confession time:

after the crystals of the ice storm wash away, and after the snow melts, it's just FUCKING COLD! it's cold and wet. and I'm sick or i might have meningitus or something. I don't know. My whole back hurts and i kind of have a fever but kind of not. It's that cold where it just hurts and all you want to do is get in bed because bed is the only warm place (and only after lying in it for 10 minutes to get it warmed up). God is this what peopel live in all the time!! why would you leave california!! damn education! And to top it off i have lowered myself to watchign American Idol. I hate american idol. A few years back my mom and i had a pact that we would not watch it because as she says "it promotes mediocrity and i do not promote america's love of mediocrity." she said this in response to the fact that she felt that good people got voted off while bad peopel stayed on cuz they had votes. But this year i kind of just wanted to watch the train wreck that is paula abdul. Was she on crack last night? i think so. Some guy just came in dressed as uncle sam and he sucked so paula's like, "next season he'll be dressed as in Indian cheif" and simon comes back with what i think was some kind of Indian sound like "bowwowowow" which i thought....wow that is REALLY offensive. Leave the native american's alone already, people!

you know what, let's just turn this into a good old am idol liveblog!! Obviously all the time stamps are off since i'll be fastforwarding and watching it an hour later but i feel liek they give you context so i will leave them.

9:00
OH shit some girl is coming on who refers to herself as "the hotness"! haha this is hilars. She sounds like mariah and she's kidn of got that mariah cookyness going on. I just love that she refers to herself as the "hotness" because she has a spicy personality. did you ever see that movie "cry baby"? She kind of looks like hatchetface from that movie. hatchetface was NOT the hotness. Oh my god she's having like a panting orgasm while singing. i love it!

9:06
the hotness: "pinion don't mean nuttin" (translation, you're opinion simon doesn't mean anything)
simon: "then why are you here?"
the hotness: "cuz you don't leave no stone unturned, whatchu know bout music"

what does that even mean???

9:09
the hotness has left the room!! "i was just TOO hot for him". INDEED!

9:17
this fat asian chick is singing the song from mulan. this may be one of the saddest things i have ever seen. she is so bad.

9:20
Mischa aka Darwin has like the droopiest boobs ever. her nipples are at her waste. hhha she said she picked her outfit cuz it's sexy. pan down shot: gold button down shiny shirt, frumpy skirt, black tights, orthopedic sneakers!! please let her be a good singer.

9:22
oh my god oh my god oh my god (i litrrrally just said this out loud to myself) she is singing "don't cha" by the pussycat dolls. i love this women. ha paula just looked at the camera and mouths 'oh my god." When paula thinks you are crazy that speaks volumes. oh my god sing already!!!

9:24
my dreams shattered. she sucks. damnit! i was rooting for you darwin! As many a prospective idol have done, Darwin chalks it up to nerves.

9:28
yes Ryan, tell me again for the bagilionth time how much it rains in seattle. Really? i had no idea. Oh even better, play milli vanilli "blame it on the rain." nice

9:38
Chubby woman is wearing a professional outfit with some kind of pink mesh body suit underneath. i kind of love it. I love how simon looks at all fat people who come on this show with such utter disgust. haha. oh simon, you slay me. Oh snap body suit girl is pretty decent. Ok wait now she went high and missed a note. if she were thin and hot they would totally have let her go. Simon: "what was that net she was wearing. It looked liek she'd been caught in a net."

9:47
oh a nice indian brother and sister team! their dad sings classical indian music. oh wow the sister has huge breasts. i kind of love them. please please don't suck! Wow paula just totally fucked up her name. It's shamali, not too hard. Paula's like "shayamayakali?" It's not hawaiin Paula! Oh she's good! yes i'm so happy. and she's cute. and not blonde and blue eyed!None of the red states are gonna vote for this girl. so sad. Come on indian community! rally!

9:50
why does Paula do that spread fingers seal clap. Oh the indian brother is singing now. awe i hope he's good. ooh i like his voice!!! oh yes i love indian brother and sister pair! oh my god i'm tearing up! so many eeemotions. i love multiculturalism! oh the family is so happy, it's liek the american dream, 2 kids getting onto america idol! Proving yet again that Indians are better than us at EVERYTHING.

10:14
some venezuelan dude named rudy cardenas. wait wait dont' tell me, he's going to be the "latino heartthrob" and the adjectives they use to describe him are going to be "spicy" and "hotttttt!" and "caliente." ugh.

