The Oddyssey: True Tales From A Weird Life

Why did nobody tell me that they are squirting the kids with water on Modern Family? We have been doing that for years!
(I love Modern Family so much.)

But seriously, it seems like statistically Barney from HIMYM should have an STD by now. At least herpes.

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:53:09 GMT

I am watching way too much Jimmy Fallon, and it's all the band's fault. The Roots are way better at playing music (and being snarky) than Jimmy is at being funny. I keep tuning in for the free concert every night.

Glee is starting to bug. Esp. tonight. Both the kids were worrying too much about getting the song right and forgot to show any feeling/character/passion. "Defying Gravity" is iconic (I guess? in 10 more years will it still be as important? 20?) so worth worrying over, at least for millenial dramakind.

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:48:49 GMT

From the shelf it called to me. Oh, it's that vampire novel Guillermo del Toro wrote in audiobook form. (I have finally realized that I am wasting almost 7 hours a day not doing anything and could be listening to books and learning foreign languages via mp3 player, so I am getting a lot of them lately. I have too many of them, actually, and the library refused to lend me any more at one point.) I don't like listening to things I haven't read, because it's distracting, and I am not a good listener, and whatever, I just like to read it first, I think it makes the audiobook better. So I broke a rule and took The Strain with me, because if I am going to be in transit for 45 minutes I might as well listen to Ron Perlman tell me about vampires and viruses, whatever, I don't know what it's about. And I probably won't, because I put the cd in and drove away from the library and got a couple of blocks away before having to take the cd out, because I just cannot listen to it. Probably because of the not liking to listen to books I haven't read, but also, holy cow, Guillermo, the world is just so goddamn magical for you. I wonder if you have brain damage?
(Seriously, I can see this at least as a patient of the week on House. Some guy comes in and sees sparkly shit everywhere and House tells him it's actually some side effect of having a concussion, now don't fall asleep we need to fuck with your brain a bit.)
And then I realized that this is just more proof that I am a horrible person and need to figure out some way I can get paid to think these awful things because I am just so fucking good at it.

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 22:39:43 GMT

When I was a kid I wasn't allowed to watch anything that was too violent, scary, or "dark" unless it was edited for TV, and even then sometimes not. Where was the fun in that?

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:18:13 GMT

"This is Costco."
"Yeah, which is where we buy diapers."
"Since when?"
"Do you remember when we adopted that baby, few months back? Since then."
Love Modern Family. Absolutely.

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:14:28 GMT

Kind of over The Middle. The mom sucks at being a mom and the midwest sucks at being the midwest. Sorry. Roseanne didn't like to cook, but tried and the stuff was usually edible- you can't get takeout every night with three kids and two mediocre jobs.
Still hopeful about Brothers.
"Waffles?"
"You should have thought of that before you fired the waffle-maker!"
"Thirty-second rule, right?"
Awful title, though.

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:52:56 GMT

Community got good a few episodes in. Hope it stays that way for the rest of the season.
Feel like I should like The Middle, but I don't. Maybe worth it for more misadventures of Failure Daughter and "read your thermos!"
Brothers has an iffy concept but CCH Pounder is great and hope she gets to say more than "he's an ass but he's my [] and I love him." Why did Carl Weathers decide he wanted a facelift? Nearly unrecognizable. Chill has great lines and Strahan is cheerful and enthusiastic. Hope the humor and serious bizness balance out, there's great talent there.
Not liking House as much as I used to :(
Heroes and Fringe are like background music, they queue up on Hulu and I play through them just in case anything interesting happens. Mostly to see what weird shit Walter Bishop does/ admire James Kyson Lee.

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:48:44 GMT

Justin Lin to remake Highlander.

Oh, please, please, please. Please use Linkin Park instead of Queen and find some way to put Vin Diesel in it, it will be eighth-grade me's dream come true.
I'm not being facetious. Vin Diesel needs a new franchise, and I need more Vin Diesel.

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:10:21 GMT

Balls! I think my vampire romance parody just turned into a decent vampire romance.

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:06:57 GMT

In light of predictions coming unfortunately true recently, in the event that I develop skin cancer that metastasizes and I lose my right arm, for the record, I called it.
May you live in interesting times.

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:54:12 GMT

It took me about a day to figure out how I felt about finding out, via Facebook, that one of my friends from high school had killed himself.
Turns out I felt like throwing up.

