Baubles the Meerkat

Baubles the Meerkat is proof that there is a god and he is hilarious.

A few weeks ago some friends and I went to the Honolulu Zoo. When we walked up to the meerkat exhibit, there was a big sign from the zookeeper to the side explaining that one of the meerkats, Baubles, was "a bit challenged" but noted that he is okay and not to worry about him. "If you see Baubles looking a bit unsteady on his feet, nothing's wrong it's just his way."

So we're thinking, okay, a meerkat that maybe falls over if he tries to do that standy thing that they do? That's not a big deal. Which one is Baubles? But at that moment it became extremely clear which one was Baubles, as he came a-baubling around the corner at just that moment and baubled all around the enclosure while we were there.

This meerkat has some kind of neurological disorder that apparently makes him think he is a pirate with peg legs on a ship in very unsteady seas. He rocks back and forth and constantly wobbles and falls over. He also can't stop very quickly and runs into things a lot.

Think that's sad? It was not sad. It was hilarious. He obviously doesn't seem to mind at all, and apparently he can still be a normal, happy meerkat. He just looks like he's really drunk and takes a little longer to do things. The thing that makes it really hilarious, though, is how everything the zoo says about him sounds like the way you talk about the one jerk in your group of friends. "Oh yeah, Baubles? Yeah Baubles is kinda... Like, you know. He's just Baubles. Nothing you can do about that guy." It somehow takes this poor handicapped animal from kind of sad level to I'm-going-to-hell-for-laughing-but-I-can't-stop level.

Please enjoy this KHON video of Baubles baubling about. My favorite note from this, "They think that like maybe he is sick or something or you know but he is just like that." HAH-HAAAAAAA! (Note: if the wrong video is displayed for you, you can view the correct one here!)

The Story No One Wants to Hear

A little over three weeks ago I started dieting and going to the gym again. Now I've spent a lot of my life working out, but I've never been on a diet before. I've never felt like I needed it because, despite the fact that I've been steadily gaining weight for the last few years, I was crazy skinny before so I was just coming into normal size. The problem was that I was not used to that. I've spent my whole life thus far having size 00 jeans fall off me in the fitting room. There are a couple of brands that made a 0 or 00 that fit me, so I've only ever owned maybe four pairs of jeans at any given time-- and you can forget about any other kinds of pants.

So when those smallest-of-the-small-size pants started to be too small for me, I didn't even realize what was happening for a long time. I've outgrown things, yes, but never in my life have I ever been too heavy to wear something. I was so used to being tiny that once I was no longer tiny I didn't even notice. It wasn't until my skinny jeans couldn't get over my hips at all that it hit me: I was getting chubby.

An interlude here to say that all the people who just rolled their eyes or got offended because that's still a small size and I don't understand what it's like to be REALLY big, I should shut up and be grateful, etc: Go play in the street.

Anyway, the moment I realized this was when I came home one day and peeled myself out of my previously relaxed-fitting bootcut jeans into a much more comfortable pair of sweatpants. That's when it dawned on me-- "These are FAT PANTS. Holy crap I have fat pants. I have to wear fat pants."

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that not being a size 0 makes you fat. But when all your pants give you muffin top such that you stopped wearing fitted shirts to hide it and the only thing that fits right is your sweatpants? Those are fat pants. And on someone who's barely five feet tall with a short stubby little torso, a size 2-4 is starting to look chubby. Yeah the size is small, but so is the rest of me. Proportionally it doesn't look small at all.

So I decided to do something about it. I calculated my basic metabolic rate, figured out how many calories I needed a day to maintain, and tried to stay around 500 calories beneath that. I made an effort to keep my calories from fat as minimal as possible and to avoid simple carbohydrates more than once a day. I made sure to spread out my food over the day instead of eating two big meals and a snack like I normally do. I already walk about 45-70 minutes a day to get around, so I added going to the gym 2-3 times a week as time permitted. Since my stamina was really low (mostly from my asthma) I started off just on the elliptical and recumbent bike and, when that got easy, I added some weight training. I never spend more than an hour at the gym.

So now, at a little over three weeks of this, I didn't feel any better. I didn't think I looked any different. Until this morning, I wanted to wear long pants but the only clean ones I had were a pair of extremely unforgiving high-waisted American Apparel skinny jeans... A pair that had ceased to fit over my hips months ago. So I tried them and... POW. Fit perfectly.

I want to share my success with people but, like my original frustration with my weight, no one wants to hear it. People will congratulate me and all but generally hearing about it being easy for me makes other people feel bad. I think Ryan North is right on here when he says "dieting is about commiserating" and no one wants to hear someone going "GUYS LOOK WHAT I DID EASILY" especially when no one thought I was chubby in the first place.

Anyway, so the final punctuation on what I'm sure has been a wholly infuriating read for most of you is this: Today I rushed home from dinner with my boyfriend so I could make it to the gym before they closed because I didn't want to skip a day. When I was adding my workout to my log I realized I hadn't really eaten much today. So on my way home I stopped at the store and got a package of little chocolate donuts as a reward, and also to make sure I got enough calories today.



Now you all hate me, thank you, goodnight.

First day on site

We got to see the sites we're working on today, and of course I got assigned to the one that's in the sun all day. Dr. B said I could switch to a different one (since I'm burned already) that's all shaded, which I think I will take him up on. All three sites are about 100 feet away from some of the most beautiful beach I've ever seen, so lunch time at any site still means I'll end up in the sun for at least a little while.

