January 2009
The number of Death Cab for Cutie references seems to be falling with each New Year.
And then it got weird.
Sameer: You gonna be around March 16-21?
me: That's finals week for me, so I'll be around, albeit in a blubbering state.
Sameer: Why, are you taking a whale dissection lab?
me: Yes. Whale dissection has been found to be KEY to artificial intelligence. We've found that the lard structure presents our best hope for replicating the neural networks that form the basis of emotions like unrestrained imperturbability and confused sexual arousal.
I funked it, man. I funked it.
But did you funk it ENOUGH?
December 2008
“I know I will be pilloried if I dare end this review without mentioning the name...”
– Roger Ebert’s review of The Spirit
“To call the characters cardboard is to insult a useful packing material.”
– Roger Ebert’s review of The Spirit
[phone conversation at airport]
S's guy: I miss you.
*pause pause*
S: They are boarding! Bye!!
“Nooooo not a compliment clusterfuck!”
After breaking the showerhead holder in my hotel room, I have decided that from now on, wearing contact lenses while showering is a necessity.
Also, Kristin Scott Thomas is very bad at feigning an American accent. You can feel every syllable straining to expand into a long vowel that ends with a crisply articulated snap.
My parents are watching Random Hearts on TV, and there is a lot of characters saying a single sentence that poignantly drips with tragic meaning, followed by a very long and excruciating pause. After a while, it becomes a rhythm: TRAGEDY. Pause. TRAGEDY. Pause. Ominous taiko drum.
My dad is doing yoga along to the instructions on TV. This isn’t that funny in itself, but the solemnity with which he practices the art is hilarious.
“She proceeded to fall madly in love with him, and bought him a toothbrush.”
– Bob on Bob: The New Yorker
a recent realization
Whenever I remember something embarrassing that’s happened to me or something shameful that I’ve done, I tend to say aloud a few of the words from whatever I’m reading at the time, or the name of something I’m looking at.
It’s weird.
I think it’s either that I need to distract myself from the uncomfortable mental state, or that I am thinking about the memory...
man, i totally picture that being said in a deep announcer voice as a big transformer-like thing holding a tuba lunges out of the dry-iced mist onto center stage. meanwhile, tall skinny black men with grey beards and sunglasses, dressed up as identical Uncle Sams, complete with red-and-white-striped, white-stars-in-blue-rimmed top hats sway with the beat and blast their trumpets.
funk masta five
come ALIVE
Adjacent in the “friends’ blogs” section of my feed reader:
http://blogofchampions.livejournal.com/149873.html
http://davidsruminations.blogspot.com/2008/12/tis-season.html
By the way, the Idea Book lives again. That’s right. In this case, smaller is better, because the larger book I got in the hopes that I’d have more room to draw crap on each page didn’t fit in my pocket comfortably, and so I never actually took it around with me much.
Also, because last quarter I only had three classes and had a lot of free time, which I spent sitting in my...
You! Me! I gots! The Internet!
i think i’ve decided:
i vastly prefer traditionally performed christmas music to this weird rockabilly or indie shit they try to infuse it with. if you’re going to play the damn thing, just play the damn thing. don’t make like late-90s disney and pretend to be cool when you just ain’t.
I should brush my teeth more often. I get good ideas while doing it, the inevitable gagging from brushing my tongue brings my mind clarity, AND my teeth get whiter. Package deal.
a bloodless joy
is what you sometimes have on your hands when you decide to make a work out of a love.
me: man, sugar is really kind of gross
me: actually, both sugar and salt are gross
me: just those
me: white crystals
me: at least i know i'm not a fan of cocaine
I don’t know if I stopped paying attention, but I feel like I haven’t heard about any groundbreaking visual effects in movies for a while. I remember when I was a kid, it was a crazy thing that there were huge dinosaurs eating humans in Jurassic Park, the animals in Babe looked like they were talking, that the White House in Independence Day really looked like it was blowing up, and...
i kind of like making maps, so long as they are completely disproportionate in favour of points of interest according to some theme. like, best places to get cheap food. good theme.
so a system where you pay money for a chance to influence the direction of a song? and the more money you pay, the higher your chances are. it would suck to do straight-up bids, because then rich people would just get everything.
