Prepoceros

Today during Lit I got a sudden craving for something. Problem was, I wasn’t sure what exactly it was. I could see it, smell it, taste it…but since I didn’t know where to get one, there was no way to satisfy the craving. The Starbucks caramelly nutty brownie-whatever I had in my backpack did *not* hit the spot, for once.

It was something like a Hot Pocket, but more closely related to actual food. Greasy, flaky, stuffed with vegetables and butter and…stuff. I have no idea what it’s called or what’s in it, really, but wow. So yummy.

Now that I think about it, it might’ve been something I had in Holland. Damn. I still kinda want one, whatever it is.

For today’s link, we’ll just stick with the baby animal theme and recommend you visit Kitten War.

There’s something about wearing a long-sleeved t-shirt that makes me feel fabulous and not-myself, as though I were some 20-something chick on TV who regularly drinks tea and reads the paper at the kitchen table before heading out for yoga and a pedicure, or whatever it is 20-something chicks do nowadays.

Maybe it’s because I don’t often wear t-shirts, long-sleeved or short-. Blame my private-schooledness, perhaps, but I feel moderately uncomfortable wearing a t-shirt in public, like I’m walking around in my pajamas. If I ever do wear a t-shirt out of the house, it means I’m sick, sad, or preparing to get some serious work done that day*. The same goes for untailored pants.

Or maybe it’s because I associate the long-sleeves-and-leggings look with distance runners, by whom I am marvelously impressed. And while we’re listing random reactions I have to an article of clothing, I’ll also note that I can only wear long-sleeved t-shirts as second layers. Wearing something baggy without a fitted layer underneath makes me feel all nekkid. Hi, I’m strangely pre-occupied with my own clothing, for someone who has never cheerled**.

The puppies at Daily Puppy can’t hold a candle to my Sam-Sam, but they’re still worth a peek and an awwwwww.

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* When I have a big paper to write or project to finish that I intend to actually do, goddammit, I’ll put on clothes that don’t match, look ridiculous, or are excessively frumpy. Somehow this is a signal to myself that I’m in work-mode. This has always felt like an obvious thing to do, but it seems strange now that I think about it.

** Inventing past participles is fun and easy.

I’m usually not big into the art scene*, but I spent this afternoon at the ArtCrawl**. I realize the website isn’t particularly helpful—the idea is that a bunch of studios in the downtown area all open their doors once a year and put on free shows for the general public.

I didn’t know quite what to expect, thanks to my aforementioned “art scene” ignorance and the uninformative website, but I found myself pleasantly surprised. The sense of overall organization was, um, not overpowering, but everything seemed to work itself out, and I didn’t have any serious goals in mind besides “see art” and “come home alive,” both of which I accomplished handily, thank you very much. Secondary, fortuitous goals-accomplished included “pick up free shiny cards with pictures on them,” “walk around inside cool old buildings,” “buy a necklace slide,” “watch a demonstration of glass bead-making,” and “ride the bus a lot.”

It was nice to walk into a fairly-fancy art studio with absolutely no intention of buying any of the thousand-dollar paintings hanging on the walls and still be greeted warmly and encouraged to look around. I’m usually intimidated by small private art-y places (i.e., not museums) because (a) I don’t have the kind of money those folks are interested in and (b) I don’t know what the protocol is, how I’m supposed to behave.

Most of the studios were in a part of town I’d never visited before, and I had no idea there was so much culture hidden away in these nondescript old warehouses. It’s almost as if…as if Houston were, gosh, I dunno, a big city or something. Who knew?

When I’m sitting at home with my internet and my puppy and my Starbucks, I don’t often have the inclination to get up and go see art. Art is frivolous, I think. I have more “important” things to worry about***. But when I actually get off my ass and go see art, I realize that art? Art is wonderful, yes it is. The world needs art. I cannot live without art. Art art art.

I was particularly impressed by an installation on immigration. The creators of this project passed out six hundred disposable cameras to immigrants and Minutemen along the Mexican border, bundled with addressed, stamped envelopes and Walmart gift cards that would have money added to them if the cameras were returned. Seventy-three of the cameras came back, evenly split between the two groups. Many of those photos were posted in the gallery, along with portraits of and interviews with everyday folks on both sides and a documentary film.

I’m woefully undereducated on current immigration policy and practice, especially considering my Texas residency. This exhibit did good work towards correcting that. In particular, I now have a bit more sympathy for the Minutemen. I’ve still got plenty of sympathy for the immigrants, of course, but less of a knee-jerk incredulous reaction to the other side.

