Figures that when I've finally mentally gathered some thinky thoughts on the last five seasons of Buffy and Angel I've watched recently, I'd head off on a five-day weekend trip. I vow to collect them in a notebook and then post! I'm putting this here to try to make myself remember. I have little to do at work besides think, so I have bullet points here on all kinds of fascinating topics, like "characters I like bestest" and "episodes I cannot stop thinking about" and "vaguely clever throwaway one-liners that crack my lame self up." Current winner in that last category: "Buffy needs back-up!" Anyone remember what that's from? I feel like people watched these shows so long ago. ;_;

Oh my god, WALL-E is SO ADORABLE.

Work is like, "Summer hours will be great! Sure, you come in at 7am and don't leave until 4:30, but you'll only work half a day on Friday! Think of how great that'll be!" Except all I'll do come Friday is SLEEP. It's not even ten and I want to go to bed!

Also, I borrowed a book for this weekend, because we're going on a three-day camping trip, but I want to start it NOW, and the library does not have any others in the series. So I'm distracting myself with short YA books from my youth. Like Animorphs. I have so many of those, oh my god.

(On early season 6 of Buffy and early season 4 of Angel. I want to smack both Willow and Connor, and Wesley is not getting enough love. Are these normal feelings?)

This is a ranty personal life post.

7am, I am woken by roommate 2, who is finishing her packing extremely loudly. She converses at normal volume with roommate 1 for approximately an hour, then goes to breakfast. She returns, packs more, converses more, and leaves. I am unable to fall back asleep with the sunlight streaming in.

10am, I give up on sleep and get to make breakfast.

12pm, I sit down to finish my last essay. 4:30pm, with half an hour to go, next-door neighbor Evan begins blasting his music. The bass vibrates my wall and shelves.

5:00pm, I pack and pack and pack.

8:00pm, I take a break to nap. Evan starts playing his music even more loudly than before. I can hear every lyric quite clearly. I search for the RA who is nowhere about. I seek another room to nap in--not only is Evan's music audible from the lounge, but the only room that's a real possibility has one bed with chatting occupants, one bed with boxes, and one bed with a napping occupant. I retire to my room to cry with exhaustion and frustration.

8:30pm, I start watching Angel because at least that way I can wear my noise-cancelling headphones.

10:00pm, roommate 1 runs in. "We're having an alcohol potluck! Want to come?" I reply: "I'm having breakfast with my parents at 8:30 tomorrow. I have to finish packing. We also need to clean the entire room, vaccuum, and debunk the beds." Roommate 1: "Okay. I was just asking."

My last night of my freshman year, and all I want to do is sleep and cry. It doesn't seem right.

Also, my roommate asked if she and her boyfriend could have the room for a bit tonight. I said sure, on the condition that they not use it too late, since I need to go to bed early and all. It's 10 and they've still not even asked. I'm going to end up locked out of my room at midnight while everyone parties drunkenly around me and I keep thinking about the shit that's undone, which my parents will blame me for, because they need to go to work Wednesday and the later we leave tomorrow, the more exhausted they'll be.

A "top story" on Google:

Clinton's Childhood Pastor Reacts to Her Exit
NPR - 1 hour ago
Weekend Edition Sunday, June 8, 2008 · The Reverend Don Jones is the former youth pastor at First United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Ill.

What? Why do we care?

Angel watching continues:

Wesley and Fred are SO CUTE.

I've hit the requisite body-swapping episode in Angel. It's taken me nearly two hours to get through the first thirty minutes because I have to keep pausing in awful embarrassment. squicksquicksquicksquick

I used the phrase "transfer you to someone who can address your concerns" on the phone at work today. I don't know whether to cheer that I'm learning how to sound semi-professional on the phone, or weep for the fact that, without training, I'm starting to say impersonal and meaningless things.

Finals are starting. This is how I feel:

AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

The campus-wide Primal Scream is not until Friday. How will I make it until then? Mostly by making squeaky whining noises at random intervals, something my roommates are used to and fortunately find sort of cute. Also I sort of flail in my chair and clutch at my head and inhale the fumes of my chamomile, and then stare desperately at my current word document for half an hour until I edit a single word in my final essay and feel mildly better.

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH.

