The Daily Adventures of Mercat

Can't talk much, gotta run. Not quite finished packing yet for our trip, insanely busy on my own anyhow, gotta get some sleep in there somewhere... but happy holidays nonetheless! May you be blessed with family and friends, but if you need an ear to turn to just drop me a line. ;)

Because I'm on break, dammit. You can find it here.

Day 1: Ten Things You Wanted/Want to Be When You're Older

1. Indiana Jones
2. Indiana Jones
3. Indiana Jones
4. Indiana Jones
5. Indiana Jones
6. Indiana Jones
7. Indiana Jones
8. Indiana Jones
9. Indiana Jones
10. Indiana Jones


...Wait. I don't think that counts as a real list. (It should, though.)

1. When I was younger I used to say I would be a different thing every day of the week. This involved ballet, figure skating, possibly being a fireman (can't quite remember), and definitely "historical bridge repainter". Because covered bridges get defaced a lot =/

2. An architect... sort of. I've always designed strange places in my mind, like a Radio Flyer fort (my sense of scale was horrible when I was little), a tree fort, several more tree forts, etc. And now that I'm older it's lots of strange things like zombie defenses and hidden rooms and things like that. Not to mention I legitimately am interested in sustainable design but I also really, really want to design things like theme parks or movie sets. IMAGINEERING FUCK YEAH.

3. A detective/spy. Always liked that piecing clues together, don't think I'll ever give that up.

4. A Total Badass

No, seriously, there's a reason I like action movies.

5. A pirate. Part of this involves dressing up (textural layers, lots of jewelry, awesome boots and fantastical hats), part of this involves me loving the island life. And Jimmy Buffett songs.

6. A bartender. Or possibly, a restaurant owner. How sweet would it be to own a tiki bar restaurant?! The answer: very. Because it would be like a theme park but also food and drinks. And tiki mugs. And I could serve delicious Hawaiian foods. om nom imu pork

7. A musician. I already miss playing my trumpet and we already know I miss drum corps. Who knows where this will go, I like my uke, maybe I'll get better at piano again, maybe I'll find some new instruments. I'd take up accordion. Maybe I'll just get more involved in dance, if I enjoy this tap class next semester. (Not really "musician", but still musical performance, so idgaf.)

8. The Proud Owner of a Personal Library. No seriously, I love books. I'm going to have a fucking fabulous library some day. FABULOUS.

9. A cat owner :3

10. Indiana Jones. This is a perfectly legitimate response.

Indiana Jones ref in Fallout New Vegas. (Coincidentally, all three movie refs he listed have Harrison Ford in them.)

Adventure in the news.

Disney tiki movie, which I'm not sure how I feel about that.

But, uhhh... this is a little horrifying.
On the Twitter front: NASA gets a coolant leak.

Creepy time-lapse videos of Japanese plants! There are few things that strike instant horror into my heart, but one of them is plants that move. I realize, yes, that plants are alive, but they don't "move" (I don't know a better way to put that) and they aren't sentient. BUT THEY WERE THE SCARIEST PART OF JUMANJI. (Although Audrey II doesn't creep me out at all... I guess because Little Shop is so campy. If it were at all serious, I'd probably freak.)

Also on my list of horrifying things, mutated/evil rabbits. The Holy Grail rabbit and Bunnicula don't count, though. And neither do jackalopes, oddly, although rodents with huge nose warts/growths probably would, as I remember being a little creeped out by my best friend's rabbit's inch-and-a-half-long nose-wart in gradeschool.

...I have strange fears.

Anyway, tonight's episode of Big Bang was INDIANA JONES THEMED! I kind of supposed it would be from the ads this week, but they didn't say anything explicit in the ads so I wasn't sure. The nerdiest thing they mentioned was Deborah Nadoolman, the costumer, but... I'm kinda iffy on her. I've read a lot of confusing accounts on her on COW, so I'm not sure how I feel about her. Anyway, it's a complicated issue and the one person maybe reading this who cares probably already knows more about it than I do (or doesn't care because he's a pretty relaxed guy, seems like).

