there was a man back in '95 whose heart ran out of summers

apparently death has been knocking on a lot of celebrity doors recently. of course, michael jackson's death is overshadowing everyone else's, but that doesnt make their deaths any less real. speaking of michael jackson, you may or may not be following the news about him, but just in case you're not, after the autopsy they decided he didnt die from a heart attack. his doctor looked suspicious for a while but apparently he is no longer considered a suspect in his death. they don't know what or who killed him yet but are looking into another autopsy to get some answers.

anyways, the most recent celebrity death (as far as i've heard) is billy mays. yes, the king of infomercials has followed the king of pop straight out of this world. i kind of feel bad about this one because of how much i hated him while he was alive. that's usually the case with me. when i hate someone, i feel an incomprehensible guilt after their death - as if my saying 'go die' so many times actually killed them. which i know is totally ridiculous and pretentious of me. but that's the way my brain works.

*The Riddle - Five for Fighting

hello, is it me you're looking for?

before i start my story of stalkerness, there is one thing you all should know. my sister wants to get married. if you know of anyone willing, let me know. she's not picky... he just has to be a he, muslim, and talk english.

now on to the story... so we were looking through an old copy of this magazine, layalena. she got to the almost last page where they had interview typish things with a bunch of guys. and she, of course, chose out her husband, making sure to calculate his present age. so in a fit of stalkerness, i looked him up on facebook. the internet is amazing. it took a few (8) tries to find the english spelling of his name, but in the end i got it. his profile was private, but we looked through his friends because yes, we are stalkerish stalkers who were bored out of our minds. through his friends, we found out a lot about this dude. anyways, because it really is a small world after all, it turns out he knows people in DC that know people we know. he was even friends with people who graduated from and were still in my old high school. serendipity, people.

that'll be a story to tell the grandkids.

*Hello - Lionel Richie

he's on the table and he's gone to code, and i do not think anyone knows what they're doing here

i was never a big fan of video games. from the atari my sister got for her 6th birthday or something to the xbox i tried at a friend's house. gameboys, psp's... they were never really my thing. sure, i play them. and yes, i have fun. but i was never one of those "natural" video gamers. i usually suck. and i get very frustrated with them and end up all tense and annoyed and ready to throw the whole thing out of the nearest window. but my cousin has a nintendo ds, and all that has changed. she has a grey's anatomy game which has become my latest addiction. you don't really do much in the game but play through episodes making choices that don't change the storyline, completing challenges like avoiding little red balls of anger, and performing parts of surgeries. not much to do, but highly highly addictive. on the addictiveness spectrum, it's somewhere between cigarettes and crack, and probably closer to the crack.

one thing i hate about the game: meredith. i don't mind her in the show and at times really like her, though she was never my favorite character. in the game, i despise her. she has a one track mind, and all her story lines revolve around her relationship with mcdreamy. the entire hospital is on lockdown because of a diptheria outbreak and what is she thinking about? how her date will be afftected by the lockdown. she is in the middle of a bypass heart surgery and asks to leave early so she will have time to get ready for said date. i mean, really?? what kind of doctor does that?? i don't care if there is a whole surgerical team doing the operation, you do not leave halfway through for a date, even in a game. she interrupts shepherd while he's prepping a patient or something to tell him that she's committed to their relationship, and while he's distracted, the patient has a seizure. i think what really annoys me is that although i control a lot of her choices, i really have no control over what happens. she's the same no matter what i do. now, i havent watched the show in a while. i missed the entire last season - night classes suck. but i dont remember meredith being that obsessed. yes, her relationship was always a big part of the plot, but i remember her being a good doctor, not a ditsy flake. if that's how her character has gotten lately, then i'm not sure i want to watch last season which is sitting on my desk.

oh, and i hate how george is such a girl.

