Fifty Fifth Post

Just to let you all know, Google is now creeping on you and using my blog to do it! That's right, I gave into the man (and my empty wallet) and signed up for Adsense. Don't click things because you like me, click them because they look genuinely interesting (because I can get in trouble otherwise). 

Hopefully the ads are cool and you like them, because it would be freaking awesome if this was an actual money-making venture for me. 

By the by, since my last post I have been hired by a place that starts up in June, contacted by a guy for tutoring his grade 8 daughter in maths, and applied to about a dozen other places. I've also had my housing issues at University of Sunderland mostly resolved (see these posts on my study abroad blog for the whole story there), and my visa issues are starting to look less insurmountable. None of my plants have died, and I'm going to an old friend's wedding on Sunday. Life is actually looking up right now. 

Fifty Third Post

As we approach finals week, I find myself less and less inclined to do homework. Rather, I have taken to watching Doctor Who, both the old and new series somewhat simultaneously.
The old series is kind of hilarious. It's got intriguing plotlines and terrible costumes, effects, and fight choreographers. I'm in 1964, and it's in black and white. William Hartnell is the first Doctor, and in this season, he and his 15-year-old granddaughter Susan (I have yet to figure that one out) are trying to return two british schoolteachers, Ian and Barbara, back to London, 1964. Unfortunately, the Tardis is rather broken. Instead of returning them, it drifts aimlessly through space-time, dropping them in unfortunate places about the universe. I'm almost done with the first season, though, and I have high hopes for their safe return.
The villains are... Well, they're more to be pitied than mocked, since they have such terrible costumes. The Daleks, of which I know only through nerd culture references, are introduced early on, although I doubt that they are intended to be a far-reaching series villain. At one point, the group runs across a race of rubber suit-wearing villains with odd headdresses, and that same story arc also features a brain with eyes that lives in a jar. The villains grow more sophisticated as the series continues, and in the second-to-last story arc (I cheated and looked at the descriptions for the next couple episodes to see when the story arc ended), the villains are actually humans trying to kill off an alien race.
I mentioned that I'm also watching the new series, which is only four or five... maybe six seasons along now, as opposed to the 20-odd seasons that the original series boasts. It picks up where the original series left off, featuring the ninth Doctor (played by Christopher Eccleston). He's nothing like the first, which is to be expected. It did throw me off, however, when I watched an episode with an energetic middle-aged action-hero man who saves London from an invasion of animated plastic with the help of a 19-year-old London girl (Rose Tyler, a long-running companion, according to the infographics that keep popping up in my RSS feed) before watching an episode with two suspicious teachers and a cranky old man living in a telephone box in a junkyard (and nothing much else happened).
It was less than promising. However, even in the 20th century, they didn't make 20-odd seasons of a TV show if there was no interest. With any luck, the series would get better. Plus, I keep hearing about a guy with a scarf... the fourth Doctor, I think. I want to make a similar scarf, but I'm not going to until I've seen at least three episodes with him wearing the scarf. Imagine the awkward, nerd-cred destroying conversation with a true believer:
True Believer (TB): "...I like your scarf."
Me: "Thanks."
TB: "Make it yourself?"
Me: "Uh, yeah. It's my Doctor Who scarf."
TB: (excited and suspicious, and justifiably so) "You've seen the original series?"
Me: "Well, some of it..."
TB: "Have you seen the episode with the fourth Doctor when he... (describes episode)?"
Me: "Erm, no. I'm still in the first Doctor's seasons."
TB: "..." (hopes crushed)
Me: (forever labeled as poser)

So yeah, I'm going to wait, no matter how much I want that incredibly long, incredibly stripey nerd culture icon.
I do feel, however, that I have seen enough episodes to qualify for a Tardis mug, found on thinkgeek.com (what a wonderful site!).
Here's some photoshopped fun from the wedding in England (or is it photoshopped? Hmm?).