...Buuuut I digress (which is just another way of saying "anyway" without starting YET ANOTHER point with that remark). I hope they continue from where they left off rather than just wrapping it up explanatorially. (Although I doubt they will--they do a good job of keeping a solidly flowing roughly-relative-to-weekly storyline, and on twitter one of the writers said that the Raiders March was not an uncostly deal.) BUT. They supposedly went to see a showing of Raiders (I'm jealous, I've missed big-screen showings of it TWICE this year, both coincidentally local to me!) with 21 seconds of yet-unseen footage... I wish. Lucasfilm hasn't released anything yet-unseen in ages. :(

Prompt time!

Top three favorite bands... Man, I don't know. My favorite songs at the moment are Tchaikovsky's 1812 (my permanent favorite), Cee Lo's Fuck You (which I also discovered his band is all rockin' girls! yeeeeaw), and Billy Joel's Ballad of Billy the Kid. Let's just leave it there and call it good.

I think I am turning into some sort of weird math nerd. (I know, and you're saying, like I wasn't already.) No, but really, more than the interest in science and math I already have, I just bought a box of cereal because it had a very well-designed box with hexagons on it. It was a very sexy design. Sexagons.

...Or something. I'll just leave that there.

Even I don't know what that is.



THESE ARE HORRIFYING. I was looking up tiki home dec stuff on Amazon (yes... this is the sort of thing I choose to do w9ith my time) and all of a sudden JUST WTF IS THAT. Seriously. Would you put those in your yard? Only if you own a Fun House, I hope. Because everyone knows those are secret terrors. Places of Weird. And not in the good Neil-Gaiman-American-Gods way. Yeah.

So I think I got dehydrated over the weekend. I didn't have an unusual amount of mountain dew last night but fuck if I DIDN'T SLEEP. I felt like I was 90% asleep for five hours and when my alarm went off I felt like I was hovering in my bed, YES, HOVERING, because I felt so shaky. Wtf? I don't even know. But I felt sick to my stomach and sore and I couldn't sleep and it was miserable. So I skipped my classes (ugh, because like I need to be more behind) and tried to sleep and IT JUST WAS NOT HAPPENING because damned if today wasn't the day of all days Ohio decided to get warm. And someone's car alarm kept going off. And the guys upstairs decided to stomp up and down the hall or something. ARRRRRRGGGHHHH. I must have gotten at least some sleep though because there was a dream with an escaped mad monkey and a banana to catch him and a magazine article about Ted Mosby. idfk. To summarize, I felt like shit and still kind of don't know why. And spring break, of course, was not so great, with gramps in the hospital and the weather sucked and I feel like I got nothing done because I went through junk papers in my room and in total cleaned only about four boxes worth of stuff. Granted, they were giant boxes and I went through every piece of paper, but I feel like I had a miserable break over all. Idk. I need a legitimate break... from something. I don't know what that means. I don't know what I want anymore, and it's driving me crazy. Egh.

Anyway. I'm ready for Easter and St. Patrick's Day because they're at least theme holidays and I can go dress up in fun ways or something.

ANYWAY, enough of that, this entry took a sudden turn for the depressing. =/

Here! Have a cat playing a theremin. There is nothing about this that isn't awesome.



I feel like I want to go into my little rant of the moment about steampunk and my renewed love for post-apoc fashion and pirates but I feel like there's enough complaining in this post. Hahaha. (tl;dr version: is it just me or is there an overwhelming amount of "HEY I PUT SOME BRASS GEARS INTO THE DESIGN, ISN'T THIS COOL NOW"? Yeah, I just... not unless you started a bike club. In which case, yes, it very much is. OR YOU'RE BUILDING A STEAMPUNK SKYNET, in which case, YES IT'S AWESOME BUT WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU THINKING?! YOU'VE DOOMED US ALL.)



How would that even work, a steampunk Skynet? Skynet doesn't activate "until" 1997. Idk. Clearly, I have weird thoughts sometimes. Weird, nerdy thoughts.

Speaking of which I need some good post-apocalyptic boots for kicking ass. They're hard to find.

I've been thinking about a lot of things lately. This may be partly due to psych 101; much like philosophy courses, I end up having a great deal to think about that impacts my normal everyday already large-topic-encompassing thought process. As such, this post is all over the places and contains both shallow and ponderous (omg, "pond"erous, get it? pun not intended, but fully enjoyed by this mercat) artifacts.

