Monk, the Monkey Man, which is to say, the Man

"Being an NS kid just requires a lot of weeding through shit. Science...is like...gardening." --Kate, 5:03 am

As you can probably tell from the time of this entry, I'm pulling an all-nighter. It's not totally necessary, but Kate is leaving tomorrow--er, later today--and Ben and Harry showed up for studying (read: talking about Robocop and drinking hot chocolate) at my mod, so it happened. I've gotten two of my five papers done, for those keeping score at home, with progress being slowly made on the rest. I'm just sort of going for broke until my Winter Break actually starts--my sleep schedule is ridiculously off at the moment and I've come to accept 1 am as an acceptable time for dinner and 4 pm as a pretty okay time for breakfast. This week totally puts the "Al" in "finals"--if Al was a big guy who smelled like rotten salmon and beat you constantly with a frying pan until you cried. (Guys, it's 5:30 am. I'm really not responsible for anything I type.) But it will be over soon, and I will have learned something from all of this, and that something is: never go outside at 4:30 in the morning without a coat and roll around in the snow (the exact path of snow which, for some reason, you thought it would be a smart move to throw failed Jell-o the night before), no matter how good an idea it seems at the time. Because it really isn't. Trust me on this. I'm an expert in Arctic Scien...tology.

Okay, so before you do anything else with your lives, even reading the rest of this entry, you need to put aside about 54 minutes and listen to 700 Hobo Names. And yes, it is exactly what it sounds like. I'm always really comforted by the discovery of things like this, because it's like, "Huh. There are other people out there like me who don't attend Hampshire and who think it's a necessary thing to record 700 hobo names, scattered throughout the mental asylums and recording studios of the world." It just gives me confidence that someone, some day, will pay me money to hear my own magnum opus, "4,536 Things I Found Under the Dumpster, Categorized by Color and Smell." That, my friends, will be truly glorious day.

So Friday we had a Snow Day (read: Katharine Falls Over a Lot Day), and I have to admit it was pretty fabulous. I mean, even in college, the whole "snow day" concept doesn't lose its allure, and even though I ended up burning snowmen in effigy (no, I don't know how that would work, don't question it) because I hated snow so much by the end of last year, it is kinda fabulously gorgeous right now. We've got like, a little Christmas village thing going on here in Enfield right now, because the snow's so high and there are just these small paths through it and it all feels very North Pole-like. Snow days also automatically mean you're going to have a pleasant, cozy sort of morning, so I slept in and made scrambled eggs then did work until Kate, Amy, and Kel burst into my mod in that angry, loud way they do. They annouced we were going out, which was the last thing I had ever considered doing on such a day, but somehow I found myself dressed and suited up and ventured out into the snowfall. We met Ellen at the bus stop, which was fairly uneventful, but getting off the bus was a little more of a trip. See, the bus in Noho pulls up to the sidewalk, but the sidewalk was currently covered by about a foot and a half of snow, so there was not so much a side to walk or step down onto. So I got off the bus first and just sort of--fell. Face first. Into the snow. I then rolled over and lay there like a slug, because there was no surface I could really use to pull myself up, as everything around me was, well, snow. My friends all got off the bus and proceeded to attempt to help me up, which just resulted in more facefuls of snow, while the people still on the bus (first-years) just sort of stared at us as we laughed helplessly at our own incompetence. I think they probably assumed I was just very drunk--I really think I need to start some sort of club for people like me, who have no motor or social skills. We'll call it, "We're Not Intoxicated, That's Just How We Are!" It'll be like D.A.R.E., except with a lot more inappropriate phallic references and awkward silences.

So we ate dinner at Fireside Cuisine, née Cafe Casablanca, which I think was a much cooler name. If you're going to change something's name to contain "Fire," you should at least write everything in that fiery-looking font, or just have a lot of people with flamethrowers around. Yeah, I should probably never be allowed to run a restaurant. They still have basically the same menu, with crepes (omgcrepes) and some of the best mousse you will ever witness in your life, except that they spell it "moose," which makes me wonder if maybe moose have really been full of chocolate deliciousness all along and we just didn't know. After dinner we went to Haymarket, land of heavenly smoothies, and studied, because we are, above all, repsonsible members of the academic community. Also, it's much easier to write about sixteenth-century literature when you're drinking a smoothie, somehow. We headed back to Hampshire, where I fell over again, but this time not off of a bus, so it was an improvement. Then we went back to my mod and watched a couple of episodes of Arrested Development: Season 2, which I ordered from Amazon.com about three years ago but which has not surfaced--curse you, SecondLongestRiverintheWorld.com. CURSE YOU.

Saturday I must have woken up sometime, and probably got dressed, though I'm not going to say that one's for sure. I finished one of my papers and then went with Ellen, Kate, Kel, and Gengjess Khan to go see RENT! at the mall. We got there early and went to Target to find snacks to smuggle in, which somehow translated to us buying the biggest bag of everything we could find. We got some of those caramel-filled Hershey's kisses, because, in all honesty, I think they may be the most orgasmic foodstuff in the universe. I'm usually not even a huge caramel fan, mostly because I can't ever decide how to say it, but man, these things are like whoa. I also bought a 1/2 gallon of milk, which, besides being really sketchy, meant I had to pee really, really badly about halfway through the movie. Planning? Not my strong suit. RENT! was, overall, pretty good, though there were some ridiculous, "what-are-we-doing-in-a-bad-90s-music video" moments. And they assumed that since it's no longer the early 90s, we've all forgotten what AZT or Life Support or AIDS is, so every time someone had AIDS (which was pretty much all the time) they were like, "We're going to a Life Support meeting. It's a meeting for people with AIDS. People like me. Do you get it? I have AIDS. Mark, you can come, even though you don't have AIDS and it's for people with AIDS. Like me. I have AIDS. You still with me on that?" It was still really depressing, though, when *spoiler* *spoilered.* Kel and I both cried, because we're little girls--well, a little girl and a little emo boi. I really enjoyed it, especially seeing it with people who know the show backwards and forwards, but nothing can compare to the stage performance. Especially since they kept a lot of the dialogue almost-but-not-quite the same, and when things rhyme on Broadway, it's just the way it is, but when they rhyme on screen, you just wonder if the characters have developmental disabilities. It was also good because it distracted me from thinking about work for two-and-a-half hours, but then I was like, "Ohhh...right. I will never have a moment of happiness again." So I went home and worked until Kate, Harry, and Ben showed up at around 3. Harry's doing charcoal nonsense, Kate is writing scientific babble, and Ben brought no work and is just sitting there being sketchy--he just spent his entire life working on this film project and now seems to be pulling all-nighters purely out of habit. So, that, in sum, is life at the moment, which this cartoon (courtesy of Kel), may just completely describe and explain:

See, when it comes to a showdown between Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's foremost novelist, and the Dinosaurs/Girls in Bikinis Team, I just think it's no contest. I mean, you can be a master at describing your homeland's dualist soul, but when that T-Rex comes around with Candy, the Pantsless Wonder, you just don't stand a chance.

