Syntactic Sugar

Damn yo, there are like only 2 or 3 weeks of class left. That is crazy!

I took out my purple yarn because I was getting sick of how messy my hair looked all the time. Amazingly I didn't have to cut them out and my hair is completely back to normal! I really should make a detailed blog post on how to do the yarn so everyone can have fun with it. You can wash your hair and leave it in for 3 months+ and your hair is still fine at the end. Those Goody hair bands that you can buy at Walmart are teh shizznit - I can even reuse them!

This is going to sound silly, but I got this awesome new hair dryer on sale at Walgreens for like 10 dollars. It has a non-tangle brush attached so you can style as you dry your hair and it has that funky ionic technology. I think my old hair dryer was too hot and was damaging my hair, since it seems like I don't have as many wirey hair with split ends. Also I got good comments on my hair today so I give it two thumbs up. Buy it!

I was going to blog about this for a while, but it's so damn prevalent that I have to blog about it NOW. So, apparently pervs in Seattle are too fancy for Hooters. OK people, think...Seattle...what do people want? I know! COFFEE! Naked girls + coffee = profit.

I first heard about Chika Latte on Craigslist. The site looks innocent enough, but check out uniforms. Holy shit. You get served coffee by half-naked ladies wearing a football outfit that says "69" on it. I wanted to go to the one in Ballard but then I found out it wasn't a sit down place - they are just drive throughs (with a glass window so you can see the A of T&A, natch). Lame.

Apparently Seattle is a lot more depraved than I thought, because there is not one but THREE different companies who cater to these coffee pervs. There's Natte Latte and The Sweet Spot Cafe. Both of these have bios of the girls who work there and the Sweet Spot even makes a pin-up calendar with their girls.

I must admit I have some sort of morbid fascination with these places, but I don't think I could bring myself to work there. You'd think you could only find this thing in Japan, but I guess Seattle is trendy enough and/or close enough to Japan so as to catch those crazy perv waves.

On Friday night I had my Svankmajer shorts party. I cooked a vegan cake and strawberry pie, both of which were super super good! The pie didn't even need to be baked and was super healthy but it was sooo good. The cake was OK, but kind of nothing special, and it creeped me out that I had to put vinegar in it. Ewww.

We watched some of his best short films and then started Alice. I thought we might want to watch Lunacy but everyone seemed to want Alice...turned out to be a bit of a mistake because I forgot how tedidous that film can be. There are totally brilliant bits in it, but in other parts it just drags. By that time it was too late to get that far into Lunacy, so we just kind of chilled and looked at silly Craigslist posts.

I felt kind of awesome since I pulled off hosting a party that had edible food and such. I don't think I had ever done that before, so yay!

I found out on Friday that Owen and Stephanie will be in Seattle too. Awesome.

And that's about it. Bye!

Sainsbury's might have just achieved the impossible - with little fanfare, I might add. Over in the small but beloved vegetarian section, I spotted "non dairy-dessert" - in other words, soy ice cream. What the heck, I'll give it a try, I thought. I got the caramel flavor and put in the fridge at the start of the day. When I went to try it that evening, I was amazed. It actually tasted like real ice cream! Now, if you've ever had soy ice cream, well it's good - but it's certainly not ice cream, and the flavor is a little bit off. So I'm not sure how Sainsbury's figured this out. However - I am not going to go completely crazy, because I think caramel is something of a strong flavor. I have caramel soy pudding which tastes delicious but the same kind in chocolate tastes a little bit off. The only other flavor was raspberry, so I'll try that and update here what the results are.

Syntax class is still random. The Irish-Italian guy I sit next to sometimes zoned out and drew an amazing cute little drawing, which I asked if I could have. I think he was a little surprised, since it was so simple, but it was just so charming. I'm going to hang it up in my room. I hope that's not creepy? Forgot if I blogged about this - I don't think so, but last time in class, I busted out my Sanskrit passive information when we were talking about passives. I think I used the example - "It is lived in the forest happily by the sages". After talking about it for some time, some dewd from the back of the class goes, "Um, what's a sage? You mean like the plant? I don't get it." And people think the British are cultured!

