ecky-ecky-ptang-zoo-boing-zow-ZING!

The following exchange occurred on Gchat yesterday:

Matt: friendly's is open until 11
me: :-\
i can't control myself around a friendly's
i'm all like OM NOM MINI MOZZO STICKS
OM NOM NOM WAFFLE FRIES
Matt: well
let me be in control then
single scoop
one topping
me: D:
me: NOT THE ONE SCOOP
NO
NUUUUUUUUU
Matt: no no, you're doing it improperly
it's NIIII
me: ... nu?
Matt: ni
me: ... nu?
Matt: no no no
its ni
ni ni ni
me: ni!
NI!
NI!
NI! NI!
Matt: excuse me!
are you saying "ni" to that woman?
me: NI!
Matt: oh what dark times are these
me: LOL

Can I just say how lucky I am to be with someone with whom I can quote entire scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? If you'd told 17-year-old me that this would be my future, I probably would have laughed in your face (and then gone and watched some toons on Homestar Runner. I wasn't a very cool 17-year-old).

P.S. My IRL best friend, Linds, just resurrected her old blog -- you should all go check her out and leave her some welcome-back love. AND Matt started one too (but his computer died recently so he hasn't posted much.) Still, go check him out as well.

gorram ruttin' reavers

Last Halloween I was working the library's Halloween Party and I dressed up as a friendly witch and painted ghost and Frankenstein faces onto 7-year-olds.

So. This year I'm off on Halloween and I want to be as horrifying as possible. Scotty and Jewel are throwing a Whedonverse party and my costume choice was obvious. I'm going as a Reaver, AKA the brutal and animalistic space barbarians from Firefly.

That's hot. 

That picture is the most prevalent image of a Reaver on the Internet. It's like pulling teeth trying to find a good solid shot of one, let alone a female Reaver. So I'm gonna base my costume off of these two gems I found:

[Totally had to remove this one 'cause it came from a site that's infected with Malware apparently. Ugh.]

I like this one because a) it's an actual costume worn by a female Reaver in Serenity (to which the movie production geek in me says: OMGMGMGMGMG) and b) it's a great reference point as to the color scheme and aesthetic that I should aim for.

OK, first of all, that is one badass chick. Second of all, it's really impressive without being too elaborate. I feel like I could put together a costume like this without having to go to a Ren Faire, is what I'm saying.

My search starts this week and I'm little-kid giddy about it. I'll keep you guys updated as I find stuff!

Sundry Summer 2010

Pictures from my first summer out in the Real World:

John Mayer concert at the Camden Waterfront with my sister, BFF, and Matt (not pictured).

Lots of D&D with Scotty and Jewel and their kitty:

Kitty liked my Homestar Runner messenger bag:

First Phillies game since 5th grade: 

Fun and games in Hilton Head, SC:

And one last hurrah in Ocean City, NJ:

Ah, summer. I shall miss you. 

sometimes i write haiku.

I just got back from my annual family vacation in South Carolina and I can't believe how much energy I have. I unpacked all of my bags, a task I usually drag out for an entire month. Matt's coming over later on, but that's not for several hours and so I have plenty of time to kill.

So I thought I'd write a recap of the four weeks that I went MIA in the blog world.

In the form of several haiku.

So.

Week One - in which I entertain visiting relatives, and see the Phillies play for the first time ever.

Baseball games are fun
but there isn't much to eat
if you are vegan.

So many things to
do in Philly area.
Aunt just wants to shop.

Where are we going
today? Oh, what a shocker.
Shopping. Stab stab stab.

Hm, aunt just gave me
two hundred dollars to spend.
Shopping not so bad.

Week Two - in which I remedy a certain technological issue, and Jewel and I attempt a Buffy season 1 and 2 marathon.

WHOA A NEW LAPTOP.
WOW THE SCREEN IS SO SHINY.
OMG SO COOL.

Oh, Angel. You are
such a creeper. In some states,
this is harassment.

JAMES MARSTERS JAMES MAR
STERS JAMES MARSTERS JAMES MARSTERS
JAMES MARSTERS EEEE SQUEEEEE

[As you can see, that was a very exciting week for me.]

Week Three: in which I help my sister prep for college, and can't stop playing Sid Meier's Civilization 4.

Just one more turn. Then
I'll go to bed. Just one more
turn. SHIT IT'S SUNRISE.

(Why am I)
unexpectedly
nostalgic over shower
caddies and whiteboards?

[OK, had to cheat on that one a little bit.]

Week Four: in which I play D&D, help Linds house sit, and attempt to make my dad a cake for his birthday.

90 percent sure
we're playing this game wrong, but
damn, is this game fun.

