via icanhascheezburger, fibonacci pigeons. i'm pretty sure this is the san leandro bart station. they've got a lot of pigeons there, but sometimes there are dead ones stuck inside the anti-pigeon netting and i don't like that at all.
i am so happy to be in school. i am so happy to be in classes where i get to read sentences (that is a single sentence, dudes!) like this:
"But the point is that between what Ryle calls the "thin description" of what the rehearser (parodist, winker, twitcher . . .) is doing ("rapidly contracting his right eyelids") and the "thick description" of what he is doing ("practicing a burlesque of a friend faking a wink to deceive an innocent into thinking a conspiracy is in motion") lies the object of ethnography: a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures in terms of which twitches, winks, fake-winks, parodies, rehearsals of parodies are produced, perceived, and interpreted, and without which they would not (not even the zero-form twitches, which, as a cultural category, are as much nonwinks as winks are nontwitches) in fact exist, no matter what anyone did or didn't do with his eyelids" (Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz), 7.
"Eclecticism is self-defeating not because there is only one direction in which it is useful to move, but because there are so many: it is necessary to choose" (5).
you're welcome.
*a pdf, but free if you need to get your nerd on. i understand.
is definitely purposegames.com. and thanks to the countries of africa mapping game, i finally know them all! (warning: if you try to tell me that you can't keep track of african geography because "it keeps changing!" i will judge you. you know what else has changed? european geography. and more recently and dramatically than african geography. but i see many more people prepared to give up on knowing where anything in africa is at all than people who have just decided that it doesn't matter where, say, the czech republic is. don't be lame. learn africa.)
next up: finally, really, once and for all, figure out where delaware is. (i am still not entirely convinced of the existance of delaware and therefore keep forgetting where it is, ruining my score on the states of the u.s.a. mapping game. yeah, i'm working on it.)
i would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone of several important points:
ellipses consist of three dots, and should have a space neither before nor after.
capital letters are not necessary after ellipses.
question marks (?) are required when one is asking a question.
exclamation points, which must be used sparingly, should appear singly (!) or in groups of three (!!!).
words written in all capital letters tend to evoke shouting. shouting is rather uncouth.
"jk," while not quite as bad as "lol*," is still a totally stupid thing to write.
thus, corrected, this misdirected text message would actually read:
"Who's hot? You! Who's fine? You! Who's cute? You! Who's sexy? You! Who's a liar? Me!!! Hahaha. I'm sorry for accidentally sending this text message to you when I clearly intended to send it to someone else. I'm extra sorry for accidentally sending this text message to you when you were kind of hoping for a text message from someone you'd recently begun to find rather shiny but who actually didn't end up sending you anything today at all.. JK LOL!!"
a little while ago i got a free ticket to a preview performance of "ariodante." it was really fun to get to see the show, the costumes were cool, and most of the singing was pretty good too...but the plot was unlike any classical opera i've ever seen.
the body count: one. only one. (WHEN DOES THIS EVER HAPPEN IN AN OPERA?)
the bad guy: he ended up being the one who died. he was slain by the older brother of the protagonist, and get this: he confessed his entire nefarious plot as he was dying offstage, and he apologized for it.
the lovers #1 (the pair who couldn't stop singing about how happy they were and how great things were and how the heavens smiled upon their union): things worked out fine, even though it looked for awhile like it was going to be a romeo and juliet situation, because she thought he had died and was going to kill herself and then it turns out he wasn't dead but he takes a billion years to shut up and go tell her.
the lovers #2 (the pair where the man was hopelessly devoted to the woman even though she was head over heels for the bad guy who was, of course, just using her): also come out just fine! she realizes that she loves him after all, or something!
also, several key male roles were played by women, and it confused the heck out of me because it was hard to remember who was who anyway. and that is what happened.
from the ingredients of the "all natural soda premium ginseng ginger ale plus antioxidants: certified with antioxidant vitamins c & e plus vitamin a from beta-carotene no artificial colors or flavors no preservatives no caffeine" that i found in the refrigerator tonight and decided to try:
"filtered carbonated water, gluecose-fructose syrup, brewed chinese ginseng, natural ginger flavor, citric acid, ascorbic acid, vitamin e and beta carotene."