I had some amusing experiences on my bus rides today. On the first ride, some crazy old guy kept singing, "On top of old smokey...All covered with snow...(something something) my true lover..." Over and over. It actually wasn't even creepy, it was almost charming, although people were shooting him some pretty nasty looks. But he just kept on singing, without a care in the world. Then, when I was about to get off, a guy who I can only describe as an Arabic druid - green robes and staff with little baubles as well as a Keffiyeh. Weird stuff. On the way back, my sense of smell was assaulted with both cat food and mint toothpaste smells, although I couldn't locate the source of either (I don't know if I would have liked to know about the cat food smell, though).

As I was writing this, I got a call to say that my package arrived - Shiriusu no Densetsu, the book and DVD, otherwise known as the Sea Prince and the Fire child - just in time for my birthday. I'm just skipping through the DVD right now. I'd hoped for slightly better quality, but it's better than the cheap ass video rip I got on ebay. And of course - it's in JAPANESE, bitches. I think my translating idea was a little bit ambitious. I'll really need some outside help - maybe the tutors can help me once I get back to Mac. The book is absolutely beautiful. I'd gotten some images online from it (like the one used in this icon) but there are many more lush and beautiful images in it peppered with a good dose of female nudity that I haven't ever seen before! Also, just watching the DVD again reminds me of how touching and sweet this story was. Erk, I'm gonna cry if I keep watching. Anyway, I'm so happy I have my hands on both of them, finally.

Oh my, I have not blogged in a while. This is because Sanskrit is eating my brain and driving me to Chocoholism. I think I have a few things to write about, though!

The secret mission which I referred to in my last post was heading to CyberCandy in Covenant Garden. I wanted to get Dan some Twizzlers as a gift and also maybe stock up on some American candy. I got Hershey's Kisses and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups since for some reason, Brits aren't so big on the peanut-butter chocolate thing. They also stock Marsupial Butt Poop Coffee (I would have bought some, but it's so freaking expensive), a candy called Goetze (*shudder* I think I'll pass), and Lucky Charms - BUT they were out of stock when I went there. I'll have to go there again sometime when they have better stock of things. I actually had to buy the straw type Twizzlers so Dan didn't end up getting as much but oh well. I also sent a very artistic gay card since I still don't know where to get cards except at Gay's The Word.

I didn't go to Notting Hill to shop that evening but I did hang out in China town a little bit. I got some expensive Bubble Tea which wasn't quite what I expected (more like a smoothie or something almost) but it was good. I still have to find a real bubble tea shop. Anyway I also bought some Udon noodles and stuff at a little grocery store, as well as cutesy buttons to put on my boring day bag (I just can't drag my kitty bag around town anymore).

Since I couldn't go shopping Friday night (it was too late) I decided to go with Heidi Saturday afternoon. I found out later that Saturday probably isn't the best day to do Portabello Road - that's the antique day, not the fashion day. I hardly saw anything that I was interested in even when we went to the promising looking "retro" stores. I put that in quotes because I guess their definition of "retro" is "things that your Grandma wore in the 80s." The sad thing is that a lot of this stuff was 20 pounds or something crazy. I wanted to keep my general spending range to 10 pounds and under unless I saw something really special.

And guess what - I did. We passed a hippy-ish Indian clothes store and I stopped dead in my tracks. That's when I saw what Heidi calls my Technicolor Dream Coat. It was a long velvet coat which was tie dyed crazy colors and embroidered with flowers. It was 50 pounds though and wayy over what I wanted to spend for the day. I decided to think about it and me and Heidi then walked down Porabello road a little longer and stopped at a "free trade coffee house" - which I'm not really sure what that means now that I think about it -  and then later to the closest thing we've seen to a real tea shop. I bought some loose leaf berry green tea there which turned out to be quite good, but I'm still looking for a place that rivals the Teahouse in Boulder. I mean, this is the UK, where is all the flippin' tea?

Anyway, after thinking it over, I went back to the place with the coat and decided it wouldn't kill me to use my feminine wiles to bargain for the coat. I fluttered my eyelashes charmingly and got him to take it down to 44 pounds which was quite decent! It was getting cold and I hadn't bought anything, so I thought, fuck it - and I bought it. Strangely enough, it's been really cold here lately so I have been wearing it pretty much every day! I thought people would think it was a little too over the top, but I have gotten several complements on it so far. Here's a photo of it if you're so inclined:


Sunday night I stayed up forever doing Sanskrit...as usual. Then Monday evening I went to a Jan Svankmajer film at the London Film Festival! Heidi let me know about it and I was thoroughly excited. I had a headache but I dragged myself down to Water Closet station or whatever. Nothing will stop me from seeing a Svankmajer film! There was a small cafe there and a very nice Italian man who made my weird sandwich choice (Cucumbers and cheese with Mayonnaise). I also had a guy giggle at me since I sauntered up to the bar looking all cool and then ordered hot chocolate.

