This is why we can't have nice people (xkcd)

My brain and my body are in two totally different places today and it is freaking me out. I feel like I have no idea what to do with my body. How to position it. Nothing feels right. Tonight I couldn't figure out what to do with my arms--where to put them, etc. Same with the rest of my body. It is a different feeling from just being restless, though. Sometimes I feel restless and keep moving around because I feel like I need to be moving, or because I just get squirmy...everyone gets that, right? But this is different, this is like I have no good sense of where my body is in space and I have sort of forgotten how to work it. Blah. I hope it'll have gotten better by morning, and especially by tomorrow night--I'll need to be coordinated enough by tomorrow night to play the violin! Woo!

I've spent the weekend organizing my iTunes library and music folders. See, my main music folder was super-chaotic because I had a lot of duplicate and incomplete files. So I deleted a bunch of stuff--a long project because I had to see what each individual file was--and then cleaned up iTunes a lot...oh man. It was long but OH MY GOD it feels so good to have my iTunes library looking all pretty and organized! And in that process I rediscovered some music that I hadn't listened to in forever. I was reminded of just how much I love Death Cab for Cutie. And Ben Folds. And Jean-Jacques Goldman. And....music.

In other news, the beaded stargazer lily I mentioned in my last post is actually starting to look like a real flower. I have all the petals and stamen-thingys done, so everything from here on out is in green beads (leaves, sepals, beaded stem, etc). Meaning, the fun part is done. Haha. Maybe not totally done. The structure of the flower itself is kind of iffy. I've been trying to lace the petals together, but how do you do that without it looking like ass? Sigh. Maybe I'll wait to see if the beaded stem gives it any more stability.

I'm pretty satisfied, though, with my flower-designing ability. I looked at a beaded flower book the other day--the Carol Benner Doelp one--and although there were a lot of patterns, the examples looked kind of half-assed. Maybe that was an artistic thing, an issue of style and preference. Her rows were very loose, which made all the petals look like strings of beads instead of solid flower petals. But again--maybe that was intentional? I just feel like the construction of my flowers is a lot stronger and more realistic. I love Donna DeAngelis Dickt's patterns--I learned most of my basic techniques from her book, and I tend to stay pretty faithful to her rose pattern. Maybe one of these days I'll write my own book. I'm going to have an awfully hard time describing my stargazer lily pattern, though. "3 PTPB petals, except the top is more P than the bottom (add extra beads to the basic wire at random), start with dark red and gradually fade into white, but careful with your proportions and don't forget to randomly sprinkle purple beads throughout! do the same with the three smaller PTPB petals, except don't do the random bead-adding thing, just start with a 2" basic, and for the love of God allow for more wire than you think you'll need. A lot more. Then when you're done and panicking about how none of the petals stay in place, lace the three bottom (smaller) petals together and they will magically support the bigger petals, but don't touch it, ever. Ever."

I'll hire a ghostwriter to write my patterns.

I love the fact that Garou is dating Lorie. French pop, anyone? No? Okay. I also love that Lorie's real first name is Laure. What I don't love is most of Lorie's music. Oh well.

Today I wore about a billion bracelets. I felt awesome. I used to do that--the billion bracelets thing--a few years ago, and then I sort of started forgetting to wear bracelets. Boo. I'm going to try to start again, because even though I know it is sooooo middle-school-emo, it feels awesome and looks so.very.ME. (note to self: CPK! CPK! tadjeu! owa tagu siam)

Bedtime? Hey, what the hell.

Roll over, Beethoven/Bach

I was so excited about this that I put it as my facebook status for awhile. I was listening to The Beatles today, as I do pretty much every day, and I realized something about the song "Piggies." It's pretty much 100% Baroque. I mean, it kind of meets all the qualifications. Lots of harpsichord, which is really the big defining feature of Baroque music. The other defining feature is basso continuo, which is huuuuge in "Piggies."

The lyrics, of course, are pure George Harrison bitterness.

It's as if Harrison and Bach made musical babies together. What more can I ask for, right?