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 16:03:23 GMT

Things I do not know how to do (but would like to learn)
-fencing
-boxing
-kung fu
-pick locks
-speak Mandarin
-speak Arabic
-speak Russian
-speak Japanese
-speak Irish
-speak Hungarian
-computer programming

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 04:10:22 GMT

I think it was io9.com that told me that Warehouse 13 was steampunk. Unfortunately, it is.
It's unfortunate because for some reason in my head "government agency" and "gaslight fantasy" don't quite mesh in my head, so I'll be watching contentedly and then we'll be back at the warehouse and its infamous steampunk keyboard (nevermind the fact that I am already sick of the hacker subplot). It just seems like such a wasted opportunity to do dieselpunk.
The weird government agency- indeed, the government agency, is in America a hallmark of the twentieth century, and most people believe the twentieth century to have started between 1914 and 1918. This puts us out of range for steam, I'm afraid, unless the argument was that steam worked so well we never moved past it.
The supernatural- great for steam. Works fine for steam. But the BPRD is pretty much on the diesel side, coming together during WWII (unless I am mistaken, not being as well versed in the comic canon as I am the movieverse) and they haven't run out of work. And the show is definitely working with Clarke's third law, running around and finding artifacts that sometimes work in a sciencey way with supernatural effects. I wonder if the technology being so advanced that it approaches magic works better with the Dr. Frankenstein mad science club or the Dr. Strangelove one.
The tech- you just can't tell me that while Kevin Costner was out in the wild dancing with wolves there was a little house on the prairie starting to fill up with tickity-tockity junk. Because that's what the tech says. We came up with this stuff way back when and never bothered to change (or didn't have enough money). Why do they have the Farnsworth, then? And why is it woodish and brassy? The workstation- the flatscreen monitor with the typewriter keyboard- developed around the same time as the Farnsworth, or WWIIish, or earlier? The aesthetic of the tech confuses the hell out of me. Was the warehouse 5 years ahead of the steampunk trend and able to work it into their budget?
We have a secret government agency, which, as far as I can tell, developed in the 20th century. We have secret advanced technology, some of it which, as far as I can tell, was developed in the 20th century. We have the supernatural element, which, as far as I can tell, wasn't exactly a federal concern until the 20th century. So it's steampunk because...it's pretty.
Or, we have a group of early twentieth century inventors getting caught up in patent nightmares, nobody believes it can possibly logically WORK that way or something and their prototypes wind up in a basement somewhere. One of the alphabet soup offices formed during the depression gets to take care of the basement. We start worrying about the Nazi occult and decide to try out some of this weird stuff, hey, it works. Cold War days have little national need for ghost hunters, so this department gets to sit around and dust. Once in a while they get called in to consult on a national situation. Usually they don't have anything for the job; when they do, nobody is allowed to know about it. Department starts getting sent out after bigfoot and chupacabras, move west to deal with situations, slowly dying off. The last time they got any money was in the 70s for the move; before that, in the 40s during the war. You make do with what you have until it dies; when it dies you figure out how to fix it. So there's a secret government agency out in South Dakota hunting down strange tech, running off of machines that are at least 30 years old. You know if they find something useful it's getting patched in, right? That's what happens with my computer, and it's only 4 years old. So the whole place is full of wrenches and cables and CRTs and occasionally something from Mars or better. (I know the seventies are technically out of bounds, being a part of the atomic age, but so long as the tech itself isn't running off nuclear power I think it should count. But I have a fondness for wrenches and cables and CRTs so I am biased.)
Why isn't Warehouse 13 more like this? Maybe it's been done before; I do not know, for I am only an egg. I'm still watching it, obviously, but the more I think about it, the more that keyboard makes me angry, and start to think of ways it could still work without the tickity-tockity.

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 13:58:19 GMT

NBC is showing Merlin this summer, so now it is on Hulu.
I am dying laughing. Who the hell greenlit this show?

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 19:07:34 GMT

Sensual Daydreams is a dumb name for an organization that goes around at night.
7/8 of the audience were virgins, and the average age was probably about 17.
And not that it isn't fun to act up at the show, it's always fun, but to have such strict organization over an event that is inherently anarchical strikes me as stupid. Just don't touch the screen or anyone who doesn't want to be touched and roll the fucking movie.
I will probably not go back to the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 01:15:18 GMT

My last light bulb just died. I turned on the overhead light and watched it flicker out. I actually said "ohhh", like it was sad. Well, it king of was. The other two light bulbs in the fixture died weeks ago, and this one was just hanging out, chilling, providing light for me.
I went and got new light bulbs. No point in sitting around in the dark.