Also, I realised how crotchety I'm getting when I reread the bit about "even in the 20th century". I'm not sure if that makes me elitist against the 20th century or what, because it really wasn't that long ago. Besides, I spent a pretty solid half of my life in the 1990s. Of course, I watched things like Zoom, Other PBSkids Shows, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, Sesame Street, Barney, Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, The Price is Right, MacGyver, Hercules, and Xena: Warrior Princess. I may have also caught a couple episodes of a show with Superman in it, since I have odd memories of phone booths and underwear right before a meeting to which the guy with glasses was late. I was under the impression for a few weeks that when one wanted to dress business casual, superhero costumes were in order. I was also convinced that any trouble I found myself in could be solved by having MacGyver around. Hercules or Xena would also be suitable alternatives.
In retrospect, I'm really not sure why my parents let me watch these shows. Anyway, I now pick my own shows, half of which are for the shirtless men that inhabit the strange world of TV land. It's not like I get any attractive men without shirts at college, and a girl has her needs.
That sounded weird, so it's time for bed. Goodnight, world.

Fifty Third Post

I have been accepted to through a study abroad program to Sunderland University in England!
Read about that at a dedicated blog that I set up so that my family and friends won't stumble upon this blog that may or may not malign them from time to time. I named it "Raeann's Study Abroad Adventure" because that's what it's about.
And... Yep.
It is midterms. You might get an interesting post over spring break. If you want one tonight, it'll have to be about Arthurian literature; if you want one tomorrow, it'll be in German.
Actually, that might happen.
However. I've been typing on this crappy keyboard that puts the b on the wrong side of the little ergonomic hump thing and has a two-thumb spacebar that clunks horrinly if I use just one thumn.
I don't care enough to fix it when my Bs come out as Ns any more.
Deal with it.

Fifty Second Post

Mostly, I just want to say that I have a bone to pick with The Little Mermaid.
Shells are impractical and sound painful.
That is all.

Okay, I lied. It's not all, although I am done talking about The Little Mermaid.
I have exciting news for you all!
That's actually a lie. I have exciting news for me, and I'm pretty much it. And I guess one other person is pretty psyched as well. I have a roommate for next year! (My future roommie is the other psyched person, and I know this because she is the one that did the asking. Otherwise I'd have my doubts because I have no self-esteem when it comes to my friends.)
A mutual friend of ours described the arrangement succinctly — "Raeann and Megan: terrifying men everywhere in 2012."
I think it has a nice ring to it.


UPDATE TWO YEARS LATER: Megan and I ended up not rooming together because I studied abroad and it would have been a nightmare, so she got a single after evaluating all other possible options and the hell that is our housing system on campus and I moved into a friend who studied abroad in the spring's room.

Fifty First Post

That's right, it's another post!
All in one day!
This one is about Fridays.
At my school, don't know about others, we have this thing were people assign a fashion function (gah! alliteration...) to days of the week.
Examples include Wacky Hat Wednesdays, Fancy Fridays, Flannel Fridays...
It is Friday. I am wearing a skirt.
It really looks as though I am participating in Fancy Friday.
In fact, I am not.
You recall how I switched sleep cycles? After wearing flannel pyjama pants all night/day, I decided that I didn't feel like wearing pants.
Logical conclusion -- skirt.
Because I don't like looking like I'm in middle school, I wore a nice blouse with my skirt.
Upon reaching my last class, someone commented that they were doing Flannel Friday instead of Fancy Friday.
I realised that I looked pretty fancy.
Except I wasn't being fancy, I was... not wearing pants.
F*** Pants Friday.
There. I'm not being fancy, I'm f***ing pants.

