Syntactic Sugar

I just found out that if you type "syntax stacia" into Google you get my Linked In page with my full name, my MySpace, and this blog. Oh sweet Frida. And to think my fake email contains these words. I need one of those "qtiekitteh23423423@aol.com" type ones now.

I bought a domain name, but I won't disclose what it is, because worse yet the whois has my home address.

I am a total germ sponge. I catch any crap that goes around the office or the bus and smear it all over Seattle.

Reasons I love Seattle:
A chunky dude in a green cape on the bus.
A soccer mom in an SUV blasting indie music or something really loud.
A lovely man with purple and pink hair and beard in a ravishing velvet dress that came into Sureshot.
The guy who gave me a purple scarf he had knitted himself on the bus one day.
Finding a pamphlet called "Chicken with penis"
A Buddhism pamphlet which talks about the joys of "urinating and defecating"

I bought a plastic bowl from Daiso for 1.50 which somehow fits PERFECTLY in my toilet. I filled it with cat litter in hopes the cats would start using it and then start using the toilet, but all they do is fling it around and get it in their water. Which is ok, since they never use it, but annoying. One of these days I am going to accidentally not take the bowl out in the middle of the night for a bathroom run, and probably just think "to hell with it" and dump it like normal cat litter, along with a slight annoyed feeling because I treat that stuff like gold. It's that expensive.

I'm going to Teavana in Bellevue next week with a co-worker. I don't really like Quan Yin teaouse - well, it's a good atmosphere and convienent, but the tea itself is quite boring. Good, but boring. Remedy Teas is also good (it has Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron!), as was Sureshot when they used to have the crazy herbal teas for when you got sick.

After talking to another Co-worker, I found out that the pad of the month club with trix rabbit menstraul pads is no longer on Etsy. Booo. But hand crafted nose studs are?? Sign me up,

The Season finale of L Word is this Sunday, but I think I'll have to make it to the one on Monday instead. I guess Dollhouse is going to be my new TV series now, although me and my friend Krista are still a little unsure about it given the whole kind of prositution vibe.

For this weekend, I have to allow adverbial predicates, but only negated ones, not denoms, I have to add a causitive semantic predication that WORKS, I have to fix my copula, and some other crazy stuff. I wish I could bring Mr. Derbyshire back from the dead. I have a bone to pick with him about verbal coordination. And ADJECTIVES, for Frida's sake.

I told people at work that I'd translate lessons for them into Sanskrit. I might have made a mistake on that one.

I posted a Craigslist ad this evening and got some totally redonk responses. I love how people respond when they are blatantly the opposite of what you said you were looking for in all respects. Some of them are so humorous that I'd love to post bits of them, just like the person who posted all the responses to that anonymous sex ad (I still don't morally think he was wrong at all, even though I believe he got in legal trouble), but I don't quite want to elaborate on what types of ads I'm placing. Er, that sounds ominous. Nothing bizarre, I assure you.

I will probably have a movie night with Vicki sometime soon. I'm kind of appauled that I've only shown one Seattle friend Conspirators of Pleasure.

I really have to start DOING more things in Seattle. Like going to shows, movies, etc. I have not been to one movie theatre since moving here. I do want to see Coraline.

Ruby programmers are really snotty.

It's a dangerous thing when Trader Joe's candy cane oreos are on sale for 99 cents! I bought one case, but I think I'll have eaten the whole box shortly. Even with all this junk food, I don't think I could top the following non-vegan foods.

I am noting an alarming tendency for wanting to introduce drama into my life. I will (hopefully) proceed with caution.

This post is a bit of an amalgamation abomination, but it will have to do. 6 days late on my montly post...

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!

Interlocutor: But how pimp are you, Stacia? How pimp are you??

Well, I'm not pimp enough to factor numbers into their constituent primes or spit the dopest rhymes, BUT I did get into University of Washington's Computaional Linguistics department! :D I was thinking I'd have to wait for a few more weeks, but Emily just emailed me last night with a really nice subject line: "Good admission news!"

So I'm gonna be in Seattle probably around mid-June, and I'll get to hang out with Joseph and Oliver, AND my mom said she'd visit me a lot. So cool. Now I'll just have to find a place to live...

To celebrate, I think I'm going to have a Svankmajer shorts party, which I'd really been planning for some time. My mom is going to give me some good vegan goodies recipes and maybe I can even make a cake or something fancy.