10:15
ok wait he says he's singing Journey "open arms." this guy might be my soul mate. Simon does not look impressed but whatevs simon. it's journey.

10:31
damnit they are playing that stupid "bad day" song. ugh not another season of this song please.
10:34
realization that watching this 2 hour episode and chatting on line, and pausing and talking on teh phone. all is making this the longest episode ever.

10:35
oh my god this really wierd hobbity looking guy is singing nsync wiht the dance moves. this is like...beyond.

10:42
gay hairdresser just said "it really helps me wiht the ladiessss." he kind of acts like a drunk Ivan. "Soul patrol! Soul TWISSSSST train!"

10:50
Ok i'm throwing in the towel for the live blog. i'm too tired. i hate these 2 hour episodes.

ugh, procrastination you slay me

as you may notice when finals week comes i tend to post alot because i take lots of "study breaks."

Ok so I am a bit peeved. In my attempts to find a new place to finish my paper (which I am clearly hard at work on) I decided to pop into the local starbucks. I have not been to a starbucks since being back in LA. Wow, starbucks sucks…A LOT!

a regular coffee costs $1.54. Up until now I have paid no more than 1.35 every other place I have been. I am by no means a coffee afficianado but seriously this is the worst coffee I have ever tasted. Like it’s really gross.

1. Starbucks, even the ones in small towns, don’t give you free wifi. So my cueessssssstion to you all is, if there is free wifi next door why is everyone here
2. The only people in undergrad campuses who hang out at starbucks are

a) stupid undergrads who don’t know any better.

b) Pretentious grad students taking undergrads on dates. A quote I am hearing from a man wearing a yellow and brown (yes you heard me) pin striped velvet jacket (read: tool) talking to a girl in pig tails saying various thing which include “well my brother and I grew up on a farm…our cholesterol was prodigious from various dairy and meat products….the whole sense of the beauty of androgeny and the higher kingdom, or, whatever.” The plot thickens as I realize that this guy also has a wedding ring.

Oh my god I might die if this douche back doesn’t shut the fuck up. He’s talking about Thomas Beckett. SHUT UP SHUT UP!!

Josh Ritter “Kathleen” just came on my ipod. This song is so good.

“All the other girls here are stars, you are the northern lights.”

Seriously!! Such a good line!!!

“They try and they try but everything that they do is the ghost of a trace of a pail imitation of you”

4:50

People don’t talk like this in real life, and the ones who do are poets and as we all know from my own personal experience, POETS ARE LIARS! My main impotace for saying this is that I dated this guy who played the guitar and sang me elliot smith songs and in the end he spoke more than he felt. Thus the saying, poets are liars. They say what they think, not what they feel because they are all about the drama and the pretty words. Point being, as a teenager I always wanted a poet who would sing me songs and tell me that all the other girls in the room were stars and I was the northern lights, and then I had that and you know what, it was full of shit. So now I’m just happy when david says “you’re so hot when you talk about critical race theory.” It’s not as beautiful as being called the northern lights but I feel it’s much more genuine.

5:21

I seriously love people watching. I think you can read so much about people just from watching them. More than you get from talking to them. Look at their body language, where they have their hands, the clothes they choose to wear. You can tell the image they want to give off and sometimes that image is different from the person they really are. And you can tell when a guy likes a girl and she doesn’t know it. Or when a gay kid and his best hag are sitting together and he loves her even though she’s kind of chubby and looks like shit because she’s the only person who treats him like a human being. And you can see the girl sitting alone with red hair who looks oddly uncomfortable and she puts on her headphones even though she’s listening to the conversations of people around her. Or the two bitches who are having the most mundane conversation EVER and acting like their shit don’t stink when you know they actually hate their lives. Whenever people ask what I’d want if I could have any super power I always say flying, but honestly I think I’d want to be invisible so I could just watch people. Oh gay boy, put down that pastry!

coffee shop memoirs

6:30
So i'm at this coffee shop called Sweetwaters (I know. It screams "see, see! we are unique! we are not starbucks! but basically they are starbucks. Anyways) and there is this really loud group of ladies having a knitting circle in the corner, but i like them. I prefer to come to the coffee shops early cuz when you come later it's the stressed study crowd and there are lots of people and they are all undergrads and instead of studying they talk and it's like...COME ON PEOPLE SHUT THE FUCK UP AND STOP TALKING ABOUT DOING WORK AND DO IT ALREADY! But the 5 to 8ish crowd are the hardcore studiers who want to be in bed by 10. The point of all this though was to say that this place, Sweetwaters, has a fireplace with a tv showing "log burning fire" inside of it and this really FOBy asian girl with like colored hair and everything (very harajuku baby love) walks up to this fireplace and crawls up on the ledge and starts like trying to figure out how it works. and me and this asian girl next to me are like, hello silly harajuku, it's a tv! so sad.

