islanded in a stream of stars

I dare you to keep a straight face for longer than 14 seconds when three of your friends/future roommates mimic you as you're trying to answer a serious call. 

Apparently I'm very animated when conversing on the phone; I personally suspect it has something to do with the prank pizza calls I fielded when answering a customer service hotline for two months.  leflyingolive, I'm metaphorically looking your way.  Ah, the strange things you learn about yourself in the company of others...

It's really sad that I can't declare a minor in occupational science because I can't figure out where the building with the add/drop a major/minor forms is.

I am also beginning to wonder if there are any advisors at this university who actually care about helping students with their schedules. Must it be so much to ask for them to actually keep their appointments and perpetually cut what time I have short? I'm better off just staring at the course catalogue on my own.

I've forgotten that the shift key doesn't work on my laptop. The inability to use parentheses, upon which I know I abuse but love anyway, is starting to drive me crazy. No colons either, nor question marks. I'm seriously tempted to spring...except that I have no idea how to get to any store that sells wireless keyboards without getting a cab. I'm pretty much out of electrical outlets on my side of the room, anyway.

Speaking of cabs, if you have to befriend anyone in LA, taxi drivers are one of your wisest choices. During the holiday travel season it's a pain to find a taxi anywhere - in San Francisco, by contrast, there are more taxis than residents- and if one of them is busy they're more than happy to have a friend pick you up.

That, and they're generally interesting people. There's this one Egyptian flight instructor with the bad luck to have immigrated just a month before 9/11. Another guy used to jump off skyscrapers for fun and was fined one dollar for each floor he jumped off the Empire State Building because he couldn't be charged with anything else. The funniest conversation I've ever had was with a grumpy Russian man, who, upon seeing a billboard for Borat, proceeded to give me a lecture on the great culture and history of the Kazakhstanian people before and ranted about the cultural ignoramuses that are Americans before recommending the movie because it was very funny.

No, I'm not exactly hitting it up in Hollywood every weekend. I seem to have some strange memory for most of the cab drivers I've met over the past year from different places. But why I remember them more than the other kinds of random people I encounter, I have no idea.


I just realized I left my Elmer Bernstein concert notes - from which I've promised myself to write up a full review, so now I won't be able to work on that until February.

( 10 quirks meme )

There's something childishly funny about Nazis in drag rushing a sorority. Tonight's shoot for Birnkrant 616 really was like something out of a Mel Brooks movie, except that one (or more) of the extras was drunk and I sort of suspect Jon to be a little liquored up as well. That, and I don't know if Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman would strip to their underwear in front of numerous females and a few public security guards. Actually, #1 was in regular uniform, which was a little disappointing. (I mean that in a totally asexual way, seriously.) Trevor did this amazing juggling act in slipping off a halter top sunddress while balancing his cell phone on his shoulder.

It's a pity that won't show up on the blooper reel, although there is this awesome shot of him running and crashing into one of the extras and then awkwardly hugging her. Ah, adolescent humor. I'd like to think that it's rubbed off on me from hanging around the crew so much, but my pre-existing affinity for Mel Brooks movies seems to suggest otherwise.

I almost regret not joining the core crew and cast for vodka, even as a mere observer. But I'm off to Redondo Beach for an Asian Pacific American issues retreat tomorrow and must somehow study for a psych test and finish a paper this weekend, too.

It seems to be rather a tough week for a lot of people, so I hope that the following might lighten the mood a little:





(I have a dark sense of humor sometimes.)

melee_melo and I passed this billboard while wandering around East Village in New York City this past summer.

It's been an absurd sort of weekend, so I'm going to blame the random disjointedness of this entry on my environmental influence. I'm trying to cut down on complaining about trivial stuff because it's really not worth wasting anyone's time on such petty matters.

I managed to stay awake for most of yesterday's football game against Washington. My parents and I had a pretty good time; it was the first time either of them had attended a college football game. It's not really worth going just to watch a bunch of guys throw around a strangely-shaped ball and tackling each other; it's the whole mass spectacle. People go to see the man in the fake Roman armor galop around the stadium after each touchdown, hear the insistent brass fanfares of the marching band (who are we kidding; nobody goes to listen to the woodwinds) and eat all of the junk food they'd normally not touch. It's suddenly OK to scream at the top of your lungs and wave around dinky plastic pompoms as you project your frustrations onto the fumbles and false fouls unfolding on the field so far away. We're ironically unified by an elaborately structured war game. When you're in the middle of it you can't quite comprehend the eeriness of this mass of humanity concentrated on a single goal; it's then when you start to understand why political rallies are so effective.

I had late night as well as morning shooting for Birnkrant 616; this show manages to eat up more of my time than I had ever expected. If only we didn't have so much filming during midterms; I keep having to rearrange more of my schedule to accomodate everything but somehow I don't feel like I'm doing enough. I wish I could talk more about what we're doing, but I'm sworn to secrecy in protecting the details of the script. The show would be zapping all the energy out of me if it weren't for the zaniness of the crew; it's like being back in the senior lounge except that there's an even sex ratio. (I don't think anyone is capable of outeating shakeitdown, though :P) We're finally shooting the scenes with the Nazis which has landed us a lot of strange and/or disapproving looks from passerby during outdoor filming. I'm getting a bit better about not laughing during the takes, but I usually have to look away or cover my mouth so I don't screw everyone else up. The off-camera antics are equally entertaining; yesterday the guys spent at least an hour mimicking Cockney rhyming slang. I hope that we can get a blooper reel later.

If you were to look at the Nazis, you'd were generic WWII era soldiers if it weren't for the exaggerated German accents. Strangely enough, none of the Nazis look Aryan; a fair number of the crew are Jewish. Even more strangely, I have problems recognizing the actors when they're *out* of costume; gas masks, helmets and goggles disguise more of the face than you'd expect.

