:: Quiche of the Day ::

:: 11.3.2001 ::

I'm not sure what I'm going to do this weekend. After last weekend, my friends don't like to take me out in public any more. It probably had something to do with me getting yelled at by employees of fine establishment on four seperate occasions over the course of less than 24 hours. The first time wasn't really my fault, though. Mars Music (where Ed happens to be gainfully employed) has got this big old piece of billboard/sculpture in the shape of an unnaturally large electric guitar. And by unnaturally large I mean huge. And by huge I mean it screamed "Look, I'm just like a jungal gym at the playground, except I'm a freaking huge guitar that you can climb on! How could you have any more fun?!" To tell you the truth, I really didn't know, so I decided to see how far I could climb up it, because if I knew one thing it's that you don't build a giant replica of an electric guitar for people to not climb on! Unfortunatly, whoever designed it didn't know much about fun, because the guitar was too steep to easily frolic upon. Just as my feet hit the ground after I abandoned my attempt to scale the musical monolith, a Mars Music employee rounded the corner without missing a beat just in time to deliever what I guess is the company line: "Please don't climb on the guitar." Sure thing, buddy, I didn't want to climb on your boring old freaking huge guitar anyway.
It was about this time that everyone else (and by everyone else I mean the four other people I came with) decided it was high time to visit Old Navy! Yeah, too bad I hate Old Navy ever since I went shopping there with my sister, picked out a pair of jeans in 15 minutes and then waited around for two and a half painful hours while she decided that there wasn't really anything there that she wanted. This extended piece of my life that I'll never get back was particuarly excruciating because Old Navy gets off on playing the most annoying techno-pop sounds in the world all the time. I think I'm actually wearing a shirt purchased from one of their storespawn right now, but it's not any fun, I'll tell you that. Wearing shirts isn't something I usually equate with fun, but if it makes Old Navy sound bad, it will further drive home my point that I didn't actually go into the store when the chance arose in the previously established narrative from which I have significantly strayed. Instead I took a trip to the Virgin Megastore and looked at all the graphic novels that I'd previously browsed through extensively. There wasn't anything new. The rest of "the gang" showed up after a while and decided to make like the proverbial bannana and split. I was still looking at all the comics I wasn't going to buy, so I decided to ignore them. Eventually they pulled the old "we're leaving without tactic" that my mom used to employ so well, and I sprited to the door, launched myself into the air, did an arial spin thing and kicked Virgin's back door wide open. Now I've kicked open a lot of doors in my day, but this was a particuarlly impressive effort. I was so proud of myself, when a Virgin employee subtly asked me "What, you can't use your hands?" I really couldn't figure out what she was trying to get at. "No?" I suggested, not sure if I was being clever or stupid.
The next day we took a trip to Disney Land! If you've been there recently, you've probably seen the new parking structure that dwarfs even the freaking huge guitar in front of Mars Music. It's hard to miss since it actually envellops the whole park in darkness when it eclipses the sun from 8 until 10 in the morning. Anyway, they've got escalators as the main way to exit the parking structure, and as usual there was one going up and one going down. We needed to go down, and at that moment, so did everyone else using the escalator. Obviously the most efficient way to get through the human traffic was to take the up escalator down. It was also the most fun way to do it. I had almost made it down when one of the Disney empolyees (sorry, cast memebers) cast me a disapointed glance and said, "You can't go down that way." I said OK, the started riding the mechanical stairs back up just long enough for him to look away, then finished what I had started. The other cast member there smiled as I got off, "You know you're not supposed to do that."
Yeah, I also knew that I was supposed to keep my hands and arms inside of the car at all times when riding Big Thunder Mountian Railroad, but I didn't know that a mechanical voice would remind me of the fact when I reached out to try and touch the stalagmites in the creepy caves part of the ride. The things college teaches you!
I don't feel like linking to all those corporations that I ticked off. Try www.{insert company here}.com if you really want to see their stuff. Otherwise, fight the system!
:: Aaron Humphrey 1:52 AM reply [+] ::
...

Comic books are neat.
So is fan fiction.
Hunger is not. Go fix it.
I guess milk isn't that great either. Sorry, Mom :(
Grant's page has stuff.
