Twert twert

Okay so I got a Twitter, you can all shut the hell up now. ESPECIALLY YOU, MOM. Jay kay mom. You're cool mom. No seriously you spend too much time starring at glowing rectangles with blue cartoon birds on them, mom.

Anyway you can find my chirping right hurrr right hurrr but it will mostly consist of non sequiturs. That first one's for you, Momoko.

And now I can't decide whether "Twitard" is better for Twilight fans or overenthusiastic Twitter users. Hm.

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.

U guise srsly

Srsly u guise. I can do everything on this phone. Earlier I was talking about giant African snails and used my photobucket app to find photos to show my classmates. Now I am updating my blog from it. Sweeeeeeet.

BONUS PHOTO.

My tower at Gateway as seen from L's tower at Gateway.

Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

iPhones are the sheezy

Gateway House at night

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Wowcrafty

Yes, yes, I did it. After watching my friends play World of Warcraft for five years I finally decided it looked fun enough to actually pay for it. What was the tipping point? Well, next week I have two ten page papers and a ten minute presentation all due within two days of each other, so I had to find a new way to procrastinate.

No really I actually just like to play video games when I have a lot of work because taking a half hour screw-around-on-Facebook break is not nearly as relaxing as a half hour kill-monsters-with-a-sword break. Games make you stop thinking about all the things that are worrying you as soon as you start playing so they work great for me at de-stressing. Ahhh.

Unfortunately when I went to the store on Tuesday to actually buy the discs (their online payment thing wouldn't work for some reason and no, I have not ever felt more embarrassed in my life than when I went to a mall to buy Warcraft) I realized HOLY CRAP IT'S NOVEMBER 10TH PHANTASY STAR 0 COMES OUT TOMORROW.

And by tomorrow now I mean TODAY.

Guys I have been waiting for Phantasy Star 0 like honestly since the Dreamcast went defunct and you couldn't play Phantasy Start Online with it anymore. More rationally I have been waiting for it since last winter/spring/whenever exactly it was that they announced it was coming this fall. And then I moved here AND I FORGOT. That's exactly how awesome it is here.

But the short version of this story is that I didn't actually buy PS0 (OH OH I JUST GOT WHY THEY NAMED IT THAT. PSO, PS0. AHAH.) because I figured I did not need TWO games right before three Great Grandaddy projects were due. I will reward myself with sweet sweet Phantasy Star goodness as soon as my last paper has been turned in, though. Oh maaannn it's gonna be so great. I'll have WoW on my netbook and PS0 on my DS. I WILL HAVE AN MMORPG WITH ME AT ALL TIMES. Oh goodness I can go to the beach and play an MMO and I won't even have to pick which one. That's a horrible idea on the one hand and yet SO GOOD on the other.

This is excited Blossom.

RIP you old structuralist coot

Well, Lévi-Strauss died on October 30th and somehow I didn't hear about it at all until today. It wasn't really on the news for some reason-- I guess anthropology isn't a hot topic anymore. Just earlier that week our history of anth prof was telling us he woke up every morning waiting to hear the news that Lévi-Strauss was dead, so we're blaming him for jinxing it. We all also got a horrible icy feeling when it was suggested that some of our professors might assign something on him in the interest of current events but so far none of them have mentioned it so hopefully it won't happen. I do not want to have to either BS my love for the guy or do the research necessary to come up with an essay-worthy argument against his ideas because he had a lot of them and most aren't very interesting. Sorry Claude, I'm happy for you and imma let you finish but Michael Jackson still had the best death this year.

In related news I saw Paranormal Activity on Halloween and I think it's the perfect example of why encouraging women to be unassertive is so extremely dangerous... And I'm only partially joking. The first time a freaking demon came and loomed over me in my sleep I would have taken the boyfriend's video camera and stuck it where the sun don't shine. LOL I'M A MAN MY SCROTUM WILL SOLVE THIS PROBLEM BECAUSE I'M A MANLY MAN AND I CAN PROTECT MY FEMALE WITHOUT DOING WHAT ALL THE EXPERTS TELL ME. What the eff ever.

(Man who thought I would ever get more than one use out of this Kanye West tag?)

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.

It was just ghastly

So Isaac and I broke up earlier this week. I guess he finally realized I didn't have any intention of changing my plans again to move to somewhere he wanted to live and then I realized he had no intention of ever living anywhere other than NYC. So yeah. I imagine he will tell his Ivy League friends about it kinda like this.

