The Mouse's Roar

so a few days ago i posted about how awesomely my music blends in with the city sounds around my workplace, and scdsam suggested that i create a playlist for the downtown life... well, ask and ye shall receive! 

I kinda fudged it a bit so this is more of a "Transit Life" playlist, a set of songs that fit my trips on the train to and from work, walking on the streets around my office building, etc etc.. you'll notice the songs all have a similar type of sound, but really not much else in common.  I didn't choose these for the lyrics (except the last one), only for the fact that sirens and cars whizzing by and ppl chattering on the street and in train cars blend in really well with the music itself. So without further ado:

Songs for the Downtown Commuter

The Dandy Warhols - Sleep (rush hour traffic, automated doors opening and closing, this is how we begin and end all of our days)
Jimmy Eat World - My Sundown (this one is nice to listen to when staring out the window of the train with the rhythm of the railroad tracks rumbling beneath your feet)
Switchfoot - Dare You to Move (for the rush of people getting on and off the trains and hurrying up and down the street)
Angels & Airwaves - The Adventure (walking into the office for a brand new day, coffee in hand, bounce in your step, a flurry of productivity; cars honk on the street below your window and the shiny silver express train thunders across the rail bridge)
Revis - Everything After (lunchtime! ppl bustling in and out of the office, chatting, laughing; drivers honking impatiently at crowds ambling slowly on the crosswalk, rushing back for meetings and lunch meetings)
Placebo - Sleeping with Ghosts (walking past the hospital after dark, the flourescent lights glowing in the windows and ambulances crying in the distance)
Fort Minor - Slip (leaving work late night, strolling down quiet streets while cars zoom past and ppl try to have conversations from opposite sides of the street)
Fatboy Slim - Wonderful Night (for Fridays at 5 pm)
Death Cab for Cutie - Passenger Seat (my dad picks me up from the train station at the end of the day and drives me home)

As usual, all songs (in addition to many others) are posted on mediafire for your listening pleasure. Enjoy!

random moment of the day: 

I took a shower this afternoon, and as usual, didn't blow dry my hair. It's shoulder-length and layered, so it dries pretty quickly on its own.  My sister walks into the kitchen just as I'm about to start eating my post-shower snack and says,

"Why do you look like David Cassidy?"

...and that, my friends, is the story of my life.

i have a lot of random thoughts in my head today so i will use the space i have handy to get them all out

1) i have a friend (more like my brother's friend) who finished his PhD from Princeton and is now teaching at Georgetown.  He gets kicks out of arguing ppl into circles or at least until they strangle him out of frustration.  He really enjoys it.  This bothers me.  But every time I bring it up he proceeds to argue with me -_-; I've given up trying to disagree with him, but it still bothers me.

2) I shouldn't get so bothered by above-mentioned argumentative-ness because I have my own perverse desires.  I often contemplate, very seriously, causing havoc for no apparent reason other than to see what happens.  I look at a busy intersection and think "i wonder what would happen if i walked right into the middle of that?" or i think about throwing my cell phone through a store window, would thecell phone break? how mad would the store owner be? would ppl crowd around to see what happened? what if i decided to drive on the wrong side of the road?  how long could i last before getting into and accident? yes.. very disturbing, i know. you can take solace in the fact that i have never acted upon these urges.  I am thinking of writing a story with a character who doesn't have my self-control/inhibition... i need a plot though

3) I just finished watching the Skip Beat anime.. were there really only 25 eps?? how could they just stop it there? it was worse than the ending to the karekano anime.. seriously.. but i loved seeing ren in action.. guh.. so yummy

4) the FMA manga is kinda weird.. i can't pinpoint exactly what i find off about it, but i'm not enjoying it as much as i enjoyed the anime...