The film is called Lunacy in English. I'm not quite sure how I feel about the plot yet. It seemed a little cliched, because the students at a Zaki Gordon workshop I went to came up with a similar plot. You know, there's a looney bin, and you don't know who is crazy and who is not...But of course, since this is Jan Svankmajer, a bunch of animated brains, flesh, eyes, and of course tongues were showing up in between every other scene. It was a pretty blasphemous film and I'm glad I didn't take anyone because they probably would have never spoken to me again! I recommend the film with caution - maybe see Conspirators of Pleasure and then work up to this film.

The rest of this week I've just been scrambling to get all my work done - especially all my Sanskrit. This has involved me chanting noun paradigms under my breath while walking to school, causing one guy to mutter, "Crazy" at me (I think so, at least.) I didn't do anything on Halloween which was a little sad, but I did eat too much chocolate and then talk with Heidi for a long time. To prove a point to her, I posed a sort of ridiculous hypothetical question, but I think it's interesting to analyze this question. Here it is:

Man, there aren't any good movies out right now. I ended up seeing The Illusionist again, which was good because this time I understood what was going on.

Shaeri, Dad and I went to this pretty fancy restaurant where I got cheese and spinach ravioli with smelly cheese on top - pretty good actually. He ended up saying something pretty silly - mentioning Nixon was a capricorn. Then he turns to me and goes, "What's your sign, Aries?" (It's Aquarius) Why Dad know's Nixon's sign and not mine is a mystery - but don't worry, I still love you Dad ;)

We saw this lady outside the restaurant that Dad said was a hooker and we all laughed, but every time we passed she was still there. It was pretty weird.

I'm going to see Goose tomorrow one last time to help her get stuff sorted out before I leave. Getting really close - less than a week, now. But anyway, I'm tired out from today, so goodnight for now.

Okay, as an internet pop culture junkie, I just had to see this movie. I mean, it's got motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane! What more can you ask for in a movie? I didn't want to go by myself, so I sent an email impersonating my mom to her friend saying she wanted to see it all together. We made a date to see it today. Man, was it funny! We were pretty much the only ones in the theater and we were giggling the whole time, just waiting for the "I have had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane" line. Woo!

I just watched a ridiculously long movie which involved so much code switching that I didn't realise I needed the subtitles until a long way into the movie (I just thought that they were speaking English with a heavy accent!) Makes me wish I could learn Hindi and/or Tamil someday. Maybe then I would be able to figure out the code switching without freaking out!

I also just somehow misplaced a half a loaf of bread. I'm not really sure how that's possible.

Today there was such a big storm here that a tree in my backyard fell over. It was sad because it was probably one of the biggest trees around. I might take a picture of it, but it's kind of boring. It seemed exciting when it was happening though! I hid in my room with my cats, since every other room sounded like it was going to cave in with all the hail. And people say "Oh, you're from New Mexico" thinking there is no snow or rain here.

Since my mom now refuses to give my movies a chance after I hit her with two weird Czech movies, we watched a boring movie that she got called Match Point. Pretty much nothing happened the first hour or so of the movie, and then the DVD messed up and I took it out to wash it. When I put it back in, I didn't notice anything too weird although I was a tiny bit confused. I found out later after looking on Wikipedia that the player somehow skipped half of the movie, but it still worked without those extra 30 minutes. Hmm, what does that say about that movie? Also, Irish accents are RHOTIC, people. What was up with that guy's accent?

There's a new version of Puppy Linux out which screwed up my laptop. I had to take out the HD, man I hate doing that! When I finally got it working, it turns out he recompiled the kernel so the old wifi drivers aren't valid anymore :( You'd think that if he's going to be recompiling the kernel, that he'd at least update to 2.6.17.7 ... (how dorky does this sound, heh) Anyway I'm going to try to get some sleep. Night night.