I freaking love crazy fan theories. I've read a few great ones lately, that Fight Club is grown up Calvin & Hobbes, Pokemon is a coma dream Ash is having to deal with his issues, Ferris Beuller is all in Cameron's head, it goes on. Some of them are crazy-awesome but completely unncessary (like these), others more legit (the r2d2 theory, which sort of retcons the plot holes added by the new trilogy). ANYWAY, I was directed to this fantabulous page of crazy fan theories about Iron Man. My personal favorites are:

1) The quantum moustache theory

Tony's facial hair exists in a state of quantum entanglement
This theory is an attempt to reconcile how Tony can appear in separate comics with either the modern goatee or the retro 'stache. In a similar situation to Schrodinger's Cat, Tony simultaneously has a goatee and a mustache until the artist "observes" him.

* Screw the laws of physics, I have money!

2) The Tesla theory

Tony Stark is a clone of Nikola Tesla.
Minus the madness, of course.

The man builds an arc reactor (in a cave with a box of scraps no less), plugs it into his chest, builds the iron man suit and hunts down the people who got access to his weapons without him knowing about it and you're trying to tell me he's not crazy?

3) Rhody's recasting

Rhody is going to get severely injured between films and require skin grafts
The recovery process will result in Rhodes getting thinner and his skin getting darker.

4) The Iron Man theory

Tony Stark is really Iron Man.
I've got it! Iron Man is supposedly an employee of Stark Enterprises but no evidence of this has ever been really seen - he's never seen following Stark even though he's supposed to be Stark's bodyguard, and on the rare occasions they are seen in the same room, Iron Man never speaks, so it could easily be anyone wearing the same armour. Stark has numerous times supposedly fired Iron Man but it doesn't stop Iron Man from appearing even though he should be out of funding and Stark always welcomes him back with open arms in the end. What more evidence do you need?

* Dude, where have you been? He claimed so in that one meet the press thing the military did about Iron Man.
* No, that press thing was just a stint to throw us off it was just like that time Harvey Dent said he was the Batman but he wasn't! But maybe you're on to something with the jerkass billionaire playboy idea... Hmm. Have we ever seen Bruce Wayne and Iron Man together?

o And Peter Parker can never get photos of Superman! It's all so clear.

+ Yes, of course... BRUCE WAYNE IS TONY STARK!
+ Obviously, they agreed to a corporate merger. It was cemented by Stark and Wayne by using the Dragon Ball Z fusion earrings. Ladies and Gentlemen: Toby Stayne!

5) All of Stan Lee's characters are the same guy (just plain epic)

6) ALL OF THE CROSSOVER THEORIES

Seriously, this page, just for entertainment's sake, I love it. The pure hilarity of it is impressive.

(Also, just ran over to the Indy page to see what the deal was, of course, it's not so nearly entertainment so much as people trying to pretend ToD and KotCS didn't happen. ACCEPT THEM AND MOVE ON WITH YOUR LIFE. It's on these occasions I am sad that the Indy fans are relatively a good deal older or a good deal younger than me...)

(Additionally, wtf, "the skull was magnetic, the gold could actually be real magnetic material"?! YOU FAIL AT SCIENCE. CRYSTAL =/= MAGNETIC.)

These sort of things make me wonder how many movie viewers actually incorrectly explain plot holes, as some people clearly to not understand logic and some to not understand science. BUT I DIGRESS, I am so far afield from anything relevant to this post idek.

Let's go where I was originally going, teenage rebellion. I don't know why it came up, but I was thinking about it yesterday and I have concluded that perhaps, despite my "goody-two-shoes" image (ha), there may exist a natural rebellion in every teenager, and perhaps I was just lucky enough to be able to funnel this energy into more useful outlets. Pats for Hats, holding grudges against certain asshats, and feminism. How did I realize this? I realized, when speaking metaphorically that sexism is THE button to press to make me go off--I realized that I (rather comparatively) flip out whenever sexism is the issue at hand. Regardless of how big or small the issue may be. And I really have no reason for feeling that passionately--well, actually, that may not be true, now that I put it to paper (or blog as the case may be). Perhaps my paranoia (well, constant worry over unnecessary things) against all sorts of things to go wrong causes me to feel oppressed by my environments and that's why I flip out with feminism? To try to regain confidence for the oppressed? I don't know, it's a legitimate theory.

Particularly in relation to this article I just read, that the objectification of women by men DIRECTLY AFFECTS THEIR SELF-CONFIDENCE. Perhaps what I believe to be my greater social awareness is to blame for what I call my "paranoia"? Maybe I will just start calling it "avid awareness" or some bullshit term because I feel like paranoia is unfair (not to mention unfounded. I'm somewhat clinically curious, though). ANYWAY.

