Goodbye 2011

Well 2011, it's been...fun.

But now, with a little too much glee perhaps, it's time to say goodbye. I'm done with you. I'm moving on to bigger and better things. To a year less...dramatic. To good things. To happiness and ridiculousness and adventures.

It seems only fitting to leave on an epic note, and so, with that, today's song of the day is Dragonforce.



I'll see you all around the bend.
Love and Stuff,
Goose and LittleFoot.

Friday

Friday was a miserable day. Just one of those days when I should have stayed in bed. Things started to unravel from the beginning, culminating with me throwing my (live) paycheck into the hospitals trash compactor and compacting it before realizing my mistake. Yeah. I totally had to climb in there and dig it out. Which was lame.

But like all days it ended. The sun came up today. And everything is okay.

I've spent the last 24 hours or so trying desperately to get some videos uploaded to youtube for you of the fish tanks. Clearly youtube is an impossible monster. One which is not easily defeated. I have uploaded 3, yes, THREE videos in 24 hours. BAH! But fear not Dear Friend, persistence is a quality I have in spades, and I am not nearly about to give up!

Lots of love!

Song of the Day for Thursday!

Song of the Day for Wednesday!

Heavens : Patent Pending



Bring your bored, bring your broken hearted
Got a vessel that we've chartered
Into the wide open sea
The two of us dearly departed

Bring a book with a happy ending
a remix of the message sending
Shining clean, this guillotine
New and improved
Patent pending

Place a curse on the hearse we're driving
Cut the brake lines, and the dying
Glad to be traumatically
Against the ropes, lost all hope trying
Finding ways to break the silence
And to quench our taste for violence
Shadow free monstrosities
Crafting the fine art of patience.

Reading lists.

So ASU is hosting a book collection competition which I feel compelled to enter. It's free and first prize is $600. Seems to me that this is the universe's way of validating my ever growing personal library.

Problem is the breadth of said collection makes it difficult to define.

Quite frankly I'm struggling to find any sort of cohesive element aside from a general 'fiction' or 'literature' which seems a little vague. Or possibly 'post-modern lit' which is vaguer still but probably a better fit for much of it, but forces me to leave out authors I love (Carsten Jensen, Tolstoy) and leaves the whole mess feeling rather unrepresentative of me.

See, this is where my issues with specificity become so damn apparent. I have a really REALLY hard time defining what I like because I like EVERYTHING (except Vonnegut, of course) and more than that, I crave variety. Require it really. I'm easily bored, I loathe repetition, and I can't read books by the same author in sequence.

SO I guess the question then becomes, if you were to categorize my taste in books, how would YOU do it?

Lots of love Dear Friend, hope you're holidays were at least tolerable, and that this coming year is better than the last. <3

Oi.

I just spent the last 3 hours frantically calling my dad (like, every 6 minutes), totally paranoid out of my brain that he was sick/hurt/dead (TOC is out of town). He's fine. Left his phone at work.

See now, this is what happens when Dad spends all his time talking to me about how short life is and living for the moment, and how he could die at any moment. (We've had a spate of recent deaths among friends and family. We're all a little off our game).

I go all wonky every time he doesn't immediately pick up his phone and sit at home teetering somewhere between having a total breakdown and doing the 'rational' thing and calling the police.

Sheesh.
I need a chill pill.
For serious.

Song of the DAYYYYYYYYYYYY:

(addendum: clearly I don't follow up on Goose's song of the day posts since I clearly just posted the same song she did the day before. OOOPS! So here's a new song...one that's not a duplicate. Lol.)



Also, Goose, I MAY have uploaded my entire Sarina Paris CD to your ipod...also possibly Ultimate Dance Party 2000... :P
Enjoy!

Wait. What happened to winter break?

Well classes officially start up again next Thursday, which seems somehow...unfair. Don't get me wrong. I love school, and I fear that I will be permanently lost without it when I leave, but two short weeks somehow seems not nearly long enough to recover from the previous semester.

I know that at least my brand of finals-fatigue is self prophesied. I know that TECHNICALLY I could do a lighter, one could argue more reasonable, load each semester. But when I'm not challenged, really, really challenged, when I'm not scrambling to keep up, to claw some kernel of knowledge out of the mess that is higher education, I falter. I fail to do much of anything. I look at how little is asked of me and I ask myself what's the point? Why bother? And then I don't. Bother that is. In fact, I don't do much of anything. I just sort of drift through the semester. Bored and listless. Indifferent to my nosediving GPA.

At this point though, I've had enough apathetic semesters to be able to write the book on the link between boredom and poor marks so I'm doing things my own way. I have hellishly impossible semesters. Tandem semesters really. I take classes I think I'll never be able to pass, and lots of them, and I flourish.