I bought some shells on etsy last night that I'll probably put into my hair along with some green yarn for graduation. Woo, it'll be all mermaid-ish.

Here is the most bastardized version of "Pavane for a Dead Princess" that I could find on youtube, but it still made me laugh. I have to admit the cello was kind of cool, though.

I forgot to mention that there is really a business called "Black Mesa" in New Mexico. They sell coffee, and I never had the pleasure to have coffee there - I should have cosplayed as Chell in front of the coffee place or something. But I doubt I'll be in NM for quite some time.  I prefer Aperture Java, anyway ;) Don't be alarmed if you don't understand any of this.

So I called the Ling. department at UW today and they were all "bloop beep boo we need more time to process the applications, we will email you in some indeterminate amount of time, kthx". To top that off, I got an email that said "Computational Linguistics Masters" which was just from SUNY Buffalo (Haiman was right, I did get in).

I'm kind of holding out on the chance that maybe the lady was talking about the people who applied later...? I'd think they would send some sort of email about taking so long, because they're going to get a lot of crap come tomorrow about not getting back to the applicants on the date they promised!

It started sleeting and snowing all crazy today. I actually can't remember a time when it was so snowy out that people got all wet and dripping, but it's like that today. I think it's letting up a little.

I am a total nervous wreck. I'm supposed to hear from UW "by" April 1rst, whatever that means.

Recently it was "X-On-A-Stick" day at Cafe Mac. Apparently there was some chicken shishkabob thing smothered in peanut butter and fried Mac'n'Cheese balls. I had the "Mushrooms-on-a-stick" which were probably much healthier and less offensive than the other choices.

When I was in Boulder, I had breakfast at this bagel place. A little girl, maybe about 3 years old, looked at me and said to her dad, "Daddy, doesn't that lady have the most beautiful hair?" That really made my day.

I've gone to two concerts in the past week, one by the Boredoms which involved Japanese guys screaming and pounding this wall of guitars with sticks, and the other was the Mekons. The Mekons were pretty awesome but they invited this asshole rock critic and annoying-ass radio personality. She kept asking him questions to which he'd respond: "No, I don't feel that way at all". Then I ended up getting Bob Dylan and Bob Marley mixed up and then Lennon and Lennin. Oops.

I got my story reviewed in creative writing last Wendesday and a lot of people really liked that. A bit of an ego boost but I'm not sure if they'll be that into my next story.

I hardly got anything done this weekend. I feel so lazy and useless but I guess that's senioritis for you.

Here are two funny videos I've seen this week: link 1, link 2. Enjoy.

Accepted to Indiana. Don't want to go. I'll find out if I got into Washington sometime before (or possibly on) April 1rst.

So there was a power outage Sunday night. I stayed in the dorm for about an hour with only the light of my computer screen, LED candle, and cell phone. Then some lady came by and said that the backup lighting was about to go off and for safety's sake I should go in the Campus Center, which was still somehow all brightly lit. I thought it was funny because I knew some kids were going to ask for extensions on stuff due to the power outage, and sure enough, they did (an extension on their extension!).

I got sick about a week ago, not as bad as my mom or Oliver, but still a little bit. I guess I have crazy willpower when it comes to getting sick during school since I barely suffered at all. I'd mention my "super healthy vegan diet" as a probable cause, but the truth is I'm probably malnourished and on the verge of getting scurvy and so on. It's all Cafe Mac's fault! Damn you for not having Peanut curry this week, and for running out of that Country White bread all the time.

My creative writing class has helped me because the stuff I read, I dislike so much that I go off and vow to write something better. That's one way to get your creativity back! Please note that I didn't like my first story very much, and I dislike most of the "professional" stuff as well. The professional story I had to read for tomorrow really pissed me off since all of the characters were absolutely despicable and it gave animal loving vegans a bad name (as well as meat eating men, I suppose). I'm getting sick of reading stuff that I dislike so much that I get really worked up about it and have to stop reading stories for a bit.

I also still am feeling a bit sad that she wasn't more interested in Interactive Fiction. I have yet to actually write one yet.

Our robot kicked ass on Monday - people with all the fancy sonar sensors in servo motors got "served" (bad dum tish) by our ghetto lil' robot. It's held together with shitty green masking tape and has wires sticking out everywhere. Anyway we decided to show off wall following and it didn't make one embarrassing mistake! Even the really fancy algorithms were doing kind of goofy stuff. Which I guess is inevitable once you have fancy code...sometimes simpler is better!

