Quote from the guy installing my bamboo flooring:

"Do you know what a baby panda smells like?

This wood--when you cut it. It's somewhat exotic...but in a way, it's not."


I don't know him well enough to know his intentions behind this statement, but this is the funniest thing I've heard all day.


While I'm quoting, here are two quotes from moms on Britney's VMA performance:

J's mom [paraphrased]: "She was either really, really drunk, or she was just so nervous that... she got really, really drunk to calm her nerves."

my mom: "She's just really lost her confidence! And, well, that was all she ever had!"

more ads that don't make sense

If I had my camera phone, I would just show you this simple billboard ad rather than the over-explanation I'm about to go into. But, in the frat district of UT, there is a billboard for Natural Light beer that I pass every day on the way to school. It is of a man's hand reaching out of a shower for his Natty Light, and there are just the words "Been There" underneath. It's pretty straightforward. Except for the question: is this an ad for beer? Or for AA? Because honestly, and I know I'm not in the frat demographic they are targeting, I don't think I have ever "been there." And if I had "been" where I was drinking my cheap-ass alcohol from inside the shower because I couldn't go 6 minutes without, I don't think I'd want a whimsical reminder of it to try to sell me some more failure.

one more character

One more person from my summer statistics course was the kid that sat right in front of me every day. The only thing I ever heard him say was the last day, when he said, to no one, "Dude's funny," about Crackers, the class clown. One odd thing about this kid was that he wore the exact same shirt, every day we had class. It's very possible he got a bunch of them for free or something, so I won't make fun of that fact (maybe he's very poor! Or doesn't value fashion! I have respect for those things really!). But I will make fun of the shirt itself which said:

If you can read this
You must be wearing Focus contact lenses.

Since I had every single classtime to contemplate the inanity of the statement, I of course now have to share it with all of you. It took me a while to stop expecting "thank a teacher" to be the second line, so the first indignity is the implication that being able to see the letters is the hard part of reading. Hey! Learning to read was hard and it sometimes is still hard! If I have dyslexia, Focus contact lenses are not helping! But your blue font does make it difficult to focus on the text, so thanks for that! Also! I am NOT wearing Focus contact lenses, and I would imagine the vast majority of people are able to read that are also NOT wearing Focus contact lenses, so you lose all credibility with your "must." After a summer of getting unreasonably angry about this, I'm pretty determined not to ever, ever get Focus contact lenses.

happy birthday, dad, who doesn't read this!

I am now officially a student. I had a class yesterday, so.... student. However, I am also on book 7 of Harry Potter--subsequent to a re-reading of the entire series. So right now I am torn between reading a lot of stuff for my upcoming classes (letting Hermione be my guide), or reading The Deathy Hallows, which I actually read less than a month ago. It shouldn't be that hard a decision. Also, sleep should be in the mix somewhere, but for some reason it's not.

Anyway, I'm vascillating between being so anxious I cry about school, and between blithely planning the next series of children's books I will re-read. To calm myself down at one point, I watched The Saint. As per usual, the first 30 minutes just made me either more anxious, or laugh hysterically. I almost turned it off because I thought it wasn't doing any good, but I did watch all of it, and then I felt perfectly at peace. And honestly, everything has gone better since then. So, mental note, watch The Saint when worried about anything. It has Elisabeth Shue, Val Kilmer, Oxford, and Russia. And finely crafted dialogue. In fact, maybe instead of reading The Golden Compass again, I will begin my screenplay: The Saint 2: Back in the Habit. Or maybe "Back in the Halo" would be more appropriate.

I haven't updated. Everything that has happened that I think "Oh, haha, that was funny, I should blog about that" completely escapes me when I sit down to type. Possibly now that I finally (after a year) got my router to work, I can blog from bed, when important thoughts occur to me.

Other things that I did: went to New Orleans, had two houseguests (hi Mia! hi Leigh!), hosted a Shadowrun game (and blew up one helicopter with another helicopter! With my brain!), washed my phone (no pictures for a while), got my SNES cleaned (goes without saying I've been playing a lot of Tetris Attack), and oh yes, got a kitten.

