goodbye my friend. you have been the one, you have been the one for me

jasper is dead, and i am heartbroken. a few months ago (possibly longer), he started to have some issues. the main one was that he would sometimes just restart out of nowhere and then get stuck in a reboot loop where he would almost finish restarting but then decide to just restart from the beginning again. these loops would only last a minute, though, and usually if i took off my phone case they'd finish even faster. another very frustrating issue was that he would get in these moods where, whenever i would go to take a picture, he'd just turn off. like the take a picture button was a power button or something. he would also do this thing where he would turn off out of nowhere, and when i turned him back on, the battery would be mostly drained. my husband (and most other people in my life) told me to buy a new phone. but i loved jasper, and he was still perfectly usable most of the time, and so i stubbornly refused.

fast forward to a few weeks ago. i was at target with my husband having a text-conversation with a friend about whether or not she was going to another friend's dinner when jasper decided to restart. and restart. and then restart some more. i took off the case and waited, but he just kept trying to restart. i took out the battery for a while, but the second i put it back in, the restarting just continued. i tried everything, but all my efforts were made in vain. and then, after about twenty minutes, right when i was ready to call the time of death, he was finally able to finish a restart and everything was back to normal. 

now, a smart person would have heeded the warning signs and made some sort of preparation for the inevitable end. i am not a smart person, though. i am a person who apparently believes deeply in denial. "he's fine," i said. "it was just a weird one-time thing. i'll never have to buy another phone for the rest of my life."

and then monday happened where any time i touched a button i would send jasper into freak-out restart forever mode. he always came back after a while, though, and so i still did nothing. come tuesday, jasper was getting stuck in restart loops that lasted hours, draining his battery completely in the process. and now here i am on wednesday night, still unable to use my phone because he will not stop trying to restart and pulled rudely from the lands of denial. 

i am not ready for my phone to die. i never synced my candy crush with facebook so none of my progress is saved. nearly up to level five hundred, and for what? i have pictures that i have not saved to a computer or backed up in any way yet. there is so much stuff on my phone that i want and/or need, and now i cannot get to it. and i am sad. plus, buying a house is expensive. furnishing a house is expensive. having a baby is expensive. buying a phone is expensive. i was not prepared for that last one in the midst of all the others. 

for the meantime i am using my husband's old phone. and i am grateful to get to use it, but it has none of the apps i use (which are basically only four: whatsapp, instagram, candy crush, and babycenter), an awful background, all the wrong notification sounds, none of my alarms, the wrong layout format thing, and is not my phone. adjusting his phone to look like jasper just feels like defeat, and i somehow refuse to accept that. i am still carrying around jasper trying to get him to start up again, but so far have had no luck. sigh. 

it's been a good two and a half years, jasper. (it's actually been two years and seven months almost to the day.)

*Goodbye My Lover - James Blunt

home again, home again, jiggity jig

i had decided to stick to a similar posting schedule that i used for my scheduled posts, but i am not the greatest with schedules and want to write a post now, and so. here we are.

[one] i brought darcy home today and oh my goodness did i miss him. so so much. here was the conversation i had with the lady at the front desk when i went to pick him up:
me: hi. i'm here to pick up a rabbit i was boarding with you.
her: *looks up in shock* not mr. darcy?!
me: uh... yeah.
her: what's your name?
me: *say my name*
her: how do you spell it?
me: *spell it*
her: oh... *pause* what's your address?
me: *says it*
her: *sigh* okay. i'm really going to miss him.
when i was waiting for the attendant to bring darcy in from the back, the lady was telling me about how he was the favorite bunny boarder and that they would fight over who got to take care of him. and is it stupid to feel proud of your pet? because i'm not gonna lie, as they told me how gentle and well-behaved darcy was (things i obviously already knew), i was feeling a little proud.
and then, after i got darcy and they all said goodbye to him, the lady at the front started to cry and i dunno but i thought that was a little extreme.

[two] a little over three weeks ago, i went to saudi arabia. we stopped by my side of the country first, where i let my younger brothers take custody of james (my laptop). i left james with them when we went to my husband's side of the country and didn't get him back until i was headed to the airport to come back to virginia. while they had james, i used jackson (my ipad). this means that for the past month or so, i have not used a keyboard. and although i had some typo issues with the letters being further apart when i first got james back, i am so happy to have a keyboard. i also strangely missed the clicking sound of the keys.

