Syntactic Sugar

We moved into the new house! The cats are back! Oliver and his family came to visit!

Damn, I found the most awesome book trolling Wikipedia for information on posionous mushrooms. Its theory is that Christianity was a sex/hallucinogenic drug cult and Jesus WAS the mushroom. OMG! Too bad it's so hard to get a hold of.

I bought The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook and I've basically been gorging myself on cheez. I am apparently "doin it wrong" because the agar (vegan gelatin) set up and it turned into a tasty but very uncheeselike spread. Also I have yet to get the right balance of lemon juice to citric acid, and my mozzarella turned out very sour...eww. The chedda had more or less the right amount of citric acid but it was still a little overpowering so I'll definitely cut down the next time I make it. I'm also an idiot and I don't know what cheese tastes like so I'm like "Whoa this tastes just like cheese!" and apparently it doesn't. I'm almost out of my nutritional yeast and my pee is turning neon yellow from the crazy B-Complex. Also, flax seed (not oil) is a LAXATIVE. Be aware.

The new house is pretty awesome. It's located really near everything and it's not on some twisty road in the mountains...I get my own bathroom and the cats have stopped fighting and love eachother again. Yay! I bought a desk from Craigslist so the only downside now is that I have a million boxes in my room and I have some nasty-ass bruises all over my legs....

It was really great having Oliver and his family come to visit...we went to hike at this place called Sugarloaf mountain and then went to Pearl Street and kind of passed out from the heat...

I was lonely after he left, so I put an ad on Craigslist looking for friends...I actually got one response from a pretty cool sounding guy so we might have coffee this weekend. I've also gotten a response from "grababootienpinch" and two guys from Texas, one of whom thought that Bubble tea was a Texas phenomenon. These have been quietly shoved aside. It's kind of embarrassing posting on Craigslist or whatever, but I figure if things go terribly wrong (a la my "showing Conspirators of Pleasure to a group of people I hardly knew" incident) I won't be in Boulder again for some time. So take that, bitches!

My mom brought home a CD today and asked if I knew the band. At first I thought it was Amandine and I got super excited, but then I realized it was the Arcade Fire album Funeral with an album cover I wasn't familiar with. So now my mom is turning into an indie snob, just like me! Although, I'm not sure if she'll honestly like them...She'll probably think they're bad singers.

Oliver lent me a book called Summerland which is sort of like American Gods for kids with baseball. The baseball is kind of turning me off, but there was a pixie in it, so I kept reading. We'll see if the faeries outweigh the baseball. It actually has kind of a Sam Snoozle feel to it, which I like (no one is gonna get this reference so just keep on movin'.)

Roger, over and out.

Oh sweet Eris - I just had a real passionfruit for the first time. I've always loved the flavor in smoothies and sorbets, but it's really hard to find in the US (if not impossible?). Imagine my suprise when I spotted them at a little fruit stand on Chapel Market. I bought 5 for one pound and I used 3 in a smoothie and ate one plain. The one left over is sad now. I can still smell it on my fingers, which reminds me of the scene in the movie Perfume where the main character can't let the smell of the beautiful girl go.

My dad and Shaeri visited over the past few days. We did a lot of cool stuff, like see movies (Miss Potter and Perfume), go to musicals (Spamalot and Wicked), and so on. The musicals were pretty amazing because I haven't been to a proper musical since I was about 6 years old. Wicked is a really fun take on the story of the Wizard of Oz, I won't give it away but it was very creative (not without plotholes, though). Spamalot got so silly that one of the actors had to sit there holding back laughter for a few moments after he delivered his ad-libbed Knights of Ni line. Silly is good though :) Perfume was a really good movie - I read the book when I was quite young and I really liked it. Kay gave it to me and marked the inappropriate part which was - can you guess? - a puppy getting hurt (not the orgy). I was a little offended that the end didn't show any hot man-on-man action even though the opposite was quite prevalent.

For new years eve, Shaeri found out about this Irish center which was playing really fun live Irish music. It's really good I found out about it, since apparently the center also offers Irish language classes and has a Piping club - how cool is that? I'm going to definitely sign up for the Irish language classes (which I couldn't have taken if I kept Zulu - another plus of dropping it). Anyway the music was very livley but the crowd was a bit on the older side. I saw a "young man" who was very drunk and asked me to dance. He tried some lame lines on me like, "I hope your boyfriend doesn't mind that we're dancing" and was pretty confused in general. Later Shaeri and dad started talking to him and he said he was THIRTY-SIX. 36. (also, how weird must that have been for him?) Wow. Hope the people taking Irish classes are more my age...?

When I was walking to the health food store to look for lavender oil, I ran into this really nice girl that we met at the Japanese restaurant wagamama. We talked so long there on the street that the sun went down while we were talking! We have a lot of things in common, which is awesome.

Tomorrow I may go to Camden to spend the extra money dad left with me - maybe on some nice long sleeve shirts or something? I also want to give myself a birthday present and buy a ticket to see Joanna Newsom live in London. She's a brilliant musician and I almost died when I found out the concert was sold out. I may also go to a Decemberists concert, but the online ticket booth was been all annoying and snarly about my credit card.