Adorable house
makes me want to buy a house.
What magic is this?!

Well, dad, I made you
this nice cake, BUT NOW IT'S GOT
ANTS ALL OVER IT.

[True story. I left it on the counter and the next morning it was completely crawling with tiny, tiny ants. Nice.]

If you decide to leave a comment, feel totally free to haiku. That's right, haiku's a verb now. I just decided.

POST MANIA

The past week or so has been so so crazy and I've had so little time for anything that I actually like to do, so I'm resorting to blogging in between setting up for programs and checking out patrons and cutting out construction paper seahorses.

(RUN ON SENTENCE MANIA)

(Also, who has two thumbs and loves being a youth services librarian assistant? ::points to self:: This girl.)

(That joke is a lot funnier IRL. I swear.)

(PARENTHESES MANIA)

So, I wanted to talk about what's been keeping me away from my lovely little piece of internet real estate, and what the plan is for when everything dies down. You know what happens next, right?

BULLET LIST MANIA!

Where I've been:

- Cleaning and cleaning and cleaning and cleaning. My room, my bathroom, the basement, the den. My relatives from the Philippines are coming to stay for a week and my mother wants the house to be immaculate, I guess so that we can impress them with how quickly our family cleans the house under duress. Because, come on. They'll totally know we only dust the piano when we're having houseguests.
- Picking up tons of extra shifts at work. She works haaaaard for the money!
- Gearing up for this weekend, which is my cousin K's wedding. She's the first cousin to get married on this side of the family, and everyone is going totally sheepshit. The whole process has just been harrowing and never-ending. It's going to be this huge ordeal that involves staying at a hotel in North Jersey with my parents for a whole weekend, and now have to hand out programs and bubbles and candy and my mom doesn't like the shoes I'm wearing and I still have to find a strapless bra to wear with my dress and I don't want to do karaoke at the rehearsal dinner but they're gonna make me and AUGH can't we just show up to the wedding and then leave afterward I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS.

- Fostering my D&D obsession. Despite my initial concerns, D&D has proven to be so. Much fun. It doesn't hurt that we're playing with our really good friends, of course, but there's an aspect of fantasy role-playing that really satisfied something in me. I think it speaks to my inner child who never got tired of playing pretend.

Where I'm going:
- The wedding, obv. Despite all my ranting, I'm sure it'll be fun and/or memorable. And my cousin Maven (not her real name, but she'd approve), whom I haven't seen in years because she lives in the Philippines, is staying with us next week, and that's gonna be totally awesome.
- A Phillies game with Matt, my BFF and some of her friends from college. I haven't been to a baseball game since fourth grade, but how hard could it possibly be to understand baseball? Some guys take turns hitting a ball and running around in a circle. That's the gist... right?
- Down the shore, again, before the oil creeps up the East Coast and coats us all in a Film of Doom.

Also, in July I'm going to do the 30 Days of Me meme and Bloggerstock (which I was signed up for this month but epically failed at remembering to do), and I've got all of these plans for my blog that I've been brainstorming but haven't gotten the chance to implement because at the end of the day I just want to eat sorbet and read Fables and pass out. I just need to get through this weekend. Here goes nothing.

back in the saddle

Urghh... I've been away from the Internet for exactly a week, and there are currently 44, count'em 44 unread blog posts in my Google reader right now. I'm going to work on chipping away at that unreal number until 12:45, when I have to go to work. But for now, here's my week in a nutshell.

- My sister graduated high school. She gave a speech. And I was like, MY BABY'S ALL GROWN UP AND SAVING CHINA!

- I went to see Toy Story 3, which we all know is officially The Greatest Movie Ever Made (no seriously, I don't know if there have been any negative reviews of it except for these two douchebags). The experience was so uniquely Pixar. Half of the time I was laughing unabashedly and obnoxiously. The other half of the time I was a whimpering, moist-eyed mess (I don't let myself cry in movie theaters anymore because I cause a real scene). Those of you who have seen it can probably relate. I had to think about all sorts of inappropriately hilarious things and fan my face vigorously to keep myself from bursting into tears.

- Remember when I got all excited about finding people to play D&D with? Well, on Saturday we started creating our characters and we had maybe a little too much fun with it. Matt's character is an eladrin wizard who wears a prosthetic beard loaded with razor blades (because eladrin can't grow beards, what's up with that?), Jewel's character is an elf ranger with "ginormous knockers," and my character is a halfling rogue with a Napoleon complex. Also, that was officially the nerdiest sentence I have ever typed. Scotty gets off a little too much on being Dungeon Master, I think, as he kept on saying things like GOD DIDN'T SAY YOU COULD CHOOSE YOUR AT-WILL POWERS YET, DID HE? I think we may have created a monster.