For our Barbie Jeep robot, I'll be working on researching Speech Recognition, Text to Speech, and NLP processing. Fun stuff that I really have no idea about, but I already bookmarked a fair amount of sites. One of them apparently does TTS with "emotion" which should be fairly hilarious if we get it working ("I'm SO excited to tell you that I'm running okay!") Or I guess we could go all GlaDOS on it. That would be redonkulous!

Also, there is no God(dess) (sorry, Frida.) Colgate owns Tom's of Maine, Clorox owns Burt's Bees and Honest Tea (a nice cheap tea drink you can buy at the grille) is owned by COCA-COLA. God lord, people.

I wonder if I'll ever get around to writing my Sanskrit morphology parser in Java. We are doing strings, not yet arrays...I guess I could technically do it now with what I know about strings?

My next project on Soico is to stalk people in public and find out how they say "bag". This sounds boring so I'm going to figure out something that speakers in Colorado or New Mexico do and research it over spring break. I don't really want to be the 100th person to present on my "bag" findings. It's just not *my* bag, baby. Unethical studies, here I come!

I'll mention in passing the Karaoke party I went to a week or two ago, mostly because they had "Dragostea din tei", "Yatta" and stuff by Modern Talking. They should have had the Rick Roll song - then I could video tape it and send it to friends. A personalized Rick Roll!

I still have to post a vid of some cute kittens I ran into at the cat shelter with Matt. Also our fave cat Shannon is back (who apparently is a boy cat!). They should all be adopted by now, but I have the videos to remember them by.

Sorry for this disjointed post. It's probably from reading all those disjointed stories in Creative Writing...

For some reason I have that song from Spongebob stuck in my head.

F is for friends who do stuff together
U is for you and me
N is for anywhere any time at all
Down here in the deep blue sea!

And then Plankton does his crazy version. Better than having the Glaucoma Hymn stuck in my head. By the way, Oliver somehow found old pics from the Viennese Glaucoma Ball, which is one rawkin' party.

Another surreal chapter in my life - my mom got me this hat for V-Day that has pom poms on it. It feels really funny when you move your head around. Anyway, me and Matt were taking the bus when this rasty old dewd came up to us and said,

"I hate to interrupt, but damn, your hat has more pom poms on it than a 75' Mexican Chevy!"

We kind of sat there for a moment, not sure how to respond. And then he continued, some sort of random story about finding a 20 dollar bill outside the bank. At some point he made a reference to Hamilton being on the 20 dollar bill. I knew this was wrong, since I remember the part about "dropping Hamiltons" on the Lazy Sunday sketch, but it didn't really matter. Suddenly some guy with a batman cap at the front of the bus gets all offended and shouts at us, "It's JACKSON! JACKSON." The hat really didn't help his credibility even though he was right.

Would you believe that some girl I knew in 3rd Grade chose "pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis" for her spelling quiz? Believe it!

Anyway, me, my mom, and my cats have been breathing Mica all the time. In my mom's case, she even grabbed a spoon covered in sparkle mica and made eggs with it. They didn't turn out very sparkly though. Anyway, I ordered a bunch of random powders online and we've been making body powders and eyeshadows. It's fun, if not really messy.

I've been really bad about updating this blog, haven't I? Well, I'm in a new (ish) coffee shop in Santa Fe. Now that I have a lil' EEEpc (which I have yet to name) I can go to these places. Not nearly as cool as Seattle or the Twin Cities by several magnitiudes, but bearable.

I'm in exile from my house since there's a house showing today. This morning I was feeling sick and I thought I would almost have to stay there groaning in bed while people checked out the house...But thankfully I perked up and was able to go out.

Blah, it looks like this shop is shutting down the router. Lame! I was going to use this opportunity to write about Seattle but I suppose that will have to wait. *sigh*

This post is slightly outdated, thus the title and the separation from the other post. Most of this seems trivial now but I promised myself I'd write a little bit about my Santa Fe Goings On. Santa Fe seems like a distant memory now. Oh well. Fasten your seatbelts for a disjointed and random post. Ready? Here goes.

So what was I doing in Santa Fe? I've been learning how to cook vegan stuff. Let me see if I can remember what we made. We learned how to make peanut sauce, mango curry, pumpkin brownies...I even made some coconut pumpkin risotto on my own and modified the recipe! I made a list of all of my fave foods and have been trying to incoroprate them into the dishes I make. As you might have guessed I'm on a real pumpkin kick lately.

