This "is" Funny

I found this blog today from the Pop Candy website: The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. My personal favorites are:

Here: "Also, we barely know what's in hot dogs, I don't even want to think about what 'hot dogs' might contain."

Here: The lone quotation mark.

And here: WTF?

Speaking of grammar and punctuation, I bought a jar of pizza sauce made by a local company. The jar proclaims that the pizza sauce would be good on all my pizza's. Sigh...

Weekend Update

Friday night and Saturday were spent sitting in class wondering if anyone has ever actually died of boredom, but the great news is that was my last in-person class till next semester! Woot! Now all I have to do is a methodology section for a theoretical study that we're making up (or, as I was told in an e-mail at which I laughed out loud, we can actually do) and then take an online final during finals week. Right now I have a 93% and the final is pretty much a guaranteed 100%, so I'm not too worried about the methodology section. Plus, I have a massive advantage because as a psych major I actually conducted research and wrote a research report. It seemed like a lot of people in my class had never heard of some of the stuff we were learning before.

Now, for my big announcement: I am finished with my rough draft of my 30 page paper for my online class. Ok, I have 27 pages written, but I can easily bullshit 3 double-spaced pages in Arial. I was a little concerned about making this paper Arial when all my other ones were in Times, but the only specifications he gave were that it had to be 12-point or less, so fuck it. I want to tie up everyone I know and make them read this damn thing because it took me so freaking long to write it. So far Rusty wants to read it (I give her two pages before she stops and I'm taking bets) and the state representative I interviewed wants to read it too; I'll send it to him, but I highly doubt he will.

I've heard some very scary things about the class I'm taking next semester. One person even heard of someone who failed, and when you fail a grad course, guess what? There's $1,000 down the drain. Another girl said it wasn't bad, but I of course choose to believe the people who said it was. Luckily, some of the people I got to know in class are taking it with me next semester, so I won't be going it alone.

I went for a nice long drive today. The weather was gorgeous and the leaves are starting to turn. I found two things to add to my "only in York County" file. The first was when we were detoured onto a one-lane dirt road. I had to pull off the road for 20 times for cars coming in the other direction. The other thing was a sign announcing a shooting competition at the local fire hall. I ended up at Otter Creek; if you're a Live fan you've probably heard of it.

I also went running/walking again. I should do that more often, but laziness usually takes over. Plus, by the time I get home in the late fall/winter, it's only light for about 20 minutes.

That's pretty much all I did today besides laundry and going to get gas. I wasted a lot of time today, but I'm totally fine with that.

I loved the Office on Thursday night! I haven't watched it a second time tonight, but I liked the balance of humor and heart. Jim talking to Dwight was great, and of course the kiss was great. I also loved Darryl and Kelly, the whoever/whomever conversation and Michael telling Toby (paraphrasing), "No one has ever asked you anything, ever." Poor Toby!

Something very weird is going on: I'm happy. I'm not sure what's going on, but I feel pretty weird right now. I'm even listening to bad music...mid-90s top 40 bad. I'm just trying to make the most of things because, as Bjork said, there's more to life than this. We'll see how long it lasts.

My brain is broken; time for bed!

Este y Eso

Noooooooo!!! Noah Wyle is coming back to ER for 4 episodes. I hate Dr. Carter!

I wish I had something interesting to talk about. I'm a little tipsy because I was cooking with wine, and when you cook with wine you have to drink some. It's the law. So I drank half the bottle, and I'm a lightweight. Rusty, I'm totally sober! Ask me anything! I had all sorts of things I wanted to write about, but now I forget them. I even perused CNN.com to find something to write about and couldn't find anything to rant about. I do know I wanted to mention how much the Doobie Brothers started to suck when Michael McDonald joined the band. I was listening to their greatest hits CD while I was making dinner and I was rocking out to "China Grove" and "Long Train Running" and then "Takin' it to the Streets" came on. Shut up, Michael McDonald.

I've been in a really good mood lately and I'm not as stressed out. I'm not sure why, but all I know is that my skin has cleared up since I stopped being stressed. I'm also using tea tree oil, which is the best stuff in the world, and clears breakouts up in about a day. I love the fact that I have zits and I'm getting gray hair. My body can't make up its mind.

I hate that that we missed out on good fall weather. It went from 90 degrees to 50 in one day.

