Rapid fire listings, go!

Lot has happened over the last few days, but I will cover from yesterday morning, in itemized fashion:

• Started smoking again - mainly chaining to help me stay awake for a little all-night cramming for PSY 330, exam 2. Not a great idea. After the first draft, I was light-headed and nearly passed out, barely even finishing the damn thing.
  
• The Office - since we went out for 15A/15B's dinner last Thursday, I was unable to catch up on it until this morning, when I remembered. OMGANDYANDERINAWKWARDCUTENESS
• Saw an old friend from high school who recently came back to Arizona to continue their education in another direction. While the greetings weren't as pleasant enough for me to usually tolerate, I forgave in favor of a warm exchange ("Wow, you still go to ASU? I thought you'd be done by now!")
• By procrastinating all spring break, not doing the last two homeworks and missing the last two lab sessions, I had just about royally fucked myself for this exam. I am prepared for a 50%, although after taking it this afternoon I feel optimistic (as in, "maybe I BS'd enough to get a 70%..?")
• Caffeine. CAFFEINE. Man that stuff is dangerous combined with cigarettes.. I'd almost forgotten their awesome dream-team'bility- 3 pots fixed that..
• The POWER NAP. 30-45mins of assisted power nap (3: Dude get up *FLASH CEILING LIGHTS*)
• That mentioned, I have slept about 30-45mins since waking up on 3/23 around 7am..
• PGS 443 - Dr. P is amazing and easily one of my favorite professors in the psych dept. Although his "I'm kind of joking about that, but not really joking" quips get repetitive after you realize that he is retelling an anecdote from 2 lectures ago.. again. Nevertheless, I renew my doubt of psychoanalysts, big pharma, health insurance companies and over-diagnosis with each dose of the entertaining morning lecture.
• Questionable Content - I've spent about 4-6 of today's waking hours reading the strip. I'm up to 99, and I've read about 500 strips back from the latest page. J. Jacques is amazing.
• Dr. K attended today's lab meeting and discussed grad school and reaffirmed my belief that it will be nearly impossible for me to attend in the foreseeable (~5 years) future. It costs a lot (just to apply, GRE, etc), my GPA sucks, I'm not interested in academia, and a few other annoyances that I will detail later.

Desperably in need of sleep.

Delicious stats:
27s smoked: 10
Coffee (20oz): 6
QuestionableContent.net strips read: ~600
Sleep (mins) since 7am/3-23-2010: 30-45mins
Anime (Ep): 0
Phone dropped: 0

Repo Men (aka Repossession Mambo), and such

So, what do I have to say about Repo Men?

The night before:
88: "[It was] one of the few movies that has inspired emotion in me."
00: "Eh, it was alright."

I fall in between these two. I found that, though the story was familiar, I like Forrest Whitaker and Alice Braga. Jude Law- I'm not sure if I like him, but I do see an awful lot of his movies. I think I enjoy his roles when he does science fiction (A.I. Artificial Intelligence).. and not so much when he's just a douche (Closer, Alfie).

If you haven't seen the movie yet and dislike spoilers, well- off you go.

The film is standard "I do a mean job and don't care.. until the turntables have.."

However, there is a healthy overdose of violence. There is minimal bullet action, but plenty of tasing and more stabbing and chopping than I'd ever think medical technicians would ever have to do. Come to think of it, I hope Repo Men is not what 72 had in mind when he enrolled in these med tech classes (id est chopping parts out of people, including friends and relatives).

The ending was a big relief to me: as entertaining as the content of the rising action was, it contained a certain corniness to it. Though the 'sex-scene' was something I could only describe as ridiculous, 88 notes that it sets the bar for sex-scenes at an absurd height for such over-the-top violence-porn, as only Hollywood can present to us.

Overall, I came out of the movie feeling a bit jumpy. It's rare for me to grip my seat during action sequences, but watching people in suits and business attire swing hammers and cleavers at each other took my breath away as no Matrix installment ever could.

As it is rare for me to disagree with Rotten Tomatoes, I feel I must here. RT, I give you another week to raise the aggregate score.. 20% is just too harsh for such a entertaining, albeit slightly formulaic, romp through violence-land. Hey, at least it isn't The Transporter (which somehow got a 53%).

In other news, it is day 9 since I had my last cigarette. While I don't feel the nicotine urge, I feel the psychological symptoms.. (exempli gratia BOREDOM). But using systematic desensitization (read: graduated exposure), I have got up to a point where I can barely go 10mins on a hookah, let alone think about lighting up a delicious.. 27. Well, I was planning on just starting back up on Tuesday after escaping the scorn of my co-workers, but I think I'll keep it up and see where it goes. The power of commitment..

Oh, and I'm freaking hungry all the time now.

Delicious stats (since 3/21):
DVDs bought: 1
27s (or any other cig) smoked: 0
Hookah (30min): 1
Phone dropped: 0
Infiltrates: 2

so I guess I'll steal a layout instead

Hey, see that crappy banner I drew that's off to the right? Yeah, I notice it's off.

So, I'm lazy, at least to the point that I'm unwilling to pinpoint why blogger likes to nudge my things all over the place. So, sometime today I will just steal a layout from one of those cheeseball sites that cater to myspace users and just doctor up the css a bit.

This one seems promising.

http://www.pyzam.com/bloggertemplates/details/throwback

I don't like the background or the text or any of the colors, but I can change that up all fine. I just need to know where exactly most of the code works and where it doesn't (i.e. fancy scrollbars don't work on firefox).