Sleep is neat, too I guess.
Can we pretend that I'm
Cool and all this is in hiaku?
No? Then I go sleep.
:: Aaron Humphrey 2:23 AM reply [+] ::
...

I’m eating popcorn out of a caldron tonight. Doing that Halloween thing. “Technically” it’s not Halloween since it’s after midnight, but in my book the day doesn’t end until I go to sleep, so I can still go trick-or-treating if I want to. I think on my birthday, I’ll not go to sleep for something close to the length of time known conventionally as a week, except for me it will really be my birthday the whole time, which means people will have to keep giving me presents and treating me nice. I’m just telling y’all in advance so that y’all can have time to get 144+ hours of neat stuff for me. My birthday now officially runs January 6 – 13. Just so you know.
We’re not very festive around here tonight. Christina’s playing Commander Keen 4, and Grant’s sulking around dressed like The Crow, disillusioned because even though he’s got creepy make-up on and has electrical tape wrapped around his abdominal area, he still doesn’t have anything to do that’s more interesting than eat corn chips and cheese sauce. Ed is lying on a couch in the lounge and pretending that he's actually doing work. Me, I finally beat Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Knuckles with all the characters and all the cool stuff tonight. Yippee. Mostly I’m just glad because now I don’t have to play it any more. The Floating Island is safe and I can get back to doing homework and reading comics.
I got Grant to take me on my bi-monthy trip to the comic book store today. Picked up new issues of Bone, Usagi, Hopeless Savages, Castle Waiting, Magic Pickle and Ancient Joe. Yum. When I get my act together I’ll actually update the comics section with reviews of all this stuff. Until then, check out Grant and Ed’s web pages, which they actually updated and in true blog fashion linked to a tonna stuff.
:: Aaron Humphrey 1:31 AM reply [+] ::
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I just finished typing up a nice long essay about everything that's wrong with capitalism for my science class. Yeah, one day we're inoculating test tubes, the next day we're writing social critiques. Only in a class with a name as ambiguous as "In Search of Knowledge" is all this possible. I think it's pretty decent, so I'll give 'er a post up here as soon as I take out all the esoteric references that only smart people will get. Not so much because y'all are lacking in the brain cell department (though if you are, there's still hope!), but mostly because I was just trying to sound smart and probably screwed them all up. Also, I've also finally hitched a ride on the comix review train, so a bunch of new stuff should be rollin' into the station any time now.
Until then, here's another route to get your kicks on. It seems like there should be a lot more fun pirate links out there scouring the seas of The Internet than I've been able to find. If you know of any, there's a reason that reply button is there. Avast!
:: Aaron Humphrey 2:09 AM reply [+] ::
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We're watching Behind the Music on VH1 in here and learning about Ozzy Osbourn's wacky adventures back in the day. Turns out he snorted up a line of ants on the sidewalk, licked up someone else's urine and tried to defecate in an elevator full of people all on the same day! "Up next: a drunken binge leades to utter madness and Ozzy almost kills his wife!" Rock stars are so cool because they're the only people who can get all screwed up with drugs, attempt suicide and destory the lives of all those around them, and then get "director's cut" documentaries made out of their lives. Forget making films, I'm gonna start some serious rockin' and rollin'!
Well, first I've probably got to learn how to properly field a phone call on my radio show. Friday was my second stint as a deejay 9no, not that one), which, despite from the constant "oh jeez oh jeez oh jeez" tension that results from to make sure that I'm broadcasting at any given moment and will still be broadcasting something five seconds from any given moment, was pretty fun. I've found enough stuff that I like playing that I didn't have to scramble every time song got down to its last 15 seconds. However, I still haven't figured out how to put a caller on the air, or actually play a song that lasts more than "not very long," ie, long enough to cover up my half of a phone conversation with someone I didn't know over the radio. Once I realized that realized that instead of hearing the indie rock that they love so much, the kids out there in college radio land got about two minutes of me saying "so wait, you want me to play what song?" I decided to cover it up the best way I could. Which was of course, turning the whole thing into a game called "See who can call in and make Aaron look as stupid as possible!" Fortunatly, we had no more contestants, but I for one can't wait until next week! By the way, the Chapman radio website can be found right about here. It's got a load of tasty flash stuff that makes it look pretty slick, but it hasn't been updated since last spring. Hopefully they'll fix that soon, and get the promised web radio broadcasting online, also. Then everyone can play along!
