Prepoceros

I seem to have strained my eyes, or at least that’s what it feels like. For the last little while, any time I’m on the computer for more than an hour I get headaches and feel nauseated. I feel that way now, in fact, so there won’t be much more of this typing thing. It’s as good an excuse as any to go to bed—I’m a little behind on sleep.*

My point, I think, is that this is frustrating. It means I’ll have to start making blog-reading the LAST thing I do when I sit down at the computer, not the first, otherwise I’ll spend my hour or more without accomplishing anything. Sigh. My life is so hard.

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Teaching from 6:00 to 9:30 on back-to-back nights when you have class during the day from 11:00 to 5:30 can be rough. At least I don’t have to stand up the whole time in order to learn. Sam, I think, would also prefer that I not be gone so long. Yesterday morning when I left he hid under the bed and barely looked at me when I said goodbye. This morning was better: he still stared at the ground in that depressed-but-adorable mood of his, but at least he let me rub his ears a little.

School is school. Most of my classes seem like they’ll be good ones. A couple are great, a couple crummy. I’m still waiting on my overload petition to go through—I’ll go in and bother the receptionist again tomorrow.

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I expected to get my LSAT score back on Monday, but it came in today. On this test, you could miss one question and still get a 180. I missed both of the questions I thought I might miss, plus two more through mistakes I made—not careless mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless. My score was a 175.

On (what was, IMO) the hardest Logical Reasoning question on the test, I stared at it for a good minute, put down a plausible guess and circled it, then came back at the end of the section to stare at it for three or four minutes more. Just as time ran out, I got a flash of insight into the problem and furiously erased and rebubbled my answer.

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I don’t know if it’s the stress or what, but I’ve been having an exceptional number of dreams that I would really rather not have, thank you.

A few days ago I dreamt that I was being chased by bats. They couldn’t fly, and they hobbled amusingly slowly, but there were three of them, they were clever, and they were definitely rabid. One of them blocked the exit to the room I was in, and the other two tried to trap me in a corner. I kept feeling pricks and scratches on my bare feet, but I could never see any bite marks.

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I don’t check the traffic stats for this site often, maybe once every six months. If I were trying to make money here I might care a little more, but since most of Prepoceros is me watching myself type . . . meh. I did pull them up a few days ago to write the NaBlo recap and was reminded of my favorite type of web statistics: search terms! Folks have found their way here on the hunt for all sorts of wacky things. Shall I share?

We’ll start with the mundane and move toward unfathomability. By far the most popular phrase that brings people to Prepoceros is “GRE percentiles,” which I assume leads them to these posts. Popular variations on this theme include “GRE percentile curve,” “how to know GRE percentiles,” and “GRE quantitative 800.” I also get a good number of hits from people searching for information on the LSAT, like “what to eat the morning of the LSAT” and “why is the LSAT so damned hard?” and a few more from people searching for SAT or ISEE information.

People have also found me by searching on my full name, or on my name plus some identifying information, as in “natalie lastname harvey mudd” or, recently, “natalie lastname houston blog.” I don’t have a firm policy on how searchable I’d like to be. My thoughts on that topic are rambly and best saved for another post*.

I think occasionally people who come here via search engine might actually have found what they were looking for, and that warms my heart a little . . . connectedness and all that. Each of the following is a search term about which something useful—lists, discussion, or maybe a link—can be found on my site. (Pssst! Search bar, top right.)

puppy nicknames
adjectives ending in ly
rhymes with junk
footie pajamas for grown ups
words that tickle the tongue
jejune definition
pictures of hurricane rita from texas
cherry preserves houston nutcracker market
hold our slide rules high
plural for starbucks
my axiom of choice you know it’s true
veere middelburg

Then there are the phrases which *might* have hit their intended targets, but it’s hard to say what the folks behind these were thinking. Want to read the archives, but don’t have hours to spare? Here’s a twenty-second highlight reel of the last eighteen months of my life:

hate tvmax
death obsession
overcooked pasta
flea bomb didn’t work
tomorrow’s going to suck
severe butt bruise
teaching lsat
astroporn
classical studies
something happen to my brain
shit i need to go to bed

One surprisingly common phrase has been “eager to please synonym,” a reference to this post. I DON’T KNOW EITHER, PEOPLE. But do let me know if you find a good one, thanks.

