Lord help us all…

…people have been finding this blog by searching charming terms like “COCK SUCKER” and “suck my penis.”

And of course, I have made this entry so that their numbers will multiply exponentially. Greetings to you, you seekers of smut. You’re not going to find anything particularly saucy here.

In terms of what’s up with me, I am a huge slacker who is putting off all 3409809834 things I have to do before I can go to grad school. What can I say; I’m lazy and I need to schedule in time to re-read Harry Potter before July 21st.

In which I bare my soul

Time to get in the sharing zone kids.

Dr. History has tagged me in some sort of “8 Facts” meme, and I lack the self control needed to resist the sweet siren song of exhibitionism. Here be the code, me hearties:

• Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
• Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
• Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

1) I dyed my hair somewhat recently and people like myself, my mother, and my co-workers were unable to tell the difference. I visited some friends from college last weekend (who I haven’t seen since last October) and it was one of the first things they noticed. Weird.

2) My college computer (a Dell) was named Yossarian after the protagonist of my favorite novel, Catch-22. This was because he was stubborn and unwilling to submit to my authority. My current computer (a black MacBook…and a much better computer) is named Blackadder after the BBC series of the same name. He has not attempted regicide as of this writing.

3) One two recent-ish long-haul travels I have been seated next to some very interesting people. I will leave it to you to interpret what I mean by “interesting.” One was a man penning a treatise lovingly titled “Zionist Criminal Jew Chieftens in Latin America,” and the other was a man who spent the entire trip masturbating. I was very uncomfortable during both trips. (And so help me God no one had better find this blog by searching the title of that treatise. In fact, I just Googled it myself to see what comes up. Mostly articles from the Economist, if you’re curious.)

4) Back before I was an all-purpose nerd, a nerd-of-all-trades if you will, I was a poly-sci nerd. Before that I was a film nerd. I guess I still do specialize a bit in my nerdy-ness since I’m far more into history and culture than, say, genomes or string theory.

5) I knew I wanted to go to the College of William & Mary since I was 5 years old. Either I am excellent when it comes to long-term planning or very, very stubborn.

6) I am painfully honest. To the point of being blunt. I am also a very talented liar. If you ask me a question I can guarantee you a straight answer (and to earn my trust you must not ask me too many questions, since I prefer to play things rather close to the vest). However I sometimes lie about completely unimportant things just because I can, and if you abuse my honesty by asking too many prying questions I will certainly lie then.

7) I don’t remember birthdays, I’m atrocious at keeping in touch, I hate phone calls, and thoughtful little gestures just don’t occur to me. By the way, I have two X chromosomes.

8) The town I’m getting my MA in, Leicester, is apparently the curry capital of the UK. This means there had damned well better be some spicy food there, because I require copious amounts of spicy food.

I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a bit drained from all that sharing. I also don’t know 8, non-LJ blogosphere people to tag, which is perhaps one of those shameful things I should be a lot more hesitant to mention. So, for the two I do know, I tag Courtney and Sara. I guess I could tag my mom too, but she’s never realize it so it would be a waste.

A personal update?

This is me, continuing to not be forthcoming about my hopes, dreams, daily activities, or personal hygiene. (Which is, now that I mention it, rather good. Quite up to first world standards, if I do say so myself.)

I never update because I try to pen these deep, cohesive entries that incorporate all of my experiences into some larger and more meaningful whole. Like most lives mine is neither cohesive nor especially meaningful, so I manage to fail every time. Really I’ve just been working, reading, visiting friends, drinking with colleagues, stressing over things I don’t control, and sleeping rather poorly. I expect the next few months to be filled with more of the same. I also filled out my FAFSA. Apparently I can only afford to pay about $4,000/yr. for grad school. SWEET! I do so love me some student loans.

The next entry I am dangling in front of you like a dangly and desirable yet ultimately most likely unattainable thing has to do with machismo and violence and mob mentality. And film. And literature. And the intersection of film and literature. AND THE MOB. I’ll bring the bullshit, you bring the cannoli.

The World Series of Ketchup

When I was but a wee lass I thought that there really was a game called Ketchup. It was what adults played when they had fallen behind. As someone who is ostensibly an adult (I have all of the parts, at any rate) and who has fallen behind rather hideously, I think it is time for a little first-class sporting action in the recently renamed Heinz Arena.

Please bear with me as I try to tie up all the loose ends I have left in previous entries. This could get ugly!