Deal with it. (if the .gif is broken for you)

Fiftieth Post

Halfway to 100!
I totally wish that I had something cool to put up. Instead, I will just reveal to you that I managed to shift my sleep cycle by 12 hours.
That's right, I made myself nocturnal.
How, you ask?
(Note: I will be using military time for the most part to keep these times in order without using AM and PM all the time. 13:00 = 1 PM, 20:00 = 8 PM, 08:00 = 8 AM)
While recovering from illness, I took a nap at 13:00 on a Thursday afternoon, intending to only sleep for a few hours.
I woke up at 17:00 and fell right back asleep after a glance at the clock.
Then I woke up at 20:00. Having achieved seven hours of sleep, I was feeling pretty good. I mean, I don't really get the whole "falling asleep before midnight" thing, so I usually end up getting six hours of sleep and swearing that I'll go to sleep earlier the next night, then playing on the internet and losing track of time and repeating the cycle all over again.
Every day this happens.
So my body is pretty cool with six hours of sleep and generally considers seven hours to be a treat.
I decided that I would just stay up all night and go to my 08:00 class as if it happened at 20:00. After all, I have a night class two days a week, and I get through those just fine...
What I didn't consider was that I would have to actually go to class and function at my usual late night hours. Those are the hours at which I eat junk food and play on the internet and lose any and all vestiges of coherent thought.
I discussed Mass Spectrometry and identified two molecules using Mass Spec, Infrared Spectroscopy, Proton Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and Carbon Nuclear Magnetic Resonance at my body's 20:00.
I took a quiz and discussed the German educational system at my body's 21:00.
I discussed rhetorical strategies and made plans for a community-improving project at my body's 22:30.
And I ate lunch with lots of random people at my body's midnight.
Unfortunately, this nocturnal thing can't work. First: Tuesdays.
Tuesdays are my hell days every other week. I have an 08:00 lit class, then a noon lab that lasts until about 14:30 (officially). On every other Tuesday, I have a two-hour live lab for German class that lasts until 16:30. The problem: Organic lab never gets out early, which would be required for me to get to live lab on time. No, Organic gets out closer to fifteen minutes late on a weekly basis.
I'll be twenty five minutes late to every freaking live lab, and I am not happy.
Anyway, being nocturnal would mean being awake and functioning until my body's 04:45 every other Tuesday, and being able to do complex labs wherein one has to multitask like a madwoman (yes, even the men have to multitask like madwomen, which elicited a few groans of terror from the pre-meds) just to finish on time over multiple weeks with multiple labs going at once and all this at my body's midnight?
No.
Even if it weren't for Hell Tuesdays, my roommate would hate me if I was nocturnal.
I would make it impossible for her to be doing awake things as is natural for an awake person to do in the middle of the afternoon. She would be unable to bring friends over in the afternoons, when no one has class. There is nowhere to go on campus at night, so I would be leaving my light on all night all the time. The poor girl can't sleep well with the light on, and she was really restless last night.
No, being nocturnal would not be in my best interests.
So now I have to fix this thing.
My efforts to return to a diurnal sleeping cycle so far include staying awake far past my natural bedtime. As of this post, I've been awake for 17.4 hours. I'll have to make it at least 22 if I want to get enough sleep to get up early on Saturday so that I can be on a normal schedule for Monday, when I have a German test.
Moral of the story, kids, is don't be nocturnal if you're sharing a room.

Forty Ninth Post

Ninth. Nineth. Ugh. Ninth is right, but it looks like it should sound like "nihnth" instead of "nienth" (or "neinth", if you're German, and if you are... please let me know, because that would make my life).

I had an adventure, unfortunately proving that my life is not all that boring.