I made about 600 dollars selling crap on ebay and I've been recklessly spending it on Etsy stuff and other random things online. Somebody stop me! It seems like it will go pretty well but some idiot tried to stick me with a paypal chargeback even though I have more "AS-IS" disclaimers than you can shake a stick at. I feel bad that the item didn't work, but on the other hand it's really his problem. I also hate it when people try to go through Paypal without contacting you first, although he might have tried to - I'm in Washington right now and check my mail sparingly.

I also forgot to write about going to the Frida Exhibit in Minneapolis at the Walker. I went two days before I left, mistakingly thinking it was my last day. I'm glad I got to see it! It had all of her famous stuff...the big one with the hearts, the broken pillar one, the monkeys and cats one, the deer one, the hair cut one...much more, even a a few I haven't seen. It even had the original photo of Frida dressed like a man that was "previously unseen" (which is BS. If you have a good memory you might remember that I used to have this as an icon before I stopped paying for Livejournal). In any case it was awesome seeing the original. Then I walked around the museum a little more and looked at the modern art BS. There was a singing security guard and a guy who did a little dance for me. He was like "Do de do I'm a performance artist!" which was kind of hilarious.

I ended up watching a made for TV Spongebob movie featuring the voice of David Bowie. I thought it would be pretty awesome, but they always seem to mess up their movies royally. Not that the show is brilliant to begin with, but they always tend to "dumb down" the movies. (The question lingers: Can you "dumb down" Spongebob?) The alien David Bowie played had different colored eyes, which was a nice touch.

My mom got a box of dismembered baby doll legs and arms in the mail recently for an art piece she's working on. This may seem unusual to you (this is common fare at our house), but the really funny thing is that it included one of those "Check this box here if you want to be saved" pamphlets. This is pretty much the most awesome place I've seen one of those. Imagine: "I didn't see the light until I opened up that box of dismembered baby parts and there was a photo of Jesus staring up at me!"

Something I also wanted to write about. At the end of last semester I was messing around trying to waste time when I suddenly thought of good old Dr. Sbaitso. I read this hilarious article, which has a download at the end. Surprisingly, it works on XP, and surprisingly it pronounces my name right. Actually, it was pretty impressive Speech-To-Text technology given the time. Dr. Sbaitso never helped me with this, but he did have a big "parity error" in the middle of the night when I was studying. Damn, that is loud. I should have known but I never remembered the swearing thing and I wanted to try it out. Oops. :)

So, I did my hair just before I left for Seattle. I used the whole skien of purple flower yarn I got from etsy interspersed with the Colinette point 5 dready locks. We used some horse hair braiding rubber bands which were pretty strong. This time we used the double ended braid technique, which is pretty solid. However 3 of them have fallen out. I guess the bands weren't quite as strong as we thought - much stronger than salon bands though. I'll put those back in when I get back.

Disturbing video which will make you turn vegan. Don't thank me :) (note, have not watched this one since the old one was deleted, but  it should contain "the scene".

I'll write about Washington/Seattle/U Washington etc etc later, perhaps when I get back.

Today I lost my keys AGAIN (how this is possible in a room smaller than my mom's closet escapes me), causing me to miss class, and then went to Uptown to work at the Planned Parenthood there. Damn that was fun! They have some really old machines there...I'm like a kid in an animal shelter...I want to adopt them all and turn them into DOS Boxes or DivX players or Linux Powered Cat Feeders. There was a 286 with a turbo button - man, I remember those! And some Dells that looked like the one I had for years (Win 98, 400 Mhz, 256 Mb RAM, 32 Mb video card), which could apparently not have its hard drive filled up by a teenage girl (I think I did so in a few months). My supervisor pretends like he's old but then goes, "Shit man, this laptop has like 16 Mb of RAM, that can't be right!" That was on a little laptop that was so old, the power brick was built INSIDE of the computer - I was looking for the power brick and thinking, this can't be right, but Andy told me that it's how old laptops used to be. I really wanted to adopt that one, but it's a real brick and I'd probably have to run Grey Cat Linux or FreeDOS, which would be fun but not really necessary. If I were at home, I'd probably snap some of these up, but as it is, I don't have much room. I got to do really hacky things, like boot up Puppy Linux on a machine in order to write a floppy image of DBAN for the machines that couldn't boot from CD. I think Andy was impressed. I had fun, can you tell?

