Food Lion was more crowded than I’ve ever seen it today
though still not in Florida Hurricane Preparedness Proportions.
It’s next to a sad Burger King, the wrong side of a disregarded exit
Off 54
Everyone was buying:
Their weight in cans
Bottled Water
Candles
Bread and Milk.
Children bundled tightly in snow suits, staring at the sky
Waiting
There was only one man ahead of me
In 10 Items Or Less
He was buying:
A container of chicken wings
A case of beer
Eight frozen pizzas.
He looked like a man who knew he was prepared
In a way the Weather Channel would never think to advocate.
I was buying:
AA batteries
Powdered sugar
Chocolate chips (the two things I’d forgotten for baking)
A giant candle in a glass holder with Arch Angel Michael killing some demon.
I know it was somehow Catholic, but they were the only candles left
It was either Michael or a dead Jesus
And I thought defeating demons was marginally more cheerful
Than to have the eyes of a sad Christ look on
As I try in vain to complete the World’s Largest Crossword after the power goes out
By the light of a candle meant for religion
But somehow next to beer and chicken wings and chocolate chips on the conveyor belt
Just the same.
I spend all of my time in a building designed by M.C. Escher hearing people who haven’t worked in a library in 10+ years prattle on about “What IS information” and “the philosophical meaning of the public library” and how we decide what’s GOOD for our patrons, as if the very fact of BEING a professor in library science weren’t elitist enough. Sometimes other people talk and it is interesting. Most of the time other people talk and they are either A) trying to impress the professor and therefore incomprehensible, B) telling meandering and irrelevant stories about their personal lives, or C) both. When I am not there, I am at home reading the same thing but in written form, and pretending I agree for grades. Sometimes there are also practical assignments, which tend to take three weeks and twenty-five group meetings.
2. I have a job
I get paid to part-timedly do a full time job. It’s like being a public school teacher, but with even more complainy parents and way less vacation.
3. I AM IN GRAD SCHOOL
I don’t think this can be stressed enough
4. The Winterpocalypse is coming
The Weather Channel’s headline this morning was “Winter Misery”. I have decided to just prepare for a hurricane while wearing three sweaters.
5. You can’t believe everything you read
Interesting story: the runner up for the title of my blog was “The Daily Narwhal”. The joke would be that it would neither be daily, nor a narwhal. Hilarious!
Now I am going to read 100 pages of something about how “people negotiate their information needs”, buy batteries, and go to sleep for the first time in like two days.
Tomorrow is Bova’s birthday, so I’ve decided to compile a list of some favorite Bova memories/reasons why Bova is amazing!!!! In honor of Bova, this post also has 30% more exclamation marks!!! These are mostly in the order I thought of them while driving home from work, and should not be considered a comprehensive, authoritative, or even factual list. Since there are way too many things that are amazing about Bova to fit in one blog post, I’ve decided to simply use some of the lesser known ones that I, her fellow THE 434 member, have special memories of.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1. Night of the Comet
You seriously do not even know how amazing this is
Night of the Comet is your typical sci-fi disaster post-Apocalyptic zombie movie mixed with a sassy coming of age story all set to a ironically awesome 80’s soundtrack. I was skeptical in the beginning too, but Night of the Comet did not disappoint. Every time I thought it couldn’t get even more awesome, IT FOUND A WAY. Another amazing movie I would never have experienced if Bova hadn’t taken her D3 professor’s derisive comments about its lack of scientific accuracy to heart and ordered it on impulse from Amazon Marketplace. Not only do I think about Bova every time I remember how great this movie was, I also learned from her and it the valuable lesson that impulse purchases of questionable taste are ALWAYS even more amazing than you could ever expect. For instance: the time I rented Santa’s Slay. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not psychic (very often) but I can predict right now what things are going to annoy me today.
1. It’s cold outside, but the bus will be a sauna. Everyone will be packed against each other and sweating in their big jackets. It will be disgusting.
2. Slow girls in high heels, short skirts, and tights will walk slowly in front of me, complaining about how cold they are and how far it is to walk across campus.
3. It’s cold outside, but the computer lab where I have my first class will somehow manage to be EVEN COLDER. It’s been this way all semester, the thermostat will argue, why should anything change now? Shortly before I leave for my second class, a light dusting of frost will appear on all the monitors.
4. Since it’s the last day of cataloging, Goth Prof told us to send her topics that we were interested in so that we could look at those in more detail. Just as a guess, I’m betting no one has burning interest in any area of cataloging that they think we just haven’t covered in more detail. Goth Prof will then decide to show us all the different subject headings for cats.
5. Goth Prof actually has a sticker on the back of her laptop that says “Meowist” with a little cat dressed up to look like Mao and a bunch of red stars. I have been staring at it ALL SEMESTER and only realized last Thursday what it was trying to tell me. It will annoy me that I didn’t realize this earlier. I will attempt to take a picture with my cellphone, but that will also fail.