After a stressful eight days, my body decided that it couldn't function without one particular object, and my brain decided that that was a good idea. It, too, refused to function properly without this object.
The object? A viscoelastic liquid commonly known as "Silly Putty" (probably trademarked, registered, or under copyright protection of some sort by Crayola, also trademarked, registered, or copyrighted). For some reason, my fingers decided that they needed something with particular amounts of give and resistance. My brain interpreted this as my impression of ThinkGeek's Smart Mass Thinking Putty. Unfortunately, I needed it right then. The thinking putty is at least three days away, probably more like five, and almost $10. I don't really have $10 to give to Timmy (the ThinkGeek monkey), so I moved on to Silly Putty. Silly Putty, at least in my memories, is no more than $3. Similarly, it is probably at WalMart.
I can get to WalMart. I have a friend with a car.
So I texted her, hoping that it would in fact be at WalMart. She readily agreed to participate when I said "Would you mind a silly putty-finding adventure?"
Since both of us are rather strapped for cash, it promised to be a boring adventure. But once we got to WalMart, we discovered that finding what one wants in the toy section is difficult.
We tried the "Novelty Toy" aisle, which has some creepy "lifelike" creatures. I kind of think of them as "deathlike", since how many live snakes squish creepily under your hands, as if they have no bones at all? Same for spiders, which don't have bones, but do have structure to their bodies. But Silly Putty isn't a novelty toy.
We tried the PlayDough aisle, which was likewise unproductive.
It's not a car, or an educational toy. No, it's not on an aisle at all!
Silly Putty can be found at my particular WalMart on the first aisle of the toy section, sort of, the second long row back, on a stand all to itself. It is $2.
Having found the Silly Putty, so essential to my thought process, I tried to pick a colour. Each package had two eggs, one original and one "bright".
The Original putty comes in red eggs. Unfortunately, it's not red. So I had no way to tell whether or not the "bright" putty was the same colour as its egg. I wanted... not yellow, not orange, and certainly not pink putty... I wanted blue putty. But did the blue egg contain blue putty?
I didn't know!
!!!
Imagine the stress on my poor brain. First, I have an insanely stressful week. My brain finally accepts that I can relax, but my body refuses to obey it. Then, my body decides that it can't function without Silly Putty, and my brain accepts this. But then! Then I find my holy grail, and I just can't pick the proper one.
My friend and I stood there in the aisle, which was fairly deserted, trying to peer into the slightly-cracked eggs. I'm sure we looked ridiculous. I was frantic, she was confused by my desperation, and both of us were sticking our fingernails into little plastic eggs.
Finally, it was confirmed that the blue eggs do indeed contain blue putty.
I was ready to take off, but my friend decided that she had had a stressful week and deserved chocolate. She's more broke than I, but she does have a pre-paid Visa affair that her mother can't trace. It had $9.
We went to the chocolate aisle, which, happily, lay next to the sock location. She hunted for cheap chocolate, and found... Mars Bars.
Neither of us had ever eaten Mars Bars, but we have both seen this video by Charlie McDonell.

Hopefully he doesn't mind me putting this up. I feel that he can get over it, since I bought his album on iTunes.
We got the Mars Bars to split, giggling about "magic Mars Bars", although neither of us had cash. I promised to make it up to her in either cash or some tangible thing that she wanted. On our way out of the aisle, she noticed some dark chocolate mint Milky Ways.
I bought them for her. We have a barter system.
Then it was off to the sock aisle! I won't tell you about that. It was boring if you're not me. Five-minute story later, we exited the sock aisle in possession of blue, grey, and white stripey socks and, notably, no fuzzy socks.
Checkout was another adventure. As per usual, only six or seven of the thirty registers were open, so we stood in line for about ten minutes before one opened up. While waiting, we tested Halle Barry's new perfume line. Most of them were decent, but the last one, down on the bottom, the only one not able to be picked up, was very... citrus-y. Of course, that was the one I made my friend spray on her arm because I refused to test it on myself.
I actually think that "cloyingly sweet" might be a better description that simply "citrus-y". It was as if some sugar monster had devoured the limonene from every citrus fruit in the world and then vomited it up (with sugar instead of bile) into a perfume bottle.
I apologised for her having it all over her arm, but didn't offer to split the stench. Perhaps it's for fruitflies.
And that's how I ended up with my Silly Putty and an addiction to Mars Bars.