saturday, may 20

•••    so, the best place for me to live is new york city. no kidding - I don't need a test to tell me that! :) but boston was second on the list, and philadelphia made the top ten, so apparently I'm doing pretty well.
(via zannah)
11:52 PM +

•••    sequels are never as good as the original.
11:09 PM +

•••    "I am considered to be fairly intelligent, especially by me." john, you rock.
10:54 PM +

•••    you know how sometimes things will become inexorably connected to a certain feeling or state of mind through random circumstances? even though they're things that you would otherwise have nothing to do with, and have no real significance aside from their incidental presence at a particular point in spacetime?
that happens to me a lot.
I finally gave in and bought a (used) copy of this today.
it makes me feel safe.
10:40 PM +

•••    okay, easy way to remember your site id: go get it from the code that's already on your site.
duh. :P
9:52 PM +

•••    jish, you expect me to remember my site id?! or even remember where I saved the email that has it? aiiee. :P
9:46 PM +

•••    in harvard square today, there was a group of musicians called "not the beatles." they were playing early beatles songs and they actually sounded remarkably similar to the recordings on the first beatles anthology. it was sort of surreal . . . but what I loved about it was that there was a little group of random people, some businessmen, some homeless guys, some students, all standing together and dancing to "twist and shout." :)
5:12 PM +

•••    yesterday it was forty degrees out - today it's sixty five. I'm going running. :)
12:11 PM +

•••    death of a comet - I can only hope mine is a tenth as spectacular. talk about going out in a blaze of glory!
10:02 AM +

•••    tonight's late-night snack: asian pears. ummyum.
2:45 AM +

•••    for a minute I thought I had discovered another rabi, but it turns out it's just a random person who uses rabi as a nickname. I have little anime characters named after me. ;) I wonder if there are any people named kazul who have the same thing happen to them?
12:24 AM +

friday, may 19

•••    roleplay of a different sort. a person pretending to be a computer pretending to be a person is a bit too deep for me. post-post-meta-meta-modern-blah.
11:49 PM +

•••    okay - now it's "funny."
10:11 PM +

•••    I have been sucking down cinnamon altoids all night, and now my tongue feels like it's going to fall off. I don't even like the way they taste . . .but I'm a sucker for the smell.
9:50 PM +

•••    I didn't know that "sarcasm" just meant putting quotes around "random" words. did you?
9:38 PM +

•••    this is awesome - it made me giggle. ;)
(via zannah)
8:33 PM +

•••    lance is hilarious. ooh.
8:00 PM +

•••    have you met my neighbors?
Isomorphisms is decorated by escher, which makes for a great scrolling experience...
david chien has lots of colors and the hobbit in three acts...
kindofblue is the (we)blog...
julia's journal has a background the same color as my shirt :)
eleven seconds has been one of my favorite blogs for a long time. and it has calvin and hobbes!!
gmtplus9 is from osaka, japan... and I only just figured out what the title means. :P
so visit them! visit them all! :)
7:39 PM +

•••    my aloe plant (which is a lot cuter than the one in the picture) desperately needs to be repotted. it looks like it's about to fall over and squash my sansevieria.
and they thought I would make a good mother . . . ;P
6:59 PM +

•••    I've read unashamed several times, but I only just now figured out that kama is a rugby fan. yeah rugby!
6:39 PM +

•••    emode thinks (erroneously) that I'm almost ready to be a mom. silly. my maternal instincts are best saved for animals and siblings and neighborhood children. ;)
1:19 PM +

•••    inchworm, inchworm, measuring the dna...
10:47 AM +

•••    does notepad count as a microsoft product? if it does, I can't say this website (or any of my websites) are microsoft-free... I have to say I don't think that's anything to be ashamed about. ;) (yes, I am a notepad holdout. I feel strange if I don't have my hands gooshing around inside the code.)
10:34 AM +

•••    I love this one.
2:02 AM +

•••    whoa - lots of new blogs got listed over the past few days. I need to do some exploring!
2:00 AM +

•••    I don't know . . . my primary objectives didn't change much when I went to college (learn cool stuff), but my methods had to change. in high school I did pretty much whatever I wanted, didn't pay any attention, and still managed to learn a lot without doing much the way the teachers wanted me to. in college I suddenly had to work my ass off, even though no one cared about how much effort I was putting into school.

maybe that's the difference. high school was all about effort. teachers got annoyed when it was lacking, no matter how well you knew the stuff. college is all about performance. you do what it takes to master the material you're presented with, and that's it.

pass/fail, though . . . I can't agree more about that. I miss it.
1:45 AM +

thursday, may 18

•••    vigorous starbursts! yeah! too bad we can't make these a little more vigorous, hmm? (I am picturing little exploding candy squares in space now, hehehe)
11:12 PM +