Renée Zellweger eats children

No, I have no evidence for the above claim. At all. I just like the way it sounds. But Renée Zellweger was at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art last week, and I decided to post about it because, as we all know, this blog is the first place to go for hot celebrity news. And by "hot celebrity news," I mean "this one time I thought I saw Paris Hilton but it was actually a rabid emu." I, unfortunately, was not actually working the day Renée showed up (yeah, she's Renée to me now--we're buds), but apparently everyone was watching her walk around via the security camera, which I feel is the truest measure of success. If people are willing to give up work and crowd around a grainy, black-and-white picture of you for an hour, you've made it. That's how I know I'm famous, anyway, since they do that to videos of me down at the police station all the time. Anyway, Renée, apparently, did not just get a sudden, urgent need to view picture book art and abandon all other plans to drive to Hampshire's college as soon as possible--no, she's actually going to be portraying Beatrix Potter, whose books we're currently featuring, in a film that, unless it includes "Harry" or "Peter Rabbit: Uncut" somewhere in the title, probably isn't going to get me all that excited. I mean, I'll see it out of loyalty to Renée, since we're such good friends now, but the biopic craze is getting a little old. What's the fun in making a movie about things that actually happened? That completely rules out the possibility of killer robots and alien hookers, and if a movie doesn't have killer robots and alien hookers, I'm not really sure what it does have. Though Beatrix Potter was apparently kind of weird: she kept a diary in this secret code they didn't break until 20 years after her death and she spent 10 years of her life working on scientifically accurate paintings of various types of fungi, which sounds like the behavior of an alien hooker to me. I'm totally planning to do the secret code thing, but when they break it after I die all it will say is, "My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard" and then they'll have to spend another 20 years figuring out what the hell that means and then they'll drown themselves because they've just spent 40 years deciphering a Kelis song. I think I'm going to pass on the scientifically accurate fungi paintings, though, because if I had to think up the world's worst punishments ever, painting scientifically accurate fungi would score only slightly lower than having my toes and fingers nibbled off by angry molerats while getting a sensual back massage from Dick Cheney.

Of the events of the past few days, the Renée sighting is probably the one most worth mentioning, and I wasn't even there for it, so I think you can safely assume that finals week means life stops being interesting and starts being "that time between 2-hour power naps." People from those crazy other colleges where they have "tests" and things assume that the last few weeks here must be a breeze since we lack final exams, but I feel it's way easier to take a test than write thirteen 20-page papers on the life cycles of Mongolian marmosets. Well, okay, I don't even know why anyone would ever require you to write thirteen papers about Mongolian marmosets, and I'm not even sure there are marmosets in Mongolia, but you get the idea. Projects and papers are far more time-consuming than tests. Way more rewarding, in my opinion, but much with the crazy-making. I just turned in my portfolio for Lost in the Story today (ohhhh snap) but I have three papers due for Dangerous Books and a final essay and final exam for International Graphic Novel. So why am I updating my blog? Because I care more about your needs than my own, random member of the Internet. I'm looking out for you, and in no way using this forum purely to procrastinate. This is all for you, nameless, faceless perusers of college-age girls' blogs (you perverted sketchballs).

Besides spending every waking minute contemplating how much I have yet to complete before I can go home and watch Degrassi: Next Generation for the rest of my existence, I'm starting to run out of food. I don't really want to do a grocery run, because I have less than a week left, so I've reverted to the scavenger lifestyle, which thus far seems to be working out well. Today, for instance, my professor brought in donuts, cider, and cookies to commemorate the last day of class, so I fully filled my carb and sugar quota for the day. Then when I got home, one of my modmates offered to make me sauceless pizza with cheese, broccoli, and carmelized onions, leading me to believe that whatever powers may be are prepared to provide me with sustenance for the next six days or so. I mean, I still have a cheese stick and some Jell-o mix in case I run into a rough spot, but I think it's going to work out. People like to cook for me--not necessarily because they really like me, but because they're afraid if I try to do it myself I might set myself on fire, and really, who wants to clean up that mess? I also slept until noon today, which I haven't done on a weekday in awhile, so it was a pleasant, unconscious trip down memory lane. (Wow, did anyone else just get a weird vision of a narcoleptic skipping merrily down the road? Because I totally did.) And there's that whole 'going to class" thing, too--yesterday Jeff and I did the usual bus ride to UMass, except we both had one of his iPod earbuds in our ears and silently danced and mouthed the words to Pink and Violent Femmes' songs, which made the Amherst students riding with us do that thing where you pretend crazy people don't exist. I think a lot of Amherst students just pretend Hampshire as a whole doesn't exist--like, when they drive past it they just go, "Oh! Look at that verdant, empty field!" and whenever they hear a Hampshire student talk they're like, "Hold on a minute, Edmund, did you hear something? Because I didn't." I base this wild assertion purely on my Hampshire-Amherst bus rides and the one Amherst party I ever went to, where people kept looking at me weird because I was drinking Yoo-hoo all night *they had a Yoo-hoo vending machine I was a little too excited about*, despite my explaining to them that it was chocolicious and refreshing. One girl actually asked me if my father owned Yoo-hoo (to be fair, she was very, very drunk) to which I responded, no, but I was pretty sure he owned a Yoo-hoo. Wow, if you type "Yoo-hoo" too many times, it really starts to freak you out. Yoo-hoo. Yoo-hoo. Yoo...hoo...Okay, that's a serious sign that it's time to work now.

"With you, Katharine, nothing is weird anymore." --Kel

Maggie: "Did you just put that whole thing of Brie on top of those chips?"
Sean: "Yeah."
Maggie: "Man, that's soooo the gay man's nachos."

Oh, the Hampshire College Queer Mod. Indulging stereotypes and misusing Brie since Fall 2005.

