It is the usual culprits that have kept me from updating: class, work, and procrastination.

Especially the last.

Regardless, I am available now (for a limited time only).

Baby carrots are awesome. Not Baby CUT carrots though. Think I'll give a ring to my parents in a sec, they've been very busy. This past month or two, they took everything out of the big room (living room, kitchen, dining room, computer room, etc.), peeled the popcorn off the ceiling, repainted it, repainted the walls, and refinished the floor. I was home for one day of sanding, and I felt so gross. The dust was everywhere!!

But the reason I was home was because Becky, mom and I went down to the Visiting Days at SI. Have I told you that I got accepted to grad school at the School of Information (SI) at the University of Michigan? It was the only placed I applied 'cause it was the only place I wanted to go, so I'm pretty stoked.

Anyways, the visiting days were neat. I got to have lunch with a faculty member and ask her questions, and most of the time I was around current grad students, who were friendly and always answered questions. Hopefully I'll have a job soon too. They held a job fair the last day and I put in my application at various places, but I really want to get the job at the Ann Arbor District Library.

In German, we are acting out and doing a spoken word of Nena's 99 Red Balloons for the end of the year banquet. Whee!

I think I am going to revise my German paper now. Bye!

mook mood: mookish
mook music: Melissa Ethridge
mook prayer for the peeps: that we can all hang in there, just a few more weeks!

I've noticed that a lot of people now a-days say they are waiting "for the next best thing". When writing the several historiographies I've had to do in my undergrad career, all the exciting works come out until 1980, and then everyone just repeats each other. There's no original thoughts being thought!

And today we had a world-renowned archivist speak to our class via long-distance TV mumbo jumbo. The three major works in archiving appraisal came out in the early and late 60s, and then 1985. This cat helped write the 1985 article on appraisal, and he said he had thought the next generation would have written something by now on how his work was good or bad, what was useful and not useful, and he said he was frankly embarrased that people are still talking about the article in the present sense. Isn't it fascinating?

In the jam-band music world, all the kids are saying that the end of the big groups, Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic, means the end of an era. No other group is stepping up to fill their shoes (admittedly, Panic has not disbanded, although many think the death of Mikey was the end of Panic 'as we know it').

The point is, is our generation culturally stagnant? Or is there simply nothing left to be said?

I think as a kid in America, we are trained to be reactionary. 'Look at the teacher's example and imitate', 'don't speak unless spoken to', 'never act out unless you have just cause to', and I could go on. Remember high school history textbooks? I thought for a long time that I honestly liked history, but really I find I just liked the class because you read a little story and answered the questions at the end of the chapter, and usually you just had to regurgitate (or just re-write) one particular sentence.

Time will tell I suppose.

Oh, here's a recap of the last couple of months:

MUN in November, represented Sudan, made an ass out of Timor Leste
December Exams, aced
Aced all classes, even German
Went home for Christmas
Got a new digital camera for Christmas
Hung out with the fam, usually on Tuesdays at the bar ($2.00 margarita and $.35 taco night)
Tobin played the Pub on New Years, I met my sister's boyfriend's family
Classes started, got my directed study approved so I will graduate with honors
Finished getting in new applicants for Mortar Board, small pool to chose from
Met t.k. splake, UP poet, and the guy whose papers we are archiving for my archiving class
Got accepted to School of Information at University of Michigan, for Master's in Library Science
Went to Toronto for very last MUN trip, had a good time, ate good food
Met Frank Boles, world-renowned archivist and currently employed at CMU

I was looking through some of splake's papers today, and saw the evolution of an entire relationship between him and his former wife. It all fit in one box.

I think obituaries are getting shorter from when I was a kid. I think my grandpa's took up two whole columns.

mook mood: reflective, but not down
mook music: office machinery hum, but the Risograph officially died today
mook prayer for the peeps: lets make the long obituary fashionable again!

I haven't been by here in a while. Crazy.

Class, work, MUN drama, its all good. At least MUN is over. Am I a bad person for saying that? I enjoyed time with my old roomie Laura and hanging out with Lil, but for the most part I felt used. Oh, and my committee partner did an awesome job, I'm v. proud.

I wish it was summer, then I'd go fishing right now. All day on the lake in the sun, that's where I want to be.

Hugs and brewskies all around! You kids take care of yourselves. Don't know if I'll be back here before exam week, but probably not. I'm bad like that.

mook mood: indifferent
mook music: Room of Angel
mook prayer for the peeps: That we Can do it, Captain. We've all got the power.

