holding steady.™

ok, so it may not actually be trademarked. but for many years now, my mother has been preaching the methods of the so-called yogurt principle.

perhaps i should explain.

but it should be noted that this all started because of my computer going on the skids a couple of days ago.

at two am on friday morning, the 12th of september, i came to the crashing realization that my computer wasn’t turning on. after trying in vain to get it to work by resetting the PRAM and resetting the power adapter and a whole host of inevitably worthless techniques suggested by apple.com/support, i decided to give up for the night, and went to bed. it should be noted that, as per my issues with getting enough sleep lately, i had taken something like half of a small bottle of children’s benadryl syrup. so when i went to sleep at two-thirty am, i didn’t really wake up until 3 pm. that is, 13 hours later.

i awoke periodically, usually to try to reset the computer again and then fall back asleep, hoping against hope that it would be alright when my eyes fluttered open again. needless to say, this was not the case. some hard realizations came my way. for one, God doesn’t take kindly to being pushed to a lower tier of priority. i’m a big believer in things working out the way He wants them to, so this was especially important for me to realize. after taking some time to get my priorities straight, i set up an appointment with the apple geniuses at the least crowded apple store in south florida (galleria mall). i went there earlier this afternoon, only to discover the truly ugly truth: my logic board has likely died. i’ll now need to ship it somewhere, and $600 later i should have a perfectly functioning macbook pro. the problem is, it will take about a month for me to get that much cash together. so i will be saving up like mad over the next couple of pay periods to try to get this all done and taken care of. in the meantime, i have housed my younger sister’s macbook. typing on such a small screen is really difficult for me to adjust to, but i suppose i’ll have to…thank goodness it was even available to me.

now, at some point, it might be nice if i explained what was meant by the yogurt principle. my mom uses this to refer to that phase when i was much younger than i am now, when i hated yogurt. i mean HATED. if she was foolish enough to leave it on my high chair, and turn her head for even a moment, that container of yogurt would end up all over the walls. but as time went on, she eventually wore down my considerable defenses and got me to enjoy yogurt, as i still do to this day. the application to my life at the moment is based on the idea that i need to continue to be dependent on that which is bigger than me, and i do that by continuing to seek the knowledge that only comes from a greater source than i.

counting it all joy, one day at a time…

so, i was hit by two cars the other day…wednesday, actually.

the process of more than one idiot in a day caused my bike seat to come completely off the frame of the saddle. ergo, i needed a new seat.

so i bought one yesterday, and a nifty litle toolkit that fits on my keychain.

status: ready to ride.

i am supposed to have a test today. i’m probably going to skip it.

i read an article today on going paperless, something i’ve been doing/meaning to do for some time. having a laptop is a sort of invaluable mental ascent in terms of boosting your productivity and organizational capacity.

i am listening to the song “reflections”, off of the newest mae album (singularity)
“Reflections are all we have and when it’s over
Reflections of the path that sends us searching”

i just downloaded yep (for .pdf file archiving/tagging). once i have completed tagging all of my pdfs, next i’m tackling my bookmarks (using webnotehappy). i’ve been keeping track of my tasks with things.

POL 586 EF, Monday/Wednesday, 12:20-13:35 - Conflicts in the Middle East & Africa

i’m actually a little scared. or maybe not scared, more like neurotically anticipatory. yeah, that sounds about right. this is the end of the first week of my last week as an undergrad. yeah, I have to take french in may, but whatever. doesn’t count. i’m gonna have to grow up at some point in the relatively near future. vomit.

REL 354 D, Tuesday/Thursday, 09:30-10:45 - Religion & Gender

i keep playing this game in my head, where I let myself get too far ahead, caught up in the future, concerned with “what’s coming next?!”

SOC 210 P, Tuesday/Thursday, 11:00-12:15 - Introduction to Social Research

this is the class I have currently checked out of to write this. so fucking dull. I maybe wrote like…five lines of notes. but I did check my email a lot.

GSC 103 R, Tuesday/Thursday, 14:00-15:15 - Evolution of the Modern Earth’s Environment

so in my geology class…it’s just like the greatest possible amalgamation of useless dregs. these are the scholars of the university of miami, and the half that don’t ooze stubborn pretentiousness/abercrombie-hollister-american eagle “vintage”-ness look decidedly homeless, complete with mildly dreaded hair and ratty clothing. read some more issues i’m having with that class here.

POL 500 SX, Tuesday, 15:30-18:10 - Ideals & Realities: Bioethics, Religion & Politics

I give up. I wanna fucking graduate already. only 112 days, 20 hours and 45 minutes to go…

this is one of those times where i’m genuinely proud to be an american. i’m bad with doing things when i am supposed to, but i’m going to try to be better. an especially simpler process since there aren’t any world cup games that interest me until next tuesday.

a little background: i have been obsessed with women’s soccer, ever since i watched the 1999 women’s world cup final on espn classic when i was a freshman in high school. it never hurt that all the girls i kept falling in love with were soccer players. i played soccer a little bit in high school…but as it turns out, it’s better for me to keep that as a spectator sport.

as a matter of fact, UM’s team has the first home game tonight. i’ll be there, with my obnoxious camera that i would like to at some point write a review of. and yes, i know, i’m not supposed to end a sentence with a prepostion. whatever.