Ok wait. I'm an ass. I just tried looking close up at the fireplace and it's NOT a tv. And the other asian girl next to me is also kind of staring at it. Now feel kind of bad for mocking that FOB girl. I love FOBs. Wow this fireplace is rather intricate. It has real wood in it but then it has like a projector somewhere projecting the scene of a fire on the brick. Me and the Asian girl keep staring at it but we are too embarrassed to go up and be like the FOB and crawl onto the ledge to figure out how it works cuz if we were judging her than others will judge us. We are having a moment. I feel you, young asian girl. And we both have IBM computers! what if she is like my asian soul sister, my kindred spirit, the diana berry to my anne shirley!

7:35
on hour later, what have i done. let's see, i had a really deep discussion with orges and emily about Heroes and the butterfly effect and the Ray Bradbury story "A sound of thunder" (if you watch heroes wiki this shit!). i'm not feeling my reading right now. this couple across from me is practicising what appears to be that clicking african language. what's it called???? !click! is that what it's called? anyways what's funny is that they are the whitest peole i have ever seen and here they are having a !click! convo.

i'm reading this article that is basically debunking all kinds of feminist dominance theory stuff and saying that women's voices are suppressed in adolescence but so are mens. this is one of my favorite lines of any psych paper ever i think

reviving ophelia is certainly a worthy goal. however, Hamlet also displaysed serious problems of indecision and lack of voice.

9:40.
it's startig to snow again. I kind of love snow. It's so....magical. that just made me think of gilmore girls and lorelie and how she loves snow. but seriously it's so pretty! it's like everything i've ever eeeeeemagined and nothing i've ever eeeemagined. It's the bomb. I kind of hope it's cold enough to stay on the ground cuz i really want to wear my new snow boots tomorrow. I think if i lived in a city where it snowed and i had to look cute and wear heals ahd drive places i'd hate it. but i live in a small town and i can walk everywhere in my really ugly utilitarian clothing from REI. quote me later during a blizzard, but i kind of love winter in small town america!

it reminds me of when i was younger and my mom had this collection of mini christmas towns.
It's really wierd to describe to people who have never seen it but there are different villages like an alpine village, the north pole stuff like that. My mom collected the "christmas in the city" collection which was basically new york in winter (not that my mom and i had ever seen new york or winter for that matter) and the "snow village" collection which was essentially a small white surburb and "dicken's village" which took place in the village where "a christmas carol" took place. I used to be obsessed with the dickens story I think mainly because of these damn villages and because my mom raised me watching that old version of "a christmas carol" with albert finny. Seriously my mom is the reason why i am a gay man trapped in the body of a straight woman. eeemagine being raised on musicals and making fake christmas villages! that kid from Ugly Betty would have died in my house. Sadly my mom has stopped celebrating christmas cuz she says it's not fun anymore but man we used to go all out! My mom's changed alot. But anyways in addition to having these humongous village sets all over the house we also had a giant nativity set. Flashbacks, we even used to make my dad cut out giant peices of wood so we could have a "stage" to set the village on and we'd use bricks cuz my mom said it "created depth to have houses on different levels" and we would start going to the christmas collectors store months before hand to get ideas and we'd meticulously plan our villages. god my mom was so crazy and yet i see so much of myself in her. this all kind of explains a lot....sorry i'm having a moment. I shoudl unearth the collection. I bet it's worth a lot since most of the peices have been discontinued or retired.

aaaanyways every christmas until puberty we would put up our villages and we would buy fake dead trees and fake snow and sprinkle it on top of fake rocks and make a fake river out of celaphane (spelling?) paper for the fake porcelain kids to skate on and it was like the highlight of my year making these stupid villages. Winter here feels like a mixture of "christmas in the city" and "snow village." because when the snow falls on the rocks it really does look like it did when i dropped the fake snow on rocks in "snow village" and the streets really are kind of made of brick and cobblestone like in "dicken's village" and ice gets stuck in the cracks. and everyone has hats and scarves that flow in the wind and snow topped roofs and dead trees with tiny bits of white snow on them. So I will be honest, we californians really don't know what we're missing.