•••    I am not exactly the world's best vegan (leather shoes, anyone?) but I would eat this before I would eat red meat, ever.
10:03 PM +

•••    I am . . .
9:54 PM +

•••    did you know? battlefield earth is lame.
9:34 PM +

•••    I'm off to watch the season finale of friends. I feel somewhat icky knowing I am contributing to a culture where actors can get paid $750,000 an episode, but I promised my sister I would tape it for her... and I know what it's like to be obsessed with a television show. so. I will put my morals aside for an hour in deference to a sibling's happiness.
7:56 PM +

•••    this little boy went to school with my brother. their homework tonight is to talk about the accident because henry is never coming back to class. sad. :(
6:58 PM +

•••    okay, half is better than none, but I'm still not happy about this. now instead of mytharc episodes and standalone episodes, we'll have mulder episodes and nonmulder episodes. how can this be good? how?
4:35 PM +

•••    princeton lost to penn state in the division one national rugby championships. guess they have trouble with teams from pennsylvania. :)
2:58 PM +

•••    the word "empowered" seems to have been tossed around a lot recently, and I find myself less and less sure of what it actually means - or even what the intent behind its use is.

I looked it up in the dictionary:

em*pow*er (verb transitive)
1 : to give official authority or legal power to
2 : ENABLE 1a
3 : to promote the self-actualization or influence of
-- em*pow*er*ment (noun)

okay . . . so then I looked up self-actualization:

self-ac*tu*al*ize (verb intransitive)
: to realize fully one's potential
-- self-ac*tu*al*i*za*tion (noun)

so, if I am an empowered woman, I am closer to fully realizing my potential than I would be otherwise? is that it? (I think potential is one of those things that can never be fully realized, just like you can never count to infinity, but maybe I am alone on that one.) that makes sense . . . but do I really have to want children, just because I have the potential to give birth?! isn't that just as bad as saying it's anti-feminist to want to be a stay-at-home mother?

I'm still confused. can we please not let "empowered" become just another empty buzzword? it has such good aesthetic qualities. packs a good aural punch.

yeah.
2:39 PM +

•••    at my biofeedback appointment this morning, while I was hooked up to the electrodes, I watched the temperature of my hands drop from 85 to 78 degrees in less than ten minutes. there is something very strange about the idea that there could be a twenty degree difference between the temperature inside my mouth and at my fingertips, and I don't even feel it.

I am still not sure what I think about this whole biofeedback thing - especially since they have to make my hands cold on purpose so I can learn to control their temperature better. the have enough trouble staying warm already, I think. :P

anyway. at least now I have these cute little thermometers to play with. ;)
1:10 PM +

•••    never mind, I have no right to complain about pain. ouch.
12:40 AM +

•••    the world is weird tonight. first I couldn't find my pajama bottoms, and then when I was looking for them I discovered my father watching the tom green show. huh.
12:05 AM +

wednesday, may 17

•••    I hurt. :P
11:21 PM +

•••    I consider myself a devoted x-phile. I have every single episode on tape. when I have time, I review them. I skip meetings and ignore homework so I can watch the show. however, I will not let myself be shackled to the x-files. if it goes ahead next season without david duchovny, I will watch it with as open a mind as possible - but if it continues to suck the way it has been, I will stop watching. I will let it live with dignity in my memory and my video collection.
8:51 PM +

•••    for the first time I feel like I'm on vacation. I just spent an hour outside playing catch with my little brother and my father, and now my left hand smells like the inside of a baseball glove. ah, summer.
8:06 PM +

•••    I am determined to keep practicing and stay in shape this summer. I even bought a rugby ball. hopefully I can stay motivated . . .
6:58 PM +

•••    I will be the first to admit that I read sports illustrated for the pictures, not the articles. but I do not read it so that I can end up smelling like five different men's fragrances. they're not so fragrant all together.
4:41 PM +

•••    leave it to mark to get all melodramatic. I do understand why he isn't having fun, but I think the intent of the great blog off has been sort of violated. wasn't the point of the twenty four hour thing to make it possible for people to compete in spite of other obligations, different timezones, and the need for sleep? no one sits at their computer for twenty four hours straight looking for links to blog! I don't think neale wanted anyone to start doing that, either. (or maybe he did; he is neale, after all.) are people so competitive that they're willing to eschew sleep and common sense (and sportsmanship) in lieu of possibly winning . . . what? admiration?

my reaction is more to shake my head in disbelief. ;)
12:03 PM +

•••    I am not leggy. I am nowhere close to 38-24-32. I'm cute. I'm a freaking eighteen year old gerber baby. and I still have to put up with sexist crap like this. women who are sexy and feminine are not the problem here. people who think any sort of discrimination or harassment based on gender and sexuality are the problem. (and, as been recently demonstrated, discrimination goes both ways.) pleh.
11:46 AM +