[three] while we were gone, one of my neighbors either got a new dog or one of the puppies in the building grew up. either way, there is this really loud, really annoying dog that keeps barking. in that deep voice that only the really big and scary dogs have. i have yet to see the creature, and i kinda hope it stays that way.

*Some Rhyme About Pigs - Mother Goose?

perhaps she'll die

so first week of school (i would say my last semester of classes, but i said that last time and look where it got me) is over, but it feels like i haven't started yet. last week was full of hanging out with my sister and nephews and friends and getting the house ready for my parents and family to come home to (today!) and really long phone calls to various family members and not having any computer or tv time, and school was just kind of thrown in there a couple of times as a break from socializing. with an entire semester ahead of me, i'm sure you'll all hear plenty about my classes, so i'm not going to go into that today. i will say that i have this underlying sense of panic and a part of that is that i have so many school related responsibilities that i did not get to this first week and now i'm wondering if i'll have time for them at all during this semester. another part of it is that my sister is leaving in a week and i have that sense that i have to spend every waking second with them or i'm wasting it because i probably won't see her or her family for at least a year after this. and my friends are leaving on the same day and i feel like i need to spend more time with them, too, but there is just no time. for anything. and that is panic inducing.

you know what a great thing to do when you're already feeling slightly on edge the whole time is? (i think it is important to point out that by great i really mean kind of stupid and you totally should not do it, but i did it anyway.) wake up in the middle of the night, start googling symptoms on your smart phone, and convince yourself that you have cancer. hodgkins lymphoma to be more precise.

while searching for what to do when a swollen lymph node is making it really hard to find a comfortable position to go back to sleep in after waking up to use the bathroom because it is causing your whole neck to ache (heat? ice?) i ended up reading people's stories on a health forum (because internet black holes are not limited to computers). anyway, one person mentioned that she'd had a swollen lymph node for a while, but since she wasn't having night sweats and a loss of appetite, her doctor had ruled out hodgkins. of course, my brain immediately went to I HAVE NIGHT SWEATS! I HAVE A LOSS OF APPETITE! (it forgot to remember that the night sweats are probably caused by the fact that our bedroom is rarely the same temperature as the rest of the apartment and we usually forget to turn down the AC before going to bed. i mean, i don't really think that cancer induced night sweats is the probable reason that two different people in the same bed are hot. it also forgot to remember that i have been both sick and fasting recently and both of those things tend to make my appetite a little wonky.)

but anyway. while my brain was busy forgetting, my fingers started looking up symptoms of hodgkins lymphoma and things just got worse. fatigue! oh no! i went into bed close to nine last night with the intention of reading but was too tired to do anything but look at instagram and play candy crush saga until it reached a respectable time to fall asleep. a swollen lymph node! oh no! that's my whole problem! (the fact that every single site said that the lump had to be painless to be cancer and that my whole issue was that it was painful and thereby obviously caused by some infection or other was irrelevant obviously.) there was no denying it. i had cancer.

just as i was about to wake up my husband and tell him the bad news, i realized that it wasn't even five in the morning yet and i should probably let him have a few more hours of peaceful sleep before burdening him with this kind of news. because that's just the kind of person that i am.

when i woke back up two hours later, i realized that i was probably just being stupid.

*There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly

it's always been the same, same old story

sometimes, i look at my academic career and my book and my family and i start to think, "you know, maybe i'm not doing too bad with this whole life thing." but then i think of james potter and my self-esteem plummets. james potter died trying to protect his family. james potter stood up to the greatest evil the world had ever seen - wandless, mind you - when he was twenty one years old. he was fighting and dying for what was right when other people were busy celebrating the fact that they could finally drink legally. and on top of all that, he could ride a freaking broomstick, turn himself into an animal, and change mice into wineglasses. and suddenly, collecting degrees and putting out a book that a handful of people will read just seems so pointless and stupid.

