January 2012
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Watchgood:
Kids are awesome - two 17-year olds launch a lego into space on $400!
Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad now have an awesome topic for their college essays. They launched a homemade balloon into space as one lucky lego got the ride of his life. The lego carried a Canadian flag and was attached to a video camera, collecting evidence of the journey.
Read more from GOOD Finder
So incredibly...
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Clean
My apartment and life never look cleaner than right before my mother comes to visit.
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bell hooks - Feminism Is For Everybody (free... →
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Runaway (Kanye West cover) - Wonder Bear
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I’m sure why I’m struggling to stay above water right now, but it means that tumblr is falling by the wayside.
I need to get my business in gear, and not just so that I can come back to tumblr…
(Miss you guys.)
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“Waterstone’s are now Waterstones. They’ve decided to drop the apostrophe. I was...”
– Michael Rosen: The Politics (and lies) of the Apostrophe (via irunfrombears)
Excuse me. “The apostrophe is on its way out”?? No.
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Night drive
There is not much I love more than driving through this city at 2 a.m.
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Too much
I just have too much on my plate right now: coursework, thesis, departmental responsibilities, editing gig, volleyball, power yoga, running, dating, socializing, keeping some semblance of sanity.
My ideal evening would involve abandoning my schoolbooks in favor of food and tv in my bed.
I do not care what this says about me.
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Polar Dash 2012
13.1 miles in the snow and slush. Grant Park-South Side loops. 2 hours, 16 minutes.
Sore.
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Just a Saturday morning
My eyelids are swollen. It’s strange and making it so I can’t really look up. (What causes this??)
In other news, I’m going to go downtown and a run a half-marathon in 7 inches of snow in 20-degrees-feels-like-8-degrees weather.
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sNOw
I’m not really excited about more snow. The weather folk are talking it up like we’re going to get 3-5 inches. That’s not quite enough to cancel or postpone Saturday’s half-marathon, but it’s enough to make it unpleasant and slippery and potentially I-will-fall-on-my-ass-if-it-doesn’t-freeze-off-first producing.
I want to do the half-marathon… but I also...
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Soundcheck: Scoring Downton Abbey →
peterwknox:
lorim:
New York fans: 2pm on WNYC.
Just finished first season last night.
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"Feels like"
You know how ridiculous it is that the temperature right now is 17… but listed as “feels like 2”??? How is that even possible.
In other news, four hours of sleep is not enough, coffee and bagels may be my saving grace today, and now I need to finish writing a paper, edit the horrible spatial theory paper, and plunk up some sort of outline of things I want to talk about for my...
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Midnight
Why yes, I am eating leftover bacon-jalapeno mac ‘n cheese at 12:15 a.m.
But I already wrote 3/5 pages of the response paper (and the syllabus says “no longer than 5 pages,” so I could totally just write four, right?), and I have a list of questions for class discussion.
So, I just need to finish the paper, outline my presentation bits, and finish writing my primary source...
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Must go faster.
dailypeptalk:
Pep Talk: You’re a flexible adapter, my friend, and you are going to make this work. You excel at cramming an hour of activity into 20 minutes and now is the time to show off your hustle. Stop reading the Internet and go go go!
Today remind yourself: Must go faster.
I will go to bed by 2 a.m., no matter what. No matter what has been written. No matter what has yet to be...
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One Twenty Five: Reasons I don’t want to runI’m... →
one-twenty-five:
Reasons I don’t want to run
I’m lazy
It’s cold outside
And dark outside. (Soooo dark at 5pm!)
I’m warm and happy right now on the couch
I have to still head to Staples tonight
It’s rush hour (lots of cars = people will see me)
Missing one run won’t matter
There’s always tomorrow.
Reasons…
Dammit I really need to be running.
Good thing there’s this...
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What a start
Had a dream where I was trapped in a laundry room, with a killer in the house. I sat there watching him for a while, watching him clean his gun, knowing he was hunting me, that I had no way out, that it was only a matter of time. And then he pushed open the door to find me, and I tried to shoot the gun I had but apparently didn’t know what I was doing, and he fired his first, and then I woke...
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Plato: For the greater good.
Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.
Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken's dominion maintained.
Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.
Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!
Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I'll find out.
Timothy Leary: Because that's the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.
Douglas Adams: Forty-two.
Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.
Oliver North: National Security was at stake.
