youwillgetnothingandlikeit

I've been sick for about five weeks now, and I can't help but wonder if this was kicked off by my near-drowning in two foot deep water. Maybe there's sand in my lungs or something. Maybe there's a thin crust of salt and minerals. Maybe there's a little tree in there and pretty soon I will have to move into a giant pot of soil to keep breathing. Either way it sucks lots and lots, primarily because I've had to start ranking my responsibilities from most to least important and cutting things off the bottom first to preserve my precious energy. What gets put at the bottom are all the things I want to do, the middle are things I maybe don't want to do but will be in trouble if I don't do, and the top are things I cannot get away with not doing.

So far I have taken off the entire bottom of this list with several deep chunks taken out of the middle, which are now causing me issues. The really disheartening thing is that my boss/professors frequently overrate the importance of the tasks they give me, which lead to weekends like this last one where I spent eight hours at work in which I did absolutely nothing because I was given the wrong event times. I spent another four hours running errands for my RIO to meet a deadline that it turned out did not actually exist. The end result of this was having to skip out early on a friend's birthday dinner and skip the Honolulu AIDS Walk entirely, which you may remember I have been excitedly planning for over two months. Even after explaining to several people that I needed to do as little as possible in the days leading up to the walk so I would not relapse again in the meantime, I was ladened with unnecessary BS and ended up falling into a nasty bout of bronchitis the night before the walk. I spent the day of the walk sleeping, coughing, and being extremely sad. (and if the person who asked me to run the RIO errands reads this, I am not blaming you, you didn't know what it would entail-- I'm blaming the ridiculousness of the offices involved, those asshats)

Unfortunately the extremely high expectations of my boss and the dependence of my RIO on me to take care of everything have meant that, more often than not, my classes have to be the thing that gets cut so I can rest between other crap I have to do. This means that, despite doctor's notes and a letter from the disability office at my uni explaining my recurring illness, a couple of my profs are more than willing to ignore an entire semester's worth of good work, good attendance, and general good studentness for a handful of what should be 100% excused absences over the last two weeks. As it also turns out, my uni does not require profs to make attendance exceptions for medical leave even if you're registered with the disability office for it, with the explanation that if you're not "healthy enough" to be a student then you don't deserve to pass. Though I'm not in danger of failing anything, it's pretty upsetting to spend three months busting ass and then in two weeks suddenly drop a full letter even though I didn't miss any actual work. I could have just screwed around those three months to the same effect. It's like when you're playing Scrabble and you're winning due to your excellent vocabulary and strategic skills, then right at the end of the game the other jerk plays "quetexz" or some shit on a triple letter space after spending the whole game time prior to that playing three letter words, texting, and watching Spongebob on the TV behind you. Maybe it fits the rules and all but to say that your mouth-breathing opponent is the better player isn't really fair.

So I went from having a serious case of the notgivingafucks about how this semester went to feeling completely cheated that my careful work to make sure I still maintained GOOD grades is now ruined. I could've followed my heart and just fucked off completely, but no, I decided to be good and responsible, which I should know by now never works out for me. The day I don't have lunch so I can get somewhere on time? Everyone else will be late. The day I stay up late to make sure all my homework is done? They won't collect it that day in class. If I come in early to help with something? It will already be done. Being responsible never seems to actually benefit anyone, and in fact it usually works out to my disadvantage. So I scrapped being nice last year, I think this year I'm going to scrap being responsible. This should work well.

The Bronchiodilator and the Sea

There is a beach here you may have heard of called Sandys. It's notorious for having massive waves and extremely dangerous currents, so apparently it seemed like the best way to kick off spring break to two of my anth friends. We went and, under the assurances of my strong-swimming friend, I agreed to go out into deep water.

I knew this would only be a bad idea of I ran out of breath by over exerting myself in the water; I'm a good swimmer and there were plenty of body boarders and surfers out that could help someone in case of rip. I used all my fancy asthma meds before I left for the beach and tied down the sides of my suit before getting in the water. With waves like this you go in with your suit too tight and come out with it loose- I've learned this one the hard way. Tie your suit down well.

