So guess what?

I’ve finally figured out a way to make myself feel better about having so many crap blogs. I’ve renamed them all the same thing! This here website you are reading is “Nerdgasms”, my Livejournal is “Nerdgasms: The Friends-Locked Edition”, and my brand spanking new tumblr account is “Nerdgasms 2.0“. It is ostensibly the silliest of the batch, but it is the most frequently updated, because I can fill it with short scraps of nonsense. Mostly I have been making fun of my new job, because I have no sense of self-preservation and I really just like to laugh.

Pissing Off Ghosts, or, “He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming”

I know, I know; I am the last person on planet internet to see this video. I am the last person to do a lot of things, like buy a car or experiment with hair dye. (I experimentally dyed my hair a darker brown once. Rebel rebel!) But when I’m the last person on earth to have their brain eaten by zombies, who will be laughing then? (Answer: the zombies. I’m not very fast.)

On the off-chance that there is someone else out in the vast nothingness of the universe who has not seen this genius bit of non-animation, here is Brad Neely’s ‘Washington’:

I discovered the hilarious Mr Neely–boldly going where thousands have before–while watching We Are Wizards, a dorkymentary about Harry Potter fan participation, particularly “wizard rock” a la Harry and the Potters. It was pretty much great, even if some of the humor was unintentional and due to the supreme social awkwardness of say, Harry Potter Year 4. For example. (To steal a phrase from my mom’s BFF, “I want to burp him.”) If you’re living in a city where it’s playing and you happen to like Harry Potter, I highly recommend it.

But back to Washington, sort of…I got a job (offer)! As a museum educator! At a historic house! This historic house used to be inhabited by a Loyalist gent who I believe may have been America’s first Crotchety Old Man. His property overlooks the Raritan Bay and Perth Amboy, NJ. I am boiling this down and taking a fair bit of artistic license, but during the American Revolution he had some hobbies. The first one was standing on his lawn and watching NJ to make sure no Patriots could sneak into NY. Sometimes, when he would go to sleep at night, they would sneak over anyway and kidnap him. I imagine there was some raspberry blowing and neener-neener-ing involved. These young hooligans just would not stay off his lawn! They’d hold him prisoner for a few days, usually as a ransom. When he got back home he would engage in his second hobby, writing Strongly Worded Letters about the whippersnappers who were running amok and violating his person. Who was the commander in chief of these ruffians? I will give you one guess!

I fully plan to play this video in my new office and perhaps cause great paranoia and upset to the ghost of Colonel Billop. Washington! He’s coming, he’s coming, he’s coming.

(Dear employers: I in no way plan to push the “America’s First Crotchety Old Man” storyline in any way. Scout’s honor!)

I’ll Make a Brand New Start of It

I’m back in New York, looking for work and procrastinating on the bit that I have left to do. I think I need a separate workspace if I ever want to get anything written! Mostly I just play around on the internet.

On Sunday I got back from London, where I had spent the summer performing free labor in a museum. It was good times, but I really hope my next job pays. I came home on a cruise ship and documented the experience (well, I’m still in the process of documenting the experience) for a travel website, thetraveleditorDOTCOM. I’ve hated mostly everything I produced during the trip itself, because those articles were written in a hurry and with an excess of noise (I was traveling with an entire family of chatterboxes). I wrote one yesterday–in the peace and quiet of my suburban home–and I actually like it. That’s the one I’ll link you to. If you want to inflict the others on yourself, that’s your deal :P

Bird’s Eye View

Three cheers for Tennyson quotations, yo.

Bye Bye Blighty

Well England, it’s been real. Now, following my lovely 2 hours of sleep, I will be departing your shores aboard a slow boat to… America. I hear there will be unlimited vodka; I’m enthused!

For anyone else reading this, you can follow my journey in not killing other people’s families over at thetraveleditorDOTCOM. Please do. I can almost guarantee that the grammar will be better than it is here. Almost.

My Favorite Poems

I am not a terribly huge poetry fan. I think my awful, very public (Google me. I dare you.) run-ins with emo high school poetry have probably scarred me for life. The other poetess you will locate if you Google my real name is an actual poetess, but I happen to think her poetry style is pretty contrived and emo high school-ish. And she is my ancestor. Crappy poetry is in my very blood!

Case in point: I know absolute jack about poetry. I don’t even like it much.

This doesn’t stop me from having a couple of poems that I adore. Lately I’ve been thinking about them both as I traipse about London awaiting some transatlantic voyaging. You will see why!

The first is my favorite poem of all time. I feel the way about this poem that I feel about Everything is Illuminated and Barack Obama and sushi. I want it engraved on my tombstone. I want to be worthy of having such a poem on my tombstone. (For the record, Everything is Illuminated is hardly inscription length, having Barack Obama on my tombstone might confuse people, and sushi goes off rather quickly. So I suppose I feel differently about this poem than I do about those three, albeit similarly.) In the interests of length I will link to it instead of posting it in full: “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

If “Ulysses” represents my idealized self, my second favorite poem more accurately reflects my actual self. It’s not really flattering, but it’s all pretty true. Except I have not been in London “this score years”, haw haw. It is “Portrait d’une Femme” by Ezra Pound. What do I do besides sit around and talk about “some curious suggestion;/Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,/Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else/That might prove useful and yet never proves,/That never fits a corner or shows use, /Or finds its hour upon the loom of days”? Not much!