5) i'm being lazy about my final paper.. my adorable prof was kind enough to excuse me from the rest of classes as long as i handed in the final... but i still haven't started it... i need to not set myself up for failure (again)

6) i'm hungry

i just spent like 5 hrs tagging all of my entries from 2003-2005 (which is all my entries made before tagging was introduced to lj)

it was fun to look back at all those entries... 2004 was a tough year for me, but i was able to see a change occur within myself in the entries from that year.. i was definitely happier by the end of it..

the nice thing is i found all of this fic i had written! i'm thinking i should post it on FFN at some point.. i also need to get back in to writing for 31_days again.. some of my best stuff came from those prompts.. remember that FMP AU fic with Sousuke and Kurz as boxers, crystaltear ? i even have some 1xR stuff! 

something else i noticed as i was going over the old entries, is how much i've stopped sharing emotionally.. i don't write much about how i feel anymore.. and maybe it's because it's not spilling out all over the place in manic-depressive fits anymore, but i'm afraid of repeating past mistakes and hiding my negative emotions instead of acknowledging them... i don't want to fall into that again.. i don't want to be that person who pretends they're ok and puts on a happy face for everyone when they're falling apart inside... then again, i feel like most of my problems right now aren't a big deal.. i don't need consoling or cheering up.. i feel like i'm handling everything ok.. but things bother me and i should express that, before that irritation and frustration turns into something worse..

so here we go...

( lots of rambling about RL )

there's more that's been going on but i'm really tired now.. this may be continued at some point (tomorrow, hopefully?)

thanks for reading guys

 ...tiptoe-ing on the cold kitchen floor to make a mug of warm and toasty hot chocolate 'cause it's liked 35 degrees outside... then creeping back into bed, snuggling in the blankets, opening the laptop and realizing you've put the mug outside of your reach

D'OH!



in other news, i'm being let go from my job in April and my parents don't like the girl my brother is seeing D:



...oh and now my hot chocolate is cold

</whining>


anybody got fic recs...? preferably zutara, kenshin/kaoru or sasusaku? or shoujo manga recs could work too.. i'm getting bored by 'wallflower' again

i know i know.. i owe you guys pics from iraq and dubai.. i'm workin on it.. whoever provides me with recs can pick which ones i post first, dubai or iraq ;)

so i made it back from iraq in one piece... it was an intense trip and one i can't really describe in an LJ post but there will be pictures on facebook for those of you who are friends with me on there...

i'm now trying to catch up one my manga and fanfic... nice thing about the flight back was that emirates airlines had the hana yori dango final movie on their in-flight movie list, so i got to watch that! really cute and fun movie.. i think SARS just came out with the hardsub today ::pokes coley_merrin :: go watch!

i can hardly remember what i was reading before i left.. i really should keep a list handy somewhere. 

anyway, i missed you guys and i'm glad to be back!

first of all my computer is dead... my poor pretty laptop! well actually it's more like a vegetable.. no brain activity but the body is fine... we're awaiting a new brainmotherboard.. hopefully it will come in tomorrow!! i've been without my compy for a whole week!! can't take notes, or watch anime/dramas, download music, work on my papers...chat with friends til 3 am ^^;

it's a sad existence...

in other news, if anybody has an idea on a topic for a 8-12 pg paper ihave to write for my spinoza class, suggestions are welcome!! my first idea was shot down by the prof, so anything you guys could offer at this point would be very helpful... the paper is due monday -_- i suck at being prepared

i also need to get started on my paper for my women's studies class..which as much as i enjoy the readings i can't stand the actual classroom time... feminist rhetoric really irks me.. i think women should just live and work as equals in a practical sense instead of just talking about it and analyzing every instance of sexism.. u can only be oppressed if you let yourself be oppressed...end of story... of course i told this to my mother (who did her post-grad work in Women's Studies at the Institute of Social Sciences at The Hague in The Netherlands)... her response to my exclamation that i don't want to go to my women's studies class? "That's because you're a man.  Only a man could dislike women's studies courses."