The new kitten's name is Ladybird. Xander mostly thinks she's the greatest toy I have ever brought home for him. But sometimes he is annoyed that she reacts to violently to his stepping on her face. She's getting used to him. He's at least 5 times as big as her, and the size differential shows signs of only slight decrease in the future.

I don't know if I blogged about this, but from the start, my condo's shower has been boiling hot. It starts off cold, but as soon as it warms up, it's boiling hot, and you can't control the temperature and pressure separately, so I avoided long showers, and took baths pretty often. A friend tried to fix it, but it only resulted in boiling hot water shooting from the wall at firehouse strength, and as it was midnight, and it took a while for the emergency plumber to arrive, the whole two bedroom apartment was a steambath, even though luckily my friend was able to deflect most of the actual water into the tub. So anyway, two results to follow with: I might at long last actually be getting it fixed tomorrow, and mom will be coming in September and we'll repaint some parts of the apartment.

So, at this point, as I have googled Elisabeth Shue twice since starting this entry 8 minutes ago, I think it's safe to say that I like to google Elisabeth Shue. But I'm always disappointed by it. I think I secretly hope it will make me her friend if I do it enough.

Now I've googled Tetris Attack Tournament (more on that later... one day), so I've branchced out.

But now, really, really, really I will read this article on foreign policy. Even though I have four days with no classes.

trapper keeper

I'm all in school and everything! Yesterday I graphed a third degree polynomial function! Then I all up and took the partial derivative of a three-variable function!

Then last night, at second work, I started hyperventilating about all the math I will be expected to know come September.

I'm trying to work out what was different when I was a good, orderly student (i.e. 3rd grade), and I have determined the crucial variable is that was the last year I had a Lisa Frank unicorn Trapper Keeper (R) . Therefore, I plan to make an old fashioned back-to-school purchase of notebook paper and a Trapper Keeper (the new Fall line is out), and maybe some mechanical pencils. And a pencil box. And lady-bug safety scissors.

So, I'm trying to read something public-affairsy, readying for school. I don't think this really counts, but I read this.

But I really feel comfortable summarizing it with the David Cross quip making fun of simplified explanations for terrorism. So not only do I not read the original MIT paper the article came from, I dumb down the article, YouTube style. That's how I roll:

Just as much as meets the eye

Today, I went against every natural instinct I have to Wal-Mart*, in search of a product-placed*, movie-as-giant-toy-commercial* toy tie-in, all-American, gas-guzzling* Honda Civic** Si Decepticon.

They didn't have it in the Transformer Aisle* (perhaps it's not released yet), but they DID have a Mr. Potato Head Transformer**.

Optimash-Prime

Transformers was good! I'm second-guessing a lot of stuff afterward, but I definitely enjoyed it as I watched it. It kind of makes you*** want to drive a Camaro real fast. And then your ragtag convoy saves the world!

*These things bother me.

**These things delight me.

***(me)

I have between 1 and 2 tests tomorrow

Total study time: 10 minutes.

I have, however, done all my laundry and put it away, gone through all my mail, washed the dishes, meditated (then fell asleep sitting up), went down to the gym (which was locked), drawn a bath (it takes a few hours to get to a non-scalding temperature, so I have the actual bath to look forward to still), vaccuumed, and restacked my boxes of bamboo flooring.

I also found this video which claims to show how that egg toast breakfast was made on V for Vendetta. Well, it doesn't make that specific claim. Probably because the end result looks more like my own messy attempts at it rather than the movie version. Their version allows a lot more wasted toast (the chewy center part, too).