Detroit or bust

Liveblog from LAX!! Did you know that LAX enacted a new policy at some point in the past 2 months whereby you have to arrive at your flight 45 minutes before take off otherwise they will not let you on? 45 minutes! Did you know that there was hella traffic on the 405 this morning such that a trip that would normally take us 15 minutes, 30 minutes with traffic, took us 45 minutes? Did you know that consequently I arrived 43 minutes before takeoff? Did you know that THE JACKASS LADY AT THE NWA COUNTER WOULD NOT CHECK ME ONTO MY FLIGHT NOR WOULD SHE LOOK ME IN THE EYE!! I kept saying, “mam I have 40 minutes. I assure you I can make it.” And she said “no, mam you can’t.” Did you know that LAX was empty and I have now been sitting in front of the terminal where my 8:37 flight was set to take off. Did you know that it is now 8:00? Did you know that they are now giving away my seat to other standby people? Did you know that I have to wait here 3 more hours for the next flight to Detroit? Did you know that I am in the worst terminal ever because all they have is a starbucks and a jetway candy shop? Did you know that I hate my life sometimes?!? No, seriously how wretched is this. When I asked when this policy was enacted they said “oh a very very long time ago.” I call bullshit. I have been flying in and out of LAX for the past 7 years at a frequency of at least 5 times a year and NEVER have they had this policy. I hate you, northwest airlines. How booty is this. Not only do they not give you food on a 5 hour flight, but they also don’t show a movie. The hell! 5 hours?? Seriously I hate Midwestern airlines.

Oh some aZian dude with a Purdue t-shirt is pissed because he missed his flight too. Oh how sad he’s late for his meeting. He barely got here though (8:39), unlike me who was here 43 minutes before, 2 minutes too late apparently. Turns out he tried to do online check in but their system was down. Wow that sucks for him. Now he’s trying to weasel his way up the list of standby people because it’s not his fault but their fault that he is late. Oh hell to the no, mr aZian man! You will not take my spot on the standby flight. Wouldn’t it just be utterly wretched if I got on this flight and got put in the back of the plane and he got on too but was put in first class because he was lower on the standby list? That would happen to me. Will I ever fly first class?

So a few things I have decided. a) I don’t care how stupid I look I am buying an airplane neck pillow. In fact I bought one in Detroit and used it on the flight here and it was excellent. No shame. I slept like a lamb. My next thought was, “you know since I always get stuck at the airport for at least 2 hours I should buy one of those DVD players to entertain myself.” Do they have longer battery lives than laptops? I will look into it. LAX has no internet. God I hate it here sometimes.

11:41 AM PST

One word to describe my feelings. WRETCHED! Truly truly wretched. I’m still on standby only now for another flight. A flight at 12:30 which I am told is oversold and has like 10 people on standby. The next flight after this is at 5 something or other which is also sold out. Truly truly wretched. It’s not even like I can go home. I’m stuck here. And if I want a guaranteed seat on any flight for tomorrow I have to pay 50 bucks, which I’m say I can’t afford right now. But my point is that being stuck at an airport is not so horrible. What is horrible is being stuck at the airport alone. It means that every time you have to pee or get food or buy water or anything you have to put everything you have away. And then you put all of your stuff away, lug it all to the bathroom and then when you get back your seat is taken! And your electricity jack is taken! And you just want to cry.

6:39 PM EST

Ok so I got on the 12:50 flight, thank the lord. Only problem is that because of raining and some crazy el nino type west winds the pilot had to come on and tlel us that we were going to have some really intense turbulence. Turbulent indeed! The pilot kept coming on every 15 minutes during the first 3 hours to tell everyone “sit down! No excuses!” like yelling at us. That is very assuring. I thought I was going to die like 3 times and I started reciting the “our father” over and over again and the pilot ordered the stewardesses to sit down for the first 3 hours. What I’m saying is I was really scared. To top it off I am sitting next ot his rather large asian dude who is reading Japanese comics on his computer but was passed out snoring earlier and then spent 20 minutes in the bathroom during turbulence. Never have I wanted to be in Detroit so bad in my life.