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I haven't written in a while, and I don't really have much to say right now. I'm reformatting my computer, and in the process I found a list of items that I wanted to blog about last summer. So, in lieu of actually writing, here's a few tidbits:
Bathroom in Strong Hall
-Hand-painted "rustic" MENS door
-Designer's first bathroom? This bathroom was made by someone who has never seen a bathroom
-Toilet never flushes. Regulation: must flush for no less than 2 seconds to be called a toilet?
-Scary stall totally full of (non human) refuse
-Sink has scalding hot or ice cold NO SHADES OF GREY
Fox & Friends
-Woman "shocked" over "suck it Jesus" at the emmys. "Why were they laughing? Is it because they respect her as a comedienne?"
-News story about religious observances in schools, headline "Chicago: Afraid to Offend Muslims?" PS: halloween is not a religious observance.
Misc
Bob Odenkirk and David Cross: very funny. Bob Odenkirk by himself: not even slightly funny.
Posted at: 18:22
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I am back in Lawrence.
I realized while working on my taxes that I've been paying an average of $260 a month on gas. Since this is basically a rent check, I decided it was time to end the commuter student experiment. Some friends were looking for a financial break, so things moved pretty fast, and here I am.
Since I am incredibly contrary, I can't help but focus on some aspects of living at home that I will miss. While my relationship with my parents has always been a bit contentious, I have to say that I miss having breakfast with my mother every morning before I left for school. While she'd frequently make a shitty comment that would spoil my morning, I definitely feel a sort of lack of companionship.
And while I don't miss spending an hour and forty-five minutes commuting between Lawrence and home, I do sort of miss the quasi-meditative experience that driving that much afforded me. I suppose I could just sit at my window and stare outside for thirty minutes, but it's not really the same.
Also, living 45 minutes away gave me a really handy excuse for avoiding things that I really didn't want to do. I guess I'll either have to become a better friend or a more talented liar.
I'm also kind of worried that I'll fall back into old, bad habits. I've been living at home since I've come back to school, in an earnest effort toward completing my degree. I made a number of lifestyle changes as well in this process, and I am really happy with where I am right now. I guess I just worry that now things have gotten a lot easier that I might backslide.
Posted at: 22:43
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It's really not that complicated...
I think that this article may have broken my brain. It's a discussion of how vegetarians supplement their diets to stay healthy. Admittedly, this is the UDK so a certain level of mediocrity is to be expected. However, this is insane:
Lindsey Cable, Eden Prairie, Minn., senior, hasn't gotten around to fully supplementing her diet yet. She has been a vegetarian since she was 11 years old and has taken daily vitamins at time, but has now stopped.
"I get sick every two or three weeks because I don't get enough iron or protein," Cable says. "I used to take a vitamin, but now I don't. I guess I really should but I haven't really looked into it."
Cable has seen a doctor about being vegetarian and tries to keep her diet evenly balanced. She says she tends to eat healthier than most of her friends but that it mostly stems from the natural diet of being a vegetarian.
I don't even know where to begin. I can't even imagine what she's eating that she has such an iron deficiency as to make her sick several times a month. She could eat pretty much any type of bean, spinach, tofu, tempeh, kale, green beans...even potatoes, tomato juice, almonds, and sesame seeds have fucking iron in them. Soy milk, if not regular milk? This is also ignoring the huge amount of processed foods in which calcium and iron fortification seems to be increasingly ubiquitous.
Even if she can't cook, it's not like this is Olathe. There is a huge, varied body of vegetarian-friendly restaurants in Lawrence.
If she is that iron and protein deficient, there is no way she has a balanced diet. I know that a lot of young girls use veganism and vegetarianism as a cover for eating disorders, so maybe that's what's going on here?
It pretty much blows my mind that an article devoted to maintaining a healthy veg diet makes no mention of healthy foods, just vitamin supplements. That's the hard-hitting reporting you can expect from the campus newspaper.
Posted at: 19:34
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Posted at: 12:58
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A Day in the Life of a Wedding Officiant
1/19/08
1:00 PM: Sat down with the intention of putting the finishing touches on the wedding script. I'd put off writing the closing for nearly two months because every time I put pen to paper, I ended up with trite, sappy bullshit. I know this is a wedding, and so some sap is expected, but I'm too fucking embarrassed to even show other people this pap, let alone read it to a roomful of strangers.
