Anyway, in an attempt to make myself feel better, I’ve decided to fill out the Rice Roommate Form again. I’m including High School Patricia’s answers to make the comparison of how awesome I’ve become even more poignant. I’ve skipped the stuff that hasn’t changed, like my birthday and how tall I am.

PLEASE DESCRIBE YOUR FAMILY:
High School Patricia: Fairly average with a tinge of eccentricity
Like a sitcom except that it’s impossible to tell who is playing the Straight Man

WHAT ARE YOUR ACADEMIC INTERESTS?
High School Patricia: English literature, history
Library science, speculative zoology, mad science, adventure archeology

WHAT ARE YOUR EXTRACURRICULAR INTERESTS? HOW DO YOU SPEND YOUR SPARE TIME?
Reading, writing, library volunteer work, storytelling
Being too cool for school, watching bad movies, making cupcakes that look like dinner

FOR EACH OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS WE WOULD LIKE TO KNOW WHAT YOUR FAVORITE IS AND WHY…
BOOK:
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (High School Patricia apparently thought this was self-explanatory)
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje–I like a man who can complain about his family in poetry

MOVIE:
Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail
Twilight with RiffTrax–”Like, what, and stuff?”

FOOD:
Apple pie (cold)
Steven-made sandwiches or improbably fancy chocolate

HANG OUT
Borders
Carrboro–can’t beat seeing people walking ferrets on the street

HOW ARE YOU SPENDING YOUR SUMMER?
Working in the children’s department of the library
Fighting crime, time travel, wearing a variety of stupid hats

WHAT TYPES OF MUSIC DO YOU LISTEN TO? (LIST A FEW GROUPS/BANDS…)
Beatles, Great Big Sea, the Rutles
Lady Gaga, Jonathon Coulton, Jeremy Messersmith

DESCRIBE YOUR DREAM VACATION
Touring famous sites from English literature and having afternoon tea whenever possible
Hot air balloon paint ball war

WHAT THREE PEOPLE, REAL OR FICTIONAL, WOULD YOU HAVE OVER FOR DINNER AND WHY?
Gordon Ramsay, because someone will have to cook the food, Eleanor of Aquitaine, because I want to know if she invented flossing, and Rhett Butler
Teddy Roosevelt, Silas J. Mariner, and Mark Twain. They know how to party.

IF YOUR HOUSE WERE ON FIRE, WHAT THREE INANIMATE OBJECTS WOULD YOU SAVE?
My laptop, favorite pen, and Sydney (top hat and close personal friend).
Laptop, favorite pen, and Sydney (top hat and close personal friend)
This one also makes me sound lame, but, damn it, that pen cost like $200 and how else am I going to keep up this famous author facade?

WHAT QUALITIES DO YOU SEEK IN A FRIEND?
Loyalty, honest, wit, intelligence
The ability to shoot laser beams with their eyes, sense of humor

IF YOU COULD HAVE A ROMANTIC OR TORRID RELATIONSHIP WITH ANYONE, REAL OR FICTIONAL, MODERN OR HISTORIC, WITH WHOM WOULD IT BE AND WHY?
Napoleon Bonaparte, because he had a very impressive hat
Marie Curie, to break Michael Curtis’ cold, Danish heart

I think High School Patricia was just confused about how to fill out forms/was morally incapable of lying on an official looking piece of paper, especially for comedic effect. Good thing I got over that one quick.

If you run even more you can explore different parts of the pixelated island!

I really feel for maximum motivation, the jogging course should be replaced by something like this:

These guys I would totally run from

I know it doesn’t fit Ninetendo’s cutesy image, but it would be a lot more fun. The second level could involve fighting zombies in hand to hand combat, featuring the same air punches and kicks that the Wii strength exercises do, but instead of looking at this:

You would be fighting, kind of like this:

And maybe after you level up, the hammer becomes a chainsaw

Photo Source

I realize fighting zombies in hand to hand combat is kind of unrealistic, but it could be anything. Dinosaurs. Bears. The Mafia. I would even settle for an exercise version of Mario Teaches Typing where you punch blocks and kick giant turtles to death. I don’t understand why this idea isn’t already available, or, failing that, why I am not a millionaire right now.

After much debate, I decided to use this recipe, although I was especially bad about having the correct ingredients. I never seem to have the right size pan, and am horrible at remembering to double everything on the fly. Also, I randomly decided to pour snack mix on top. So here is my revised recipe (with notes about mistakes I made):

2 sticks unsalted butter
1 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups flour
2 cups oats
However much jam you have
1 package of Fruit & Nut mix with dried fruit and different kinds of nuts

1. Preheat oven to 350 and line whatever size pan you have with wax paper.
This part was fine.
2. Cream butter with sugar and salt. Add flour. Stir in oats.
This is the part where I realized my pan was too big, so I’ve doubled this recipe to match.
3. Press about 3/4 of the mixture into the pan.
4. Place jam in small saucepan and cook over lowest heat until it becomes liquidy, pourable, and looks vaguely like congealed brain or Halloween-style blood. Pour jam over pan.
I also underestimated how much jam I would need so it was more like a light dusting.
5. Sprinkle remaining dough and Fruit&Nut mix over jam.
6. Bake for 35 minutes. Cool in pan for 30 minutes.