- We celebrated Father's Day lounging around the house, doing nothing, as per my dad's request. He wanted Father's Day to be about conserving money and resources, and so we didn't go out to eat or go shopping or anything like that. We all just went about our normal Sunday, which for me meant attempting to clean my room but then just falling asleep for several hours instead.

- I have successfully made it through another week of being incidentally vegan, and I've learned one very important thing:

geeky. girly. SPAAARKLYYY.

 I got the best award ever from Angela a couple of days ago.

The Geek Girls Unite Award! 
[For girls who are proud to be geeks.]
[Isn't it awesome? And SPARKLY?]

And here are the rules:
List ten geeky facts about yourself and...
Pass this award onto your favorite female geeks!
That's all you need to do!

My geekiness is my favorite thing in the world to talk about, so let's do this!

Top Ten Geekiest Facts About Me:

1, I used the phrase “Joss is Boss” at a dinner party. Everyone stared at me.

2. I read Terry Pratchett.

3. I get all teary-eyed when I hear the Shire theme.

4. I depend on Digg as my primary news source.

5. I own an album called This Machine Pwns n00bs.

6. I read so. Many. Webcomics. For instance,
Basic Instructions
cyanide and happiness
Girls With Slingshots
Questionable Content
Sam and Fuzzy
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cartoons (click the red button!)
Subnormality
Super Effective
Today, Nothing Happened
xkcd

7. I know what Howl’s Moving Castle is.

8. I know what the fifth element is. In chemistry AND in the Bruce Willis/Milla Jovovich movie.

9. And I know what sectumsempra would do to you.

10. My nerd boyfriend and want to get a Corgi puppy and name him or her Einstein, after the genius dog in Cowboy Bebop.

Whee! That was fun. I'm passing the torch to [drum roll, please...] Caity of caity.nu! She's one of my favorite girl geek bloggers. On her front page alone you've got a birthday picture of her in a Nintendo t-shirt, a sweet picture of her Kindle, and a blatant plug for Flight of the Conchords. That's so much awesome I can barely stand it.

Feel free to nab this and pass it on to your friends, as well. This is a really cool award and I want to see it all over the blogosphere.

Have a great weekend everyone, and DFTBA.

insane in the membrane: the story of my weekend

This weekend Matt and I descended upon Lambertville, NJ, a small, historic town near our alma mater that is known for its art community, antique shops, and all-around quaintness. It's the kind of place that I guess people go to retire. Honestly, after spending the weekend, now I kind of want to live there when I retire. It was awesome, is what I'm saying.

Some of the highlights of the trip:

• The FOOD, OMG. We just picked restaurants at random but we happened to end up at the best places in town. And the breakfast our B&B served was insane in the membrane. Warm scones with blueberry preserves, fresh fruit from the farmer's market, and blueberry-cornmeal pancakes from scratch. I nearly died.
• Touring River Horse Brewery and facepalming (in amusement) when Matt insisted on asking the geekiest questions like "What sanitizer do you use on  the bottles?" and "What kind of machine you use to flash-chill the beer?"
• Stumbling upon a secret room in an otherwise typical curio/antique shop that was literally jam-packed with pop culture memorabilia, records, action figures, old magazines (from Tiger Beat to Rolling Stone), pulp fiction books, and kitschy toys. Matt, who is a collector of classic rock LPs, found original presses of Are You Experienced by The Jimi Hendrix Experience AND Aqualung by Jethro Tull and he bought them both for FOURTEEN DOLLARS. 
• The fact that the B&B had A Mighty Wind in their DVD collection. It was slightly less exciting when the DVD crapped out just before all the good stuff happens, but still. It's the concept. 
• Discovering that I fucking love B&Bs and I don't care who knows it. All I can say is that instead of being worried that it would be lame and annoying and I'd have to make chit-chat with pretentious Princeton retirees [note: I actually did have to do that, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be], I should have been more concerned with the monster that a B&B would unleash in me. As soon as we got to the house and dropped off our bags I dragged Matt downstairs into the common area for way longer than necessary in the hopes that we would run into the owner again or come across another couple. So, yeah -- the B&B experiment went, like, outlandishly well.  

And now. Pictures.

Here's the pop culture room I mentioned before. I seriously had to catch my breath when I first walked into this room. It's like Geek Heaven.

This is Peddler's Village, where Matt and I had dinner and window shopped. I took this picture while he was buying us some ice cream. 