and then i remember that james didn't have the internet to distract him and i don't feel as bad about myself. because you just know if wizards had access to the internet they'd be too busy procrastinating to do anything cool. voldemort would be too busy writing mean anonymous comments to people and sniggering to himself to try and take over the world. which would work out fine because dumbledore would be too busy watching videos of cats on youtube to stop him. sirius would be changing his facebook profile picture every three seconds, peter would have a tumblr full of images of food and celebrities, and hermione would get lost in wikipedia for hours clicking the random article button. ron would play fantasy quidditch, and fred and george would probably spend their time between cracked and buzzfeed.

and harry would just be standing there in the middle of the room screaming about how important he is, and his parents (who would have never died) would tell him to shut up and go to his room. and he would just always have this nagging feeling that things were supposed to be different, that every child alive should know his name. he would write about it on his blog.

*Father and Son - Cat Stevens

all these things that i've done

did you know that kids are more likely to own a cellphone than a book? and i'm not just talking about teenagers, here. i'm talking about every child from the age of seven to seventeen. now, if this meant that libraries were being frequented more than bookstores, well then, i'd be okay with that. but most libraries i've been to say that they have some days where no one comes in. not one single person. and maybe i just live in an area where there are too many other things to do and people are too busy working for the government to go to a library or take their kids to one, but i really don't think this is only limited to my area. and i find this statistic both sad and really, really scary.

i want to blog more, but aside from feeling like i have no time to do anything lately, i also feel like i have nothing to say. i'm actually being pretty productive with my days. well, sort of. i'm getting things that i want to do done, and they may seem like a waste of time to other people, but i am not other people so it counts as being productive. and there are only so many times i can say that i'm editing and potterying and schooling and knitting before i want to punch myself in the face, so there's that.

i need to develop some subplots for my novel, and though i have two in mind, neither of them seem particularly exciting to me so i'm kind of dragging my feet with it. (probably because they're kind of hinted at and ignored already and my brain keeps telling me that if they weren't worth developing then, they aren't worth developing now.) i also desperately need a title for it, but can't think of anything good. titles are hard. once i have all the main plot points in, i can go back and edit line by line which i am looking forward to because there are a lot of things that need to be fixed on a sentence level. i was literally laughing at loud at some of the things i wrote when i was doing the initial read. so, so bad, you guys. but then there were some scenes that i read through and was just like, "wow okay i like this. this is good," and if i can get the rest of the scenes to incite that same reaction then i think this may actually go somewhere. maybe. at least i hope so.

i have two homework assignments due friday that i am supposed to be doing right now. actually, i was supposed to start them at nine and finish them at ten. which was fourteen minutes ago. so maybe i'm not as productive as i'm letting myself believe.

*All These Things That I've Done - The Killers

i thought i was smart

thursday nights i get home before my husband. i usually just make myself dinner and read or sit on my computer with the tv off (my husband likes to have the tv on almost all the time) and relish the alone time. (i was born a hermit in a society that is too technologically connected to allow for hermits, but i do the best i can.)

tonight i got a text from my husband asking me to make chicken and corn soup. while i was rummaging through our pantry that is too small, overstuffed, and unorganized (especially now that i have doubles of a lot of baking things because my sister left the country) i hear a whistle from behind me. remember, this is during my i-have-the-house-to-myself time. remember also that i scare easily.

anyway, i of course completely freak out. i yelled really, really, really loudly, dropped everything i was holding, and made an even bigger mess in the pantry than before. with my heart thumping wildly, i turn around slowly to see who the whistler is.

there's no one there. (which freaked me out more than if i saw someone. my imagination can be scary.)

then i notice that my phone's screen is lit up on the counter. i had just gotten a text message and, idiot that i am, completely forgot that i changed the ringtone to a whistle.

needless to say, i felt ridiculously stupid, silently thanked god that no one was around to witness my scare, and then decided to post it on my blog for all of you.

lesson learned: never change my ringtone again ever. and i should probably get started on resuming my exercise because i don't think my heart can handle many more of my dramatic scenes.

