Hmmm
I am very tired.
I would like to talk about that, since it's a major section of my thoughts at the moment, but that would be in direct violation of the pseudo-oath I took (you do "take" an oath, don't you? or me?) a few posts ago (I refuse to look for the exact one since I wouldn't know how to link it anyway), all about not talking about me because I'm pretty sure it would bore you, my imaginary readers (yes, I have returned to referring to "you" as "my imaginary readers". I know. Me - find - help).
So, cunning subterfuge-r that I am, I shall discuss drowsiness and general sleep-deprivation-related crankiness and its secondary effects when combined with nervousness in the context of an on-again, off-again hyperactive personality.
One could practically publish this in Nature. Maybe I could use this for my doctoral thesis... oh, right, I'm not a med student... well, who cares, just splitting hairs... (my ability to wander into tangents that are fearsomely detached from the curve of what I think I'm talking about reminds me of the title of an article "Far out, man! But is is quantum physics?", which I thought was very funny, and also --my ability to wander, etc-- it scares even me. So maybe I'll leave this road for another day --yet knowing how way leads on to way, I wonder if I shall ever come back... ok no more Frost for today-- and finish up with this serpentine of a parenthesis once and for all before one of us --"you" or "me" heehee. I'm having fun, aren't "you"?-- goes nuts. Here we go... the long-awaited convex or concave --no idea which-- parenthesis is arriving... I'd say it's about 10 sentences late... it's pulling up... it's coming... brace yourselves... any second now... and it's HERE!!!)









PS: I absolutely positively do NOT use drugs, and any indication otherwise is misleading and should be taken in the context of *see above*.
Cross my heart and hope to die.
Unless Coke (the BEVERAGE, people!) counts as a drug, in which case I DON'T, repeat DON'T, hope to die. I like my life, no matter how loud (or long or dragged-out) I complain

You may have missed me. You may have not noticed I was gone. Either way, I'm back, with a good excuse to boot.
School started. No, I am not a freak. No, I am not suffering from amnesia and believe it's September. Yes, I live in the Southern Hemisphere!
So, 20th March, and it is back to routine.
No matter how boring this may sound to you, believe me that your tedium pales away into off-white wall paint when compared to how boring it sounds to me. On the other hand, it is my life anyway so I should stop blabbering nonsense and say something funny and interesting for a change.













Since that didn't seem to work out very well, instead I'll tell you a true and truly gruesome and depressing recent tale from my neck of the woods, which is all I can come up with right now.

There is a show on TV here that revolves around the weekly pursuit of challenging "tests" of a sort, where everyone is invited to participate, with the goal of raising money for some worthy cause. Last week, they came up with the idea of getting 40 people to pull a train (the locomotive and a couple of wagons, actually) for a short distance in a small town. But it was badly organized, and since there was a lot of fanfare surrounding the event (and as said before it's a small town with nothing much to do), a pretty big crowd gathered around the locomotive, and at one point, before the preset time, somebody yelled "Let's go!", and a lot of people started pulling. But not the 40 ones that had been selected to pull. Anyone really. There were children and old people and many others pulling, and the crowd hadn't been contained so that people were standing in the tracks and very close to the train. So many people were pulling that the train effectively started moving, but not only that, it started gathering speed. Eight people were crushed to death, not being able to get out of the way of the train they were pulling because of the tumult. A 70-year-old lady and an 8-year-old boy were among those killed. Many lost limbs.

Sorry. Not very cheerful. But it makes me mad that they weren't able to prevent it. Those deaths were truly pointless.

Full moon!!!

A few months ago, I was on msn chatting with a friend in Spain and he said "look! full moon!", and I looked, sitting here thousands of miles away, and I saw it. And I realized that I had never actually registered that when you watch a full moon (or any moon for that matter), there are millions of people around the world watching the exact same thing that you are watching. I know it sounds a bit stupid, but it was a bit of a reckoning for me, to think that others were just as goofily craning their necks up and thinking of shiny pennies and rabbits and werewolves and love and eerie shadows and howling dogs and craters and seas of tranquillity and tides and "I miss you so much" and "remember that time..." and life in outer space.

I got a bit carried away, didn't I?

But it is sort of special in a corny kind of way, if you think about it. It's just the sort of thing that makes me smile stupidly when I'm alone and there's really no one to smile at. Well there you go. All the little embarrassing details have a way of coming out sooner or later.

Look at the moon!!!
That's all I got, anyway.

