My sink reminds me of a desperate game of tetris; if the dishes reach the top, game over.  Actually, they already have reached the top - the goal now is to keep them from piling up so high that they slide off the countertop.  I'm almost tempted to clean some... too busy, though.  Plus, it just doesn't seem fun.  I never really liked tetris.  Except for the backwards R.  Backwards Russian R's kick ass.

  All in all, a good weekend.  PASSED MY 2nd YEAR EXAM!  ...and Blake and Aaron visited.  (Haven't seen Blake in ages.)  Also, I was made to realize that I really don't know of anything fun to do in Seattle.  My social life really doesn't involve the barhopping activities typical of my age demographic.  As a result, I had no idea where to go play pool when Aaron and Blake asked.  Rather embarrassing.

  Grrr... I just threw away the receipt, too.  Bought Metroid hunter as a reward for passing my 2nd year exam... and in the box was Metroid Pinball.  Damn pinball.  It better be fun, because the bastards at EB Games have made it clear that their mistake is my problem, unless I can find the receipt.  Bastards.

  Hmm... need to pick up Cassondra from Christine's place.  Until next month,

  Peace and Cookies!

  Heh, all these immigration protests amuse me.  Good luck getting your message through to our politicians, since you CAN'T VOTE!  Hahaha... suckers.  Rallying for immigrant rights is an interesting thing to do... see, immigrants DO have rights.  Plenty of rights.  So long as they're LEGAL.

  Of course, the crazy "crackdown law" would never work, even if it passed.  Making illegal immigrants felons?  Sure, I guess - it's not a smart or enforceable idea, but "illegal" and "felon" sort-of go together.  It's the felonizing of the people who help them that I find ridiculous.  All we have to do to solve this illegal immigration nonsense is enforce existing employment laws.  A crackdown on businesses that hire illegal immigrants would dry up demand, but there would still be enough temp-work visas to keep strawberries cheap.  Mexico would get most of its hardest working, most motivated citizens back, and that country (assuming no major government mismanagement) would start to not suck.  (Though I'd prefer that America opened legal immigration to anyone who fulfilled certain requirements, such as learning English, taking naturalization classes, etc.  - that way we get the hard-working ones back, and they can integrate better.  This is why the McCain bill makes more sense to me...)

  An immigrant "boycott work" day?  Hmm... I wonder what sort of affect an American "boycott tourism" day would have on Mexico

  Anyway, now that the rant is out of my system... yeah, nothing more to talk about.

  So there's this post on a bulletin board in the Chem building advertising Darfur fest (or some such)  - The illustration is the typical chained, scarred hand reaching for help.  I take issue with the slogan: "Genocide is Everyone's Concern."  I think what they meant to say is "Genocide SHOULD BE Everyone's Concern" because, realistically, everyone is NOT concerned with Genocide.  I'm guessing that most people who see that poster are thinking something more along these lines:  "Yeah, good luck with that genocide thing.  Hope you don't get too wiped out and dead and stuff.  We'll send food or weapons or whatever it is you said you needed - if we have extra, and remember, and aren't busy that day..."  Even more likely: most people just notice the interesting artwork for .5 of a second, then continue on to the bathroom, because they really have to pee.  The simple fact is that people are concerned with what directly affects them.  If you could link genocide to high gas prices, there'd be a hell of a lot more concern.  (Speaking of which: we need a new source of energy, dammit.  Fuck gas.)

  So, yeah, I've pretty much officially semi-abandoned Xanga.

  In other news: my birthday is tomorrow.  Yay for food and power.  (Power being the power bill my parents are going to help me pay, which will be my very non-exciting but much-needed birthday present.  It would be cooler if the "power" from two sentences ago referred to the amazing super-human powers I was going to attain on my 24th birthday, but alas, those come on the twenty-FIFTH birthday.  The golden birthday.  So I'm waiting one more year for the superpowers, then.  Yup.  Sooon...  just one more year, and I take control of this pathetic planet with my amazing and finally-activated god-powers.  You pitiful mortals will finally understand the true meaning of oppression, suffering, and free pizza!  Bwahahahahaha!   -the pizza will have anchovies, by the way.  That's the "suffering" part.)