Until then, there's always fan fic.
:: Aaron Humphrey 12:07 AM reply [+] ::
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Yeah, I probably should be sleeping. Stayed up too late last night writing a paper about Run Lola Run for my film aesthetics class, and woke up too early in the morning (actually almost too late) to attend said class. As a result, my body's been sending me these nagging "need to sleep" messages all day, but I've been fighting back by . . . um . . . not sleeping! Take that, body!
I've got this theory that things like sleeping and eating are work just like writing term papers or doing your laundry are work -- you gotta do 'em. Frequently, as Mary Poppins says, the job . . . becomes a game! You know, the "let's see how much of this candy I can eat," or "let's see how long after noon I can sleep in!" It's kind of like the "let's see who can go the longest without talking game," except people actually play along with the eatting and sleeping games. In the end though, they're not really games. They're a job, and don't let anyone tell you any different. Your body is like a fascist regime -- it makes your work as the way it wants you to work. If you slack off or neglect your duties, the regime kills you. You cannot hand in a two-week notice to tyranny!! There's no escape -- it's just like 1984, I swear!
So anyway, I was kind of tired today. Just the same, Grant and I decided that it was Happy Fun Go See a Movie Time, so we took field trip to the local movie theater where we rode the Mullholand Drive train, and it delivered 2000 tons of I have no idea what. The beginning started out kind of slow, and the theater was as and dark and quiet as my seat was nice and comfortable. My body said "take a nap, it won't hurt, comrade!" but my mind countered, "yeah right! I just paid six dollars to watch this thing!" After a couple of minutes though my body started enforcing its command and I was having to blink an awful lot in order to keep my mind open. I've started falling asleep during movies before, and what usually happens is I miss some parts of the movie, and make up other, different parts usually involving bunnies or birthday cake to fill their places. The result is not a very coherent movie-going experience. I'm still not sure what exactly happened throughout the entire first half of Das Boot, though I think there was something in there about checking for lice. On the other hand, I can remember snippets of dialogue from Nosferatu, which is peculiar because it's a silent movie. I was afraid that this kind of thing might happen again with Mullholand Drive, and was beginning to think that it might be better to submit to the will of my body, but then the creepiest freaking guy I have ever seen in a movie (or in real life probably) showed up for about six frames. I actually jumped and made some kind of vocalization that was not a scream, but more of a "hrrm!" From that point on I was completely awake. Not that it really made any difference. The only real difference between watching this film wide awake and half asleep is that now I have to figure out who dreamed up the entire last quarter of the movie, because I know it wasn't me. My dreams usually make reasonable sense (and feature early '90s pop stars!)
I'm not convinced that writer/director David Lynch is a genius. He probably isn't, but I'm also not convinced that's what he wanted us to think in the first place. The whole thing felt like a stroll through a modern art museum, except a little bit funnier. It all looks very nice, and certainly conveys some kind of abstract meaning, but I don't think that it's got any definite point or way to figure it out. It's too blatantly over-the-top and disjointed to be pretentious, but too creepy and tense to be rollicking. Whatever. I haven't had that much fun in the movie theater since The Mummy Returns.
I'll put some links up in this post tomorrow. Until then, enjoy this great line that I cut out:
"Mighty calamity, sensei! Or how much water holding is your red-hot metaphor capable? Can you not quit from jobs regular?"
:: Aaron Humphrey 2:01 AM reply [+] ::
...

I’m wearing a sweatshirt and jeans tonight, which is a pleasant feeling I’ve missed down here in the desert heat of the semi-desert known as Califor-ni-ay. Of course, it’s 11 at night and we’ve got the air conditioning on, so I guess I don’t really have a legitimate reason to be feeling this warm and comfy, but heck with it, I’m gonna pretend that I’m back home where it’s nice and cold and dreary and I can watch the streets smear with rain. Mmmmm . . .