•  Hullo Interweb! and Artery Clogging Sausage Stuffing don’t really have any loose ends. The stuffing is still delicious and lethal, and the only question that might arise from the first entry is that of which person I am in the photograph. The answer is, of course, the attractive one. Or the one on the left. Whichever.

• Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline asks the age old question of “what the heck is this blog about?” Like most cosmic queries, it has proven unanswerable. So sorry. I still love the New York Public Library as much as I did when I made this entry, though I have not looked at the available Rosetta Stone software even once. What can I say; I am a lazy American and my monolingualism is imprinted on my DNA.

• Next up was my pièce de résistance, Not So Live Satire Blogging, also known as the only entry of mine ever read by more than a dozen people. Well whaddaya know! Apparently The 1/2 Hour News Hour was picked up by the Fox News Channel, which has been airing it ever since. (Thanks Wikipedia!) I couldn’t be bothered to sit through it again, not to mention that it airs in the same time slot as The Tudors, and I can think of very few television shows that take precedence over Jonathan Rhys Meyers frolicking shirtless and being Machiavellian. Also, um, all that history.

• A Soul Crushing Work of Staggering Idiocy. Where to begin? I’m still pretty idiotic. However, I did finish my personal statements, did hear back from my recommenders, and have been accepted by my top three Museum Studies programs. Oops, programmes. I will most likely be accepting a place at the University of Leicester for the 2007-2008 MA course. Now of course I must stress over finances, visas, health, housing, fitting my copious belongings into one suitcase, etc. I never did make a follow-up entry on the International Spy Museum, but suffice it to say that I got to crawl through an air duct. It kind of shames the museum dork in me, but that was probably the most satisfying experience I have ever had in a museum, and I could have done something similar in a local junkyard. There was probably less of a tetanus risk in the museum though. (Really that’s just me being facetious. I’m a big advocate of making museums more interactive, though that line between Disney World and Learning is a little blurry and hard to pin down. I’m not going to even pretend to start on this topic… I’m supposed to be tying up loose ends not raising more questions!)

• I was such a huge cock-tease in Peaceable Kingdom. What kind of person promises sensationally titled entries like “Fisticuffs with Jesus: 5 People Who Want to Sucker-punch the Lord” and then doesn’t deliver? A real bastard, that’s who.

• Have I mentioned that I managed to finish my personal statement? Because I have. It doesn’t have anything to do with The Universal Curatorial Impulse, though I’m still trying to work out how to build my Master’s thesis around this (completely made-up) concept. You wouldn’t know it from this particular blog, but I am a great fan of making up concepts. If I were a great philosophical genius (or just a genius) I could take these crackpot ideas and turn them into accepted scholarship, but instead I am a passably intelligent crackpot, so I turn them into blog posts.

• I am not even going to attempt to re-type the title of this entry, but know that in the interim my grandmother has attempted to set me up with (among others) distant relatives, parents of my mother’s students, and 40 year old men. There is some overlap in these categories, particularly the “40 year old men” one.

• I came in last place in all my NCAA pools, much as I predicted I would. Also, I still find the kid who plays Harry Potter to be disconcertingly attractive. I console myself with the fact that his haircut in the upcoming Order of the Phoenix movie was a regrettable choice that causes his head to somewhat resemble a penis.

• I never actually experienced Saturday, Computerless Saturday, as I unsurprisingly chickened out and checked the weather online. It was all downhill from there. It was in this entry that I mentioned my “upcoming trip to Costa Rica.” I went and I had a great time. As you might have noticed from the entry previous to this one, there were monkeys there. There were AN OBSCENE NUMBER OF MONKEYS there. This might require more significant follow-up than I can provide in this bulleted list. No promises, of course.

• Unsurprisingly, the majority of Americans do not think the solution to school shootings such as the tragedy at Virginia Tech is to arm students to the teeth so that they can return fire. After those involved had time to mourn, I am pleased that public opinion blew in this direction.

Just so everyone is aware, there is some large and scary bug flying around my room right now. I thought you might like to be informed. Also this entry has not been proofread. At all. I didn’t even intend to write it right now… I wanted to go to bed!

How has your month+ been?

It has been so long since I looked at Nerdgasms that the addresses for the blogs I frequent from my blogroll are not in my browser’s cache anymore.

Somehow I manage to spend hours and hours doing nothing at all on the internet, and I don’t even have this blog to show for it! Nothing much has happened with me; I’ve been accepted to the grad school program I wanted, but I still feel like that’s very up in the air for a variety of reasons, most of which come down to sheer pessimism. I will let you know how that goes.