  Oh, the Melting Pot was truly a-fucking-mazing.  (Hmm... "fucking" doesn't really fit there... I'll make a note of that.)  Christine and I have been together for over a year now - we celebrated last Thursday with 3 crazy-awesome courses of gourmet fondue.  (Plus an extra salad course, which was tasty but less exciting.)  Nothing beats roasting a gourmet gram-cracker-crumb-covered-marshmallow over a pot of chocolate that's covered with liquor that's on fire!   And looking at your smiling girlfriend through the sexy blue liquor fire.  Then dipping the marshmallow in the chocolate below the fire and eating it.  Hell yeah.

  So maybe this is too much information:  Since pirates are way fucking cool, Christine and I figured we'd watch a movie that attests to this.  Specifically, a movie about pirates fucking.  (Seriously.  Luckily, female pirates were over-represented.)  It's the first actual porn video that either of us have watched - we mostly just laughed at the bad acting.  Then we got tired and went to sleep halfway through it.  It didn't exactly have the expected effect.

  Damn... no good April fools ideas.  I could say that I won the lottery and invested my millions in a marijuana growth operation, but you wouldn't believe me.  Oh well.

  Oh, but this is good: tonight, you will lose exactly one hour of your life.  No foolin'.  It's daylight savings time, bitches!

  Current influences:  Howl's Moving Castle, and Night Watch.  Goodbye, formulaic Hollywood drivel - hellO sexy foreign flicks.  I am currently unable to watch other movies, secure in the knowledge that I will feel as if I'd wasted two hours of my life on something WAY less cool than Moving Castle/Night Watch.  (It's just a phase, of course.  I felt the same way after the first Lord of the Rings and the first Matrix.)

  Howl's Moving Castle: kickass battleships, weird-ass magic, and a badass fire demon.  (This ghetto plot summary has been brought to you by the letter "ass".)

  Night Watch: Think Matrix + Underworld + really cool subtitles... and, unfortunately, -English.  But it's better than it sounds - the characters aren't slaves to special effects, and for the most part aren't even cool.  But that's a good thing.  In the Matrix and Underworld everyone wears the stereotypical gothic trench coats/leather/whatever.  And Incidentally, in good Hollywood form, everyone but the older/goofy male characters are unreasonably attractive.  In Night Watch, people are REAL.  Company uniforms, threadbare patched coats, and (in the case of one very odd character) 50's style Russian grandma-clothing.  The characters have powers, but they're subtle; not flashy and explicitly described like in X-men.  The "good" and "evil" sides (light and dark) start off as stereotypes, but things become sufficiently complicated as the movie progresses.  Hell, the light and dark factions aren't even at war, they mostly just annoy each other... though that begins to change, too.  Anyway, in summary, it kicks ass.  Watch it.

  More current influences: Confessions of an Economic Hit-man  Damn good book  - and it's no wonder the US Government is grasping at straws to discredit it.  It's convenient that the Government can't be directly implemented in most of what the book describes, since most of what goes on is government-encouraged private-sector stuff.  Of course, on the other hand, the book is essentially a personal account - not a statistical/scientific expose*.  While nothing he claims seems particularly unbelievable (most of it I'd seen in history texts already, albeit from a different perspective) it couldn't hurt to throw in a few more statistics w. references.

  Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong is pretty damn interesting, too.  It gets preachy and is perhaps too obsessed with political correctness, though.  (Political correctness is essentially anathema to what the author is trying to do: just portray history as it actually was.  He probably doesn't realize that that political correctness is just revisionism in another form.)

*Just so you know, I'm boycotting those stupid slanty-things the French decorate their words with.  This is English, dammit, we don't need no slanty things.

  I Watched Seattle's Q13 Fox News last night, for some reason.  As I expected, it's pretty conservative - especially for Seattle.  Fox spent almost half its program hyping up the death of a handful of teenagers who died in a car crash while drinking and doing drugs.  It included a long "message to the viewers" from a parent of one of the kids that went something like this: "Never let your children have any freedoms at all, or the evil devil-children around them will convert them to the dark side and they will start drinking and doing drugs - and then they will die and you will feel horrible, just like I did."  (Okay, so he didn't say EXACTLY that, but it was close.)  This didn't surprise me.  What surprised me is that, in a brief interlude between news stories, they played part of an Alice and Chains song: "No Excuses".  Bitchin' .  What would've been cooler: playing ACDC's "Highway to Hell" during the entire "troubled teens drive drunk and die in car crash" segment.  That would have been WAY more interesting.