Although now that I come to think about it, if you're just in that right sort of sugary teen angst and only need a catalyzer to start the chain reaction that will propel you into muddled philosophical quandaries and plain ole heartburn, you might want to give "Brighter than sunlight" by Aqualung a shot (it's a song, just in case you were wondering). It's NOT a work of art, but it does fit into the mellow yellow musing phase that you might be in if you're staring at the moon.
And, if that's not your cup of tea, then maybe you would be better with Billie Holiday in "I cover the waterfront". Very groovy (if that's the word I'm looking for, though I'm not sure that it is).

"With the dawn coming on, make it last..."

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/b/billie-holiday/17853.html

This is just to say

(spot the high-falutin' literary reference -- well never mind, probably even google doesn't know)

Spirits are back to normal and accounted for, promise not to lapse into self-absorbed blubber with any regularity.

Today's topic: lack of hot water.

How do people survive without a hot shower? That is, with cold showers (not with no showers at all, which staggers the imagination smell-wise unless you have access to the sort of lovely clear stream that only Hollywood and daydreams provide).

Unless it is absolutely stinking hot, I find jumping into a cold shower a test to my strengths quite unlike any other. It requires mettle, determination, willpower, and a very (very) strong sense of duty to overcome that icy shock that spreads like wildfire, numbing the senses and at the same time sharpening the awareness of the fact that nothing, NOTHING, would be more desirable at that moment than a warm towel and an umbrella.

Anyway, there is obviously a good reason to force troops to shower in cold water. I assume nothing makes or breaks a man/woman quite like getting up before the rooster croweth, when the sun don't shine, to jump into that Hitchcock-worthy nightmare EVERY SINGLE DAY, without so much as a whispered whimper through the teeth.

That, and my love for beds with bedding and nice clean sheets in a room of my own, are possibly the main reasons why I don't join the army (of course, you should add that I couldn't hurt someone with my fists or run two blocks if my life depended upon it -- though I do hurt flies and therefore can't use that particular clichè).

I sit here and I ponder.

Basically depressed.

Trying very hard not to begin an ominous tendency to discuss my daily woes in this place.

So.

A women is president in Chile! Yey! Who gives a damn?!

Maybe I should answer a questionnaire of some sort. Keep me focused.

Sort of like the odd questions that appear on the profile editing thing (how technologic am I?).

What's for dinner? (not an odd question, just information of interest to no one else but me)

Answer: fried chicken (but not like the Kentucky FC; just the chicken fried in butter with no covering -- I'm talking about the crust that they put on it that's like flour and then they fry it... just forget it *sigh*) with rice and sauteéd eggplants and onions. Something like that. Doesn't sound too appetizing when described like that, but it is actually.

So much for that.

I think I'll just mope in silence now. Resume your previous activities and, if you're nice and still hopefully awaiting the fruit basket and/or today's leftovers, leave a cheery comment. You WILL be reimbursed in kind

Well here's the thing (I really have got to work on my entrance lines; I never can seem to figure out how to start writing): looking back at my posts, I realized that I promised Archy and didn't deliver. Now that, to me, is a punishable offense, especially since there may be people out there who don't know about this continuously-reincarnating-no-punctuation pseudo-Shakespeare. They really don't know what they're missing.

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the books with me, so I have to rely on google for this teeny resumè (is that how it's spelled?). From now on, we'll archy our way through this and so disrobe ourselves of all pretenses of punctuation or capital letters stop try to bear with me

archy was a free verse poet at one time
and upon dying and reincarnating into a cockroach
he dedicated himself to writing in the graveyard shift
in the newsroom
at the evening sun
in new york
on don marquis apostrophe s typewriter

don marquis
not having any good ideas for his column
called the sun dial
anyway
started printing archy apostrophe s musings
on life as a poet
trapped in a cockroach
and cohabitating with mehitabel the cat
an eccentric alley cat
who claims she was cleopatra in an earlier life

of course archy was not just about ignoring punctuation so keep in mind that none of this could hold a candle to archy apostrophe s cynical and often hilarious commentary

i wont leave the whole of don marquis apostrophe s column where archy makes his first stellar apperance because it might be a tad too much comma you can find it here at http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/column.html stop i will be content with transcribing a few choice words from the neglected master

most of these rats here are just rats
but this rat is like me he has a human soul in him
he used to be a poet himself
night after night i have written poetry for you
on your typewriter
and this big brute of a rat who used to be a poet
comes out of his hole when it is done
and reads it and sniffs at it
he is jealous of my poetry
he used to make fun of it when we were both human
he was a punk poet himself
and after he has read it he sneers
and then he eats it

i wish you would have mehitabel kill that rat
or get a cat that is onto her job
and i will write you a series of poems showing how things look
to a cockroach
that rats name is freddy
the next time freddy dies i hope he wont be a rat
but something smaller i hope i will be a rat
in the next transmigration and freddy a cockroach
i will teach him to sneer at my poetry then

