The Rabbit Hole

Last night, the roommies and I binged on TV, so I'm up to date on a few series at least. Some quick impressions:

Chuck: Awesome being totally out of his depth is deeply amusing, but the episode broke my heart with developments for (in no particular order) Chuck, Morgan, and Ellie.

LOST: WHEEEEEEE I STILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT IS GOING ON AND I LIKE IT.

Supernatural: I wasn't hugely impressed, but I will say that, no matter how batshit he or his rabid fangirls are, Misha Collins can give a deadpan like nobody else; in two minutes of total screen time, he was funnier than "funny" episodes of this show have been. (Bonus preview on web shows that this is a trend that will continue into this week's episode. Score!)

Tonight, WE DINE IN HELL! Er, sorry, watched the 300 Rifftrax this weekend, brain is still occasionally stuck on SHOUT AT THINGS TO MAKE THEM SEEM IMPORTANT. Ahem. Tonight, I finish what I hope is the last episode of the last season of Heroes ever. Or maybe I'll watch it tomorrow. I think I have some homework I'd rather be doing.

My desk at work is a tad cramped but is honestly a good place to get a lot of studying done. I stayed on until about 8 pm last night taking notes. Despite the hustle and bustle of the other lab, I managed to get three chapters of notes taken. I stopped at 8 pm to get food and had an epiphany--why not move to the conference room? Bigger table to spread out on, totally quiet!

Of course, as soon as I moved there, several older Latinas descended on the place. One came in at first, said "Hi," and then proceeded to make a phone call. A tad disruptive, but anyone speaking in another language gets drowned out as nonsense pretty easily. I guess her phone call summoned the other ladies because soon they were all there, at the other end of the table, picking at a piece of velvet with many pieces of gaudy jewelry on it and exclaiming loudly about it and rushing back and forth into/out of the room to fetch purses and the like. I suppose that's what they do some nights when no one is around.

Still, I stayed until 10 pm, finished off a bitch of a double-chapter (that I'm going to have to carefully review because the material is complex and we spent a lot of time on it, so he'll probably ask a billion questions on it). Aside from the Spanish shoppers, the conference room was a lovely study place. Very brightly lit, for one thing, quiet for another.

Today, I'm two chapters done, one to go, and the reviewing can then begin. Hooray for forced productivity!

Erm, that tag sounded dirtier than I intended for this post. I only meant that I got the H1N1 vaccination finally. I got the nasal vaccine. No big, just that after a few minutes, the liquid sort of works down the back of your nose and you can taste something that's just barely there enough to notice.

But ugh, I was up so early to get the clinic at 8 am sharp. I had to stop and meet my Dad and one of my younger sisters, who needed the vaccine, too. We got there, were the first people to get it, and still waited and hour and a half. Sheesh. And tonight is one of many marathon nights of testing for my experiment for class. It's going to be a loooooong day.

And now that that test is over! I can post about the trivial things that are much more interesting to me! Woo!

My weekend was lovely. ( Ah, family. )

While I was in San Francisco, I finally got to see G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. I can't say that it was better than, say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Certainly, it was shorter, so it has that in its favor. ( There's also some tangential stuff that's fun. )

But still! Fanboys! Shipping wars! We can all get along. :D

Let's see, anything else? Nope. I just finished that stupid practice test, I have to get my lab in some sort of recognizable shape before tomorrow, and I've got work to do at actual work. Better get to it then.

I need to stop taking red-eyes. Or, alternatively, I need to remember to drink a liter of red wine and take a few Benedryl before getting on one so, whether my body likes it or not, it has to sleep on the ride home.

I had a great time in San Francisco, but the trip was rounded out by being a) 1.5 hours late because of weather in New York headed out; b) getting slightly motion sick on that plane ride; c) taking a red-eye back which I've not even barely recovered from despite approximately 15 hours of sleep taken since...

and d) coming home to my apartment last night (after spending some time with viridian for her birthday--Happy Belated Birthday!) to find poop on my doormat.

Poop. It looked to be the consistency and size of cat poop. This is all that is saving the many yappy dogs in our building from summarily being executed. I don't know why a cat is running around pooping on my doormat, but until I discover otherwise, I'll assume that the stupid yippy dogs are not guilty. THIS TIME.