Anyway, so we go out. And out. And soon the body boarders are starring at us as we swim past them, wondering what the hell we're doing all the way out there. I'm fine until we've been out for about forty minutes, and then I start to have to breathe a little harder. No biggie, I think. I'll go in now before I really need to, just to be safe.

Lesson I have learned: once I have any trouble breathing, it is already too late.

Going back in is the hardest part. I felt fine, though I was progressively struggling for breath, and was keeping on top of the waves. Then I got to the shore break and, unlucky for me, a series of extra tall waves came up on me. The water was now too shallow to ride them so I had to duck under, but at this point I was panting and the deep breath necessary to go under wasn't good enough. I surfaced hastily and got pushed under again. And again. I started to wonder what would happen if I passed out- would anyone notice? I managed to look over the water long enough to see a few fat tourists starring at me from the beach, not understanding what they were seeing. I started to feel foggy and wondered if anyone would be able to help. Then I felt my feet hit the bottom and I pushed up with everything I had, comic staggering out of the water as fast as I could. I only made it to the edge of the water before I dropped down in the sand, panting, covered in the wet sand from the shore break, hair in a giant matt all over my head. I caught my breath and sheepishly trekked down the beach to my towel, thoroughly embarrassed.

A few minutes later, my first friend came staggering toasted the towels, still dripping, covered in sand, and panting. "Did you see me almost die?" I asked. "Did you see ME almost die??" She replied.

A few minutes after that my other friend, covered in sand, still dripping, came running over, panting. "Did you see me almost die??" She asked. We traded stories and I mentioned how the first two of us has slowly dragged ourselves down the beach, embarrassed. My third friend shook her head. "As soon as I could put my feet down I just ran the hell out of there and didn't stop till I got here. It prolly looked like the ocean just vomited me up."

I think they were not as serious as I was about the true impending nature of my demise by drowning, but I didn't really want to emphasize how much I suck so I downplayed it significantly. I did learn several things, though, among them being the fact that I do not want to be the only idiot in the world to die of asthma duress brought on by overly ambitious outdoor sports. The other lesson is that holy shit drowning might be the worst way to die ever.

I told them how I wondered if anyone would notice I'd passed out and she laughed. "I just thought, 'well, this is it. I had a good run.'"

Nine More Weeks of Winter

In nine weeks I will graduate and I will NEVER HAVE TO DO THIS SHIT EVER AGAIN IN MY ENTIRE LIFE* and I cannot even tell you how excited I am. I was really excited about working full time because I've always preferred working all day to being in school all day but now I really don't want to do anything. I want to have some time off to do NOTHING for a while because I am burned the hell out. But I don't get to do that at all, actually, and odds are I'll end up with a job that doesn't have vacation time. So there's that.

Also, I think you can very easily absorb my feelings about everything by reading Pictures for Sad Children from the beginning. You don't have to read all of it to understand, but the first 100 or so comics pretty much sum me up right now. I used to think A Softer World was the saddest thing I'd ever read but Pictures for Sad Children definitely takes that cake. Stay in school, children, what else are you going to do?

In other news, I am seriously beginning to think Hawaiian tsunamis are fake bullshit things made up by Menehune Water Co to make people buy their entire stock all at once. How else could a wave slap the shit out of every island between Malaysia and California and nothing happens here? Fucking magic, that's how. That or this whole state is its own goddam Truman Show and they use tsunamis and weird racism to keep us from enjoying the island too much.


*Unless I go to grad school, and if I ever need to go to grad school I might as well just go up on a mountain and die because I can't imagine wasting any more of my precious finite life on this crap.

Job Applicants Are People, Too

I've spent way more time than I'd like to admit applying for jobs over the last year and a half since I moved here. In that time there have been periods where I was applying to something new every few days for weeks at a time. I can't rightly estimate how many jobs I've applied for, but I can give you the exact number of times I've been rejected: Zero.

That's right, zero rejections! But I'm still unemployed, right? How is this possible? Because I got no responses at all. None that said yes, or no, or hey we got your application. Nothing. And every time I called a place to say "did you get that thing I sent ya" after sending applications by email (maybe it got lost in the internet tubes somewhere?) they were generally dodgy and annoyed that I was wasting their precious phone time. One place I applied to was a wee little business run by one woman, so she can't even use the too-many-applications-to-contact-everyone excuse. In fact no one can, because this is a tiny island and I know that there will never be more than MAYBE two dozen applications for any job opening ever.