6. Today will probably be the last time I ever see Goth Prof, and I still have not solved the mystery of why she is like 26 and still Goth.
7. I will slip on the stairs as I’m coming home.
8. Having to go to work.
9. Having to drive so far to work.
10. Traffic.
11. My first tutoring group of the day will not stop talking. I will threaten them. They will ignore me. My attempts to bribe them will work marginally better, but not really.
12. My second tutoring group will consist of one good student, one good student who was free basing pixie sticks before coming in (only possible explanation), and one easily distracted student who hates math. Deadly combination.
13. Having to drive so far to get home.
14. I will slip on the stairs (again).
15. My apartment will not have magically filled with ball pit balls.
16. We will be out of sandwich meat.
17. The hot water will cut off about 2/3 of the way through my shower.
18. We will also be out of juice.
I live about a half hour walk from campus so I almost always take the bus. The only bus that goes by our apartment complex is the lovable J Route that, during certain times of the morning, becomes so crowded with students from the apartments around here that we are forced to stand awkwardly against each other and drive by most stops after mine. The first week it was fun to watch the people at these stops throw up their hands angrily as the bus sped by, but now they’re quietly resigned. You’d think that with us all being students, you’d get to know the same faces of the same people going to the same classes at the same time every week. This, strangely, is not so. I always seem to be waiting at the stop next to completely ridic people whom I then never see again. I always want to surreptitiously take their picture with my phone, but that would be kind of obvious. Instead, I have started keeping a list.
List of Ridiculous People I Have Seen On the Bus 1. Guy in trench coat and Dr. Seuss hat. Added weirdness: this was before it got cold out, so there was really no reason for long sleeves. 2. Mystical Gypsy Fortune Teller Lady. You know that stereotypical character the heroes in the movie/tv show always consult once randomly about their fate/birth mark/mysterious past? I sat next to her on the bus once. 3. Girl with large, oddly red layer cake. It was like blood red, and huge. 4. Small child that stared at me, making roaring noises for fifteen minutes. ROARRRRRR! 5. Mormons. Asking everyone who got on what questions they would like to ask God. I said, “Why are manatees such useless wastes of space?” They chose to ignore this, but my follow up question would have been, “If he’s so omnipotent, why couldn’t he make them to get out of the way of my speed boat?” 6. No Pants Girl. First day of legit chilly weather and she was wearing a sheer skirt and a thong. How do I know she was wearing a thong? Because her skirt had no lining so I could see it. Well, more like I could see that she wasn’t wearing anything else more substantive. She seemed confused. 7. Sleepologist girl. Today I overheard this conversation–actually, overheard is maybe a misleading word. I was standing five people away from these two and couldn’t HELP hearing because the one was pretty much shouting:
Girl 2: cuts everyone in line to stand in front of Girl 1’s face HEY!
Girl 1: makes some kind of sleepy grunt noise
Girl 2: HEY! What time did you go to bed last night?
Girl 1: I don’t know.
Girl 2: WHAT TIME?
Girl 1: I really don’t know.
Girl 2: I WILL NOT ASK YOU AGAIN!!!
Girl 1: I guess around 3.
Girl 2: THREE?!?!?! You NEED to SLEEP!
Girl 1: I did sleep.
Girl 2: ONLY FOUR HOURS IS NOT SLEEP. Then they had a brief debate about exactly how many hours and minutes she’d slept. This seemed to be confused by the fact that they kept hearing the other say different times, and neither seemed to be able to subtract in base sixty
Girl 2: Well, whatever. THERE IS NO WAY THAT WAS REM SLEEP!
Girl 1: Rapid eye movement sleep.
Girl 2: NO, you need AT LEAST six hours a night. And NO sleeping in the library! And no excuses about coffee.
Girl 1: It was Mountain Dew or whatever.
Girl 2: NO EXCUSE! Watch TV for thirty minutes under the blanket, lie on your bed in the dark, close your eyes, and try to think calming thoughts. The bus arrives. I sit near the front. They sit in the back. Despite other people on the bus, I still hear vague shouts of “SLEEP!” and “THIS IS NOT A REQUEST!” throughout the bus ride.
I can only assume Girl 2 was some kind of sleepologist in training and Girl 1 was her test subject who kept refusing to follow orders.