Two things about me:

• I eat only the center of pancakes, unless I'm very, very hungry.
• I read magazines backwards.

sample space

In my statistics class, I've been forced to find entertainment in my fellow classmates. At first I thought the young man with his arms and neck choked with tattoos would be most interesting--he got irrationally angry when the teacher was not explaining things to him, and would testily say "thank you" and stare pointedly at his hands after each interchange. I also was forced to find humor in the kiss-up girl in the first row so that she didn't annoy me (I later found out she wasn't on-the-ball because she's a statistics expert, but because she's already taken and failed the course once). But for the last few classes, my hero has been the Eating Boy. EB has great timing that makes everything he says unintentionally funny. His timing is because before he says ANYTHING, he stuffs about 5 animal crackers in his mouth, and continues to put them in his mouth as he talks.

The teacher often has to get a tall person to help her do things. EB is pretty tall, and usually obliging, but once she asked him to stand on his desk to turn on the projector on the ceiling, and he calmly put a cracker in his mouth and said "I don't do desks." She had to stare at him a few moments to realize he really wasn't going to budge. The teacher was, for about the fourth time, wanting to show us a slide she has of mammoth and elephant tusks, and how at the extremes, their normal curves intersect, and that you wouldn't be certain what kind of tusk you were looking at if it was in this intersection. This time, she began talking about a museum in Lincoln, Nebraska that has six full mammoth skeletons, and how astoundingly huge they are. For someone so stressed about the accelerated nature of this course that she rarely answers students' questions to their satisfaction, she can get off on a tangent. And with all the interesting examples that are used in the textbook problems, it's easy for all of us to get off on a tangent. Anyway, after a full discussion about mammoth bones and current digs in Nebraska, there was a silence as she sidled back up to the board to segue back into the actually math of the problem. Crackers (I like this name better than EB) finished chewing his mouthful and said "You are crazy about mammoths, lady." The next problem was finding the human threshhold to detect sulfur in wine. Tangent: "There are people who's whole job is to smell things! Like wine! And... perfume! And.... lots of things." Her tangent wasn't especially interesting in this case. And I don't know how many other things people get paid big money to smell. Anyway, Crackers said with uncharacteristic enthusiasm "Have you guys heard that thing about asparagus?" (no response from class) "Some people can actually smell asparagus" (no response) "In PEE." Another girl responds "Yes, it's one of those genetic things--you either can or you can't." I don't know what the teacher was doing at this point. After the class had no further response, Crackers stuffed his mouth, nodded sagely and said to himself smugly "I can. I can smell it."

Furthering occurrences that don't translate well into stories: at a bar the other night, a man came back looking for his wallet by our table, and found it! He was so overjoyed, he wanted to buy us all a beer. He left and came back several times, repeatedly expressing interest in buying us a beer. He said "Thank you! Thank you so much for guarding my wallet! Or... for not stealing my wallet!" (slight awkward silence on our part) "Or, for not having the wherewithal to turn around and look behind you!" He ended up buying us a pitcher of beer at about 1:58am. This was why we hadn't wanted a free beer--closing time. But we were glad to share in the man's overwhelming joy.

And here is something my boyfriend said the other night, about Juliet from Lost. "I would probably watch a porn with her in it." (I glare). "What? I would!" And just for the verisimilitude, picture Cliff from Veronica Mars saying this.

i've had some feta cheese in my fridge for a week, and I haven't done anything with it. I realized that I wasn't sure what feta tasted like. I knew I'd had it before, but I kept imagining cottage cheese, which I knew was cottage cheese. So I took an enormous bite (because that's how much came off in the fork). You might be thinking "oh, one time I, too, had an enormous bite of feta like that." But let me stop you right there because I'm pretty sure I have taken the biggest bite of feta cheese ever in the history of cheese. And I'm also pretty sure it had gone bad. You know what, I don't even want to talk about this anymore.

I am going to go ahead and have a serving of this peach cobbler which is green and black in parts (and was last night when I took it out of the oven), but I'm not even going to question that. My taste buds' sense of horror threshhold has ballooned ridiculously in the last 10 minutes.

And now I'm going to watch House, which shockingly features a brain tumor according to the summary.