CA’s all about fabrication anyway, so if I want my anti-CA fantasy, I’m entitled to it. Technically there shouldn’t even be trees and grass and people living in nice little houses with their dogs and cats and fast food joints down here. There are no rivers to speak of in Orange County and the average number of inches of rainfall here is roughly the same as the average number of donuts (or cabbages even!) in a dozen. Yeah, that’s twelve inches or rain or less a year. Yet all the grass here is an unnaturally healthy looking vibrant shade of green. My science class has been talking all about this crazy water stuff, which is a lot more interesting than the old H and 2Os seems at first glance. We've had the whole truck-load of water-related reading assignments too, so my hydro-awareness has increased significantly in the past couple of months.
I was actually reading Cadillac Desert while capturing video footage, so I must be amazingly dense not to have realizde until recently that my second movie is all about that kind of thing. It's kind of an alternate reality sort of thing where the city’s got too much heat and not enough water and how people deal with that. I tried a number of new things for this movie, like only putting in sync sound and a couple of sound effects for the soundtrack (that means no music or dialogue), but didn’t do anything that’s going to beat you over the head and say, “hey, check this! Look at my ‘innovation!’” It’s a nice little movie, and since I don’t want to be the next Guy Ritchie, that’s probably a good thing.
:: Aaron Humphrey 12:30 AM reply [+] ::
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Hello web page! Hey, I know it's been a while, but I still love ya, you adorable little hyper-text amalgamation! How's that old hit counter doing? Yeah, people generally stop coming when you stop updating. You should work on that, buddy. Do I have to do everything around here?
It's another Friday night in OC, and we're cool kickin' it like we do so well. Ed's writing a paper comparing and contrasting Amazing Rock Legends Jim Morrison and Scott Weiland, so he's embarked on a kind of musical holy week by only lending an ear to the sacred music produced by the aforementioned rockers/essay topics, and we all get to come along for the ride! I'm learning oh-so-much about rock 'n' roll history, that it's incredible that I was ever even able to pretend to be cool before my resent enlightenment. Now I understand the delicate intricacies of life (and death as well!) thanks to the supreme coolness and tasty irony of Rock And Roll!
Oh, who am I kidding, I don't have a clue about music. Otherwise I might have been able to pick songs for my radio show tonight based on something other than which albums had cool covers. As it stood, I was able to provide wacky behind-the-scenes commentary like "OK, that last song kind of sucked, but it had an elephant and a rhinoceros on the cover, so it looked cool at least. Coming up -- track four from some band with a sofa on the back of their cover because I'm not sure what's on the front!" That, coupled with my undeveloped knowledge of all that technical stuff that spins those radio wheels (like having the microphone on when trying to talk) made for a the kind of edgy, alternative and entertaining show that you'd only find on college radio. Well, it was edgy because I was always just skimming the edge of not having any music within reach to play next, and I know that I'd keep my grubby mitts from touchin' that dial if I heard the deejay say, "That was Ben Folds Five, er, maybe it's just Ben Folds now, since there's not a Five on the CD, so that was Ben Folds, and this is Steely Dan. No wait. This isn't that song. Um . . . it's track six! Alright, this is track six of something and we're just gonna listen to it, so it's like a surprise! Yeah, track six." A good time was had by all. I'm just glad that I only said my name once, and that I don't carry any lunch money.
Fan fic? Si, esta en este paigna de los gatos y viernes para beber!

:: Aaron Humphrey 1:36 AM reply [+] ::
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Blame Sonic the Hedgehog.
Ed’s got an old Sega Genesis that he brought with him to school, and I’ve been studying it extensively. I’m sure that I’m not the only college freshman to lament the fact that there’s no way to major in playing video games, but doggone it, things sure would be a lot easier if slacking actually part of a class instead of something I had to clear out time in my schedule for. Good news? I got all 14 Chaos Emeralds! Bad news? No one cares.
Today I actually managed to get some work done on my next, yet untitled film project. Gonna try and get some editing done tonight, come up with a title in the shower tomorrow morning and get a preview posted up soon. This one’s not quite of the epic proportions that characterized Out of Hand, and my resulting epic lack of sleep, and I wrote out an extensive shot list for it before I even picked up the camera. Hey kids! Know how the establishment (i.e. your teachers and parents) is always telling you that if you plan stuff ahead of time it works out better in the long run? Yeah, they were right about that! Honest! You can trust me, because I’m cool enough to have my webpage!
Screened said epic-sized 10 minute film before my film class last week. Basically they reaffirmed my suspicions that it wasn’t gonna win any awards, but it was generally pretty well received. I think I’ve got a handle on all of the flaws the movie has and am pretty sure what I’d need to do to fix them. The one major problem here is that this imaginary world in which I re-shoot and re-edit to perfection cannot possibly exist within my current schedule. Will I cry about this? I haven’t so far, but . . . um, I can’t think of a clever way to end that sentence.
Arrgh . . . Nostalgia!
:: Aaron Humphrey 11:32 PM reply [+] ::
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My science class is set up as one of those crazy cross-disciplinary courses where professors from a bunch of different departments come in and lecture about how their field relates to the issue at hand. In this class the focus is the versatile and multi-faceted, all-star topic known as “water.” Yeah, not that it matters, because most of the profs just talk about whatever they want anyway.
We starting in on water ethics this week, after a rousing exercise in confusion known as water economics, which was taught by one Professor Don Booth, who is shaped like a rather large pear. Last week he asked us a bunch of questions about how we like paying for our water and whether we thought people should be able to build hotels in front of other people’s houses, and then assigned a six page paper on something completely different.
Monday we got a lecture on utilitarianism from the ethics teacher, who passed out some readings that suggested ways for dealing with environmental policy other than cost-benefit analysis. Wednesday, the ethics teacher went MIA, so Dr. Booth, who seemed to take this whole ethics thing as a personal assault on all he held dear, took the opportunity to fight back by passing a number of pro-economics articles, (which none of us had the slightest intention of even looking at), and deciding to give another impromptu lecture.
Apparently he felt that because someone had told us that sometimes some economists refuse to assign values to stuff (in all its sundry forms) based on anything except how much people are willing to pay for it, that we had been completely turned of from economics, and this did not jive well with the Boothmeister.
As he stood in front of us, dry-erase marker held high and ready, the thought had let itself in and was reclining comfortably in the back of my mind: “this man is evil.” Logically, I knew that the idea had more to do with the fact that the man looked like every evil fat cat tycoon from every film noir I had ever seen than his place on the scales of absolute truth, but it sure wasn’t helping his case any. He could have actually won a lot of points with the class if he had a) given us any information we could use in the ambiguous (ie, stupid) paper he had assigned, b) actually made any tangible amount of sense and/or c) let us leave early.
Instead he chose to explain how economists occasionally choose the will of the community over the will of the individual. Well, I think that was what he was trying to explain. His example was that here in the United States, we’re allowed to have as many kids as we want, and the choice is up to us, being the good individualists that we are, while over in China, they’ve chosen to cap the number of children that most couples can have at a hearty amount of one. That was it! The one example he used to combat the evil ethics empire came from a communist country that denounced nearly all of the Western economic ideals he had laid out for us the week before! If you’re peddling logic, that’s what you call a market failure.
No, wait, there’s more!
A while later, after he’d gotten suitably off track, Dr. Booth drew a circle on the board, divided it into four equal pieces.
Booth: “OK, so say we’ve got this pie, alright? Now we want to divide it equally among all of us, right, so we split it up like this, and then you let me take the first piece, but I take a bigger piece than I’m supposed to. Now how does that make you feel?”
We proceeded to give all the standard answers like “that’s not fair!”
Booth: “Yeah, but you let me go first, that’s what happens. But -- but what if we had this other pie that was bigger, and when I take a piece off of the other pie, my piece of the big pie gets bigger, and that makes the whole other pie get bigger, so there’s more for everyone. How would that make you feel?”
Student: “So is it a magic pie or something?”
Booth: “No, that’s how it works. It’s still the same pie. When I take away a big piece from this pie, it adds a little tiny piece to this bigger pie, and makes that pie bigger.
Aaron: Hold on, you’re saying that by taking a big piece out of one pie, you actually take a small piece out of this other pie, that’s really the same pie, but you make it bigger, too, but the other part of the pie stays the same size? Somehow I don’t think we’re talking about pies any more.”
