Whoo! My bandwidth is back, after downloading a little Pixies, a little Dropkick Murphys, and taking a shower. I'm sitting in my towel, bouncing in my chair and screaming sotto voce so I don't wake my family. Life is good. I might even get out of the house tomorrow, to hit the sidewalk sales and pick up more music at the library. Gnutella is great in theory, but in practice it's been damn hard to find my fill of illegal mp3s, as every server I manage to connect to seems to go immediately offline. Eh.

So no substance today, I'm burned out after the last couple of angst-pukes.

I'm going to ditch most of my proposed link pages in favor of the simplicity that is Link-O, and then maybe cave in and put a small selection of web rings on the main page. It feels wrong, and underdone somehow, as my previous web sites have all had multiple pages full of yikkity-small rings. Such is life.

And on a totally random note, I need your help. A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I found a picture of an old man, sitting in a typically old-mannish chair, reading a newspaper. He may have been wearing a pink shirt. Since it's currently propaganda season for my pseudo-frat, I'd like to find many similar images for subversive non-commercial use. If you have anything you think I'd be interested in, please send it along. Winners will be credited here, and other fabulous prizes will be given as I see fit.

Someday, I'd like to write a book entitled The Decline and Fall of the American Longhair: how those damn hippies got jobs and barbers. It would be a coffee-table book, full of black and white photographs of protest rallies and office buildings, and sparse, dispassionate text.

You random Internet-People probably haven't met my hair fetish yet. Hair fetish, meet random internet people. Random internet people, meet hair fetish. It's not even a fetish, clinically speaking, but "hair preference" just sounds dumb. Anyway, about a month ago I broke up with my favorite source of hair, after a year and a half of cuddling and making our friends puke. I was going back to Iowa, and then to Denmark, and we won't see each other again until January. He'd seen me drunk at parties, I'd been me drunk at parties, and we both knew damn well it would never work. Fine, goodbye, I'm very glad I met you and we fell in love, good luck.

Of course, now I'm single. I haven't been single, really, since my freshman year of high school - as soon as one boyfriend left, I magically found another. Or else I magically found another, and then the one left, but that's another story. I've often wanted this freedom, and now that I have it, I just want a hug.

The rest of this angsty rant was averted at the last minute by DOM, who flirted with me until I felt better. Yeah!

In other news, I garnered some beer money today by participating in a linguistics experiment. I sat in a small room, while listening to disjointed sentences, repeated over and over by many different speakers. The overall effect reminded me very strongly of one of the acid-inspired dada scenes from a Robert Anton Wilson novel. I also bought a new watch, for 99 cents. It's lime green, and makes me happy when I look at it.

Today is super-mullet-link-day! No particular reason, but I found a lovely mulleted Sim skin, and realized that it's been a while since my last round of mullet-bashing. And there's no place better than Rate My Mullet, both for shocking photographs of mullets in their native habitats, and silly commentary by random internet jerks. Mullets Galore, alas, is spitting out server errors left and right at the moment. But there's always the Mullet Dating Service - you dine on mullet roe (not that bona fide mullet-wearers would ever eat caviar), and then go see Mullet, or catch a show by the Virginia-based Mullet, or the British Palmers Mullet. When the night is over, relax to the soothing strains of Wesley Willis and his smash hit, Cut the Mullet.

Then hie thee to the nearest La James College of Cosmetology, and learn to cut thy very own.

I like to think of a computer crash as a chance to get up, stretch, and grab a fresh glass of water. You know, that 5-minute break you're supposed to have every so often if you don't want any delicious repetitive motion disorders. But this is getting ridiculous, even for Windows.

So, when Andorus waved to the one person who had signed her guestbook, I naively assumed it was me, and IM'ed her about it. Which resulted in a perfectly nice conversation with absolutely no funny coincedences, even after we realized that I hadn't actually signed her guestbook after all, had never taken Applied Viola courses, and was not named Kat. The only glimmer of serendipity is that each of us claims to like Irish music, which is a coincidence for which I'm not ungrateful. (Did I just write that? *convolution overload*)

My aunt's baby shower was today. It was cute, a roomful of women oohing and aahing over tiny socks. Meanwhile, all the associated men were hauling furniture with my uncle, since they've just bought a new, more baby-riffic house. Though I've dimly noted the gender divisions at family gatherings before, it never really made an impact on me until today. Not in a "geez, I'm related to a bunch of sexist bastards, bring on the feminist ray gun" sort of way, but in a "whoa, why did I just go to a baby shower when I would probably have had more fun hauling furniture?" sort of way. (To be perfectly honest, I was tired this morning, and didn't feel up to volunteering myself for heavy labor. On the other hand, had I been one of my male cousins, I probably would have been commandeered.) Amazing how you can fail to notice these things until you've already eaten the baby food.

