

...has blocked Tumblr as well as Facebook and YouTube, apparently.


Well, don't be surprised if these posts disappear due to the Chinese government finding out what a polluting source of information LiveJournal is. Not like they're that enlightening anyway...if you really can't wait, rest assured, I'll be back home in just over a week.

What a crazy short vacation...it's really too bad they get more hectic as we all grow older.