And now I will disappear to study for the next twenty-four hours since between nausea, an adorable two-year-old, and extreme exhaustion, I haven't done half the studying I ought to have done for my test. Which is tomorrow. Joy.

(If anything happened that was interesting, let me know. I will try to go through LJ, but as soon as I'm done with the test, I have to get together my lab report and work on a lab design for the day after. Come Thursday night, I'll be a basketcase! Woo!)

So, I got out of class this morning and went to stand by the bus stop to wait for the uptown shuttle. There was a trio handing out free sodas. By "free," they meant both that it cost nothing and was "free" of chemicals and bad stuff. Stuff that, you know, I kind of depend on in my soda. Caffeine is pretty much the whole reason I drink soda. (That, and I've since become addicted to it. So, a little from column A and a little from column B.)

The brand is Snow. The website will give you the gist of their marketing strategy--all natural ingredients! No fake sugar! No preservatives! Vitamins! Green tea extract*! Part of our sales income goes to stopping global warming!

I managed to get two of their three flavors--Pure Cola and Lemon Lime. I figured "generic cola" and "Sprite-like" were probably safer bets than a start-up company's attempt to make something called "Cranberry Pomraz." The fact that they're messing with three fruits there (as opposed to Lemon Lime's two) completely ruled it out as a choice.

I should have left all of them alone. Pure Cola tastes like nothing until you swallow it. It has this abusive aftertaste of shitty beer and sheet metal, as if you licked PBR off a rusty spoon. Lemon Lime is only marginally less awful. It's like they found a way to put the horrible false-citrus taste of a powdered vitamin C supplement into liquid form. It reminds me of the taste of Airborne.

So, yeah, I can totally not recommend free street soda. Unless you already know the brand--any free Coke/Pepsi product I've gotten that I've already tried has never hurt me--stay the F away from it. I can't believe I didn't learn my lesson after the debacle of the Diet Dark Cherry-Vanilla Dr. Pepper. Blech.

What is it about starting school that leaves me so wiped out? ( I wonder. )

Also, I saw 9 last night after giving blood, which might explain some of the physical and mental exhaustion. Blood donation was fine, but I was already tired from not sleeping well the night before and I get cranky when they insist on taking blood from my right arm. (I need that for stuff!) Not to mention that something broke with the tubing so the guy splattered my blood on the floor after he finished filling up the test tubes. (I'm fine! Nothing went wrong with the blood bag itself, just the other half of the Y-junction tubing where they collect a smaller pouch of blood for tests.) That was just gross and grossly wasteful. I also wasn't pleased that he ignored my request to have tourniquet loosened. (Had to do it myself.) I need to figure out the right place to donate blood at this hospital. It's too easy for them to get distracted when I go in the large building.

As for 9, meh. Fine to look at, but it was painful to think about for even a few minutes. It felt inordinately long at about 80 minutes, and it had neither the plot nor the characterization to carry it even if it had been 40 minutes. I wasn't terribly excited by it, so I'm not disappointed, just annoyed that it turned out so poorly when it could have been cool. I'm always irritated when people set up awesome things that just don't materialize into anything coherently interesting.

Thank God for Beatles Rock Band, though. That shit is gorgeous. I'm with moonlightalice, though: I really want to watch the animations! When feiran stopped singing, you could see more of it, but you're so busy with the playing, you miss out. It boggles the mind, however, how many songs I can only vaguely recognize. I mean, this is The Beatles we're talking about. Not recognizing one of their songs is like not knowing which days of the week end in Y.
(Interesting note: in Hawai'ian, none of the days do! Hawai'ians don't believe in your crazy Ys. I know this because I bought my wall calendar--one of them--in Hawai'i and it has all the months/days in both English and Hawai'ian.)

Nonetheless, I look forward to playing around with the harmonized singing, though I know I'll be crap at it because I can never remember a specific part, especially not if it's a subtle one. I tend to go with whatever melody is dominant when I sing. Oh well. Half the fun is seeing stuff you didn't even recognize was there, like who plays what part in what song. I have never watched any Beatles films or filmed appearances, only ever listened to them, so I never really recognized which songs were sung by which person, or who took lead on which guitar part. I am not a Beatlemaniac either, so a lot of that stuff I wouldn't have investigated on my own regardless, but here it's presented to me with no research on my part necessary. I'm getting better, though, thanks to the dissertations of the Beatles cover band I follow as they do each individual song. Now Rock Band will help with that, too.