Sun, 24 May 2009 14:55:39 GMT

Hey, guess what? Losing 20 pounds since the start of the year? Actually type 1 diabetes. Good grief.
Weight loss got noticeable around Easter. Then I got thirstier and thirstier. By the last week of class I would chug my nalgene and a half hour later run for the bathroom. I was hungry all the time, but still losing weight. From all the water, my acne went away. So now I'm skinny and clear-skinned, I can apparently eat whatever I want, I'm very well-hydrated, the semester is over, everything is perfect except for having to pee all the time.
But I know from Ann M. Martin books that being thirsty and hungry and having to pee all the time might mean diabetes, and if it isn't it still isn't healthy anyway, so I go to the school clinic on Monday because it's the last week I can go in for free. They take some samples and tell me I probably have diabetes and need to go to the hospital and probably need to be admitted. The hospital, when I tell them that I don't have insurance, tell me I don't need to be admitted and that they want to talk to my mom. (Which is irritating. If I'm old enough to be chronically ill and uninsured I'm certainly old enough to take care of my disease. As this was all going on, I was 8 days from being 22.)
I can't binge on junk food anymore. I can't drink all night anymore. I have to eat lunch everyday. I have to excuse myself every two hours to do maintenance. Up to last week I was a hard-living scoundrel of a grad student, and now I have to change some things.
So I will save money by not spending it on things that are bad for me (though it will get spent on things that are good for me). I will stay in shape (and not spend any more money on new clothes and look good in the ones I have). I will stay out all night and be charming and witty and not slur my words.
I will be even more of a badass bookworm, because stupid little things could kill me but I won't let them.

Wed, 13 May 2009 13:43:29 GMT

I went to pack up stuff to give to goodwill and found out I can fit in jeans I bought in high school.
Not the last remaining pair of fives, those are out, and if I fit that size again I am not buying jeans from walmart. Bought senior year, when I could drive myself to lunch and get McDonald's every day and started to gain weight.
I can just fit in the blue suit I bought when I was 16, and can't quite fit in the black dress I bought when I was 15. I can fit in the blue dress I bought when I was 14, but it catches and pulls in places and is very short.
I would tell myself that it is medically mysterious weight loss, but then I remember that I am on a diet.
I am going to pick up a bike path pass today, and maybe go look at bikes. And figure out how to reprogram the speedometer so that it is an odometer.
And I am going to take two showers a day and treat my skin morning and night.
And I am going to lift in the morning.
And I am going to work on doing a split.
And touching my toes.
And doing a headstand.
And a pullup.
And clean out my computer.
And learn French.
And Spanish.
I have goals.

Sun, 03 May 2009 16:01:22 GMT

CNN lady doesn't want a girl.
I wonder if my mom did. I know she had a miscarriage before me, and told me that she really didn't think about how much she wanted kids until she did, so I think when she wanted kids she just wanted healthy (and hopefully good-looking) ones. But my mom was crunchy before it was cool, and grew up bucking expectations as best she could, so I wonder if she worried about pink.
As it turned out, I loved Cinderella. And playing in the dirt. She used to tape a bow to my head, so people would know that I was a girl. I could be irritated, that she didn't think I passed for girl, but maybe it was about letting other people know that I was a girl, and yes, girls can and will scale the outside of the jungle gym, run around hollering, pushing children in the dirt. Go mom.

Sun, 26 Apr 2009 22:48:28 GMT

I take it back. Though I don't think I ever shared this particular thought with anyone.
I disliked the Disney stage musicals that came after The Lion King. I shouldn't even worry about them. They exist in places I do not have to go, but discussion tends to crop up among musical fans, usually after or right before Wicked. Wicked is more than I want to think about at the moment.
But the Beauty and the Beast stage musical seemed particularly awkward, because the movie was such a great Ashman/Menken show and they have to fill up space with Menken/Rice songs. So for a long time, I really figured there was no room in the canon for the Menken/Rice songs, and then someone told me I had to hear "Me". Which was funny, and fit right in. So, I was a little less against the stage version, because of "Me."
I got ahold of the stage version and listened. I had hear "If I Can't Love Her" before and didn't care for it, so I wonder if I heard a different version before, because I like this one. It fits perfectly, and Menken's musicis really great. Plus, I am a sucker for French horn.
But I still don't like "Home" or "Maison des Lunes". I know everyone wanted to know.
So now, we make movies, and then make them stage musicals, and then make movie versions of the stage musicals. How have we not gotten around to making "The Breakfast Club" a show yet? When I first saw it I was sure it was a play, but it wasn't. It takes place in a library all day- it has monologues- it's perfect. And It could be a musical just as easily. Let Duncan Sheik at it. I'd totally go see it.
Better than "Shrek: The Musical", right?

