Eleven Eleven

Oh christ, I have no idea what to say.

Gibbrish

In the course of getting my flapjacks, I ginned up a bunch of cartwheels. I will be the ruler of Cantalonia, and make all of the pants include the seals sold at auction for multiple sclerosis twins.

I will.

You're wrong, unless you're not, but I guess it's possible.

I also just made you read this, just like how you watched my DMV videos. ::maniacal laughter::

Proper Behavior: I Haz It

From time to time, I get the urge to yell obscenities, either with my mouth, or in all caps. Nearly every single time, I restrain myself, and remain silent.

For instance, right now, I want to drop a major f-bomb on all of my Facebook friends, but I won't, because I am pretty sure that it would be considered rude.

I'm totes going to bed now.

Whale Immersion Day

My neighbor had a "Blue Moon Party" last night, and I attended for a little while. We got to the topic of wearing all grey or all blue clothing, and for one guest, it brought up his memory of a great dream that he had. A friend of his was really into whales, and just a few nights after a conversation with this friend, he had a dream that there was a national holiday called Whale Immersion Day.

The basic premise of the day is to wear all grey or all blue, then to move and make sounds like a whale would. To do that, you move about slowly, as though you are swimming. And you communicate with other people with whale sounds, including clicks and high-pitched noises. This idea really intrigued me, and I'd like to push for an actual holiday like this. February 16th is World Whale Day, which sounds like a good candidate for the new holiday. Let's all set our calendars for February 16th, to look and act like the whales.

Hmm, I hope he participates

The Ultimate Votive

These were never part of my Catholic upbringing, probably because my family wasn't sufficiently Spanish, but when I saw this in the bathroom of a party I was at in July, 2010, I knew that I needed at least one. Granted, the teachings of Catholicism are painfully outdated at best, but the pageantry and artifacts of the religion can be beautiful and fun. My friends told me to poke around my grocery stores to find them, but I live in Berkeley and go to hippie Berkeley grocery stores, so I didn't think I'd find them there.

Actually, I never looked for candles a those stores, but one afternoon that fall, I went to a Safeway in Oakland to get groceries and see if they had these candles. I found two, one with Jesus, and the one I got, with St. Jude. I couldn't get the Jesus candle, because it didn't exactly scream "Catholic" the same way that any saint candle would. An added bonus to these candles is that they all come with prayers on the back, in Spanish, then English. Over the next few weeks, whenever I lit the candle with friends, we would recite the prayer for fun.

Having been an atheist for now nearly half my life, I have absolutely no idea what it must feel like to say something, light a candle, and assume that something or someone can actually hear me. I've had experiences that could be considered religious, like the time I "found inner peace" on a cross-Atlantic flight after some significant sensory deprevation, but I've never heard voices or felt presences. Not that I am lamenting my lack of mild schizophrenia. My approach to solving my problems involves things like talking to real people about how to realistically solve them.

Of course, a pretty candle is a pretty candle, and I have been determined to build a respectable votive collection. So in the following months, I found the ultimate in Mexican Catholocism, the Our Lady of Guadaloupe candle. That was when I allowed myself to buy a Jesus candle, but I decided to go for the gory angle.

But today, after taking Steve with me on my weekend morning walk, we stopped at the corner store to mainly get some B&J, but browsed through the store too. We saw the votives section, and found the goriest, creepiest votive, that I obviously had to buy. The prayer on the back is more or less a prayer to exact revenge on someone. It seems like some kind of fusion between Catholicism, Aztec death stuff (a la Day of the Dead), and maybe a bit of voodoo. So, I present the Zombie Votive.

Nothing Not to Like

After a nice dinner at the Green Papaya, we saw this:

I may swing by after hiking to see if I really can earn $20 AND protest with kitties. I guess my participation will depend on what they are protesting.

Nostalgia for the Ventura Years?

He may have really low popularity, due to the furthering the anti-tax stance of this state, but still promising utopia. The same state where a couple of the primary industries pay incredibly low wages for all of the jobs they create and most others are either office-type or low skill service jobs.

Still, I will miss the Governator.

Spider Time

So, I pledged a whole blog section about spiders, but apparently, there is only ONE post tagged with spiders. This is wrong. I have seen some good ones lately, including this one on a stop sign near my place.



I saw another big one a month ago or so. A couple was looking at it. Can you see it?

Flower Time

I call this "Potential" or something like that, then I cut the flower part off.

Just kidding, lol.







Here was a purple flower as seen through our fall foliage.

Just Don't

I love you, Energy 92. You give me the high bpm I need. You have Greg and Fernando, but wtf is up with playing the dance remixes of Pink songs? Who the hell is making those in the first place? No one wants to dance to her song about her dead friend, or her crumbling marriage. None of her other songs are fast enough for dance beats either. And let's not even mention Katy Perry, ugh! Are you trying to make her sound slow and retarded? Just stop - if I want to hear those songs, I'll listen to my CDs.

Classic

It dawned on me tonight, after I refreshed Pandagon, that almost any motion picture clip that existed, especially after the advent of VCRs, probably exists on YouTube, even if the copyright holder takes it down over and over again. So I went searching.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

OMG This Rules

superpoop.com

God, I love Superpoop.

So Glad This Exists

I can't claim to understand this very well, but it is hilarious.

To Our Favorite Drug Addict

I'm so sorry I called you ugly so I sent you an apology note.

Pop Quiz!

A friend calls you at home one evening. She tells you that she received a chain letter email on a topic that both of you are very interested in and she forwarded it to your work email address.

Your friend asks you to read the email when you return to work, and to please forward the email to ten other people to help keep the email chain growing.

What should you do?

