snarp’s blog

The artificial-intelligence-y satellites in Silent Mobius are named Donald, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. At one point they break, and we are expected to mourn them.

There are about eight million reasons that I cannot take this anime seriously, but this feels to me kind of emblematic of all its other issues.

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

( Cut for offensive banner ad. Because I don’t put *ads* right out on my front page unless you’re *paying* me. It’s a *principle*. )

It’s been about ten days since I started writing this entry, and I still don’t have any conclusion aside from “augh!” (which is the title of the text file on the desktop), so I’m just going to post it now to get it out of my head, and go read Fruits Basket.

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I keep using sound effects for post titles. If I’d used a sound effect for the title of essay-pocalypse, it would have been “HACK *die*”.

Essay-pocalypse weighed in at twenty-seven pages. And then I went to work.

So I AM READING MANGA TONIGHT PEOPLE OKAY

I have a sweet taste in my mouth that will not go away. It is definitely because of the antibiotic or something. It doesn’t mean *anything* about my blood sugar. That’s just bullshit.

…

AAAAAGH ESSAY-POCALYPSE.

Having a fever for five days straight is sort of like getting bludgeoned with a pastel rainbow and then trying to make up a metaphor about it.

I think my brain is randomly chopping out about half of what people say today.

I walked out of the health center this morning with a paper bag containing:

* 1 box of Sudafed

* 1 bottle of Mucinex

* 2 packages of throat lozenges

* 8 packets of salt (for warm salt water for gargling)

* 6 packets of honey (for tea)

The sorts of things they hand out down there amuse me. I wonder if they also keep tomato juice for people wandering in with hangovers.

The nurse was very insistent about the curative powers of the honey, and my throat is presently so swollen I can feel *exactly* where the air’s going when I breathe, so I just used half of one of the packets. I feel completely justified in saying that you people who sweeten tea are criminals.

I nearly missed the mandatory East Asian department meeting because I was drugged and sleepy and totally forgot. I only left my room because I couldn’t get hold of Professor Portentous on the phone, and needed to ask for an extension on a paper. I went up to his office, saw that it was still empty, and laid down on the couch out front for a few minutes to wait, until The Artist who Formerly Wore a Beret All the Time pointed out to me that he was probably at the meeting.

So I staggered in something like forty-five minutes late, and Sensei, Mr. Smuckles, and Professor Portentous all laughed at me. I am not expected to be responsible.

There is an award ($500) that they give out to the really studious Chinese majors, and to absolutely no one’s surprise, this year’s went to The Tao. They’d made The Tao give a speech about his senior research, as an example to the rest of us of the proper way to do it, and I cleverly timed my entrance to right in the middle of this speech. I should argue that The Tao is only able to exist within the East Asian department because I am here to counterbalance him, and that therefore I should get $500, too.

In Summary:

* Hate everything.

* Almost out of sandwich stuff.

* Not “sore throat” - throat demon.

Public Service Announcement

Never, ever, ever attempt to uninstall Norton. It will mess you up. Hire a man to take care of it for you.

I’m trying to make it sound like hitmen are a logical response to Norton software, but I’m slightly too irritated to make that totally obvious. I apologize for this.

System Restore is a blank box and fucking *Windows Help is broken*. And it gave me a weird error message telling me I should uninstall McAfee, and then broke all the McAfee icons. This seems like kind of a dishonest business practice, what’s going on here.

I can still open most programs, but some of them are acting weird - one of the textboxes on the LiveJournal site has changed sizes, for instance, and in IE the buttons have disappeared. Since I can still get into Wordpad and Adobe, fixing this is going to have to wait until after essay-mageddon.

The past couple weeks, I keep noticing the piece of tape on the back of my phone, and kind of vaguely wondering what it’s doing there. Then I put the phone away and start thinking about something else. As is only right.

I figured it out today: When I first got the phone, I put the tape on there and wrote my number on the tape, but the ink’s gotten rubbed off since then. The number obviously must have disappeared from the phone the very second I finally memorized it.