*Jumper - Third Eye Blind

happy endings gone forever more

i have this thing for well-written, unhappy endings. death. separation. unrequited love. whatever it might be. yes, i love a happy ending as much as the next person, but tragedy appeals to me just as much... sometimes more. when i watch a movie, even when i'm counting on the predictable happy ending when the hero and heroine live happily ever after, a small part of me is hoping for the complete opposite. it's hoping that the hero really does die in the war. that the heroine does leave him with a shattered heart. i dont know why. it might be because it's more realistic in a way, or maybe i'm just a complete cynic with a heart of stone. whatever the reason, if jack and rose both lived and grew old together, if rhett didnt leave scarlett (not taking the sequel into consideration), if sirius black didnt die... the stories just wouldnt be as good as they are when they pull at your heart strings and leave you with a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes (yes, few endings bring me to tears, but you get the idea).

speaking of endings, i cant believe michael jackson died. despite everything people said about him - of which i believed nothing - no one can deny that he was super talented. he had a huge effect on countless peoples' lives as well as the music industry. i dunno but he always seemed immortal in a way to me. it felt like he had been around forever and would be around forever. his death was a wake up call. a friend of mine had tickets for his comeback tour, a concert that was said to be unmissable and is now to never happen.

you know what's kinda scary?? a lot of the actors i grew up watching, singers i grew up listening to are dying. scientific ideas and theories about the universe that we learned in school are now considered wrong and outdated. i'm getting old, people, and i'm not sure i like it.

*Happy Ending - Mika

Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny's

LOL... read the ticker tape on the bottom of the screen too.

our concentration it contains a deadly flaw

funny story that happened to my cousin (the sister of the one scared of cats). she was talking to this dude online, yasser. so one day he put a picture up and said it was a relative of his. the picture was hideous but she didnt really comment on it to him because no one likes to hear that their family is ugly. then, later, she got a friend request from some social network from a dr. yuyu, who she assumed was yasser. so the next time she talked to him she was like i didnt know you were on that site and i didnt know you were a doctor. he was like yeah i just made an account there and i am a doctor i just never mentioned it. so then my cousin was like your pictures are really nice, not like that relative of yours, he was hideous. she basically lets out all the pent up comments about him. so yasser goes, just so you know i have no idea who that dr. yuyu is, but he's not me. the picture i put on before, though, was me. my cousin didnt know what to say. poor guy. but i mean, next time don't pretend to be someone your not.

speaking of this cousin and her sister, do you know there's like three names for a phobia of cats? and there's a phobia of ugliness, it's called cacophobia. Allodoxaphobia is a fear of opinions. Androphobia is the fear of men. If you are afraid of people with amputations you have apotemnophobia. athazagoraphobia is the fear of being forgotten. ehebiphobia is the fear of teenagers. there are also phobias from nosebleeds, long waits, large things, staying single, small things, beards, religion, and beautiful women... read more phobias here.

my brothers have recently become obsessed with jinxing people. you know when you say the same word at the same time and whoever gets jinxed cant talk until someone says their name?? yeah... they have no idea how to play it though and jinx everything. one will say something, the other will repeat it, and they'll spend the next hour shouting jinx at each other. one tried to jinx me cause we were breathing at the same time. :/

anyways, here are a couple of sites to entertain yourselves with for a few minutes. watch an animated step dance type thing. play with a rag doll for a minute. pop clouds that fill the otherwise clear blue sky. i dunno why i found this addicting.

*Maintain Consciousness - Relient K

they're worse than tremors. they're these terrors.

i have a cousin who is deathly afraid of cats. like really really terrified. a certified phobia. she's been that way for as long as i can remember. anyways, we went out to dinner with some other cousins and were getting dropped off. i dont remember exactly how we got to talking about this, but one of my cousins ended up saying to her, "i hope when you're walking up a cat comes out of nowhere and runs through your legs"... or something along those lines.

