It’s cool ’cause I realized I could use my Dock again for the programs I use regularly, and just use my application launcher for the ones I need to summon just to do one or two small things on. It’s quite fun.

There was also an application to control iTunes that I downloaded. On the plus side, this was free. I kinda thought it was cool. To use it, you just click the bring down menu arrow, and the mini-app sorts all the music in your library by albums, artists,  and genres as well as recent versions of those three. You can play any song, artist, or album just by going through menus. It’s pretty awesome.

Okay, so now that I’m done with my geekery, I should probably write about how my life’s been. It’s been pretty good. I went to see Rent with Jen T. on Sunday, and it was amazing. During intermission I bought a keychain and a poster. Jen was making fun of me a little because I bought a lot of crap for more money than was necessary; what she doesn’t quite know, however, is that this is my wont.

I cried as I usually do during the second act. This was actually my third trip to see the musical, and it seems that no matter how much I go, that won’t change. It doesn’t actually bother me that it happens; I just think it’s funny that even though I know exactly what’s going to happen, I still become an emotional wreck.

When the cast finished singing Finale B, the actor who played Angel was telling the audience that they were selling special items. The proceeds from which would go to BC/EFA. For $20 I got a Rent Playbill signed by the cast who was currently performing the show.

I’ve been tabling for Day of Silence all week. The event is on Friday, and I’m kind of excited. I only have Russian on that day, and I don’t think my professor will have a problem with me not talking in class. I asked her about it and she pretty much said "That’s fine, but show up anyway; I’ll just talk at you."

And for some random other goodness, I introduced Dia to the joys of Final Fantasy XII. She seems really excited to have a new game to play. It’s a little frightening, considering her zest for World of Warcraft. I actually used the word zest. Does anyone else think that’s a strange word when it isn’t referring to fruit or a brand of bar soap? ‘Cause I do.

There’s an odd amount of people in the W/H Lounge right now. It’s kind of disconcerting. But, anyway, I really need to finish my research paper. I’ve got 2 1/2 pages to go.

::Slides over to the work desktop::

I was really excited when I heard that we were going to go because I had found on the FOF fora that Marc and Fausto would be at the expo. Which means that I would get to meet them after listening to the podcast for about two years.

I did get to meet them, and I got some pictures taken with Fausto. I was kinda sad that they didn’t have any shirts that I could buy, but I already have two so it wasn’t really that necessary. I did get a free pin though, which I’m rockin’ on my jacket. So that was cool.

The ResLife staff at Drew decided to put together and host The Price Is Right. It was cool. I was in the audience, but I didn’t get called down to do anything. I was kinda annoyed, because I wanted to win prizes. But one of the people on my floor won the Showcase Showdown, which was pretty cool. She got an iPod shuffle, which was probably the most expensive item to be won.

So I applied to WoCo House on Tuesday, and I found out that I got in this morning. It was pretty awesome.

I’m going to take a nap soon, and it will be fantastic. More random crap to come later this weekend.

Love!

So my English teacher gave the class a bit of an extension for our midterm portfolios. Instead of being due Thursday at 17h, they have to be in Sitterly House on Friday at noon. The extra nineteen hours will be helpful, but more than likely I’ll spend them procrastinating.

I plan on doing some work tonight, and finishing tomorrow. I’ve got 1 1/2 pages at the moment, and I want to get to three. Maybe four if I’ve got a good caffeine high going. History has shown me that caffeine tends to make me get less work done, though. We’ll see what happens.

I got back from the Alliance meeting about an hour ago. Jen D. had this great idea that involved silly string, which turned out to create a horrible mess out of Baldwin Main Lounge. She was even asking us why she thought that silly string would be a good idea. We cleaned up the mess after the meeting, and you can still tell that something interesting happened there. The important thing is that we cleaned all that we could. It tends to get stuck in carpet; without a vacuum there’s nothing more we could do.

We did some more planning for Day of Silence. There was an Easter egg hunt. Each egg we found had a task for us to complete in it regarding the planning for DoS. I’m going to be helping Christa make a stencil so that we can paint a message on t-shirts and helping create a chalk mural. Should be good times.

I should do some work now.