(...My theory also explains why, I think, my family thinks I am bat-shit for thinking Twilight is bat-shit. Because I react that way, and I expect others to be as offended about feminism and stalkers and pedophilia BUT MAYBE THAT'S JUST ME.)

No, I definitely still think that shit is horrifying

Again on the topic of feminism, the anti-rape condom. I have mixed feelings about this. One, well, it is good to have a tool to fight in this war? I don't know. But (two) it really bothers me that this puts the responsibility in the hands of the victim. I mean, I don't want to have to shove that thing up my vag just to maim a rapist in the event that may happen. I mean, what, do you wear this every time you go out? Every day? All day, all the time? (And technically, by the mechanics of it, is it really a condom? Idk, it's more like... a diaphragm trap. Except it's not a diaphragm either, I know I know, so... what is it?

...Well let's just say I'm resisting the urge to post Ackbar in here.) Anyway. I feel like this is a measure for the desperate only, and otherwise has some rather dire implications. BUT that is society and welcome to it =/

I am learning to play Hey Soul Sister on my uke; the chords are difficult both in that they hurt (gotta learn that stretch and that muscle memory) and that I don't know how to hold my uke properly to change chords rapidly. THIS IS A PROBLEM. No thanks to my uke teacher, of course, because I remember asking her and she never really had anything to say because she didn't have any sort of formal teaching. Awesomesauce.

Melissa taught me a new word today: revagulous. This may just take over for recockulous in terms of outlandishness and entertainment value. (See, I told you, I can appreciate bodily function jokes on the same level of my brain that is in psychology-mode. IT'S CRAZY, I know.)

(...Literally?)

CLUB OBI-WAN let's goooooo

Handwriting is History?! Let me answer that with an emphatic NO. What if all our computers were to die? And I'm guessing it teaches kids good small-motor-skills. Oh and then there's the part where typing special characters and equations is still a huge fucking pain in the ass. But this dude is a journalist so I'm sure he has no idea that trying to write out Taylor Series expansions is SO EASY WITH TABLETS, amirite? Oh wait, almost none of the engineers use their laptops to take notes. Too much a novelty, still.

This shirt is ugly as sin but I love the pun.

Random thing: I was just looking at passiveaggressivenotes.com and saw a "flowers to go: if your name is bitch, come in and get your free flowers" post. It reminded me that, I think, the night before I left for Spain, I was coming home from Regal 20 and met my parents for dinner at Marion's or ice cream at Friendly's or something (actually, I think it was a Thursday and I was coming home from my Thursday night science lecture), and I passed the flower place over by the gas station, and it had that promotion but it said "Diane" that day. =) Good times. Wow, random memory, huh?

A somewhat worrisome facebook article. They keep everything. HOLY SHIT. Also, it pisses me off that though they have all this old data, I can't recover my statuses and Twitter only keeeps 1,000 tweets. I lost all my first tweets :( And I had some good stuff I wanted to come back to, as well...

(Also, Facebook Beacon! Done via a 1x1 GIF bug. That is sly. And douchey. And I'm starting to hate facebook more and more.)

A history of the ampersand! Completely fascinating.

And on the topic of typography and characters, an English-language sarcasm mark. Only I find it ugly and I think if you are blatantly told something is sarcasm you are missing a critical level of enjoyment and understanding of sarcasm. In addition, if you miss written sarcasm you may want to re-evaluate whether you are truly understanding the writer. (Although the use for indicating sarcasm in subtitles is useful.) (And... it costs $2 to buy and use? Yeah... not gonna catch on, buds.)

Nightmare snowmen! As featured in Calvin and Hobbes. Fantastic work. Art.

D: Oh well, that dream out the window I suppose.


Anyway, so here's a tip. Don't spend a day looking at Shag's art, and tiki art, and Pink Panther stuff, and spend the most of the next day missing Hawaii, and then go dress shopping for a formal. It's... dangerous.