So to all potential employers I say: what gives? Don't you understand that we're people, too? We have feelings, for one, and it is very stressful the weeks after applying for a job when you're wondering if you'll get an interview and then you never hear anything at all. It's rude, on top of that, to treat applicants like we should be grateful for any time you ever spend interacting with us. What more, we are customers. We probably want to work for you because we like your company, but if we apply for a job and never ever hear from you, that's gonna turn us off. And if we apply by mail and then you get all huffy when we call to see if you received it? We are not going to like your company anymore. And just like any bad other customer experience, that is really bad for you.

What more, you have no idea how little work it would take to make us happy. This week, after a year and a half of this crap, I emailed an application and the company replied to let me know they were looking at it and that if I didn't hear in four weeks I could assume I had not been selected. They also asked me for additional information and when I supplied it they replied again to thank me for responding promptly.

There, two emails consisting of about three sentences each. And now I love these guys and I won't even be mad if they reject me. I'm even more hopeful that I'll get this position now, and even if I don't I'll gladly keep supporting their organization. By contrast, runs-her-own-business lady lost me completely. I had been really interested in supporting a new business that did a lot of things I liked, but not anymore. This is the most effortless good press you can possibly buy yourself as a company, don't ruin it by treating your applicants like crap.

The C-Word

I've realized something recently. All the things that make my life the hardest are called cancers.

It's extremely appropriate, I think, that people born between June 21 and July 22 are Cancers. Every boy in my entire life that has cause me large amounts of trouble, with the exception of one, was a Cancer. They stick on you like that, too. In a lot of ways they never go away entirely. You might stop seeing them and you might stop hearing about them, but you start acting differently because of them. You probably never stop thinking about them.

And if my tattoo is any suggestion, I'm more than a little shaken up about my dad's illness. Like Steve Irwin, you keep seeing him do crazy shit and you think "that dude is gonna get killed!" and then when he finally dies you're shocked because, really, how can someone who has to frequently defied death actually die? After seeing someone dodge it so many times, you start to believe it can't even happen. Unlike Steve Irwin, my dad will not go out in a way that's appropriately absurd. He will gradually decline and we'll see it coming, and we'll try to stop it but eventually it will come back and that will just be that.

I've heard before that it used to be that you didn't talk about cancer. It was the c-word, something you didn't want to talk about. Something you only brought up in trusted, intimate company. In some ways, this is still true about the disease. For me, this is also true of all kinds of cancer men. I don't talk about what's happening with my dad to most people. I don't talk about what's happening with my boyfriends to most people. Because it makes people uncomfortable, and it exposes something about yourself that you don't always want to expose.

Unless you're me and you prick it directly into your skin so everyone can see, and then you don't really have to explain.

Update, Re: Hope

My optimism has waned considerably after three tries and vaguely-red-and-not-even-the-right-red hair. Why is it so easy to shake up my world views? I think all anthropologists are like this. If we weren't, there's no way we could use Warcraft to write on the creation of identity and the nature of human interaction. And certainly no one would give you tenure for it*.

If anything, the cognitive dissonance and guilt related to having to tell your perky stylist they messed up is just further proof that I am never going to change. And, more importantly, if I think dying my hair will make me change, I am dumb but probably also a fantastic ethnographer. Because in medical anthropology EVERYTHING MEANS EVERYTHING and no extrapolation is too generous. Take the last article I read, for example: People sharing food with each other in Fiji means that your body is communally owned and you are not your own individual person, nor do you have control over your own physicality.

So my excitement over the tattoo is combined now with a deep-seated fear of permanent disfigurement and a compulsion do just freaking do it anyway because like, come on. Really.

Though I guess it's not fair to say I'll never change, since I haven't turned in my last two weekly assignments in Ethnobotany and I don't even really care. Normally this would cause me to panic but these things are like, what, half a percent of the whole semester? And when I have a paper, presentation, project, or midterm nearly every day for three solid weeks, watching videos and giving trite summaries is just gonna have to go on the back burner. The fact that I'm okay with that is pretty interesting.