Anyway, I felt delightfully nerdy when I realized the Beatles-Baroque connection, and I felt like sharing it with the world. I don't think I know one person who actually gives a shit--well, maybe my music theory teacher would--but hell, I'm excited.

In other news, I'm spending tomorrow in Greenwood. Just the day, though, 10 hours or so. It'll be fun, I know it. Julie wrote on my facebook wall today saying that she'd just watched all the Teen Girl Squad episodes. I loved those when I was just about her age. Actually, I watched them all again today and they had me laughing hysterically--so I do still love them. "Ow! My the fact that I was alive a second ago!" "I'll notify her next of...fruit cup." "STOP TALKING TO FRUIT!" omg. I need more things like that in my life.

There was the one day when I went home and spent three hours looking at cat macros with Brian and Julie. I get the feeling this is going to be an Internet Videos day. I need to show them the Powerthirst videos on YouTube. Look it up. srsly. KING OF THE JUICE.

I love the internet.

In other news, I've had a tiny bit of alcohol tonight (srsly, just one wine cooler) and I'm a tiny bit sleepy and I have like 7 hours before I need to be alive and conscious and pretty (well, the first two anyway) so I think it's bedtime.

But wait! Because I haven't babbled about beading for awhile, here's a tiny update on The Things I've Been Stringing.

Beaded flowers! I knew I couldn't escape that easily. After I finished my big bouquet, my life felt incomplete without having wire to twist. I made a purple rose last semester, but, you know, meh. However! Kate's birthday is coming up in a week and a half or so, and I am almost done with her gift of two beaded flowers. Red and white, of course, because she is the queen of school spirit. Photos forthcoming, once I get batteries for my camera.

Necklaces and bracelets! I have rediscovered the beauty of tigertail wire. That stuff is excellent for necklaces. I mean, chain is okay, whatever, kind of boring. String is awfully precarious unless you thread the damn thing like four times and you just try doing that with seed beads. Stretch cord does terribly tangly things to my long hair. Tigertail, though? Shapes perfectly--for shorter necklaces that is--and doesn't get caught on anything. Providing you don't suck at crimping like I do, it's pretty easy to attach clasps to tigertail. So, w00t. Dooooo it.

I mentioned my crimping-suck disorder. Seriously. Maybe I just need better crimp beads. I know my pliers aren't screwy. Even my technique isn't horrible, I mean, how hard can it really be? The technique issue I do have is angles. You can't friggin crimp at an angle. Ever. And my hand tends to slip. So it's kind of iffy when I do decide to break out the crimp beads--about 2/5 of the time the bead breaks and I have to start over, about 2/5 of the time my technique is crap and I bend the bead every-which-way, and 1/5 of the time, maybe less, I actually get it right. Bleah. I need to find crimp beads that aren't breaktacular but aren't too thick/rigid to bend. Like my black ones, except, you know, silver. Black crimp beads are strange because they do not stay black. Silver ones blend in with everything, which is exactly what a crimp bead should do.

In other news, Farz wants me to make her a beaded stargazer lily for her birthday which is in like 2 1/2 weeks. Yiiiiiikes. I'm going to have to design this one, since I am pretty much anti-pattern at this point. I like it--I'm at the point where I am creating patterns for these things. Whereas a year and a half ago it scared me to look at the books because I was convinced I'd never ever be good enough at beading to make French beaded flowers. Heck, the first flower I made took me forever. A rose in two months. Nice. I do those things in a week now, when I'm slacking. But at the time...I remember thinking "French beaded flowers...hell no, those are for real artists. I just string beads and stuff."

'Course, now...following patterns? psh. I'm a real artist--I design my own mothafuckin patterns. IN MY MIND.

I'm gonna have to have pencil and paper for the lily pattern, though.

Sorry. Ego trip got in the way of my thought process.

I am so tired.

In other news, last night I had a dream in which I had sex with the three tenors and a guy named Matt. I am severely disturbed that I had a sex dream about Pavarotti but somewhat consoled by the fact that even in the dream I was like "This is NOT cool; I am super-gay now. Holy shit."

Man. What a week.

I am happy and here is why.

I am ridiculously, incurably, scary-happy right now. Let me enumerate the reasons.

