discovering that one of the desk chairs is extra bouncy:
me: "ooh." (bounces)
simon: "we're gonna charge you for bouncing."
me: "what, like 15 cents per bounce?"
erica: "a dollar."
me: "pfff, that's a ripoff." (continues to bounce)

discovering simon's non-circular rolodex:
me: "you have a rolodex?"
simon: "yep! it works, too."
me: "but it doesn't roll. what good is that?"
erica: "it dexes, okay?"
me: (sighs) "okay."

this has been a surprisingly cake-intensive week (and i mean the food, not the band). on the first day of my internship i got free chocolate cake because it was one of the reporters' birthday, and yesterday i got free white cake because the high school interns were graduating.

then today i woke up and decided that i would spend my day off making a cake on my own, especially because forkthief told me you can make red velvet cake with just cake mix and dr. pepper (it's true!). unfortunately wegmans didn't have any red velvet mix, so i just bought some white cake mix and decided to add food coloring (not knowing that red velvet cake usually has cocoa powder in it). then we didn't have any regular food coloring, so i had to use the red food dye from kate's cake decorating kit, but it was in a gel-like state and hard to remove from its container in any great quantity, so i ended up with more of a pink velvet cake. it was delicious, though. pat ate about half of it and now it is all gone.

originally, after looking up what i could celebrate today on teh internets, i said the cake was for eric carle's birthday, because everybody loves the very hungry caterpillar. but then caroline told me michael jackson had died (WTF?!) so i changed my mind and made it a memorial cake for michael jackson. mama say mamasa mamakusa.

me: okay, i think i'm breaking up with you to date nephri.
she's too cute.

Andy: cats are cute
but if that's all that a relationship was based on then i would have dumped you for the walking pumpkin from banjo kazooie long ago

***

i lost my burt's bees again today. i noticed it at work, as the photo editor and i were getting out of his car back at the office, and started to freak out. i had to force myself to tell him that it wasn't a big deal when he asked if i wanted to get back in the car and look for it. IT IS A BIG DEAL! IT'S BURT'S BEES! MY LIPS HURT REAL BAD*! I'M KIND OF ADDICTED! PLZ FIND ME MORE NOW KTHX!

*YES I'M STILL QUOTING NAPOLEON DYNAMITE! DEAL WITH IT!

on zachary quinto:

"he can break the speed of sound running by intimidating air with his eyebrows."
-vellum (whom i do not even know, but had to quote due to high degree of LOLing.)

after the show i had to text jon courtot to confirm that deanna troi was not in the original series, because my mom was convinced that at some point she had been romantically involved with captain kirk.
"no, mom!" i persisted. "she was only in next gen!"
(but because i'm no authority on the original series, i wanted to make sure.)
turned out she had captain kirk confused with commander riker. who confuses kirk with riker? they both have Ks (and Rs, and Is) in their names, i suppose, but i mean, come on. one of them is william shatner, and the other one is not william shatner. that alone helps me make sense of 90 percent of the people and objects i encounter on a day-to-day basis ("ah, there is my dad. he is not william shatner").

then i was going to go to borders to look for the new DMB album while my mom got her toenails done, but when we stopped into starbucks for a quick beverage, it was sitting there on the counter next to the ray charles duets CD! i am almost more enticed by it than by tori amos' latest, if you can imagine such a thing (though abnormally attracted to sin is, in fact, really really good).

andy and i have started collecting all the issues of the sandman together.
i suppose this means we're in it for the long haul, because i am not giving up my gaiman.

also we're back from spain! yay! check out this fountain (the magic fountain at montjuic in barcelona), it was insane.

apparently, as of a couple of weeks ago, one of the two jobs currently being advertised in the national press photographers' association online job bank...

is a photojournalism position at the tiny paper IN THE TOWN I GREW UP IN.

this is not even the paper we used to get in our driveway! this is an even tinier paper!

but still. it's a job, in a place that i know well, in the field i want to work in...
...although i won't even be available until after my internship ends (i.e. august), and if i did get the job i'd probably end up living with my parents.