*If this does NOT make you want to quit your job and become an anthropologist, you better be a professional chocolates-massages-and-wine-at-the-same-time critic because I cannot imagine anything sweeter than getting paid to screw around in Warcraft and then tell people how to think about it.

Gateway House is the new Free Store

A few weeks ago a group of skinny white guys rolled up in a van and stole all the couches out of the lobby of my dorm. In broad daylight & with the RAs present, who got photos of them and their license plate numbers. We later saw them being chased around campus by security, but we have yet to get the couches back.

Then last night we saw (well, I missed it because I was in the shower, to my endless disappointment) a guy stealing a bike. Oh I'm sorry, did I say stealing a bike? Because I meant being a goddam ignoramus. This slick joker was at the bike racks directly below ALL the windows in one tower of Gateway trying to hacksaw a u-lock. I don't think I have to explain why this is one of the dumbest things anyone will ever see, but there are a few things that make it extra special: For starters, you can hear what goes on around the racks in every room in this side of the building, which houses upwards of 100 people. It was late, meaning not only was everyone home, it was quiet hours in the dorms.

And my favorite part of this whole equation? Most of the bikes out there don't have good locks like that one did. Even the nicer bikes mostly have crappy cable locks, the kind you can take off with pretty much anything sharp that you could find in a tool box. If this maroon had invested in a pair of bolt cutters he could have probably absconded with two or three bikes before anyone noticed.

Instead, he tried to hacksaw a u-lock. So some time after midnight, the entire Ewa tower of Gateway House was serenaded with the scrsh-scrsh-scrsh sounds of saw-on-tough-ass-bike-lock.

Don got up and yelled "HO, WHATCHU STAY DOING?" out the window. There was a short silence... Then faster, scrshscrshscrshscrshscrsh. After a minute he took off, just before campus security rolled up. I was mad that Don yelled at him because I wanted to go down and sneak up on him. Oh well.

With this caliber of criminal, I'm questioning the necessity of a police department. We should just phase it out and use the money to end Furlough Fridays and buy me a shiny new bat. I'm pretty positive I could personally take care of this problem with a shiny bat. They'll call me the Bear Haole.

Spring back

Unfortunately today was the first day back from spring break, to which I say LAAAME. My wonderful, thoughtful, totally not vindictive phys anth prof decided to make our second midterm today at 9am, plus an extra credit paper was due. Before the break he cheerfully told us that we shouldn't worry about the test because the class average on the last one was 77%, and that's great because usually his class averages are more like 67%, so we're doing great! Smile! Yay! There was a big heavy silence before I piped up with "That's a terrible grade, no one wants those kinds of grades!" and everyone else chimed in with "Yeah dude wtf, wtf dude." He seemed confused and repeated that he's not going to grade us on a curve anyway, so whatever. Also, three exams like this one make our entire semester grade. Silly physical anthropologists, you're all so odd.

YES MILANA, I'M TALKING ABOUT YOU AND YOUR APES.

I had library books due yesterday but the library was closed for the break so I had to wait until today to recheck them. They're still charging me a late fee for all of them. It's only 75 cents total so I won't complain, but sheeeesh. Way to be a pain in the ass, library ladies. This is even more annoying than the time I returned books on time but they didn't get around to checking them back in for a few days so they tried to charge me late fees for that time.

Good news, though. I was talking to a girl in my Biomedicine and Culture class (one of the two other pre-med profession people in the class) about how difficult it's going to be for me to get the kind of experience necessary to apply to public health school. Turns out she manages the pre-health profession advising office on campus, and she got me an appointment with the director and gave me a lot of good advice on where to go to get the experience I need. I had tried several times to get that info from the pre-health office before and they'd told me to just go to the public health school's admissions and ask them, which is a horrible idea. I'd also asked the community service office and the career development office, both of which had told me to leave, go home, get on my computer, and search their database for openings.