Also, they cause fires.

I decided the best way to celebrate would be to buy chocolate from Miel Bon Bons, the classy “patisserie & confiserie” in Car Mill Mall. I’ve definitely wanted to check out their chocolates before, but was always intimidated by the extreme fanciness. I am just a humble grad student, albeit in the finest flip flops the mens shoe section of Target can provide (I have abnormally large feet). Nevertheless, today I felt I deserved it. In the end, Steven and I decided upon three.

Steven chose the one on the left, as you probably could have guessed from its lack of prettiness.

The ugly one on the left is a muscadine truffle. Apparently a muscadine is a kind of grape. It was DELICIOUS, essentially what Chocovine wishes it tasted like. The one on the right is sea salt caramel, equally delicious and rich, not annoyingly sticky like most caramel. Then, the weirdest one:

The purple one: clearly the best

Pineapple basil flavored! I know, weird. But oddly good. The pineapple provided a smooth background taste, whereas the basil and chocolate mingled in a nice blend I wouldn’t have expected. Yes, it was kind of strange to be eating basil in dessert form, but I’m not going to argue with purple tastiness.

Fanciness well earned!

Anyway, I have decided to change my mind:

Polka bands are clearly AWESOME. I want to form my own to cover Lady Gaga songs. I call accordion!

Also, I’ve been getting so much Russian spam on my blog that when I signed on Google was all: “We’ve noticed this page is in Russian, do you want us to translate it for you?” and I was all “STOP OVERRIDING MY DEFAULTS BY SHEER NUMBERS, SPAMBOTS.” Don’t worry, I won’t give up the good fight.

SHHH! Keith Richards, the grizzled veteran of rock’n’roll excess, has confessed to a secret longing: to be a librarian. After decades spent partying in a haze of alcohol and drugs, Richards will tell in his forthcoming autobiography that he has been quietly nurturing his inner bookworm.

He has even considered “professional training” to manage thousands of books at his homes in Sussex and Connecticut, according to publishing sources familiar with the outline of Richards’s autobiography, which is due out this autumn. He has received a reported advance of $7.3m (£4.8m) for it.

The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.”

The rest of the article can be found here.

Also, I’m going to DC today! I hope to relive my childhood and also show Steven what is what. It will be just like The Roadtrip, but much shorter.

At least, until now.

The trees here are greeting the return of warm weather by bathing us all in smoky clouds of yellow. I washed Trixie yesterday afternoon and when I went out to get the mail just after dinner it already looked like she had had some kind of run in with the car version of Goldfinger. Everyone in my classes is hacking and sniffling. And yet, I am fine. I at first assumed that I had died without noticing.

Then the girl sitting next to me told me that the best way to fight allergies is to eat the local honey, since it has been made with that same pollen. Like a tasty, tasty vaccination. It occurs to me that I have been eating extremely local honey bought at the farmer’s market for months now. Could my allergies finally have been cured from homeopathic, hippie folk wisdom?? Has my interest in farmer’s markets from my Literature and the Environment class at far off Rice actually saved my life? I assumed so.

Then I called my parents and they were all like “Allergies take a while to kick in, wait till next year and you’ll feel like you’re DYING”. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

Whatever, in the face of logic, I am going to embrace my smelly, hippie brethren and believe that they know what they’re talking about. You can tell how long it’s been since I’ve seen Jeremy Caves, the force of his good-natured, Parmesan-loving, eco-pushing personality is starting to wear off. I don’t think I’m prepared to punch someone for not recycling anymore as JerBear so often recommended. You’ll notice that JerBear has his own tag on my blog, though he would probably be too busy contesting this nickname to feel honored. Brian Reinhart is the only other person to have won this achievement (through his treachery).

“I love facebook invites. They’re so easy for everyone involved and you can upload hilarious pictures. I wonder if I can just make facebook invites for my wedding? And then everyone who clicks ‘Maybe’ won’t get food. It’ll be awesome.”

The second was:

“NEW MOON RIFFTRAX ARE OUT?????? Why didn’t Mike Nelson inform me PESRONALLY??? I am there.”

In case you are uninitiated, RiffTrax is a lot like my beloved Mystery Science Theater 3000 in that it’s a track you can play along with a movie that makes fun of it AND IT IS WRITTEN BY THE SAME PEOPLE. It’s different in that the movies are often real, theatrical releases and not The Incredibly Strange Creatures who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-up Zombies. The Twilight RiffTrax was definitely the funniest I’ve seen–probably because A) Twilight is horribly written AND horribly acted, and B) there is so much dramatic pausing to leave plenty of room to make jokes in between dialog.