Me: Yeah mom, the GRE is $115.
Mom: Well shoot, I'll throw you in a room for four hours and let you doodle, then tell you you're smart. Then I'll just keep the money.
Me: I don't think UM will trust your word over a test score.
Mom: I could build a wing onto one of the buildings, then you won't have to take the test.
Me: I think $115 is cheaper than a building wing.
Mom: That's why we sent you to college. To figure out stuff like that.
Me: Grrrreeeat.

~
I know of atleast five seperate occasions where one parent or the other has said something dumb, I'll correct them, and then they say "that's why we're sending you to college." Is my family just nuts, or is this a common phenomenon?

At any rate, Pat Robertson needs a swift kick by God, me thinks. In short, he tells little Dover, Pennsylvania to expect the wrath of God for voting out school board members who support intelligent design.

“I’d like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God, you just rejected him from your city,” Robertson said on his daily television show broadcast from Virginia, “The 700 Club.”

Now see here. God does not answer to the whims of Pat Robertson, otherwise he would've been president. Also, I don't give a rats ass what theologians say, intelligent design IS NOT creationism. Intelligent design essentially takes out the agent in the formula. Rather than "God created the heavens and the earth," intelligent design says "the heavens and the earth were created" (past tense, booyah!).

So, to me it seems that Robertson Is trying to weasel religion into the schools. But it don't mean a thing if you ain't got that swing. Not to mention, if we put intelligent design at the same level as creationism, isn't that what we were killing off the pagans for? Ya know, not using the right god in their creation stories?

In other news, France. Man, them riots is whack. LA, anyone? 'Cept a different color. I think white people need to get a really good riot going, other than after the Superbowl. We're such pansies. It'd be a lot of fun, until everyone's cell phones started ringing. Then it'd be chaos!

mook mood: I've got to do homework!
mook music: The Joker ~The Animals
mook prayer for the peeps: That we all feel special today.

Got it bad, got it bad, got it bad! So hot for teacher!

http://www.nabiscoworld.com/oreo/memories/default.aspx

Take the personality quiz, I'm a dunker!

So for my senior seminar in history class, I am writing on Italian Immigrants to America between 1880 and 1914. I've had to do quite a bit of reading, because it is a historiography, which is the history of history. Essentially, the paper is a long essay on what historians have written about an event/person(s). And to honorize the class, I have to write a paper analyzing primary sources. Bazing!

My German civ and culture class and my German directed study are just as I anticipated, a waste of time. Your education is what you make of it, and I really don't care about learning German, but I need a modern foreign language for grad school. Oh, the Irony! Poopy kitties!

T's sister's wedding is the weekend, saturday the 1st. I'm bringing fruit salad, and T is bringing speakers for music. Schwicked. We are also helping to set up on Friday night, and probably tear-down on Sunday, whee. But I hope it doesn't rain for them, it would really put a damper on things (pun intended). Their new cat and Peyote are getting along swell now, I figured they would chill if they had the chance to be around each other. Peyote has a bad tendency to vomit in the middle of large groups of people, so I hope she can contain herself this weekend, since both of the families are going to be milling about.

It rained all day yesterday, while me and T and the band had to cart all of the stuff out of the bar they played in last night. It was a really cold rain too, and towards the end I figured if you're going to get wet you might as well swim, so I jumped both feet into the biggest puddle I could find. It felt really good... but since I was wearing flip-flops, my feet got real cold. Yah know that cold that starts to feel hot because its so cold? Exactly.

Its still looking pretty gloomy today, there was reports that it was going to snow last night but it didn't, amen! It suppose to be 70s and 80s this weekend though, perfect for a wedding! I just hope the fruit doesn't get brown and slimy from the heat. Veerps!

mook mood: stressing, but still procrastinating.
mook music: nugs.net
mook prayer for the peeps: the price of gas plummets, this is getting a little ridiculous!

I'm dying slowly of a terrible case of allergies. So I walk down to my friendly neighborhood Wildcat Den, intent on purchasing a cup of tea to soothe not only my throat but my raging sinus infection (you see, the cup of tea should be hot.) But Lo!, yon merchant bequeath volumes of information unto me, including "we are out of hot water".

Excuse me? Is there a shortage of hot and/or water in Marquette, MI? Its water, you make it hot. You've got hot coffee there missy? THEN YOU GOTS SOME HOT WATER.

The tea plan was unceremoniously scrapped. I venture to the other side of the island, with thoughts of sweet hot cocoa dancing in my cranium. The machine dispenses the liquid that could be ambrosia, and the merchant what spoke tomes of knowledge unto me before again relieves herself all over me: "Hot chocolate? A dollar twenty-five."

The fifty cents in my hand thus shrinks, completely dwarfed by this number previously unconcieved of for a tiny cup of bad, lukewarm hot chocolate. I am the picture of dumb-struck. I Literally gaped at her. $1.25 was going to buy my entire lunch! This is ludicrous! A rage for this university previously untapped hath quaked within me.

You owe us $700.
You still owe us $494.
Yeah, that free money you got? We took away some of your loan. $241.
Huh. overage? No, you still owe $125. And your firstborn son. And a dire rat's tail.
"Hot chocolate? A dollar twenty-five."

A day of reckoning approacheth. Tread lightly, you capitalist mongrels who so over-charges on every single thing.

I'm hungry and broke. And this allergy thing is threatening full-frontal migrane. Literally.

In other rants: My aunt sends me this email. The subject is FW:FW:Too CUTE! I hate the double forward, at least let me think that you deliberatly created this email for me. Why don't you love me *mrffle*?

A political cartoon is the body of the note. Yeah, not cute kittens or anything, very misleading. But what's this? A man saying "This is our plan for the most part", standing next to a diagram of a toilet, with New Orleans in the bowl and Lake Pontchartrain in the tank. My understanding is that the cartoonist was making fun of the government's (of Louisiana, New Orleans City, and the U.S.) plan to not deflood and rebuild the city. However, my aunt has expressed sentiments (being a "hardworking, patriotic republican") to the effect of 'no need to worry about the people that were evacuated out of New Orleans. They have lived off the state their whole lives and will continue to do so' and 'New Orleans is a pile of trash anyways, what a waste of time'. So either she's an idiot that didn't actually bother to read the cartoon, or she thought it was a good idea and a sound representation of what she hopes the republican party will agree to do.

Where else but in the city of New Orleans can you find the grandeur of southern architecture as a stable building design? Where else are the secular and the sacred not distinct categories? The home of Mardi Gras and all of its history, the birthplace and caregiver of jazz? Where else could there be a monument to a mass-murderer (Andrew Jackson) that is made safe because of the laid-back atmosphere of the city itself? In what city is the best food in town at the nastiest crab-shack? Where else can Beignets and Po'Boys make a meal? A blind guy make a living by playing spoons next a statue of Joan of Arc? In what city can you be inspired by the awesomeness of a graveyard?

You can't find it anywhere else. Period. Aunt, you're a moron and you're a stick-in-the-mud. And pretty heartless, too.

Oh no I didn't!

Classes are average, I don't think it'll be too bad. My intership has come to a screeching halt, which I will rectify today. I'm poor, which I will hopefully rectify in the next ten years or so. My presidency is off to a rocky start. We did have a lot of new people at MUN, we'll see if they come back for more!

And my sinuses are ready to pop out of my face and writhe in pain on my keyboard.

Sally forth, my friends. For soon we will be at day's end. And the bottom of my cocoa cup.

Finis.

mook mood: sick and hungry. But optimistic!
mook music: Room of Angel, from Silent Hill 4
mook prayer for the peeps: Wir kann deutsch lernen. Hallo Petra!

Sunrise! Sunset. Sunrise! Sunset. ~ Fiddler on the Roof

That's about life in a nutshell, get up then go to bed. And some stuff in the middle.

So about the whole workin at the library to get experience thing is not happening like I thought it would. The lady lost my contact info, then I forgot about the whole thing so I didn't call, and so I finally call her and get an appointment and then she had to have eye surgery on the day I am suppose to meet with her. V. frustrating. That was a week ago, she's still not back to work yet. And apparently everyone else can't help me at all. Poopy kitties.

I'm trying to strip the paint off of T's mom's door. She can't replace it cause the door size isn't standard so she would have custom order one, and that's a lotta bones. The going is slow. And it rained today, so i'm not sure if i'll be able to work on it.

T started his new job this week, at a new restaurant in town. It's where the old restaurant in the Landmark used to be, but they re-vamped it. Its called Capers, like the little mediteranean vegetable. There's all sorts of Tapas and wines and sangrias and some big meals, but the meals are wicked 'spensive. What else is new.

Why do we spell veggies with 2 gs? Vegetable only has one. Vege looks like you would pronounce it veggie. so what gives?

Peyote, for those of you who know her, is still crazy foo'. She catches this bird sitting on a branch by wrapping her paws around the handrail in the garden, so she can grab it from the top and bottom. Then she played with it for a long time. Next morning we couldn't find a body. I don't think live food agrees with her, the litter box smelled like the business end of a four-hundred lb man who just got over a week-long bout of constipation. No joke.

Finally finished the new UC board for MUN, now i've gotta work on the Mortar board one.

Did you know "pussy whipped" is an entry at dictionary.com?

Final words: Today is the twenty-third. Of June. You've got one month 'till present time, suckas!

mook mood: surprisingly well-balanced, unlike my diet.
mook music: a fan blowin. its muggy in here.
mook prayer for the peeps: sunburns suck. may we all be blessed with the foresight to wear sunscreen.