So this is mixed good news. On one hand, I'm finally getting the information I should have gotten (and tried to get) seven months ago when I started at UH. That's good news. On the other hand, it turns out that I REALLY need to have been working to get the requisite experience for an MPH program starting... Oh, SEVEN MONTHS AGO. Turns out they want you to get work experience while you're an undergrad, not after you graduate. That's the bad news-- whatever lazy chicks had been brushing me off at the pre-health office before quite literally screwed me out of getting to apply to an MPH program on time because they didn't give me the opportunity to get that veeery valuable little tidbit of information. Meh.

That means I'll be trying to get taken on as a full time volunteer with at least one medical center and/or clinic nearby here. After I get back from Guam I'll use the advice I got today to try and get a paid or intern position at a private practice. Apparently the trick is to just keep asking until someone agrees to take you on, which I'm going to hate doing but whatever. I'll have to jump through some stupid hoops if I want to SAVE THE WORLD and whatnots.

I mostly post at night. Mostly.

I'm baaaaaack holy crap this semester has sucked some eggs. My goodness. I just withdrew from THE JAPANESE CLASS FROM HELL in light of the fact that it was going to cause me to fail all my other classes by being a goddam time vampire the likes of which I have never seen before. That means I can no longer receive back credits which means I just got boned out of 8 credits I deserve for being placed in an upper-level language course. That means I'm not going to be able to graduate on time if I don't load on summer classes. If I had only had a different professor, this would not have happened. I am BEYOND angry about this, so much so that I don't even want to talk about it.

Anyway, I got a new haircut. That's about the only good thing that's happened so far.

My dad is coming in a week, yaaay. Unfortunately his plane gets here right when I have a super important class thing so I can't actually pick him up from the airport, which blows. I wanted to have all my local friends ride along and talk pidgin for only the first ten minutes and then, by our synchronized watches, they would suddenly stop and start talking like normal. I was curious to see if my dad would say anything. Now I don't get to find out, boo.

I was less than happy to find that the medical assistant position that I didn't get last semester is STILL being advertised and it still says they need someone ASAP. It had just been posted when I applied... I almost want to call them and be like BET YOU WISH YOU HAD ME ON STAFF NOW BITCHES AHAHAHAHAHA-- then hang up, but that's not really constructive.

My edjumacashin

Long post is long.

The yoo-hoos in the College of Arts and Sciences advising office better thank their lucky stars that I got all the classes I wanted today, because there would have been many flaming bags of dog doo on their metaphorical front steps tonight if I hadn't. They thought it would be a totally rad idea to spread registration out over a full week with one group's registration period opening every half hour from 9am-4pm. The groups are divided by just a couple of credits each, meaning that they spread everyone out so completely that, for example, L and his roommate Don started here the same semester but their registration times were three days apart. FAIL.

Oh and for extra fun they leave a whole weekend in the middle in which no registration periods start but people whose times began the week before can still add classes, so anyone stuck registering in the two days after that weekend are BONED with a capitol F-U-C-K-E-D. Guess where I was? Yeah. I had to redo my schedule four times in the last two days.

Here's how my schedule worked out:
-Physical Anthropology + Lab (MWF)
-Anthropology of Consumer Cultures (TR)
-Intermediate Japanese (MTWF)
-Women and Madness (R)
-Biomedicine and Culture (MW)

So now I'm at 17 credits with a dilemma. I had originally planned out a 19 credit semester with a two credit public health class instead of Anth of Consumer Cultures-- I had wanted to take it but it filled. Miraculously, someone dropped it right before my registration time, so I jumped on it.

An aside: The Arts & Sciences advisors will insist to you that even if a section fills up you can still e-mail the prof and get in 100% of the time. Those e-mails, much like the goggles, do nothing. Most of the time you don't even get a reply. Usually you get rejected. This prof had rejected me for this class already (as an extra student, that is) so I was psyched.

Unfortunately it conflicts with the two credit course that was going to bump me to 19 credits, which is the limit. You have to get special permission to go above that and can't do that until the start of the next semester. Then you have to prove to them that you can take a heavy semester like that, which I'm not sure they'll buy coming from me. So my dilemma is this: Do I wait for next semester to start and try to petition to take another three-credit course, or do I drop my Consumer Cultures course for the two credit class? Two credits are hard to come by or I would just find another one to pop into this schedule.