1. Run to work, open the email, and forward it to ten people because, like your friend, you too are a complete idiot.
2. Find out what the message is about, read it the next day, then forward it to your mom and your brother cuz they would find it interesting too.
3. Hang up the phone and defriend the person immediately, you don't need anyone that stupid in your social network.
4. Tell your friend that you would rather have her send this to your personal email address and also that you check your email constantly, so there is no need to call you to announce that an email has been sent. Then check the calendar to make sure that you have not gone through a time warp back to the year 1996.

I would probably do number 4, but be very tempted to choose 3.

Fight Oppression by Pants

From a Michigan friend

You can de-pant if you want to.
You can leave your trowsas behind.
Because if you wear pants, and if you use pants, then you're no friend of mine.
Hey depant.
Hey depant.
Everyone loosen their pants.

It seems she has also learned the excitement of skirts :D

Spiders in the Rain

I have always disliked spiders, but as I age, the fear gets dimmer. When I was 14, there was a huge spider in my bedroom which I ran from and made my parents kill. I wasn't able to sleep in my room for days. Some time passed and I told my first therapist about my fear. A few months after that, I saw a garden spider on my ceiling, which was about 4 or 5 feet from the bed I was lying on at the time. I grabbed a shoe, killed the thing, and went back to bed.

When I first moved to San Ramon, I noticed that massive webs with "big ol'" spiders seemed to be pretty normal. As long as there is enough distance or a window between me and the spider, I love staring at them in the atriums of the buildings at work. In my old apartment, there was a time when I killed a massive spider at least once a week, but this apartment doesn't have as many. Earlier this month, I saw a smaller, but still pretty large spider crawling on my bed while I was getting ready for work. It was too big to smush with my hands, so I grabbed a TV remote and managed to smack it. Call me the Spider Killer, I guess, but its only when they come into my dwelling.

This spider was on a light pole outside my place last week. That was when I decided that I want to document my 8-legged finds. I hope you'll enjoy the series. My morbid fascination with spiders definitely aids in overcoming the somewhat irrational fear.

Stop the Presses!

The tagline under the top stroy on Yahoo right now is as follows

Tiger Woods' caddy makes an unflattering comment about golfer Phil Mickelson.

Source

That isn't news, that is gossip, and regardless of what the comment was (really, he could have issued a death threat or even something horribly misogynistic), who really cares? What a bunch of crap.

Seven Years Ago

The week after Thanksgiving, on a Monday night, Minnesota and northern Wisconsin had a snow storm. Huge piles of snow dropped on the great white north, closing most schools on Tuesday. College classes weren't canceled until after everyone had already done their best to get to campus (about a third of the students at my college commuted to class from around town). It was also the second Tuesday that semester that classes were canceled after noon, the first one being on September 11.

I felt bad for any teachers - or students, for that matter - with Tuesday night classes, which met only once per week. Living in the dorms, the snow storm was nothing but fun for me. I woke up in my loft and decided to cancel my classes myself - screw what the administration said. I had just gotten a mattress pad for my bed and it was soooooooo comfy! Actually, I can't remember if I went to class or not, I'm pretty sure I didn't, but I was up and about that day. After all, the cafeteria was on the other side of campus, and I had to eat and catch up with friends.

That night, while hanging out in the dorm room we all hung out in, my friends and I decided that we were going to celebrate the storm and get drunk. Problem was that we had no booze, only one of us was 21, and the liquor store would be closing soon. So we created a shopping list. For some reason, two of us wanted wine coolers, another two wanted beer, and someone wanted some Boons. The 21-year-old and I set out with our backpacks. We weren't normally friends, him being an evangelical and me being an atheist, but we hung out and got along. He was also an Art Major and I was History. We decided that if we saw any of his Christian group friends, we would tell them that we were on the way to the library to study. If we were past the library, we were going to a classmate's apartment off-campus to study. What were we studying? Art History, of course. We could safely tell most of my friends the truth about out outing.

So onwards we trudged over the ice and through the little paths created in the foot deep snow. We finally made it to the Coburns liquor store with time to spare. My friend went in and bought the consumables - 22 glass bottles in all. When we were safely across the street, in the parking lot of some church or other, we packed the bottles in our backpacks, taking care to make sure we weren't seen. SCSU was a dry campus, after all. We ventured back slowly. Clinking bottles would be a dead give-away. My friend told me that if I fell on the ice and broke anything, he didn't know me. We made it back to the dorms, checked in with the night supes (it was past 10pm by now) and walked up the stairs to see the rest of our friends resting in heated comfort.

That night was a lot of fun. We peeled off our snowy clothes, drank, and danced all night long. Being only 20 years old, I wasn't smart enough to avoid a hang over yet, so the next day, I felt awful. I ended up canceling my own classes again and nursed myself while working on a paper for my Wednesday night class. On Thursday, I remember taking a good look at that snow with some co-workers at my admissions job. I remarked that it looked like it would be gone by Christmas. They thought I was crazy, but the snow was gone by finals that semester.

Note to Self

• Buying Sudafed, Affrin, and Saline Nasal Spray isn't enough, you need to use it, then you won't get this sinus pressure.


• But the only time I ever feel it is when I am near the Caldecott


• Didn't you feel it another time on Tuesday?


• Maybe, I thought that was on the BART approach to that tunnel


• You didn't take the BART through the tunnel, you parked at MacArthur that night


• Duh. Haven't the last few days been totally awesome?


• Totally, especially that little dose of weekend on Tuesday night


• That was so enjoyable, I really should move to the city


• Yeah, but you'll have to wait another 9 months until that lease is up


• Not to mention the moving and commute considerations


• No kidding