My "War and American Society" prof had better love me...

I spent about 8 hours writing the second half of a paper for that class today. I still have to find a thesis statement (oops!) and write a conclusion, then just edit it and put in my citations. Then I have to do the same thing for my Amistad paper, but at least 90% of my argument is already worked out on that one.

So to celebrate (mostly) finishing said paper, I decided to have a frosty bottle of Woodchuck Draft Cider. And then another. And then another. And now it's almost 1am, and I'm watching some terrible show about fads in the 70s and 80s on CNN Headline news. Egad.

(ok, after a few ciders, I'm strangely drawn to this bizare contraption... its a good thing my wallet is downstairs. Its a computer stand! And a book stand! And a music stand! YAY!)

So between now and the end of the semester I only have to finish my War paper, the Amistad paper, write a paper for my China class, and take two finals. Frak, I'm screwed.

I really should have gotten more accomplished yesterday at work, but my co-worker was watching the NFL draft with the volume up waaaaaaaaay loud. I spent the day re-reading old livejournal posts and reminiscing.

That led to re-loading my iPod with all kinds of music that reminded me of the past. I think it was spawned the the dream I had the other day. I stared with Owen, then added the Wrens, then all the Faith No More songs we'd shout at the top of our lungs, then Braid and then even some Dashboard Confessional (OMG DON'T LAUGH!) Maybe its the three ciders in my belly, but I'm not quite as sad as I was earlier today.

I didn't start working on my War paper till about 3, cause I had to go drive and sing along to said iPod. I drove all the way to Manassas to get green beans for dinner, then came the long way on Wellington road, ended up at 29, went east to the battlefield then made a u-turn and went down to Vint Hill before coming home.

I'm not really actually all that sure why I'm posting here at 1am, instead of doing something more sensible (like maybe, SLEEPING) except that for some reason I fell better. This afternoon I was dreadfully down, and now I'm happy. Maybe its the cider, maybe its the fuzzy black kitty in my lap. Who knows.

I did do an awful lot of slacking today though. I woke up around 8, and Mark was up already. We went to McDonalds for breakfast, and came back and watched last Friday's Battlestar Gallactica. It was a slow episode, but it was good. I still can't believe how fantastic that show is. One day I'll write a paper about using TV as a medium to make social commentary, and BSG will be a big part of the foundation of the argument. See also: M.A.S.H., Planet of the Apes (from the 60s, duh) and Jericho.

Ok, now it really is 1am, and I should be passing out. Enough is enough. I do believe I'll keep up this pattern though, I really need to post here more often. And (at least till the end of the semester) they'll all graded too! I have to keep a blog for my English class, so all my recent posts have been cross-posted there as well.

(and apparently having three bottles of cider makes a Benjamin hyper-link-happy)

Today was YARD SALE DAY!

Today was YARD SALE DAY!

As in, the whole frakking neighborhood puts shit out in their driveways and people come by and give you money for it. I think they advertise it in the local papers, they do it twice a year, apparently.

This one was special though, because A) I woke up at 7:15 and had my stuff outside before the crowd (last year I woke up at 10! HA!) and B) I actually sold some stuff! Go me!

I sold my nailgun that takes .22 bullets and is made to fasten wood to concrete for $10, my wet tile-saw for $30 (çause that bastard on ebay never paid for it after he won the auction!) and Mark's doggie gate thing for $6. I was asking $10, but some lady talked me down and I was late for work. I took a loss on the tile saw (I wanted $50) and the doggie gate (I think mark wanted at least $10, who knows) but all in all not bad for killing three hours talking to the neighbors.

I discovered that Murphy's Law applies to yard sales as much as it applies to anything else: Whenever I'd walk across the street to talk to Tim and Kim (last name Fish, does that make them "the fishes" collectively?) someone would pull up and look at my stuff.

It is also important to point out that the main reason I'm stoked about the yard sale is I put this stuff out there last year AND the year before, and nothing sold. I think I need to do some major craigslist-ing this summer. I still have my beer/cider kit to sell.