But by the time I've stumbled out of the jungle that is finals I'm exhausted. Physically and mentally fatigued and in need of a good long nap. Possibly a small hibernation. All I want is chocolate, possibly some cake, and a cozy bed...for a month or so. Long enough for me to be able to speak in coherent sentences not just the me-want-num-nums kind of caveman talk I find myself babbling around the time I'm polishing off my last research paper.

Two, maybe three-ish weeks is not what I had in mind. It certainly wasn't something I had anticipated, at least not far enough in advance. But I'll live.

More than that, I'm going to demolish this semester in spite of it.



Oh, one more thing...
Did I tell you I had a religions class in there? Something reading intensive but still kind of soft?
Yeah, I ditched that in favor of a course on the history of technology and social thought. :p

Song of the Day!

song of the day! From Goose!

Soooo I've come to the conclusion that LittleFoots blog needed an awesome Japanese Metal song of the day so I bring you Dir en Grey.. They're pretty freakin sweet. Also if you want to see a creepy ass video by them look up Obscure (uncensored), I was going to post it but its pretty bad in both a bad way and a good way. Watch it at your own risk and don't blame me for the man in the mask and his weird mechanical junk. Thats it I suppose.

Goose.

Song of the Day!

I suppose one can't avoid Christmas songs forever. Well, maybe I could, but it seems like it would be a lot of hard work. . . and I'm feeling kind of lazy. So here's this one.

NUFAN Cover:




Original :

song of the day! From Goose. Again :)

A Slipknot song was way over due.
You're welcome. :)

Song of the day! From Goose.

This was my all time favorite band until they kicked out their lead singer... Now they suck! I'm still a bit bitter.

Songs for the Days!

Crossing the River Styx...I am totally in love with this song today. Just so you know.


Also. Neko Case. <3


Also my lovely, I think your phone is wonky. When I call it doesn't ring, I just get a message saying 'the cellular customer you are calling is unavailable'. I didn't even know phones even said that anymore...

I guess my point is that you should call me. Soonish if you're not all busy with the holidays or whatever. I'm still trying to pretend they're not real. ;P Lots and lots of love.

We had these...

really fantastic neighbors that lived behind us. Cute as all get out. Quiet, soft spoken. Covered in tattoos. They had sweet, well behaved little kids.

Then one day they moved out.

I'm not sure who lives there now, but I can tell you that I for sure, despise them.

Every night, every night at 9:15 they crank up the music. Loud music. Heavy bass. They rattle all my pictures. Knock fossils off the shelf. And I hate them. See-red-punch-through-the-wall-massacre-your-stereo kind of hate them.

So now I spend my evenings pounding on the wall. Wailing against the noise. Raging against their very existence. And I will continue to do so until they come to grips with what denotes a 'reasonable' volume.

For the record, I am a reasonable neighbor. I know that community living has its drawbacks. That one of those is knowing way too much about what your neighbors do or say or listen to on the other side of our shared walls. I know that no degree of good craftmanship is going to sound-proof my home and forever block out the endless sounds of life coming from other apartments. I know that ASU is an intrinsic and inescapable facet of life in and around Tempe and that its hell-goblins will inevitably share walls with me. I accept these things.

However, if you cannot keep your music regulated to a volume that does not SHAKE MY BELONGINGS OFF THE COUNTERS I'm going to be forced to make life as difficult as possible for you.

The wall pounding is my warning to you. The first sign of things to come. Take heed.

Today was lame.

I slept until 1pm because it was raining and the sun never came through the windows.

I emerged from my lair to find the house a wreck.

We bought a fish tank stand yesterday because the new tank was too big/heavy for the old bookshelf to support it. It took me the better part of yesterday to put it together since it had literally fifty thousand parts. It can support a max weight of about 1200lbs so I don't know what I was expecting, but that thing was for-serious a hardcore beastie.

The downside to that is that my living room is now full of the dismembered parts of the old bookshelf/all the stuff that was on it that needs to be put away. It's...overwhelming. Ugh. She-she's going to take the old bookshelf but she doesn't know how to put it together, I don't have the instructions, and it's not as straightforward a build as one would assume. So here it will stay until x-mas when I have time to take it over there and put it together.

I've been frantically trying to organize the chaos with little success.

In addition Oscar has been causing trouble since the new tank was installed. For the past couple of weeks it's been sitting on the floor in the hallway. This was nice because he could just lie around on the floor and stare at the fish. Now however, the only really close-up vantage point is from standing on top of the tank. I'm sure you can see the problem with that. Well today he took a flying leap across the living room onto the top of the tank, shattered the glass and fell in. Since then he has forgotten that the glass is no longer there exactly twice, both times resulting in 32 lbs of wet cat, scared fish, and a screaming me. Ugh.