I mean, I love the dress. I liked it when I saw it on the wall of the store because it's structured, and most dresses now are that lame under-the-bust stupid design that makes every girl look like they're pregnant. Yeah, so, I was really into these bright jewel tones more than anything (like I said... too much Shag art) but nothing really fit well. So I have this awesome fitted dress, but... I don't know. It's about >this far< from being trashy. I mean just imagine the bright gold heels and some Tiffany & Co. jewelry on there and woo baby it's like you walked out of Talladega Nights. So you have to play it... carefully. And the problem is, I can't quite place the style. It's not quite forties, not quite fifties, not quite sixties... Maybe it's more thirties but it's too bright for that and I can't exactly waltz in there with a big sun-hat and breakfast-at-tiffany's shades. The dress is already too look-at-me for me. I mean, I like the dress, I just hope it blends in more than I'm suspecting it will.

Meh, anyway, Laura and I bought the closest thing we could find to a black fascinator that didn't have a rose on it (we were looking for feathers) but the closest thing we could find was a headband with this reconstructed-black-glittery-flower thing on it.

This is essentially the dress: dis one


And I mean, if this were really more formal than "formal" (it's not a black-tie event, or even prom-like; probably more like homecoming), I would put on my black fed or just a hat in no time flat. But, eh, I guess you take what you can get.

OH, and Laura said wearing my Hawaii flower hairclip would be too trashy. :C That makes me sad because I really love them and I'm really feeling that right now. (Too much Shag.) Oh well.

So... yeah, I'm kind of afraid of tomorrow. I generally hate attention and it's just one of those dresses. I dunno, I kinda feel like I should be a dumb platinum blonde when I step into it... Does that even make sense?




Okay, it's kind of sad, I'm looking for a pic of that dress and finding all this bright Indian and gypsy style stuff... It's gorgeous. And dangerous. If I ever end up as a crazy cat lady I'll be wearing shit like this all the time, you know it and I know it. Fuck.

Loooooooong post tonight. I have a million tabs to clean up, haha.

OMG ALFRED MOLINA IS IN THE NEXT PINK PANTHER MOVIE. I am so frigging excited. I got worked up about losing my checkbook (boo) and my Shag art Pink Panther checks (double-boo) and spent the day looking at Shag's stuff and Pink Panther stuff, trying to find those cute versions of his. Unfortunately, they were just for the 40th anniversary in 2004... So it looks like it will take some actual hunting to find them.

So how awesome is Shag? Well, I really want this for my computer.

And this is from an interview of him on Modculture.com: "Are there any celebrity "Shag" fans you are willing to name? Do you get invites to celebrity parties?
"There are celebrity collectors, but almost any fairly established artist in L.A. will have them, as the celebrities are the ones with lots of disposable income! One of my biggest collectors is Whoopi Goldberg. Ben Stiller, Seth Green, Rob Zombie, and Nancy Sinatra also own paintings. I don't feel really comfortable around famous people and usually decline invitations to "hang" with the stars.""

YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT, FUCK YOU BEN STILLER HATERS. AND FUCKIN' SETH GREEN. These guys are infinitely more awesome than before.

Also: things you worry about typing into search engines--"shag" is one of them (also, afraid to type in shag.com directly). See also: "shag pink panther". Trust me, I know the horrors Google can wreak. (Like Cthulhu from the depths of the internet. His screams are your own.)

Next up: check out these remixed movie posters. They're awesomely 60's. (And no, it wasn't just Last Crusade that caught my eye.)


Star Wars, as told by someone who hasn't seen it. HILARIOUS. May I also note this is on my "sinning by not having watched it" list, but only as a sci-fi and pop culture classic. There are a lot of others just as equivalent, say maybe Pink Panther? And I do mean the classics. This is nowhere near the magnitude of not watching Indiana Jones, I daresay. E];D

A Public Service Announcement for College-Aged Guys. Yeah, I went more specific than her, whatever, I think it's hilarious. AND EXTREMELY ACCURATE. However, I will admit that cleanliness > organizedness. I look like the messiest person ever because it is somehow all organized in my head. However, dirty is gross. THAT BEING SAID, if you're trying to impress someone, and you have advance notice, go a little out of your way to make an improvement... I don't leave my shit around in the living room when we have Phi Rho meetings, do I? No, I don't. (And my room is a mess because it's not really a living space, just a storage/sleeping space, and I'm not taking anyone in there anyway so who am I trying to impress? That's right, nobody.)

The best story I've ever read about Hades and Persephone. The writer has an amzingly clever way with words.

Obamicon yourself! I feel like this is already overdone, but, hey, I'm sure it will come in handy in a few months...