Jul 15, 2020 15:36 from Major Kira
One of the things I wish would happen would be for someone to come up with a clear, yet not silly, shorthand pronunciation of "www".
"triple doubleu" is about the best I've heard. The silly ones I've heard are "dub dub dub" or "triple dub".
[Linguistics> msg #20207 (5 remaining)] Read cmd -> Next

Jul 15, 2020 16:56 from Vanity
Sextuple-u? Sextew?
[Linguistics> msg #20209 (3 remaining)] Read cmd -> Next

I will now be referring to "www" as "sextupleyoo" in everyday conversation (spoken, not written, the damn thing takes too long to type and I'm not sure how to spell it). You saw it here first (or second, if you're on isca). Thanks, Vanity!

Yeah! the server's back up! Now I have an excuse not to sleep.

I have: thrown together a quick biography and a links page, and joined the Amazon associates program, which makes me feel a bit like a whore. On the other hand, it gives me the right to grab album cover graphics, and if I'm still doing this in 10 years I might have earned the minimum amount to get a gift certificate. I've gotten real Internet-People® to drop by and sign the guestbook. I have not gotten any hate mail yet, perhaps I should be more controversial and tell people how much I like genetically modified überbeans for breakfast, they're delicious! Or perhaps I should interpret "ADD 4 INCHES TO YOUR DICK" as some kind of misogynist threat.

Anyway. I have to be awake before noon tomorrow, to drive to Ames for my aunt's baby shower and moving extravaganza, so I'll spare you all the random commentary on porn spam. Perhaps when I'm more awake I'll choose to write a nice book review instead.

It's three in the morning again, and I've been visiting random other blogs, to scope out the competition and try to snag potential link-swappage. I really should add a blot for links somewhere, maybe a cutesy page of 88x31 promo buttons, static. I always like those, it's the same feeling I get looking at a crazy quilt of squares. Comfortable.

Anyway, I've come down with an episode of argyle-sock-style-envy. I wish I wore thick-rimmed glasses, argyle socks, and a skirt, instead of ancient patched jeans and a t-shirt with the high voltage warning sign airbrushed on. I wish my hair were short and dyed mulberry, instead of
natural brown because I'm too vain to let a drop of bleach anywhere near my long, silky hair which I keep pent up most of the time because it gets in the way. I wish I had the flair it takes to put this page on a bright yellow background. I don't, really, wish for any of this, it's not at all who I am or even who I want to be. But damn, it sure looks good, and it might be easier than developing my own sense of style, since I don't have much in the way of an artsy-design-chick support structure. So I have a question for any of you girls in thick rimmed glasses (you might know who you are): do you consciously think about the image you project to the world? or does it just happen?

My cat is a huge grouch. And I swear I'm not telling you this because of a sick fascination with cute kitten stories and Anne Geddes photographs, this is actually about my mother. My cat is a huge grouch, except when she's stoned out of her gourd on catnip. So whenever kitty is particularly ornery, Mom will give her some catnip - where "give" means "shove her kicking and mewling into a grocery sack full." Then she'll make some offhanded remark about how nice it would be to sit in a plastic bag full of pot.
Many months previous to the discovery of the Pettable Stoned Cat, my mother would pop in an old documentary about alley cats, which showed a couple scenes of educational cat sex. When I came back home for winter break, she told me about this with a gentle, mischevious gleam in her eyes and mentioned that Kitty seemed to enjoy the view of tomcat booty. This was, in effect, kitty porn.

But the bag-o-pot remark set me thinking. Mom's spent the last 20 years raising my sister and I, trying to be a proper role model, and now we're finally both old enough that she can start to relax. I'm sure she's feeling approximately the same thing I do when I fly back to California... but dammit, she's still my mother, and I still haven't adjusted to this new, non-authoritarian relationship, and it's just disturbing, that's all.