because for the past few weeks, my dreams have been horrifying. the kind of dreams that take hours (or even days) to start to forget, and the kind of dreams that cause me to wake up terrified and already in tears. but not last night! last night i dreamed that i still worked at thatonejob (okay, that part was pretty crummy) but, amazingly enough, the office building was way, way nicer, my cornucopia of nasty bosses seemed much less involved...oh, and also: morrissey was one of my co-workers.
i have no idea what his job actually was, or really what he was doing there at all. he didn't really seem to talk to any of the people who worked there, and none of us really talked much to him. i think my co-workers were all either in awe of the fact that we worked with morrissey (i was!) or totally indifferent to him. (believe me, that office was chock full of indifference...to everything, pretty much, which apparently, at least when i'm asleep, extends even to morrissey. crazy.)
having ridiculously handsome co-workers is generally pretty great, i think (seriously dudes, look at him!) but apart from being ridiculously handsome, morrissey (who, for some reason, went by "moz" in my dream [his attempt at traveling incognito?]) clearly didn't take anything about our office seriously.
he came to work sometimes, but not on any kind of reliable schedule, and definitely not on time. and for some reason, he had his own office (in both real life and my dream, this job was located in a mess of a cube farm, and quite a few people had desks crammed into a shared space that was clearly originally intended for only one person.)
and he smirked at everything. he was always very kind to anyone who managed to summon the courage to say hello or to try to make small talk (which we rarely did,) but it was totally obvious that he was completely unafraid of our bosses.
and when he did actually come to work, it was common knowledge that he spent most of his time on the internet listening to music. he didn't make any attempt to hide this fact, and would occasionally leave himself logged in to various music sites on public computers in the building (to show how much he wasn't intimidated by the abusive management, who, for some reason, seemed to generally leave him alone? to encourage us to be brave too? to suggest new music to us? who knows?)
anyway, it was a pretty funny dream, and it almost made up for the yucky dreams that i also had last night. i had the morrissey-as-co-worker dream last, fortunately, so that's the one that's stuck in my head this morning. (sorry, housemate! i sure did tell you this story when you were just trying to brush your teeth this morning, didn't i? ah, the occupational hazards of living with sarah in the morning time.)
in conclusion, despite a poor work ethic where soul-crushing administrative work is concerned and a particular aura of celebrity unconducive to office-based camaraderie, morrissey is likely an awesome co-worker owing to his physical attractiveness, tendency to simply ignore terrible bosses, and kindness toward fellow employees.
i learned several amazing geography facts today. here is one of them:
the earth isn't perfectly spherical. there's a bit of a bulge because of the centrifugal force of the earth's rotation (imagine pressing a tennis ball on a table, and you'll have a good idea of how it's shaped.) there's nothing on earth that's the shape of...well...the earth. so, some geographers decided to come up with a name for the earth's shape: geoidal. the definition of geoidal? earth-shaped. the earth? yeah. it's geoidal. yep, earth-shaped.
as you may remember from the other times i've written about cleaning my shower, between the large amounts of hair that i shed and the fact that the person with whom i share my shower goes through an astonishing amount of soap, our drain is frequently kind of slow.
i try to pretend it isn't happening, and then when i get tired of rinsing the soap suds off of my feet and ankles at the end of a shower/footbath, i remove the drain cover and dig around below the drain for large disgusting hair clumps. i hate doing this. it is gross, especially after i mentioned to audra that i thought it was strange to find so much lint in the shower drain and she told me that it was actually dead skin cells. yuck. (i am pretending that this isn't true, because it is gross.)
i know that there are several products for dealing with this sort of problem, but i don't want to use anything toxic unless it's absolutely necessary. and it's not! because i successfully unclogged a really slow drain!
i put some baking soda down the drain as far as i could (and since the big box of baking soda that we use for cleaning and keep under the sink had started to clump up from getting damp, there were big satisfying chunks to use! yes!) and then poured some vinegar down after it. after that, i poured a pot of boiling water down the drain...and it all drained right down. aw yeah. (also, the baking soda/vinegar combination is very fizzy, and the noise it makes is nice.)
i had this dream in which i was visiting with a dear friend, and we were somewhere in the jungle where she was living. one of her other friends was there, and she and i were looking around at our friend's furniture and belongings. in the middle of the jungle, in a little clearing, she had a huge inflatable couch, and also an enormous bunk bed that was covered in inflatable flowers. it was very strange.
and then we were at some sort of campground, and then the boy who i dated in high school and i were riding mountain bikes up a big hill, and his younger cousins found a bright orange car. it was made of paper mache, i think, because when they touched the bumper, it started to spin and spin and eventually flipped upside down into a depression in the road.