this is strange and frustrating!

on the train back from figueres today (we went to the salvador dalí museum; it was awesome) i noticed a lot of people with FC barcelona jerseys and scarves. "oh," said i, "there must have been a big game today."

when we returned to a city full of even more people sporting the blue and red, i thought, "maybe it was a REALLY big game."

then we walked past a bar and discovered that the game was the european cup game (UEFA champions league final), and it hadn't even happened yet.

we were tired from our excursion, so after procuring some groceries we actually stayed in our hotel room - with the door to the balcony open - and watched. i don't really follow fútbol, nor do i especially care for it even after watching this particular match, but it's kind of amazing to squint at a spectacle on your crappy 17-inch hotel TV that doesn't get very good reception, and to sometimes have to stop to decipher if the cheers are coming from its speakers, or from the streets. people started setting off firecrackers at the end of the first half, and now, at 11 pm, they don't seem to want to stop. we heard the yells of "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAL!" when leo messi made the second score for FCB, and the roar that went up when the 3 minutes of overtime at the end of the game were declared over. right now the din consists mainly of horns - both novelty and car, which since earlier has included some people honking rhythmically, BEEP BEEP BEEPBEEPBEEP BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP BEEPBEEP or similar) - chanting, yelling, singing, fireworks, and stuff being hit with other stuff, and we wonder how long it will go on.

i'm always amused, and impressed, by how something so superficial (and don't tell me how much XYZ team means to you, because when you take away all the meaning we invest in it, the professional sports industry has basically no impact at all on the socioculturopoliticowhateveral development of the modern world) can make people so happy. or so sad.

or so noisy. BEEP BEEP BEEPBEEPBEEP BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP, BARCA!

ETA: " I now own a madras hat and matching shorts, and am two articles of clothing closer to looking like the most awesome person on the planet. My dad and I saw a madras shirt, some full length pants, and a tie all for sale at a Brook's Brothers, and my brother has a pair of Madras shoes. Maybe I could be the Tom Wolfe of madras, only instead of it making me seem neutral and refined people will want to punch me for wearing clothes that look like they were made out of blankets. Do you think they make madras socks?" -andy

OKAY SRSLY GUYS. YOU CAN SHUT UP NOW. IT'S BEEN TWO HOURS.

was to spend three days holed up in our hotel room with some kind of virus. boo!

see you later, i'm going to spain!

awesomest thing i ate today: homemade thai tea egg cream/french soda with coconut milk.

awesomest thing i discovered today: what happens if you change the "worm" in the TMBG song "dr. worm" to "house."

okay, so. i have an internship in ithaca lined up for this summer. said internship requires a car, but my car is in california. thus, from about the 9th to the 19th of june, andy and i will be getting my car back to ithaca.

WHICH MEANS:

if you live anywhere along the yellow line and would like a visit, speak up! we may be facing some minor time constraints, but we can certainly spare a few hours at the very least, and i would love to see people. (plus if you have some floor we can crash on, bonus!)
at this point we're looking at a route that takes us through the southwest and turns northward in oklahoma, going straight up to chicago and then along the lakes for pretty much the rest of the way. i think ten days will be a reasonable amount of time, and i am super excited.

i think i have the gator golf jingle stuck in my head...?

can i just say, i am so tired of finding research participant opportunities on craigslist and not being qualified for any of them because i have a history of mental illness. i just want to help! help and get paid! in the name of science!

hello there. this is me trying not to think about the fact that i'm graduating in two weeks. instead, i have been meditating on topics such as these:

1. tori amos' impending new album! i'm liking welcome to england, and excited for the "visualettes" on the deluxe edition. yay!