I've been getting more into MySpace latley because I've been bored. Not the best of hobbies, but I figure I might meet some friends on there. So far, the only luck I've had is meeting a very nice girl from SOAS. I guess as long as I have that one triumph, it's worth it, right?

I try to browse to see people in Santa Fe that may be interesting. I came across this quote that kind of sums up what I've been seeing so far (actually, more like without the first part.)

I enjoy intellectual conversation deeply and I value the willingness to listen to the point of views of others. I am very interested in the branch of philosophy called aesthetics, I am very curious to understand beauty and its implications. Other than school and the profound, I enjoy Muscle cars and drag racing,

WTF is a Muscle car? In any case it doesn't sound like something I'd be interested in. I actually lol'd when I read this - that thing about the drag racing and stuff was so random.

Another great quote:

I would like to meet Albert Einstine and some hot bitches.

I wonder if he'd get along with Einstine?

On an unrelated note, tonight my mom and I saw a really good movie called Breakfast on Pluto. Well, I'm a sucker for anything with transvestites in it. Anyway, the whole movie I was thinking "Wow, that actor makes a really beautiful woman." After looking it up on IMDB I found out it was the same actor who played the pretty evil guy in Batman Begins! I remember thinking he was really pretty then so it's pretty amazing he played a transvestite in this movie! You should really see both of these movies to see what a different character this actor is - it's amazing.

Wow, I've been having fun today looking at embarassing old Bollywood movies on YouTube. This kind of thing makes me sad I don't have enough time to learn Hindi at SOAS. Here's a funny Beatles rip off, and here's a Mohammed Rafi song. Classic.

Last night, me and my mom watched In the Realms of the Unreal. It's a really excellent documentary about a somewhat crazy guy named Henry Darger who wrote a 15,000 page crazy story about little girls with penises who were enslaved by the non-Christians. He was just a janitor and a very reclusive guy, so no one knew about this huge amount of work he'd done until he died and they checked out his room. I really recommend it. We're going to be watching more weird movies soon so I'll keep you posted on that.

Oh yeah, and I'm back in Santa Fe. I'll be going with my mom to Boulder in about two weeks but for now I get to hang out here at home with my cats and my mom.

Well, I haven't written in my blog, and as this weekend was of particular note, I decided I should do a short write up of what I was up to. (Hope this satisfies Will, if he's reading :)

Sedona has a really awesome film school called the Zaki Gordon Institute. It has a really fancy setup, and my dad even teaches there sometimes. Every year, they show the films that the students worked on over the semester. In particular, this semester they got a grant from Kodak to work on a 35 Millimeter film project (no more jagged pixelly lines!). The film itself (titled "Who's Watching Now?" but I can't find anything on Google about it) was well shot, but the plot was really confusing, and I didn't understand it until after I watched the "Making Of" film a bit later.

I forgot if I mentioned this before - but Stephan Schultze (the leader type guy of the film school) was searching for an alien looking text to use in his movie. My dad told him about my language and I ended up "translating" (really just taking the phonetic value of the English words and approximating it in the sounds of my language) for them. This is going to be really amusing if this film makes it onto IMDB, since I'm actually credited as Alien Linguist. (Strangely enough, this particular blog entry comes back to bite me in the butt...I didn't make any money off of it though!) They didn't quite finish editing it all, and my text was only used in one portion. I ended up being a little disappointed because they put a block of normal text in with my font, which doesn't quite work. For example, there are Ws or Cs...and capital letters mean something else entirely. So it turned out being mostly my language with the occasional W or C thrown in there. I'm sure more people didn't notice, but I did. If they don't care, I certainly don't though. No big deal.

The day started off dreadfully because they have a little trick of showing all the shitty films first. Acting sucked, sappy plot line, etc...There were a couple really good ones though that turned up towards the end of the day. Here are a couple I really liked.

• Skate Dance by Daniel Garfield
  This was a seriously funny movie about this 70s guy who used to be a skate dancer. Great acting, well done technically, and it included gender-bending roles which I certainly approve of.
• Life of Will Mezzo by Jeff Cravath
  This movie was very whimsical. It was about a boy who would zone out and go into his own beautifully crafted little worlds. Shaeri thought that the ending was sad, but me and my dad interpreted it differently.