In similarly lame news, I am getting the worst breakout I have ever had in my entire life on my cheeks right now and as it's healing it's leaving behind little marks. The kind of little marks that do not go away for a good year and even then require extensive chemical peels to remove. This is an unhappy blossom. Sad face :(

In happier news I'm going to see Where The Wild Things Are tomorrow (yaaaaay) followed by yakiniku for dinner (yaaaaay) with Ikemen buddy (yaaaaay) and two people I don't know, one of which is visiting from Japan. He's begun trying to convince me to do an ethnography of some kind of intense nerdy subculture like LARPers or furries with an emphasis on participant observation. He says, and this is a direct quote, "it really speaks to the tension between the nature/culture divide and the problems people have when other people transgress it." He says I should be a mongoose. THIS IS HOW WE ROLL IN ANTHROPOLOGY.

We've also spent the last week staying up most of the night and commiserating each other on our various midterm projects and his thesis. We have two classes together so a lot of that is "Man, can you believe this class? Man. This class. Geeze." Before our History of Anthropology midterm this morning we pledged psychic unity of study guide information. ANTHRO HUMOR.

He's been working on his thesis outline for like two months solid now. At some point tonight he realized that he was actually putting like five times as much detail as was necessary into the outline and could have had it finished a few weeks ago. He found this out as I was doing the third draft of my study guide for my History of Japan to 1700 midterm. And the road to perfection is strewn with our bodies.

The Guild

After much prodding I finally watched all of The Guild that's online so far. I recommend you do the same even if you're not into MMORPG type games because it's still pretty funnay. Admittedly the first couple of episodes (which are only like 7 minutes long) aren't that appealing but it gets better. Felicia Day writes/stars as Codex. She started the show after a few years of dealing with internet addiction.

Here's the promo they did for season three, which is catchy as all get out:



And if you want to start watching, here's the first episode.

Yeah right.

So I started doing these broad searches for schools with MPH programs, then narrowed that down by the type of program, academic standards etc. and narrowed my options down to just one. Are you ready for this? Because you might hurt yourself laughing.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

For the first time ever I am suddenly intensely remorseful for how much I have not given a crap about academics. I can't find any statistics as to what percentages of people are admitted to the program but I'm relatively sure it's somewhere between fat chance and no way.

Unfortunately now that I've looked at the Health in Crisis & Humanitarian Assistance concentration I can't settle for anything less in depth. Look at how specialized the course work is. Water and Sanitation Needs in Complex Humanitarian Emergencies, Assessing Epidemiologic Impact of Human Rights Violations, Ethics of Public Health Practice in Developing Countries, and my personal favorite, Issues in Maternal Mortality Reduction in Developing Countries. Compare that to U Penn's Global Health track and maybe you will understand why I've got my heart set on this now. Critical Appraisal of Occupational and Environmental Health Literature-- REALLY, GUYS? You're gonna make me live in West Philly and then make me read occupational and environmental health literature? Why don't you strap me to a damn rack while you're at it?

I'm going to go ahead and apply to see if I can't get in-- they require work experience so I couldn't apply for at least two years after graduation anyway, so I have a long time to think about this. Unfortunately that also puts me up against medical doctors and established health care workers, which is... Bad for me, to say the least. Wish me luck?

Philosophy

Dear Internets,

Today in class I referred to the Platonic form of a chair as a "knee-bending, ass-resting thing" in a discussion about realism and nominalism.

That is all.

In case of emergency...

... You better hope I like you! :D

Because I am, as they so delightfully phrased it in The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, a disasterist. I am determined to learn things that will allow me to function in case of a city/state/country-wide disaster and potentially be self-sufficient thereafter. I can build fires, build shelters, forage for food, and help treat injuries, and so on. I intend to be able to field dress game, drive 18-wheeler trucks and boats, repair necessary electronics, etc.

Why?

Because if anything crazy happens you're really going to wish you knew how to do a lot of things you don't know now. I'm not gonna say that I'm planning on a zombie apocalypse or anything, but I am gonna say that if that ever happens I am going to rock because I am scrappy lady. I will ninja in your damn window armed with a fire poker and a really heavy lamp base and be like COME ON THE BUS IS WAITING and then you will pile in with the other survivors and then I will drive you all to a heavily fortified hiding place up in the mountains. THIS IS THE APOCALYPSE OF MY DREAMS, GUYS. I'm not gonna say I want a zombie apocalypse, I'm just saying that if there was a zombie apocalypse I wouldn't be all that upset.