I'm not sure how I stumbled upon this, but it's something Oprah wrote about how she took the month of July off when she found out she had hypothyroidism. It must be difficult for you to take a month off from working, fly to Hawaii, eat only fresh foods, and sleep when you want to. My heart is breaking for you. Shut up, Oprah. Guess what? A lot of people have diseases and have to continue going to work, cooking, taking care of their children... I don't know how people can read this shit and not feel condescended towards.

I was cleaning out my filing cabinet today and I came across a "newspaper" we made in Spanish class our senior year called El Gran Flan. Here's a picture of our class. I'm sitting at the table in the middle and Rusty is on my right. We were so young! I would make a pact with Satan to look like that again. The guy on the far right holding the Spanish dictionary died about two years ago of a brain tumor. He was in the popular clique, but he was the sweetest guy you could ever hope to meet, and I know Rusty agrees with me. I don't believe in an afterlife, but if there is one, he's being rewarded.


I leave you with one of my favorite Stephen Crane poems, since my Stephen Crane sampler was in the same folder as El Gran Flan:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter--bitter," he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

Misc.

I was trying to describe to my dad why the only sport I like to watch is hockey, and it mostly had to do with the fact that the players don't have egos. I found these quotes in a 2000 article from Slate that summed it up nicely.

"It is straightforward and unpretentious. Hockey players, all sportswriters seem to agree, are the nicest bunch of guys in professional sports—accessible, courteous, refreshingly modest, if not terribly interesting. Canadian, in other words."

and

"Crass commercialism is destroying the NBA; the final periods of the Stanley Cup finals didn't even have commercials, because the NHL doesn't allow TV timeouts during overtime. Lazy crybabies abound in baseball; the Stars' goalie tried to blame prescription drugs he was taking for his sub-par performance in the first game, and he was roundly denounced—by his own teammates. Sanctimonious God-squadders, when they're not under indictment, are ruining the NFL; I have never heard an NHL player thank God for his help putting the puck in the net."

I have a very bad cough right now and I'm short of breath. I feel like a 400-lb. man is sitting on my chest and I took a 3-hour nap this afternoon. So much for getting schoolwork done! Although I guess I can't complain, because I did write my daily paragraph...never mind the fact that I haven't written anything in days. BUT, the great thing is that I don't have to write anything new till October 22nd. Everything I have due before that is finished!

Chris talked me into getting a new printer/scanner/copier/fax. It was originally $400, but on sale and with rebates it came down to $150. It's much better than the printer I've had since high school where I had to clean the ink jets after every page. I'll have to find some pictures to scan.

I haven't talked about The Office yet! I'm a bit behind...I'm still working on my second viewing of the first episode. I liked the first episode a lot (Toby as Satan, Creed with the painkillers, fettuccine alfredo to carbo load, Jim and Pam!), and I liked the first half of the second episode. I'll have to get better at posting my thoughts while they're still fresh.

It's Hockey Season!

B-E-A-R-S Bears, Bears, Bears, Wooo!!!



Fights!

Liberry Stuf

The nice thing about taking an online class is that I can sit here and blog while I'm in class. Multi-tasking, baby. The on-site class, on the other hand, blows massive donkey balls. 6-9:45 on Friday night and 8-6 on Saturday. Thank Jebus it's only 3 weekends and 2 of them are finished. Grad school isn't hard, but it's an assload of work. My web class is a 3-page paper every week and then a paper of at least 30 pages by the end of the semester. I have about 13 pages of the big paper finished, but every time I sit down to work on it, I write a paragraph and then think, "I can't take this anymore!" I suppose if I write one paragraph per day I'll have it done by the end of the semester though. Next semester I have to take Cataloging and Classification, and it's on-site, so it'll be another 3 weekend dealie. 14 hours in a 24-hour span on learning to catalog? Kill me now. I'm only taking one class at a time from now on though.

One of my professors makes fun of undergrads a lot. I know I was an idiot when I was an undergrad (I still am), but I don't think I was that immature.

Happy banned book week! Read a banned book this week: Animal Farm, the Bible, Call of the Wild, Lolita, The Lorax, Mein Kampf, Nineteen eighty-four, Tom Sawyer, Uncle Tom's Cabin...just to name a few. I'm reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Here is a list of the 100 most frequently challenged books from 1990-2000. I've only read about 13 of them, so I better get reading. Not that I feel the need to read The New Joy of Gay Sex (not that there's anything wrong with that) or What's Happening to My Body?