*Fight Test - Flaming Lips

here i am again, doing things that i said i wouldn't do

i have finally succumbed to peer pressure (and dying phones) and gotten myself a smartphone. and guys, a part of me died yesterday. the part that adamantly refused to jump on the smartphone bandwagon, the part that was more than willing to let the train going through the present to the future pass me by without hopping on to be left in the past with the polluted smoke and gum wrappers, the part that held onto my dumb phone like it was the only thing keeping me me, that part is dead. and part of me mourns her loss. part of me wants to host a funeral and set up a memorial for lasting as long as she did. part of me wants to bake a batch of gingerbread men and put icing frowns on every single one. but the other part is too busy playing games that don't require you to press six to go right and four to go left. the other part is caught up in trying to find an appropriate name for the new addition to our family of electronics. the other part saw the dead phone lying helpless on the nightstand this morning and felt... nothing.

so yeah, that's my big news of the day i guess. i really am working on finding the perfect name, i will let you know what i come up with. (the names i have thought of so far have been shot down so we'll see. feel free to suggest names in the comments. has to be a "j" name, though.)

i have also been babysitting my sister's plant while she's in the desert. his name is peter. i dunno why i mentioned that really, except that i thought i had something to say about him and then realized that i didn't.

also, i need to reorganize my bookshelves.

and i have the perfect lyric in my head for the title, but i can't for the life of me remember what song it's from or who sings it and google isn't helping and it's killing me. i've never even heard of the bruno mars song google is telling me to use instead, but there it is.

*Only When You're Lonely - Bruno Mars

i can't hear you

so my phone died yesterday. my beautiful (on the inside, maybe?), crappy, dumb, dumb, dumb phone finally had enough of being thrown across parking lots when i get out of the car and forget it's in my lap, being drooled on by numerous children, dropping out of pockets and bags and hands onto various types of floors, and whatever else it had to endure on a daily basis. apparently dropping calls and eating text messages was just not getting the results it wanted, so yesterday evening it up and killed its own mic. suddenly people i was talking to could hear a robotic hum at best and absolute silence at worst. it was a very sad moment when i realized that i could no longer spend months looking at different phones and pretending that i was going to buy one. the time has come when i am forced to buy one.

i've switched over to a temporary backup phone for the moment. (though i did strongly consider not doing that and actually having a valid excuse not to talk on the phone with anyone ever until i got a replacement. i really do hate telephones most of the time. it would have been perfect. unfortunately, my family is in the desert and since we have no land line, they contact me through my cell phone. though i have no problem being telephonically-unavailable to people here (because, hello? just text me.) i don't think it would work so well with a continent or two between us.)

i've never had a phone die on me before. my husband, though, has had several. he's pretty much an electronics murderer. (okay, maybe not that bad... but whatever.) i blame my phone's death on him, obviously.

*The Noise - Regina Spektor

remember that time?

do you guys remember when yahoo was a legitimate search engine? and people used to ask jeeves everything before they killed him off to seem more professional or something? and there was an e one. excite? anyway, i remember having research projects and the teachers telling us to use all four of the search engines (redundancy is underrated i guess), and then one day, but it was nothing as sudden and noticeable as that, google just kind of took over everything. and suddenly you're not "looking things up online" you're "googling it." and all the other search engines crawled into the dark corners with their tails between their legs and just let it happen. (i guess backbones are overrated.)

i also remember a project i did in seventh grade. part of it was looking up things that happened (o)in the year, month, and day we were born. it was the first big school project where we were required to use internet sources instead of just books. (remember those days? now they have to force us to use books in research projects and even then i usually lie about it.) anyway, the teacher kept telling me that i was searching wrong because i had too many words in my queries. apparently i was being too specific or something? (i typed 'earthquakes in april 1988' and she went crazy.) now we type entire sentences into google. i've searched for entire paragraphs. i've put so many words into my search bar that google had to cut me off and tell me to shut up halfway through my request. (every time i do though i feel my seventh grade english teacher glaring at me.)

anyway, i really don't know where i was going with this or what even brought it to mind. but yeah. there it is. google. and searching. and... stuff. here's a quote i like to make up for my lack of a point (it's secretly one of my biggest fears. (the quote. not not having a point. i got over that one ages ago)):

“As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.” ~Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

i think i abused my right to use parentheses in this post.