Yes, I know I haven't updated in about 24 years. Yes, I know you've all been forced to make mini Katharine dolls out of chewing gum and Slinkys to get through my absence. Yes, I'm a horrible, negligent person, but maybe if you bought me nice things and complimented my hair once awhile, I would stay home and blog instead of hitting the clubs with Hortensia every night. Er--but in any case, since trying to recall my life in any sort of chronological order would make this entry exactly 76,548 pages long, I'm just going to break it all up into semi-relevant categories so you can store this information properly in your Katharine files:

Getting up before noon: Okay, so the past few Monday mornings, I've been getting up at 7:30 (I know, I know, but hold on--it gets weirder) and gone swimming. Swimming. In a pool. Not of my own vomit. It's weird. You know what else is weird? Naked teachers in the locker room group shower. But we're never going to talk about that. EVER. Anyway, it's made me all...active. And...wholesome. And I'm not sure I like it. It's given me a lot more energy, which I feel can only be dangerous, as I discovered when I was talking to my supervisor at the Eric Carle Museum and trying to explain to her what was going on. I was like, "I think I'm turning over a new leaf, right, but it's only been a few weeks, so it's like the leaf is sort of precariously balanced on its edge, right, and it's on the verge of tipping all the way over, but it could also tip back the other way, or it could just stay there and then it wouldn't be an old leaf or a new leaf, it'd be, like, in purgatory and then what have I done to that poor leaf, you know?" And she was like, "Yeah...you're clearly very, very high." And I was like, "No! That's just the way I think." And then she was like, "Oh...why do you work here again?" Which gives me the perfect segue way into our next category: work!

Work! Working in the Eric Carle Museum is basically like working inside of a giant picture book, which is simultaneously comforting and terrifying. It's very spacious and mostly white, with these occasional crazy splashes of color all over the place, and everyone smiles all the time and there are always yelling children underfoot. Luckily, I mostly work in the back office, since I'm the Development and Marketing intern, so the only time I encounter children is in the cafe for lunch. Kids are really cute, but they can also turn on you really fast. Also, I'm still really scarred from my experiences as a babysitter, because the main girl I sat for had this favorite game where she would pretend to tie me up, set me on fire, and kill my entire family, so I'm not really a huge believer in childhood innocence. But the job is actually very sweet, and they mostly set me up in the room where they keep all the bottled water and chocolate biscotti, so I'm kind of set for life. I work for five hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays--for any potential work-study students reading, that's really an optimum amount of weekly hours. More than that and you have to start making ridiculous excuses for why you can't come to work because you have so much work, like "My dog ate my right leg" or "My grandmother's on fire." (Wow, there have been two mentions of "people on fire" in this one paragraph alone. I feel like that's a bad sign.) Working at the Eric Carle is an awesome job, because it's right on campus but isn't an actual on-campus job, which usually consist of menial tasks and getting to find out way too much about the seedy underbelly of Hampshire College. Not that our underbelly is particularly seedy, but apparently there are some things you just never want to discover about the personal lives of staff and professors--like what they look like in the shower, which, again, we are never discussing again. EVER.

Mod life: My current enemy of enemies is TBS--and no, I didn't just mistype TB again, like that awful, awful time at that children's hospital. The problem with fighting a television network is that venting your anger to anyone associated with the TBS at all takes work, be it a phone call or an e-mail, so you end up just yelling at the TV instead and that does you little to no good. Plus, it's not like TBS is technically doing anything wrong that I could ask them to stop doing--it's just their current existence in general I'm pissed about. The reason, other than their insanely annoying promos--you know, the ones where the people call in to ask if things are funny--is my modmates' obsession with "Sex and the City." I liked "Sex and the City," when I was 13 and I would watch it on HBO after my parents went to sleep and feel like I was really cool because, you know, this whole sex thing was really a recent development at that point. But now it's five years later, and "Sex and the City" is no longer so much risqué as it is insanely boring. And it's TBS, so most of the sex is censored, anyway, and the sex that's shown is all heterosexual and all with rich white people and all takes place in some version of New York where all everyone has to be concerned with is if they have enough money to buy 4,000 pairs of shoes. If they changed the name to "Rich White Heterosexual Sex in Upper Manhattan," I might be okay with it, because then I'm pretty sure everyone at Hampshire would recognize its pointlessness and stop watching it, but at the moment Sarah Jessica Parker's voice alone is sending me into panic attacks.

If I was going to be completely fair, which I'm not because having a blog means you never have complete control over all sense of justice in the universe, I would point out that I probably have no right to judge any show that anybody else watches, considering how I screamed out loud with joy when I found out that last Friday was "Phil of the Future Fans Appreciation Day" on the Disney Channel. But I'm not mentioning that, and that last sentence should in no way be interpreted as something I actually did while making "I Heart Ricky Ullman" badges and sewing my own Keely costume. Because that never happened. EVER. (Huh, a lot of my paragraphs end that way. Coincidence? Must be, because it could in no way mean I have many shameful secrets or an unhealthy obsession with children's television.)

Katharine Hott McHomemaker: Um, well, I made a giant squid out of Jell-o, which was probably my biggest culinary accomplishment in...well, ever. It even had little whipped cream suckers and was all green and jiggly and completely delicious. I made it for Kate, though I can't remember why--probably because she yelled at me or threatened my life or something--and at the pre-Ireland meeting, I somehow got identified as the cook in my three-person apartment solely because of my ability to make shit out of Jell-o. I was like, "People, I get that Jell-o is fun and exciting for awhile, but I don't think it's going to keep us satisfied for three whole weeks, even if I cut it into little star shapes or make it look like a steak or something." So, I'm not exactly Martha Stewart or even Rod Stewart, who I hear makes a mean chocolate soufflé, but I get by. I'm successfully managed an broccoli omelet and French toast in the past few weeks, so I feel that if it has something to do with eggs, I'm pretty set. If I ever end up going vegan, though, I'm screwed. I'm just going to eat rocks and hope my body somehow evolves so I become some sort of super-mineral-based being, because that would be awesome and I could probably walk through fire and start a successful rock band based solely on the novelty of me being an actual rock person.