Granted, the last day of classes isn’t till next week, so I still have time to become an expert in at least three more things. Consider this list a work in progress:
1. Getting off an entirely too crowded bus without smacking anyone in the face with my bag Some of the undergrads still need to learn how to do this 2. Looking like an incredibly serious studier in the SILS library when I am really just reading trashy teen girl novels This week’s is about a slutty California girl and a prim English girl who switch places! Recipe for amazing? Or just trite Prince and the Pauper knock off? 3. American Born Chinese 4. Finding information about causes of the American Revolution (still in progress) 5. Wheedling Steven into doing ALL of the cooking 6. And the laundry 7. Being cold 8. Bribing children into doing what I want 9. Writing poorly plotted novels way fast. 10. Negotiating an apartment full of appliances/fixtures that all ALMOST work exactly right 11. Making my parents feel guilty about how I’m Gonna Make It On My Own Christmas is going to be awesome 12. Ignoring my blog for long stretches of time Luckily I don’t think anyone’s noticed. Or maybe sadly. 13. Every program in Microsoft Office Except PowerPoint but we’re starting that today! It’s funny how the waiver form for this course wanted you to know all these programming languages, but the actual course is just an intense semester-long Microsoft Office tutorial. 14. Being resigned Some battles aren’t worth fighting. Like the battle to get my collection development prof to give us any grades ever. 15. Not slipping and falling down the stairs every time it rains You may laugh, but they are MAD dangerous. Three people have already plummeted down them.
This week I’ve been preparing for my triumphant return to H-Town next weekend to see my one-act and collect my royalties, which have been upped from three pies to three pies and one trashy romance novel after I valiantly and selflessly agreed to add ten more lines of dialogue at two a.m. I’m not really sure if it’s humanly possible to eat three pies in two days, but I’m excited to find out. You know, FOR SCIENCE.
Anyway, I made a list of all the things I miss about H-Town that I want to be sure to do while I’m there. Then they were all restaurants and I realized I couldn’t eat lunch twelve times on Friday. So I’ve decided to dig deeper, and think about what non-food things I miss about H-Town.
1. On-Ramps
It's like I'm living in the futuristic dystopia... TODAY!
Steven has always said that, unlike him, I’m a “natural Houston driver”, which I assume means “not a total wuss”. I really miss the needless enormity of the Houston highway system. Sure, it ruins the landscape, but I always feel like I’m entering a giant game of pinball as I speed up the oddly inclined on ramps or am about to rocket into a hover car skyscape a la The Jettsons. Sure, North Carolina roads are less intrusive and more in tune with the natural environment, but they make me feel two-thirds less like a super spy. Read the rest of this entry »
As previously stated, Seminole, Florida is a suburb which, oddly seems to have no real “urb” to be a “sub of, since the entirety of Pinellas County is really just a conglomerate of similar houses and strip malls, searching for a metropolis. You know, and the beach. But it’s still home and here are the four best things about it, should you ever be trapped here on some kind of low-budget Floridacation.
1. The Water Tower
So this water tower was originally a really drab blue, but they decided to jazz it up when I was in middle school and hired an artist to paint gigantic native Florida birds on it with some clouds in the background. This made total sense, until someone decided that the water tower’s natural shape would lend itself really well to painting a big orange cage over them all. Obviously this image creates a few troubling philosophical questions: if those are clouds WITHIN the cage, did some even larger person put a cage over THE SKY? How could these birds, even at normal size, even fit in a bird cage? Is this a metaphor for human interference being akin to a harmful cage put over THE ENTIRE NATURAL WORLD? Or, we could go with my immediate reaction the first time I saw it: “OMGOD THAT OCTOPUS IS ATTACKING THOSE BIRDS!”
Apparently the city agrees with my complaints because they wanted to paint over it awhile ago, but people complained, saying it was “good for giving directions”. Read the rest of this entry »
Just like every other time my brother has forced me to watch something on youtube, the first time I saw this, I was skeptical:
However, the second I saw a giant–nay, MEGA shark attacking a plane while it was FLYING IN THE AIR, I knew this movie would not only be a masterpiece of artistic subtlety, but also an eyeopening account of important global events that the media and Hollywood often ignore. Namely, when prehistoric, giantass sea creatures are unleashed on a totally unprepared modern society. Oh, the Valuable Life Lessons I learned! Read the rest of this entry »
Harmless Gullible Freshman... OR IDENTITY THIEF???
She looks a little TOO happy considering we convinced her to buy most of the Wiess Garage Sale. I mean, don’t get me wrong; I love Rachel Liontas. If there was some kind of bracket system to determine The Best Freshman, she would totally be in my Final Four (now that I think about it, why DON’T we pit the freshmen against each other in a dramatic, death-defying battle for the seniors’ love? Or is that the Freshmen One Acts?). At the wildly successful Wiess Garage Sale, Rachel made off with the following from THE 434’s stash of amazingness: a coconut cup, kickball, Mystery Date Game, pirate hat, Rubix Cube, shiny pink 80s dress, hot pink toga, cowboy hat, Christmas lights, and red star sunglasses. This list is a little too calculated to be just random, impulse buying. Clearly she is amassing all of our definitive possessions in a wild bid to become THE 434 after we have gone. DO NOT BE FOOLED. Just because it is pink and sparkly does NOT mean that it is necessarily Bova! Read the rest of this entry »