How to rape your brain without dropping acid. Honestly, I'm gonna try that first one. Similar things happen to me when I'm very tired, very quiet (pretty standard for me) and trying to fall asleep but just staring at the back of my eyelids. However, some of the other ones seem like they would just hurt... Like the fake-arm-hammer thing. Uh, thanks, my brain still hurts thinking about the Boonshoft's Laser Rollercoaster Show. (Ow.)

Still going through some other links. I'm a lazy-ass.

Frig I love tikis.

So Monday dad texted me that his hygienist was selling a 2004 Saturn for $7000 with 27000 miles. I have given up on car shopping for time reasons since school started back up, so I just said yes because I knew I couldn't find a better deal. Well Tuesday night I went out to dinner with mom and dad and gma and gpa and Vince, and dad and I were talking about my car, and I joked asking dad if I could have it by Tuesday for driving people for the field trips so I wouldn't have to clean my Taurus, and he said yes.

Well, on the way home driving back up Wilmington Pike I thought my lights on the dash and my headlights were dimming and I couldn't see anything. The radio and clock were still fine but I couldn't see my spedometer and my inside light was dimmer when I checked it. So I called mom and we talked and I said I'd just drive it back to school since there was enough street light and we could check it later. Well as I slowed to a stop near BP and Ritters the lights went all the way down and the clock had dimmed and then the car nearly stalled, so I just pulled right in to BP and called dad to come pick me up.

So jokingly I had thought to myself that I hoped the Taurus wouldn't be upset about a new car, because though I never gave the car a name (well, other than the Parrotheadmobile--I never could assign a "gender" of character, as it were), I still kind of personificated it with the whole Jimmy Buffet thing, and I did hear Margaritaville just a few days before. So I think it's appropriate that the Taurus wanted to go out in style (NOT Otis; and also Chester the "mouse" in the trunk), and I think that this required its own entry.

Taurus, you were a good sturdy car and you had a good character. Even though it's probably just you alternator according to Dad, I'm glad you decided to "go out in style" (even though I won't get the new car until later and I have Laura's now).

RIP.

Ummmph. I'm tired. History test was pretty easy today, though the other class got cancelled. So instead I spent four and a half hours finishing my final project for ceramics because I need to make a backup on Friday because wetwork has to be done then. And I still need a decent idea, I haven't really had any compelling ones in a bit.

My mom sent a package about a week ago that was supposed to arrive in about three days, and I gave them the benefit of the doubt over the weekend, but it's still not here. Which is an issue because it has food and tax forms, both of which have expiration dates.

I went to the bookstore the other day (Monday?) and picked up Empire magazine and Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman. I've been reading the book since dinner, it's pretty good. Just a collection of short stories and things. However, I kind of just realized that Gaiman writes very matter-of-factly and that that's kind of how I'm reading off this entry in my mind. Literature with good tone usually does that to me.

What else, what else? Nothing special. I might give blood tomorrow if I can sign up, I couldn't do it today because I was slaving over a project that looks crappy anyhow. Eh.

For as long as I was feeling homesick and generally despondent, I'm now just despondent and homesick for here. I can't only have a month left. I really don't want to go home, at the moment, and I don't even know why.

Umm I got this story through another blog I read, and I had a humorous image in my head. I think if 90% of the women in the world watched this Depp/Bale film and then watched the McGregor/Jackman one that's coming out soon, the world would spontaneously combust or something. Just a funny thought.

This makes me really sad. Fucking idiot. I wish I would have been there to punch his lights out.

Hmm, I promised I'd make up for yesterday and I'm sure I'm still missing a day or so from spring break so I'll just toss out what I have at risk of having nothing new to post tomorrow. 42 days! How is it that close? Everything feels kind of surreal right now. Anyway, here's what I have.

Fantasically atomic REAL wallpaper. However, click on the image to see a bigger one and save it. That's some gorgeous shit right there, my friends. (I'm including this under the 1957 qualification, and if you don't like that I'm putting it under the tikis/flamingos/Jimmy Buffet/go fuck yourselves section.) (Wow, what is with me tonight? I'm like half asleep and totally mouthy, but in the way that I sort of mean it, not for humorous hyperbole like usual. Maybe it's that British humor where you feel everything you say but you rarely mean it. That would make sense.)

Preview of the Indiana Jones handbook... which is already in some stores so I'm angry I couldn't find it at Barnes and Nobles the other day. Although I guess I should really be saving my money right now for those "limited edition" books and save the other stuff for my birthday or something.