*Stutter - Umbridge (A Very Potter Sequel)

hypnotized by the words you say

i was reading about different internet k-holes the other day and couldn't help nodding along to most of them with the thought of, "haha i've done that before" going through my head. from youtube to tumblr to hate reading, i'm sure we've all had days when we get lost on the internet and came out several hours later not really sure what had happened. according to mcsweeny's, an internet k-hole can be defined as:

 (n) Impulsive-yet-not-random, thematic internet navigational trajectory that leads a user through various websites or pieces of content that include a variety of media (i.e. text, pictures, animated GIFs and video) in such a manner that when one ‘emerges’ from said tunnel, one is viewing something entirely unrelated to the ‘doorway’ (first piece of content in tunnel). Popular tunnel themes include porn, conspiracy, creepy, Wikipedia, and apocalypse scenario.

and of course by "days" i mean every single day of my life. obviously. for example, yesterday i got online to check my email, download music, and then do some writing. after checking my email, i went and checked the blogs i followed for updates. the i checked facebook and noticed a friend had shared a picture from tumblr. i clicked through to that blog and saw a post from a different tumblr blog i used to read that basically picks apart twilight. while i will still say that i did enjoy twilight, i am not one to pass up on anything combining books with snarkiness and grammar. call me a nerd, but it's just who i am. so anyway, i clicked through to that blog and started reading through the gazillion posts that i had missed since the last time i read it.  halfway through that, i clicked on a link she had posted that basically showed four pages from another tumblr of why robert pattinson is awesome. (most of it was gifs from interviews of him promoting (read:bashing) the twilight saga movies.) from there i found myself watching a video of kristen stewart and a few other actors [trying to] read bits from 50 shades of grey. then i was watching a video of gilbert gottfried reading 50 shades of grey followed by selena gomez acting out 50 shades of blue. and the next thing i knew i was twenty-four pages into a blog basically dedicated to 50 shades of grey hate and wanting to read more, it was time for dinner, and i had done nothing i was supposed to.

beware the internet k-holes. they sneak up on you, suck you in, and only let you out when you don't want to leave it.

*Shiver - Maroon 5

it's funny how things change

growing up, i never went bowling. my family did a lot of "family things" together, we were all in sports, but we just never bowled. the first time i went bowling was towards the end of my undergrad years. since then, i've been quite a few times, but i'm not really sure why i'm sharing all of this with you. to get to the point, a couple of months ago my husband decided that it would be fun to go bowling with my whole family. we'd gone with my brothers and sisters, but never my parents. what with people dying and parents leaving the country, though, it kept getting pushed back. then trying to find a time that worked when my brothers were home from school proved to be impossible so we decided to go today with my grandma, parents, and younger sister.

when i mentioned the bowling plan the first time to my parents, i thought they would say they weren't interested. but they were actually surprisingly up for it. apparently they were big on bowling before us kids entered their lives? who knows what other kind of interests they had that i have no idea about. i mean, i know my parents had lives before us, but going twenty three years without ever knowing that your parents used to bowl is just weird. 

but that's not the point either. we get to the bowling place and my parents and grandmother's reactions were hilarious. they were surprised at how "automated" everything was these days. according to my mom, the last time that she went bowling, you had to have a designated score keeper [that was really good at math] to keep track of the scores. (my dad said that the last time they went bowling was '84.) according to my grandma, she remembers going bowling when there were boys sitting on little platform things that would jump down and set the pins back up after every turn. apparently, my grandpa was one of these boys at one time. 

i've obviously been taking this technology for granted. 

*Teenage Hearts - Allstar Weekend

and you're checking your phone

[day sixteen: something you see every morning]

well, we're officially past the halfway mark of this challenge. and yay. today is crazy busy being both my husband's birthday and my nephew's birthday party (his birthday was yesterday). march is a birthday filled month. but i won't get into that. back to the challenge topic.

i see a lot of things every morning. most of the same things that i see all day every day. the first thing i see every morning would probably be my cell phone, though. at least, that's the first thing i look at. i'm practically blind without my contacts or glasses so there's no way i could read the clock across the room. instead, i check the time on my phone. or i turn off the alarm on my phone. or i check who's texting/calling me on my phone. basically, i wake up to look at my phone for one reason or another. most days it's the most attention my phone gets.