and then we had to run from the police. we ran and ran (and at that point, i woke up a little bit, realized i didn't really have to run from the police [although i had been really scared up until then], went back to sleep, considered walking for a bit, but then decided that i don't get enough exercise anyway because of the soul-crushing office job, and went back to running, which had really become more of a full-body upright swim through foam resembling vanilla pudding.)
we reached a campsite, which had apparently been ours, and hid in tents, but then decided almost immediately that we had to leave, and that we had to pack and bring everything with us. (we were still running from the police at this time.) we were furiously throwing things into bags, and trying to disassemble the tent and get everything into cars as fast as we could, and there were a lot of people with us.
then i ended up going over to this huge wagon and talking to the people there. it seems that two women who had been friends for a long time had always dreamed of owning a costume business. it hadn't really seemed like it was going to work out, but then one day one woman decided that they were going to do it after all, and they would start off with a bang by duplicating the costumes of the fire dancers in labyrinth. (you know, the awesome movie from 1986 starring jennifer connelly and david bowie's pants?) okay, okay, here are the fire dancers doing "chilly down," their song from the movie:
anyway, only one of the women had stayed with the costume company, but she had this huge wooden wagon full of costumes and clothing and jewelry and hats and accessories of all kinds, including the fire dancer costumes that had started it all off. because we were all trying to get away from whatever was chasing us all (i don't think it was really the police anymore), she had decided to give away a bunch of her stuff, starting with the fire dancer costumes. i really wanted one, for some reason, but i felt bad taking it since it was such a complicated costume. (they really did look like they did in the movie.) then there was a bunch of awkwardness because i couldn't find it, and she kept telling me to look for it, but they were all gone, and we were both very confused.
then i started to pack other things there, because i thought she wanted me to, but then i wasn't sure, and she had a little boy there who seemed kind of confused and frightened, and i was worried about him but i wasn't sure what i could really do.
and then i was looking at old zip disks (thanks, brother bear!) and found a very, very old journal that i had written in college all about a mean boyfriend, and i was so sad to see how much i had cared about him and how much i had overlooked in trying to be happy with him.
and then i woke up.
ps: check out this awesome video! it's a clip from the making of the labyrinth about the fire dancers scene. remember, dudes, they were doing all this during the 80's, back when movies had to really happen and they couldn't be created in a lab. amazing.
i feel like a total weiner, being excited about casual friday. but i am. excited, that is. whether or not i'm a total weiner is perhaps open to debate.
but dude, it is so nice to have one day a week when i can always count on being able to wear something comfortable to the office. no constant tugging, special undergarments, or being kind of too cold all day, not on casual friday.
and comfy (and warm enough, and easy to bike in) shoes! yeah!
i wish every day could be like casual friday. clearly the world doesn't end when people wear jeans and sneakers to my office, so why not the other four days? (or just mwf, that would be fine with me too, because i have a different job on tuesdays and thursdays. tuesdays and thursdays could be suit of armor days or whatever, i don't really care.)
i know i've mentioned this already. last night, though, while i was having the usual low-grade nightmares that i've had every single night for the last month or so, i had this wonderful dream about vacuuming! i was vacuuming a bunch of things, including my room (family and friends, shut it!) and it was so great. i haven't had that kind of wonderful amazing dream in a long time. seriously, when i thought about it today i still felt all happy and glowy.
also today i kept thinking about how much i would like to vacuum the carpet in my office. not the entire building, just my office.
via icanhascheezburger, fibonacci pigeons. i'm pretty sure this is the san leandro bart station. they've got a lot of pigeons there, but sometimes there are dead ones stuck inside the anti-pigeon netting and i don't like that at all.
having ridiculously handsome co-workers is generally pretty great, i think (seriously dudes, look at him!) but apart from being ridiculously handsome, morrissey (who, for some reason, went by "moz" in my dream [his attempt at traveling incognito?]) clearly didn't take anything about our office seriously.
and when he did actually come to work, it was common knowledge that he spent most of his time on the internet listening to music. he didn't make any attempt to hide this fact, and would occasionally leave himself logged in to various music sites on public computers in the building (to show how much he wasn't intimidated by the abusive management, who, for some reason, seemed to generally leave him alone? to encourage us to be brave too? to suggest new music to us? who knows?)