I'm going to be up all night finishing a paper, and there is absolutely nothing getting posted anywhere that can function as short-term distractions. All I've got are Buffy and Angel episodes and X-Men comics, and all of those turn into long-term distractions way too easily.

Maybe I should, like, write the paper really fast and then have time for the long-term distractions.

Ahahahahaha.

The USB drive that my roommate's Vista laptop saved last night is, I think, dead for good. I closed out everything and used Safely Remove Hardware before unplugging it today, and it's still unrecognizable by all our computers. It also gets really warm whenever I plug it into something. Later I'll try turning off my computer for a bit and giving it another shot, but I think it might just be gone. Now I'm wondering if it was "just its time" or if my old fritzy laptop actually killed it. I have a free 512mb USB drive I'm using right now to transfer episodes; if it does not work after it's spent time in the laptop, I'm going to assume that that computer is a flash drive murderer. And then, well, the laptop will be useless to me, as I can't seem to get it internet access. Fantastic.

Vista is actually good for something!

I had a .rar file containing an avi I wanted to watch on my laptop. When I realized I did not have winrar on my laptop, I foolishly changed the extension to .zip and tried to extract. Obvs, this did not work, so I unplugged the USB drive it was on and plugged it into my desktop, to unzip it there and place the actual avi back on my drive. Except: USB port malfunctioned, device not recognized! So I unplugged and replugged, and tried every single port I have, and then I plugged it back into my laptop, and unplugged and replugged, and googled for help and tried some things, and stopped short of editing the registry only because the file I was meant to delete wasn't even there, and when my roommate noticed me throwing the drive down and putting my head in my hands (because I'd saved files to the USB drive that were backed up nowhere else, ironically because my dad had warned me never to save things directly to my old and unstable laptop), she suggested we try plugging it into HER laptop, which runs Vista.

And lo--it scanned, it found things okay, it opened the drive, and immediately popped up with the error message I'd had in the middle of my bad extraction attempts when I'd unplugged the USB drive. She cancelled the action, deleted the zip file, safely removed hardware, and gave the drive back to me to try in the desktop. And it worked!

So I've backed up my files and vowed to be a lot more careful with USB drives in the future, and also to remember that Vista has at least one useful function. Now I can watch that fucking Doctor Who episode and go to bed.

The watching continues. I want to read some Buffy/Giles. Am I a bad person?

After nearly a year of hiatus, I started watching Buffy again. I'd stopped early in the third season. And, like usual, I, um, put off certain commitments to marathon for a bit, and now I'm on the last disc (ps, thanks again Kita!), which means frantic downloading of the fourth season before I run out of eps and go mad.

I also started rewatching Queer as Folk. That's right, the show I never actually finished watching the first time (stopped in fourth season for the same reason I stopped Buffy--lost momentum). I'm on second season now. I think it's my reaction to SGA being done for the season. Somehow my very intellectual love for Criminal Minds and my extremely reluctant rekindling for Doctor Who do not fill the fannish hole in my heart.

(Speaking of Criminal Minds, I can't find a torrent. Was there not a new ep last night?)

There's a strange smell and an awful lot of giggling in the hall, and I was puzzled for a while before I remembered the date. 'Tis college.

This is the first time I've started drinking in a poor mood, and, as it turns out, alcohol doesn't magically change things. If I felt outside the group when I was sober, I still feel outside the group tipsy. I'm such a genius.

And it's amazing how little it takes to give me that feeling. I usually drink with L, C, and Mo, and I like it. Sometimes Me joins us and it's also cool. But take out Mo and add B and suddenly everything's off.

I downloaded Boa vs Python when I saw it uploaded, figuring I could force myself through gore and bad acting for some awesome David Hewlett, and maybe so I could start reading all this crossover stuff with Thoughtcrimes (sga fandom, you realize we're really weird to cross two wholly unrelated movies just because a couple of the characters are on another show together? yeah? cool. I love it). But, in my efforts to judge just HOW much gore I was going to be faced with, I came across the plot keywords list. Uh. Is this a snake movie, or a porno? There are a few I expected, like "Shot to death" and "Giant snake," but then there's "sex," "sex in a car," "cunnilingus," "bikini girls"... Please, Hewlett, you are awesome, but stop doing awful movies. I already tried and failed to watch Darklight and Scanners II. This is getting frustrating.