It's important to note that, even with 19 credits in the spring, I will have 41 credits left before I can graduate and only two semesters left in my four years. Because I transferred I essentially lost a whole semester of credits that didn't transfer over. This means I will have to go to at least one summer session, probably to take something like two or three classes, and then I'll still need to take 17 credits per semester my senior year. I only have a couple of classes I need to take the graduate, it's mostly getting the total necessary 124 credits. I need a minimum of 19 credits in the spring-- I can't just sit on 17.

And no, I don't want to just take another semester. I don't wanna and you can't make me, neener neener neener.

psOH SNAP!!

It has only just now ocurred to me that the game I have been waiting to play for months-- no, YEARS --has been out for two and a half weeks and I have yet to even look at the case. This is madness, you guys, on Spartan freaking levels. I have been waiting for a new Phantasy Star Online since the Dreamcast network went the way of the Virtual Boy, if you catch my drift.* And who is to blame for this? Why, it's Dr. Geoff White, professor of Pacific cultural anthropology. And for this offence I will leave a flaming bag of dog poo on his metaphorical porch. The bag will read "PHOTON BLAST"

Oh man if I can't feed my mag fluids to make it evolve into two wing-shaped devices that float behind me in PS0, I am going to be SORELY disappointed.

Speaking of nerdy video game times, L and I found copies of Kid Pix, The Incredible Machine, and The Amazon Trail at Goodwill today. YES HE WENT THRIFTING WITH ME, u jellis bbs? And hells yes I use Oxford commas. Anyway we got Amazon Trail and played it. Hit the slow one! Noooo that's a log! AAH THE HARPOON BROKE.

I had thanksgiving dinner with L's family. I think it was the first time I've ever had thanksgiving without my mom's family. They brined the turkey and put it in this kooky kamado grill that looks like a depth charge and it was GOOD. The rest of the food was all local, which was weird as hell but interesting. As it turns out there is no variation of sweet potatoes that I can eat without feeling like I have a mouthful of damp, half-dissolved sugar. L and I also watched Jackass 2 and discussed how much we do/do not want to try to avoid an angry bull on a giant seesaw.



*You know, since the VMU went the way of the console cartridges.

P.S.
I posted this with my newfangled iPhone. Haw haw.

Oh SNAP

Okay okay so I have a class with a bunch of the UH football players, right? They were traveling last week so the two guys I know needed to copy some of my notes and I was supposed to meet them so they could make the copies tonight. We met at the library and I cracked some jokes about the game last night and they got pissed and PICKED ME UP and were telling me to say that again or whatever. But then they fumbled me so I got away.

Just kidding, they didn't do that. They're great guys. Seriously though, Denver Broncos.

Homecoming, hooray

I didn't get to go to the homecoming game tonight because I had promised one of my friends I'd go out to dinner with her since it was her birthday. We got to the restaurant only to find a TV right in front of where I was sitting with the game on... :D We won but I still felt like I was watching some kind of special ed little league game a few times. They kept pitching the ball out of bounds and into the damn benches.

Yeesh.

I couldn't stop thinking of the Denver Broncos:

That game was bad and you should feel bad

Goddddd we got MURDERED 54-9 by Boise State today. Seriously, shouldn't they have been too jet lagged to ream us like that? Cripes.

Luckily I have found out that none of my extended family reads this so now it may be the blog of KINGS! Damn hell ass kings!

Also, please to not be adding me on Facebook family members and friends of family members. I feel like a jerk not adding you back but I like to be able to say/link to whatever on my Facebook and with you guys being around I would have to censor my stuff. What would I do in my spare time if I couldn't post links to penis-shaped cake pans? :(

Fun fact: I originally typed "penis-shaped cake pants" which is actually way funnier than my joke.

Fantastic morning

Imagine, if you will, that you have been working on a very important presentation that makes up about a third of your grade for a class you really like. It starts on Monday at 11:30am and you are the only person presenting that day.

You wake up and the clock says 11:28am.

This is not a good start to the day.

