I Am Completely Serious

“Oh, he might not be a thief. He might just have stolen something.”

“You know, once or twice, on the side. That doesn’t make him a thief.”

“It’s like how I’m not a congressman, I just sometimes make laws, and molest -”

“You just sometimes sexually explicit text messages to minors?”

“Sure, sometimes! Doesn’t mean I’m a congressman…”

$25 to anyone who will carve me a Rorschach pumpkin! I will provide the fedora.

Recently I have failed at:

1) Sleep.

2) Remembering where the flippy-things go in nearly every kanji I’ve been trying to memorize.

3) Getting down to the store.

4) Not getting sick from eating the cafeteria food (logical consequence of (3) ).

5) Not accidentally defining two default constructors for my program that was due last night, and thus ending up spending an extra eight hours redoing code that worked perfectly fine to begin with convinced there was a problem.

6) Daylight savings time.

GRRR-RAH!

F*******e yourself with cold metal implements, thou worthless debugger!

Grrrrrah…

(Edited much later because the time was randomly way off.)

Either one of my so-called “friends” got into my translation project – or I got very, very, very tired at some point.

In a place where there ought to be complicated kanji technobabble, I find instead katakana, saying “baka na!”

I actually really don’t think I would have done that. I’m thinking Jenan.

Doesn’t even make sense in the context of the paragraph, I’m disappointed in her.

At school. Finished big programming assignment; will now (or, soon) start on big history paper.

I now have a space heater. It’s kind of loud.

I read League of Extraordinary Gentlemen the other day. It got much funnier when I started googling the proper names I didn’t recognize.

At home. Politics is infuriating and sleazy and I will do the revolution just so as not to subject people to stuff like what happened today. My revolution will be the first to use a video game for its core text, that being Kingdom of Loathing, which teaches that you fight sleaze with ice and spookiness – but watch out, ‘cuz it does double damage on fire and stinkiness!

I will have there be some kind of jerk blood-test that they administer before they allow you to run for office, or maybe one of those questionnaires that’s supposed to identify sociopaths. It will save the non-loathsome candidates money, and the public a lot of unattractive advertising.

I went to take a nap immediately after thegeekgene and I got home, morosely convinced that she would wake me up in under an hour so I could deal with a crisis involving sleaze having followed us home and being on the porch with a fake special knife from a seventies movie from out of the Edge Co. catalog.

Mom woke me up an hour ago and fed me some very good pork, though, so I feel better now.

I just found a fragment of a button on the floor of my room. I do not know what it came off of, but since I will probably get upset when I find out, perhaps this is for the best.

We watched a video on zen in art this morning, you see. I’m very zen about this clothes problem.

We watched the same video last semester, in Professor Portentous’s early Asian civ class; it has monks who try to stay awake for seven days, and get hit with sticks when they doze off. When it was over, the professor asked us, “Did watching that video make you go to sleep, or get tense? When I watch the monks’ training, oh, it makes me really tense!”

I think this must be kind of a Rorschach test kind of thing – because I am a lazy person, it just made me want to take a nap. The professor, however, is very serious and always kind of nervous and jumpy, and was probably worrying about the fact that she wasn’t sure she could stay awake for seven days, and would get hit with sticks.

When Professor Portentous showed us the film, he left to do something else. Clearly he has attained satori.

(I bet Sensei would giggle.)

Hahaha, ha. I didn’t even do that on purpose. So this tea is not helping me be not tired. And tonight I need to program things and think deep thoughts about the Meiji era and cultural fragmentation. I don’t even know if cultural fragmentation is an actual real thing you can say.

I think I’ll bring Rurouni Kenshin to class and pretend it’s the textbook.

* Blew off Scrapped Princess again.

* For some reason did not blow off Lodoss War. A protagonist died and we couldn’t tell because it was too badly animated, but after a while we realized the person wasn’t there anymore, and then there was some dialog about it.

Also, there were like fucking four clerics just standing there during the damn death – they didn’t do anything. See? This is why I hate all clerics.

* Yakitate Japan lied to us about science often and creatively.

* In Princess Tutu, Jenan got excited about the idea of Mytho only getting the sad feelings back, and ordered us all to prepare for next week an interpretive dance on the theme of a bad feeling. She gave herself drunkenness. I took berserker rage, as is my wont.

* Doctor Tran? What? I can’t figure out if it was funny or not. (The Voice went on YouTube.)

The United States has given me mutant paranoia senses. Coming outside this morning, I realized that everything smelled really bad, and also that there was a loud grinding or pouring noise from somewhere. I did not think, “Dude, the celestial cat pissed on god’s stove*,” then “They must be doing some kind of weird construction again.” No, for that is the reasonable response.

I thought, “Dude, the celestial cat pissed on god’s stove,” then, “Oh shit we’re getting biological warfare’ed with grindy-sound burnt-cat-pee bombs why does international law not forbid grindy-sound burnt-cat-pee bombs why.”

This concern actually seriously affected my concentration on studying for this morning’s history midterm. I was sitting in the basement of the library thinking about those biological weapons I read about for essaypocalypse, trying to remember if any of them somehow involved urea.

I started composing this post in my head then, to shut my paranoia centers down. However, I did not let myself post it until now, because first I had to check the internet to make sure no one did use biological weapons on my campus. They might not tell us!