Or not.

Here’s a picture of Costa Rica, because that is the way it goes with me. Yes, so I traveled the world, got into the Museum Studies program of my dreams, etc etc but that’s not important. DID YOU KNOW I ATE TUNA FOR LUNCH?!?!?! Here is an entire post about my sandwich.

What a precious monkey.

Pardon me, do you mind if I exploit your tragedy?

This has not been a good day, either personally (a kid urinated on me) or nationally (“Virginia Tech Shooting Kills at Least 33″). Join me in marveling over how disparate those two events are.

Now I did not go to Virginia Tech; I do not even know many people who went to Tech. But I went to another public university in Virginia, the College of William & Mary, so I know many people who know many people who went to Tech. And so, untouched, I am still affected. I don’t yet know which of my friends are hurting right now, but some of them could be, and for that reason I am hurting. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by this truly disturbing and upsetting event.

It is amazing to me (now and after every tragedy in recent memory) how quickly we all turn each happening into another check-mark in the great column of Why We Are Right, how quickly each disaster is exploited by everyone with a point to prove. (I am not trying to set myself above the guilty parties here. I’m sure this entry evinces some sort of bias, and I’m sure someone will quite happily point it out to me.) If the tragedy wasn’t so great it might even be amusing to see how the gun lobby and anti-gun activists have both seized on the same event to talk about how inherently correct they are. My own politics aside, this event is not about gun control. It is not a testament to how all college students should be packing heat so they’re not sitting ducks in case a madman decides to open fire. It is not unequivocal proof that banning all guns will prevent future incidents like this. Yes, it’s a nice talking point for both sides, but this is about the Virginia Tech community and about a human tragedy. To quote Democratic Conversation (I’m sure you can guess their stance):

This fact is the epicenter from which all the spin will radiate. With all of that, here is the worst part: the students, teachers, and staff of Virginia Tech will be drowned within the vortex of this spin.

Do the world a favor (I’m looking at you blogosphere! I promise that someone–where by someone I mean the mainstream media–will still be spinning this even if you refrain for a few days) and forget the politics for a minute and remember the people. Think about thepirateroyal’s description of college, “It’s a home. It’s comfortable and safe. It’s like walking into the place you grew up in, only the hallways happen to be outside and your “parents” happen to be people with multiple PhDs and more brainpower than anyone you’ve met previously,” and remember the people for whom that safety, that second home, was forever ruined.

Quick edit for clarification 16 April 2007 at 11:11pm: I in no way intend to imply that this situation shouln’t be looked at in terms of gun control. Surely there’s a lesson or an example in here somewhere, and I recognize that partisan bickering and bipartisan dialogue share many common elements, the most important of which is the free exchange of ideas and opinions. My point is that we should mourn first, debate later. Now, not even 24 hours later, it is a time for mourning.

Saturday, Computerless Saturday

The fact that somebody found this blog by Google-ing (Googling? Googleing?) the lyrics to “Camptown Races” entertains me greatly.

So guess what Internet? I am going to try to live without you aaaaallllll day Saturday. I might fail as I’ll possibly need to Fandango, am still trying to get tons of grad school stuff accomplished, and really am sort of flying by the seat of my pants for my upcoming trip to Costa Rica. Shut Down Day amuses me though, because it’s just seeing if you can turn off your personal computer for a day. Sure, I can probably live with that and you likely can too. But can you live without computers period? Maybe if you sleep all day. Better not switch on your lights unless you know your electric company does not have their switchboards computerized. Don’t you dare get sick and need to go to the doctor, where they will certainly use a computer to check if you are insured, and potentially to call up your records as well! Better not drive either, because those traffic lights? Synced with the help of our friend the computer. In answer to their Big Question, “if they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?” I posit no.

See, this entry is a great example of why I am so much better at Livejournal: I don’t think out posts before I make them. I just write my uninformed opinions the second I form them. Forethought? Afterthought? Proofreading? Puh-leaze.

Peacable Kingdom

This may not constitute a proper blog post but I’m sorry, this is the cutest thing ever. Sad too, what with the part where the tigers will eventually wish to eat their best friends, but cute nonetheless.