Okay, I’m running out of time and falling asleep, so I might as well end here. Link? Um, go read The Onion or something. I’m going to bed.

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* Is there such a thing as the “art scene”? Do people even say that? Perhaps there’s more than one. I’m so far out of the loop I don’t even know what shape the loop is or where it is or how many loops there are. Ha, awkward literalization of idioms FOR THE WIN.

** I say “the” ArtCrawl as if I’d heard of it before last week. I have no idea how well-known it is.

*** Like posting a goshdarn entry every goshdarn day goshdarnit. I hate writing under time pressure. I feel like I’m churning out nothing but crap, but every night it gets to be 11:50 and crap is all I’ve got, so I cringe and hit Publish. Blargh.

Rereading last night’s post jogged my dream-memory*…

This morning I dreamed I met Oprah as a young woman, back in the seventies. She was in the audience at a big public trial, and she became famous for declaring a few unpopular opinions, then proclaiming that she trusted almost no one in the world.

Now whenever I see Oprah, I’ll think of her in a white pantsuit and flipped-out hair yelling, “The Irish! I trust the Irish!”

EDIT (11:25 PM): Oops, forgot to post a link. [Here were four unnecessarily-angsty paragraphs about why I’m linking to this site. The short version is that I’m feeling all emo tonight**.]

Don’t visit The Saddest Thing I Own if you’re happy today. Save it for a time when you’re already sad, or when you need a good cry.

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* Not the same as real-life memory. See here.

** For some reason Sammy is all snuggles tonight, so it works out. I’m deep and dark; he’s warm and cuddly.

I don’t know what it means, either. I dreamed it thirty seconds ago, not in bed where I ought to be, but scrunched in an awkward position against my couch. You know that weird in-between state as you’re falling asleep, when your thoughts seem to be a continuation of what you were thinking a minute ago? But if you stop and think about it, they make no sense at all? Mmm, that’s good stuff. Hilarious.

Oh look, there we go again. I drifted off for maybe a minute between paragraphs just now and dreamed my mom was in an aerobics class out in front of our house.

This is probably a common sentiment here at the halfway point, but I don’t know if NaBloPoMo is good for me (or you). Knowing I “have to” blog everyday makes it seem like a chore, so I put it off and put if off and put it off until it’s 11-something, and then, instead of writing something that might be worth your time to read, I’m racking my brain for a quick and dirty topic I can dash off with as little effort as possible. Whatever runs through my head in the last ten minutes before midnight I write down, and somehow that counts as a post. I’m doing this at this very moment, as I’m sure you can tell. Sorry.

Lazy link: Postsecret. It’s self-explanatory. I’ve blogged about it before.

I’ve just made what might be the world’s worst cup of hot chocolate. The top is covered by a lovely grainy skin, and about a third of the way down it becomes too sludgy and chunky to drink. Even the part I’ve managed to swallow was far too sweet, with an aftertaste of burntness. You should see the pot I made it in—the residue is slimy, yet powdery. Intriguing, and wholly unappetizing.

I wasn’t expecting much. The milk was sketchy to begin with, having a “sell by” date of November 9, and the hot chocolate mix was SUPERsketchy—it’s been sitting open in the pantry for at least six months, and I’m pretty sure I opened it for the first time in 2003.

Why did I even bother? Well, there was no other chocolate in my apartment, as usual—no cake, no cookies, no ice cream, no candy—and I didn’t want to bother running out to Starbucks, for two reasons: (1) it’s cold out, thanks to a curiously strong wind that’s only just now dying down, and (2) I’ve been in a relatively good mood and gotten some things done these last couple days, and when I’m in that sort of mental place, the mere thought of junk food makes my stomach turn.

Okay, xkcd posted a new comic today, so we’ll make that our link of the day. As the tagline explains, this is “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” and I love it because many of the comics are REALLY REALLY DORKY. But then again, some of them aren’t—it’s a grab bag.

I have to admit that I’m partial to the dorky ones. Like today’s comic:

If you’re not a math person, you’ll have to trust me that this is cute and clever. Chuckle. Does enjoying “inside jokes” make me a bad person? It feels sinful.

Today was a long day, much of which I spent staring at this here screen, picking through the requirements of three departments in an attempt to lay out a plan for the next eighteen months of my life. My eyes refuse to be subjected to further torture, so this is about all I can stand to write tonight. But here I am, obeying the letter of NaBloPoMo if not the spirit.