Now that I think about it, I’ve figured this out about the tape at least once before, then forgotten about it. This all makes a very deep statement about the uselessness of revelation and the transience of memory inherent in modern life. I will write a Japanese short story about the experience.

I should write some Really Hard kanji on the tape, so that they’ll be permanently transferred to my brain when the last of the ink gets rubbed off.

This book is apparently a joke, which I guess is good - I’d seen it in Barnes and Noble and whatnot, but never tried to pick it up, because I was afraid it would give me that disease that makes you start a collection of porcelain unicorns.

When I was twelve or thirteen, though, I remember flipping through one of those little stable-bound books with titles like “Eighty Kajillion Million Games to Play With Your Cat” that they have at supermarket checkouts, which cited the book quite earnestly as proof of how smart cats are. I wonder if the staply-book was serious about this, or if the author was actually a very angry dog person unhappy with his/her career.

“- you - you told me to marry her, you didn’t specify *where* or *how* -”

“I told you to marry her within certain obvious unspoken constraints! Don’t ask her to say “obey,” don’t kill her after, find out her last name, and *invite me*! *You dick.*”

-

I will never finish this book, because I would rather come up with snippy dialogue than figure out the plot.

My schedule has been destroyed. *Again.*

You are *fired*, Sensei.

A combination of the quality of the material my cheap jeans were made with, and the positioning of the expensive MP3 player in my pocket over the past couple of hours, has inflicted upon me an irritating dermatological condition which I term “nerdrash.”

Don’t steal my term, jerks.*

The buds on the tree I can see out the hall window get bigger every day. Tomorrow morning I expect to find that they have, sometime during the night, suddenly exploded into monstrous, bloated, cabbage-like growths, smashing some poor frat dude too drunk to ever have known what hit him into the window. His slow slide to the ground will leave a sickening smear of blood and pollen trailing down the glass. Also, arbitrary alliteration.

Spring is malevolent. I keep *sneezing* and stuff.

* It’d be even better if I could somehow connect this with Passover.

(This text was originally posted on LiveJournal. It has been reformatted (awkwardly) for use on WordPress.)

( No other foe has ever made Bruno’s blood *rush* like Red did! )

Hee hee.

Apparently, the people who were feeding the vain deer are Comm Lady and her crazy Canadian husband. Huh.

If “Spanglophone” were a word (and apparently, it’s not), would it be capitalized?

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This is an extremely excellent idea and I need to find someone I only sort of like who’s having a birthday now.

Fire alarms are a sport, and points are awarded based on the number of people who were in the shower. This time, the score was two.

I think you win if the RA’s naked.

On a library chalkboard:

“Senior research is DONE, bitches!”

My (imaginary, because I’m very professional) contribution:

“No, wait! It was all a dream! You still have seven more pages to write, and you completely forgot about that source that your advisor was “really looking forward to seeing your reaction to!” A bug just flew into your last Red Bull! ALL THE PRINTERS IN THIS BUILDING ARE OUT OF INK OR BLINKING MYSTERIOUSLY”

They’re apparently all off getting drunk to celebrate turning everything in. Which might explain why I’m hearing sirens tonight, for the first time in a while.

The Posture Pals wouldn’t approve.

“- but I’m not sure I’d get elected *just* because of Napoleon Dynamite.”

Though nothing comes up when I search the student directory for “Pedro.”

She mostly just kept eating while I was standing there messing with the camera, but when I started to put it away, she pranced off up the hill.

The little table in front of her seems to be a deer feeder set up by whoever lives in a house that’s to the right - the deer was obviously pretty used to coming there to eat, and didn’t pay any attention to the cars going by.

There was also something else behind the tree there, which I thought at first might be a baby deer, but I don’t think it quite moved right for that. It was hard to tell how big it was - maybe it was a rabbit or a groundhog, maybe it was a dog that was for some reason okay with deer.