At least he admitted that I was right. He never did explain what exactly he was trying to say, though.
Eventually we started talking about what had happened to our dear economics professor. He suggested that since we were all paying tuition (or at least our parents were), it was worth about $1000 for Prof. Warren to show up for class. In order for her absence to be justified, he argued rather reasonably, that whatever she was doing should be worth more than that to us. What if, he speculated, she had found a limping puppy by the side of the road and decided to save it and return it to its owner. He told us he knew what our answer would be, and had a pretty good reason why we would say that. The class all agreed, for whatever reason, that saving the dog would be worth missing class, so Dr. Booth began concocting permutations of the situation. He kept going until the hypothetical Prof. Warren met a hypothetical ameba on the side of the road.
Booth: “So how would you feel if she missed class to help this microscopic organism find its way home?”
Aaron: “Um, well it’s microscopic, so she couldn’t exactly see it on the side of the road in order to help it, and she wouldn’t really know how to help in the first place even if she could see it, nor do any of us in the class have any idea how an ameba could possibly be in peril on the side of the road, or what kind of aid it would need even if it was. The analogy doesn’t hold up because there’s no way we can imagine how we’d feel about Professor Warren helping a microscopic organism when we can’t even come to terms with the fact that there are thousands of microscopic organisms crawling around on our eyelashes alone.”
Booth laughed under his breath and changed the subject. We never found out why he knew what our answer would be.
I know that Dr. Booth is not evil. Nor is he probably as stupid as these stories make him out to be. Even after Prof. Warren returned the next day to pollute our minds with more ethical garbage, I don’t believe that economists are evil. However, economics is the science of determining how much everything is worth, including life, love but assigning an objective value to it, and in Good’s eyes, that’s quite often the definition of Evil.
:: Aaron Humphrey 1:11 AM reply [+] ::
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I got a bowl of soup today for lunch and brought it back up to my dorm room to eat it. It was alright as far as soup goes, nothing to write home about (although I guess I kind of am anyway), but when I finished it there was still some broth left. Thinking I'd be neat and tidy, I dumped it down the sink. Too bad we've got some little grid thing over drain; now there are little pieces of vegetable something or other floating around in the same basin I wash my hands in. Oh well, college is all about learning, right?
Yes, I'm quite aware that I've been spelling sense with a c, which I guess is the "wrong" way to do it. Don't I at least get points for being consistent? I guess it's time to start spell-checking, although that seems so unothodox on The Internet where every1 types lik this.
Longer update coming soon . . .
:: Aaron Humphrey 12:54 PM reply [+] ::
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Went to see the movie Zoolander today with some other kidz from the dorm and "around." It was alright; Ben Stiller and Owen Willson have made some of the greatest movies ever, so I had at least moderate expecations for their newest offering. Mostly I wasn't disapointed. The editing was sub-par, but that doesn't matter to most people. Though the middle sagged, there were a couple of really funny bits in the beginning and the end that made up for it. Just the same, none of us had anything to say about it after the credits rolled.
I have no grip on the current national movie scene any more -- someone told me that you don't have time to watch movies when you're in film school, and so far they've been right. I'm gonna make myself see the 35mm showing of Raging Bull on Monday, though; good stuff is still good stuff whether you've got time or not. And then there's The Mummy Returns, which has a special place in the trash bin of my heart. Its plot is translucent, its character development . . . scratch that, it has no character development, its sence of danger and/or suspense registers just below an episode of Blues Clues, and it doesn't even make an attempt at realism. The action scenes are good, though. And it's hilarious. If writer/director Steven Sommers knew all that going in, he's a genius. If he didn't, he's a hack. Unfortunatly, I missed the chance to find out to ask him about that when he came to our school last Thursday. The school had a showing of the just-released-to-video flick in quesion, with Sommers and his editor there to field questions afterwards. I was torn between going to judge the man's self-awareness and not wanting to be spotted at a showing of one of the most artistically vacant films I've ever seen.
In the end, my silly sence of pretension won out and I stayed at home. I think part of it was the fact that all the Kevin Smith fanboys, who are without a doubt the most annoying people in the film department, kept asking me if I was going to go see it. It's just like high school -- if you're popular, even if it's for a bad reason, people want to hang out with you.