Strangely enough, i get that a lot... even from my best friend... should i be worried that the people closest to me think i'm like a man?

so if you guys remember the engagement party i drove all the way to chicago to only to end up having our car breakdown and miss the whole thing, the wedding is this may and i've been asked to be a 'bridesmaid' (in quotes because all it really entails is 14 girls wearing matching saris to the wedding) anyway, it's a nice gesture.. and while i'm not as close to the bride as most of the other girls (by virtue of living almost 1000 miles away) it was in my car that the bride and groom-to-be first met, so i guess i really should be involved... i wonder tho how weird it be for me to go without my family (my parents are friends with both set of parents, so the trip to the engagement was a family outing, and since our ordeal my parents aren't keen on going to chicago again)

...that's Virtual Disease! and i caught it from crystaltear since she's the one who used to have chat dysfunction before, and mne only showed up last night...

so sorry for disappearing from chat last night, but it's all CT's fault... i heard it was veeeerrrreh interesting... i plan to get my hands on the transcript soon...

also, in case anyone was wondering whether i ever found that drabble about 'fine-tuning' (a la CT and lemonyloyce 's inappropriate mentor/mentee relationship) i did! and here it is! 

in other news, i have a midterm tomorrow which i haven't started studying for...anybody know anything about Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise? All i got out of it was that God=Nature and therefore whoever is in power is 'chosen' by God, because it was 'natural selection'. 

I guess that means God chose Bush.

I think I'm an atheist now. 

I should probably read the book again, so I can convince myself that Spinoza has no clue what he's talking about. For my sanity.


I'm still sick.  Anybody know any good home remedies to get rid of phlegm? (sorry if that was TMI) I hate sounding like a 40 yr old chainsmoking lesbian...

altho maybe the lesbian part isn't so inccurate, eh girls? ::eyebrow waggle::

I am so evil

But you love it.

I'm gonna go drown myself in ramen now.

ok so today my sister sent me an email that made me smile... and no it wasn't one of those cheesy forwards about why sisters are the best friends God gave you or some crap like that

but this requires a little backstory...

so ever since i started writing fanfiction, i wanted to share it with ppl and since i share pretty much everything else with my sister (clothes, a room, and up until a few yrs ago, a bed) i figured i could sho her this stuff... mind you, this girl used to watch sailor moon with me in rapt interest when we were pre-teens, but she thought this was the dumbest thing i could waste time on... (sort of like blkros's life coach) and so I backed off and never really shared anything "fanficcy" with her again... even when she formed an extreme obsession with Harry Potter, since she "didn't want to hear ppl's fake stories about what happens", she wanted to wait for the real books to come out... (i guess you could call her a sort of purist fan, she hates spoilers for her favorite tv shows and movie trailers that give away the whole plot)

So anyway, my disdainful-of-all-fanfic-little sister, just sent me a link to this article from the Wall Street Journal about.... dun dun dun... fanfic writers!! 

and! i thought you guys would enjoy it as well, so i pasted it under the cut below...

 

the reason the fact that she sent this to me made me smile is that it was sent with this enthusiastic message "reeeeeeeeaaaad!!!" which i guess is her way of saying, like "hey this hobby might turn out to be beneficial for you! go for it!" 

^______^



ps any of you guys get LJTalk?  you think I should?

freak out fit has passed... i finished the second paper and somehow between frege and kripke managed to talk about Rome and Juliet and the show "sliders" ...let's hope my prof thinks it's cute (or creative or like...GENIUS) har.

in other news, i have signed up to write fic based in NYC for citynextdoor and with coley_merrin's prodding, i have decided on host club as the fandom to do it for... I am dying to somehow include the hookah bar near Columbia U. in the story but really have no idea how to get them there except for blaming it on another opne of Tamaki's passing whims... how would they react to the belly dancer?? i can't wait to find out!

(you know, you'd think i'd be experiencing some kind of burnout after being up during the early morning hours 2 days in a row to write 2 papers, but i think i've actually hit a productivity spike! go me!! i can't remember the last fiction piece i wrote...)

love to everyone who commiserated with me during my craziness... it makes me sad that this is going to be normal behavior for me throughout the year

no, seriously... i'm sure many of you will cringe when i tell you about my day...