2. my mother is pretty sure she has swine flu. this may sound like i'm doubting her, but there are four unconfirmed (but strongly suspected) cases of it in patients at the clinic where she works - which makes sense, since a high percentage of patients at said clinic are mexican, and with relatives still living in mexico, whom they often visit - and she definitely has some kind of flu.

regardless, my mom is healthier than pretty much everyone else i know put together, and there is no way swine flu is going to take her down. i've mostly just been raising eyebrows (and occasionally LOLing) over the ridiculous amount of precautions the rest of the country is taking.

3. speaking of swine...what?

i tried to give blood today, but the red cross workers stuck me in both middle fingers and said my hemoglobin was a hair too low, and i was turned away. the deferral paper they gave me had on it a list of iron-rich foods, which i could supposedly eat to keep up my iron count, and on the list were at least four or five things i had eaten in the five hours immediately preceding my attempt to donate blood.

so, confused, i struggled home through the rain and 30-mile-per-hour wind gusts - wondering the whole time why i had decided to wear uggs today - and took a 90-minute nap. and it was glorious.

happily, i seem to be past the point when the end of the semester looks like a huge clusterfuck. at this point it looks more like a neatly laid out set of entirely accomplish-able tasks, punctuated by occasional exciting events (band concerts, photography exhibitions, senior dinners, unbridled bouts of drinking, etc.).
this weekend we had a rock star party because matt and john were in town. we dressed up - for most people this meant putting on a leather jacket and/or opening a few extra buttons on their shirt, although andy and i tried to pass off the white stripes, and zack was a flawless freddie mercury - and played a lot of rock band 2, and seth spent $100 (most of which he did not earn back from cover charges) on alcohol (most of which ended up in his system and andy's system). it was a beautiful day and the street was infested with grillin' bros, frisbee-playin' bros, and tannin' bros, but we stayed inside and hammered out tom sawyer and aqualung. and it was awesome.

i'm compiling a mental list of things to start doing again after graduation, such as:
-reading books for pleasure
-exercising
-checking my flist more than twice a week
-washing my sheets
-keeping in touch with extended family and high school friends

hmmm. i'm hungry for something i can't quite put my finger on.

hey, life is great! except i'm starting to wonder whether i should really move to rhode island in august.

of course this is all irrelevant right now, as nobody here has actually offered me any jobs, but my academic adviser seems to think that i have a very good chance of getting work at the newspaper here after i finish my summer internship (which, of course, is not even finalized yet, technically). when i told her i was planning to move in with andy she made it clear that she thought it was a bad idea, and the worst part was that i knew she was making sense. the more time i spend searching in vain for jobs in rhode island, the more i wonder if it will actually be possible to make a wage there without working a job that makes me want to shoot myself. or if it will be possible to make a wage at all, for that matter.

and then i get distracted by this is why you're fat.

it must seem like i've been avoiding LJ, but really i've just been busy. to put it one way: i have four 35x28" inkjet prints to make for our photo show. before i can print them, however, i have to take out all the dust in photoshop. the first print took three and a half hours to fix, the second four. and after having spent roughly five hours on the third one, i'm only half done (and the fourth one is still sitting on a CD in all its dusty glory).

to put it another way: seth got the first three seasons of venture bros. on DVD. GO TEAM VENTURE

as an eighth-semester college student with no real idea about life after graduation, it's nice to have at least some semblance of a future. so after being offered a summer internship at the local newspaper and figuring out where i'll probably be living next year (fabulous south county, rhode island! woooohoooo), you'd think i'd be stress-free! WRONG.

last semester i drew a little chart detailing every aspect of all the projects and tasks i had to complete, and it actually helped me calm down a lot. i tried it again this semester, though, and this is what i got:



YARGH

i assume that many or even most of you will remember the adventures of pete and pete:



so danny tamberelli (little pete) - who was also a star of all that, figure it out!, the magic school bus, the mighty ducks, and more pinnacles of entertainment during my childhood - has a band now, by the name of jounce. he plays bass and sings.



(tee hee.)

but wait: JOUNCE IS COMING TO ITHACA TOMORROW NIGHT.

WHAT.
I THINK I MIGHT HAVE TO GO.

sometimes i forget how awesome this is: