laugh track

kinglets and kittens

2006-10-06T13:57:00.000-04:00

I spent yesterday afternoon helping out with a field lab my all-time favorite professor was doing with her introductory zoology course, which involved measuring the webs of spiders belong to different genuses out at a local wildlife area. It was a lot of fun, though I must admit my attention wasn't one hundred percent on the students in the lab... I was distracted by the birds.

For the first hour or so all I noticed were a lot of blue jays, the occasional crow, and some turkey vultures overhead. However, as I was walking through the brush from one group of students to another, I struck gold: a mixed flock of fall migrants suddenly materialized out of nowhere in the scrubby trees around me. It was amazing.

It's one thing to drive for a couple hours to visit a wildlife area specifically known for being a staging area for spring migrants about to cross Lake Erie, and another thing to suddenly walk into a flock of migrants when you're not even supposed to be birdwatching. And it's one thing to have an experienced birder point to something moving in a tree and tell you, "That's a ruby-crowned kinglet," and another thing to find yourself face-to-face with half a dozen of them.

Kinglets. A number of them, hopping to the edges of their bushes for a look at me while I just stood there pishing quietly. Also some sparrows, wrens, and a warbler or two, none of which I got a good enough look at to identify properly (though I'm guessing the wrens were house wrens, just based on what species would be likely to be migrating through my area at the moment). After five or ten minutes, the flock moved on, and I went running to find the professor to tell her about it...

Only to find her with two students, trying to coax a pair of abandoned kittens out of their hiding place.

So I finished out the afternoon sitting on top of the earthen dike with my professor, each of us cradling a kitten on our lap. Two of the students who live in the area volunteered to give them homes. After a brief stop to show off the local bald eagle nest, we headed back to campus. All in all, a pretty satisfying way to spend a Thursday afternoon.

movie review

2006-10-02T12:22:00.000-04:00

Okay, here is my attempt to write a coherent review of An Inconvenient Truth (as opposed to my infuriated babbling after seeing Who Killed the Electric Car?).

The movie opens with an ethereal shot of a river with mist and trees and Al Gore's ethereal, misty voice-over talking about how wonderful it is. And then it cuts to shots of Al Gore running out on stage and being cheered by people. And extreme close-ups of Al Gore looking pensive. And... I was kind of giggling. Because, you know, it's Al Gore.

But after a few minutes things get going and you get drawn in to the point that you forget to giggle at Al Gore. This film does a very good job of explaining global warming in a way anyone can understanding and showing that it's definitely not just part of natural variation, with a lot of excellent graphs my statistics professor would go ga-ga over. (He has a thing for graphs.) It's not the most sophisticated movie ever, as it's mostly just Al Gore giving a Powerpoint presentation, but that's not the point. It does what it sets out to do. And well, if there's a certain amount of "Look how awesome I am for doing all this stuff spreading the word about global warming" from Al Gore, he is doing a wonderful service, and he probably deserves his moment (okay, many moments) in the limelight.

Memorable quote (wording may not be exact): "Too many people make the leap from denial to despair without pausing to ask what they can do."

Go to http://www.climatecrisis.net/takeaction, part of the movie's official website, to take a quiz to calculate your own carbon emissions and find out how you can help change things. Kay? And now I must run to my music history class.

fasting

2006-09-28T23:59:00.000-04:00

While fasting was interesting, I'm glad I don't have to do it every day for a month.

Coming soon, a review of An Inconvenient Truth, since Zilla asked.

just rambling

2006-09-27T22:23:00.000-04:00

It's raining. I love being snug inside and listening to the sound of rain and thunder.

Tomorrow is the birthday of one of my roommates, the one from Pakistan. Since it's Ramadan (and she's Muslim), I told her I would fast for her birthday, so I'm going to get up at five A.M. to eat sehri with her and then not eat or drink anything all day until sunset, when she breaks fast with iftar. Is it odd that I'm kind of looking forward to it? I've never been religious myself but I've always found different religions and cultures fascinating, and the idea of trying this out to experience for one day what my roommate (who is also a really good friend) does for an entire month every year appeals to me.

I'm genuinely enjoying the whole roommate this year, now that I'm rooming with three people I'm friends with and enjoy being around. We watch TV together and take turns buying milk and bread. It's cool. It may seem odd that two girls from Ohio can coexist so well with a girl from Pakistan and a girl from Sri Lanka, but it's great fun.

Anyway. That was my pointless rambling for the day.

tv addictions

2006-09-25T22:38:00.000-04:00

If you're going to be addicted to something, better a TV show than, say, drugs or alcohol or phone sex, right? First it was just Numb3rs, and now this year my roommates have gotten me into House, and this evening one of the roomies and I watched the premiere of Heroes, which looks awesome (like X-Men but not).

I face a dilemma, though. An Inconvenient Truth is being shown twice this week at our local theater, and a friend of mine wants me to go with her tomorrow at 9, which would mean... missing the end of House! Eek! I definitely want to see An Inconvenient Truth one way or the other, but I'd rather go Wednesday and avoid missing my TV goodness... but she can't go then. Decisions, decisions.

(And no, it wouldn't just be choosing a TV show over going out somewhere with one of my friends. I'm not quite THAT pathetic. It would be choosing one of my weekly rituals with my wonderful roommates over going out somewhere with one of my friends.)

so mad. SO MAD.

2006-09-20T21:47:00.000-04:00

I saw Who Killed the Electric Car? with my roommate this evening.

OH. MY. GOD.

I was literally almost in tears as we were walking out of the theater, I was that upset and frustrated. Roomie and I spent pretty much the entire second half of the movie staring at the screen in open-mouthed shock at how much corporations and the government SUCK. Did you know Condoleeza Rice used to be on Chevron's board of directors? I sure as hell didn't. Roomie and I quickly came to the conclusion that she really, REALLY needs to get registered to vote between now and November so she can help get our current Republican Bush-buddy senator out of office. Because right now, my mindset is that anybody even remotely connected with this administration needs to go.

And of course, the stuff in the movie about the Bush administration wasn't even the main focus. When they showed the footage of the electric cars being secretly crushed and shredded and destroyed in the middle of the desert, and then showed the footage of the GM spokesman guy promising that all the parts from the cars would be "recycled"... and when they showed people being led away in handcuffs for trying to block the trucks that were taking the cars to be destroyed...

Y'all need to see this movie. Seriously. Now. If you're not lucky enough to have a little independent theater that show awesome films like this, you need to get your hands on it the minute it comes out on DVD.

Oh my God.

murphy's law

2006-09-16T12:05:00.000-04:00

If it's just after midnight on Friday night, and you're returning from a friend's room in the basement of your dorm to your own room on the third floor, and you're in your pajamas and your hair is messy and you're carrying an armload of statistics textbooks, and you want nothing more than to go to bed... you're bound to step out of the elevator to find yourself face-to-face with a cute guy you know. And not even a cute guy you know well enough to consider a friend so you don't really care that much if he sees you in your pajamas with messy hair, but a cute guy you only know slightly. From band.

Cute Guy: Hi.

Me: Hi... you're an interesting person to run into in my pajamas.

Yes, I actually said that out loud.

(And yes, I spent Friday night watching television, doing statistics homework, and going to bed by twelve-thirty.)

five years ago today

2006-09-11T12:09:00.000-04:00

I was in my ninth grade English class when my teacher said someone had attacked the World Trade Center with planes. I thought she meant fighter planes firing missiles at it or something. I didn't know what to think.

It wasn't until I got to lunch that I really realized what was going on, because TVs had been set up in the cafeteria so we could all watch the news coverage. When lunch period ended I seriously considered skipping my next class in order to stay there and keep watching CNN, and skipping class is something I would normally never ever even have thought about doing.

Anyway, my next class was biology, and my biology said something I'll never forget: "We aren't going to have another normal day for a long time." We all thought this might be just the beginning, but even though there hasn't been a major attack on American soil since then, she was right. There hasn't been a normal day since, not really, not according to what we thought was normal before that day.

I had a dentist appointment that evening.

It was a Tuesday.

Funny, the things you remember.

so apparently i've been tagged...

2006-09-10T18:10:00.000-04:00

...by Zilla. You know, for a meme. So here goes.

1) A book that changed my life: Eats, Shoots & Leaves, because it wasn't until after I read that book that incorrect punctuation really started driving me nuts.

2) A book that I've read more than once: The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie R. King, because there's so much awesomeness in that book that I never get tired of it. So what if my mom pointed out a big plot hole after she read it.

3) A book I'd take to a deserted island: Life of Pi. It's one of my favorite books, and it's (sort of) about a castaway in the Pacific, so it would fit well with a deserted island.

4) A book that made me laugh: Several (including a number of other books mentioned elsewhere in this post), but Catch-22 especially comes to mind, an odd book in that parts of it make me laugh out loud and parts of it (like when McWatt and Nately die) make me rather teary-eyed. Zilla, you should be ashamed of yourself that you've never finished this one.

5) A book that made me cry: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I rarely ever cry at books, but the ending of this one had me bawling.

6) A book I wish I had written: Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis. Sinclair Lewis was such an amazing writer. I wish I could write like that.

7) A book that should never have been written: The Da Vinci Code, I suppose. I've never actually read it, but I have read Angels and Demons, and it was so ridiculous and so poorly written that it definitely didn't rate a sequel.

8) A book I'm currently reading: State of the World 2006, required reading for my Environmental Alteration class.

9) A book I'm planning to read: The next one in the Lord Peter Wimsey series by Dorothy Sayers. It's Unnatural Death. I looked it up just now because I realized I didn't actually know the title of the next one in the series.

10) Who I'm tagging next: Oh, hm... Patrice and Jen, though I don't seriously expect them to do it.

my ecological footprint

2006-08-31T13:01:00.000-04:00

Everyone needs to go to this website and take the quiz to determine your ecological footprint. And if it doesn't seriously start you thinking, there's something wrong with you.

I've decided that if I'm going to be an environmental studies major, I need to start considering the way my habits effect the environment if I'm going to avoid being a major hypocrite. So this year, I'm getting involved. I'm joining Environmental & Wildlife Club, I'm volunteering to help empty the recycling bins in my dorm (and making the effort to walk down the hall to actually put things into them more often), and I'm going to try to start doing some of the little things suggested on the above website, like eating less meat (meat production is apparently really wasteful and really bad for the environment) and even just turning off my computer when I'm not using it. It's so funny, I've had exactly two class periods of Environmental Alteration and read the first two and a half chapters of the book, and it's already got me thinking and changing some of my habits. Pretty amazing.

i think i sprained my vocal chords

2006-08-17T16:30:00.000-04:00

I can still talk, but my throat is sore and feels like it has a big lump in it, and when I was singing along to Harry and the Potters' new album earlier today I discovered my voice went about an octave lower than usual. It was weird. That's what I get for screaming so much.

You see, last night a couple of my friends and I drove for three hours to hear Harry and the Potters and Draco and the Malfoys live in Lakewood, OH. And it was awesome. Picture a mosh pit, but then picture it in a public park with librarians and eight-year-olds, and a couple of dorky Jewish guys in red-and-gold ties jumping around on the stage with guitars, and you'll start to have an idea of what it was like. And, I bought a T-shirt, and Paul DeGeorge autographed it (though he signed it Harry Potter). It was the most fun I've had all summer. Who can resist songs with lyrics like "You may have freed our house-elf/ And brought doubt to our family name/ But your parents still got toasted by a big green glowing flame" and "Oh the bus don't go to Hogwarts/ You gots to take the train"? Punk rock, Harry Potter style. Freaking awesome.

this settles it... snape is good!

2006-08-08T10:38:00.000-04:00

I found this on the website of the Hindustan Times, of all places, after reading an article on Mugglenet that (to my frustration) mentioned Salman Rushdie's theory without explaining what it was. Yes, Salman Rushdie is apparently a Harry Potter fan, and he showed up at a reading J.K. Rowling was giving to ask her about his theory about Snape and Dumbledore.

Some of the more tantalising tid-bits she let fall are that although Albus Dumbledore – the headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry – was murdered in Half-Blood Prince, he would still have an important role in the final book, and furthermore, his killer Severus Snape (whose role is assayed by Alan Rickman in the Harry Potter films) is actually a good character.

The latter bit, which had been a topic of much debate and speculation among Potter fans, was first voiced at the concert by author Salman Rushdie, who offered his theory that Snape and Dumbledore were in cahoots (over the latter’s murder) and that Dumbledore’s death was a hoax.

“In my opinion, Snape is good,” he declared.

Rowling’s answer: “And your opinion is right, but I feel I need to make one thing clear about Dumbledore: he is dead.”

I almost can't believe she'd come right out and give a definitive answer. Maybe Salman Rushdie has some extra pull with her, being a famous author himself. :) You can read the whole article here.

bluebirds and other blue birds

2006-08-06T19:16:00.000-04:00

Why, when I almost never see bluebirds around my house, has a pair been hanging around the telephone pole in our backyard on and off this afternoon? I've even seen them disappearing out of site on the top of the pole with something (nesting material? food?) in their beaks. I wonder if one is actually a fledgling with a parent following it around with food? I guess I need to look up when bluebirds typically fledge.

Anyway, I finally finished with work on Friday, and now I have three weeks before I go back to school. My favorite thing about work, I think, was the drive there and back. It took about twenty minutes each way, but it gave me a little time to be by myself and think and decompress, and I had the added bonus of heron-watching every morning.

Birdwatching while driving can be a dangerous pastime, but I couldn't resist looking for this heron each morning as I drove past. On my way to work I would take a road that followed the bank of a river for a little ways, and right where the river bent away from the road was a shallow area where every once in a while I'd spot a Great Blue Heron hunting. I'd just get a glimpse of it as I drove past, this enormous bird standing absolutely still in the bend in the river, neck arched, waiting for a fish to swim within range.

Great Blue Herons are actually pretty common around here -- you see one in about every shallow stretch of river or patch of marsh or lakeside inlet. But they're so gorgeous that I never get tired of watching them. They're so incredibly graceful, with their long legs and long necks, still as stone until the moment when they explode into motion and come back up with a silver fish struggling in their beak. So if there's one thing about work I'll miss, it's the drive, and the heron. The park near campus at school has its own charms, like the Northern Flickers I see there every once in a while, but there's no place to see herons within walking distance of my dorm.

some people don't know what's in their own backyard.

2006-08-02T15:00:00.000-04:00

So to speak.

A couple weeks ago my parents, my nephew and I went hiking at a state park near here. At one end of the park is good-sized lake, and there's a pair of bald eagles in the area (as there is at most of the reservoirs around here, really). When we got there a man was standing on the dam with a spotting scope, watching one of the eagles. Later, when we were going back to our car after our hike, I said something about the bald eagles to one of my parents. A woman standing nearby overheard and said, "Bald eagles? Here? Really?"

Today at work, a guy at my lunch table was talking about how much he enjoys hiking and canoeing in this same state park. When I said something about the bald eagles, his reaction was the same: "We have bald eagles around here? Really?"

Yes. We also have beavers, foxes, coyotes... just because you don't often see them from the windows of your car while you drive to the grocery store doesn't mean they're not there.

On a related note, I came across a really cool website, mentioned in a book I'm reading. It's called eBird, and it lets you keep track of what birds you've seen where and when. Not only can use it as a personal life list and record of your birdwatching, but scientists use the information on the site, too. Makes me want to go birdwatching right now!

a familiar face

2006-07-30T19:17:00.000-04:00

When I was in Berlin on a study trip several years ago, most of our time was planned for us. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing - our chaperones took us to the Jewish Museum, to the Schloss Sans-Souci in Potsdam, and a lot of other famous attractions. However, it was nice when one afternoon we were told that our time was our own for the rest of the day. The only caveats were that we had to travel in groups of at least two, and we each had to visit at least one museum, the ticket stub of which we had to retain as proof. (We were also to be reimbursed our admission costs when we presented our ticket stubs).

My friends and I poured over our map of the city, trying to settle on a museum. According to our information, there was some sort of art exhibit (I don't remember the details) in a palace called the Schloss Charlottenburg, so we set out on the subway. However, when we got to the palace we found that the art exhibit hadn't actually been there for some time. We toured the palace itself, which was gorgeous, but none of us was quite sure whether that counted as a museum. There were a couple museums across the street, though, so we went to check them out. There were four of us all together, and two girls were enticed by signs promising Picassos inside the little art museum, but the third girl and I decided to try the "Aegyptisches," or Egyptian, Museum.

When I was in sixth grade my friends and I read the book The Egypt Game, and for the rest of the year we'd been obsessed with ancient Egypt, constantly passing each other notes written in hieroglyphics. Prominently featured in the book had been the famous bust of Nefertiti, the image of which had become symbolic, to my mind, of the entire culture. I'd always assumed the original must be in Egypt somewhere and never expected to actually see it.

Imagine my surprise when, after paying our admission to the unassuming-looking museum and going inside, this was the first thing we saw:

To my sixteen-year-old self, it was like a miracle. It was liking finding a civilization of fairies in the back of my closet. I will never forget that day.

a cheese sandwich

2006-07-28T19:51:00.000-04:00

This is my official entry in Zilla's cheese sandwich story contest (a link to Zilla's blog can be found to the right). I think it's lousy, but I did my best to fulfill what understand as the instructions - to take something mundane and increase its significance by using heightened language. Zilla suggested a trip to the zoo, and this is what I came up with. She limited the length to 750 words, and this is 656.

Cheese Whiz

For a zoology major, a trip to the zoo can be a trying ordeal.

Take this weekend. I was sitting in the reptile house across from the turtle tanks, resting for a few minutes while I waited for my parents to catch up, and one by one I watched half a dozen sets of parents tell their kids blatantly wrong information about the animals on display. "Yes, that's a very big turtle, but they would die before they ever got that big in the wild." (Wrong: it was an alligator snapping turtle, and they certainly do get that big in the wild.) "I wonder why there's a little crocodile in with the turtles?" (I don't know why it was there, but it was an alligator, not a crocodile.) The ignorance was blinding.

So was the heat. The cool, dark reptile house was a pleasant break from the paths that wound between the outside exhibits, where the concrete gathered sunlight and sent it back at us in waves that battered us without mercy. Outside the only respite came in the form of the misters set up every few hundred feet, where children danced in the sprays of water. Even the animals were feeling the wrath of July, and many had misters of their own plus piles of crushed ice on the floors of their habitats. The large animals all slept in the shade, dreaming of wild places with refreshing breezes.

My parents found me just in time, right before I was about to step up the ignorant parents feeding their children made-up facts and tell them off, and we continued to the last glass-fronted reptile exhibit: the Khomaini water monitor, my favorite. A huge monitor lizard about four feet long from nose to tail, it was almost too big for its small habitat. As we watched, it stalked back and forth in the tiny space, its forked tongue flickering in and out to taste the air. Its strangeness fascinated me, the cold eyes, the scaly skin, the third eye on the top of its head (all lizards have this, a light-sensitive spot covered by a single transparent scale that helps set their internal clock). According to the sign this was the only known specimen of its species in the country, and it had been hatched here at the zoo a decade before. The only place it was found in the wild was on a single miniscule island in the Indian Ocean.

What would it be like, I wondered, to spend your whole life without seeing another of your kind? To live in a glass box only six feet long, only two feet more than your own length nose-to-tail? But my musings were interrupted prematurely by my parents' desire to get going, so we proceeded out the door and back toward the zoo's entrance. The reptile house had been our last stop for the day, and now we were headed home. Still, the cold, thoughtful eyes of the monitor lizard stayed with me as we crunched across the gravel parking lot to our car, the sun baking out the last of the coolness that had lingered with us from the reptile building.

We had more in common, that lizard and I, than was first apparent. Domain Eukaryota, Kingdom Animalia, Phylum Chordata, Subphylum Vertebrata, the zoologist in me listed off automatically; we shared that much of Linnaeus's system of classification. And after all, didn't I live in a metaphorical glass box of my own sometimes? Doesn't everybody? Except when we are completely alone, our every word and action is part of a performance for the benefit of an audience. We put ourselves on exhibit every day.

I didn't know how long it would be before I happened to go to the zoo again, but as we pulled out of the parking lot, air conditioner blasting, I silently wished the monitor lizard well until our next meeting.

drool

2006-07-25T21:34:00.000-04:00

A longer post will hopefully follow later, but right now I'm busy drooling over the first movie poster for Star Trek XI, slated to come out in 2008 (about which nothing official is known except that it's slated to come out in 2008... and the poster doesn't exactly reveal much).

When the first theatrical trailer comes out, I don't care what movie it runs before, I'll pay for a movie ticket just to see the trailer. Yeah... drool.

uh-oh, suzy sim's bladder motive is getting low...

2006-07-16T20:33:00.000-04:00

I have one computer game addiction. Just one. A couple years ago I went through a Harry Potter computer game phase, but I got over it, and now I've come back to my first computer game love.

Yup, it's The Sims. Or rather, now it's The Sims 2, to be precise.

It's a game that involves creating little people, building them houses to live in, and then running their lives. You know, making sure they use the toilet when they need to so they don't have an embarrassing accident and making sure they get to the carpool on time so they don't lose their job. In The Sims 2, each character also has wants and fears to worry about, which makes it even more interesting. Usually I create a family, play them for a bit, then get busy with school, and then just start over with a new family when I start playing the game again, so I never really get very far with any one group of Sims. But when I came home for the summer I started yet another family that I've been playing ever since, and the girl I created as a toddler when I started the family just gave birth to a daughter of her own yesterday, so I feel a sense of accomplishment.

Kind of a pathetic thing to get a sense of accomplishment out of. But I'll take what I can get.

We went to the zoo again today. Next time I'm going to wear a red polo shirt and impersonate a docent so I can do what I really want to do, which is stand by the alligator tank in the reptile building and correct every parent who tells their kid the critter's a crocodile.

they say we can choose our friends, but...

2006-07-08T15:21:00.000-04:00

...not our families.

My oldest nephew is spending three weeks with us. He's fourteen, which is a pretty obnoxious age, but he's okay most of the time - just not when he's following me around the house expecting me to entertain him because Grandma and Grandpa are busy. He was impressed by my music collection, though. Not so much by my taste in music, just the sheer size of the collection. I guess sixty-three CDs is a lot.

Yesterday evening my mom and I were sitting in the living room while my dad was outside somewhere. Mom was reading and I was on my computer writing. My nephew came wandering into the room - I guess he wanted someone to watch Ultimate Smackdown with him, poor kid, but I really don't like wrestling - and he just stood there for a minute, and then he said, voice full of disgust...

"This is all you guys do? Sit around and type and read?"

Yes. Some evenings that is all we do. And there's nothing wrong with that.

a fourth of july memory

2006-07-05T18:25:00.000-04:00

Spring three years ago I was getting ready for my trip to Germany, a month-long all-expenses-paid study trip I'd been selected for by scoring high on a standardized test. It was a big deal, and the local newspaper had done an article about me winning the trip.

I had a dentist appointment, and when I got to the dentist's office I found that someone there had cut the article out of the paper and stuck it in my file to give to me. I declined, since I already had about half a dozen copies of the thing, but the dental hygienist and I got to talking about the trip. She remembered the dates in the newspaper article and commented that I was going to be there over the fourth of July.

"Yes, that's right," I said.

"Isn't that nice," she said, "you'll be able to see how the Germans celebrate it!"

And to think that in a few moments I was going to be trusting this woman with my teeth.

the return of the blogger

2006-07-03T19:08:00.000-04:00

Boy, when you drop of the face of the earth (or the blogoverse) for a month, you miss some things. Working full-time for the first time in my life has been so all-consuming that I haven't been online much at all lately. But I just made an effort to go through and catch up with at least some of the blogs on my list, though it's hard because I don't have access to my RSS subsription thingy here at home since I can't seem to hook my laptop up to the Internet. Drat.

As I was leaving work today I noticed a bird hovering above the field across the street from the building - just hovering in place, a bird about the size of a mourning dove. I wracked my brain all the way home trying to remember which bird that behavior of hovering and watching for prey is typical of, and when I got home I checked my handy dandy Peterson's and discovered that as I'd suspected it was indeed a kestrel. So yay, add another bird to my workplace list!

Happy Fourth of July, all. I'll try to keep up better for the rest of the summer.

still here

2006-06-29T18:25:00.000-04:00

Sorry I haven't written anything or kept up with other people's blogs lately - I've never worked full time before! I'll probably get cranking again in the fall.

Anyway, speaking of work, I work in a very birdy place. Killdeer along the driveway, cowbirds on the windowsills, blue herons flying over the parking lot, goose jams on the highway leading to the building. Quite fun.

yesterday...

2006-06-06T22:17:00.000-04:00

...all my troubles seemed so far away... (Sorry, couldn't resist!) Anyway, sorry for the lack of blogging and commenting lately but I spent the entire weekend at various graduation parties and yesterday I started my summer job, so I'm pretty exhausted.

I also got a wonderful piece of mail yesterday: my check and contributor's copy for my poem published in Aoife's Kiss! You know a magazine is smaaaaall when you get a check handwritten from the editor. Funnily enough, on the same day I got a rejection letter from a different publication for a short story I'd submitted a while ago.

Good night, all. I have to get up at six thirty tomorrow morning... again... ugh. Stupid job.

bird envy

2006-06-01T15:48:00.000-04:00

Okay, Tufted Titmice are freaking loud. There was one in our front yard earlier, and even though we were in the kitchen, which is at the back of the house, we could here it clearly. "erp-PEEP-PEEP! erp-PEEP-PEEP! erp-PEEP-PEEP!" over and over again. Don't get me wrong, titmice are among my favorite birds (along with... almost every other species of bird?), but sometimes I'm amused by how loud and insistent their call is. Even my dad noticed and asked me what it was.

Then he told me about a friend of his who apparently had a Pileated Woodpecker nearly demolish a telephone pole in her yard. I'm jealous. I've never seen a Pileated Woodpecker.

Anyway, in case anyone's interested, the opening lines in my previous post come from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Life of Pi, Catch 22, Great Expectations, and Babbitt.

first lines

2006-05-30T19:48:00.000-04:00

They say the first line of a story is crucial - it needs to really stand out somehow to draw the reader in. So I was musing over the first lines of some of my favorite novels.

"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."

"I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him."

"My suffering left me sad and gloomy."

"It was love at first sight."

"My father's name being Pirrip, and my Christian name being Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip."

"The towers of Zenith apired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods."

What do you think?

a trip to the zoo

2006-05-28T18:23:00.000-04:00

I am never, ever going to the zoo during Memorial Day weekend again - it was unbelievably crowded. Sure, the baby koala was cute. But as a zoology major, sometimes I get frustrated at the things I overhear parents telling their children.

[at a pond full of tadpoles]
Small child: Mommy, what are those?
Mother: Baby fish!

[at the wolverine exhibit]
Mother: Look, [small child], a wolverine! That's a kind of wolf.
Father: Is it? I didn't think so.
Mother: No? Maybe it's a cat, then.

[at the orangutan exhibit, the gorilla exhibit, etc.]
Parent: Look at the monkeys, [small child]!

[at the Komodo dragon exhibit]
Small child: Daddy, these are poisonous, right?
Father: No.
Small child: Are you sure? I thought they were.
Father: No.

Honestly, those poor kids. I'm pretty sure I knew by a young age that tadpoles grow up to be frogs, wolverines are members of the weasel family, and there's a difference between monkeys and apes. And while Komodo dragons technically don't produce their own venom, the deadly bacteria in their saliva make their bite lethal anyway, so the difference is only academic. The saddest part is that most of this information is on the signs that accompany almost all the exhibits, and the parents just don't bother to read.

april showers bring... may tornadoes?

2006-05-25T19:59:00.000-04:00

My best friend and I went shopping this afternoon, and when we got home (after driving through moderate rain, nothing too terrible) I found out that we'd been under a tornado warning. Huh. Oh well, just so long as it didn't hit us.

Anyway, I went to the mall with the intention of not buying anything, but since I turn nineteen the day after tomorrow I decided to get myself a small birthday present and bought a pair of earrings at Hot Topic, the creepy punk/goth/whatever store. Now I can finally say I bought something there instead of just going in, staring in awe at all the band T-shirts, and leaving again. Somewhere deep inside me there is a punk rocker fighting to get out.

The only other interesting that's happened lately is that I finally got the contract for my poem that's getting published next month. Yay!

noooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2006-05-20T20:12:00.000-04:00

Okay, remember how I posted about looking forward to the NUMB3RS season finale? Our cable went out Thursday, so asked a friend to tape it for me so I wouldn't miss it.

I called her today.

The first fifteen minutes taped and then it mysteriously stopped.

Ahhhh!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!

another birdwatching adventure!

2006-05-20T18:03:00.000-04:00

Our internet's been down for a couple days, but I'm back!

So today I got up at 6:30 AM to go on a trip to Crane Creek and the Ottawa Wildlife Refuge, led by a naturalist from the local nature center. When I arrived at the nature center and discovered that most of the group was comprised of obnoxious middle students who were there solely to get extra credit in their science class, it seemed like a bad omen. But, I didn't end up having to carpool with the obnoxious children - I ended up in a van with their teacher, the naturalist, and another lady - and the day got better from there. Beautiful weather, and lots of birds...

Our main goal was warblers, and since I've only been seriously birdwatching for a year and had never really done warblers before, it was a treat. At Crane Creek there's a boardwalk that takes you through a woodsy area that's absolutely crawling with them - American Redstarts, Black and White Warblers, Yellow Warblers, Yellow-Rumped Warblers, Yellowthroats, Mourning Warblers, Wilson's Warlbers... some others that others saw that I couldn't spot, too. Plus a female Rose-Breasted Grosbeak (I would have loved to have seen a male, I never have), lots of Catbirds, a pair of Ruby-Crowned Kinglets, some thrushes, and other goodies.

The surrounding marshes were crawling with herons and egrets, and we also got really luck and saw a King Rail. Rails are a wading bird about the size of a chicken, and I'd never seen any before, and the King Rail is by far the rarest species. It was the naturalist leader's first ever King Rail. Boy, did we get lucky!

Other sightings included Bald Eagles, Pied-Billed Grebes, a Vesper Sparrow, and a Blue-Winged Teal. And LOTS of Baltimore Orioles, which was cool. And a muskrat. :)

All in all a good day.

season finale time

2006-05-17T15:48:00.001-04:00

Last night I watched most of the season finale of Boston Legal. It was the first episode of the show I'd ever watched, but I love William Shatner, and it was fun. Very "grown up," as my parents put it - meaning there's lots of sex - but I liked it. The final scene cracked me up, because it totally broke the fourth wall. The two main characters (Shatner and that other guy) were sitting on a balcony having a deep conversation, and in the end they lifted their glasses "to next season." Excellent!

This Friday is the season finale of my one TV addiction, NUMB3RS. I started watching it when it first started during my senior year of high school, and this past year I got a lot of my friends at college hooked on it too. It's about two brothers, one of whom (played by the guy from Northern Exposure, which I've never watched but my mom likes) is an FBI agent and the other a mathematician, and the math brother helps the FBI brother solve crimes. My friends and I like it because we like the characters and the plots... but pretty boys don't hurt either. And Rob Morrow and David Krumholtz are soooo pretty. Anyway, the previews for the finale look pretty freaky, and I'm looking forward to it. The best news, of course, is that it's renewed for a third season.

the joys of rereading (and revising)

2006-05-15T18:30:00.000-04:00

I'm reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for the third time at the moment. It may seem funny, but I'm still picking up on details I missed the first two times through. One of the amazing things about those books is the way they can stand up to rereading after rereading.

Shortly before I came home for the summer I used up my remaining printing credit at school to print out a hard copy of the novella I wrote last summer. Having not looked at it at all since I finished it, I was kind of dreading what I would find, and indeed as I read through the first few pages I found myself moaning "Oh man... this is bad... the pacing's off, the word choice is poor... this sucks..."

My best friend and fellow writer, bless her, pointed out at this point that she'd read it right after I'd finished it and thought it rather good, so it couldn't be that bad. And she turned out to be right. Once I got past the awful beginning and got into the meat of the story, I made some interesting discoveries: I actually had a decent sense of place, a strong setting, for one, something I usually struggle with. My main character and her family were also pretty well done, though by the time I finished rereading the story I didn't actually like my protagonist as much as I had when I was writing her. She's a bit of a brat, really. But that's not necessarily a bad thing; a character can be flawed and still be sympathetic. Yeah, the word choice was laughably pretentious in some places, but to my surprise I discovered that I'd actually improved as a writer in the past year because some of the mistakes I'd made in this novella were things I would never do now.

Probably the funniest thing I've found that I need to change is a scene where the main character happens to be watching a birdfeeder out a window while she waits for another character to come back into the room... she sees a cardinal leave the feeder and go flying off across a cornfield. Last summer I hadn't done much serious birdwatching yet. Now when I read that I think, what the heck is a cardinal doing in a cornfield??? Heh heh.

backyard wilderness

2006-05-13T18:32:00.000-04:00

We have a big backyard that borders on an overgrown ditch, and we get a lot of wildlife running around our yard sometimes. For example, right now we have a pair of fat, bristly woodchucks (a.k.a. groundhogs or whistlepigs, depending on where you live) with a bunch of furry babies just starting to poke their noses out of the den, a pair of rabbits who no doubt have babies of their own somewhere, an assortment of chipmunks and squirrels, flocks of robins and grackles and starlings, two or three species of sparrow, the occasional goldfinch, and even a hummingbird now and then. Looking out the kitchen windows can be surprisingly entertaining. Oh, and there are tadpoles in the water that's accumulated on the pool's winter cover.

And, today there was a flock of Canada geese in the drainage ditch next to WalMart, with half a dozen fuzzy goslings.

Living in rural Ohio does have its pluses.

home sweet... whatever

2006-05-11T16:13:00.000-04:00

Here I am, with three whole weeks until I start my summer job. Yay.

For some reason my laptop is refusing to connect to the Internet here at home, which means I'm stuck using my parents' computer and don't have access to my nifty RSS feed subscription reader thingy. (Technological, aren't I?) So my reading of other people's blogs may become sporadic for a while, but at least I have Internet access.

Now, back to my usual summer break pursuits of watching Star Trek reruns and playing Sims 2. Huzzah for being productive.

nossir, not me, i wouldn't do anything like this

2006-05-09T13:45:00.000-04:00

"People who write books where the main character is a young, questioning writer should be shot out of a cannon into a pit filled with leeches."

Noooooo, I don't have a 2000 word excerpt and part of an outline for a novel in which the main character is a young, questioning writer. Of course not. Nuh-uh. Not me.

My stuff is all packed (except for my computer!), my room has been cleaned top to bottom, I'm all ready to check out and go home. Yay. But I'll miss my friends over the summer.

music and musings

2006-05-07T21:02:00.000-04:00

My friend SR just lent me what I think is my new favorite CD: the string quartet tribute to System of a Down's Hypnotize. That's right. String quartet covers of angry rock music. Does life GET any better???

My parents came today with boxes and we packed up the vast majority of my stuff and took it home. Basically all I have left here in my dorm room is clothes for tomorrow and Tuesday, my computer, my toiletries, my chemistry books, and miscellaneous pens and pencils. And the sheets on my bed. Letting my parents take home my headphones, both my CD players, and my entire CD collection was a mistake, since I have trouble studying without TV or music in the background (our TV is gone too); thus the reason I went down SR and N's room and begged music and headphones from them.

Anyway, I had an adventure last night, consisting of trying to make Oreo cheesecake with E and N. Our unsuccessful attempt. I had never made cheesecake before, and apparently it's not easy, because we ended up with burnt Oreo crumbs and filling the consistency of a glue stick. Maybe if you halve the recipe you shouldn't bake it the full amount of time... or maybe stirring the filling mixture for twenty minutes was overkill... or maybe you just shouldn't bake cheesecake in a toaster oven...

Wish me luck on my chem exam tomorrow. I'm sitting right on the fence between a B+ and an A-, so this test will pretty much determine my fate. Will I keep my 4.0 GPA? Will I not? So good night, all, and think of me at 1:30 tomorrow afternoon...

six degrees of separation

2006-05-04T18:19:00.000-04:00

Ever played six degrees of separation? The goal is to see how many famous people you can connect yourself with in six steps, six "degrees," or less. My friends and I started doing this when earlier today M happened to mention that her cousin is one of the people who discovered the tenth planet (I don't remember what it's called, but it's bigger and further out that Pluto).

Between me, M, S, and two other friends of mine, N and E, we managed to come up with a LOT of people. Here are a few:

Katharine Hepburn in four degrees: a lady who goes to my church is the cousin of Hugh O'Brian, who was in The Shootist with John Wayne, who was in Rooster Cogburn and the Lady with Katharine Hepburn.
Wynton Marsalis (a famous, famous jazz trumpetist) in two: he's friends with my band director here.
Senator Joseph McCarthy in four: my dad's parents got a personal letter from J. Edgar Hoover when he was born, because my grandfather was in the F.B.I. and my grandmother was sick for a while after my father was born; Hoover knew McCarthy.
President Musharraf of Pakistan in six: S's grandfather played bridge with the father-in-law of the current prime minister of Pakistan, who obviously would know Musharraf.

And I could go on. The funny thing about this is that once you start doing it and you realize HOW MANY PEOPLE you can connect to, you start to realize how many more you could probably connect to if you only knew the steps. I bet I could get to Einstein, because I can get to the guy who came up with string theory in two, and theoretical physicists are probably all interconnected.

time flies when you're having a nervous breakdown

2006-05-02T13:53:00.000-04:00

So I didn't get the research fellowship I applied for next fall; in a way, I'm relieved, because it's one less thing I'll have to worry about. I did, however, find a summer job. I'm going to be an Order Entry/Customer Service Associate at School Specialty, which means I get to sit at a desk and enter numbers into a computer for forty-two hours a week.

I'm sitting here staring at the computer screen, various things I could write about cycling through my head. The one most on my mind right now is my amazement that I'll be going home for the summer in less than a week. Where the heck did the year go? I'd pretty much spent my entire life before this year looking forward to college, and now I'm already a fourth of the way done with my bachelor's degree and it still hasn't hit home that this is it, I'm actually a college student now. I don't feel grown-up and sophisticated and independent. This isn't all that different from high school, except for living in a dorm, which by this point just seems normal... not a big deal at all.

My roommate M has been taking down her posters and putting things in boxes, and last night we rolled up the area rug and put in a closet, ready to be taken home. The room looks really bare. This weekend my parents are coming to help me pack and start taking my stuff home.

Seriously. Where has my freshman year gone?

arizona wildlife

2006-04-30T00:03:00.000-04:00

My parents went on a trip to Arizona over Easter, the first time in many years they'd taken a vacation without me, actually. Among the photos they brought back were a couple pretty nice ones of wildlife I thought I'd share.

My dad's description of this was essentially, "Look! We saw a bird on a cactus and took a picture for you!" I managed to identify it as a gila woodpecker. I guess it makes sense that woodpeckers would live in saguaro cacti, but it hadn't occurred to me before.

This little guy is a chuckwalla (a sort of medium-sized lizard with a fat tail) that my dad saved from being tormented by some kid. My dad didn't say how old the kid was - he could have been my age for all I know - but my dad told the guy the chuckwalla would probably bite him if he didn't leave it alone, and that scared him off. I have no idea how likely the lizard actually would have been to bite him, but it doesn't matter as long as this person stopped chasing it.

Anyway, these make me look forward to traveling again... we're planning a family trip to Colorado sometime this summer, and I'll need to get a field guide for the birds of that part of the country before we go!

hooray for chemical fumes

2006-04-27T20:15:00.000-04:00

In my chemistry lab this morning we were working with diethyl ether, and I kept thinking of that M*A*S*H episode where they run out of their regular anesthetic and have to use ether, and all the patients are gagging and everyone in the OR keeps passing out. Oh yeah, what a lovely smell... not. I spent most of the morning trying to breathe as little as possible.

Then I spent the entire afternoon hanging around the avian microbiology lab, helping make media for bird banding this weekend and talking to my advisor about my paper on sparrow preening. And I got to thinking.

For the past year I've been telling everyone (friends, professors, parents) that I know exactly what I want to do, and that's get my PhD in zoology and do research. So after telling everyone this with such certainty, what do I do if I change my mind? If I decide that I don't think I'm going to be able to handle the pressure and the competition of being a research scientist? If I want to do a less rigorous track of classes within my zoology major so I can focus on what I'm actually interested instead of the physics and organic chemistry I'll need to get into grad school?

Arrrggghhhh. Maybe it's just that I'm stressed out or that the ether fumes affected my brain, but suddenly I'm all topsy-turvy. I ranted to my roommates for a little while and they calmed me down and convinced my that for the time being I should just keep on the way I am and keep my options open.

pigeonholes

2006-04-24T14:56:00.000-04:00

(because being an ornithologist, I like bird metaphors...)

I'm only a couple weeks away from finishing my first year of college (God, already? where did the time go?), and it's still amazing me. At my high school, most people were easy to categorize. Druggies, band geeks, jocks, you know the sort of slots teenagers fit into. I don't know category I myself was, maybe none at all, because I tended to have friends from all of them.

College is completely different. Every time you think you've gotten someone pegged, they surprise you. There's a guy in my avian microbiology tutorial who's double majoring in zoology and French, a very articulate, well-informed guy. In high school, I could have predicted that someone like this would be something of a geek. However, outside the classroom this guy is a huge womanizer and partier. And yet he's genuinely nice and intelligent and I have a lot of respect for him.

At the other end of the spectrum is one of the guys I was recently assigned to work with on a project for my music class, the kind of beer-drinking jock that makes you think "oh, please no" when you find out you're assigned to work with him. For our project we had to analyze a piece of music by Claude Debussy. Wonder of wonders, this guy ACTUALLY LIKES CLASSICAL MUSIC, and did a good job on his part of the assignment.

So yeah. People keep surprising me. I wonder if I'll ever get used to it.

ok, i probably shouldn't be this excited, but...

2006-04-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

THERE'S GOING TO BE ANOTHER STAR TREK MOVIE!!!!!!!!!!!!

I could have sworn they said Nemesis was supposed to be the last one, which was a pity. That was a really sucky movie, not a good note to end on. I mean, they killed off my favorite character, but it wasn't a very good movie even overlooking that fact. It was just silly.

But huzzah! I checked the Star Trek website today and the big headline was STAR TREK XI, tentatively planned to be released in 2008!

According to the article, it's not going to be a continuation of the Next Generation characters, but something completely different - sort of "Kirk and Spock: The Early Years," about their time at Starfleet Academy and their first mission together. I wonder who the heck will play Kirk and Spock, because it sure can't be the Shatman and Nimoy, they're way too old. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Ah, wow, this is a great day for geeks everywhere!

high drama, college style

2006-04-19T22:07:00.000-04:00

The last week or so here has been full of a lot of drama as everyone figures out their living situation and course schedule for next fall. I have enough credits that I got to register for next fall's courses as a rising junior, even though this is only my first year, and I ended up with more or less the classes I wanted: I'm going to be taking Environmental Plant Biology, Environmental Alteration, Applied Statistics, and Music of the Middle Ages, Rennaissance, and Baroque. I also applied for a student fellowship to do a research project involving the affect of development (like, construction, housing developments) on avian abundance and diversity. Woo. I wonder if I'll get it.

Then tonight was the big housing lottery thing where we all get to pick where we're going to live next year. MH, SR, my previously unmentioned friend MJ, and I were planning on sharing a quad next year, and we really wanted to be in the same dorm we're all in now, which is the all women's dorm. The problem was that our lottery number, which determined our place in the pecking order for selecting rooms, was really low. We watched in dismay as the rooms in our preferred dorm were taken one by one... we started to accept the fact that we'd have to take a pair of double rooms in an inferior dorm with communal bathrooms... when our number was called! We made fools of ourselves by jumping up and down and squealing because we got THE LAST AVAILABLE ROOM IN OUR DORM, the last quad on campus. It was very exciting.

And I'll stop with all the college drama dorkiness now.

the grand opening

2006-04-18T00:15:00.000-04:00

Hello Patrice, Jen, and whoever else followed the link from my old blog. This post constitutes the official grand opening of the new site. The last two posts were just for later reference.

If this isn't coherent it's because it's 12:15 AM and I am not a night owl. Happy Tuesday.

the cast of characters

2006-04-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

MH. My roommate and a good friend. She's from Sri Lanka and is Buddhist.

SM. Another close friend, a Muslim girl from Pakistan, who I'm planning on rooming with next year.

MJ. The third of my intended roommates for next year, a plain ol' Ohio girl like me, unlike the other two.

SR. The person I'm generally referring to when I mention my "best" friend. I've known her since elementary school.

The parentals. Yeah. I mention them every once in a while.

More to be added as they pop up in blog entries...

100 things about me

2006-04-17T20:42:00.000-04:00

I have no idea what to put as the number one thing about me. I mean, that's pretty defining, isn't it? Incidentally the items that follow are in no particular order.
I do not handle stress at all well.
I prefer dark chocolate.
I was in love once.
I am neurotic about organizing the files on my computer; for example, papers for school are arranged into folders by class, and further by semester, with the file names matching their titles, etc. etc. etc.
I rarely ever drank coffee before I started college. Now I'm an addict.
I can say "bless you" (like what you say when someone sneezed) in Arabic.
When I'm nervous, I have a variety of odd ticks like pushing my glasses up my nose and constantly adjusting my watch.
I play the trombone. Quite well, actually, if I say so myself.
I am aware that hardly anyone reads this blog and yet I keep it up anyway.
My two favorite-ever novels are The Beekeeper's Apprentice and Life of Pi, both of which are sitting on my desk next to me as I write this.
My favorite play is Inherit the Wind, and one of the people who co-wrote it graduated from my school.
I am a Trekkie.
I never used to get fangirlish about movie stars, but I'm in loooooooove with Ewan McGregor.
I have a half-sister and a half-brother who are much older than me (sixteen and eighteen years older, respectively, as I recall).
I was one of those girls who made friendship bracelets out of embroidery floss, but I eventually moved on from that to making actually jewelry with beads and beading wire and clasps and whatnot, and now I'm glad I did because I have the ability to repair my own jewelry when clasps and stuff break.
I was also one of those girls who drew pictures of horses in elementary school.
And I used to be really into different alphabets and stuff -- Egyptian hieroglyphics, Elvish runes, Shavian, I tried my hand at all of them at some point or another.
The most times I've ever gone to a single movie when it was in theaters is three. It was Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
I was in second grade when I decided I wanted to be a writer. I'd written a mystery that year about a family of rabbits whose carrots were stolen by a fox, and it made it into the school district's literary journal.
I have an extremely eclectic music collection. Classical, jazz, oldies, pop, movie soundtracks, Harry Potter fan music (a.k.a. "wizard rock")... yeah.
My fingers are double-jointed; I can bend them back about ninety degrees.
I am utterly incapable of touching my tongue to my nose. I have a really short tongue, I guess.
I don't like tomatoes.
I hate spending money. I got this from my parents, who are very cheap.
I don't wear make-up. Hardly ever. The last time I wore make-up was for my senior prom.
My favorite colors are blue and purple.
I'm more of a cat person than a dog person.
I used to speak German pretty fluently, but since I stopped actually taking German classes I've gotten extremely rusty.
I went to see John Kerry during the 2004 presidential election.
I have never owned a cell phone.
I have four pairs of earrings and two pairs of socks with frogs on them.
I got red highlights in my hair a couple times in high school, but for the most part I pretty much leave my hair alone. Wash it, dry it, put it up if it looks crappy down, and get it trimmed whenever it starts getting ratty.
I don't really like to swim.
I know the constellations (you know, the stars, in the sky) pretty well, but not as well as I used to.
I'm not religious.
I am very well traveled, especially for someone my age.
When people give me backrubs it tickles. I squirm around and giggle.
My high school graduating class voted me "Most Likely to Become a Politician."
My first car was a silver Ford Taurus. I think the year was... '94? I have no head for such things. It used to be my dad's.
I used to think it was immoral to burn CDs because it's, you know, illegal. I'm not that naive anymore. I burn CDs all the time.
I don't think drinking is immoral, either; I don't even think underage drinking is necessarily immoral. But I'm not a drinker myself.
I love ice cream. And cheesecake, though I didn't use to. And chocolate cake.
I like coconut, and mushrooms, two thing that many people don't like.
I've eaten sushi, but (as of this writing) only the sushi they have here on campus, and I have no idea how authentic it is.
I was definitely a PBS kid. I watched all those PBS kids shows. (Though there were some different ones then than now. What happened to Kratt's Kreatures? I can seriously trace my interest in zoology right back to watching that show when I was six or so.)
I have trouble working in a group if I'm not in charge. Usually. If I'm intimidated by other people in the group, then it just freaks me out, like when I had to lead a trombone sectional and my section included several music majors.
If I were to ever get a flat tire while driving by myself, I would really be screwed. I couldn't change a tire to save my life.
I can be very insecure about my friends. I always hate it when my friends do anything fun without me. I feel like I'm being left out of the loop or something.
For an English project in my senior year of high school, we had to pick the four adjectives we felt best described ourselves. Mine were intelligent, creative, contemplative, and I forget what else. Out of curiosity I asked my best friend what adjective she would use to describe me, and all she could come up with was "musical," which I found rather irritating.
People confided secrets in me surprisingly often in high school, and I didn't handle it well. Probably a good thing that no one at college has shown this tendency.
I had braces, but only on the bottom.
My only piercings are a single hole in each ear.
I secretly think it would be cool to get my nose pierced. But I'm too chicken.
I like reading the ends of books before I actually get to the end. I get more out of reading a novel if I know where the plot is heading. (For the same reason I like reading really good novels for the second time even more than the first.) My best friend thinks this is heresy.
I cried when Dumbledore died in the sixth Harry Potter book, but not when my grandmother died.
I can't decide whether or not I like the fact that I grew up in a small town in Ohio. It was cool to grow up somewhere where everyone knew everyone else, but on the other hand it was a pretty narrow-minded little place.
I consider myself a feminist.
I spent three and a half weeks in Germany without my parents when I was sixteen and I didn't try beer once.
I think Katharine Hepburn is the greatest actress ever.
I keep a paper-and-ink journal in addition to my blog, but I don't write in it nearly as much as I should.
I finally made the switch from old-school pencils to mechanical pencils when I started college.
My favorite word is "defenestration."
My favorite city I have been to is San Francisco, probably closely followed by Berlin and Munich.
I love Walt Whitman's poetry.
The only computer game I own is The Sims 2.
I've never taken piano lessons, but I borrowed a friend's piano books and taught myself the basics.
I'm having a lot of trouble coming up with 100 things about myself.
When I was little I thought Karl Marx was one of the Marx brothers.
I'm a browncoat.
I never spend change. I save it up in a jar, and when I have enough I put it in rolls and deposit it in the bank.
I have never once in my life plucked or waxed or otherwise manipulated my eyebrows. It's just not a skill I've ever acquired. Maybe I should ask MH to teach me.
I've grown to like doing laundry, but I've never ironed anything by myself.
I can bake some things, but not actually cook.
I've been to all three American coasts (East, West, and Gulf).
The first time I rode in a plane was at Kitty Hawk.
I played with Barbies when I was little, but now I think they are evil and if I ever have a daughter she will NOT be allowed to have Barbies. Barbie clearly suffers from anorexia.
I like dangly earrings, but not really heavy ones, because I'm afraid of getting my lobes all stretched out.
I can tell a red-bellied woodpecker apart from a pileated woodpecker by sound alone. (That one's for Jen...)
I know two people who got perfect 1600s on the SAT test (before they changed the scoring and made it out of 2400).
One of them is the person I was in love with the single aforementioned time that I have ever been in love.
I myself only got a 1450. Stupid math score brought me down.
MH got me hooked on Friends, but I can't pick a single favorite character: it's a toss-up between Joey, Chandler, and Phoebe.
I learn the words to songs really quickly. My albums that I own and listen to regularly, I know all the lyrics to all the songs, and I do tend to sing along with them out loud when I play them. My roommates are amused by this. (All my lovin... I will send to you-oo-oooo... All my lovin... darlin i'll be truuuuuue...)
I can also memorize things on the trombone pretty easily. I can still play all of the solo I did last year from memory, and most of the one from the year before that.
My best friend and I have known each other since first grade. Now we're going to college together, which is pretty cool.
My parents don't know I have a blog. Well, actually, my mom might suspect but she's discrete about such things, thankfully.
I live in an all women's dorm.
The quotes on my Facebook profile consist mostly of things I myself have said, because strange things come out of my mouth sometimes, such as "So if God didn't want us to make obscene gestures we wouldn't have been born with middle fingers?" and "I need to marry a former Pakistani cricket star so I can divorce him and date Hugh Grant."
I have scoliosis - not bad enough to have ever needed a brace, but I do have it. (It means my spine is kind of curvy. You can't really tell unless you run your hand across my back, though.)
When I was in sixth grade I had pneumonia and missed two weeks of school.
Never once, all through middle school and high school, was I ever marked tardy for a single class.
My very first "real" job was at a McDonald's; before that I'd gotten paid for giving trombone lessons and for playing trombone at a church, though.
I sometimes filch things like staplers and paper from my roommates.
I generally get along with people very well. There are a few people who extremely get on my nerves, but they tend to get on everyone else's nerves, too.
I took a yoga class a couple years ago and loved it, and I wish I had time to take yoga now.
I used to be afraid of thunderstorms, but now I think they're really cool.
The movie Shawshank Redemption was filmed in the area around my hometown, as were a few scenes from Air Force One.
I'm trying to think of something really definitive for number 100.
Um... I hate sauerkraut. (Wow, Rebecca, really definitive.)