Anyway, here’s a really quick update about what I’ve been doing for the last four-odd weeks:

A few days after my last post Mandy held Condom Fun Night. It was an amusing hour of condom games and sexual health trivia. We played dental dam slingshot and had condom races. The dental dam slingshot game involved two people holding one of these devices and attempting to fling a condom as far as possible. They didn’t fly very far. I think one did go about three feet, though. The condom race required two people racing against each other to see who could put a condom on a glass dildo the fastest.

The week following Condom Fun Night, I had a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t technically a nervous breakdown, but as close to one as I’ve actually gotten. I was writing the first draft of a paper I had to do for my writing class. I remember feeling really overwhelmed by the thought of having to do this draft, but knowing how I usually end up completing papers, this didn’t strike me as being that out of the ordinary.

I only decided to call my Mom and tell her about this because along with the feeling of being overwhelmed, I had been experiencing some kind of sadness/depression/melancholia thing. This had been happening to me for a couple of years, but it was never as intense or lasted as long. I figured I should probably talk to her about this.

After I called her, I took a walk over to Asbury to see if Jen was in her room. I think I remember Samanda telling me she was at an Alliance board meeting. Anyway, I talked to her about what had just happened and what was going on. She was able to help a little and by the time I had finished talking to her, my mom had arrived on campus.

I left Drew for two days that week and had returned to campus on that Thursday with a recommendation for counseling at Sycamore Cottage and a prescription for Zoloft. Ever since I started taking the meds I’ve been feeling pretty decent. I don’t really feel as depressed as before, and the counseling I’ve had so far has helped.

So that was a major thing that happened. Besides that there’s really not that much to tell. Except that about two weeks ago I went with Jordana, Caitlin, and Hezaa to Morristown to see Rocky Horror Picture Show. It was the first time I saw it in a theater, so Jordana had marked my forehead with a big V in eyeliner. One of the cast members had requested all the virgins to come up on  stage for the "devirginization" process. We had to try to make louder orgasm sounds than the other people on stage. Hezaa won, and the irony was amusing.

I have been slightly obsessed with the movie and soundtrack since then, and my mom and I are planning on going to the midnight screening in Chelsea next weekend.

Jen traded in her FJ Cruiser for a Volkswagen GTI. We had a goodbye party for the FJ the night before she was to get her new car. Jen D., Jen T., Jordana, and I went to the Park West diner and while we were out, I was able to see both Jen D.’s and Jordana’s houses. They were both kinda ridiculous, though in different ways. Jen’s house was cluttered, so much so that I made some jokes about her needing to get the Clean House people to come to New Jersey to fix everything. Jordana’s was huge and pretty cool-looking. It reminded me of the kind of home the 90210 characters have.

Other highlights of my life from the past month include my family getting a PS3. It’s pretty damn amazing. I’ve got a few games for it already. I knew I had to get The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for it, since I’ve been wanting to play that since I heard of it. I’m also hoping to buy Rock Band, but it costs somewhere around $170. It may not happen. I’m kinda pissed that Sony took away the backwards compatibility feature, though. I was hoping I’d be able to play my PS2 version of Guitar Hero 3 on it, but no luck.

So it’s 4:12 now. I should probably go to sleep if I want to attempt to live a somewhat normal life.

After I’d showered, I remembered that I needed to finish doing laundry. I had done laundry on Thursday so all of my clothes were clean, it was just all of my hoodies that needed to be washed. I’d have done them at the same time but I only had enough detergent for one load, and I didn’t want to mooch too much off of Hezaa.

I walked over to the UC to pick up detergent. I was planning on doing laundry during the waking hours, instead of now, but I got distracted when Suzie asked me to make a card for Love Yourself Day. I ended up getting food with Amanda at the Snack Bar and sitting at their table for a while.

I finally remembered that I needed to get stuff in the Bookstore, and went to go purchase my crap. It turns out that the Bookstore didn’t have the kind of detergent I wanted, so I bought a magazine and three biscotti instead. I went back to the table and found out that Amanda was planning an event called Condom Fun Night. She’s planning on having condom races, and she even requested to use the glass dildos from Health Services. I was actually kind of surprised that Health Services had dildos, but there they were. It was kind of amusing that the women who walked by the dildos didn’t notice them at all, but the men who walked by were staring at them.