Uhh, I can't think of any other ones I really liked right now. Those two are the two that I really liked both the story and technical work - there were several others where I admired the technical work but didn't like the story, and vice versa. I'm very tough at grading these movies - there were a lot of really BS movies which were actually just a bunch of pretty footage cut together with no storyline or very vague text like "We are all connected" trying to bring together footage from Japan and Bali and all these places. I thought that was real BS, but my dad and Shaeri liked it. One particular short actually used a song from Scribe (a New Zealand rapper! NEW ZEALAND HIP HOP STAND THE FUCK UP) which was really awesome.

Ah, I did forget to mention though - there was the obligatory worst movie. It was called "Legion" or something, and at first it looked like it would be one of those campy things about detectives getting murdered, but a Demon (actually a fat punk rocker in a hoodie) was doing the murdering. Then all the sudden it gets all religious and stuff and Jesus gave him this sword to kill the punk rocker in the hoodie. I'm thinking, okay, maybe as a parody it has value. But then then the Q and A came up the guy goes, "Yeah I'm a serious Christian and I made this movie to share my belief system" or something like that. I was so embarrassed for him! At least he did say "If you like it great, if you don't, that's okay too." There was another religious themed movie which (I have to grudgingly admit) was well done...but that kind of stuff gives me the creeps overall.

There are some pretty interesting looking people, a lot of which are my age. I'm hoping to talk to some particularly interesting ones tomorrow and/or stalking them on MySpace (coincidentally, there was a documentary on that too...amazing how many people have no idea what it is.) I myself don't have a MySpace profile, but I have a MySpace account. I wonder if I should put up a profile one of these days, but something that this dude said in the MySpace documentary makes me think twice of it (something about no one ever reading it except the person who wrote it, which isn't quite true, I don't think.)

We've seen most of the movies, so tomorrow should just be seeing about 3 more, possibly winning some Apple products, and par-taying. Although, if the par-taying is anything like it was last night...I went to an opening buffet for the Film students and man was I bored. They had a chocolate fountain but after seeing a bunch of people dip junk in it I started to get paranoid that there were germs in there (Am I developing OCD?). That film group is just really close knit, and I guess when someone like me comes in who doesn't know everyone and doesn't get all the in jokes, it's a little hard to mingle with the crowd. Especially when I'm not the most social butterfly in the world. Although maybe I take that back - there was a kinda creepy but good movie about a butterfly collector (I don't wanna get caught!). I'll be a social kangaroo instead, then.

Maybe more updates tomorrow. Tata!

I just realised to my delight that LiveJournal decided to give me twice as many user pics as I had before, which I think is very reasonable of them because the ammount they had before (15) was a very small amount indeed. I just tried to fill all my slots and it took me some time. I probably should have been doing homework but oh well.

Last weekend I bumped into Jospeh and Ola at dinner and suggested we watch Conspirators of Pleasure by Jan Svankmajer, my favorite surrealist film maker. The thing about surrealist films is that you can't really describe the plot, and the name of the movie was hard to remember, so it kind of just became "the masturbation machine movie" because that was the thing that I remembered from the description. Apparently this made Joseph and Ola pretty interested (Matt less so) and we decided to watch it. It had no dialogue in the whole movie and still managed to keep me entertained (in the sense of going WTF? every 5 minutes). The funniest part must have been when someone walked into the lounge where we were watching it during the masturbation machine / fish fetish part which is one of the weirdest parts of the movie, and then ran out to go get a friend. When they came back, it had gotten fairly boring looking again but the person was saying loudly, "I swear, there was this hand massaging this guy and these fish..."

Heh, I have no idea why, but I ended up getting the movie A Chinese Ghost Story on my Netflix queue for some reason. I put it in and it looked fairly bad, so I tried my old trick of setting the movie on double speed with subtiles (I actually needed the subtitles in this case, because it was Cantonese). This made it really amusing to watch the funky kung fu scenes, because everything went by so fast.

And what would a bad Cantonese movie be without badly translated subtitles? Here are two of my favorites:

(a snake jumps out of the bush, and the main hero, a tax collector, jumps on it and starts stomping on it)
Stepping you to death!

(an old man gets beat up on the street)
The world is so cool.

Word, Ning!

I'm really upset right now, because some asshole old man who I've never seen before in the hardware store got very angry at me and yelled at me for feeding the cats. I know the manager personally and I told her about that, so hopefully he gets in trouble or gets his ass fired or something. I mean, what the hell? Cats aren't stupid like dogs - if I had something bad in the food or catnip they would know and stay the hell away. Also I don't look the least bit threatening, I go there ALL THE TIME, and the cat was following me around. I mean, come on. I guess I can understand his concern, but the impression I got from him is that he was just trying to be mean.