The Gay: Oh, and I'm still gay. Actually, the only reason I included this category is because I've been spending an insane amount of time in the Queer Community Alliance, the queer space at the top of Donut 4, which has a TV, VHS, DVD player, refrigerator, bathroom, and the most comfortable couches ever. I'm a signer for the QCA, but Kel actually works hours there, so we've sort of commandeered it as our second mod, which also benefits the community since young lost queers can usually wander in at all hours to receive our incredible advice and wisdom on the ways of the world. And by "receive our incredible advice and wisdom on the ways of the world" I mean "eat ice cream and make out with us if they're hot." Mostly we study and sing RENT up there, but a couple of weeks ago we had a honest-to-Jossness tea party--a tea party complete with matching tea cups, muffins, and handmade scones. I'm pretty sure I've never had a scone in my life, much less a handmade one, so it was kind of intense. We also had a sleepover, complete with junk food and staying up until 5 in the morning--I feel like old-fashioned sleepovers don't happen enough in college, because, hey, everyone's bed is about 5 minutes away, so why sleep on someone else's floor/couch? Unless, like it was this particular night, it's really really cold and you've just watched Romeo and Juliet and Josie and the Pussycats and it's way more important to stay warm and talk about Rosario Dawson than get to your own bed. It did sort of throw my modmates off when I stumbled back in the next morning, though, because I was covered in Peppermint Patty remnants and lugging this enormous bag of bedding and food and they were like, "Um...we would assume you were doing something kinky all night, but it seems more likely you just decided to go on some sort of 'communing with nature' quest that went horribly, horribly wrong." Besides hanging out in the QCA, I also had to help Kel draw up the budget proposal for the QCA, which means we get to plan crazy events and buy all sorts of new books and movies. I was in charge of book-picking, which meant I had to make all sort of important decisions, like whether to buy Gay Sex or Ultimate Gay Sex. Of course I chose Ultimate Gay Sex--come on, when given the choice between the regular version of something and the ultimate version of something, you'll go with the ultimate every time. Unless it's like, "Destruction by Vicious Fire Ants" or "Ultimate Destruction by Fire Ants," because no one in they're right mind (read: Kate) would ever pick the second option.

OMG MOVIES: As the temperature drops, my film-watching time increases. See, movies mean you'll be in a warm place for at least an hour and a half, which is really top priority in everyone's social life this time of year. I can't even remember all the stuff I've wasted my life and time watching in the last few weeks--I remember that I watched the Devil's Rejects with Kate, Amy, and Jeff a few weeks ago, which you should probably never see unless you've pretty much surrendered your last vestiges of decency and morality and which has forever changed the meaning of Lynard Skynard's "Free Bird" for me. We also watched the Rules of Attraction at some point, which is the most depressing portrayal of college ever and has that girl from "A Knight's Tale" who named her kid "Audio Science." Having that name is bad enough, but what would be completely awful is if her kid was deaf and really bad at science and everyone was like, "Hey, Audio Science! Hey, you can't hear audio, and you can't even pass biology! Hahahahahahahaha, oh, the irony!" I also watched the "Bitter Suite" musical episode of Xena with Amy and her new girlfriend at like 2 am, which was probably a bad move on Amy's part, because I'm pretty sure her girlfriend thought we were completely nuts. (The first time we saw this episode together, Amy and I thought we had jointly hallucinated it because it was so damn weird, and we watch Xena all the time, so to a normal person I'm sure it was completely inexplicable. Then we watched it with Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor's video commentary, which means we need to be banished from society as soon as possible.) Besides watching movies in various mods, I've also ventured out to see Good Night, and Good Luck, which was good, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which was kjnowijevjwnohmancrazy. I didn't like it nearly as much as PoA, but the twins were adorable, Harry and Cedric were so slashy I thought they were going to have babies on screen, and the scene where they came out of the maze made me cry both times I saw it. I haven't had as much time for theater-going as I'd like, though, which means I still have to see RENT, Jarhead, Capote, and a bunch of other films, as well as find the time to see the other amazingly exciting movies that are coming out, like Brokeback Mountain. I've pretty much come to terms with the fact that I'm going to have to physically muzzle myself while watching Brokeback Mountain, considering how much ridiculously unnecessary screaming I did over the web site and trailer. This film is bringing out the fangirl in me times 4,000, and it's very, very shameful. I'm almost afraid for this whole, like, gay subtext becoming, well, text thing, because I already do enough shrieking and freaking out over subtext alone, even when it's not there at all. If they're like, "Yes, they're gay, yes, they're making out, yes, they're in love," I'll probably just expire of sheer squee. (Wow, I just actually used "squee" in a sentence. That can't be okay.) I may actually just have a heart attack watching Brokeback Mountain, but at least I'll go out shrieking.

Thanksgiving: My immediate family abandoned me to go college-visiting in Florida, so I went to my uncle's friend's farm *yeah, it sounds a little sketchy, now that I consider it, but I heard they had food and cable, so I was there* where they always have like 200 people and animals running around. There was lots of free food to be had *which was excellent since Thanksgiving is actually, in my mind, "Grab as Much Food as Possible and Run Away" Day and I got a chance to try out my new-fangled pie-concealing pants* and Degrassi *OMGSOINTENSE* and sleeping. We had a thirty-pound turkey, which freaked my supervisor at Eric Carle out. (I was like, "Man, that's like, a small child of a turkey." Her response was, "Yeah, why didn't they just cook a small child?" and I was like, "Um, one, because I think that's frowned upon in most societies, and two, are you at all aware that you work in a children's museum so that statement is 20 times as creepy?") I miss my dogs like crazy, so I bonded with their various animals, even the really stupid Irish Setter who seemed to have the intelligence of a brain-damaged tree stump. My 15-year-old military-obsessed male cousin and I managed to bond over Diablo II, which lead to lots of conversations about composite bows and their various merits I'm not really sure I should mention in public. I also introduced my eleven-year-old cousin to Next on MTV, which was probably a bad idea, and she in turn made me watch Star Wars 3, which made me laugh so hard when I saw it in theaters that I had to cover my face with my coat in order to avoid getting killed by the other members of the audience. I mean, has George Lucas bodyswapped? Did somebody exchange his consciousness with an eleven-year-old boy? (No offense, former Lucas employees who may or may not be reading this blog at this very moment. George, though, if you're reading this: look, buddy, we need to talk. Come by sometime for some tea and we'll work this out.) I greatly appreciate any stretch of time where I don't have to pay for my own food or wash my own dishes because of that whole "dishwasher" thing, so Thanksgiving worked out well, despite the fact that I ended up getting an 80s-style, "big hair" cut I never want documented or spoken of in this life or the next. (It's gone now, trust me--long, long gone.) Also, my relatives bought me groceries on the way back to Hampshire, which is awesome because it's getting to the point in the year where I don't want to buy groceries because I'll be leaving soon, but I also have to eat something besides ketchup packets. (And yes, I mean the whole packet. You'd be surprised how easily it goes down.) My relatives were, I think, slightly sketched out by Hampshire, but they would have been significantly more sketched out if they had arrived earlier in the morning to pick me up, when the Inexplicable Band came by. You remember the Inexplicable Chicken Parade that came by a couple of months ago, that completely baffled me but I said things like that happened more than they probably should? Well, this was another one of those things. I walked out of my mod to go get my laundry and there were these four guys standing there, wearing buckets and aluminum foil on their heads and playing this weird, eerie music on broken phones, recycling bins, and violins. They were all just kind of swaying, though at the end they went crazy and started throwing their phones everywhere, and I couldn't make out any of the lyrics, which were all uttered in some kind of zombie language. It was creepy, but it was even creepier because it was the day before Thanksgiving and the campus was completely deserted so I was like, "Oh, sweet gods, someone else witness this with me! I cannot bear this experience alone!" Things like that are exactly why I can't live anywhere but Hampshire at the moment. If you don't have Chicken Parades and Inexplicable Bands roaming the campus, really, what's the point?