I had a paper due this morning on Plato's Theaetetus for my philosophy of perception class, and despite the fact that i had the entire weekend to work on the damn thing, I ended up waking up at 5 am to start writing it... luckily i was able to finish it by 10 am (my class was at 10:55) but not before realizing that I do not own a printer and that I would have to run down to the library to print out my paper before I could go to class... i did, in fact get there before class ended somehow and handed the paper in, but having woken up so early and adding the detail that i was fasting, i waspretty much braindead by 1 pm... i didn't have russian class till 4:30 so i thought, lemme get a quick nap in and then i'll be coherent (or as much as i usually am) for russian... set my alarm for 3 (because i still had some hw to do before that class) and ended up resetting the alarm for 4 pm once... and then decided that i really could not pull myself out of bed while I was still fasting... and so skipped my class -_-;;; i have a quiz tomorrow

and that wasn't even the bad part... 

I have another paper due tomorrow for my philosophy of language class... it's a comparative analysis of bertrand russell's theory of names and gottleb frege's theory on the same... I HAVE NOT STARTED IT... instead, I am sitting here writing a friggin LJ entry... WHY AM I SO RIDICULOUS????

i should be shot, and hanged...and then shot again... i am PAYING MONEY OUT OF MY OWN POCKET TO GO TO SCHOOL

ok so once upon a time, i joined a message board with a bunch of family friends and community members... the star of the show was a guy named "Anonymous" (like that was his actual user name and not jus cuz he used to post without signing in) 

so it's 1:30 am on Saturday and everybody's finally getting ready for bed... sort of

Living room lights and kitchen stove light are on, 2.5 yr old nephew finally turns off his dad's laptop and comes into the kitchen to his grandma...

Nephew: "Nana, game?"
Nana: "Mama and Baba are sleeping. Don't you wanna sleep?"
Nephew: "No! No sleep."

Living room lights switch off...5 month old nephew squeals next me... a rustling is heard.

Me: "Mom, he's doing something."
Mom (aka Nana)is washing dishes and can't hear over the water. The rustling is interrupted by a thunk before it continues again.
Me: "Mom! I just heard a thunk, he's messing with something."
Mom: "What? Oh! No don't do that!...I need to sleep..."
Me: "Take him with you!"

Family room and living room lights go on. Me and 5 month old furrow our brows and blink rapidly.

Big sis (aka Mama): "What's goin on here? Isn't he tired yet?"
Mom: "You aren't sleeping?"
Me: "If you guys turn off the lights, he'll go upstairs."

All lights switch off.

Family room lights on again.

Me to baby: "Hey how come you're fine? I'm blinkin like crazy."

Big sis: "I can't see anything, why do you keep turning off the lights?
Mom: "We're trying to get him upstairs"

Lights off. Everybody except me and the baby go upstairs. Baby freaks out in the darkness, so I tak ehim to the front door window to look at the street lamps.

Foyer light switches on.

Me: "Ow! geez..."
Big sis: "Whoa, you scared the crap outta me. I didn't know you were here."
Me: "Where else would I be?"
Big sis: "The family room?"
Me: "We decided to take a field trip."

Lights off.

Laptop switches on.

The baby and I bask in the glow of the screen, while I type up the entry with his help. He enjoys pressing the CAPS LOCK button.

The end

i haven't done a real entry in a while and then i saw this meme that team7 came up with...

so here is a description of a typical day in my life...

Now that I've just read over that I am so glad that routine is over. Blech. My life is now filled with babies. Two of them to be exact.  My sister and her sons are here to visit for an entire month.  I quit my job the day before she got here ^^

ok so for those of you who don't know what i do at my boring-as-hell job.. i work at a pharmeceutical company where i proofread the forms and studies they are submitting to the FDA for a New Drug Approval... they're full of patient information and other mind numbingly banal stuff...

highlight of my day:

a comment on one of the patient information forms said,

"Sex is missing. Please provide."



...i just can't stop giggling...i am 5 yrs old...


other fun tidbits:

"adverse side effects of drug include flatulence"




any bets on how long i'll last at this job?