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT1QG8Hguzo I love Andy Hollinden and the aura of awesome that follows him everywhere.

2. My RA application is officially complete, which means I have the next year and a half of my life basically figured out. I plan to stay in Bloomington until mid-June and take classes during the first summer session (one of which might be a Hollinden class). I will be an RA during my senior year and not have to worry about money for one more year of my life. That's been a heck of a stressor this year, but I should probably get used to it.

3. Kate gave me Advil twice today, because go figure, as soon as I buy Advil and leave it in Em's car, I wake up with a crazy migraine. Of course, now Kate is even more convinced that I am unhealthily addicted to Advil and she is threatening intervention. It's not that I'm addicted to Advil, it's that I'm addicted to not having headaches.

4. I love my best friends. I think right now I'm including four people in that category.

5. I got to see E.C. on the 6 bus today. Her eyes are gorgeous.

6. I went to the SRSC and worked out for God-knows-how-long (an hour? maybe?) this afternoon, and it felt gooooood. Afterward I went to the IMU and, having my beading supplies with me, sat at a desk there and worked on Kate's birthday present. It was delightfully tranquil.

7. I have one class tomorrow--music theory, for which I turned in my homework early--and then a four-day weekend. Four, because my sociology professor cancelled Tuesday's class. I don't know what I'm going to do with my life. Sleep, probably, and play with beads. Who knooowwws.

8. I wrote an eight-bar piece for my music theory class and titled it "Orchioid Proctocorns." Which, if my medical-to-English dictionary is correct, translates to something like "testicle-shaped anus horns." I've been giggling about anus horns all week.

9. Life, and the supreme being who makes it all possible. How could I not be happy about that?



And now I will discuss my family's Poopy Water Theory.

On the way back from Alabama, we got into a discussion about children's Bible stories for some reason. I explained my belief that Noah's Ark is not actually a story suitable for children, and here's why. Great Flood, okay? The entire earth was flooded. Everybody and everything died. God was so pissed at everyone that he killed them all in one of the most frightening ways possible--drowning. We'll get to that in a minute.

Children's versions of the story generally focus on cute animals and two-by-two. He built a big boat all by himself! Wow! Nobody ever teaches the kindergartners about the main point of the story--the horrific mass death.

We tend to assume that the horrific mass death was all as a result of drowning. Well, that can't possibly be the case. Giant floods tend to include things like raging currents and less-than-sanitary conditions. I mean, we saw Hurricane Katrina, right? So I'm going to assume that some of the people who died in the Great Flood met their demise as a result of being swept up in the currents and, say, thrown full-force into trees and rocks and cliffs. Bam!dead. No drowning necessary.

The Poopy Water Theory comes in here. Say you're just minding your own business, nailing a prostitute or whatever, and suddenly you see a giant wall of water beginning to engulf your house. What is the first thing you do? Shit yourself out of pure, sudden fear. Imagine everybody on earth--and not just the people, the animals too--doing the same, simultaneously. Then imagine all the pre-shat shit, in whatever they used as sewage tanks back then (buried in the backyard). That is a lot of shit. Mix that with the waters of the Great Flood, and you have a planet bathed in poopy water and a planet full of people and animals swimming/drowning in it. That's awfully unsanitary and could conceivably lead to various types of death that I do not care to envision.

The only thing worse than drowning would be, I think, drowning in poo.

And then, because my family members are not only immature but also kind of sick and twisted, we spent perhaps fifteen full minutes just saying "poopy water" over and over while giggling hysterically. Parents included.

So it was great the other day when Kate brought up the story of Noah's Ark and I couldn't stop laughing. I also couldn't explain it to her, because to put it lightly, she would probably not take it well. She isn't one to laugh at things that aren't actually funny. Much to my dismay. All I could say was "my family had a conversation about that...it was bad...but so good...never mind."

I have a headache again, so off with my head! I mean...off to bed!

I say you, you say fucked.