But now that I’m sure it’s safe, I think I might go into town to get stuff to make sushi.

-

* I can only hope that this metaphor is not as vividly familiar to others as it is to me.

Snow!

It is Fire Safety Week this week, implying that the rest of the year has been the Chinese Zodiac Year of Let’s Microwave Our Keyyyyys. The RA sent out messages inviting us to a demonstration in which a fireman would use the oven and not burn himself, and then we would be granted s’mores. No one claimed their s’mores. I didn’t.

Also, people have been storing stuff in the oven.

I noticed this only after I’d been preheating it for five minutes.

Fortunately, though the frying pan in there definitely was not intended to be baked (its handle was cheap plastic), it hadn’t suffered any damage by the time I got it out. But I did not learn about fire safety this week, and the owner of the pan evidently did not learn about fire safety this week, and the RA didn’t learn about fire safety, either – when I told her about my substandard kitchen habits, she said, “Wow. I wouldn’t even have thought to check.”

Fire Safety Week has been a terrible, terrible failure. We can only hope that Not Aggravating Bees Week and Maybe Get A Pap Smear I Guess Week fare better.

Reiko Okano and Tezuka’s son are married?!

That’s awesome.

They’re laying a new sidewalk in front of one of the buildings, and one of the workmen is taking a break in the lounge right now. He is watching a cooking show explain how to make pesto.

Earlier I looked out the window, and saw huge strands of a spider web being blown apart somewhere drift by. The way they light hit them, they looked exactly like tendons. The spiders are building an animal in the trees, with silk for muscles and flies for a heart.

I’m dozing off a lot today. I also decided, while watching Princess Tutu and looking up at my shelf for a second, that a bird of some sort was totally about to peek out from under my fedora to show it’d heard that whole secret conversation on the screen.

I went down to the farmer’s market this morning because I randomly woke up early and desired yukon gold potatoes, which the grocery store doesn’t have. These are good potatoes because they have very thin skin and I don’t have to peel them, and also they’re pretty and kind of sweet so that they are highly appropriate to curry. Unfortunately, whoever it was that was selling them before apparently stopped, because I could find only brown and red potatoes.

However, there was a woman selling baklava.

Baklava is a dangerous, dangerous substance. I am already planning to go down again next week and buy larger quantities.

Anime Club News:

Akachan showed up. (Though I guess she’s not an akachan anymore, seeing as she’s now in college and stuff.) I indoctrinated her to my hatred of Record of Lodoss War, though I didn’t need to try very hard – she was very excited by the pretty opening sequence, but the spirit of artsiness within her grew gradually more and more enraged as the episode wore on and she realized how badly the actual show was animated. She spent much time sputtering in annoyance.

We got the episodes out of order in both Lodoss and Princess Tutu, and it actually made a significantly bigger difference for Tutu, which is supposed to be our crack show. (After Yakitate Japan, that is.)

A horrifying gay stereotype – a chef who specializes in “sweet buns” – showed up in Yakitate. I could totally cite this in my research as an example of the difference between Yaoi Boys (good and pretty) and Gay Guys (bad and ugly), though I guess I’d need to come up with some more professional-sounding terminology for it.

Also, we learned that an afro is a natural expression of grief.

We totally failed to watch Scrapped Princess.

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

I just finished reading RG Veda. Response:

holy crap what was that

…

( spoiler-cut )

Yes.

Continue reading “RG Veda”

When I was in the room with the jerk yesterday, after the phone conversation in which he insulted his dad and lied to him about being sick, he started on this process where he called someone he knew, asked them for help with his program, found they couldn’t help, sat there and loudly said “fuck!” at the computer for a couple minutes so the rest of us in the lab would know he was coding much harder than we were, then called another person.

All through this, I was sitting there thinking how it would be very helpful to everyone involved if I said, all peppy-like, “I think you should call your dad. I bet he knows.”

I didn’t do it, because I just wanted the asshole to leave – he obviously either wanted someone to do his work for him or, failing that, attention, and if no one gave him either he’d just get bored and leave. Which he did.

And for about ten minutes just now a friend of mine’s girlfriend was yelling at him out in the lounge. To give you a sense of how sane this yelling was, the girl is an otakukin. She thinks she’s spiritually a Sailor Scout. I don’t remember which one.

She was being loud enough that I could hear her perfectly, but I couldn’t make out his responses. She broke one of his dishes (I’m pretty sure it was his because I don’t think she owns any) at the end of it, and I heard him say something worried-sounding about that.

I had this intense urge to go out there, all in my slippers with my big old flannel shirt drooping off me and my coffee mug in my hand, and kind of lean against the wall and, as though unaware of her presence, go, “Hey, dude?… I don’t like your girlfriend.” Then shuffle back into my room.

I wrapped my leg around the chair to keep myself from getting up.

It sounds like they’re gone now, so it’s probably safe for me to go to the kitchen and make hot chocolate.

And I am informed that my reaction to the gentleman is not unique.

He’s just sitting there sniping at Link for no reason, then he gets a call from his dad, and he sits there and lies to his dad and snipes at him for a while, and then he hangs up and starts calling other people trying to get them to do his work for him, and gahhhh I need to work. Thank god he left.