I Am Completely Serious

WE ARE ALL THE VULTURES

WE SAY “HI”

Flickr photoset

There was a person sitting on a bright orange towel in the middle of the field. After a few minutes the snow got too heavy, and we both went in.

(Though he actually did show up.)

(Some!)

My life is a long series of headaches and essays about Japanese transvestites that I can’t finish on time. Or maybe I just can’t remember back very far, I don’t know.

I’m at home, alone, because my family is uhhhh… basketball… and oh god this puppy is just dumb. And I have to carry the keyboard around with me because there is only one in the house, but two computers, both of which I need.

Here is a picture of a book with a plan of some sort.

I mean, today’s just fired.

(The third round of power outages was the last straw.)

But it does prove something I’ve suspected since the beginning of the semester - no matter how infuriating everything else is, coding always calms me down. I just go into the zone. When I get frustrated about the program, it’s not the big-smile “I WILL PUNCH ANY DEITY IN THE CROTCH” sort of thing I get from papers and whatnot. Your essay or your paper ninja ornament might have an problem that’s just impossible to solve - but your algorithm won’t.

Or, apparently that’s how I look at it.

I just uploaded my last month or so’s stuff to Flickr. (Though most of it’s marked private.) When I was looking through my photos for the animal shelter ads, I thought this puppy picture was cute, but…

…I don’t… it looks like it’s going to transform. Into something bad. I don’t know about this puppy.

(Fortunately, I don’t think it’s the one I actually used in the ad.)

I made katsudon (pork bowl) today. I kind of burned the katsu part a little. Hahaha I can’t fry stuff without hurting myself ha.

I felt the urge to try this because of the book Kitchen, by Yoshimoto Banana. This is an excellent book about death, soft fluffy couches, and cooking, to whose plot a specific bowl of katsudon is extremely important.

Mine tasted fine, but still, somehow, I suspect that it wasn’t tasty enough of a pork bowl to bear that great of an emotional and symbolic weight. Though of course, I’ve only had it once, so perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps, here, today, in a dorm kitchen in Ohio, I did inadvertently create the pork bowl of the gods, the Platonic ideal of katsudon, of which all other katsudon are mere pale reflections and flickering shadows.

But I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

Murgatroyd showed us this Sock Baby thing at anime last night. I’m having trouble articulating why I think it’s so awesome. Oh, wait, no, wait, I think I can articulate it - everyone talks in funny voices. Yeah, I articulated that there pretty darn good.

It is sort of a 70’s martial-arts alien-robot parody thing, filmed on location at a house. It’s apparently by the creator of Earthworm Jim, which I’m sure is very meaningful to many smelly boys. For myself it is not, nor to Murgatroyd - when pressed for explanations, she said, exasperated, “It’s just some college students screwing around with a camera! My gosh, people!”

Anyway, if anyone with a large pile of investment capital wants to dig these guys up and pay them to make a whole movie like this, you’ve pretty much got my seal of approval, and everything.

I think I’m going to design myself a seal of approval.

I wish Tomoyo was there, though. And Syaoran was more fun when he had no social skills and exploded all the time.

I accomplish nothing.

The Aforementioned Red Bull Mole Encounter:

On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the 9:00 PM-to-midnight shifts at the library. This is obviously not ideal, but Jenan grabbed the midnight-to-2:00 AM shifts, so, you know, what are you going to do. The other person on the shift is presently a sophomore who only just got hired. Which isn’t a problem, because she’s not a crazy person or anything, but I’ve still got to answer a lot of questions and show her how to work stuff and all.

Little did we know that there was another new hire in the library Tuesday night. Little did we know that we stood, that evening, under the same buzzing fluorescent lights as the Red Bull Mole.

Or as they dub it, “the student brand manager“.

The Mole waited until after eleven to make its move. It struck at a moment when the senior supervisors had retreated into the back office to do computer stuff, and the junior supervisor had gone to the bathroom. It might well even have been listening in, earlier, while I was explaining cargo procedures to the new girl, marked which was the senior student worker, and decided to wait until she was too engrossed in her gigolo comic to take notice of its unseelie shenanigans.

At any rate, it was she who turned to me and said, “Oh, wow. What do you think this is?”

(Aw, isn’t that cute. BUT IT’S WRONG)

She asked me if I thought she should go find the person who’d dropped them off, since she “didn’t see anyone go outside, so they must still be in here somewhere” - but I’d remembered the fliers that had showed up around campus at the end of spring semester, soliciting applications for the exalted position of Denison University Red Bull Student Brand Manager. I assured her that this was definitely an intentional Red Bull “drop,” calculated to addict people who might be falling asleep towards the end of their shifts, and that much the same procedure was used by cocaine dealers to addict affluent suburban ten-year-olds on Halloween. Or maybe I didn’t say that second part. I then, immersed in my own fuming anti-consumer bigotry, asked what the person had looked like. She said she thought it had had been “just some girl.” My holy quest to slap a person in some way associated with the marketing of soft drinks had been thwarted… for now.