   The other day Adam mentioned that the feminist club at his college had an awareness-raising bake-sale.  I love the irony.  I like feminism, but I would still have mocked them if I had the chance: "So, you're making us aware that... a woman's place is still in the kitchen?"  Since hardcore feminists tend to have no sense of humor whatsoever, I probably would've had a large welt on my forehead from a high-velocity cookie impact.  But hey, free cookie

  My undergrads take their big final tomorrow.  The forecast calls for an ETERNITY of Grading one of Niels' arcane, complicated tests.  Multiple choice has been slain; evil reigns supreme.

  Christine's dad's wedding was pretty fun.  It was an informal but traditional Jewish ceremony, complete with the stomping-on-the-glass thing.  Damn, breaking stuff kicks ass.  I know there's a lot of symbolism & deeper meaning surrounding the glass-breaking tradition, but at my wedding it would be destruction for destruction's sake.  (I think I could get away with that since I'm, y'know, not Jewish.)

  The Oregon coast (the wedding's location) is beautiful - especially the few stretches that aren't cluttered with annoying, tourist-trap towns.  Reminds me a lot of the Vancouver island coast, but warmer and more cliffy - and with funny "Tsunami hazard" signs that shows a stick figure getting crushed by a giant wave.  I even got to see Sea Lion Cave - apparently it's the largest sea cave in the world.  (Though I'm guessing they didn't research that one too hard.  Ignorance is bliss - or sounds more impressive, at least.)  Basically, it sounded and smelled like hell.  (Inhuman groaning, moaning, and other guttural noises mixed with a howling, fowl-smelling wind.)  With a good enough imagination, it LOOKED like hell, too.  (Make the lighting a little more red, imagine the sea lions as turd-demons, etc.  It's not too hard to do - sea lions are already turd shaped, turd colored, and turd scented.)  We even had to get there via a crazy long elevator ride.  All that place needs is a big sign inscribed "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" - and some fake horns and pitchforks for the workers.  That would maybe, possibly, make it worth the eight bucks.

  Damn.  February is short.  It must have short parents.

   And now, for another famous "Way Too Much Information" news bulletin!   After two nights of convulsing uncontrollably and pissing out my ass, life is relatively back to normal.  Diarrhea, you are my bitch lover.

  Stop grimacing - it's not like it's contagious via the internet.  And you didn't actually have to EXPERIENCE it.  So feel better about your life, dammit.

  Normally game-nights at Christine's place are lots of fun, but I'm currently bitter since I was eliminated from the capitalism game (like monopoly, but more fun) just 3 rounds in.  Capitalist dogs!  The flags that fly over the cities of your grandchildren shall bear the hammer and sickle!  Arr!  (Communist pirates kick ass.)

  Escaped to Walla Walla for the weekend - fun times.  Watched my bro's volleyball games; he got the all-tournament award.  (and played pretty damn impressively - he has all the family's volleyball genes, apparently.)  Of course, I got sick right after I left town - probably all the homemade liquor I drunk.  (Mmmm... homemade liquor.  Methanol does a body good.  Except for that going blind part...)  I have a lot of respect for a guy who makes homemade absinthe - Heidi's friends kick ass.  (I'm not naming them because, last I checked, our father-knows-best government has made absinthe and alcohol distillation illegal.  Also, I don't even remember their names.)

  February 15th should officially be called "afterglow day".  Not only would this be an appropriate name, but it would give single people another reason to be bitter.  (Well, y'know, assuming they didn't find a random hook-up...)  Part of the fun of Valentines day (February 14, "single awareness day") is nurturing bitterness and resentment for all mankind, plotting the downfall of all the world's disgustingly cute couples.  But not this year, of course

  Ah, life is fun...     

  This is officially the FIRST "real" Valentines' day for me - the first time I've ever had a girlfriend on the 14th of February.  (Okay, so 5 years ago I was dating Kellie on the 14th, but we weren't actually together for the 14th since we were going to school on opposite sides of the state...)

  So... no bitter rant from me this year.  I still think the holiday is silly and fabricated - but it's amazing how far a few roses, chocolates, and/or heart-shaped balloons will get a guy   I realize now that I should've embraced the day in years past - maybe I just wasn't enough of a bastard to take advantage of the fact that single girls are (on average) so lonely and bitter on the 14th, hooking up is like shooting fish in a barrel.  And if sappy chocolates and flowers aren't your style, play the "I'm just a platonic friend, also made bitter by this horrible holiday - here, let's share some ice-cream and later we can drown our sorrows in alcohol" angle.  Damn - why do I get all the good ideas now?  But I shouldn't complain - I'll definitely be having fun tonight   And, come to think of it, the ice cream bit is still a good idea...