Strange - I've been spending dozens of fruitless hours at work trying to find a good 2nd-year out-of-field project... but I came up with my first worthwhile idea last night, right before I went to sleep. Strange, how good ideas strike at such strange times. I guess all that time spent at work was wasted. Oh well. If I cared about that, I wouldn't be wasting my current workday writing in Xanga - heh.
Christine got her hair dyed red again. Mmmm... dead sexy.
Aha, I'm a genius! Instead of washing my blue jeans, I can just erase the stains with a blue sharpie! That totally saves me, like... three bucks in laundry money! Sharpies are awesome.
Awesome weather today. It was so windy while I was jogging, it felt like I was running underwater. Until I turned around - then it felt like flying. Fun times.
I've been saving a lot of money lately: my haircut expenses have been zero for the past few months. Of course, it's getting tougher and tougher to see with all that damn hair in my face - but I'm also saving money on hats! Shaggy hair means I don't need a hat to stay warm. Bonus.
Yeah, so I have nothing important to write about. Time for video games.
Oh yeah: Go Seahawks! I think. I'm not really sure who they are (other than being some sort of American football team, obviously) or why I should care (other than to seem normal, though I don't usually bother with that), but apparently it's a big deal and Seattle-ites will be watching the superbowl for more than just the ads this year. Maybe I'll use the superbowl as an excuse to drive around without traffic, since everyone will be at home watching the game and the streets will be mostly empty... except that I don't really like driving just for the hell of it. Damn, I need to find a way to take advantage of this superbowl distraction... hmm...
So apparently if you draw pictures of mohammed you're going to get some fun reactions by closed-minded people who have no conception of free speech. It makes me wish I was in charge of creating an entrance exam for an art school: "in the space below, provide an illustration of the prophet mohammed." Seriously though, why can't muslims be like the other religious wackos and think to themselves "well, they'll all burn in hell/never reach nirvana/face the wrath of Yahweh/etc.", instead of holding non-muslims responsible for muslim law? I find it humorous that the Egyptian government and a host of other arabic nations/organizations is calling for an apology from the government of Denmark - which has rightly refused to apologize, since the mohammed cartoons were published by an independent company and had nothing to do with the government. Apparently people from the middle east don't even understand how a free country operates - I feel even sillier now, living in a country (America) that's trying to promote "freedom and democracy in the middle east." Riiiight. Good luck with that. I mean, I know it's just a stupid cover for stealing oil, but the lie becomes even more fragile when one is aware of just how incompatible oppression-free democracy is with that region. I say we let them have whatever system of government works for them - and purposefully ignore them when they whine about some religious taboo of theirs we're (we = people in relatively free countries) breaking. Damn, I wish we didn't need oil so badly. Oh wait, if the US government spent a tiny fraction of the Iraq war's cost on alternative energy research, or alternative energy subsidies, we'd already be significantly less dependant on it. Fucking dumbass government... grrr.
Heh... it's funny, seeing mid-east wackos burn Danish flags instead of the typical British and American fare. I mean, it's fucking DENMARK. It's one of the world's smallest (not counting Greenland), most insignificant countries... and its flag is being torched all over the middle east. If I was Danish right now, I'd be proud that my country was finally important enough to warrant that sort of attention - even though the reason for that attention is ridiculous and the credit goes to a private company, not the country on a whole. Oh hey... I think I'm 1/4 Danish by blood, come to think of it. Sweet.
Hmm... in other news - last Thursday I moved from my exile in the far corner of the lab to an actual office desk... could get a bit interesting, since there can be waaay too much estrogen in that office. (I guess I'll just leave to work on the computers/clean the lab if it gets too gossippy or something... in any case, I'm not particularly allergic to estrogen or I wouldn't be sharing an apartment with my sister and hanging out with my girlfriend at every opportunity.)
I just watched the Bird Cage... and now whenever I see a girl who looks a little mannish, my first impulse is to assume she's a drag queen. There's a prime candidate in a quiz section I teach - she's built exactly like me, (tall & flat chested) has a gender-neutral name, etc. Damn, that movie is a bad influence... but it would be kinda funny if my initial impulse was right, and she was really a man. Weird, but funny.
Found an interesting blurb in the news today.
"The Legislature rarely changes the borders or definitions of counties, though last year it added a sentence to the description of King County to declare the county named for civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The county was originally named for slaveholder William Rufus DeVane King of Alabama, vice president under Franklin Pierce from 1853 to 1857."
A strange sort of irony, that. Though I'd much prefer my county to be named after Martin Luther King Jr. than some old slaveowning bastard, it's not like the state legislature can just re-write history with a law. But I suppose they can "re-name" the county, even if it's technically the same name. Weird.
So I was looking through the deleted scenes for the Serenity movie, and I noticed that there was a pretty long scene where Inara talks to some random lady at her temple/school. This lady is not seen anywhere else in the movie. It had me wondering... if you act for a movie, but your only scene is deleted, does it still count? You'd be telling your friends "no really, I was in the movie, I swear! Well technically they cut my scene from the movie... but I had like, six or seven lines! My character was badass! Just buy the DVD and find the deleted scenes to see for yourself." Sad, really.
Life is still happy and relatively uninteresting. My Friday workday was unusual, though - spent the entire afternoon deep-cleaning the lab. Half of the wastes and random glassware/lab equipment we ("we" being the relatively new people in the lab) took care of were from grad students that weren't even working in the lab anymore. Imagine deep-cleaning your refrigerator after a year or so of neglect (I do this roughly once a year) but imagine that your refrigerator is about the size of your apartment, and full of festering chemical and biological wastes. Yum.