CustomCon Indiana Jones figures. Not too bad, but the faces are kind of wonky. That idol setup is to DIE for, though. Damn.

[EDIT] I think it says something that I got through the entire post without trying to reference 42. I am very tired.

Yay! I got to the airport fine, pretty much a whole hour early. I called a cab and the guy was really nice, he knew who the Flyers were and talked to me the whole way. =) Nice cabbies are a blessing on the earth, lol. So I wandered around the airport a little trying to figure out where I could meet my parents (had to aska security guard how to get downstairs to baggage claim--the escalator was closed off), and then sat around trying to figure out where they were coming in from. Around twelve I figured my best guess was O'Hare so I went and sat by the baggage claim and read some Douglas Adams. That man is a genius. Anyway, they showed up around two (they landed at 1:35) and we got the luggage and the rental car and found the condo-thingy and walked up and down Waikiki a little and then got dinner at Lulu's. They got rid of the Elviki! I'm kind of sad. I'm hoping they just moved them upstairs to the club or something. But still, Elviki is like perfect 50's kitsch. I got a Magnum PI burger, which is a bacon cheeseburger with guac. Not only is that sort of thing delicious I just kind of went "hee Indiana Jones" like you would expect me to, lol. I had a virgin pina colada (pretend there's a tilde on my "n"), actually the first since I've been here. I don't go out to eat that often but I just found out that there's a really good, pretty inexpensive greek place a block away! That is so taking over for Subway. Hummus/pita/kalamata olives? Oh hells yes. Anyway, I think I can tolerate pineapple more, but I still think straight up pineapple would be too strong for me. But the apple-pineapple juice they have at the caf that they soak the apples in isn't too bad. For desert we had something called the Foster's (or Frosters?), which was vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and caramel topping with banana slices. Pretty good, though I'm not a huge fan of bananas in my ice cream. All in all a very Elvis meal.

Speaking of apples, the last few days when I've snacked on apples, it's aggravated this pain in my jaw. The pain is kind of throughought my jaw, but my ears feel tight, too (like they're on the verge of popping), and the other day my neck started hurting. Yesterday I kind of freaked for a moment because I thought it might be mono (there was an outbreak on campus), but I thought maybe just TMJ. But it definitely is painful and gives me little headaches and makes it difficult to sleep. I talked to mom and dad today though and they think I've either started grinding my teeth in my sleep (that would be a weird trigger, since I'm less stressed for once in my life) or that sleeping on the couch is too awkward for my neck, which is actually plausible but makes me kind of sad. So we'll have to see.

Oh, I forgot to post on Sunday that one of the guys living at IT (Timmen or Timmeh or something?) said that my skull ring was BA when I put it on. Lol. It's kind of funny but also awesome when guys comment on jewelry. =P

Let's see, otherwise... just two classes tomorrow and maybe uke lessons and I am done! Plus these classes are all fun... I love it here. Really.

63 days until Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull! Woo! Today's trivia: Apparently Lucasfilm sort-of released a statement the other day that the diamond Indy goes after in ToD is the Peacock's Eye, a diamond he was after he was younger (which you can see in the YIJC). Everyone kind of guessed/suspected this because they looked the same, but it's a good chance that it's sort of a fanservice-afterthought. ;)


Ugh... I don't want to do lauuuundryyyy...

I haven't decided about the LJ strike tomorrow. I really don't think it will do much good, and since LJ seems to have posted an apology (though not very well), I will stick through to see what happens. I'm not really against the ads, I can see why they would have to add them, it's a business. I'm just very ticked off they didn't say anything, tried to hide it, and didn't use the resources in front of their faces. So... anyway. =/ If I do get internet in the condo (which will probably be better than wireless here?!), I will probably be posting. A strike seems kind of futile, though I could support some sort of movement for the cause.

Plus I have my dedication to my 100 days 100 posts... ;D Oh, silly, silly.

In the meantime, I have a brief assignment and some email inbox-clearing to attend to...

Just watched Legally Blonde again, too. It's actually pretty decent. I think a lot of stuff in movies went over my head when I was a kid, so I liked it but I didn't really get it or remember it all. But that could be a lie, even movies I love, if I give them some breathing space, I forget things about that I enjoy rediscovering. =)

[EDIT] Note to self: "strike" tags do not work in titles.