Wednesday, January 26, 2005

what smoke are you cracking?

as all of you know, i ended up moving in with the val verde girls. the house is big and beautiful and very cozy and homey…. i love it. there are downsides, of course, the main one being no internet. no internet! how primitive, you are no doubt thinking, but i thought i would be tortured by this fact a lot more than i am. the only real sides effects are that i’m bored and can’t look something up whenever i want to. like today i had to make a phone call to find out the surface area of a sphere. i used to be just a few clicks away from stuff like that… do i really have to remember it now? sigh….

moving in with non-techies is simply relating to me once again how backwards i really am. first of all, bedtime… i thought jessica slept a lot, but wow. these girls go to bed at like eight thirty. i don’t get it. i recently read an article about how much people sleep, and i’m not alone. it seems there are a handful of people out there who are groggy when they get to much sleep, too much being like six hours. i find that i function the best on about four. so on the weekdays i’m up late doing homework, and on the weekends, i think, hey, no homework due tomorrow! i can go to bed early!

on saturday night my roommate nicole saw me in my p.j.’s at ten and said, “are you seriously going to bed right now?” my thinking is, “it’s the weekend! time for sleep!” while theirs is, “it’s the weekend! stay up late!”

backwards.

another realization came when mike and i went out to dinner with some of his friends from home. a guy that used to go to tech, matt, his girlfriend, emily, and her best friend, jon. since we’re all students, of course we talked about school. it was so weird… mike and i have completely different lives than jon and emily. matt, who knows both situations, was in the middle and almost seemed uncomfortable taking a side. just talking about the math alone was weird. emily is nervous about taking algebra. jon is proud that he took calc one. mike laughed… i just didn’t know what to say. and then emily was talking about her major, cultural anthropology. i didn’t even know what that meant. at one point, jon asked us if we even had humanities at our school. and i’m pretty sure he was serious.

last night i went to presidents to hang out with carmen and ended up playing catch phrase with a few of the girls that live there. my word was “net.” i thought later that a normal person would have asked their teammates, “what do you catch fish in?” but i asked, “what do you use to check your email? what do we call it for short?”

and they guessed it right away, no hesitation.

tis a strange and sorted life I lead.

Sunday, January 02, 2005

media blitz!

i have been using gift cards and such to beef up my cd and dvd collection. here's this season's edition:

cds:
carla bruni- she was playing in barnes & noble when i went into the store, and i totally forgot about the i am sam soundtrack i wanted and bought her cd. french girl with a guitar... i really like it. it wasn't till later that i remembered all the beatles covers that i wanted. oh well, maybe next year. i'm glad i bought calra. she's chill.

norah jones- okay, norah is my hero. she's awesome. if i was her i'd be awesome. anyway, she and carla took care of my new chill music category. i ran them both by my grandfather this morning, and he didn't think either of them were bad, which is saying an aweful lot. he really doesn't like a lot of music. sweet.

chicago soundtrack- now i can enjoy the awesome music without the pain of seeing half-naked girls. woo! i think queen latifa is SO talented. and she's so pretty too. her songs are my favorites.

down with love soundtrack- the tracks with the original movie music are hilarious! i wish i had lived in the sixties.

no doubt: the singles- i needed some girl rock to balance out the girl chill i get with norah and calra, and who better but gwen? my favorite on this one is "i'm just a girl." i'm noticing a trend so far... i must be on a girl-power trip. all i need to do now is talk about aretha franklin. she's my hero, too.

ultimate 80's- i knew i watned an 80's cd, and i picked this 30-track 2-disk set for one big reason... it had owner of a lonely heart on it. true, i already have that song, but any variety cd that includes yes is sure to be a hit in my book. i'm very happy with it.

the ratpack- it's like the vegas years or something. i really like sammy davis jr, think highly of dean martin, and of course who doesn't like frank sinatra? this cd has solos, duets and trios from all three, so i'm happy.

dvds
legally blond 2- okay, this one was a gift. i've been wanting to see it, because i liked the first one. i watched it with my sister the other day, and we both thought it was aweful. i can't even tell you how bad it was. i don't know why i would ever watch it again, but now i own it. hmmm... what a quandry.

shrek 2- another sequel, only this one is excellent, arguably better than the first. playing far far away idol is very fun, too. of course, all movies are better if i watch them with my dad and he likes them. interesting, that's the third time i've brought someone else's opinion in here... maybe i have a people-pleasing complex along with girl power issues. i'm a very complicated person.

my darling clementine- no, it wasn't in the store... i had to order it. this lovely tale directed by john ford is actually not about clementine, it's about wyatt earp, played by the handsome henry fonda. if you've seen tombstone, it's a very similar story. doc holiday is a lot better in tombstone because val kilmer does such a great job, but i like henry fonda a whole lot more than kurt russell, i mean really. this is one of my favorite westerns, partly due to the shakespeare scene. for the record, i can recite more of hamlet's soliloquy than doc holiday can. yay, me!

grease- well, what can i say? it's just one of those i need to own.

master and commander- yessssss! it's mine! i LOVE this movie, it's so great. i can see how some people think it's boring, it's not very fast paced and a lot of the movie is in the dialog, but i adore it. i watched it today and i may watch it again before i go to bed, now that i'm thinking about how great it is. i spend days after i watch it pretending that i am a sailor and i sleep in a hammock and i have an english accent. i love that this movie is about friendship, and that both friends were willing to give up something important for the other. and the little one-armed kid is totally my hero! i know i already said my hero was norah, but i changed my mind. the one-armed kid is so much cooler. i love him.

i light of all this, i've really been wondering at my materialism level. i'm willing to spend my hard-earned minimum-wage wages on this stuff that won't last and that i don't really need. it makes me momentarily happy, however. another quandry. what shall i do?