Oh yeah, occasionally there's this thing called school: Lest you get the impression that my life is some kind of bacchanalian of gay movies and Jell-o, I feel I should include a section about that whole academic thing that happens, you know, sometimes. I have a Division II committee--OH YES. For those of you not versed in Hampshire, for certain departments (like Creative Writing and Theater) you have to apply for your Division II faculty, instead of just like, chilling with them and then asking them awkwardly if they'll guide your academic, professional, and personal development. So I applied and got my first choice chair (Ben James, my Lost in the Story professor) and member (Wayne Kramer, who taught my Theatre of the Eye and Theatre of the Ear courses). The title of my Division II is "Reinventing the Story: Multimedia Approaches to Creative Narrative," which is an incredibly Hampshire title, but not nearly as Hampshire as some others (think "F--- you, DIORAMAS!" or "The Effect of Menstrual Blood on the Mating Habits of Serbian Crickets," which I seriously think Kate should consider doing.) I'm incredibly thrilled to be working with Ben, since he teaches what may be the best class ever: to prove it, consider that just last week we workshopped: a romantic comedy about a compulsive grave-digger who unearths his fiancé’s mom; a story about a crazy French women who lives under a pile of leaves; and a woman who steals her husband's father's memory then has sex with him (the father) in order to conceive a child that will look like her husband. My final story, in case you're wondering, was about a blacksmith named Edgar, his legless mother, and giant squid sex. Yeah, it was awesome. Ben also spends a good deal of class talking about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, his pregnant wife, and his goats, who bred a couple of weeks ago with a stud named Mozart. (Are they still called studs if they're goats? This is a piece of knowledge I never thought I'd need in my everyday life.) That particular story ended with Ben shouting, "Mozart! For God's sake, stop ejaculating all over the yard!" just as this girl got into class late, causing her to give all of us one of those, "Oh man, this college is just not like any other place, is it?" That sort of thing gets more clear when I go to UMass for my comic book class--oh, yeah, I got an A on my midterm International Graphic Novel exam , which I'm completely thrilled about, though I was sort of confused when he handed it back to us, because he sort of scribbled the grades in the margin and I, being a Hampshire student and used to comments versus grades, was like, "A? A what?" Then I caught on and was like, "Oh! An A! Sweet!" I mean, cool, but it was sort of a hollow victory, because you really have no idea what your professor thought about your essay. I mean, you know A is better than B, but is your A any different from the person next to you's A? Are you now both the same person? Do grades give anyone else the identity crisis they give me, or am I completely insane? I think if people insist on having a grading system, they need to come up with more descriptive symbols: a zebra, or a half-eaten melon, or something. It doesn't really matter much, as long as it describes your work, or how your prof reacted to your work. Like, a lamp covered in Skittles could be, "Mildly illuminating, but superficial. Also chewy." There's only a week left of Hampshire classes and two weeks of UMass classes, so we are getting to the crunch time, which is bad because we all feel like we've already finished our work and are fully prepared for winter break to happen nownownow.

And then there was this weekend: On Friday, I got up at noon, made some scrambled eggs and microwave bacon *which taste pretty much exactly as good as it sounds* got my paycheck *oh sweet, sweet money of life*, and went to Walk the Line with Amy and Kel. I've been going through a hardcore Johnny Cash phase for some reason lately, so I was crazy excited. Plus the movie theater at the mall has these snacks called Dibs that are AMAZING. I usually hate buying food at the movie theater, because I always seem to end up $20 poorer and sicker, but these things are the awesome. They're, like, little chocolate-covered ice cream bites, and they're only $3.50, which for a cup of bits of heaven is not so bad. *No, Dibs Inc. did not pay me any money to mention them on my blog but, incidentally, I am now set up with a lifetime supply of Dibs, purely by coincidence.* Walk the Line was pretty sweet, Reese Witherspoon didn't make me want to eat my own liver like she does sometimes (read: Sweet Home Alabama, which I will only admit under torture to watching), and Joaquin Phoenix was hot, though his cleft lip was occasionally surprisingly distracting. Friday night I hung out with Amy and we went to K2, where we met up with Hannah and Sven. Sven used to be a professional chef (he's 38) so he made this amazing guacamole that I actually approved of, which is weird since I'm usually against anything green, on principle. He also just got new teeth and this authentic furry Russian Communist hat, which in combination makes him pretty much one of the coolest people I know. After that I went to the Crazy Pitches performance with Kate, Kel, Jess, and Harry, which was a little intense. The Crazy Pitches are the audition-only a capella group on campus--there's also the Gin and Tonics, which Jeff co-founded, that anyone can join, who also performed a set between the Pitches' sets. Now, a capella versions of modern songs are really damn cool, honestly, but after awhile, the novelty of the thing kind of starts to wear off. The show went on about two hours, and by the end I was just like, "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, SOMEBODY PLAY A DAMN INSTRUMENT. EVEN A GODDAMN TRIANGLE. I CAN'T TAKE THIS ANYMORE." Saturday I woke up, presumably--oh man, what did I even do Saturday? Oh, right, Kate, Kel, and Amy and I went into Northampton to study at this coffee shop that has the best sandwiches in the world and tiramisu that is not, in fact, tiramisu at all, but banana cream pie, which is weird. We worked for awhile, went by Atkins, then I went back to campus and hung out with Amy. Afterward I went back to Enfield and met up with Kate and Kel, and we sort of checked out the party at the Greenhouse Mod but decided hot cider back at Kate and Kel's mod was a much better idea. Sunday I rolled out of bed around 2, did work, and then piled into Kel's car around 5:30 to go to Hartford for the Rusted Root concert. Rusted Root is this crazy hippie band--they did "Send Me On My Way," that song in Ice Age, which is sadly the way most people probably know them--and they are super-cool. We got spots right up by the railing, which is really the only place to be when you're a cripple who dances like a spaz and has a distinct tendency to lose her balance. Jess, who had seen one of their shows before, said they didn't have quite as much energy this time, but they were still much with the awesomeness. Their lead guy looks exactly what I would picture, like, Lucifer looking like if he just decided to give up the whole evil thing and form this earthy, multi-instrumental band. Plus there was this really hot chick who had amazing silver boots and played crazy and inexplicable instruments, and this guy over in the corner with glasses and a scarf who played the bongos and just sort of chilled out. I rocked like none other, because I am willing to surrender use of my limbs for a day or two for the sake of crazy dancing. My priorities are most definitely in line.