ETA: This movie is SO BAD. When's David show up?

ETA2: Obviously David eventually showed up and I took to skipping every scene that didn't have him in it, as that makes the movie 70% better. But now there is snake sex and he is talking about snake penises omgwtf

What is wrong with me? I'm contemplating going to bed at eleven. I got up at nine! I shouldn't be tired!

You know how sometimes when you try on new clothes because no one else is home, and admire yourself in the full-length mirror, and realize you look damn awesome, so you do a little dance, and pose, and admire the way the clothes make your legs/breasts/ass/whatever look so much hotter than usual, and can't bring yourself to take them off even though they're wholly inappropriate to what you're doing?

Yeah. So right now I'm wandering around the house in heels, tights, and the most fantastic black skirt I have ever owned. Mmm.

Rilo Kiley - Hail to Whatever You Found in the Sunlight That Surrounds You

Been listening to it a lot lately, I share with you. I've no idea what it's about but I like the sound of it, musically as well as lyrically.

Hail to those who have come from the sunlight that surrounds you
Pray for those who have gone from the sunlight that surrounds you
Hail to whatever you found in the sunlight that surrounds you
Pretend all the good things are for you
Pretend all the good things are for me too
And the weather changes not halfway between your house and mine

I'm sorting out my recent saved SGA pics, because I've been lazy lately and just tossing them into the main folder rather than subfolders. (Computer claims I've got 3800 files in that folder. CLEARLY it is lying.) But I think I really will do a picspam tomorrow or soonish after, because for once I've got free time, and there ought to be some good coming out of this magpie nature of mine. Probably some SGA, some Criminal Minds, maybe some DCU scans if I feel like delving into that pit of chaos, and perhaps some cute animal pictures to finish it? I hoard those too. They're useful for calming down my roommate when she's stressing out, I've found, particularly if I email them to her without a word and just wait for her to check. Inevitably there's a delighted "awww!" and then two or three minutes of beaming.

I have 450 gigs of hard drive and yet cannot fit Neverwinter Nights 2?

*rages futilely*

*uninstalls some stuff*

*weeps*

(The biggest program I have is an export helper for EndNote, which is the program that makes citations and bibliographies ridiculously easy. It's bigger than Oblivion. Dear god. I don't know if it's safe to get rid of it!)

Iz mah birfday! \o/

19 years old, which means as of today, I can do...nothing I couldn't do last year. Dear me, it's positively thrilling.

Chère flist, you make me happy. I'm pondering a multi-fandom picspam, whatever prettiness I've got on hand and maybe some random funny or awesome. I'm a hoarder by nature so there's a lot. We shall see what I feel up to tomorrow.

My English final is in an hour. I sort of want to die right now. Except I can't, because the grade on this test (in most likelihood) will either not hurt me or improve my total, so I need to go and I need to do well but fuck, English Lit has just been like a stresspot for me this term. It pops open by itself and stress streams out, just for me! Oh thank you stresspot. *weeps into keyboard*

(Sanity to return in approximately two days, expected to last until grades come out.)

So after my supervisor gave me a bag of Hershey's kisses to help get me through finals, I decided it really was time to take a picture of how much chocolate and candy I have amassed in my dorm room.

( PhotoBucket shrunk it but it's still kinda big )

I've started offering my chocolate with greater frequency than I have before, with the aim to get some of this eaten before Easter lands me even more loot, so I think I shall be quite the popular girl on the floor before term's up. *beams*

Found via elandrialore


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Goes without saying I am bemused by these results. Apparently I am worth $900 more than the average person taking this quiz! Hooray?

I feel like there are good times and bad times to lose your focus and your cool at the end of term, and the night before a lot of stuff is due is not one of the good times. At the same time: Holy fuck, this is the last week of term, I have so much to do, and I haven't had real fun the past two weekends, and I want to curl up under my bed and mumble nonsense and maybe stop being sick. The challenge is good for me, I like the academic rigor, but oh I'm so tired.

Also, sometimes I want to write in iambs, and I find myself crying things like "Thither must we hasten!" and I'm really enjoying this Lit class but maybe it's time for a break.