...I need to post more often because this became an info dump of exceedingly and unnecessarily prodigious length.

Of course we had to talk about the Spitzer thing in class last night. A very good skeptic (not cynic!) recognized something interesting about the fallout from Spitzer's (presumpitve, last night) resignation. Spitzer had been a supporter of Clinton, and, as a super delegate, he probably would have thrown his weight behind her.

And now we have a Harlem democrat who will be governor. No, this person wasn't suggesting that Obama had anything to do with getting Spitzer outed (the federal wire-tapping program and Spitzer's own history of indiscretions did that), but that Obama now, potentially, stands to gain from it. Isn't that fascinating?

I know, right? Moi!? Needing of the grammar help? But I totally do.

For my news and feature writing class, I got marked down on an assignment for mixing tenses (SHOCKING!). I want to be sure that he doesn't try to mark me down again for something I feel that I navigate pretty well in my academic writing, so I have to ask:

In an essay where you are writing in past tense but need to describe things that are a perennial thing, you can switch to present, right? My example:

A competitive cheerleading routine lasts two and a half minutes, divided into three segments. There is gymnastic tumbling; group stunting work where some girl, the flyers, are lifted and tossed; dancing; and, of course, cheering for the local team. She summarized routines thusly: “It’s like holding your breath for two and a half minutes, running a marathon, doing sprints, and smiling all at once. And making it look like nothing.”

Describing the events, I used past tense. But describing the rules of the thing--which are not linked to the past, and are immutable givens at any time--it is right to switch to present tense, correct? It was in French...

What a funny collection of miscellany I have to report for my first post-Disney LJing.

One: I now have to go see the live-action G.I. Joe movie. Pity me? Christopher Eccleston wastes his talent on yet another project that will be only as good as his presence can make the thing. Never liked Joe all that well, especially not after reading some of the Cobra after-action reports on SomethingAwful. Ah well. I enjoy seeing that Ray Park still gets work. He's awesome. Yet another non-speaking part, alas. He's got a cute British accent. And Joseph Gordon-Levitt is still alive! Amazing!

Two: A woman is stripped searched forcibly by seven different guards after someone dials 911 to report that she's been the victim of assault. Fucking sickening. The video gave me the creeps, and before anyone comments, you have to watch the video. Because there's no way anyone deserves what she went through, least of all when she was already the victim of an assault. This? This is why people stop calling the police. Worst of all is the complete silence on the police end in the video. If there HAD been any legitimate reason to attack her this way, the least they could do would be to explain to her, after any one of her agonized, repeated screams for them to do so, why they were doing this. Suicide risks need more fragile treatment. A truly suicidal person would have bitten their tongue clean off in despair after this bullshit.

Three: I bought stuff on feiran's XBOX 360! I gots me some Rock Band downloads. I got to sing "The Joker & the Theif" and I was all happy forever and ever. It's strange to buy stuff not for my system--I've been the one with the system that things got bought for for so long, it's just a funny change.

Four: I should just pay the money to have orders from Best Buy shipped to me because I spend more on going to the store with a pay-as-you-go metrocard. Also, erm, I can't ever seem to leave the store with just the thing I ordered. I went for my $5 copy of The Aristocats and went home with Transformers and The Wedding Singer and the aforementioned purchased points for the XBOX machine. Then I happened to pass a Barnes and Noble where I dropped my $25 gift card and a little on my own copy of Set and two more Pratchett books. And, finally, my own Scrabble dictionary. For when we have those, you know, intensely debated games. That was sarcasm. I'd love to have more games of Scrabble. I really enjoy the games I played over Christmas with various folks. And the paper copy will cover us when we're away from the computer (like if we do Shakespeare in the Park again--ooh, do let's!)

Five: I skipped class tonight. I ended up out in the snow shopping and I'm not getting to bed early. This seems a tad silly to have done if I weren't going to do anything with that newly free time. Like homework. Aiyah.

Six: I haven't got a single hat/scarf/gloves matching set. I'm doing my best to approximate around it. It just takes the classiness out of my big-girl fashionable coat to be so poorly coordinated. SIGH.

Seven: Twenty-four hours ago, I wanted a swim, it was so warm. Then it was a blizzard. Stupid weather!