The quote above is from a screwed up movie Matt and I saw last night, called the Forbidden Zone. It turned out to be a lot more offensive than I thought it would be, but there were some funny parts and I guess it was a good "WTF" movie. I think sometime I will make a list of WTF movies that aren't extremely offensive or turn out to be quite good as well as being weird. I found a site about weird movies once, but every single one of them dealt with some disgusting and disturbing subject.

Well, should go work on my Hungarian data set for tomorrow. Oh, I wanted also to write about something cute from my Sounds class. For our homework assignment, we have been "cursed" by an evil sorcerer (or linguistics professor!) and have to rewrite a sentence in a certain way. I thought it was a very cute way to make an assignment. We also learned that we're members of the elite cardinal vowel crew - Sarah is the student of the student of the student (etc) who invented cardinal vowels.

Man, I just had a very haunting dream after napping all afternoon.  If I had to describe it in just a few sentences, it would be something like that movie I saw, A Zed and Two Naughts, but only if the brothers were mermen/marine biologists...

If I can remember correctly, a woman was trying to preserve the exact part of the ocean (plants fish and all) where she met her lover, the marine biologist/merman for the first time (I say it's like ZOO because I think she may have had a thing for the brother, too) I think the mother of the marine biologist tried to stop her from preserving that part of the ocean, so the woman has to stop it by going forward in time. The mother in law was pretty bad news and was slowly poisoning people at this party where they would fall face forward into these vats of custard and chocolate and drown. I only remember the chocolate and custard part because the woman was trying to fish one of the victims out, and finally grabbed the mother in law by the hair, making it all mucked up with chcolate. (the mother in law also had a really bad dye job. Why was that so vivid? I dunno) By the end, the woman gets to stay with the marine biologist merman she loves so much and gets to save that part of the ocean too..I woke up feeling very lonely and disoriented. Another vivid moment in the dream is when the woman looked up at the picture of her with the marine biologist when they were younger and I could feel her longing. At least things worked out well in the end, as far as I remember..

Cheryl, any ideas?

Hehe, I finally saw 5000 Fingers of Dr. T for the first time - I saw a bit of it on TV once. I saw someone who maybe looked a little like Uncle Dale but I couldn't tell.

Highlights of Dr. T:

• "undulating undies"
• The CREEPY nightmarish dungeon elevator operator!
• "it could be...ATOMIC!!"

It was a very funny glance into the fifties. Me and Eric laughed a lot when the atomic parts came up. After that I was still not ready to go to bed so I decided to watch the other movie that I got, A Zed and Two Naughts. I very wrongly called it "that amputee fetish movie"..I actually liked it quite a bit. I thought there would be gross sex scenes or something, but it was actually quite tastefully done - and that's saying a lot, because it even had decaying animals in it (no cats or anything too graphic, so I was fine) I like movies that make me thing about things, even if it's your own inevitable death and decay..I guess it was kind of interesting, because you were able to see the brother's obsession with decay and how it progressed. And AGAIN it was tastefully done, although there was something about a weird girl and a zebra at the end that I didn't really get. I also might have just liked it because they had British accents :)

Tehehe, I told Matt that Metropolis had homoerotic undertones, but he didn't listen. Proof!

Anytime Freder gets within 5 feet of another man, or anytime another man makes the mistake of speaking to him or making eye contact with him, Freder throws himself bodily at the unfortunate man and begins groping and caressing him, pulling the other man's face toward his and staring intently into his eyes. This is not only embarrassing, but it potentially exposes his father's company to sexual harassment lawsuits as well.

Blah. I think I did really badly on my Sounds of Language exam, even though I studied quite a bit. I knew all the symbols and stuff, but I guess I wasn't all that great when it came to questions like "For which of these consonants are the vocal cords farthest apart?"..Duh..On an aspirated consonant? I have no clue, really. There was also a question where we had to pick the odd one out in a set of consonants. It took me probably a half hour to figure out 5 of those, and one of them I was still not sure with and chose "pulmonic air stream" as a cop out answer. It worked but it didn't feel like the right answer.