I went with Amanda and Suzie to a sex store on Rt. 22. It was really entertaining. I was looking at the sex toys with Suzie, and they were selling some ridiculous things. There were 16″ dildos and one very large butt plug. There were also a few penis pumps, which were a little bit disturbing. I’m not quite sure how they’re supposed to work, and I’m also not quite sure if they could negatively affect one’s health. We were in there for about a half hour, probably. It wasn’t as horribly sketchy as I thought it would be, but that might be because I didn’t actually look around in the porn section. I did notice a person leave with some discs, though. I didn’t realize that they’d put the porn you bought on a writeable-looking disc in a colorful jewel case. That’s nicely discrete. You could accidentally leave them in your car, and people who happen to walk by and notice will just think that it’s a disc you’ve burnt for a friend.

After the porn shop, we went to the Stop & Shop in Madison. I finally got my laundry soap there. I also bought a quart of milk, Jell-O flan, and some iTunes gift cards, because I’ve been wanting to buy music for a while.

I went to the Snack Bar around 20:00 to get something to eat, and I walked over to TOE aroun midnight for a snack. It turns out that there were some people playing music there. People whom no one knew. It was interesting because TOE is usually a fairly quiet place, but when I walked in there was this ridiculous playing this loud, screamy hardcore music. It was a strange experience. One of the other bands that had already performed were ridiculously trashed, and were being annoying and smelly. Suzie was freaking out, ’cause she had to work there while trying to tune out the music. Mandy was freaking out a little too because the musicians who were there had arrived already half in the bag, and were quoting Rage Against the Machine in the way that only really sloshed people can do. They finally left around 1:00.

My laundry finished drying about a half hour ago, and I’m going to sleep now ’cause I’ve got nothing elses to write about.

I just finished tabling for the Alliance. I sat there for two hours trying to get people to make Valentine’s Day cards and whoring chocolate Hugs and Kisses. It was fun, although I was also visiting random webpages, attempting to finish my DIS application, and doing Russian homework.

There was a general Alliance meeting last night. It was pretty normal. We started off talking about stuff that’s coming up, and then we had a circle discussion about love. It was an interesting time. I suggested last night that after the Support Group meeting we go to the diner in town. It’s a little Valentine’s Day tradition my mom and I have. We eat greasy food and be bitter together. We’re weird like that .

I just got back from the Support Group. The actual meeting was from 19:00 to 20:30, but I shared my VD (double entendre intended) tradition with the group. We went to the Broadway Diner.

It was interesting. Our waiter kept referring to us as girls, which makes sense sort of because Jen Tuson and Allison were there, along with Hezaa, and me. If someone doesn’t know Hezaa, xe would assume ze’s a woman. Me, however, not so much. Besides that, I ordered chicken penne pesto and I think I got penne alla vodka. It’s not what I wanted, but it was good anyway.*

We got back to Drew and I did homework. I decided to do laundry at around 0:30, and was done and went to bed around 2:30.

I just checked my Drew e-mail, and I found out that I don’t have Russian class today because my professor has the flu. I have a completely free day! What an awesome way to start the weekend. I kinda feel bad about taking joy in my professor’s sickness. I guess it proves that I am actually human, instead of the weird outer space alien that I was theorizing. Meh, life goes on.

*This paragraph needs a lot of annotating. Jen Tuson is the combined woman made of the Jens Toslu and Dugan. I use xe (pro: /ksi/) as a pronoun to refer to people in general, and ze (pro: /zi/) as a pronoun for people who wish to be referred to in a gender-neutral way.

I actually want to see how I can improve it. I think adding a works cited page would probably be a good idea; I’ve got the parenthetical references in there, I just forgot to create the last page.

So I went home on Saturday for my birthday party. My birthday’s actually 29 January, but we almost always have the party two or three weekends later. I don’t know why; it’s like that with my family. It’s just a weird tradition. My aunt and uncle gave me some money to buy stuff, and so did my grandma. My mom baked me a cake. It was awesome. It was only a cake mix, but it came out really good. She used Cool Whip for icing. It was delicious!

I came back to Drew on Sunday night, and attempted to do homework for six hours. I got none of it done. I suck . I’m seriously going to start doing some as soon as I finish this entry.

I had linguistics, Russian, and anth today. Thank god that I have an hour break in between linguistics and Russian. Mondays and Wednesdays would be hell if I didn’t get a few minutes to have lunch in between classes.