but yeah, about two weeks ago, i just happened to be moseying around on the nike women’s site, and noticed the new ad campaign for the women’s national team, “the best team you’ve never heard of.” i hadn’t been paying attention to women’s soccer (gasp!) for some time, so i went to the site. and spent the next hour and a half getting acquainted with the new and slightly revamped USWNT. so i’ve basically being getting up at the crack of dawn this week to watch the live games on espn (2).

i had several minor heart attacks while watching the battle between the us and north korea on tuesday. something interesting that i noticed was that each offensive attack encompassed all their strikers and all their midfielders, a reigning mass of tiny korean women with the exact same haircut. they attacked in a block…something i dubbed the typical communist attack. oh, kim jong-il. it’s so hard to take a man seriously when he has been protrayed in a movie with puppets.

then today…i watched us whoop up on sweden, a game that i anticipated to be a bit trickier for us. however, some key factors helped us achieve a much needed victory. first of all, hope solo. i thought this, and apparently so did the announcers: it was utterly vital for hope solo and the back three to keep out attacking goals. we needed the three points from this game, and thank God for solo’s composure and placement. a couple of times she seemed to get lucky, but she seemed much more in control of things than against the pressure-happy north koreans. even though the swedes got a couple shots on goal, her punch-out of the particularly menacing attempt in the middle of the second half, and her subsequent imperturbability proved her mettle as a player. her size and former field experience are not the only characteristics that make her appealing to her coach as a starter and frightening to opponents. secondly, and of no lesser importance to the usa’s success, are the legs and head of star striker and international phenom abby wambach. the woman is basically made of steel. she’s is a footballer robot, perfect execution. even on a less than stellar PK in the first half, wambach is about results. and lord knows she delivered what some might call a do-over, with a quick chest bump and pelting into the upper left corner just beyond the outstretched hands of the swedish keeper. this is another player whose size and strength is fantastic and works for the team, especially when playing with smaller and slighter teams like north korea and upcoming nigeria. i would say the only other thing that needed to go right for us came about as the result of the inexperience and frequent missteps of the second tier keeper sweden was forced to go with for this match, lindahl. i was disappointed, because my favorite player, natasha kai, did not make an appearance. with her inexperience on the international stage and in world cup play, i would have expected greg ryan, the head coach of the us team, to put her in an earlier match, where her near-deadly speed might have been an asset and to at least get a feel for what is to come in the forthcoming weeks. maybe we’ll get a glimpse of the hawai’i native in the match against nigeria.

anyways, i just wanted to post about one of the things i’m obsessed with. back to normality in a few…

i’m in the middle of a study-session for the lsat, which I’m taking in a few weeks (september 29, to be exact), so i simply haven’t had the time i’ve wanted for the site. as an fyi, i’m working on the building of the main part of the site, which is basically an exploration of my political interests. those two things, plus i’m trying to find the end of a term paper i started writing, oh, six or seven (at this point, nine) months ago. now, so that i feel less bad about myself, here is a ported review of a book i read a few weeks ago, “a dirty job” by christopher moore. i’m going to take down a lot of old posts from my other blog and replace them with things that i hope are more interesting. so far, the idea is storylines based on freaky dreams that i’ve had.

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(originally written monday july 23, 2007 @ 01:17 hours)

So, yesterday, my inner voracious reader got a good workout while i was waiting to get my hair done at the beauty salon. The basic premise of the novel: an ordinary “Beta Male” loses his wife and is left with a newborn baby. Then he discovers that he is a “Death Merchant,” thanks to the guidance of a man who wears mint green suits. With the help of his lesbian sister, insane Chinese and Russian widow neighbors and his off-the-wall employees (a goth chef and online-dating-obsessed ex-cop), he raises his daughter while basically managing to keep the whole “I collect dead people’s souls” thing to himself. I mean, sure, there’s a whole creepy shadow-minions-talking-to-you-from-the-sewers thing that good ol’ Charlie Asher (the protagonist) has to deal with, but all in all, he maintains a relatively even-keel as he’s faced with the end of the world and the possible overthrow of all humanity by, well, Hell.

This book was maniacally comical. I judge a good novel to have humorous content when I find myself laughing so hard that I genuflect. I doubled over about forty times while sitting in the waiting area. And THAT was just based on the first hundred pages or so. Trust me, the last three hundred pages are even more hysterical, I just wasn’t in a position to bend, given that there was a squat Dominican woman attacking my head. Pick this one up, it’s totally worth it.

This is a new adventure for me, the first and most complete version of a website that I have ever gotten around to attempting. The idea here is, well, less than fully fleshed out in my mind. But I am a hundred percent sure that it will take shape sooner or later. In the meantime, I’m working on getting my web gallery up. There’s a .Mac one to fool around with, but that will be something I fool around with.

A quick note on me is probably in order. I love Macs. Love them. Took me a while to switch to this platform, but that was mostly financial. Now that I’m here, it’s almost better than I could have imagined. I’m a big fan of learning new things, particularly technology related, particularly Web-related. So, that’s what I suppose this whole website thing is about. My continued adventures on the Interweb.