So self doubt and stuff! Current anxieties include the ubiquitous job search (how pathetic that “ubiquitous job search” is actually a phrase I use with regularity) and aforementioned upcoming endeavors. I have some concerns about how well my chatty, bloggy, underwhelmed self will take to travel writing.

I hope my relatively high usage of adverbs (often pointlessly) doesn’t hinder my travel writing. Similarly, I find myself concerned about another trope I frequently employ: the long and self-indulgently complicated sentence. And sentence fragments! And CAPS LOCK. And excessive exclamation points!!!!!

I love the smell of epic fail in the morning.

The promised optimism will make an appearance in the next entry!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Glamour and VIKINGS

Remember the utter non-event that was Flying (By the Seat of My Pants)? You probably do not, because I updated it approximately twice. It was supposed to be a painfully detailed account of my year abroad, but it just didn’t work out. There are two reasons, I think. One is that a year is an awfully long time and tends to be filled with long stretches of Nothing Much to Do. Yawn! The other is that I am chronically lazy and need to be held accountable if anything is ever going to be accomplished.

Well guess what? I have found someone to hold me accountable! The folks over at The Travel Editor will be hosting several articles that I, my friend Kat and her sister Jennifer will be writing about our upcoming transatlantic cruise. Yes, you read correctly: transatlantic cruise. Oh the life of the idle rich! (Ha, if only. Idle unemployed more like.) It’s actually cheaper to cruise than to fly, not to mention about 100% less nightmarishly stressful and cramped. We’re going to be updating daily from the ship and our ports of call (the Shetland Islands, Iceland, Newfoundland and Halifax, Nova Scotia). It will be simultaneously glamorous AND Viking themed! Plus there will be pictures of all the cake we are going to eat. And maybe of some sights too. I will keep this blog (and my LJ, and Facebook) updated with the forthcoming details.

I was re-reading some of my blog entries just now because I include a link to this site on my TheTravelEditor.com profile page. I wanted to see what other people are going to see if and when they click! I realized that my blogging ‘voice’ can best be described as Underwhelmed. Oops?

This is my vow to you, fair readers, that I will keep things peppy enough to make for enjoyable reading (i.e., no poetic dirges about how deep and wide the sea is, and how this clearly reflects the deep and wide chasm of my soul or some such nonsense). That said, I am a young lady of unassailable character and I cannot be bought! I’m going to tell it like it is in my (hopefully charming) curmudgeonly style. If it sucks it sucks, and if it’s great I might grudgingly admit that it’s not entirely without merit.

That said, TheTravelEditor.com is pretty meritorious, and I hear tell it’s about to get even better. Check it out!

Crotchety Old Person Concert Reviews

I’ve ignored you for a month! And without even a decent excuse like my untimely demise! It’s mostly just because I’m lazy. And because my life is so boring that I’d prefer if there were no public record of how dull it is. OH WAIT TOO LATE. Dang.

In addition to working in my unpaid internship (working for free in the arts sector is apparently one of the latest bits of Stuff White People Like) I’ve mostly been either melting or freezing (England!) and not writing my dissertation. And getting my bearings so I can walk places. For example, it takes me 1/2 hour to walk from Covent Garden to my crapola bedsit in Camden. It takes me 1/2 hour to take the tube from Covent Garden to Camden. One of those options is free! Unfortunately one of those options is also usually quite wet.

I have also been to some concerts, hence the title of this post.

Now as you might know, I am 24 years old. I am ostensibly young and fun and sometimes I like to dress up and pretend that I am also hip. Well me and my neon pink earplugs are here to bring you the bad news: LIES.

I’ve often thought that I belong to an earlier age. I usually just chalk it up to romanticized history dorkiness when I dream of flapper dresses and ocean liners and, of course, mucking out the pigs’ stalls and popping out 5 babies by the age of 16. But you know what? Maybe I belong to a long-ago era when 24 was thoroughly middle aged. Because I suspect I am kind of a geezer.

First I went to the Dr Who Proms, which is perhaps more along the lines of “extremely geeky” than geriatric. I mean, I did have to loose sleep in order to line up around the block for tickets. I did scream like a maniac for some of my favorite performers. (Catherine Tate! She is the coolest.) HOWEVER, there is the small fact that the Proms is a series of classical music concerts. And also? It was Dr Who themed. The other people in the line around the block were mostly families with small children.

Anyway, that was probably the best £5 I have spent in England, and I’ve been here for almost a year. SO GOOD. I can’t wait to go to more Proms, even if they don’t come with daleks and cybermen.