In closing, I would like to present you with my latest idea for Hampshire's new logo, since they seem to have roundly rejected the "Katharine's Image on All Hampshire Material and Merchandise Idea." Allow me to unveil my inspired new image:



I stumbled across it on LiveJournal and immediately decided it encompasses Hampshire, which is actually impossible, since nothing could really ever completely encompass Hampshire. But it comes close--I mean, Lenin is already the team mascot of the only really sport we have (Ultimate Frisbee) and come on, DDR? Speaks for itself. Except when I play it, in which case it does not so much speak for itself as it does eat my soul and cause me to have multiple fractures. But that's a bedtime story for another day.

VOLDEMORT CAN'T STOP THE ROCK

So, on a scale from 1 to 20 ninja, I'd say my last two weekends have rated, on average, at about 23 ninja. (Don't you hate when people do that, where they make up some scale and then immediately devalue it by citing a number outside of the scale? It's like saying, "Okay, so last night I either went out dancing or watched Moulin Rouge. Guess which." "Umm...dancing?" "No, actually, I covered a ferret in chocolate chip ice cream and went ice skating on a pond made of frozen goat pee! God, you're dumb." Like, playing by the rules, you could totally never guess the answer.) I was in costume last Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, and not only that--I was in a different costume for each of those three nights. CRAZY. This weekend was not as costume-y, but it did include maple syrup and Angelina Jolie, so I'm going to count that as a win. Onto the incredibly lengthy and gut-twistingly exciting summary of my life, which, as usual, is precisely 65.4% more fabulous than yours:

Sooooooooooooo...okay, so last weekend was the weekend to end all weekends. Man, there was a lot of "end" involved in that last sentence. The weekend before that was spent being a wholesome, academically inclined young lady (read: thinking about writing papers while constructing a fort out of the beer and soda cans left in Kate and Kel's mod--hey, I was protecting myself AND the Kingdom of Cheez-Its-onia) so this weekend was the time to let loose and be merry. It kicked off Thursday night, when Amy and I went into Newbury Comics in Amherst and I bought the first season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Pee Wee's Big Adventure. (You know, being in college is, I've decided, is really a lot like being twelve, except you have no curfew, a credit card, and full possession of your hormones. No wonder they call it the best years of your life.) I couldn't watch these gems of the universe right away, though, as I had a pressing appointment with the coolest wizards in rock n' roll--a.k.a. Harry and the Potters. As you know full well if you read my NYC blog or have talked to me for more than five seconds, Harry Potter ranks pretty consistently near the top of my obsessions, which is impressive since I have about 1,456 top obsessions at any given moment. As usual, Kate and I were the only two members of our crew to openly express our love for indie/emo Gryffincore rock, so we got super-swanked-out and headed to MHC for what turned out to be the rockingest night in rock history. Well, that might be a slight exaggeration, but I'd seriously like to see Ozzy Osbourne top what Harry (Year 5) and Harry (Year 7) were dishing out--bat biting is nothing compared to ad-libbed Cho Chang/Dumbledore references. Last time I saw Harry and the Potters, they were playing a slightly different sort of venue (read: a library full of 3 to 13-year-olds), so this was a totally new experience. It was mostly MHC girls, along with a scattering of recognizable Hampshire students, all in varying degrees of Potter-themed costume. I don't have a picture of mine, most unfortunately, but just take a minute to form store this image in your mental database: me in black combat boots, fuzzy white leg warmers over black fishnets, a black and blue plaid schoolgirl skirt, Hogwarts jacket, and GINORMOUS fuzzy white witch hat. What's that word you're searching for? Unbearably hot? Yeah, I thought so. Harry and the Potters even had an opening band (ohhh snap) called--you're going to need a moment to deal with this one--Uncle Monsterface. Wait, wait, one more time--Uncle...Monsterface. The minute I heard it, I was like, "My god...I never realized it, but if I ever formed a band, I think that's EXACTLY what I would have named it." Uncle Monsterface consisted of three guys, one of whom wore a dinosaur helmet the whole time, a sock puppet theater, a projection screen that showed random images like a prairie dog playing the piano in front of a swirling psychadelic background, and a guy actually dressed as Uncle Monsterface, who didn't appear until halfway through the set. They made Buffy references, played songs about Count Chocula and a lobster building, among other things, then called on Uncle Monsterface, who popped out from behind the puppet theater and ran into the crowd (at this point, I gotta admit, I was pretty sure there had been something hallucinogenic in the punch) and came back with Spongebob, Sesame St., and He-Man sheets which the band members wore as capes. At the end, they called a bunch of people up on stage (are you wondering if I went? Do you even have to ask? There was a STAGE. Of course I did) to rock out with inflatable guitars while a white mouse running on top of the world played on the screen. I have to say, guys, I deal pretty well with weird shit, but this...was so...weird. I just stood there, completely perplexed, as was pretty much everyone else, until, somewhere in the middle of "Count Chocula (you're never safe)" I looked over at my companions and was like, "You know what, I'm just going to go with it" and started dancing like a madman. Kate's two comments, which helped me process the whole experience were: 1) none of these guys have ever felt the touch of a woman, and 2) this is exactly the band their twelve-year-old selves would have formed, so really, they're living their dream. That helped me to deal somewhat. I'm still somewhat edgy around breakfast cereals and sock puppets, though.