ETA: I swear sometimes I'm perfectly content and on top of things. It's just I don't usually feel a pressing need to post at those times. I confess that having a journal, aside from assisting in easy reading on a variety of topics, is more for my own stress relief than for, well, journalling.

Dear sophomore in the single next door:

Does your music need to be that loud for a small, friendly game of Beirut? Really? My furniture is VIBRATING, and not in any fun way.

My friends on the floor just threw me a surprise party for my birthday (which is in exactly one month, when we'll all be on break). I am so amazed and touched right now. Will have details later, because a couple things very nearly went wrong, and the only reason I didn't figure it out is because I am a MORON.

A very happy and loved moron. With a new stuffed bear, and cake and pie and balloons. Eeee.

This is amazing. And they say us kids aren't into politics.

I feel like I have never been colder, waiting in the open-air observatory for a chance to look through the sixteen-inch telescope, and yet the internet tells me it is only -8.

Also, the eight-inch, which was pointed at Saturn and allowed one to see its RINGS, was way cooler and had a shorter line. It is so awesome to be at a school with big refracting telescopes.

I don't think I mentioned this at the time, but earlier this term I was sick for approximately a month and a half--really sick, with coughing that kept me up all night and the like, for the first two weeks, and then a lot of varying symptoms, which the nurse suggested was my repressed immune system letting through every little bug I came in contact with. It was a little bit miserable, but it never kept me from work or class, so I took some Diphen and I took some Tussin and I took some Sudafed and drank water and slept a bit and got better.

However, I live in a dorm. A mostly freshman dorm. Someone is always sick, like musical chairs with disease, and now it's my turn again, and I'm coughing enough to get a headache and lose my appetite, and it's eighth week (out of ten) and I just want to be healthy so I can focus on my schoolwork.

*stares sadly at Ben Jonson poetry*

On the plus side, I love everyone, and mostly everyone loves me, and there's a lot of chocolate and heart-decorated post-its to show it, and also some hugs and kisses we should probably cut down on if we want the floor to ever be healthy again, but I don't think we will because that's what makes life good.

And now a link!

"Is it a good day in America? Is it a good time to be in this broke, disgraced, sexually bewildered country when the lumbering and lost state of Texas finally crawls, lurching and sputtering and blinking hard, into the 19th century as it finally, against its will, is forced by the courts to allow sex toys to be sold to adults, thus leaving only Alabama and a bit of Georgia to stare into the void of their own unused genitalia and scream in abject terror?"

I've got this column on a feed and yet I only read it rarely. I really must more often.

So I ought to be writing witty things about early English literature so as not to do awfully in this class, but instead I am thinking about uploading some of the high-res pictures my Dad and I have taken on vacations around the country (mountains, lakes, wild animals, flowers...bugs). Might make for some neat galleries. PhotoBucket, however, hates high quality and resizes everything. Does anyone have a suggestion for a decent photo-hosting site, easy to navigate and link to?

Prof emailed to ask why I haven't been doing a type of assignment that gives me anxiety. Now I have to go speak to the prof about it, and THAT is giving me anxiety. I am going to be a massive bundle of anxiety and probably break down in his office and it'll be awkward and awful and I'm going to get a bad grade.

*breathebreathebreathe*

Today was my first time seeing the Vagina Monologues! \o/ I loved them, the happy and the sad and the angry and the empowering. The moaner? Was fantastic. Damn. One of the men I went with had to whine that the angry/sad bits made him feel guilty to be a man, so I tried to explain how the Monologues are for us and that turning the attention back to defensive men, who ought not to feel attacked if they really are the non-capitalized nice guys they claim they are, defeats the purpose of giving women a voice this way. Alas, I am not very eloquent. I think he got the start of the idea, at least: we talked it back and forth a bit, and he started making agreeing sounds and dropped it.

Aside from that, they were all fantastic, and "coochie snorcher" is my euphemism of the day, and ({i}) my ascii emoticon of the week.


(Why is LJ underlining 90% of my words in red in the update box? I know I'm not misspelling things, what the fuck?)

(ETA: Seems it's attempting to spell-check in French, which is what my browser is set to. Er. LJ. Just no.)

Is it wrong of me to judge people based on their reaction to that one S4 casting spoiler for Doctor Who?