Alright gang, let's split up

I think Hawai'i is officially the most haunted place in the freaking world. Apparently no one here has ever seen a horror movie because they just will not stop building stuff over ancient burial sites. They don't even excavate and re-bury the remains, they just screw it all up. They were gonna put the new Whole Foods in one place but people got mad because there was a burial ground there so they moved it to Kahala where they moved a cemetery so they could put it in that spot. THAT'S NOT ANY BETTER, GUYS. Seriously I looked at a list of haunted places on this island and all but like three of them were build on burial grounds. Whyyyyy.

This came up in the debate over whether or not to go see Paranormal Activity with my buddy Ikemen (names changed to protect the innocent whatever and to also make him incredibly awesome) when he also suggested we go to Morgan's Corner. This, I think, is the worst idea in the history of all bad ideas. For those of you not in the know (i.e. everyone) that's a now closed-off road, at the end of which a girl hung herself some years back. It's popularly known as being Super Crazy Haunted and if you go there you will see her and then she will freaking kill you. If you're in a car, supposedly it will stall at a certain point in the road and everything. You know what I don't want, guys? I don't want to invoke a goddam Ju-on style haunting that will kill me in the same manner as my nightmares, thereby manifesting my darkest fears into flesh. That does not sound like a fun weekend.

What I DO want to do, however, is walk over the bridges in the Manoa Valley hiking trail. It's a long trail with a dead end and apparently when you walk down it there are seven bridges to cross but when you walk back there are only six. I have GOT to see if this is for real. Some of Ikemen's friends did and it and swore there were only six coming back but I'm not buying that. I gotta actually go and get to the end with one bridge missing before I'll believe it, but this is such a common story (and it's so easily verifiable) that it just has to be true. The case is probably that, when you walk back, the lay of the land is such that when you walk over one of the bridges you don't notice it. But I want to find out now!

Luckily one of the biggest hauntings here, the night marchers, cannot be seen by haole so at least I'm off the hook for that one. I don't know if they're supposed to still be able to take your soul but as long as I don't see them I think I'm good.


Anyone wondering what "ikemen" is, basically it's someone who would fit in this photo.

An open letter to locals

Not all locals. A very particular handful of locals that one of my friends has the misfortune of having to work with.

If someone moves to your hometown and brings a different culture with them and you get an attitude with them because they're too different and haven't already seamlessly assimilated into the Borg local scene, they're not the racist/xenophobic one. That title can fall squarely on your sheltered (and yet somehow still perfectly tanned) behind.

Furthermore, if you know someone here who moved from another country entirely and they say "wow things in America sure are different from back home," you have no right to get offended. I'm still not sure why you got offended, but somewhere between "YOU'RE PREJUDICED AGAINST OTHER CULTURES" and "AMERICAN CULTURE SUCKS HOW DARE YOU COMPARE US TO THEM" we surmised that this was projection of your own problems onto us.

So basically, you're racist and xenophobic. You hate my friend because she's different from you and you honestly believe that your inability to deal with her due to her being different makes her racist and xenophobic. You've never been to the mainland but you're entirely positive that the locals here are absolutely nothing like Americans on the mainland and should not be grouped in with them. At the same time you don't recognize me as being from the mainland because the culture I grew up in on the mainland is so similar to the one out here. You only recognize my friend as being different because she's actually from a different country altogether and isn't familiar with American culture or laws.

In summary: sit down and shut up, you clearly have no effing idea what you're talking about.

Stuff White People Like

Okay, I have a proposal for two additions to the list of Stuff White People Like... Which, by the way, got me again with the addition of "Hating People Who Wear Ed Hardy." Touché, Mr. Lander. Maybe one day you will convince me that I am white and not Caucasian but that day is not today.

Anyway, Stuff White People Like.