Just the same, I still would have liked to ask him about that scene where the CG rocket-powered blip is flying through the CG canyon pursued by the CG wall of water superimposed with a CG face of our boy favorite mummy. Now that was classic.
:: Aaron Humphrey 12:11 AM reply [+] ::
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No radio-station fun for me tonight. There's some problem with the magic card-swiper thing on the door that lets you into the station, which can roughly be summed up as it doesn't work, which means no one can get in. Oh well, maybe next week.
No one's been around for the last couple of hours. People are usually bursting at the seams trying to get into our dorm room and kick it with us, but tonight they're all no-shows. It doesn't help that my room mates, who are much hipper than me aren't around. Grant is visiting his hometown of San Jose, and Ed went to go play soccer about four hours ago, so his status is now effectively MIA. I've just been surfing the web, finding some pretty good comic book sites and just generally wasting my time. I'm going to the beach tomorrow morning to do science research, so I've got the perogative, OK?
People are finally starting to filter into the hall, so I'm gonna go get my social groove on. Tonight = bonus fan fic time!
:: Aaron Humphrey 10:27 PM reply [+] ::
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I'm leaving soon for my first ever radio broadcast! I'm a deej/djay/deejay/dj from 7:30 until 9:30 on Friday nights here at the local radio station. Or at least I will be come 7:30. The word is that they'll be broadcasting over the Internet soon, so I'll give y'all the hook up for that when I get it. Until then, read new fan fiction and visit the new comix review section! The first (and currently only) review up there is Dan Clowe's angst-filled, adapted-into-a-movie, really-good trade paperback Ghost World. Plenty has been written about the movie and the comic, but I want a piece, too. So there. More reviews coming soon!
Time to break out the turn tables!
:: Aaron Humphrey 7:17 PM reply [+] ::
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The ants first showed up about a week ago. I didn't really worry, or for that matter, even notice for a couple of days, so I'm not sure exactly when they made their debut apperance on my desk. I do remember thinking something like, "Wow, an ant! Hee hee, they're fun!" and then going back to typing. After a couple of days, they started showing up more frequently, and I began thinking of them as my little six-legged pals; there was always a couple of them hanging out, and one of them was always on the wall right above my desk. I liked that one the best, and never really questioned what he was doing there -- I just figured he liked to live vertically instead of horizontally like all the other ants. He was a rebel! A nonconfromist! He was a kindred spirit! The night I had this revelation I went to bed thinking about naming friends with my ants, learning their little anty personalities and giving them names. It'd be like a big ol' ant party on my desk!
The next morning, I found out that the ants were indeed having a fiesta -- all over my desk. It was a lot less fun than I thought. For one thing, there were more than enough of them to saturate my fun-with-ants tolerance levelsl; you know, two's a company, three's a crowd, and if you can't count them, it's clobberin' time!
Or it would have been if I didn't want ant guts all over my computer, CDs, stereo, various papers and action figures, used cups and dishes, cookie crumbs and basically everything else on my desk, and if I didn't have the sneaking suspicion that the ant population would quickly replenish itself after anything but a cataclysmic event. There were enough ants crawling up and down the wall that it was obvious that a) the indepentent, "vertical living" ants had sold out and become main-stream or b) they had been crawling all across the room and were using my computer cables as a bridge to cross over to the hold land of my desk. A quick scan of the room confirmed that the second was the case. They were snaking (can ants snake?) across the corner between the wall and the celing, down to the air conditioner, which seemed to be a very hip place for today's ant population to hang out, before finally making the exodus to my Desk of Milk and Honey and getting stuck under my keyboard keys.
My first thought was "wow, I wish I was an ant so that I could climb on the walls and celing!" My next thought was, "Jeez, that's really gross!" Ants don't usually register on my gross meter, but for some reason their large and rapidly growing numbers really disturbed me. Even though they were looked cool, had six legs and could defy my perception of gravity, they were as worthless and annoying to me as little walking pieces of trash. I like my trash to stay where I put it -- usually on my desk or in the corner. I don't like trash walking across my comic books.