•••    ugh. this is just wrong.
11:06 AM +

tuesday, may 16

•••    at first I thought it was just because I wasn't used to it yet, but I've been back at least six times and saturn.org still makes me dizzy. web induced vertigo. imagine that. :P
10:28 PM +

•••    well. I've finally witnessed that blogger-post-eating thing firsthand. it sucks. stupid blogger.
9:40 PM +

•••    you know, I was actually taking this dump truck full of money thing seriously until I read the part about how pyra builds cool shit. ;P
5:23 PM +

•••    when I was sitting in the opthalmologist's office today, waiting for my eyes to dilate, I had an interesting conversation with the patient next to me. he was, I learned, seventy two years old and recovering from his second round of eye surgery, though he admitted to chronically lying about his age. after I convinced him that I had just finished my freshman year in college, not high school as he had guessed, he told me something he had learned about growing up:
"you know, everyone always wants to be that much older, that much more mature, but one day you'll stop and look back and think - 'what on earth was I doing!' - because you'll realize you're really becoming less mature. grandparents, they're all three-year-olds in disguise."
me, I think I'm pretty happy being eighteen, immature or otherwise.

as a side note, I think the whole magazines-in-the-waiting-area thing is kind of twisted. it's as if they want you to feel your vision deteriorating; first you can't read the articles, then the headlines go, and when you can't see the faces of the people in the pictures, you finally have to admit defeat. (of course then you realize you have a splitting headache from the whole ordeal.)
4:18 PM +

•••    forty two is the answer to life, the universe, and everything...
(via elise)
11:51 AM +

•••    nummy nummy black hole. :)
11:33 AM +

monday, may 15

•••    33.6 bps is cruel and unusual punishment. I know my modem can go faster than this!
::glaring at the world at large::
10:18 PM +

•••    found in my referrer logs today: obscurity and competence, which I think is one of the most interesting blog names I've seen thus far. I am still pondering it. ;) it's a nice blog . . . go see. I especially like the smiley faces. :)
7:42 PM +

•••    I think I missed most of the favorite-blog-frenzy yesterday while I was in transit between philly and boston. all I can say is... whatever. read the ones you like, check out a few new ones at least a couple times a week, and you'll be fine.

actually, that's not all I can say. I do have a favorite. (no joke.)
4:08 PM +

•••    my younger sister is boycotting the massachusetts comprehensive assessment test this week, and my mother and my little brother are both going to a protest rally in boston today. tis the season for political activism.

I was a guinea pig for the mcas during its earliest stages of development, and it was the most ridiculous test I've ever taken. fortunately I didn't have to sit through all seventeen-plus hours of it, but the sections I did see had questions that were badly written, unnecessarily verbose, and about material that just didn't seem very important to me. would you know how to complete this sentence: "the productivity of the design process has been greatly enhanced by the use of integrated design stations that include computer hardware and software called...?" would you know if you were in tenth grade? (it's CAD, which stands for computer aided design - but the test won't tell you that. you have to know the acronym. besides, the question doesn't even make sense.)

of course, no one really likes standardized tests. I'm not at all a fan of the college board, even though they helped me a lot more than they hurt me. this might seem like just a bunch of disgruntled kids trying to get out of taking another annoying test. but it's not just the students who are complaining - it's their parents and teachers, too. (and their older siblings.)

if you care about public education, and especially if you live in massachusetts, you might want to read and sign the petition against the mcas. let your complaining voice be heard. :)
3:54 PM +

•••    okay - I need to unpack and get my computer re-connected. right now it's almost impossible walk through my room (not that it takes more than four steps to get all the way across it, but that's something else altogether). it's really weird coming home from school and feeling so displaced like this. I guess I'll get used to that - it's only the second time I've done it.

hopefully the next time I post it will be from my own computer. :)
12:31 PM +

•••    I'm listening to feet and wearing my swarthmore physics and astronomy t-shirt...separation anxiety, anyone? ;)
11:52 AM +

sunday, may 14

•••    the new jersey turnpike sucks.
it sucks more without gas. ;P
10:13 PM +

•••    I'm disconnecting my computer now. really.
three months without high-speed internet access. I think I'm going to cry. :P
11:31 AM +

•••    yaaaaay.

I've watched this at least three times every day since it was posted last week, and it still makes me laugh.
10:55 AM +

•••    this morning I didn't even have enough shampoo left for a lather, and my brush is packed... so you can imagine what my hair looks like. ;) (I did manage to braid it.)
10:39 AM +