Our room. It was way bigger than it looks and so cozy. That bed was the most comfortable bed I've ever slept in. I have to admit, though, when I saw the flowered wallpaper I had a bit of a moment from the episode of Gilmore Girls I talked about last time. You GG fans know what I'm talking about. And no, there wasn't actually any foil in the paper.

I just needed you to know that our toilet paper looked like this when we got to our room. This is the level of service we received, people.

I can't believe I'm even posting this, but I just wanted to show you how Matt has this uncanny ability to ruin pictures of us. 

See?

And of course, the obligatory food picture. This is Matt's order of Chocolate-Banana Coconut French Toast. I bet you can guess what happened approximately 1 minute later.

Gone.

the final verdict

So, how did my weekend turn out? I know you've all been waiting for the answer with bated breath. Let's take a gander:

CONS

The cons list can be distilled into one huge con: It was 90 degrees this weekend, which is an affront to all that is natural and right. It shouldn't be 90 degrees in New Jersey during the first weekend of May. It just shouldn't.

Some of the ways this detail affected my weekend negatively:

1, We couldn't turn the A/C on because it's not supposed to be this hot like ever again, so I had to try to sleep in the sweltering heat, which resulted in me waking up completely naked on top of my covers. Sometimes I take my clothes off in my sleep. It's something you should know about me.

2. I could not fully enjoy my walk-about-college-campus with my friends because it felt less like a carefree frolick through the fields of memory and more like the last leg of Sam and Frodo's journey into Mount Doom. It was hot and exhausting and my belongings seemed to get heavier and heavier the further we walked. And nobody was like, "I can't carry [your camera]...but I can carry you!" 

3. Cuddling with Matt on the leather couch in my living room is more hot-and-sticky than cozy. And not hot-and-sticky in a good way, don't you get any ideas. 

4. All hot food is completely unpalatable in this weather. For dinner my mom had made fried tilapia and though I like fish, I could think of nothing more disgusting than fried food. I was like, how about watermelon? How about blueberries with cinnamon ice cream? No? Oh right, because it's THE FIRST FUCKING WEEKEND OF MAY.

PROS

Likewise, the pros can be boiled down to one Amazing Super Pro: 

Matt and I finally found people to play D&D with!!

On Sunday night Matt and I hung out with our friends who happen to be engaged, let's call them Scotty and Jewel. And it was a huge success because not only did we play LOTR Trivial Pursuit (in which we came up with kick-ass theme song for the Nazgûl which basically amounts to "IT'S CHAAASING YOUUU" and "RUN AWAAAAY") and get to cuddle with their adorable kittens, but we also discovered that we all want to try Dungeons and Dragons -- like, old-school, tabletop, Monster Manual, Funyuns-and-Mountain-Dew D&D. I'm ridiculously excited, despite the fact that I'm not really sure how this is gonna work.  

We have the tools: Jewel's dad has an original game set from the 70's, complete with a 12-sided die and a Dungeonmaster's Guide. 

We have a DM: Scotty, chosen by the very official process of me suddenly blurting out, "I VOTE SCOTTY FOR DUNGEONMASTER." 

We have the experience: most of us have done some form of roleplaying or strategy gaming. 

And I have a cloak! I do have a cloak. So that should come in handy.

But none of us has actually played D&D before. We're all firmly footed in other aspects of geekery -- Scotty plays war games with tiny metal figurines, Jewel is completely obsessed with writing Stargate fanfiction, Matt would probably rather play video games than anything else in the world, and I'm... well, I'm kind of a well-rounded, anything-goes geek -- but never have we delved so deep into True Geek Culture. It's sort of intimidating. But also really exciting.

So! I'll let you know how that goes.

And as for the final verdict on the weekend: Awesome. Hot, but awesome. How was yours?

shake it up and down

One thing you should know about me is that I spend nearly all of my free time with my boyfriend Matt, and I'm not particularly ashamed to admit that. I mean, I'd love to divide my time evenly between my friends and my boyfriend, but I don't get to see my BFFs on a regular basis, because one of them lives in Queens, one of them lives in Hartford, CT, and one of them is a first-grade teacher and therefore has no life. It's sad because we all used to live 8 minutes from each other and some of my best memories were made possible by this proximity. But that's another post.

Anyway, Matt and I are usually pretty boring. We're always having a blast, but from an outside perspective you probably wouldn't think so. We wouldn't make for very good reality TV, is what I'm saying. 

Sometimes he comes over and we do couples stuff like go out for dinner or ride bikes or sit in a Starbucks and discuss whether we prefer the Marvel or DC universe. 

Sometimes we stay in and watch Mythbusters or a movie or try to get through as many episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion as we can before I fall asleep (I actually like NGE... but that's another post). 