Apparently MySpace is the new big thing. Whatever. I joined a while back with Christine to find cool friends in the Seattle area. That didn't work... but I ended up finding all my old friends from high-school and college - or they found me, I should say. (I never made a single friend-request on MySpace, and now I have 25 friends in my list. Admittedly, one of the "friends" is Tom, that guy who comes with MySpace when you sign up - kinda like the generic picture that comes with the picture frame. On a related note, I should make an online friends site and include myself in everyone's friends list by default... instant "comes with the picture frame" style popularity. "Brandon Kier: your generic default friend.")
I'm proud - I made chocolate mousse all by myself. It's a rich honey coconut mousse, and it's extra-dense because I didn't whip the cream enough. (Heh heh... whipppped. Heh. Okay, sorry, that was a Beavis & Butthead moment there.) Anyway, Christine will still like it. It's our 9 month anniversary today. Craziness.
Wow, Trader Joe's is the best grocery store ever. Weird, exotic, healthy food... and it's CHEAP! I have no idea how they do it - maybe they just aren't corporate bastards, so they can afford to charge less. (Other grocery stores have a "corporate bastard fee", methinks.) I'm currently eating delicious gnocchi that I bought at Joe's for a buck thirty - and it's too much for one meal. Gnocchi rocks... but it's spelled funny. Oh well.
I caught the salvation bus this morning. I call these freak scheduling mishaps "salvation buses" because: as soon as you miss your regular bus and you're moping around pissed off that you'll be into work late and wondering what on earth you're going to do with an extra fifteen minutes in the rain at a boring-as-hell bus stop... salvation! Another bus was just 60 seconds behind! Not only that, but the ride is faster and you catch up to the bus in front of you, because there's narry a soul at the bus stops (besides a few lost ones like me.) Hmm... I wonder what "narry" even means...
Tomorrow is going to be CRAZY. Quiz sections from 8:30 through 5:30, only a couple breaks. Ugh. Luckily, I thought ahead and stocked up on caffeine.
Heh, so this is odd: the first thing that comes up in the Xanga spellchecker for "gnocci" is "genocide". I just about ate delicious genocide that I bought at Joe's...
(Also, ironically, the spellchecker does not recognize "spellchecker".)
I need to invent a new kind of soda. I don't know exactly what flavor it would be, but I have a good name and slogan: CARBONATRIX. -The sexiest possible way to suck calcium from your bones.
Apparently I'm a pretty good GM. Yay for role-playing. Never tried it before; I can definitely see the appeal (though having fun, interesting people is important.)
So last Christmas (which was technically on the 29th of December) my family started watching "A Christmas Story" - y'know, the old movie set in the 50s where the family eats duck at a chinese restaurant on Christmas day, and the kid gets his tongue stuck to a pole, and the main character gets in huge trouble for saying "the F-word", and a lamp in the shape of a woman's leg is delivered as a major award... so right during the part of the movie where the lamp is being delivered, I hear the doorbell and find a package of about the same size and shape as the one in the movie. It has a huge "Fragile" written across it, just like the movie, and I open it up (just when the dad in the movie is opening his package) and it's the exact same thing: it's a lamp in the shape of a leg. Holy shit - my family is awesome. It took me a while to figure out that it wasn't just a freaky coincidence.
Oh hey, I scanned my maps a while back, I should upload a few.
Happy New-Year! Well, it's still sort-of new. Anyway, I had a good time on the 31st/1st - mostly just walked the Ave with Christine, celebrating vicariously through the crazy street kids. (They were chugging bottles of hard liquor, and running in the streets and yelling at cars. Fun times.) I had my new years' kiss (it was a good one!) in the Well-lit Wells-Fargo ATM alcove, across the street from the big digital clock on the intersection of 45th and the Ave. (The clock, unfortunately, switches back & forth between time and temperature. Convenient if you want to know exactly how much you should shiver, but frustrating in that we'll never know EXACTLY when the new year arrived, only that it was 42 degrees when it did.) The only alcohol I consumed was a twisted shooter I bought in Canada - tequila and lime for me, strawberry cream vodka for Christine. (She claimed that she liked it, but I couldn't convince her to drink more. She's 21 and has never been so much as buzzed, let alone drunk. But I've probably mentioned that before...)
New Years is, of course, a silly and arbitrary holiday - the only non-arbitrary yearly events worth celebrating are the solstices and the equinoxes. Even those are pretty boring - they mark turning points/midpoints in slow transitions between the Earth's seasons. If I was in charge, the yearly event to celebrate would be the night when the MOON WAS LIT ON FIRE AND DEADLY CHUNKS OF FLAMING ROCK WERE HURLED TOWARDS EARTH, KILLING MILLIONS! By celebrate, I mean hide from. Mwahahahaha! Foolish Mortals!
Damn... I made Christine late for work (technically the restaurant did, but it was my idea) so now I have to think of a way to make it up to her. Plus it's New-Years Eve Day, and I have no idea what to do... boyfriends are supposed to plan fun, exciting dates for New-Years, right? Bleh. In any case, this New-Years should be less eventful than the last one, which is a good thing. Last year was kinda fun, but a little too weird for me. I'm pretty sure I left out a few key details from my Xanga entry... being drunk probably didn't help my memory all that much. Speaking of which, it's been almost exactly a year since I've been drunk. New Years seems like a good time to end the soberness streak... but it would be more fun if Christine was a drinker. Oh well. Overall, I'd say it's a good thing she isn't.
Christmas was awesome... I'll write more about that later, right now I feel too stressed. Which is silly, since I don't really have anything to do for the next couple of days. Meh.
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