I recently was able to play the game I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream, an old DOS adventure game classic. I enjoyed it - I haven't had the choice to play many "serious" adventure games as there aren't a lot out there, but I did always hold a special place in my heart for The Dig (you might make the argument that my idolism of Maggie is what got me interested in being a linguist.). The game also appealed to my perverse, Jan-Svankmajeresque side - cutting out the hearts of people on meat hooks, a man who coughs up blood every time he tries to eat something despite his never ending hunger and is drawn to cannibalism because of it...The way I describe it sounds sort of like some slasher film but it's not gratuitous - it does add to the story, which deals with diving into the psychological world of these five people.

I made the mistake of searching out the short story to read, though. And I ran into the same problem that I've run into several times when reading sci-fi stuff, which is why I try to stay away from it. Ideally, I don't think your gender should be apparent when you're writing something. For example, I hope you could take this post, take it out of context, and not be able to tell what gender I am (although you could make the argument that women are more interested in women's issues, so maybe this post isn't the greatest example). I actually didn't know if the writer was a man or a woman when I started out, but halfway through the story and several gratuitous and inappropriate sexual references later, I was convinced that this writer had to be a male. It really added nothing whatsoever to the story to focus on the computer enlarging someone's genitalia and the "slut" of a woman enjoying this man most for this very reason (even though he was crazy, and gay). She also "serviced" all the members of the group, who all happen to be - what do you know? - men.
 
This isn't an isolated situation, either. I remember playing the computer game RAMA and being interested in the concept, so I got my hands on a copy of Rendezvous with Rama, the book it was based on. Again, bad idea. I had to put it down early on because of some random reference to a male astronaut who was going to ban female astronauts because their breasts were too distracting in anti-gravity situation. It was so out of place and so sickening to me that I had to put it down - I think there were other references too, which further alienated me and pulled me out of the story.

I also remember another instance of painfully not being the target audience of the book. Snow Crash is one of those books that everyone says, "You have to read!!" and makes references to, so I decided to read it. It's an interesting concept, and you could even make the argument that the female character Y.T. is quite liberated (although I haven't read the book in a while) but the thing that really stood out to me was a section when they were on a boat and passed by some gay sailors who were gesturing to them or something, and there was some totally homophobic reference about "their assholes shrinking to pinpoints" which was quite out of place.

It's quite ridiculous to me that most sci-fi stories (or at least the ones that I've been unfortunate enough to read) contain these inappropriate nuggets of sexism and homophobic references, which almost always reveal the gender of the author and pull the reader out of the story as well as alienating them by reminding them they're not the intended target audience (otherwise, I'd just gloss over it, right?). The ironic thing is that um, it' sci-fi. This means the future, or some very technically advanced society. While I'm not saying that advanced societies will ever reach a point where all prejudice is gone, it seems a lot less likely that these offensive portrayals of women and homophobic sentiments would be present. I have read books where this isn't an issue, but it's something that kept coming up, so I felt I would blog about it.

Just wanted to make that last post separate!

Anyway, I'm sorry I haven't written in a while (I just spent like 10 minutes looking for a blog post on people who write ridiculous excuses for not blogging, but gave up). I'm not going to give a silly excuse because I have quite a sensible one: I got sick on Wednesday last week. I thought it wasn't so bad, but then on Thursday night, Zulu really zapped me and I felt awful. I had to miss my Sanskrit quiz on Friday and spent most of the weekend feeling weak and recovering. I read Howl's Moving Castle again to see how it matched up with the film, and was surprised to find out that Howl the Hottie is actually a Welsh guy. Wooo, can he get any more sexy? I also read the second book of the Inheritance Trilogy about Saphira the dragon and Eragon. It was okay, but I got really sick of all those emo descriptions of Roren (was that his name?) whining about his town getting burned down and his girlfriend getting kidnapped. Get over it, man! Strangely enough I saw a review that said the only thing they could relate to in the book was this emo shit. Huh!

Anyway, I said I spent most of the weekend, right? Over the weekend, Dan (myveryownme ) came to visit from Edinburgh since he somehow scored a bus ticket on eBay for one pound. So we met up for coffee on Sunday and ended up hanging out until he had to catch the bus back home! We had a really fun time. I love meeting people from The Internets in person, it is so fun, because you don't know what to expect yet it ended up feeling quite natural. After coffee and Sanskrit fun...


We tried to get into this exhibit at the Museum that was this video game thingy. It sounded awesome but we got there a little too late and wandered around the exhibits featuring things like a game that tells you whether you're male or female (I kept getting the male responses, Dan kept getting the female...) a "realistic" operation game, which had a cutout figure marching around with no walking animation plopping shapes into a hole in this guy's chest. Wow, I can really relate to surgeons now that I know from a realistic perspective what their job entails. We got kicked out pretty quickly, but not before we saw this random-ass baby lying on the floor:

Then we kinda touristed out down by um, Picadilly Circus or whatever it's called. I actually hadn't been down there before. We walked around Chinatown and Dan bought a ton of these Japanese snacks as well as some pocky for me (*nibbles pocky*) I have to go back there myself now that I know where it is.