Up next, some day when I get home before 7pm, Fisticuffs with Jesus: 5 People Who Want to Sucker-punch the Lord. I’m only up to 3 right now (and I will give you a hint: James Cameron is getting his wag of the finger), and I don’t want to cop out and just list Hilary Clinton a bunch of times. Clearly this means I need to be reading more news sources with a conservative bent. (Although I realized the other day that I read more with a conservative slant than with a liberal one…and me a liberal! I simply don’t have time to read any more anything. You should see the backlog of books I have to tackle.)

So, until next time…

Not-So-Live Satire Blogging

My original intent was to post a play-by-play of the almost certain train-wreck of Fox News Channel’s The Half-Hour News Hour for my non-existent audience. Laziness and a poignant sense of my own limitations stopped me, but lo, I bravely soldier on.

When I was younger my parents subscribed to a magazine called (rather aptly) Parents. It was full of useful tips for raising kids from birth through, I think, 12 or 13. Being my paranoid self I thought that my own parents were using these techniques to manipulate me, their guinea pig first-born. I started reading incoming issues before anyone else could get their hands on them, thus cleverly keeping myself updated on any potential enemy action.

Tonight I thought I would continue to keep myself updated on any potential enemy action (Is your tin hat adjusted? No, mine neither. Really I just have a New Years Resolution to follow the news from all perspectives.) AND repay these perceived slights by turning the tables and using my parents as guinea pigs. Ha! I am clearly still just about as clever as my 7 year old self.

Being a lucky member of the Boomerang Generation, I am a 23 year old who lives with her parents. I am neither proud of this fact nor much delighted by any aspect of it, but it will probably come up again so I may as well mention it to you now. My family gets along best while sitting silently in front of some sort of flickering image, so it’s not that shocking that we wound up watching The Half Hour News Hour tonight. I’m sure it didn’t hurt that I turned it on, either. The opinions floating around the internet have invariably been biased: liberals were/are determined not to like it, and many conservative bloggers were/are determined to portray it as hilarious and successful. So how to get an impartial reaction to cable’s newest fake news show? Poll your parents giggles.

This works especially well with my parents, since my mother is relatively moderate liberal who used to be a hippie and my father is an in-denial libertarian masquerading as a rabid conservative (who is actually registered as an Independent). A cross-section of the American public in two people! Thus I give you, segment by segment, though probably not really in order, Not-So-Live Satire Blogging.

1. The Opening: One of the segments floating around YouTube recently, featuring Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter as President and Vice President. I had already seen it and didn’t think it funny, but my father got a kick just from the fact that Limbaugh and Coulter were present. Honestly I don’t think he reacted to any of the “jokes,” but he did launch into a little anecdote about how Coulter is Colmes of Hannity and Colmes’s sister or sister-in-law? Or something. My mother didn’t react at all. I’d say this segment was neutral to mildly successful in the target demographic. If people in their 50s are even a target demographic for satire
2. The Requisite Hillary Bating: Both of my parents are ardent Hillary Haters. Neither of them gave a peep. This segment, part of the larger “Weekend Update” segment, was unsuccessful. But is it really Fox’s fault? All the jokes about her have been around for 10 years already.
3. Ed Begley Jr’s Magnificent Electric Car: Or: How To Kill Your Running Gag Dead Almost Immediately. I admit they had me fooled here. At first I really thought they were going to have Ed Begley Jr. on as a guest, and I was a little flabbergasted. “How big of them,” I thought. Well that didn’t last long. This was run into the ground by the end of the show. I even caught my father reading during all these mentions of human-waste fueled hybrids and liberals who look like homeless people. Embarrassment on behalf of whoever came up with this stuff? One can only hope. Highly unsuccessful.
4. BO Magazine: The intellectual height of comedy! Another “leaked” YouTube segment, the big draw here was the BO joke. My mother cracked a smile at the “Should We Even Bother to Hold the 2008 Election?” headline, and my father chortled at most everything, but his big belly-laugh was reserved for body odor. I thought this was all extremely lame and played out, but the laugh-o-meter tells me it was successful.
5. Children’s Book Parodies: Very weak. We’re lovers of …And Tango Makes Three around my place, so my mother and I exchanged sympathetic “awww!”s when it came on, but the rest of it drew no reaction. From anyone. Except maybe more embarrassment for whoever writes this drivel. Unsuccessful.
6. Che Guevara T-Shirt Salesman: One of two segments that I am shocked drew no reaction from my father, who went on a rant about what a criminal Che Guevara was as recently as yesterday. We all giggled at some of the t-shirt slogans. Mildly successful.
7. ACLU Commercials: The other segment(s) I’m shocked my father didn’t react to. I can’t even begin to count the number of rants he’s gone on about the ACLU. I expected at least some grunts of agreement or the start of another rant. Perhaps he was being silent so that I would have time to let the innate truth of what he has been saying all along seep into my brain? I may never know. What I do know is that, while he might have found it truthful, he didn’t laugh. Mildly to completely unsuccessful.
8. 6 Degrees of Global Warming: BOMB BOMB BOMB BOMB BOMB. My mother went to bed. My father went to go get something and only returned when it was over. I don’t know if this is related to the segment in any way, but I like to think it is. Chalk it up to the tendency to idealize one’s parents, though I have already cited in this entry my childhood fears that they were cunningly manipulating me for unknown and surely nefarious reasons. In the absence of any of my (admittedly highly scientific) data I am going to go with my own gut and the sense of shame I felt watching this clown, and call this one completely unsuccessful. Completely.