Sometimes we end up spending 3 1/2 hours doing quizzes on Sporcle, my absolute favorite procrastination tool. Once we did one where you have to name all the Generation One Pokemon characters, and we got all of them except two. #thatkindofgeek

Sometimes I realize I needed to upload and edit some pictures and I do that for 40 minutes while Matt watches hockey (alternately, sometimes we watch hockey together). 

But yesterday my sister Melanie joined us. Mel is basically like a perfect clone of me. We have the same face and body type, the same voice, even disturbingly similar personalities. Our only difference is that my boobs are bigger and more luscious and appealing than hers.

But my point is that when my sister, Matt, and I get together, everything is way more hilarious. For instance, Matt and I had played Super Mario Wii before, and we'd had a good time marveling over the game and taking it extremely seriously. Here's a sample of quotes from those nights, to give you an idea of the mood:

Wow, this level is really fun. 

I love how faithful they were to the original game.

What are Goombas supposed to be?

I wonder why we haven't found any Warp Zones yet.

etc., so on.

But last night Mel played too. Now I'll share the quotes that were generated from that event. 

The "Anyone Listening Who Didn't Know What We Were Doing Would Be Confused" ones:

It'd be nice if it were the end of the world, but it's not.

::Gasp! It is! It IS the end of the world!

The "Penguin" series, which there were many of, since we were in the ice level:

It's impossible without being a penguin, don't you agree?

It's never a penguin when you need it to be.

I don't think he needs to be a penguin here.

And my personal faves, the "That's What She Said" ones:

Awww, you forgot to be big.

Oh! Shake your thing up and down. Shake it up and down. There you go. 

Yay! Now you can beat it even more!

So I guess the moral of this story is, hooray for sisters. And hooray for video games. And hooray for quotes taken out of context. All of those things make life a little more awesome.

you're alright, birthday. you're alright.

Before college, I'd always built up my birthday as this one shining day in a sea of ordinary days on which you're allowed to believe in this fantasy that the whole world revolves around you. My best friends and I used to lavish each other with attention on each others' birthdays. But when I got to college, my social network shrank, and my birthday became more insignificant. And then junior year happened. That year, I got in a fight with my housemates (read: only friends) around my birthday and almost all of them proceeded to not only not acknowledge my the occasion, but also basically ignore my existence for most of the day.

So on my 21st birthday, of all days, I had never felt more alone. My boyfriend was backpacking in Europe without a cell phone, my best friends were in separate states, and the people I lived with hated me. I decided to make my own happiness that day -- I got myself out of the house and went shopping alone and blasted music with the windows down and gorged myself on a Venti Mocha Chip frappuccino (Venti! Who needs that much frozen cappuccino? Who?!). My parents and sister came to visit and take me out to dinner. But all-in-all, it was one of my worst moments. At 20, I had never known that the universe could be that cruel. A lot has changed in 3 years, but the memory still stings. And I'm still working on allowing myself to be excited and happy on my birthday.

This year was a good case for the "Birthdays Rock!" side of the debate. After the Dead Baby Bunny incident, things looked up. I had a day off from work, so that was a plus from the start. I spent almost my whole day tinkering around on this blog, and I joined 20sb and went a little forum-happy. I ate a sandwich and a chocolate muffin. I made some plans to hang out with some of my friends from Ye Olde College Days. I got sucked into a marathon of The Hills. Oh! And my best friend Lindsay called me and had her entire class of first-graders sing "Happy Birthday" to me (complete with "cha-cha-CHA"s). It was pretty much the best thing ever.

Then my boyfriend Matt showed up with an arsenal of geeky presents: a PS2 and like 6 editions of Final Fantasy; Super Mario Bros Wii; and the piece de resistance: my very own factory-sealed limited-release Lord of the Rings extended edition DVD box set. There are only 1,000 of these in the whole world and I have no idea how he found one because I assumed they had all been sold back in like 2003 or whenever they were released. Since Matt already has his own copy, we're going to continue watching those and just keep this one forever unopened and maybe displayed in its own back-lit case or something. Because we are That Kind of Nerd. And we went out to dinner and had the most epic Peking duck and fried rice.

Unfortunately, I fell asleep at like 9 PM because I didn't get any sleep the previous night and when I woke up at 5:50 AM, Matt was gone and I still had my nice dress on and Mario was still on my TV bobbing from side to side and shouting "Let's-a go!" at me.

Today the festivities continue. Matt's got this whole day in Philly planned for us, and later tonight we're getting together with friends to maybe play video games or maybe just watch Serenity for the 90th time.

Like I said. That Kind of Nerd.