Delicious stats:
Phone dropped: 0
Hookah (30min): 3
Redbox: 2
27s: 0

Beautiful St. Patrick's Day

I'll begin today's post with a conversation between 00 and I-

From a few days ago..
27: "You know.. it's my dream.. to build a goldfish pond."
00: "Everybody has dreams. It's my job to crush them."

I had lunch (dim sum at Great Wall.. mediocre, but it's Wednesday) with my Mom and my brother today, and they visited the house a few hours later. My mom's dog 'Diva', in addition to it's house-training, has been taught to avoid strangers. I think I've had better luck offering advice on the internet than trying to give that dog a treat. As usual, mom disapproved of the dust in my room, and that I should have the audacity to own posters of women who are scantily-clad.

The pond is ready to be lined, just financial issues as usual. Tonight, we should be celebrating by getting 3 nice and drunk, though he gets quite irritable when he has one too many. 88 suggested a stay-in, so I've called 72, though he hasn't responded yet. We'll see; I thought I spied a bottle of Maker's Mark back in the cabinets. Ah, the spirit of celebrating one's culture.

I've yet to smoke a cigarette since Friday, but I have had this annoying habit of just burning up these cheapo cigs my dad gave me. And last night, I smoked a bit of the shisha I had layin about, mixed with some mugwort. It made for a very unsatisfying experience, as far as replacing smoking goes. Maybe this can be worked in some sort of systematic desensitization if I get tired of the act of smoking itself. I'm beginning a daily mind-game of debating with myself the merits of non-smoking, although the arguments are rapidly disintegrating- but I WILL last until Monday, if at least to avoid the mockery of my co-workers.

Tomorrow is dinner with 15A and 15B; I think we're going for Mexican.

I still need to fix the icons to my liking, but I will not cease the stats for today
Delicious stats
Phone dropped: 1
27s smoked: 0
Dunhills smoked: 0
Cheapos smoked: 0
Hookah (30mins): 2

ok, blogger, you are PISSING ME OFF

the html editor is GARBAGE (adds the most worthless crap imaginable), the wysiwyg is crap too (how about you not adding spacing when I do not ask for spacing?!).

I can't even line up my icons without it misreading my tables. whoever invented tbody, thead and tfoot and that nonsense needs to be given a shiner with the heel of my itching foot. This is disgusting.

pond ready to be set-up!

I woke up this morning, in a daze, to ALI Project's hairy-sounding tunes (Kinjirareta Asobi, I believe). Got up, went outside for my morning cigarette, and finding myself with no 27's left, I went for the Dunhill stash in my closet. BAM! "You stopped yesterday!" I put down the dunny and watched it sort of just burn up.. at least I got a lovely icon out of it with 00's camera-phone. Well shit, that's a great way to start off the morning.

In the kitchen, I navigated through the mess and found that we did indeed have one clean bowl. I have cereal. I have no milk. My solution is to knock on 00's door. He answers, realizing too late that it is I. Anyway, I forgot most of the details of the morning, but I finished digging the hole out in the back. Oh, they were right. It is soo satisfying to finally finish it on my own. Now, if I can somehow obtain funding for a rubber pond liner, I can begin the pond before the graduation party in May!

Sometime around noon, 3 woke up and declined to assist in either the pond digging or the garage cleaning. All is not lost however, as I was able to obtain a slice of pizza from his half-asleep grasp, and we got (mostly) everything done anyway. The garage should be cleaned out by tomorrow afternoon.

As for the matter of nicotine, I am aware that the drug itself may remain in my body for up to a week. The question, do I switch from the incompatibility-exercise track to graduated exposure and just get myself down to 1-2 cigs a day? That seems much more reasonable. If I had a weight-problem, I wouldn't quit eating.. I'll ignore the issue of deciding whether smoking itself is a problem- outside of monetary issues and the exercise thing, the cancer thing has never been all that convincing to me. People in Japan live to their 90's and drink and smoke like fiends.

If I had a camera I would have taken a photo, when 88 was getting ready for the War concert. The hair reminded me of a Stegosaurus. So little time. Well, it's time to do some dishes, and make more icons.

~Delicious stats for today

x 0	x 0

SO- First post

So, I've followed through on creating the blog, and it seems appropriate to post something, even though I haven't even started on the layout or basic look yet. As far as a blog or blog-type enterprise, this is not my first attempt, but an ideal world, you'd be able to tell that so far, this is my strongest attempt. I cannot, in this post, describe the direction or tone that my blog will take, but I see fabulous amounts of time wasted in the near-future, including modern warfare-esque accolades, frequent references to people I know and frequent red herring for those same people, on the borderline chance that they find their way into my corner and I need barely-plausible deniability for my actions.

As far as today's slice of life goes, I've pondered the possibility of stopping smoking for awhile. There are several reasons which I will itemize:

1. It is expensive. Seriously, it's not really supposed to be in my budget.
2. I'm getting REALLY lazy. Which means..
3. I'm totally out of shape. INTOLERABLY out of shape.

I'm pretty sure that smoking developed out of classical, rather than operant conditioning, as there was hardly any reinforcement from smoking when I began almost a decade ago. With this in thought, I thought I'd try shaping an incompatible response. Exercise. I'm not sure right now if the primary goal is to get in shape or to stop smoking for awhile (because we never 'quit', as 72 is fond of pointing out (my first numerical reference!). I'll establish some sort of routine tonight- probably sit-ups and jumping jacks. Har har.

Logically, taking better care of the ol' vessel should prove easier- it's difficult not to keep up hygiene and dietary habits when I'm active. Speaking of which, I'm going to go eat that onion/olive pizza now (one step at a time..)

Today's delicious statistics (since 8am)
Phone dropped: 1
27's smoked: 9
Coffee (20oz): 1