so we get out of the car and walk up to my cousins' (the one scared of cats and her sister) apartment building. i was last one in so i close the door behind me and start walking towards the stairs - they live on the top floor. as i'm about to reach the stairs, i hear someone start to scream, like a blood-curdling someone is attacking me with a knife while stealing my chocolate kind of shriek. next thing i know, my cousin is hurtling down the stairs, pushing her sister and mine out of her way. i, having no idea what was going on, immediately get an adrenaline rush and hurry back to the door which didnt seem to want to open. i finally get it open just as my cousin reaches me with a speed that let me know she would have burst through it like the koolaid man if i hadnt gotten it open in time. she runs into the street still screaming with her scarf flying off her head and a look of sheer terror plastered on her face. i run out after her before i realize that what has sent her into this frenzy was a fluffy cat sleeping on the stairs. apartment doors open as people check to see what's wrong - the apartment building only has family in it so once people saw the cat they realized what had happened.

anyways, my sister chased the cat away and my cousin made it safely up to her apartment. we spent the rest of the night laughing over the scene she had made while we ate baskin robbins ice cream.

i dont think i've ever been afraid of something so much that it would send me running screaming into the street, but i'm not completely sure. have you?

*Sleep - My Chemical Romance

so superficial, so immature

facebook seems to enjoy making me angry by broadcasting people's stupidity. the latest thing facebook people do to annoy me: putting something cryptic as their status and then pretending to get annoyed when people comment on it.

if you don't want people to know about something, then putting it as your facebook status is obviously the best idea to come around since sliced bread. because, when you have to click 'share' to post it, that obviously means that no one will ever read it. right? i doubt anyone is that stupid, which leaves them with being a more pathetic kind of stupid. they put something like "the you-know-what with you-know-who is happening you-know-where at you-know-when" to get people to ask for the who, what, where, and when. and then, when people do ask, because when you're bored on facebook that's just what you do, they start in with the omg you guys are so nosy it's none of your business comments, which usually end up with them saying how they're going to just delete the status to ward off the questions. of course, by then, all of the attention has them feeling like all that and a bag of chips, so it's work is done.

so here's my suggestion: when they resort to such thinly veiled attention seeking attempts, ignore them. don't ask for a clarification. don't act curious or interested. just let them sit there staring at the status waiting for comments as they wonder why and when they became so unloved. deflating their ego is perhaps the best thing you can do for them.

be a good person. ignore someone.

*High School Never Ends - Bowling for Soup

life in plastic, it's fantastic!

my cousin's daughters want me to do this song/dance thing with them to the song barbie girl by aqua. i have a hard time saying no to them, so of course i'm doing it. now i have the stupid song stuck in my head. grr.

anyways, i have to start applying to grad school pretty soon, and i am 99.3% sure that i want to get an MS in computer forensics at my school. so last night i was double checking the admission requirements since the program is brand new (it's just starting this fall) and they keep making changes to it. and guess what?? another change.

they made the GREs a requirement ONLY if you didnt attend to an accredited higher education program, which i obviously did. soooo that means i dont have to take the GREs anymore. i was ecstatic. not that i was planning on studying for them or anything (even if my professor hadnt said that the scores wouldnt be a major factor in getting accepted because the program is so new, i find studying for standardized tests a major waste of my time. i can barely get myself to study for normal tests.) but now thats one less thing i need to worry about. and with the money i save by not registering, i can have an amazon shopping spree. yay!

*Barbie Girl - Aqua

late dawns and early sunsets

driving to makkah this morning, we saw the most amazing sunrise. it was really picture perfect. the rays of the sun shining out over the mountains, the gilded clouds...

are you a sunrise or a sunset kind of person?? i could never decide; i love them both too much.

sunrises are gorgeous. they are full of hope, of endless possibilities. they are the start of every day when everything is fresh and new and unwritten. oh, and they remind me of mountains, though i'm not sure why.

sunsets are just as beautiful, but it's more of a melancholic beauty. they're a testament that everything must come to an end. no one day - good or bad - can go on forever. they're proof endings aren't always a bad thing. the wider variety of colors signify everything that has been done during the day. like sunrises remind me of mountains, sunsets remind me of the sea.

while sunrises give the opportunity of life, sunsets confirm that life has been lived.

*Early Sunsets Over Monroeville - My Chemical Romance