On Friday night I stumbled in from the pub with the £2 Leffes to some emails from my friend which essentially read “OMGTOMBAXTERWTFLOL!.” (She’d been hitting the Leffes just as hard that night.) Last month we had entered to win tickets to a bunch of concerts taking place during the iTunes festival. The venue, Koko, (which claims to be famous. Maybe some of you youngsters can save my aching eyes from looking this up by letting me know if that’s true.) was conveniently located a 5 minute walk from me and everyone likes free things. And everyone likes concerts! Or so we thought.

We didn’t enter to win Tom Baxter tickets, but iTunes thought we would enjoy him and gave us some anyway. I could listen to Tom on the radio. I could use him to lull me to sleep. One thing I could not do was stand there and listen to him in concert. I chalked this up to my general preference for a more physical concert-going experience and slept the blissful sleep of an innocent and worry-free infant.

Despite the fact that I could foresee no circle pits there, I was pretty psyched to win some tickets to the Pretenders. It was only when I was standing there with my pink earplugs in that I realized, holy adult contemporary, Batman! I’m old now.

The Pretenders were actually very good, despite the fact that they completely neglected to sing their most famous song. Disappointing! I enjoyed the bits of the concert I could see, which were viewed through the LCD screen of the 7ft. tall gentleman stood directly in front of me. I did not enjoy the people in front of me at our second vantage point (we moved further back in a misguided attempt to escape the apparently exclusively 7ft. tall audience. These were an VERY ENTHUSIASTIC middle aged couple. The woman had a huge bag and she was dancing the Elaine dance from Seinfeld without any sense that maybe other people didn’t like being smacked constantly with her hair and bag and elbows etc. Guess how tall they were! Now as I’ve already said, I enjoy a more physical concert going experience. Urm, when that’s what the music calls for. The Pretenders? And when you are standing in a sea of people with maybe 1.5 sq. ft. of personal space apiece? And you require about 4 sq. ft.? (NOT TO MENTION THE 7 VERTICAL FEET. But as I said that was the norm.) Then you are an asshole.

I also didn’t enjoy having something very sticky spilled on me from the balcony. Or when the folks at the venue thought a good time to take out the trash would be in the middle of the set. Or that they thought an effective way of removing it would be to drag it directly through the crowd. Clever, Koko. Very clever.

So to summarize, I can’t wait to go back to the classical music concert series, I thought the concerts at the famous and hip venue sort of sucked, and even the adult contemporary scene proved a little hardcore for my tastes.

GEEZER!

The Shiftless Gypsy Blues

I have come to the conclusion that I would never throw anything away ever if I didn’t pack up all my belongings and move once or twice a year.

This move, from a country I arrived in with 2 suitcases and will leave with 3, will involve even more purging than usual. In addition to all the papers and books and half-used bottles of spice that I would normally schlep between NY and VA, I will be disposing of pots and pans and bedding and towels and a laundry hamper and a printer. It is insanely wasteful, but I simply can’t carry any more. I’ve posted some stuff on freecycle and will take several other bags of stuff to charity shops, but the majority of it actually came my way via a friend who got it from charity shops 2 years ago. I guess it has mostly been well-used but it’s all still perfectly serviceable. It just seems like such a shame.

You may figure from the above that I’m moving back the the US soon. Not so! I visit briefly, with suitcases overweight with books and boots, starting on Monday. While there I plan on speed-writing my dissertation, registering for what is essentially welfare health insurance, hanging out with friends, celebrating my Nana’s 87th birthday, and finding some cute summer work clothes. Then it’s back to London for my work placement. But all my stuff will still be in Leicester! And I can’t go back for it for at least a week after I arrive in the UK! So essentially I also have to pack a week’s worth of summer clothing in addition to all the winter clothing that I’m taking home.

Then I have to take all my stuff from Leicester to London on the train, without Rebecca’s help this time. Ugh. I just can’t think about it.

In other news, woo hoo Barack Obama!

Adventures in Sitting Around the House!

Life. It’s pretty exciting stuff! Even when it’s so painfully boring that you have nothing to do but sleep in, sit around watching movies, and go out to drink beer (though you should be working out or writing a dissertation) exciting stuff can happen right where you live.

Today has been a day of total thrills. FIRST I was woken up by my window blowing open in the wind and a bunch of leaves blowing into my room. This is only notable because my window opens about 1/2 inch at the top, so the fact that leaves managed to squeeze in there is nothing short of remarkable. I suppose I was lucky it wasn’t a bird, since they sit outside my window and squawk 24/7.

NEXT an egg exploded like a little egg bomb! I was making hard-boiled eggs and one cracked as soon as I added the hot water. It still cooked fine, but when I went to cut the eggs up to make egg salad it exploded all over my kitchen as soon as the knife pierced the yolk. Crazy! Clearly that egg didn’t get eaten, and not just because most of it was scattered across the counter-top and wall.

So you see kids, excitement will find you right where you live! And when it does, expect to be showered in plant matter and bits of egg.

New Year, New Banner

About damn time, too! Weird Al just wasn’t working for me. This one is “gacked” (and then edited, of course) from katespade.info.