B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.
Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.
Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of "crossing" was encoded into the objects "chicken" and "road", and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.
Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.
Aristotle: To actualize its potential.
Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.
Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.
Salvador Dali: The Fish.
Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.
Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.
Epicurus: For fun.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn't cross the road; it transcended it.
Johann von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.
Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.
Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.
David Hume: Out of custom and habit.
Jack Nicholson: 'Cause it [censored] wanted to. That's the [censored] reason.
Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?
Ronald Reagan: I forget.
John Sununu: The Air Force was only too happy to provide the transportation, so quite understandably the chicken availed himself of the opportunity.
The Sphinx: You tell me.
Mr. T.: If you saw me coming you'd cross the road too!
Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately ... and suck all the marrow out of life.
Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.
Molly Yard: It was a hen!
Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.
Chaucer: So priketh hem nature in hir corages.
Wordsworth: To wander lonely as a cloud.
The Godfather: I didn't want its mother to see it like that.
Keats: Philosophy will clip a chicken's wings.
Blake: To see heaven in a wild fowl.
Othello: Jealousy.
Dr. Johnson: Sir, had you known the Chicken for as long as I have, you would not so readily enquire, but feel rather the Need to resist such a public Display of your own lamentable and incorrigible Ignorance.
Mrs. Thatcher: This chicken's not for turning.
Supreme Soviet: There has never been a chicken in this photograph.
Oscar Wilde: Why, indeed? One's social engagements whilst in town ought never expose one to such barbarous inconvenience - although, perhaps, if one must cross a road, one may do far worse than to cross it as the chicken in question.
Kafka: Hardly the most urgent enquiry to make of a low-grade insurance clerk who woke up that morning as a hen.
Swift: It is, of course, inevitable that such a loathsome, filth-ridden and degraded creature as Man should assume to question the actions of one in all respects his superior.
Macbeth: To have turned back were as tedious as to go o'er.
Whitehead: Clearly, having fallen victim to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
Freud: An die andere Seite zu kommen. (Much laughter.)
Hamlet: That is not the question.
Donne: It crosseth for thee.
Pope: It was mimicking my Lord Hervey.
Constable: To get a better view.
Yeats: She was following the Faeries that sang to her to come away with them from the dull, bucolic comfort of the farmyard to the waters and the wild.
Shelley: 'Tis a metaphor for the pursuits of man: though 'twas deemed an extraordinary occurrence at the time, still it brought little to bear on the great scheme of time and history, and was ultimately fruitless and forgotten.
Tolkien: Chickens are respectable folk, and well thought of. They never go on any adventures or do anything unexpected. One fine spring day, as the chicken wandered contentedly around the farmyard, clucking and pecking and enjoying herself immensely, there appeared a Wizard and thirteen Dwarves who were in need of a chicken to share in their adventure. Reluctantly she joined their party, and with them crossed the road into the great Unknown, muttering about how rude the Dwarves were to take her away on such short notice, without even giving her time to brush her feathers or fetch her hat.
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Reasons to love or hate grad school:
So far, my day has consisted of writing a critique about a book on the paranormal and research on and analysis of the 1860 Indian Penal Code’s dictates on offenses relating to religion.
Next up, more of each of those, plus more spatial theory, plus analyzing and writing about spatial theory.
Moving from Intelligentsia to a bar soon, though. I need to kill some brain cells.
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“Thought and sex are the only human activities which are not totally ridiculous.”
– Jacques Vallee
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“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live...”
– Muhammad Ali: In His Own Words (via life)
Wise words to be applied to grad school…?
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With Arms Outstretched - Rilo Kiley
It’s...
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Cancel
At least he stopped by to apologize in person. But still. Disappointing.
I went from date clothes and make-up to PJs and glasses in less than five minutes.
So, I guess the plan is leftovers and more spatial theory and more writing. Dammit.
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Cancel?
U of C just called to say it’s possible he has to deal with a work emergency (he’s calling his boss to find out shortly), but then that means no date, no after-date horizontal activities, and even more time for me to do the work I don’t want to be doing because I’ve already been doing it since 1 p.m. and it’s either kind of banal and pointless or theoretically dense...
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suzywire:
fleet foxes - dancing on...
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Forge on
Tummy ache, what up.
Time to ignore it and plunge into my workload again. I’ve already procrastinated away my whole morning. Rad.
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