Best yet, towards the end of the day we started getting hungry and Andy said he'd order food for me and the other lady working there. I was thinking, "Well very nice but I doubt I'll be able to eat anything being vegan and all..." Not so! He called up Pizza Lucé, a very vegan friendly yummy restraunt I'd never heard of! I was all, "no cheez kthxbai" but then they were like "oh hai u can has soy cheez" and I was like "omg u r full of win!!". More or less. I haven't had pizza in sooo long, and it was delicious...the soy cheese didn't even taste like soy cheese, and I noticed that it wasn't greasy and gross like real cheese pizzas..you can really feel healthy while eating a vegan pizza. I remember as a kid some people would take their napkins and "blot" their pizza pieces over and over to get the grease off...Yuck! Anyway, they just opened one in St. Paul on Selby so maybe I'll go there sometime. It's kind of sad, actually...I wish that ALL places had vegan options. It's like when it happens you do a double take, WHOA! Veggie options are pretty common, but soy cheese is pretty rare. They were even offering some weird nut cheese I hadn't heard of but since I'm a "good vegan" (yeah right) I didn't eat it - it had casein. *angel halo*

Food was a perk, but this is even better: They ended up having an LCD projection panel downstairs that I can have! That means if I whine on Craigslist for a free (or cheap) overhead projector, I can put together a basically free projection system! I already have one cheap ass panel I got off of ebay but the projector I bought was this thing out of the 60s and it almost burned the house down. Well not really but it was making some funky burning smells so I threw that thing out. Anyway I'm guessing this will be slightly better quality than the one I have and I also have top pick of any old crap I find in the basement...Too bad they don't have any Librettos, I would be all over that in a second.

Then I kind of wandered around uptown and bought some really cheap ass "magic" gloves at Ragstock which are supposed to be one size fit all, but actually they DON'T fit my hands, and my hands are pretty small. I took the 21 back since I needed to hit whole foods and didn't want to transfer to the 84, and on the way there was a super crazy guy on the bus. I recorded him on my mp3 player..I may put up a file later, but it was pretty bad quality. At least he was shouting so you can actually hear it, unlike other crazy people I've tried to record.

Finished up the day (well, not really) by getting my weekly Tuesday tea. Hopefully this should keep me going through the night, as I have half a homework to do for tomorrow. I'm feeling strangely mellow for having so much work due. Perhaps it's because I was feeling like Francis in this PVP comic all day!

Since I've been getting very little sleep over the past few days, my dreams are plentiful and feverish. I just wanted to post about them before I forget, since one was so wrought with symbolism it just MUST be important, but I'm not sure why.

Dream 1:
I was standing outside Oakwood school, where I went to for K-Grade 2, not sure why. I got a phone call or was contacted in some way by a middle aged guy and went to meet him about a job he wanted done. He ended up looking a lot like my Japanese Lit teacher, but that's besides the point. Anyway, he told me that he needed me to take care of two animals in cages: One tiger, and one crow. I could apparently train these animals by using a silver figure of a duck turned upside-down. I was very scared about the tiger and it seemed dangerous, but the man assured me it was safe if done right, and then said that if I did commit to training the animals and backed out, he would hunt down my friends and kill them. I think I was already too far in at this point, so I said yes, but I was scared. In the end I ended up taking a flight to Japan to get away from everything and selling the meat of the crow and tiger in a bento kit. I don't remember killing the tiger or the crow (and I would never do this in real life) but I distinctly remember this bento kit that I was selling in my shop in Japan with tiger meat and crow feathers.

Bonuf lol dream:
I had a weird sort of dream where I was an eternal ghost who saw these fake brothers of Oliver growing up...some of them were real asses! Anyway it is hard to remember but it was kind of cool since I got to see this alternate commie reality: PvP (Player Versus Player), the webcomic that I reference earlier in this post, was now CvC : Comrade Versus Comrade. That really made me laugh when I remembered it. I'm also laughing because that looks like a potential generation string for a language (consonant vowel consonant). I'm such a geek. You should have heard me and Joseph talking to dinner last night...This is not far off from the actual conversation:

Me: "I've never really gotten palatal stops, you know? In Sanskrit they're supposed to be stops but everyone says them like affricates. And to complicate things there's an aspirated version too."
Joseph: "There is a difference but I'm bad at it too...When I looked at Hungarian, they had both as separate phonemes as well as a t with a palatal secondary articulation..."
(keep in mind I'm not even a phonetician!)