Of course it might not turn out that way, but this is my fantasy world and I choose to believe that I will be a badass. So there.

Fun fact: While looking for that comic in the archive, I ctrl+f-ed for "side" and when I found "The Tasty Side" as the name of a comic I knew that must be it. looool forever.

Since there will never be a zombie apocalypse (QUESTION MARK) I guess I will just learn that stuff to be a bigger badass in the real (read: boring) world. Although actually that may all come in handy if I really do decide to go to some insane place to do public health (I'm looking at yoooou Myanmar) or in the entirely likely event of World War III. And it would definitely be handy in case of a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake.

Now you all think I'm insane, I'm sure, but I'm really just an ESFJ. Or, more appropriately for this scenario, an ENTJ. I tend to get one or the other when tested depending on how excited I am about a zombie apocalypse. I guess I'm walking the line somewhere between "Do you folks want some homemade cookies?" and "TUCK IN THAT SHIRT, SOLDIER."


P.S.
There's still hope!
A small warning about A Softer World: Most of the comics are either funny or just plainly poignant, but some of them can be downright upsetting. Each one tells a whole story and sometimes those stories are very dark. It may not always be for the faint of heart. Just a note.

Yes. Skin cancer.

I also have a master plan for not getting skin cancer. It involves daily doses of a multivitamin high in vitamins A, C, and E plus at least one food or drink every day that is high in similar antioxidants, mainly green tea. I am also using a fruit juice-based antioxidant serum on my face (as well as a juice-based antioxidant cleanser and an antioxidant eye cream with SPF) and a vitamin E-based lotion on the rest of me. As soon as I can find a neat electric kettle I will also be spraying straight up green tea all over. Why? Because we have a shower stall so I can't bathe in it.

I honestly haven't been wearing sun screen every day and before anyone gets on me for this I should explain. Recent studies on lab created skin have shown that skin treated with the sun-blocking ingredients in sun screen had less sun damage but had more cancer-causing free radicals than the unprotected skin. The medical community at large is claiming that this doesn't mean bupkis and that we should all keep wearing sunscreen, but I think they're full of it and just don't want to admit they're wrong. The trend in skin care and makeup for the last couple of years has been NO SUN. SPF in everything, self-tanners, everyone wearing hats and long sleeves to keep out of the sun. The rate of vitamin D deficiency has gone up steeply which would indicate that people are getting much less sun exposure... But the rates of skin cancer have still been increasing.

That, paired with the other study, are telling me that sun screen is not your best friend all by itself. What you need mostly is a great deal of antioxidants to help specifically prevent against cancer, otherwise you could be doing just as much harm as good. You know why no one gets cancer in Japan despite that fact that it's polluted as hell and they all smoke like chimneys? Freaking green tea guys, seriously. I am not a crunchy granola hippie, I want to prove this with science. So I am going to do this totally uncontrolled and not entirely scientific experiment and get back to you in a few biopsies.

This is by far the most delicious experiment I have ever participated in. I just realized that's not true because I once found out how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie-Roll center of a Tootsie Pop for science fair. But this is a close second.

Promises of photos

Okay so all those photos I promised before I put this thing online will be coming shortly. I mostly haven't taken any photos because I don't want to look like too much of a haole taking photos of everything until I have enough of a tan to claim I'm local. Anywhoo.

I'm going tide pooling with another anthropology major this weekend (could it be I have finally found another outdoorsy type??) which promises lots of photos of, I donno, barnacles and stuff*. I went to the beach finally last weekend and took my camera with the intention of taking new Facebook photos... I'll wait while you laugh. Done yet? No? Okay I can wait...

...

... Alright that's enough. Anyway I decided against it because I went by myself and as the beach was crowded I knew at least half a dozen people would notice me setting a timer and then running away and then running back again. I didn't feel like looking like a loon that particular day, so there are no photos. And I wasn't going to just hold the camera out to get just my face and a smidge of background because this is FACEBOOK, guys, not MYSPACE. Sheesh.

I have temporarily satiated my desire for a full back koi tattoo by getting a tank top from T&C Surf that has an almost identical design on the back. I also got a tank with wings on the back from Papaya but that didn't affect my desire for wing tattoos, so I'll have to come up with something more creative. Like henna.

*Stuff is the technical term for limpets and algae and mussels and starfish and sea urchins and little fishes and crustaceans and a whole assortment of other little sea animals. Would I say I have a plethora of sea animals? ... Yes I would.