So today Rachel and I (and Steven) experienced New Moon: The Movie: With Rifftrax. And it was so painful. I cannot imagine seeing it in the theaters without someone making fun of it in the background. Here is a rundown in case you are curious:

Bella: can best be described as—DRAMATIC PAUSE–”noodley”, we decided, since, like many toddlers, she seems to have trouble–DRAMATIC PAUSE–developing these gross motor skills and often ends up falling down or–DRAMATIC PAUSE–just going limp on the nearest available surface.

Edward: is incredibly squinty. Rachel thinks that may be–DRAMATIC PAUSE–Robert Pattinson concentrating to say his lines in an American accent. I think that he just can’t stand–DRAMATIC PAUSE–being near Kristin Stewart’s equally bad acting.

The Effeminate Background Elf Characters from Lord of the Rings: are now effeminate Italian vampires, apparently.

Now just imagine about 300% more dramatic pauses, and it’s like you ACTUALLY WATCHED New Moon. But 24 times shorter.

There are about a frillion videos on youtube of people doing ridiculous flips etc.

Naturally, I’m super jealous of Colorado, Boston, Ohio, California, Nevada, Missouri, and–OMFG YOU GUYS THERE IS ONE IN HOUSTON. What was I DOING for four years of my life when I could have become a trampoline dodgeball champion? I could have become a trampoline dodgeball coach! Wasted. Potential.

So. I got to the SILS library a little early and sat down at a table. Everyone around me was working on laptops and looking super serious. I felt slightly self conscious about sitting near them doing something silly like a crossword, so I spread the paper out and looked like I was about to analyze it for some kind of assignment. THANKFULLY my anxiety led me to actually look at the articles on the second page instead of just flipping right to the crossword in the back. So I saw this article with the headline “Zombie Attack Advice Comes to UNC”.

Naturally this led me to first think “WHAT? Am I doing a talk?” and then, since that was ridiculous, “WAIT IS MAX BROOKS DOING A TALK???” Because, honestly, who else is enough of a zombie expert to be trusted by such a large, public university like UNC? Rice may have been able to get by with just Charles Lena and me, but UNC has the money to pay for the best. If you don’t already know (for some reason, like you haven’t taken an amazing Student Taught Course about it), Max Brooks, son of Mel Brooks, wrote:

My copy is full of highlighting and underlines... AND IS NOW SIGNED

But his fame didn’t really skyrocket until he published the (more entertaining, though less informative):

Which I would recommend to anyone, since it's an amazing story

The audio book of the above is also pretty awesome, although they cut out my favorite part, the whole stolen Chinese submarine thing. World War Z is probably one of my favorite books, not just for the zombocalypse information, but for the character studies and writing style. I used both of these as texts for WIESS 101: Zombies in Fiction and Film. Which, despite some course evaluations, was totally bitchin.

I impatiently sat through my conversation with the visiting Korean scholar, and then ran out of Manning towards the Student Union, where I had never been before. I was surprised that there wasn’t a big sign or a giant crowd at the box office, and that there were still plenty of free tickets left. Do people not REALIZE how awesome this was? I grabbed two and guarded them with my life for the rest of the day.

The lecture ended up being held in the Student Union Auditorium, which was about the size of a small movie theater, and just as drab. I would say there were about 50 people there, which is shocking considering the size of UNC and the fact that it was MAX BROOKS. The lecture was entirely about effective zombie preparedness and debunking myths perpetuated by “the mainstream zombie media”. He also mentioned how we have to overcome our cultural biases towards some groups of people who may have co-opted good ideas we’ll need to survive. Namely, our natural-born hatred of hippies. Yeah, they don’t use soap and water, but that doesn’t mean they’re stupid, and we’ll need bicycles and working together to survive the zombocalypse. He also revealed that what we call “Z Day” in the US, Canada calls “The Great Pay Back”, and that they are preparing, on that day, to raise the Maple Leaf Curtain and guard their border with sharpened hockey sticks from helplessly fleeing Americans. I never trusted them. When someone asked if he’d seen the movie Zombieland, he replied, “Oh, no, but I’ve read the book; IT’S CALLED THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE”. There’s a (possibly better) summary of this talk in today’s Daily Tar Heel.

Then afterwards he signed books (and one person’s crow bar)! I told him I’d used his book as a text in a class I taught, and he thanked me for saving lives! You’re welcome, Rob and Roque. Sorry, Rachel, but Charles Lena is going to shoot you on like Day 1 because you’re a “straggler” and a liability to his zombie fighting team. And I can’t do anything about that.

So basically thanks to visiting Korean scholar wanting to meet too early for me, it was the BEST DAY EVER.