I'm not as upset about it as I could be - I think at heart I'm a syntactican, and only care about sounds if they are affecting morphology or something. Also being able to identify sounds is helpful - but I don't know how interested I am exactly in what our little friends the vocal folds are doing every second of the day. But yeah..it's still linguistics, and I want to do well in it. Maybe this will turn out like my Algorithms class last semester, where I felt like I failed every exam and then ended up getting great grades on all of them. But I dunno how optimistic I am.

By the way, the title of my last post was referring to a funny story my Irish teacher told us in class. We were learning the words for body parts, and after a while he goes "Ok guys, why hasn't anyone asked for the word for penis yet?" and everyone kind of giggles nervously and doesn't say anything. He tells us that the word is bod (pronounced like bud) and proceeds to tell us a silly story. He and a friend were at this party drinking Bud beer (maybe you can see where this is going). They accidentally get their cans mixed up, and just as the music stops and the room goes quiet his friend goes "Hey!! I thought my bud was bigger than yours!"

Okay, juvenile, but it's incredibly amusing having a teacher tell those kind of stories (at a Catholic school, no less).

Today turned out to be a very gloomy day. Right now I have my full spectrum light on and I'll probably have some tea later. I think that Eric is coming to watch a movie later, which is going to be the 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, unless for some reason I decide I'm comfortable with watching that random amputee fetish movie with him...(don't ask me why I rented that one! I guess I'm on a quest to see the weirdest movies ever.)

I've been sleeping/napping all day, trying to get out of starting my grammar of Khmer (Cambodian). I was happy with Tauya because I kind of knew what to say, but I hate being specific when I really don't know what I'm talking about...I get the exact same feeling when I work on my own language. It's a very frustrating feeling. But I suppose it's practice, and Haiman should tell us what's going on, so if in the future we encounter something like this, we'll go "Ohhh...". And I know I'll have way more than enough practice next semester with Field Methods (Yay 5 days a week, 2.5 hours a day)

I saw Metropolis with Matt last night. He was trying to tell me the metaphor the whole time, but I just liked the homoerotic undertones best! The way Freder grabbed all those male characters like that..teehee...

I don't really have any reason to post right now but I'm posting anyway. There's a kind of depressing little taken apart computer in my drawer. Poor Robin. I just ordered a new hard drive so I sure hope that will fix the problem, and that it goes back together ok. I guess in the end this might be kind of a fun project, assuming I don't have to sell this thing for parts on ebay. I hate opening up electronics, but I've gotten really used to it, so it's getting better. I guess it's fairly hard to actually break something, I mean hell, once I caused a SPARK inside this big computer which scared me to death. It still seems to be working fine, as far as I can tell. Getting a new hard drive might be good, because it will be much faster.

Last night I watched a fairly disturbing movie with Owen and Patrick and someone else whose name I forgot. The scenes where he got headaches were really hard for me to watch..Also the brain they used was real. Ick. But I learned in Brain, Mind, Behavior (or as me and Matt call it, Brain, Behavior, Bullshit. We like the class, but the name is hard to remember, and alliterations sound neat) that brains are like yoghurt and if you put a spoon in them they'll mix around. People have to put soak the brain in a lot of chemicals to get it to the point where it's not smushy like that.

Sensei totally busted Funk-san in class yesterday..It was really funny but sort of my fault so I felt bad about it. Funk-san jokingly makes fun of my dating games by saying I'm playing H, or etchi (other words dirty) games, so I made fun of him back. Sensei overheard this and then when we were going over giving and recieving, he said he got a video game from his little brother. Then Sensei asked if it was an H game in front of the whole class! Heh. Moral of the story - don't say that I play H games, or I'll have your teacher bust you in front of the whole class.

Me and my mom had a really fun day out today. We went to the Japanese noodle restraunt, then to see Charlie and the Chocolate factory. We love Johnny Depp, so it was fun to watch :) I guess this could be considered a bit of a spoiler, but I'll say it anyway, I was glad to see that they didn't put in the part where he got all scary and rasty like in the last movie. He was a little creepy yeah, but not SCARY.

We got a ton of great food at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's. Man I miss Trader Joes!

When we got back, my cat Zig was hanging out near his cat grass looking really posessive. I could just imagine him going "I'll cut you, bitch" And he would!

I'm going to see Goose tommorow, that will be fun. Goose is a really awesome person!