#129 - Wooing. No I don't mean making the ladies swoon, I mean yelling WOOOOOO. After much careful observation I have concluded that only white people woo, and that it is always completely douchebaggy. The two favored places to woo are in a large group of moving people and in a large group of people moving in a car. Apparently being in a "fun" place makes white people much more likely to woo, as I have probably heard five thousand god damn woos from white people over the last three weeks since my bedroom window faces both the main dorm walk and the main street on campus, meaning that every group of moving people going woo as well as every car full of people going woo can conveniently be heard clearly in my effing room. Apparently other people are getting tired of this, too, because today after a few walkway woos another girl on the floor above me yelled SHUT THE HELL UP out her window. The worst times for wooing are definitely on Friday and Saturday nights, as the number of alcoholic drinks a white person has consumed has a direct relationship with how many woos they will throw out in an hour.

#130 - Blasting Hip Hop. This goes somewhat hand in hand with #116 - Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore except that these are the white people that do listen to “Commercial Hip Hop” which I guess could land them in the category of the Wrong Kind of White People. The deal isn't that they listen to hip hop, however, it's that they play it as loudly as humanly possible with the bass turned up so high that my room shakes when they drive by on Dole St. These white people don't seem to actually really listen to or enjoy hip hop, they just pick a few tracks to play extremely loudly in the hopes that it will make them look cool to everyone who can hear it. They seem oblivious to the fact that it actually makes us want to punch them in the nose.

If that wasn't annoying enough, there are about half a dozen particular songs that some group of white people really, really like somewhere in the vicinity of my room. I've never been able to tell where it's coming from, but every day the same five or so songs are played in a loop so loudly that I can hear them in bed with the fan on over the traffic noise even though I think the person playing it is actually in the building next door. On top of that I can't actually hear the song for real, just the bass (in the case of cars) or the drum machine (in the case of my wanker neighbor).

But the thing that is about to make me snap and FIND this guy is one song in particular that he normally plays in the morning while I'm sleeping and at night while I'm trying to work has a track in the chorus of some kind of small child babbling out of tune with the music that for some reason is as loud as the drum machine. So I hear DOON DOON CHCKA DOON DOON CHCKA BLAHBLAH DOON BLEE DOON BLOOBLAH BLAH CHCKA. One weird habit my brain has is partially waking up in the late morning and convincing me that something I'm dreaming about actually happened*. It doesn't tell me OH PSYCH THAT WAS A DREAM GIRL for at least a few hours. On the mornings I get to sleep in that babbling somehow gets into my head while I'm half-awake, so three days out of the week I spend 7am-9am half-dreaming that I am interacting with a lost child and/or have to get my own kids ready for school. To say I wake up confused would be the understatement of the century. I am pretty sure this is going to drive me to madness. I guess the reason he's playing it so loud is because that babbling has caused him to go insane such that he thinks playing the same five songs over and over so loudly that he's causing himself hearing damage is a good idea.



*This is one reason I avoid zombie movies. If I watch one I am probably 98% likely to dream about it all night, and for the first thirty or so minutes after I wake up I am pretty positive that I need to get to a mall fast.

My Pedagogy

Official notice to everyone: While this will not at all surprise the academics among us, any professor that has a "My Pedagogy" section on the syllabus and actually discusses this on the first day of class is going to be a big old sack of sad. Drop the class.

If it's required for your major as History of Anthropology is for me AND 25% of the grading is based on attendance because back in his day we always attended class and he thinks it's just the least you should do and you should be grateful that you get a grade just for showing up because that's much easier than anything else and if anyone is not willing or is going to be unable to attend for any reason you need to drop the class because he will fail you because really it's just the least you can do and he also recommends that we form outside study groups but he doesn't think there should be class time devoted to that because it's a waste but let's devote some time talking about how we're not going to devote class time to it and oh by the way would you like to hear his thoughts on Marxism? He has some opinions on Engels, too, while we're on the subject... Bring your damn laptop because it's going to be a long hour.

Move in partaaay

So with the upperclassmen move in starting yesterday, this is campus now a combination of this:



This:



And this:



I would like to let it be known that my original choice of example was the Beastie Boys going FIGHT. FOR YOUR RIGHT. TO PAAAAAAARTY in the lamest way possible. No embed allowed. Then I moved on to Prince, who I forgot is a jerk and has a team of lawyers keeping his stuff off YouTube, and eventually I got all the way down to Risky business before I finally found a video they would let me embed. Extra fail, guys. Extra fail.