dont you ever eat any sandwiches in your office
i haven't had a crumb of bread for i dont know how long
or a piece of ham or anything but apple parings
and paste and leave a piece of paper in your machine
every night you can call me archy

this is the page http://www.donmarquis.com/archy/ scroll down and check out the links under the world according to archy
more tomorrow but i think i apostrophe ll try to dose the archy here so you dont suffer from an overdose
yes i know that having given you the link there is not much point in transcribing the whole thing but i know i would be too lazy to look plus i love it so i have fun while doing it

cheers and long live vers libre cockroaches exclamation mark

Now that I know I have an audience (or the possibility of an audience, anyway), I'm starting to get the jitters. Isn't it always much easier to write/speak/sing/perform in general when there's no one watching?
At least, that's the case for me.
Now I stutter, I doubt, I delete, I restate... In a (horrid, I know) pun (if that's what a pun is; I'm never sure actually), you could say that it's a hard world out there for a word-pimp.
Did I fall so low as to actually exceed your bad-ness expectations? I certainly think so.

Tomorrow is Women's Day, I think. It somehow feels odd to talk about that, a bit too political to be included in the "utmost levity" theme. But I ain't got nuthin else (yeah, I know, I should shut up right now before somebody definitely decides this is not worthy of the valuable time they could otherwise spend eating noodles with fresh basil or contemplating the meaning of life while staring at a blank screen).

Well, then, Women's Day. I don't see the point. I don't really see the point in any Day with a capital D. Except birthdays, of course, and Christmas (not for religion but because it sort of brings people together, even if we do have to stand a lot of fartsy feel-good song and dance about it), and any holiday which provides days of from school/work.
But Women's Day, I don't get. There seem to be no perks to anyone in having it, except if your boss is feeling guilty about being a sexist dickhead and gives you some hypocritical flowers that look nice on your desk (which implies a perk for florists, too).
Other than that, I dislike the idea that women should have a special Day. It feels like a sucky tradeoff that got signed late Friday when most people had already left the office and those who stayed desperately wanted to wrap it up; something like: "We'd love to give you equality in the workplace, but that's just not happening right now; how about we give you an International Women's Day with a third page headline guaranteed once a year instead? Huh? Pretty good, right?"

PS: when did I get so bad-mouthed? and politicized? since when do I have an AGENDA?!?
Could we please scratch this and pretend it never happened? (I know I could choose not to post it, but I spent a long time here with my eyes falling out of their sockets and it would depress me if it had been in vain)

I reached out a hand from under the blankets, and rang the bell for Jeeves.
“Good evening, Jeeves.”
“Good morning, sir.”
This surprised me.
“Is it morning?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you sure? It seems very dark outside.”
“There is a fog, sir. If you will recollect, we are now in Autumn – season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.”
“Season of what?”
“Mists, sir, and mellow fruitfulness.”
“Oh? Yes. Yes, I see. Well, be that as it may, get me one of those bracers of yours, will you?”
“I have one in readiness, sir, in the ice-box.”

The Code of the Woosters - P.G.W.

I love Plum!

Not long ago, I stayed home alone for two nights in a row. I had to study so I was stuck in my apartment in completely solitary confinement for the first time in my life (for that period of time, anyway).
So, day 1 I didn't study at all, and got home around 9 PM. I ordered in, and went to the den to watch some tv. Bad idea.

I should clarify before proceeding that up to that point in my life, I had always gently scorned people afraid of cockroaches. With a little smile (perhaps, I am ashamed to admit, a small knowing smile, which is of course the most annoying type), I would say "Cockroaches? Really? No, they don't freak me out. I mean, sure, they're a little gross, but I can totally handle them. Bees and wasps though, they make me hysterical!!".

Turns out, nothing further from the truth.

So, I was standing in the threshold, happily anticipating a marathonical stretch of total numbness, when I see a little black something (I'm overdoing the italics, aren't I? And the parenthesis. But that's more ingrained) scamper right across the carpet and under my sofa!

I won't go into details. Suffice it to say that I spent at least an hour tiptoeing barefoot around my apartment, with one shoe in each hand, cursing loudly and repeatedly, in a state suspiciously approaching hysteria. In the end, I isolated the room by shutting the door real tight and kept my feet up whenever possible; I didn't watch any tv whatsoever (possibly improving my studies), and I came to the conclusion that I could never live alone because I'd go barking mad (I was torn between 'barking' and 'stark', but I think 'barking mad' has a nicer ring to it, doesn't it?).