*Changing - The Airborne Toxic Event

making the same mistakes again

the other day in class we were talking about how apple is like that obnoxious kid who grows up to be that obnoxious adult that thinks he is the best thing since juice boxes and can do no wrong, even when his mistakes are staring him right in the face. now, i have nothing against apple. i think it makes cool products, even though the only apple thing i own is my ipod. but my god, apple, do you not learn?

quick history lesson: when computers first started being the big thing there were two main forerunners: apple and microsoft. apple seemed to have a head start, but windows thought about the bigger picture. with a few smart ideas, they eventually took over the market. one of its main smart ideas: don't tie the software to the hardware. windows operating system could be used on a gazillion machines. apple was exclusively for apple.

more recent history: the dawn of the smart phone. we, again, have two main forerunners: iphones and android phones. iphones came out strong, but they made the exact same mistake they made before. iOS is for the iPhone. only. android's os is for a whole bunch of phones. we saw what happened last time this mistake was made.

and surprise of all surprises, it is happening again. the iphone hold on the market is shaky. androids have almost caught up to them. and now, when basically all conceivable new features have been made and the changes to new phones will be more along the line of storage space and processor speed instead of super cool never before seen things, iphones will start to fade.

in a few years there will be the group of apple die hards and hipsters that are using iphones and claiming superiority, but the majority of the people will be using android phones. and apple will have no one to blame but themselves.

of course, i'll still be using my crappy little dumb phone that has fallen more times than i can count, has a camera that's not even measured in megapixels, and a memory that's worse than pathetic. holding on to it is starting to be done out of pure spite now.

*Falling Away With You - Muse

let's go, time's a wastin'

this morning, as i checked four of my email accounts, my blackboard account to see when an assignment was due, my patriotweb to see if my bill was paid, my bank account to make sure i had enough money to buy all the text books i suddenly need, my amazon account to track a package, my facebook, and my blog, i realized that i spend a lot of time signing in to things.

i must have spent a year at least just typing in my mason id and password into all of the different mason sites a million and three times a day for the past six years. none of them let you stay signed in when you leave the page, secure but annoying. and then when there are conflicting sites (like my two gmail accounts or my mason mail and hotmail) i have to keep signing out of one and into another throughout the day. there's another nine months gone. and when i go from joe to junior to a school computer, i have to sign into everything all over again. i've spent at least three months doing that. 

and then i wondered, if i spent less time signing into things, would i actually be more productive? ignoring all the time i waste on the sites themselves, am i using precious moments to type and retype variations of 'skabli' and my password? let's say i spend fifteen minutes a day signing in. in those fifteen minutes, i could have written or edited a page or two of a novel. with a page everyday, i could have a publishable book done in a year. if i spent those fifteen minutes teaching myself how to program, i could write my own malware and infect the worlds' computers thereby guaranteeing myself a job with the us government after i get out of jail. if i spent the time exercising, people wouldn't constantly congratulate me on being pregnant. if i spent it doing something religious, i could work my way towards heaven. if i even just spent it playing online games (flood-it on google + is my obsession) or watching netflix i would at least be having fun.

but i'm not. i'm just inputting a username and password. i'm wasting time waiting to do things to waste more time. there has to be a more efficient way to do this. 

*Tine's A Wastin' - Johnny and June Cash

i'm going away for a while, but i'll be back

so i just finished packing for florida and... i need a new wardrobe. desperately. everything i have has either been worn a million times and i am sick to death of it or it doesn't fit me thanks to my new found marriage fat. (this was going to be a post on its own, but i never got around to writing it. basically, everyone in my family - and i'm talking sisters, cousins, aunts, etc - gains weight after marriage. i don't know what it is about us, but i don't like it.) i will be leaving early tomorrow morning, and there is a high chance that i won't be blogging for the next week. hopefully, though, i will come back with a fresh brain that is capable of writing posts that are worth reading.

in my absence, please enjoy this medley of random links and videos.

>>i know that clips of the mickey mouse club are pretty much everywhere since it was where a whole bunch of actors and singers got their start, but this clip of ryan gosling, justin timberlake, and jc whatever his last name is, in my opinion, hilarious. i find the dance thing they do at the end especially funny.