Linguistics class is always pretty cool. We went over a exercise about word order in Yiddish sentences. The prof also talked about Noam Chomsky and the so-called “universal grammar.”

We went over the genitive case quiz from Wednesday today in Russian class. I did pretty well, but I forgot that учитель was masculine, despite the fact that it was being modified by старый. I’m used to thinking that all words ending in a soft sign (мягкий знак) are feminine. Most, like дверь, дочь, and мать are, but not all, as I should’ve known. I think it’s kinda funny, actually, because the adjective was right there. Whatever .

Anthro was pretty cool. We started class with a discussion of The Forest People. That led into some notes about how various cultures use and interpret symbols. We ended class with a discussion of how various musicians are important to our culture, and how they can be thought of as symbols of our culture. It was pretty cool, because we started out talking about Elvis Presley, which led into The Beatles, and finally Bruce Springsteen.

I don’t quite remember how he was brought into the conversation, but I think it had something to do with how Reagan used Born in the U.S.A. as a campaign song, without any care about the lyrics of the song.

That actually amuses me a lot, though. You’d think someone would actually pay attention to the song, maybe listen to the words, before using it in your presidential campaign. I suppose they just thought “Oh, hey, this is a nice title, from an artist from New Jersey, so it must be a patriotic salute to the country.” ‘Cause that logic is absolutely flawless.

So, yeah, I’m easily entertained.

I found out on Thursday night that I didn’t get into Earth House. But it’s cool. I really like my floor, and as much as I may not like my roommate, he’s not deserving of a single. So now, even though I’m stuck with him, he’s also stuck with me.

Q.E.D.: Schadenfreude is a horrid bitch, but my life would be incomplete without it.

Anyway, I reregistered for Last.fm about an hour ago. My username is thesilentrevolt. Sound familiar, maybe? Yeah, so, I’m gonna go do homework and eat some Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds.

I’m taking Russian 2 & 4, Anth 4, English 1, and Linguistics 10. I like my Russian class a lot; it’s an awesome language.

Anth 4 is about cultural diversity. It’s been cool so far; I like it more than I thought I would. Caitlin is in the class with me, so that’s cool. We watched a movie about Franz Boas on Wednesday. It was pretty interesting; he was the first “real” anthropologist. By “real,” I mean not a ridiculous pseudoscientist who attempted to justify racist hypotheses through science.

My linguistics class is really cool, but since I’m on the waitlist I may not be able to take the class. I’ve been going to the lectures, but there may not be a space for me. It really kinda sucks, but I’m going back on Monday. Hopefully, the people who haven’t been showing up won’t start to. I really want to take the class.

English is okay. It’s more of a writing course, which I don’t like as much as a literature course. But I have to take it, so I’ll just get through the semester with minimal complaining. At least I have a professor who lets us choose our own topics to write papers on.

David Jay is coming to campus for a presentation on asexuality tomorrow. It should be cool to have him talk about it. I’m kinda excited. I need to bake a vegan-friendly cake for the event, and I don’t really feel like it at the moment. It’s not really that much harder to veganize a cake, but baking is such a process. I’ve never actually made a vegan cake, so we’ll see how it turns out. Hopefully, it’ll be good.

Jen Dugan is having a Super Bowl Party tonight, except instead of watching the football game, we’re going to be making posters advertising when Alliance meetings are. There should be a lot of fun involved.

And I still need to do my Anth and linguistics homework. Procrastination = death.

I had a job interview last Thursday. It was in New Brunswick for an environmental activist group in New Jersey. I got the job, which wasn’t really a surprise because anyone who shows up to the interview does. Anyway, I decided not to take it since it would only be around the New Brunswick area. It kinda sucked, but I’m going to see what’s going on at the Career Center once I get back to Drew.

I’ve been playing ridiculous amounts of Final Fantasy XII since I have so much free time. In about three days, I went from the start of a new game to being around the Tomb of Raithwall. I’m at the Stilshrine of Miriam right now. It’s actually the farthest I’ve gotten in this thing, and I’ve had it since around the time it was released in 2006.

I’m excited for XIII, it looks really cool from the pictures of it that I’ve seen. Maybe by the time it comes out, the PS3 won’t be such an expensive piece of plastic.

I’m excited about going back to Drew. I’ve missed it there. I can’t wait to see everyone from Holloway First again.