Here are some phrases I remember referencing, but which I’m fairly certain this site contains no useful information about:

swankie blankie
collapsible hamper
leta armstrong
floating cinema
glass menagerie jonquil
pas de drapeau pas de pays
22 degree halo

And finally, the most entertaining category: the WTFs. Today’s title is taken from this group. Reading through these brings up so many questions, like “How many pages of ‘fisting’ results did you have to flip through to get to my link?” and “When did I ever say ‘bongoballs’?” I could search for these things myself, I suppose, but I prefer to preserve the sense of mystery.

barbie jet
wowdy woo
anodyne machine [I don’t even know what this is]
video clips of whole severe thunderstorms going over
ancient dildo
how electricity runs through dvds
take apart put back together working
good traction shoes [I *wish* I had some of those to write about]
words that mean something else [something besides . . . what they mean?]
shameless sexgirls
myspace and modern dance dance and layout
petsmart groomers killed my dog [two similar searches — this has happened more than once? More than NEVER?]
what will happen if my dog ate 24 ibuprofen
stuffed moose for wax dipping
me naked highschool [sorry to disappoint]
animated weather in bulgaria
essays on walnut cookies

So there you have it. By typing those in, I’ve now guaranteed that the next person looking for a stuffed moose for wax dipping will come here FIRST. Hello, weird moose candle person!

Since I can’t think of a way to conclude this post, I’ll shoot off in a tangential direction and mention that for some reason I’ve suddenly remembered my dream from this morning. In one vivid scene, I was Britney Spears, and I was taking a huge dump in a tiny office. The rest of it was actually rather nightmarish — part of the time I was in Jennifer Aniston’s body, I think, in a fabulous dress, which was nice, but I was desperately running from some horrible people who wanted me for a crime I hadn’t committed. I nearly drowned several times and barely escaped being crushed by the pieces of a very complicated elevator. I tried to hide in the locker room of a public pool, but I didn’t have the right color towel, so they spotted me right away. And the worst of it is that you stopped caring several sentences ago. Good night.

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* I removed my last name from the “about” page here a few months ago**, but there are still a few old comments lying around signed with my full name and linked here. I could ask the owners of those blogs to edit my comments, but I haven’t decided I want to be that anal about it yet.

** . . . and five minutes ago I got the bright idea to search my own site and turned up another reference I hadn’t noticed, in an old post. D’oh.

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.

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.

When I wake up on my own feeling well-rested and ready to get out of bed in a few minutes, and I take a few moments to enjoy this rare experience, thinking about the dreams I’ve had, snuggling with my puppy, wondering how much extra time I’ll have this morning now that I’ve woken up early . . . and then my alarm goes off.

It’s better than my usual painful wake-up routine, but still. I was all excited for a minute there, damnit.

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P.S. “Central crisis of my psyche”? That’s rich. I should write while I’m awake.

[UPDATE: Video version here. Same story, a few more details.]

I’m subbing for an LSAT class this morning, and I only found out yesterday, so I haven’t prepped the lesson very well. I really needed to sleep tonight, but even though I went to bed right at midnight for what would’ve been a not-quite-adequate seven hours of sleep, I tossed and turned (not even thinking about LSAT or anything in particular, just unable to sleep) and didn’t drift off until around 2:00.

Now I’m up early, as you can see, but not by choice. I just had the most awful nightmare I’ve had in months. Most of the dream was a long, slow story that was of course quirky, but not very emotionally charged. But then all of a sudden things went all to shit and the last few minutes shot from boredom to confusion to worry to terror. I woke up right before I found out just how imminent my death was, but as I was waking up, the dream rewound itself and replayed the last minute or so, and this time IT WAS WORSE.

I’m going to try to go back to sleep now, though I don’t know how productive that will be, as my first alarm is set to go off in half an hour. Though I feel awake at the moment, I know that I’m nowhere near well-rested, and I can’t even imagine starting my day, not to mention teaching, on the sleep I’ve had.