We also talked about the evils of SIL. Now that I read their Wiki, I feel more sure of their evil motives. We thought it might be fun to sabotage them by documenting the language in such a way that the output Bible would be downright blasphemous.

Well, now it is "goodnight" - although my night has only just started. For all x such that  x=Stacia, then that x has to do her damn homework.

Alright, I'm staying up again all night (has this become a weekly tradition?). Right now I'm procrastinating before I get back to work.

I just had a weird thought come to me that I had to blog about. What has always bothered me about Sci-Fi is how humanoid everyone is...The best "alien" I've seen was in RAMA - they were called Octospiders and "listened" to fountains of moving color instead of music. They also worked on a base 8 number system, natch. Anyway - my point is: I just thought how absurd it would be watching a Sci-Fi movie made by real aliens. All of their "aliens" would be based on their body structure, therefore "alienoid". Actually that's not as weird as I first thought since you do get these movies with Chinese people playing Geishas and speaking English. Not to single out any movies, though.

I've been meaning to write something about this but I forgot: I'm turning into a big time Linux nerd that Richard Stallman would be proud of. I was looking for some software to wipe hard drives at Planned Parenthood, and came across a commercial one that looked okay - they wanted to use commercial software because it was more "legit", but we ended up using DBAN anyway. Open source R0xxors. Anyway, moral of the story...I burned a demo CD and immediately saw that it booted a version of Gentoo Linux, which is...you guessed it, open source. Nowhere on their site do they mention the GPL, the source code isn't available, etc etc. I even got in touch with some guy who had the same issue with this company who knew more about open source software than I did. It seems that they both gave us the same lame answer, which was to "Go download Gentoo's source". Sorry guys, you are violating the GPL, and that's not cool. The very fact that this paragraph will be nigh-incomprehensible to 99% of the population proves that I am a super nerd. At least I did my part and stopped that company from getting our money.

I need to move to Iceland. Everyone there must bleed haunting post-rock music when you poke them. Actually, that might get annoying. Anyway, you should listen to Ólafur Arnalds now.

I FINALLY found a copy of Chinsagu no Hana from Japanese Story. Yay! I love that song, I think I even blogged about it before. I can find anything on the internet...just try me.

Ok peeps, so I am writing this paper on temporal concepts in language. Whorf is full of crap when he says that Hopi doesn't have them, so I bust his ass on that and then look at some really interesting tidbits. Including!

• In Ayamara, "back time" means future, and "front time" means past. This is rationalized as being because they have a visual temporal system rather than spatial. You can "see" the past, since it's happened, but you can't see the future. They do this when they gesture too - farther in the past is farther in front, near past is closer, and future is behind the shoulder.
• In Hausa, you can say, "Tuesday is before Monday". Their spatial terms allow you to designate a far away object as being "in front", and a closer object as being "behind", so this carries over to the temporal world as well.

Current Obsessions:

• Coconut. I used to think I didn't like it, but now I'm crazy about it. Coconut curry at Cafe Mac, Coconut Couscous, Coconut Mango or Coconut Wintermelon tea lattes...I am all over it.
• Slathering manuka honey all over the boo boos on my leg. Seriously, there is Manuka honey all over my room. It's really crazy. But I think it's healing, so I'll deal with weird stickiness for a while longer. Manuka honey is expensive, but since you get like a pound of it, it's probably way cheaper than a teeny tube of neosporin. I'm also a bad vegan since I was eating some of it. I don't have a huge problem with eating insect by products. I wonder if there is a word for that kind of vegan. Insecto-vegan?
• Watching this video over and over.
  

Aasdghghg. I bought some expensive-ass Manuka honey for my scraped up knee which is hurting like hell by the way, and it's just gotten everywhere and made everything all sticky. I should have gotten the gauze wrap around bandaids.

I stayed up all night so I'm rather incoherent. I didn't exactly need to, since the "rough draft" in Algorithms due today sounded like it could have just been a sketchy outline, I didn't want to look too much like I was slacking off. I have a fairly legit excuse, that I had a 24+ hour migraine...Anyway I basically just did an outline plus a small writeup for the CYK algorithm which is teh awesomeness. But everyone knows that languages are mildly context sensitive, yo. This only works for CFLs. I guess we'll just have to tell and those dutch guys with the a^n b^n c^n stuff to STFU.

Logic test today...I has it. :( This is one of the must unfufilling classes I've ever taken...I get better grades in classes where I *don't* understand the material, how weird is that?