So then, after having our minds scrambled and eaten by sock puppets, it was time for Harry and the Potters. The Hampshire kids got up right in front of the stage, so I was pretty much face-to-chest with Harry (Year 7) which made the whole thing crazy intense. They played the old standards ("Wizard Chess" and "Wrath of Hermione," anyone? Remember those from our wild and sordid youth?) and premiered some Book 6 songs, at which point everyone in the room pretty much passed out from joy. I danced like someone hit with the Dansus Incredibilis curse--okay, more like someone hit with the Cruciatus curse, since I was pretty much spazzing out and screaming occasionally, but it was still awesome. The Harrys crowd-surfed and did lots of jumping up on speakers and were pretty much rock gods. At some point during "Save Ginny Weasley", Kate and I turned to each other and were like, "Man, this is the best night of our lives and we should never, ever mention that fact to anyone we know, ever." Afterward there was a costume contest, based on house, so I entered as a punk-rock Ravenclaw but lost out to Luna Lovegood (that spacey bitch). There was also pumpkin painting, which we did not partake in, and candy, which we heartily partook of. I bought a "Save Ginny" shirt, which you will get to see later, in my Halloween pics, and got it signed by little Harry, who wrote, "KATHARINE--don't let Voldemort crash your DANCE PARTY!" We talked with him for awhile, and I offered Kate $15 to ask him to make out with her, but alas, she is a yellow-bellied fiend. Can you imagine how much your street cred would go up if you made out with one of the Harry and the Potters? I mean, you'd be at like, mega-gansta status. If you made out with one of the members of Uncle Monsterface, though, your street cred would probably just explode and you'd have to live your life in the sewers or something. Not in a bad way, just in a "you are not meant for this world" sort of way.

So, Friday. Oh my, Friday. As you may have anticipated, a large amount of Friday was spent on the floor of my room, trying to figure out how to build a wheelchair out of a zebra footstool, a roly-chair, and 500 LEGO pieces. Because of that whole, y'know, genetic joint disability thing, the day after dancing like a fiend is often known as the day my legs rebel and refuse to fulfill their proper function, but luckily, after a long bath, stretching, and some Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was up and about again. And thank Joss, because Friday night was none other than Hampshire Halloween. Hampshire Halloween is, pretty much, the biggest deal on this campus ever, and that's not just me misusing "biggest" and "ever" again. It's a huge thing, and our most massive party--apparently it was even on Rolling Stone's Top 10 party list and some point, which means that unless your school has a party that involves lots of making out and takes place in a giant ball pit, surrounded by a lazy river, we kick your asses. (Kate decided, and I heartily agree, that the epitome of luxury is having an estate that includes a giant ball pit and a lazy river. Like, if you've got both of those things, you've made it. You're a success. No question. This past week I amended my personal vision to include a Spaghetti-O's lazy river, complete with full-size Spaghetti-O's rafts, but at the moment that's just making me somewhat nauseated, so maybe it's not the best idea.) On Hampshire Halloween, the campus closes down for this crazy-ass, school-wide party, to which all the good people of the Valley come. You're allowed seven guests, who have to register and whatnot, and they all have to enter at designated spots, meaning, as my friend Kel discovered, that there is a two-hour line to get onto campus. You don't want to leave campus at all on Halloween--you may never get back. Around six, when the lawn carnival started, I started to get suited up as none other than Harry Potter in my Save Ginny t-shirt, jeans, black Chucks, and Hogwarts jacket. I used a red pen to draw on my scar, carried around my Hedwig the snowy owl hand puppet, and stole our mod's broomstick to use as a prop/inconspicuous cane. I even wrote Nimbus 2000 on it--man, am I crafty. I couldn't find my plastic Harry Potter glasses, though, so I went over to Kate's, where she and her best friend from Bard, Christine, were getting decked out as 50s-style B-movie aliens. They had a bunch of pipe cleaner left over from making their antennae, so Christine, the craftiest of us all, constructed a pair of amazingly round spectacles for me using only green pipe cleaners and Sharpie. The only problem with that was that the Sharpie then came off on my face somewhat, so I kind of looked like Harry Potter going through heroin withdrawal for most of the evening. Amy showed up in her mailman garb (complete with postal service hat, dirty postcards, and sketchy glued-on moustache) and Ellen was also there in what was supposedly a red Gummi Bear costume, but was really just her excuse to wear comfy red clothes all night. We went over to Harry's mod, where he had just finished getting Hermesed-out--Harry has this weird theory that because he wore only a loincloth and shorts his first year at Hampshire Halloween, he has to be progressively more naked each year. This might make sense if we didn't live in Massachusetts, but because we do, it doesn't make any sense at all and means Harry pretty literally froze his balls off this year. No, really, literally. I think he's now sterile. It was that cold. Luckily, though, the constant rain I complained about last entry had finally let up, so it was dry and actually pretty pleasant if you were wearing an appropriate amount of clothes. Jeff showed up as Oxytocin, the hormone of love (read: he was too lazy to get a costume and made up for it by touching everybody inappropriately), though apparently earlier in the evening someone had actually drawn a big red F on his forehead because he failed so badly at Halloween. Jeff and I frolicked off to the lawn, where they had a bouncy castle, slide, obstacle course, and basketball thing, as well as crazy dance party nonsense. There are three places to dance during Halloween: the big tent on the lawn, where the live bands play; the smaller tent on the lawn, with the DJ; and the RCC, with another DJ. After dropping by Alice's mod and meeting back up with Kate and Christine, we went into the big tent, where ZEBU was playing. ZEBU is a fairly well-known band on campus, but I had never heard them play, and am pretty sure I never want to hear them play again. I mean, it was fine for Halloween, because when you're dancing around with a bunch of crazy people in costume, nothing can really be wrong, but outside of that context I think ZEBU should probably never be heard from. We were kind of standing around, trying to determine if the noises we were hearing were supposed to be musical, until everyone just sort of got into the spirit of things and started dancing to whatever music they heard in their heads. It was actually really good for a Hampshire crowd, I think, because since there was no rhythm, everyone just sort of picked a dance style and went with it, so people were like moshing and salsa-dancing and break-dancing and all kind of nonsense. Dance parties, I've deducted from long years of research, are 78% more fun when in costume, no matter how ridiculous the music may be. There was a guy on stage screaming, "AFRICAN WATER BUFFALO!" and a giant squid head-banging in front of me, and I was like, "Man, this is totally like if one of my dreams came to life. I LOVE THIS SCHOOL." After dancing around a bit, we went to Prescott, which apparently had mini-quiches at some point in the night, but only had nachos and condoms when we got there. Another awesome feature of Hampshire Halloween? Free food. Lots of it. As a semi-independent college student, I will attend pretty much any event that has free food, even if it's like, Skittles. The Greenwich/Enfield house office had an open house the other day and I stocked up on so many mozzarella sticks and vegan brownies--which, for the record, you should never really eat in tandem, both from a political and dietary standpoint. On Halloween, all the house offices have something going on, plus food, so life=good. After Prescott, we went to Dakin to check out the Haunted House, which we actually didn't end up going into since Amy, sketchy mailman extraordinaire, showed up and wanted to dance some more. We went to the RCC for awhile, then to the smaller tent, both of which rocked profoundly. We also just generally wandered, which is always really amusing, since people go all out for Halloween and have the weirdest costume choices. In addition to the giant squid, Edward Scissorhands, and Frank from Donnie Darko, we noticed that this year there were a disproportionate number of unicorns walking around. We counted about a dozen, and though we also counted about a dozen Willy Wonkas, that made sense because, hey, movie. But unicorns? As far as I'm aware, there has been no unicorn-centered media enterprise since, ironically enough, "The Last Unicorn." Maybe unicorns are back, though. Maybe all the cool kids are going to start wearing horns and then some posers will start wearing horns and the original unicorns will laugh at them and call them rhinos and then the rhinos will stampede and destroy all the unicorns. Maybe. Anyway, there were also lots of ninjas, hipsters, and Greeks. In one of the tents we met this girl with an amazing Frida Kahlo costume--I mean, she totally looked like Frida, and had even gone all out with uni-brow and partial moustache. There was a Spaghetti Monster (AMAZING) and my personal favorite, a Cock Block, who was just wearing a giant block and would look for people making out and then get between them and be like, "Nope, nope, can't allow this, I'm a Cock Block, cease and desist." We also passed this Slytherin smoking a cigarette and being generally Slytherin, and I swear he gave me the kind of look Draco would give Harry, the "Merlin, you think you're so cool but you're just a stupid-ass Gryffindor." Christine saw it too, and she was like, "Man, you should challenge him to a duel," and I almost did until I was like, "Wait...we're not actually at Hogwarts. And he's not actually a haughty pureblood, and my wand is plastic." Then I got really depressed because I suddenly really wanted to go to Hogwarts and Christine was like, "I completely understand," and then told me about this theory her sister and her came up with, which is that in the U.S., the wizard school lets you go to college before they send you your letter, because they want you to have a full education in all ways. So it's like wizard grad school, and there's still a chance we can all get our letters. I was more thrilled by this idea then I should really admit in public. At some point we went into the library so Christine could go to the bathroom, and though there's technically nothing official going on in the library, there were a ton of people hanging out there because hey, warm. We met up with my modmate Kate, who was wearing a $5 Salvation Army bumblebee costume, and she and Amy punched each other for no apparent reason until Christine came out of the bathroom freaked out because someone had been having sex in the stall directly next to her. Just then, this girl dressed as Velma came up to us and screamed in this really shrill voice, "Oh my god, you guys have such cool costumes. Let me hug you!" She then hugged, shook hands, and kissed each of us on the cheek, and as she was walking away Christine was like, "Um...that was the girl having sex in the bathroom next to me." We were like, "Oh, sweet Jesuits...are you sure?" And she was like, "There's really no mistaking that voice," at which point we all decided we desperately needed to go wash our hands and faces. At about 1:30, after lots more dancing, we started lining up for SAGA breakfast. I have this theory that Hampshire Halloween is wholly engineered to make our SAGA seem attractive. SAGA's actually pretty good, but after partying like a motha and standing in line in the freezing cold for 45 minutes, it is the best thing you will ever experience in your life. The breakfast starts at 2 am and is served by various faculty members, including, this year, Ralph Hexter and Manfred (!!!) I was a little too focused on getting TATER TOTS NOWNOWNOW to really pay attention to Manfred, but at least he is now more than a creature of myth. The line for SAGA moved incredibly slowly and by this point we were all incredibly cold and hungry, so we had to come up with various methods of entertainment, including--and this was incredibly surreal--leading the entire line in a sing-a-long of "A Whole New World" and "I Will Survive." When we finally got in, after watching someone set off illegal fireworks near Merrill, we sat in the backroom and inhaled our eggs, tots, and French toast with zest and joy. Christine, Kate, and I headed back to Enfield and met up with Freddy, who, of course, was not wearing a costume because he is, as he told us, "Same as always, same as always." Somehow, in the process of his proposing marriage to Christine, we managed to get him to slip up and admit to us that he is building a time machine, so we now know some small part of his master plan. I came back to my mod to find Sean, who had gone out as a lizard, scrapping pastels off his face and decided to just go to bed and deal with the permanent marker on my face later. Man, that's how so many of my nights end up...