She asked if I thought we could keep them, and I told her they were all hers, but asked her to wait to dismantle it until I’d taken some pictures. And that is the tale of My Red Bull Mole Encounter On Tuesday.

From an email:

And [person] (at least I think that was her, I’m bad with names) left a sword with a cat (?) puppet on top of it outside your door. Just to tell you, if you were wondering. I don’t think anyone would have taken it but…oh well.

( . )

Continue reading “ANIME CLUB SHENANIGANS”

I met some stupid deer today.

Gate leading nowhere:

Stairs leading nowhere:

I decided I’d might as well figure out how YouTube worked. I uploaded this video of Dad’s huge Saint Bernard grooming thegeekgene’s cat. The dog does this often, and to every amenable cat she encounters, but she and this cat in particular share a special bond; the white cat is the only one I’ve yet seen groom the dog back. Or stand on her back and give her a massage.

You can hear That Show With Undertakers in the background, and the video goes on about twenty seconds after the dog stops grooming, because I’ve tried three video editors and still not convinced any of them to both cut and save the file properly.

I went to the beach. And now I am at home. Dad and I got here at 9:00 tonight; Mom, thegeekgene, and elongated_tito will be back tomorrow. (I am writing like this because I am tired, and tired people do not use contractions.)

There was a Bad Problem while we were at the beach. Everyone else left last Wednesday, leaving the house and the pets in the care of some law students. On Friday, these people just left. They did not call my parents, or arrange for someone else to feed the animals in their absence. Fortunately, the animals are all still here and alive.

There were also other crimes, which I will document here for posterity:

* They left the lights on.

* They left dirty dishes in the sink.

* They left the computer on. (The computer was also very upset, as it overheats easily. There is something the matter with the mouse, which I will say is their fault even though it may not really be.)

* They also erased the Bookmarks menu, and may have installed some sort of spyware toolbar.

* They left the toilet seat up. And urine-sprinkled.

* They seem to have lost the mail and newspapers after taking them out of the box.

And, unrelated to the house, but most evil at all,

* They were working for a group that provides legal aid to the poor - hence, I think, my parents’ willingness to trust them with the house - but left without giving the group any warning.

There is much anger.

I also direct anger at the student group that was supposed to be finding me a place to stay in New Orleans next week, as I have still not heard back from them, and they are not answering email or phone calls - though they also did not cash my check, so I guess I ought to assume they just never got my application. (But I am still on their email mailing list! I am not sure how that happened. Maybe I signed up for it at that meeting I attended before applying? I cannot remember giving them my address then! Maybe I did?)

And I direct anger at myself, because apparently I did not submit my timesheet when I left campus last week, which probably confused my supervisors, to whom I had said I was not coming back for three weeks. Fortunately, I saw the email yelling at me for this at 11:00 PM, an hour before the final final final deadline, and submitted it.

At the beach, I read a lot of books, bought a few books, watched some of Princess Tutu on the laptop, and worked (some) on translating 11-nin iru! (some) - I was mostly only transcribing dialogue onto the laptop to make it easier to work with later, when I have access to better dictionaries. It is probably somehow funny that the manga I brought with me to use for practice starts out with so much techno-babble. I did not see the humor at the time, but now I have internet access again, and perhaps I may again someday feel that sensation of which I have heard, in another world, and which I think was termed “joy.”

I also bought some essential oil called “Illusion Angel.”

In celebration, I give you the Triforce of Power.

(What happened was, the lens froze stuck out and the camera wouldn’t stay on for more than a couple seconds. It flashed “E18″ at the corner of the screen during those seconds, so I googled “canon s400 e18,” and found about eight million people on various websites suggesting twisting the lens (plus a class-action suit).

Seeing as the thing is long out-of-warranty anyway, I went ahead and twisted the lens. And it snapped menacingly and I nearly had a heart attack, but it’s okay again now. So, yay.)

That’s what the internet weather predicted. I didn’t see any.

Though the wind was blowing hard enough that I couldn’t stay upright and my pictures came out blurry.

Yes, I WENT ON MY WALK ANYWAY.

If you walk through poorly-drained parking lots enough, your pants will actually gain enough weight in water to significantly slow you down.

I imagine it somehow involves science.

Bugs leave you alone if you’re covered in patchouli.

I’m not very threatening or something. I was six feet away from the bunny, yet it sat staring at me like that for about thirty seconds while I played with the camera. Hello, I eat your kind! I make you into curry! So dangerous!

UDON IS VERY HARD TO EAT.

I remembered to take a picture today, but I forgot to buy plastic baggies, which I needed. I did buy cookies.

Someone threw out an old wreath or basket - it’s hard to tell which now - beside this wall; the artificial twigs and flowers are slowly being overgrown by the ivy, and the papier mache birds watch the people who pass by with deceptively mild expressions. They know their fate, and they know by whom they were consigned to it…