2:30 PM: Put down Guitar Hero and really, for really reals, attempt to write the closing for the wedding. I sketched out a general framework for what I wanted to say the night before, but again: pap. This is where having some kind of religious tradition would be useful, since I could just read a couple obtuse selections from the Bible and be done with it. But since this is a secular operation, I'm on my own.
3:50 PM: I got nothin'. Spent over an hour trolling the internet for some meaningful, schmaltz-free quote about weddings, or even just ceremonies or rituals in general. I call Justin in desperation and we talk about Jung and Frazer for a while, but the only quotes we come up with all involve some variant of the phrase "primitive man," which we both agree might not be appropriate in this context. Justin hands the phone to Amy, and she tells me a bit about medieval wedding ceremonies, before she utters the golden phrase, "weddings are really just a public acknowledgement of a relationship, anyway." I don't know why, but this phrase was the catalyst for exactly what I wanted to express. I thank Amy and then, almost at once, end the call, the wedding script, and my two months of writer's block.
6:00 PM Arrived at the, what, wedding hall? It's the Lawrence Visitor's Center by day, and as I arrived I found that it was still essentially serving this purpose. Everything related to the wedding was on the periphery of the room, waiting to be unpacked. The building was essentially two large rooms connected by a very narrow hallway, one room for the ceremony and the other for the reception. There seemed to be a flurry of activity, but considering the state of things an hour before the ceremony, it might be best to refer to this phenomenon as just a "flurry."
6:10 PM The room was showing the beginnings of transformation now. There were an awful lot of people doing...things, though not much was getting done. I approached the groom and mentioned that I'd still really like to at least discuss the ceremony with him and the bride. He took me to the women's restroom where the bride, still in pajamas, was getting made up by three or four women simultaneously. Shocked looks from all of the women as I entered their space. At first this gave me pause, but then I remembered that I'm a fucking holy man now and continued in unabated. I ran through everything, as close to a rehearsal as we got, and left the ladies room.
6:15 PM Things were starting to come together, in as much as there were now rows of tables with associated chairs. All of the hundred-odd people seemed to be helping set up in some capacity. I wondered whether it's expected for the officiant to help decorate. I realized that since no one knew that I'm the officiant I just looked like the one asshole friend not pitching in, so I decorated some tables.
6:40 PM I found the world's largest container of potato salad in the hallway. A giant box, originally destined to hold hanging files judging by its shape, contained no less than twenty-five gallons of potato salad.
6:50 PM I entered the ceremony room in time to see a woman hang a giant Jesus-bearing crucifix on the wall directly above my designated spot. She caught my eye and recommended that I, sans microphone, face the wall away from the audience to conduct the ceremony (speaking really really loudly, I guess?) so the bride and groom could face their friends and family. She had the nerve to suggest that no one came to the wedding to see my face. I said in bad faith that I would take it under consideration.
6:58 PM The groom and I stand at the ready. I was facing the crowd, with him standing in front of me sort of sideways. I resisted the temptation to smirk at the crucifix woman. There was some music playing at the back of the room. The groom had instructed one of the ushers on which track to play when, but it didn't seem to be going well since the groom was repeatedly yelling "No, TRACK 4!"
7:00 PM I saw the wedding party lined up in the hallway. The entire audience was standing and turned around to face the wedding party as they march down the aisle. It's only now that I remembered that I was supposed to make a few announcements, and did so just in time to interrupt the beginning of the procession. Announcements concluded, a song that was distinctly not the wedding march played for a few seconds, followed by the more familiar tune. There were tea candles along the aisle on the floor, and as dresses passed over them I envisioned concluding the evening in the burn ward. As I began my introduction, all five babies in the room started crying simultaneously.
7:05 PM As I hit my stride, I noticed that everyone was still standing. I paused to consider how best to tell people it's cool to sit down, but as soon as I stopped talking everyone sat down at once. Crisis averted! Oh, also: my voice totally cracked when I say the word "maturing." Classic.
7:15 PM I officially exercised my ability to marry two people.
7:30 - 11:30 PM The reception was nice. As a part of her toast, the maid of honor referenced a (hilarious) porn clip that we all watched the night before, after the "rehearsal dinner." A number of people let me know how awesome I was. The women running the food line were pushing the potato salad really, really hard. As the night began to wind down, I wondered whether it was expected that the officiant help clean up after the wedding.