>>remember recess (the cartoon)? well, this class remade the theme song with real people. aside from the fact that the elementary students are suddenly old, i think it's pretty awesome.

>>i thought this was a nice mash-up of the killers' somebody told me and the gorillaz feel good inc. both of which are songs you should listen to if for some reason you never have.

>>this poem, called the cold within, is worth a read. it tells a lot about the way of the world/society.

>>if you're on any other social media sites, you have probably seen the "shit girls say" videos. just in case you haven't, though, you can watch episode one here and episode two here. i have to admit that, stereotypical as this is, i actually do some of these.

>>this amazing fact generator is a great way to procrastinate (in case you were looking for one) and get smarter at the same time. a win - win situation.

>>i found this article interesting about how smartphone cameras are gaining popularity. now 1/3 of all pictures taken are with phones.

oh, and my professor finally posted my grade, officially ending my masters degree, but still no word from mason about the phd program. grr.

also, i was wondering. do people still go caroling these days? if you do or know people who do or see people who do, let me know.

*Misguided Ghosts - Paramore

oh, i believe in yesterday

i wake up this morning tired, which seems to be the new theme of my life. i have a gazillion things to do today and after spending half an hour checking my mail and basically wasting my time on the internet, i decided to get my writing finished first. i plug the thumb drive i've been storing my novel on into my computer and for some strange reason i see that it is installing the driver for the device, though the driver has been installed for a while now. and then, because things like to go wrong when i don't have time for them, windows tells me that it cannot recognize the drive and wants to format it. uhh... no. that is my novel on there and i refuse to delete it. i try the usb in joe, hoping that junior was just being stupid, but the same error popped up. and now i'm about ready to just go into a corner and cry about everything. (lack of good sleep will do that to a person, you know.)

okay, so before i go getting you all feeling too sorry for me, i did have a backup of it saved onto my computer. the other day i thought to myself, it would really suck if my usb stopped working and so i backed it up. i think now that that was tempting fate a bit too much. but that copy is missing the last two thousand or so words, and the last two thousand words are where i wrote all the exciting-ish things that i don't want to rewrite for several reasons that i will not list here. since i refuse to rewrite it, i have to try and recover it which will take time and stuff, and i just wanted to write, and now i can't, and this sucks.

plus it's gloomy outside and cold and wet. and i have to make the t-shirts for my brother's birthday on sunday which i know are going to turn out awful because, as i learned last night, i can't draw food to save my life. and i'm just tired and annoyed and not liking today at all.

and the title doesn't really fit. whatever.

*Yesterday - The Beatles

you think you're cooler than me

my phone has an ego issue. it happened a short while after i mentioned it in my blog. i think that, being a dumb phone, it didn't realize that i wasn't really saying anything good about it, and the whole thing went to its head. now it simply refuses to do its job right, taking hours, or even days, to pass on the messages people leave it for me. it refuses to remember anything i want it to, claiming that its memory is filled with more important things. and it's apparently too dignified to raise its voice too loud to tell me that someone is calling me. it's really starting to get ridiculous, not to mention extremely inconvenient, and i'm thinking i'll have to go buy myself a new one now. stupid technology with its expiration dates. do you think that cans connected with a string ever got lazy on the job? do you think you needed to get new cans every few years? no. though i imagine the string might get some wear and tear.

and because it's november, and i'm sure you're all super interested in my nano-ing, it's time for my nano problems, though i'm not so sure if they're problems or not yet. i was writing this year's story by switching narratives between two characters. one of them was writing in first person, and one was writing in third person. first person has always been easier for me to write, but this character just seemed to work better in third. so i went with it. i recently noticed that i've started writing her in first person, too, though. for the past couple of days i had to go back every few paragraphs and switch all the i's with she's. i finally decided today that that was taking to long and kept interrupting the flow of my writing so i'm switching her to s first person narrator as well. eventually i'll go back and fix the beginning. i'm just not sure if i can write two first person characters and keep their voices separate. we'll just have to wait and see how it goes, though, i guess.