REAL IDs. They're actually fucking going through with it. But apparently it's just for people born after 1964. Why? Does the government trust 50-year-olds more than 30-year-olds? Probably. That, and a whole fucking lot of people were born before 1964. They call them baby boomers. I call them old farts. Tomato, tomahto. It would be quite expensive, I imagine, to produce high-tech, invincible ID cards for that whole generation. Maybe there's some other issue behind it that I'm not thinking of. Whatever.

I'm not entirely certain how REAL IDs can be interpreted as anything but the beginning of the end of freedom. I understand security concerns, blah blah blah, but there has to be a better way for the government to deal with the issue of security than keeping all its citizens on leashes. The Patriot Act (eroding liberty bit by bit!), freakish ID cards...it seems like we're on the frightening path to having a government agent assigned to each citizen as a babysitter. They'd carry tasers, and use them liberally. I know it.

So anyway, the reason I decided to rant about this. The idea for REAL IDs (why is that capitalized?) came up after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, obviously in the giant oh-shit security frenzy. It's been said that "America won't let the terrorists win" and "This tragedy will just make our nation stronger" and all that. The current federal government has gotten so power-happy and big-headed in the wake of the attacks that it's starting to seem more and more like the terrorists would be thrilled with what they've done to this country. They've instilled a great amount of fear and paranoia into the American people and particularly the American government. We cannot be secure and we cannot be strong if we are constantly worried about who's going to attack us next. We cannot be admirable if our government is ethically deplorable.

I'm looking forward to getting somebody with an IQ greater than that of a kumquat in the White House. Unfortunately, our options are kind of shit-tacular.

I kind of feel like Obama would be the best choice for president, although he doesn't seem to have any clue what he's getting into and it's hard to know what he really believes when all his speeches and opinions are constructed to pander to the wishes of whomever he happens to be speaking to. On the plus side, he seems to be the least batshit crazy of all the viable candidates. That's worth a lot these days.

I don't know how I feel about Hillary. She strikes some kind of primal fear into my heart, but then again I've heard all sorts of good things about her. She might be batshit crazy, but to be fair, she has been married to Bill all those years. I'd be crazy too.

Giuliani is a slimebag and if he gets elected I'm moving to Canada.

I can't wait for the day when I never have to hear about Ron Paul ever again. I literally had some asshole shove me against a wall while she was screaming in my face about how awesome Ron Paul is. HE ACCEPTS MONEY FROM NEO-NAZIS. THAT IS NOT A GOOD THING. Also, he's possibly the MOST batshit crazy of all the candidates, although I can't lump him in with the viable candidates, because thankfully he hasn't a snowball's chance in hell.

Gotta go to class. More ranting later. Fuck politics.

Sick, tired, UNSTOPPABLE

Back in Bloomington, and it looks like there will be no shortage of drama this semester. Oh, joy! Hopefully I'll be able to be a Voice of Reason.

You know things are getting out of hand when Clarkie is your Voice of Reason.

Anyway, the rest of Christmas break was excellent. I got to see a lot of friends in Greenwood and I spent a lot of time with my family. Toward the end of break, I got the plague. Mom and Julie and Brian were sick around Christmastime, and I thought I'd avoided it, but noooo...just a couple days ago I started feeling like death--fever, sore throat, nose mutiny--and I'm not 100% better quite yet. So that kind of sucks ass.

Otherwise...life is good. Classes start tomorrow. Mondays are going to be crazy for me. L490, Z111, H212, X001. If I can survive tomorrow I can survive anything (perhaps even the plague). I still have no clue when I'm going to be able to get my books. Tuesday, I guess. Before I go to the SRSC.

Speaking of. I've started working out, sort of. Shhh. Don't tell anyone. Over break I started doing 5 miles a day on the stationary bike, and I really enjoyed it. So I'm going to continue, on the 3 days per week that I only have one class (T/R/F). I'll do my 5 miles--maybe gradually build up to 10--and practice basketball, and maybe do other stuff too...who knows. But I don't really want to tell Kate and Farz about it, because then they'll want me to come with them when they go to work out. No, no, nooooo. It has to be a solitary activity, otherwise I won't be able to focus.

I made a necklace today. It's pretty.

Holy fucksticks, I'm bored. Maybe I should just go to bed. Tomorrow is going to be a hell of a day.