Besides, I thought I was part of the dominant species around here, and as dominant species, the other, lesser species should listen to what I say, doggone it! I tried yelling at the stupid ants, and even tried being nice to them, but my room mates just laughed at me. Ed said, "So, uh . . . I guess they don't have many ants in Oregon, huh?" I just fumed.
Eventually that turned out to be the answer. Someone brought over a can of Raid, which I reluctantly tried on my home-grown ant farm.
That stuff is the friggin' scariest stuff I've ever seen packaged in an aresol can. There's be something downright evil about a mist-like substance that can kill on contact. Humans aren't the dominant species on the plant, deadly chemicals are. :(
That's my political statement for the night. I "stabalized" the situation thanks to good old Death in a Can, but I was left with an empty feeling inside and a lingering sent of insecticide in the room. Neither was pleasant. The next time I found an ant on my desk that wasn't severly impaired in the living department I actually started jumping up and down and cheering for the little guy. The speicies persisted! I had not comitted an act of genocide! There was a single ant crawling up and down the wall.
It was so cool!
:: Aaron Humphrey 1:00 AM reply [+] ::
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I'm in a lazy mood tonight, and I really don't feel guilty about it for a change. I've got a paper to write, and I'm confident that it will get written. Since I don't have the slightest inclination to write it myself, I'm not sure how this is going happen, but it will. No worries. I feel like I've just gotten back to my hotel room after swimming in the hotel pool and soaking in the hotel hot tub. Part of this is probably because the air conditioning is turned on really high, as it tends to be in most of the hotel rooms I stay in, and part of it is probably because . . . uh . . . well part of it isn't because I just went swimming, because I didn't. Haven't been swimming in a looong time.
All is not so quite on the massive never getting my doggone movie finished front. I managed to squeeze some magic Working Juice out of the computer system for a change this morning (actually, they just happened to be working abnormally fine when I got there), and salvaged a better cut of the film than the one I printed to tape yesterday. Or was that today? Anybody out there wanna explain time to me?
A girl from down the hall just came to the door and did that annoying knocking thing to it. Grant, who's chatting on the Internet and watching either his priated copy of Fight Club or listening to his pirated collection of punk music, remains as glued to his chair as he is when I say "Hey, what's that panda bear doing in our room?!" which is to say, he didn't move. Ed was busy having a life somewhere, so it was my job it ensure that our room remained in social contact with the outside world.
"Hi, do you know if these are contaminated?"
Annie, a girl from down the hall wass holding up an orange starburst and confusing the old bejeeubs out of me. I responded with kind of brevity of frequently lacking in my written thought:
"What?"
"They put these out there, but I don't know, do you think they're poison or something?"
She still wasn't making any sence, the crazy dame, so I decided that it'd make it easier for all of us if I figured this out myself. I decided to start looking in the direction she was pointing. That's usually how these things go. Someone had left a bunch of orange and lemon (orange and yellow) starbursts, and exactly one mini Resses peanut butter cup on a paper plate in the hallway. The plate said "take one" and had a smiley face drawn on it. It would have looked mighty sinister, except for the candy and the smiley face, two things that always seem to say "fun is on the way!" I said that they were probably OK to eat, but Annie said she didn't care, because she had just gotten back from working out, and figured that she deserved one. She just wanted someone else to eat one too, so that if she did die, she wouldn't die alone (for someone health concious enough to work out, she sure didn't seem to be particuarly worried about long term health risks like death-by-poison).
I was just a pawn in her confection consumtion plot, but it was candy, and it was free, so I didn't really care. I did wait to make sure she didn't die before I ate my starburst, though.
I've got comic reviews and fan fic to post, but somehow I think I should check and see if that paper's written itself yet. That stuff will go up soon, though.
:: Aaron Humphrey 11:21 PM reply [+] ::
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You know what's cool? Typing something out for your web page, and then having your Internet browser screw up and lose it all! It gets even better if you're really tired and sore and just want to go to bed, and would much rather be sleeping than prentending you've got something important to say.
No, actually, none of that is very fun at all.
Movie is on VHS, ready to show to class. I'm too mad at it to care any more.
Sleeeeep . . .
:: Aaron Humphrey 1:20 AM reply [+] ::
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