The “rural juror” joke from 30 Rock is still one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard.
The older I get, the more proficient I am at killing flies in midair. By the time I’m 30, I will be a fly-killing MACHINE, baby. They will make a cartoon out of me, and then there will be a spin-off live-action show featuring Patrick Warburton, and then his career will be ruined. Again.
me: wooo i can fold a shirt now
Mike: i'm excited for you
me: i know
me: this is terrifyingly exciting for something so mundane
Mike: dizzying
NUGGLE PLZ.
i kicks it.
Most people figure out how to make themselves look at least kind of good during high school. Most of the rest figure it out in college. The rest of us spend a lot of time getting it together for a few days out of the year.
reading about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:
So what you’re saying is that if there’s a draft, all someone has to do to get out of it is to ask a fellow soldier of the same sex for a blowjob?
EDIT: Scratch that. The current article for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell on Wikipedia notes:
On September 13, 2005, the Center for the Study of Sexual Minorities in the Military (on...
Okay, so:
a linklog that tells the reader what format each linked piece is in (video, pure text, text with embedded video, photograph, collection of photographs with captions, etc.) and how long it takes to experience. would be so nice to have.
I wish Beyoncé would just shut up and let the beats take over.
Pablo Neruda - "Sonnet XVII"
I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries hidden within itself the light of those flowers, and thanks to your love, darkly in my body lives the dense fragrance that rises from the...
Three-dimensional Scrabble. Letters rising up, spinning on their axis like gleaming jewels, forming the steps to a Mayan temple on Yavin IV.
“Putting shit in your eye HURTS, man.”
Pitchfork needs to stop reading silly shit into individual song lyrics. They could be door-to-door evangelizers, the way they pull lines out of context.
“He’s Just Not That Into You is an American romantic comedy film, based on...”
– …which, in turn, was based on a book by Candace Bushnell, which, in turn, was based on her New York Observer column, which, in turn, was based on her own embroilment in the sort of situations with which the second thing mentioned in this sentence is supposed to help and about which the first...
Christmas music wouldn’t be so bad if every goddamn shop in the world didn’t see it as their personal mission to imbibe their visitors with the apparent joy of the season. What happens to you as a shop if you don’t play Christmas music during December? Do you get fewer patrons? Is this something people have studied?
Money management can’t be that fucking hard. JUST DON’T BUY SHIT.
there’s an uncomfortable amount of homoeroticism in male church youth groups.
me: he's arguing that religious experience is not possible without psychedelic drugs
me: he says that organized religion is empty and useless without the experiences engendered by psychedelics
me: meanwhile i am installing a music player so i can listen to daft punk
me: coincidence?
me: i think not
“All I have to say is, I need an IV to this drip, because it’s just liquid...”
Mary: I never talk to mike anymore
Mary: I find it's less traumatizing this way
Oops.
Well, apparently I accidentally deleted the file that tells Windows what pieces of hardware it’s compatible with, so now I’m going whole-hog Linux on my laptop.
EDIT: It may amuse the reader to know that I messed up Windows while attempting to recover it using the recovery partition that came installed on the laptop. Big oops.
Sometimes I have a psychological desire to eat something but also have a competing psychological desire to not eat anything because the taste in my mouth feels marvelously blank, neutral and neutered with no imbalance of salt or sugar or oil or spice, and to put something in it would be to jolt it out of its complacency, a sort of reverse spaying process that would leave me out of sorts, wanting...
I’ve got this bad habit of occasionally saying aloud fragments of what I’m reading with great intensity just because the monotonicity of everything that I’ve been doing has suddenly accumulated to some sort of pressurous breaking point and has decided to break down the dam with a wave of change in one rushing collapsious peak.
more bitching about being stereotyped
this probably shouldn’t irk me as much as it does, but:
there’s this facebook application called compare people that offers a user two of their facebook friends and asks you to answer a comparative question about them, e.g. ‘who is smarter?’ or ‘who would you rather hang out with?’
it rankles me that i’m ranked high on ‘more well-mannered,’...