*Cooler Than Me - Mike Posner

and long weekends without regrets

so this weekend my family and i went to visit jamestown/yorktown/williamsburg. when we got to the inn we were staying at, we were told that they didn't have wifi. okay, we thought. we can go three nights without internet. when we got to our room(s), we noticed that we could barely get phone reception either (you were lucky to get like half a bar near the window). in fact, we could barely get phone reception most places we went in the area. we were happy to get a few minutes with one bar at a time. now me, being an unreliable phone answerer at best and a complete ignorer of all things telephone related at worst, struggled little with my sudden inability to contact the universe. to my sister, on the other hand, it was the end of the world. most of the weekend saw her walking around in circles with her hand up in the air trying to find reception.

anyway, our days started with breakfast, went on to visiting one of the historical towns, and ended with me reading an old story a friend and i wrote years ago that i recently downloaded onto my kobo. this made me feel like i was living in a bubble of a world that consisted only of muffin tops, the american revolution, john smith, and fictional characters (who were a lot more arrogant and a lot worse friends than i remembered them being) completely separate from the rest of the world. somewhere classes were being taught, people were going to work, and my wedding was coming up, but none of that existed to me then. it was sort of peaceful.

overall, the weekend was fun. there were times when i could swear i was being cooked alive by the sweltering heat coming from a sun much too hot for may, and i can't say i'll miss sharing the bed with my younger brother, and we were stuck in a traffic jam for way over an hour on the way back because they decided to close down an entire highway, but it was an awesome pre-summer-vacation vacation nonetheless.

this could have been a better post, but i'm actually really tired and the trip has inspired a couple of posts for the next few days so it's okay that this one is a little pointless.

*Rain Delays - Crash Parallel

while we're quietly losing control

have you guys heard about IBM's Watson, a new supercomputer designed to accurately mimic human thought? it is labeled as a "question answering machine" that can understand all the nuances of natural speech and come up with a simple answer. to test it out, they are pitting it against jeopardy champions in three jeopardy matches that will be aired sometime in february. jeopardy questions cover a vast array of topics. they deal with puns, metaphors, and slang. you have to buzz in quickly and think even quicker. all of these factors make it impossible for artificial intelligence computers that otherwise excel in things like chess, archery, or eating dead bodies for fuel. (click the links. enlighten yourselves.)

here is a video of a sample round played with the three contestants:

now, i don't know about you, but i think we might all end up ruing this very day. who cares about the zombie apocalypse or the world ending in 2012? so what if we're in a recession and there's never anything good on tv? we just created a computer so intelligent that it just might take control over the army of less smart but way more deadly robots we've already created. so go ahead, eat that extra donut, take that trip you always wanted, splurge on the ridiculously expensive pair of shoes. pretty soon, you may not have the chance.

also, you know all those unexplained mass animal deaths? i'm thinking it's time we take the robots in for questioning.

*I Will Play My Game Beneath the Spin Light - Brand New

just sitting around, hanging out this afternoon

okay so i know i've mentioned the whole, this younger generation is not looking for waldo but seeing as this is my blog, i can talk about it again if i want to. my brother had to go in to the doctor for a test the other day and when he came home, me and my sister obviously asked about it. his response, "it was pretty boring and pointless. they put me on a treadmill and the nurse was like 'okay look at this poster and keep walking until you find waldo.' i walked for like two hours before i said i found him, and i dont think i even did." we laugh and say that, yes, finding waldo could be hard. he says, "um.. who's waldo? is he some kind of baseball player?" me and my sister die. of course, not knowing who or what he was looking for obviously made the search harder for him, and there would be know way he would admit to the nurse that he didnt know what he was looking for. this kid likes to think that he knows everything. and something about doctors/nurses make him up his i-can-do-everything levels. a couple of years ago he came home and admitted that he "cheated on his hearing test at school because he had failed the eye one and couldn't fail twice."

on another note, while watching cartoons with my brothers the other day, i realized that the commercials have changed a lot from when i was the targeted audience of cartoon breaks. instead of a hundred commercials for awesome looking toys that immediately make you run to your parents begging for them only to be told no, there was just commercial after commercial of online games. this has been happening for a while, but it didnt really hit me as strange till then. mixed in with the online game commercials are yogurt and cereal ones. then you have a few nintendo ds ads and occasionally there will be one about robotic hamsters or something. and then we wonder why kids sit on the computer all day instead of actually doing something.

*This Afternoon - Nickelback