I still have two papers to work on today, and I'm stuck at work till 11. I had better get to it, so I can salvage my Sunday.

No queiro despertar

I'm really not sure what's going on at the moment. I haven't known what day it is for a few weeks now, and if I didn't have my work/school schedule programmed into my phone I'd never make it anywhere I was supposed to be.

Ojalá acabaré todo. Ojalá.

Soñaba de tú ayer. Desperté, pero tú todavía estabas durmiendo. Tú eras hermosa.

I layed there for awhile, watching you breathe. Your hair was covering most of your face, I brushed it back with my finger, and kissed you on the cheek. I crawled out of bed as queitly as I could, and left you sleeping. I snuck downstairs and fed Yoshi, then sat down at my desk to pay some bills. I glanced up and saw you sitting on the stairs, looking through me at the railing. You smiled, I smiled back.

"How long have you been up?"
"A few minutes"
"How long have you been sitting there?"
"A few minutes"
"Sorry if I woke you"

You gracefully rose and came over to my desk. I put my arm around you as you sat in my lap.

"You did, when you kissed my cheek. But I still love you."

And then you kissed my cheek.

Thats when I woke up.

Geeses and meeses

An AIM conversation from last night:

Lisa (8:20:07 PM): hey. are a group of moose meese?
Benjamin (8:20:36 PM): no, they're moose
Benjamin (8:20:47 PM): "a herd of moose"
Lisa (8:20:58 PM): well
Lisa (8:21:01 PM): goose
Lisa (8:21:01 PM): is geese
Benjamin (8:21:08 PM): yes
Benjamin (8:21:22 PM): but goose is a germanic word and moose is an american indian word
Lisa (8:21:31 PM): ah okay

Now while most people (you'd think) know that moose is the plural of moose, I gave my "goose is a germanic word and moose is an american indian word" answer sort-of as an off the cuff sarcastic remark. I didn't really think it was right, I was sort of being a smart ass. Scarily, I was pretty much spot on:

Moose Etymology:
From North-Eastern Algonquian language, perhaps Eastern Abenaki or Narragansett, mos (or something similar; Proto-Algonquian *mōswa), possibly meaning "he strips off [bark]."

Goose Etymology
From the Old English gōs.

Thanks, wiktionary, for proving that I have way too much worthless information buried in my head. I am such a dork.

The coming Animal Revolution

I left work last night at about midnight. By the time I was close to home I was pretty tired. When I was driving down Balls Ford road it was completely dark, and I was the only one on the road. I came around a turn and saw what I thought was a piece of trash at first, but then realized it was a fairly large possum. I swerved to the left, into the oncoming lane to go around him at the last second, and unfortunately he darted left as well to escape me. I ran right over him, thunk thunk. I didn't hit him with the tires, but the undercarriage of my car most definitely tumbled him, if not squashing him completely. I felt terrible.

Thats just one more example of weird animal sightings I've experienced over the last few weeks. Two weeks ago I was driving to work and saw a wild turkey (not the bourbon! A live wild turkey!) randomly chilling in the center of the Prince William County Parkway. He was larger than any Thanksgiving turkey I've ever eaten, maybe a good 40 lbs. Freaky.

The following week there was a rooster on the exit to 66 by my house, a mile or so from where I saw the turkey! WTF!?! For those not familiar with the area, these roads are surrounded by industrial space. There are no farms for miles around, and the farms that are nearby are mostly horse farms.

A few nights ago at about midnight I went out to smoke a cigarette before bed and I stumbled across 3 rabbits munching on the fallen blooms from the tree in my back yard. While they did scatter immediately, they stopped about ten feet from the tree. They all froze and stared right at me. As I was enjoying watching them, I stayed on the stairs and let them watch me. After a minute or two, the two smaller ones slyly hopped away, but the large one (the dad or mom perhaps?) continued to stare. I walked down to the end of the driveway to see what he'd do, and he stayed perfectly still, except for his ears. He still stared at the door where I had been, but his ears turned and followed my steps. Strange. My first thought was "wow, if I only I had a slingshot, I'd be having some rabbit stew tomorrow!" Not that I know how to skin a rabbit, or even cook one for that matter, but I wondered why he was watching me instead of running like the others did.