Posted at: 22:04
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Nothing says "good start to the semester" like 8 inches of snow and 25 mile-per-hour traffic on the highway between Kansas City and Lawrence. I freely admit that I have a bit of a short temper at times, but even I was shocked by the vitriol issuing from my mouth on the 45 minute turned 2 hour commute this morning.
Did I mention that I'm officiating a wedding this weekend? Shawn and Liz are getting married on Saturday and asked me to officiate. I like to think that this is a reflection of their respect of my oratory prowess, but I know that it's because I was the cheap option. I'm getting fairly nervous, actually. I haven't had to "perform" like this in some time, and I'd really prefer not to ruin their wedding. But, you get what you pay for I guess.
I just got the new Blonde Redhead album, and I'm totally smitten. Misery is a Butterfly is one of my top favorites, and I was pretty disappointed to discover that it was a major departure from their earlier work. 23 is excellent, and like Misery is likely an album I will listen to non-stop for months. I keep hearing people refer to Blonde Redhead as "shoegaze?" I've never heard that before.
Posted at: 19:01
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I finally got a new cell phone. Hooray for current technology! In lieu of studying, I've spent the last four hours making custom ringtones and generally figuring out how everything works. Boo...
Posted at: 22:17
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Look at me still talking when there's science to do...
I had a pretty strange realization on Halloween this year. I asked my mom whether there were many trick or treaters, and she said there hadn't been many for several years. I remember when I was younger there would be an unending flood until fairly late at night, so this was surprising. She pointed out that all of the children from our neighborhood have grown up and moved away. In a sense, our neighborhood has "out-grown" Halloween, which is really sad.
My grandparents lived in Leawood, and I always thought it was strange that there wasn't anyone for miles around that was under like 60 years old. I guess now I know how that happens. It's kind of strange, though, that when we moved here everyone had kids around the same age. I guess it must be that we moved shortly after development ended, so it was still a young neighborhood.
So, nothing really came out of me talking to my TA about my worthless lab group. She said she wanted to wait and see how things would play out this week. This tells me that nothing is going to happen, because there's only two more labs left. I guess I'll just have to deal with it.
Also, I just recently realized that Emacs has a spellcheck mode, which is completely awesome. I write these posts server-side with Emacs, and now I won't have to spend so much time being crazy about whether I'm spelling things correctly.
Posted at: 18:46
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Curse you, somaFM, for getting me excited about xmas inappropriately early.
Posted at: 07:39
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Thoughts from a Saturday Afternoon
I've been overusing the word "churlish" recently. I'm not really sure what brought me to this, but since my most common use of the word is "I thought about doing X in response to Y, but it just seemed overly churlish," maybe it's not that I'm overusing the word but that I've been feeling overly churlish recently.
As I was leaving the lab on Thursday night, I heard music in the elevator shaft and when the elevator doors opened I saw a six person band in the elevator practicing church music. I just stood there for a moment, mouth a-gape, and one of them was like "Well, come on in, man!" I faced the wall of the elevator for the entirety of the ride down and beat a hasty retreat afterward. It was pretty fucking surreal.
Since I spend so much time driving between Lawrence and Olathe, I've been listening to a lot of audiobooks to pass the time. I recently finished the Takeshi Kovacs Trilogy by Richard Morgan. I enjoyed that it was sort of a post-cyberpunk/detective/war/revenge story mash-up. I did not enjoy the numerous, frighteningly graphic sex scenes. Most sci-fi writers are pervs, but Morgan really pushed the envelope. I think that it was especially disturbing because of the male narrator's dedication to emoting the text. I would estimate that the most frequently repeated line in the series was "I was hard almost instantly." Sheesh.
We've been without home phone service for nearly three months now. We were going to port our number to Comcast, but after reading some really negative shit about Comcast phone service on the consumerist we decided to cancel. A week after the cancelled installation appointment our phone line went dead, and has been ever since. Both Comcast and AT&T are totally impossible to deal with and are denying any responsibility or willingness to help.
When faced with a large amount of work, I tend to delay getting started in pretty retarded ways like organizing my mp3s, or driving around pointlessly for hours. I think that I may have hit a new low today as I spent several hours trying to teach myself to type in Dvorak.
Aaron is in town this weekend, and we're throwing Britt a birthday party tonight. Callie and Ryan should be there, which is exciting since I haven't seen either of them in years.
Posted at: 12:38
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