When it was (blissfully) over, my father summarized it like this: “Well, parts of it were funny.” I have to agree. There were moments I giggled, though like many on the internet I would not say that the things I laughed at qualify as satire. In addition to lacking the charisma and talent of a Jon Stewart or a Stephen Colbert, the anchors were such bad actors it was painful. But that’s my biased opinion. So why not go by my biased opinion of the biased and nonverbally expressed opinion of others? Clearly it is more accurate.

Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline…

…Because I can’t figure out what to put after it.

I have spent a great deal of time musing over what the heck to do with this blog. Being no great wit, I am wary of attempting a typical personal blog. Not only do I lack a clever way of telling you what I had for breakfast, but there’s also the fact that what I had for breakfast is likely even more dull than whatever you ate. (That is my polite way of saying that my life is not all that interesting. A word of advice: do not take a gap year after graduating college. If you must, do not move back home. Go be poor somewhere else!) Still, a personal blog is essentially all I know how to do, having kept a Livejournal (oh the wangst!) for years.

So what to do? Pick a subject to focus on? OK, I’m game. What subject? I guess I could talk about education, particularly my place of employment the New York City Department of Education? No: others do it better, I’m not that entrenched in the politics and culture (this is a gap-year stopgap), and as I have gotten in trouble for journaling—because for whatever snobbish reason I am drawing a distinction between blogging (here) and journaling (LJ)—about real life in the past, you might say that I am “once bitten, twice shy.” Well, then what about culture and the arts? Nope. Again, other people do it better, though I suspect I will end up not blogging at all if I refuse to write anything that isn’t shiny and perfect. Plus, being the nerdgasming nerd I am, I’m a bit terrified of writing about anything that will cause my ignorance and naïveté to show too glaringly. That knocks religion and politics right out of the running too! In fact, it knocks out just about anything that doesn’t have to do with 17th and 18th Century American history… and you just KNOW that would be fodder for some fascinating blogging! Today’s post: making tobacco barrels in colonial Virginia…

I am going to spare you that post, though you might be interested to know that I once sat through an hour and a half lecture on that very topic. Instead, I am going to throw off the shackles of crippling blog insecurity and just make a darn post already. Coherent subject and theme be damned!

Well, really I just thought that maybe since today is Valentine’s Day I could get a thematic freebie. Last year my Valentine was beer (a very Love You and Leave You Hurting and Broke sort of chap), and this year I am following it up with another inanimate lover (remember when I mentioned that my life isn’t that interesting?): the New York Public Library. I feel this is fittingly nerdy for a blog called Nerdgasms, and as such might even be on theme!

If I could write poetry I would compose a Petrarchan Sonnet unto my love the NYPL. It giveth me unlimited free books, movies, and CDs! It alloweth me to download some of these directly onto my computer! It permiteth me to request exactly what I want and have it delivered to the library nearest me (which in my case is about 3 blocks away…sweet)! It even granteth me access to Rosetta Stone language software for free! …OK that’s getting old.

Basically, unlike beer, the NYPL wants me to save lots of money AND remember things the following day. Instead of renting videos and spending billions of dollars at Barnes and Noble, I can get (almost) everything I want to read or watch for FREE! Or, at least it would be free if I returned things on time. I’m actually pretty awful at that. Also, I get to GROW brain cells instead of killing them! It’s brilliant!

It’s also pretty convenient for someone such as myself who is going through severe college withdrawals. Trust me, the brain does not stay alive all on its own.

And I still love beer. It only hits me because it loves me back.