NOTE: in attempting to maintain veracity and keep the hyperboles down, I checked out definitions for hysteria and came up with one that says "occurring almost exclusively in women". Do any of you imaginary readers out there know if that's true? It sounds suspiciously like machismo, a women-are-such-drama-queens kind of thing, but maybe I'm wrong. Waiting for your telepathic response!

A promise is a promise, so, with severe forebodings of inminent writer's block, here goes:

"Cockroaches: exposed"

If I were a stand-up comedian, which of course I'm not, I am sure cockroaches would be a fixed part of my repertoire, source of the jokes to fall back on when the folks in the back are dancing with wild abandon and the people in front are merely staring in my general direction because that's the way the tables are placed.

We've all heard one or two, I'm sure. However, I remembered none, so I looked it up, and found several, including this rather vindictive story of roach revenge:
It appears that an Israeli woman found a cockroach in her living room and summoned the courage to step on it (no mean feat, from my cowardly viewpoint).
The creature, however, refused to terminate its existence, if only out of spite for so rude a host. The lady then proceeded --by what means I don't care to know-- to place it in the toilet and spray an entire can of insecticide on it, presumably to ensure its painful passage to the afterlife (though for all I know, maybe she liked the smell).
That night, her husband comes home apparently suffering from a serious head cold, enters the toilet and lights a cigarette (hiding the habit? trying to quit? deceiving the missus?). When he throws the (cigarette) butt into the bowl the fireworks begin with a vengeance. The poor man's derrière is naturally affected. But, as if that weren't enough, when the paramedics arrive to aid him, they start laughing so hard at this unfortunate event that they drop the stretcher, breaking the man's pelvis.

Now, in a desperate attempt to show versatility, I'll try the next one in stand-up comedy style (you have been warned):
"Good night everybody! All right?! So, is it raining or what?!? Craazy out there!! I swear I saw Lassie chasing a siamese through the clouds, it's really pouring! Yeah, and I got delayed cause I was at a party, you know? A friend of mine just finished his thesis and he did a little get-together. Real smart guy. You know, he couldn't figure out what to do his thesis on at first, so he was just sort of lounging around, thinking about it, and he saw a cockroach on top of his desk --you know, I really can't stand the things, but he's really into insects and that sort of stuff-- anyway, he decides he's gonna base his thesis on cockroaches, and decides he's got to do an experiment, so he tells the cockroach "Run!". And the thing runs, great, better than my dog anyway who just looks at me when I say Fetch! So he goes and pulls out one of its legs and puts it back on the desk and says Run! and it runs just like before, so he goes OK, great, and pulls out another leg, and you should see the roach go! It's on fire! So my friend goes and pulls the third leg and yells, and the thing goes at it like mad, maybe a little slower, but that's all, and it's running on ONE leg. Finally he pulls out the last leg, and yells RUN! and the thing just twitches a bit but it doesn't move. So my friend, he's all happy, and he writes his thesis: "When you out all the legs of a cockroach, it cannot hear you anymore" (... time for laughter) How's that?! Huh?! I think he got an A. Real smart guy my friend. You know he had this girlfriend, and his mother-in-law on his birthday..."

Well? Should I not quit my day job? I rather think not. And, since I can't help myself, I'd like to point out that cockroaches don't really have 4 legs, they actually have 18 (but telling the joke in that scenario would be rather unbearable, I'm afraid. Just goes to show you the benefits of artistic license)

Up next, I'll make a quick tour of my own roach-related life experiences and possibly write my own comments so the posts won't look so lonely -- cheers!

"I say! Help!"

I fear that in this tucked-away corner of the mighty World Wide Web I shall pass unnoticed, a mere damp sock in the immensity of the industrial washing machine. And that probably makes the last two hours I spent struggling to create this thing rather pointless. After all, who writes a blog if not to be read?
So, before you despair of my outdated language and mildly depressing complaint tone, here is who I am and what I intend to do.
I am 19 years old, student, female, and with time to spare. English is not my first language so please bear with me.
I like sitting on the grass and dislike the occasional damp derrière that results from it.
I dislike deceit and so will try to tell the truth at all times (not a very big bonus, I know).
The idea here is to say moderately funny (the goal is hilarious, but let us not kid ourselves) things about pretty much anything that comes around (my first topic, I think, will be "Cockroaches - exposed", with the mandatory nod to Archy and hopefully no boring miscellanea).

Doesn't sound like much, now, does it? Fortunately I'll probably be the only reader, thereby sparing myself the embarrasment.
If you think I stink, or rock, or have a suggestion or idea or a plea for mercy, I'm all ears (eyes?). Mainly, if you read up to here you are my new best friend and in line for the complimentary fruit basket.