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 14:24:41 GMT

The thing about grad school is that it has a lot of nutjobs, and a lot of people who may be able to write a paper, but can't get through a class without saying something really pointless. Like the one who has to have every concept explained twice or the one who thinks Russian is a romance language or the one who keeps asking about the effect of whatever we are talking about on the gay community.
Though, really, we should reconsider who explains America to the Korean students. At the beginning of the semester this guy was teaching one of them how to use the term "indian giver"- wtf.

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:58:47 GMT

Back in February I decided I was going on a diet for Lent. It turned out to be this messed up series of binging and binging and stress and not having time for lunch on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Then a week before Easter I freaked out and pulled a crash diet, because I had a 24 pack of Coke Zero in my car, so why not just not eat when I was at school? Plus I had to fit into my suit. Really, I shouldn't have to, because I've had the suit since I was 16 and should acknowledge that six years later it doesn't have to fit, but I guess I would rather not eat than go shopping for clothes. Besides, then you can use the money you would have spent on new clothes for fun things that you will use, like books or alcohol.
I have no way of knowing whether it was the healthy diet or the two week crash (which was interrupted by me being really really hungry and wanting falafel because they sell it at school) that made me lose two inches off of everywhere. The stupid thing is, because I haven't had time to work out, I'm rocking the skinny fat look, so I jiggle and have bones poking out. And I have no butt whatsoever and more boobs than I would like. And the size ten jeans I bought last weekend are too big, but the clothes I had last summer that were too tight fit fine now.
But I am freaked out because I don't want to get neurotic about food, so I have to start eating at school again. And working out, because I need my tight little butt back.
I've been looking at apartments a lot. I need a roommate, probably two, so I've been looking on craigslist and facebook marketplace. Craigslisters inevitably turn out to be even creepier than I had suspected, and facebookers tend to be flaky. I am probably going to move back to the ghetto around MU, because it is cheap and familiar. Still no word on the HNIP or any advice as to how to graduate, looks like I'll be working all summer in MKE and paying extra to take a core class online. I hate the fact that they charge more for online classes, it seems so stupid, especially if you are on site. Well, what is really stupid is that they don't offer this class on site and I need it for many things. What is extra stupid is that I can't get a straight answer out of anyone in admin and have to sort this out the best I can when they keep changing the rules on me. You know, it's not necessary to do a fieldwork? I think I may not do one. I already have a job, so why do I need to take an unpaid intership that takes up credits I could be using for a real class? This shit is bananas. I need to get out as soon as possible.

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:17:28 GMT

I went to the basement, because that's where the pantry is, and there was a BIG centipede on the wall, right at eye level. D:

Sun, 19 Apr 2009 15:57:44 GMT

Went over to my friend's house last night to chill and drink and watch movies. We were mostly waiting for my friend's roommate, who nobody likes, to get home so we could mock him, but I guess he wound up in jail or in a ditch or something so we just sat and waited.
Within this circle, I am best known for knowing exactly how to cut anyone down to size and getting very very drunk. Usually, these things go together, but I decided that I didn't like being embarrassed afterwards when I remembered what I'd said the night before- and I do always remember, though sometimes what I remember is so ridiculous I have to ask other people who were there if it actually happened. Mostly, I am a little too candid when I am in that state. Which is great for insults, and less great for more personal matters.
Finished Edmund Morris' The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt before I went out. The more I read about TR, the more I get the feeling that I should not like him. I think I do, though, because one of his least-favorable traits is one of my own: a disgust for personal weakness that becomes a distaste for weaknesses in general. TR was such a weird little kid and figured out that weirdness was not good, though traits like curiosity would carry him far, and sought to stop being so much himself. I have done the same thing. Maybe I wish I hadn't. Maybe, if I had been homeschooled and never compromised myself for the public, I would be twice as far as I am today. Or I could be a freakish basement dweller obsessed with mythology and distant lands. Never gone to MU. Never met any friends. Never taken up rugby. Never gone past the wicca diys and Gundam Wing fansites.
Curiosity. We haz it. And also, shame.
This is why I can't stop loving Theodore Roosevelt.