Speaking of scratchy eyes, I had a fairly frightening dream last night in which my eyeballs were rotting away (because of an infection, I think)—prescient, perhaps. But then again, in that same dream I was also trying to escape from the Nazis in a Ryder truck along with the other members of my orchestra, only to be thwarted in my search for a hiding place by plastic playground equipment of gigantic proportions, and none of that happened today, so maybe the eye thing was a coincidence.

Have I linked to Finslippy yet? I don’t think I have. Go there.

I’m trying to focus on the positive things about today. This afternoon we had a test in Latin. I almost didn’t rock it, but a few minutes of cramming in the parking lot ensured that conditional statements and deponent verbs were, in fact, rocked. Yay for at least one easy class.

After school I went to a coffee place because I knew I would get nothing done at home. I still had internet access, but there was no puppy to play with and I couldn’t watch YouTube. After getting the compulsive bits of newsreading procrastination out of the way, I worked on a Nutcracker Market post for a while, but the words weren’t coming out the way I wanted them to, and I couldn’t get it organized properly. It still needs revision, which is why you’re reading this post instead of that one.

After almost an hour of decent work (on the post), I suddenly lost all focus and didn’t regain it for the rest of the evening. This probably goes without saying, but I would like to be able to control my motivation and ability to concentrate. They seem to come and go with little warning, and though I’m sure there’s a reason each time it happens, I’m not usually conscious of it.

Again, blindingly obvious here, but I imagine the first step is to figure these reasons out. I ought to keep some sort of log of my focus levels and possible contributing factors: food, sleep, time of day, stress, location, yada yada. Why am I telling you this? I don’t know. This is the sort of “project” I used to embark upon as a child/teenager/aw heck, I still do it all the time: detailed, ambitious, and destined to fail or be forgotten about within twenty-four hours. But there is a germ of a good idea in it, no?

Hello, and welcome to my ramblespace, my brain dump, my sounding board when Sam’s asleep. Come in, sit down, and prepare to be bored out of your mind. Cookies and lemonade are on the table in the back; please help yourselves. No, I didn’t remember to bring napkins this time. Eat your free cookie and quit yer bitchin, geez.

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Linkage: If you’re in the mood for food porn, look no further than Chocolate and Zucchini. I’ve been reading C&Z for a couple years now, and Clotilde has never failed to bring the deliciousness. The descriptions! The recipes! The photos! This woman knows her way around a kitchen, folks.

Every time I read about another dish she’s whipped up out of nowhere from all that wonderful fresh food, I look at my sad little bowl of pasta (or worse, sack of tater tots), and I am ashamed. Le sigh.

My OTHER favorite thing about C&Z is getting to practice my French food-words, which constitute probably half of my passing acquaintance with the French language. I don’t really know any verbs, adjectives, or function words to go with them (except of course manger), but I can translate a shopping list like nobody’s business.

Today is seventeen minutes from being over. I had a post half-planned, but I can’t say what I want to say in seventeen minutes, so you get this instead. And by this I mean jack.

I was ready to tell you about the funny dream I had while lying on the couch just now “brainstorming” for the post I was going to write, but deleting the 183 spam comments I got today has made me forget it.

I still don’t know if yesterday’s video is salvageable. Best Buy was closed when I got out of my last tutoring lesson tonight, by which I mean I forgot to check.

Link: Funniest writing on the internets? Mimi Smartypants. Go there; you will see. I usually LOL *for reals* at least once while reading a post of hers, which is a compliment so clichéd as to now carry nearly as little weight as ‘LOL’ itself, but it’s six minutes to midnight so HA.

Did the market happen? Yes. Am I going to tell you about it tonight? No.

Like last year, there was lots of delicious free food, lots of tacky sparkly things, and lots of walking. Walking walking walking. Seven and a half hours of walking.

So I’m tired, but generally happy. Things are good, except…oh right. My camera? It’s being a little bitch. It claims to know nothing about this “Nutcracker Market” or the twenty minutes of footage it told me it recorded there. All it knows is blue. The online manual suggests that I clean the heads, but I don’t have a head-cleaning tape, and I can’t be arsed to go get one tonight.

Blah. Whatever. I’ll assume the tape is still good and deal with it later. Right now I’m going to bed. I might not have much to show for today, but I do smell really good. This is logical somehow, yes.

Lazy tired-person link: You’ve heard this before, but go read Dooce. If you’re into that sort of thing.