Currently I'm re-washing a mountain of laundry I'd just finished folding since fat-pants catman decided to use it to dry off.

I've also come to the conclusion that our apartment is way too small. It takes WAY too much effort to get all my stuff to fit in here nicely without looking cluttered, and as much as I like organizing things, I'm getting pretty tired of it.

Well, that's all I know. I found my phone but it's dead and my charger is at work so I won't get to call you today. Do you work tomorrow? When are you free? I'll call anyway. Miss you tons and tons. Hope life is tolerable. <3

Song of the Day!

Lips like Morphine...

Song of the day!

Ring the bells




When you let me fall
Grew my own wings
Now I'm as tall as the sky
When you let me drown
Grew gills and fins
Now I'm as deep as the sea
When you let me die
My spirit's free
There's nothing challenging me.

wha-wa-waaaaa

Well with yet another semester down and only two (TWO!) somehow remaining the problem of selecting classes and hashing out some kind of coherent schedule is upon me yet again.

I did register already. I have laid out a practical (if slightly insane) schedule for the spring, but we both know that once the reserved seats opened up I'd be forced to at least consider dropping most/all of those lovely practical classes in favor of something more interesting.

I had several classes in mind, totally useless self-indulgent classes mind you, but classes nonetheless. Since I only have 2 classes left to complete my degree (With a time conflict between them, of course) I have lots of room for the totally ridiculous. Problem is that now that I've opened the door to nonsense classes there are so many I feel compelled to take.

Firstly I am dismayed that the seminar class on Nobokov has only five available seats, and further dismayed that they are all full since statistically speaking, the chances of a seat opening up in there are nill.

Secondly I spent a great deal of time contemplating taking this class on game theory and the possible application of feminist politics and macroeconomic theory to WoW. Not that I care about gaming at all. (Particularly WoW which as I think we all know, is the genital herpes of the gaming world.) Clearly I don't. But just the same, the discussions generated in that class would be amazing.

For a brief moment I contemplated taking Lady Gaga and the Ideology of Otherness, mostly because it would provide a platform for me to complain (ad nauseum) and to a captive audience about the brain parasite that is Lady Gaga. But then I spent some time picturing what the other students in that class would be like. What they would sound like. The kinds of conversations I would have to endure. . .
Do you have any idea how badly the thought of that class, of those discussions frightens me?
Well I registered for Plant Geography instead. Plant. Geography.
Case.
In.
Point.
I just keep seeing that 'leave Brittney alone' video in my head over and over again and the thought of having to sit through even one similar outburst in a CLASS that I PAID FOR makes my skin crawl. No thanks.

As it stands, I have 21 semester hours. 3 math/math related classes, 1 geo class, one anthro class, and two bio seminar classes. My lowest level class is a 394, and I may very well have to kill myself before the semester ends. BUT at least I'll never be bored.


Song of the Day: Ace of Base!!!


Lots of love to you Dear Friend. Miss you terribly.

Song of the day!

The sparkle in your eyes
keeps me alive
and the sparkle in your eyes
keeps me alive, keeps me alive.

The world
and the world turns around
the world and the world, yeah
the world drags me down.

...I'm sure in her you'll find
the sanctuary.

Song of the day!

John Prine via Susan Tedeschi...there's some Grateful Dead thrown in there too I think, but that's just a bonus.



Make me an angel
that flies from Montgomery
Make me a poster
of an old rodeo
Just give me one thing
that I can hold on to
to believe in this livin'
is just a hard way to go

Song of the Day.

It rained all day today. From the moment I woke up. And it's still going now. But it's not a true rain. It's an Arizona kind of drizzle. But it's been steady, and that's something.

I'm tired. Exhausted really, and ready for the semester to be over.

But then I remember there aren't even 2 weeks until the new semester starts up, a fact which I seriously dislike. Does anyone know why school is starting up the first week of Jan instead of the third week? Because it's got me baffled.

Anyway, here's song of the day:



P.S. there's a bonus in it for anyone who can guess my favorite Garbage song...

Lots of Love.

Song for yesterday.

Song of the day!

Song of the Day!!

Long time no see...

I have so many f-ing things to tell you it's ridiculous! Today however, and for the next week I am short on time.

*cough*cough*finals*cough*cough*

The short version is that ASU email switched to google mail and somehow that made it IMPOSSIBLE to log on here. Gah! But I've found away around that. I now officially have way too many fish tanks. Two of my fish had babies. The dog is afraid of her new nail trimmers. And I just answered the door with my night vision goggles on.

Yeah.

You heard me.

NIGHT VISION.

Now I'm off to pray to the Gods that be that I somehow make it through the next week without imploding.
I love you tons dear friend!