On the plus side, I will come back bronze. I think I'm going to actually have to try to not come back from Guam looking like a boot.



Anyway, if I go to the other site (the first latte site) I'll be working on the shallowest excavation. The other one, Casa Real, is the deepest, and also the least interesting in my opinion. It's a Spanish colonial-era building was standing as of the 1970's when the military bulldozed it, so it's a lot less exciting than the other sites. At the two latte sites there are tools and potsherds just laying on the ground out in plain site, which is amazing. And then of course there are the latte stones, some of which are still standing, albeit without the capstones on top.

Ours aren't as big as the ones in that photo I linked; they pillars are about waist-high and the capstones are less than three feet wide. They get much larger. That's from the quarry on Rota, apparently the latte stones around where we are in Ritidian are normally a lot smaller.

Tomorrow we start excavating for real, and at night we're going to get Chamorro food which is exciting because I have no idea what that actually consists of.

I suddenly have way too much spare time

Some things you all need to watch:

Forrest Gump in One Minute
Kill Bill in One Minute
Star Wars in One Minute
28 Days Later in One Minute
Minesweeper: The Movie
Machete trailer from Grindhouse MUST SEEE
Werewolf Women of the SS trailer from Grindhouse

Who put the goat in there?

Okay I mentioned India to Layne and he reminded me of this video, which I felt I had to share. I have no idea what's actually going on but the dancing is hysterical. At the same time I feel like I can't laugh because it also looks pretty difficult. Anyway, it has subtitles that say what it sounds like they would be singing if they were singing in English. Hilarity ensues.



I actually really want to know what this is from and what they're saying, it looks fascinating. And a little bizarre.

We're insinuating it

This is probably my favorite commercial ever.



"We're not saying this body wash will make your man smell into a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it."

This list goes to eleven

Things I have learned so far this week:

1. Japanese classes in universities are universally horrible and don't actually teach anyone Japanese.
2. I was born to be a medical anthropologist.
3. I never want to work in academia.
4. The university housing office can (and will) give you a roommate without telling you.
5. I am gradually becoming ambivalent to my responsibility to society.
6. No one makes red spiral notebooks anymore.
7. I do not belong in A) churches or B) gyms and going into these places makes me feel like an interloper.
8. My loony suitemate has made it very easy for me to go from 0 to bitchtacular when dealing with people's dicketry.
9. I was not made to get out of bed before 9:30am and taking 9am classes is a recipe for disaster.
10. The cafeteria food here tastes good if you've been lifting weights/running in the hours before dinner.
11. Death metal rooster makes everything better:

Was it an African octopus or a European octopus?

Look at this. This shit is bananas.

Octopi have been found to carry around coconuts to hide inside them. Apparently that's part of how they used to catch them around here-- coconut shell on a string.

Our biggest import is fat white tourists

This makes the smiles.

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:

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.

Suddenly, bananas! Thousands of them!

I have an upcoming presentation on Monday for Anthropology of the Body and, as of this morning, I am officially tired of reading about FGC. If I have to read one more value judgment about how psychologically damaging it must be for women to be circumcised without any accompanying condemnation of male circumcision I am going to have kittens.

Anyway, went to see Zombieland. It has by far the BEST cameo I have ever seen in a movie ever and I am including Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder when I say that. If you are afraid of clowns, though, I would not recommend it. There are zombie clowns. They jump out and go BOO and it's not funny at all. :| What was funny, however, was the guy I went with making very concerned noises in his throat every time Jesse Eisenberg did something awkward and creepy.

Unhappiness is deciding to finally wash all your dirty clothes late Saturday night only to realize that you don't have any money left on your laundry card and the machine to recharge it does not take credit cards or $1 bills, meaning that you have to wait until Sunday to go to the grocery store to get cash back in $5 or $10 dollar bills so you can recharge the card so you can do laundry.

Also: "You are being shagged by a rare parrot."

Which one of you preppies put gold dust in my fencing mask

If you don't laugh at this you have no soul.

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.

We got that boom boom pow

One really weird/cool thing about UHM is that there's constantly music everywhere. This is good because in NJ I would ask people "hey have you heard the new Radiohead yet?" and they'd be all "lol who." Usually I answer the blank stares I sometimes get when Radiohead comes up by going, you know, I'm a creeeeep, I'm a weirdo... but that didn't work there as apparently none of them had ever heard it. What the crap, even my mom knows the words to that song (hi mom, sorry mom).

Anywhoo there's been a DJ booth outside Campus Center all week for some reason and tonight there was a live band in the little square between the four Hale Aloha towers next to my dorm. I get woken up every morning by people driving around playing loud music starting at 5am which, while annoying, is still cool because at least the people out here are alive.

The downside is that living in a dorm and not having a car means there is NOWHERE I can play loud music and sing without anyone hearing me. Yes the no one hearing me part is important. It's not fun if you know your neighbor is sitting in their room griping about your bad taste in music.

This is unrelated to anything else but I just have a love affair with this video and I would like to pimp it as much as possible:

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.

I go to school with Rikki Tikki Tavi

If you want a closer look, just skip to 2:19.

I had no idea some clown had introduced the Indian mongoose to Hawaii. Apparently he wanted to get rid of the rats in his cane fields. Long story short they ended up with both rats and mongooses. If you want to see more of these anerable little badasses, check out this one taking down a cobra in India. They're so cool cats don't even mess with them. In fact, here's a group of them chasing a lion. Here's a less badass vid of one attempting to steal someone's lunch.