I really need to stop snarking about my floormates so much. Though one of the assinine males mooned me while I was studying and none of the males seem able to distinguish any of the Asian girls on our floor apart (apparently it doesn't matter that my hair is shorter than any of the other girls on the floor), my other floormates have been having an intense discussion about religion for over an hour. It's not their first one, either.

Now only if a few of the guys would stop smoking pot in the elevators; you'd think that they'd be a little more discreet after being caught by the police a few weeks earlier. At any rate, it's a good incentive to use the stairs more often.

( And now for the totally unreleated, interactive part of this entry. )

I have no idea why, but there have been at least three other random older guys who have been trying to invite me to church-sponsored parties off campus. Naturally they will send me the details later about minor things like date, time and place. They're *always* church-sponsored, although the churches/religious organizations tend to have really vague names like "Asian Baptist Ministry." The weirdest part is that I never see them ask any of the other students randomly walking around campus; maybe I just send off some weird invitation vibe? It's starting to creep me out a little At this rate I might run out of fake names and telephone numbers to give to them.

Somehow I managed to come up with a ~1,750 word feature article about asexuality in four hours that I wrote for fun. I meant to start it earlier as the deadline's today, but I'm really terrible in turning in articles at the last minute just before time's up. That's the problem with being your own editor for too long.

If I'm lucky I might finally get something published in a real publication, which would be super awesome. If the first publication doesn't work out, I might be able to publish it in the regular newspaper for which I copy-edit after some revisions. We'll see.

Seeing as today would have been Agatha Christie's 115 birthday, it seems appropriate to sign the petition to save the BBC Hercule Poirot TV series.

On a completely random note, apparently Microsoft Word does not believe that "commodification" or "patriarchical" are words. Hmm.

I still don't have a script for the Nazis vs. college students sitcom I'm working on, which is bad because we have our first production meeting today. Also, I have absolutely no idea where to get heat resistant gloves for handling a camera I don't really know how to operate.

I'm pretty much terrified of accidentally dropping the camera on the director's foot, basically. It's also kind of weird being one of the few non-cinema majors on the crew, but they are awesomely random so that makes up for the potential awkwardness.

Edit: I forgot to mention this earlier, but mvmontgomery has the dubious distinction of being the LJ user to leave me my 2,000th comment (yes, sadly enough I've been on LJ for *that* long.) Thanks very much!

Some wicked perpetrator absconded with my garden gnome! Now poor Jean seems to be somewhere in Ohio, and I have no idea how to contact the gnomenapper. What am I to do?

I don't know quite how this happened, but I've spent one and a half as much time in the psych experiment rooms as a lab rat than in class today. I was lucky enough to have time to eat lunch.

Once I've become sufficiently brainwashed everyone in the LA area should watch this show whose crew will be using me as chief coffee maker or production assistant. There will be no subliminal messages encoded in the broadcast. Nor will Mind Games, the game show I write for, include any such messages. Right.

(It is so not obvious that I haven't gotten much sleep lately. As there have been four robberies in various stages of completion that have taken place since yesterday, there are LAPD helicopters flying ahead at all hours. If reading large quanities of Marx doesn't kill me, staying on top of all of the writing, production and post-production meetings, Avid training sessions, copy-editing sessions and weekend tutoring project sessions while finding time to do laundry undoubtedly will.)

But on the bright side, the Elmer Bernstein concert is tomorrow night. I'll write up a review afterwards.

Loud delivery truck or some other large motor vehicle + 200-300 sorority rushees gathered outside my dorm in the middle of the night (?) + a singing guitar-playing duo RIGHT OUTSIDE MY DOOR = A

Construction on the building across the street + room facing the sun with blinds that won't close + roommate who woke up early even though she doesn't have class until 2 PM = B

A + B = so much for trying to get some extra sleep. Well, at least I'm never bored.

And aparently there are people on my floor who have never heard of Nietzsche. As pretentious and snobbish as that sudden remark may appear to be, I only bring this up because I write some kind of vaguely amusing quotation on the whiteboard outside my door on a regular basis. The last one I put up was the quotation on dragonfly66's sweatshirt:

God is dead. -Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead. -God

I saw that someone scrawled "Who the f*** is Nietzsche?" when I came back from the library last night; however, when I came back to my room this afternoon another person scribbled "Nietzsche is God." I've also been encouraged to vote for Anna as PR rep of who knows what.

I forgot why I'm writing about any of the above in the first place; I suppose I just feel like being random and pretentious as I often am.


I've officially now had all of my classes and generally like them. I ended up dropping the RA counseling one because I missed the first class session to go to the College Honors Society dinner at the Natural History Museum, and I figured that if I missed the first section of a class I'm not even officially registered for it's probably too late to take it on. I love all my core classes, although having to read a lot of Marx's Capital for two different classes may flatten my brain into some unrecognizable shrunken version of what it used to be. My writing seminar sounds really intense (there are one on one tutorials a few days before papers are due, so I actually have to start writing rough drafts more than a week in advance), but the format and the structure is a lot like the upper-level high school English classes. My problem is that I've come to really dislike writing about literature for academic purposes; I'll be happy to write about pretty much anything else but high school killed my love of literature classes. The psychology lectures can be a little dry-apparently the other professor is more interesting, but switching into that class would cause major scheduling conflicts. Or maybe it just seemed more boring last time because I was sitting near the back, and the guy next to me fell asleep for most of the lecture. At least the subject matter is interesting.


And now for something completely different: I just discovered The THRUSH Evil Overlord's Guide. There's a copy of it below the cut.

( Building a Better Tomorrow Through Anarchy )