The answer, I believe, lies in something Tony Kornheiser laments about on his radio show all the time: the coming Animal Revolution.

I think the animals have started watching us, and are preparing to take back their planet. Don't believe me? Here's a story about a family dog attempting to murder a member of his human family, no doubt with the mantra "the only good human is a dead human."

Take notice, friends. The Revolution is coming, and we must be ready to fight.

Music, politics and comics

So Tai called the other day and told me to get on myspace and look up a band called "Chromeo". I did, and they're fraking fantastic! Imagine if Ratatat got the two guys from Flight of the Conchords to do vocals, except one of the guys has a talkbox. I immediately downloaded the torrent err, I mean bought the instant downloads online and put both sets of mp3s on my ipod. Oh fantastic!

So have you heard Hillary's story about her trip to Bosnia under sniper fire when she was First Lady? She's trying to add to her Presidential cred it seems. Oh wait, she was lying... (with youtube video of the truth! HA!) I really dislike her because I think she's totally slimy. This is just another incident of her slimy-ness showing through.

And I really do love xkcd.com. Today's comic is no exception:



Ok, the comic's funny, thats obvious. But notice that they're not just having sex, the boy stick-figure is going down on the girl stick-figure! Haha. All the more reason to love that site.

Well, I should get back to reading the two books I have to finish this week. Untill next time!

My slacker friends will be proud

Because Wednesday night I stayed up till 4:30am putting the finishing touches on a paper for my History of China since 1949 class, something I've never had to do before. Stay up all night finishing a paper, that is. Though, they might be fooled, a bit. I actually wrote 80% of the body of the paper the weekend before, and spent most of Wednesday revising and adding text. Wednesday I didn't wake up till almost noon, and had a meeting with my advisor at 1:30. Then I had a couple of hours in the library before class, and then I had to go to work till midnight.

I actually spent about 90 minutes Wednesday night on the phone with a dispatch tech out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico. He was waiting for the local guy to come let him in so we could test their data line. The local guy took almost half an hour to arrive, and I spent the time working on my paper and bullshitting with the tech. It got to the point where I was bouncing titles off the guy! Some random redneck! Ha, it was great. I eventually decided on: "'Inevitable and Necessary to a Great Revolution:' Violence, Contradiction, and Idealism in China’s Cultural Revolution." The first half is a quote from the author in the book, the second half are the points I make in the paper. I love the quote though, it fit right in and saved me from having to come up with something to use.

When I first started the paper I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to get it to the page, but eventually I think it turned into a pretty good peice of work:

Early in Spider Eaters, Rae Yang introduces four women: a young girl in Switzerland, a courageous Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution, a peasant working on a pig farm, and a literature professor who teaches at an American university. The story of these four women and Rae Yang’s attempts to reconcile them into the one woman that she has become is a fascinating one, but even more so are the contradictions of the Cultural Revolution as told through the words of a young Chinese girl. She must set aside her morality in the name of Revolution to justify the destruction of property and later, the taking of a human life. Then she must work through the horror of a member of her family being labeled a “rightist”, only to almost suffer the same fate herself. She must also learn to reconcile the ideals of the Party with the actually of the Communist Party at all levels, and yet she also shows how Chairman Mao was able to separate himself from the bad policy and squabbling within the party while rallying the Red Guard to his cause. Within these contradictions, this suffering, this confusion, and this idealism lies the story of the Cultural Revolution and the Maoist period of China’s socialist revolution, as told by those who lived it.


Oh shit. I just re-read that paragraph and caught a gramattical mistake. HA! So much for attempting perfection. I'm sure the prof will catch it, but the intention is still fairly clear. The original wording was: "through the horror of as a member of her family is labeled". I guess the real lesson here is though staying up till 4:30am might get something finished, you *still* need to proof read one last time before turning it in. I'm not going to read the rest of the paper now though, no use worring about it all weekend.