I was gonna do a voice post but am so cold-ridden right now that i fear you guys would be quite annoyed by all the mid-sentence coughing fits...

so yes, this week was spent feverishly planning a suprise party for my li'l sister's 21st b-day.. she'd been wanting to go to either serendipity (from the movie with the same name) or cafe lalo (from 'you've got mail'...where she meets him with the rose in the book).. was discussing with another friend when she told me about this candy store called dylan's that was right at the corner from serendipity and the plan was made...

unfortunately the ppl at serendipity were very bitchy about taking reservations from non-celebrities and i was told that i would have to do a walk-in and that i'd have to wait at least an hour and a half for a table... so i decided i would get to the city at 5-ish and get my name on the wait list for a table so it would be ready at 7 when everybody arrived...

thursday came around and brought with it an impending cold.. my throat was scratchy and i was sneezing like crazy... i medicated myself heavily in order to remain at functioning level for the next day but woke up multiple times thurs nite with above-mentioned coughing fits and was so tired i had no idea how i was gonna pull this crazy party off... decided to take off from work after lunch on friday and try to get a nap in before taking the train up... those plans were foiled when i decided to stop at the bank to get some cash (as i have been told never to travel to the city without some emergency cash stashed in my shoe/sock/bra/buttcrack) and the friday payday lines kept me there for an hour! ::weeps:: but i decided to take my chances and lie down for at least 15 minutes as i felt my head had been stuffed with cotton a la winnie the pooh...

which means of course that i missed the train.. (story of my life)

( more on this... )

we stopped off at dylan's after dessert so i could buy my sis some of that harry potter candy and discovered that fizzing whizbees are pop rocks, jelly slugs are swedish fish (shaped like slugs) and drooble's gum is jus little blue gumballs in a cute package... i should have bought a chocolate frog..at least then i might have a wizard trading card for my money... (spent $10 on candy!)

we then decided to have dinner (after our dessert) at a "renowned" street vendor on 53rd and 6th... on the way there i really started feeling the chill... wearing 4 layers and shivering and bitching about the cold i realized that it was actually snowing.. you know that feeling u get when ur sure that u smell something burning but no one believes you until they actually see the iron has been left on the ironing board?  that's how i felt when i saw the snow... like wtf?? i knew it was freaking cold!!

so we took the food back to her place and ate it with a view of columbia university and overlooking broadway.. and jus when i thought the night might be over... her friends decided to she needed to smoke some hookah..

( we literally rocked the casbah )

i've pressed the refresh button on my friends-list about 15 times in the last hour... my boss is out sick today and i have no motivation to actually work... i kinda have to pee too, but i'm too lazy to get out of my chair and actually do so...

i have, however, been enjoying playing music from http://last.fm and have discovered a new band that i like... they're called athlete (http://athlete.mu) and they're sorta like death cab for cutie i guess? except they sing in spanish too (which i think is mucho cool)

i've been meaning to write a locked-post about the financial dynamic within my family... seeking advice on the subject actually... that prob won't be today.. i think i've used up my LJ posting quota for the month... and it's not even the 10th yet...

also figured out that unless i start on nano tonight, i'm prob not gonna do it this year... november is my socially busy month it seems... last weekend was spent in queens, this coming one will be in DC, and the one after that will be spent in pre-thanksgiving parties (one of which is a batman sleepover that i am soo looking forward to...what? 2+3=5, so according to basic numerology i'm still at primary school level! i'm allowed)

my thanksgiving weekend is going to be impossible (my family doesn't even really celebrate it, but i've got a wedding, a health conference and my high school reunion going on during those few days i actually have off)

so... yeah... probably no nano...

my life hates me

so how long after you email your best friend should you expect a reply?

and now that we're on that... when does a best friend get demoted to just being a good friend? where do these definitions come from anyway?

(anybody else noticing a trend with my last few posts? i need some happy thoughts)

EDIT: oh wait! happy thought! watched the first ep of samurai champloo... my new love! sooo kickass... i think it might beat out cowboy bebop in that category.. the fight scenes are meant to be rewound and re-watched... so cool! can't believe i gotta wait another week for it... promising to be very good stuff