Blah blah blah. I have been pretty damn emo lately in this blog. Maybe I'll have to start going in and editing out emo. I'm only really posting now because I tend to do that when I stay up all night, like that day at MIT when I made 6 blog posts or something. I don't think that will happen again.

Well off to class for me.

Happy Caturday everyone. Things I've been obsessed with lately:

• The Polyphonic Spree
• Pumpkin Walnut Bread at Breadsmith
• Epilating
• Buying cute stuff on Etsy

Elaborations below:

A while ago, I saw this awesome flash game and I reminded myself to check out the music when I got the chance. The music that's presented in the game actually gives a different feel than the actual album, but I love it anyway. I've listened to all of their albums now and Together We're Heavy is my favorite. For a sec I was worried that I was listening to some gospel thing, due to the way they dress (people often mistake them for a cult, so I wasn't so far off) Then I realized I listen to Half Handed Cloud all the time. Anyway they're not so I felt better about it. Anyway you should listen to the Polyphonic Spree now. If only Facebook weren't so ridiculous by spamming everyone with me changing my music. "Stacia has removed 'mum' from her favorite music. Stacia has added 'múm' to her favorite music.

On Thursday I did a group presentation in Philosophy on a topic I didn't totally understand. We were hopping on the top bullshitters to get in an argument to make the presentation go longer, and they did! Yay. I also got to make a silly Powerpoint presentation with a photoshopped George Washington holding a glass of XYZ (don't ask). Anyway one of the group members randomly brought in some Breadsmith bread, which I'm sure raised our grade by one whole letter. One of them was a Pumpkin Walnut bread that I had to try even though I wasn't totally sure if it was vegan. It tasted fine so I ate all of it but felt mildly guilty knowing that egg may be in it. When I went to Breadsmith later, I checked out the ingredients and it was fine, so I bought a loaf for myself. I've been eating way too much of it.

A couple of weeks ago I ordered an epilator on Amazon because I was sick of getting wax all over my room and having to go to the lounge to heat the damn stuff up. Basically it is a super crazy tweezer. It's so effective and fun that I'm half tempted to epilate all the hair on my body (hence the title - ancient Egyptians shaved all their body hair). Some pain weenies may not be able to handle it but it doesn't really hurt me. You can get the one I bought on Amazon, it's called Silkepil X'elle or something stupid, but it works really well and is sparkly blue.

Damn I love etsy. People are so adorable and sweet on there - they can make you badass custom items, and the handspun yarn is incredible - better than the Colinette Point 5 that I usually use in my hair. I just have to be careful not to buy too much stuff, but the winter stuff is (more or less) justified. Maybe I'll put photos of my etsy stuff as it starts coming in, but nothing has yet. I've only officially bought one thing.

I went to a 10 minute plays thingy tonight. I went to see one of these years ago and it turns out the first skit was one that they'd used already, which was kind of lame. There was one with a girl who could do an awesome Minnesotan accent, a funny one about a girl not wanting to sleep with a guy because she was worried that he had voted for Bush (funny because it's true!), and a more emotional one about a girl and her ex-boyfriend. Oh and a creepy-ass one about these Christians who controlled this girl's life. There was a weird quote from that one like, "The body is the temple of the lord and if you let yourself get fat, you are disrespecting the lord!" Yikes!

I wish I could blog in Sanskrit. Apparently the language fellowships at the grad schools I'm applying to aren't very friendly towards ancient languages, which sucks.

Blah I'm making typos tonight. I'm trying to learn Dvorak but I don't want to write this blog post in that, takes too damn long. Anyway goodnight, peeps.

This post is going to be sort of random thoughts, so watch out.

• 作戦成功！ I finally got passionfruits at the market. The guy must have thought I was crazy for lurking around there every day asking for passionfruits. I also bought fresh blackberries and I made a blackberry/passionfruit smoothie as well as a mango/passionfruit smoothie, both of which were awesome.

• Does anyone remember that song about Jacques Cousteau? It's driving me crazy, I always used to sing it when I was a kid but I can't find one mention of this song on Google! My mom can't remember either. The first part went like this:
  

(Side note - the name of this post comes from this random wikipeida article. I found the title hilarious for some reason - at least the socialists here never went that far. I guess it would be more appropriate if I had actually cut my hair but I'd probably forget by the time I did. I had a dream about cutting my hair - does that count?)