I spent most of Saturday recovering from Halloween by sitting around watching "Pee Wee's Big Adventure"--er, I mean "Cool Indie Movie About Intellectualism and Sophisticated Things that Doesn't Involve Pee Wee Herman"--and ordering Andiamo, which I did a lot last week since I really needed to make a grocery store trip. Andiamo is the nearby panini place, and they have incredible panini and gelato, so despite their slightly heightened prices, I can't resist them. The Andiamo guy walked in to find me sprawled on the couch in my pajamas with Sharpie still on my face and was like, "Had a good Halloween, huh?" He told me that as he walking across campus he just saw people crawling toward their homes or the woods, depending on how desperate they were to find somewhere to sleep. I watched movies all day and then that night Kate, Christine, and I went into Noho to discuss Kate's tattoo options and rock out to Hedwig and the Angry Inch. There was a Hedwig sing-a-long at the Academy of Music Theatre, and if you know anything about me at all, you know a Hedwig sing-a-long is pretty much what I've been waiting for my entire life. I dressed up as Tommy Gnosis, which was pretty easy since he wears all black and 86.3% of my closet is composed of black clothing *exactly 86.3%--I calculated it in my mind. You think I'm making up all these exact figures, but they're totally computed by my Calculator of Everything That You Cannot See Because It Is Also Invisible So Sucks to Your Ass-mar (TM).* I also put disgusting amounts of grease on my hair and drew a silver cross on my forehead, which I thought would get me more weird looks than it did until I remembered I was just going to be around Hampshire and Northampton, where nothing, save nothing, is weird. So we went to Lucky's, the piercing/tattoo place in Noho, where the tattoo guy had a heart-to-heart with Kate about the tattoo she's been wanting forever. Like I mentioned in an earlier entry, which you must know because you've been diligently memorizing each word I post, Kate's dream has long been to get three ants tattooed on her shoulder. ANTS. And not just your generic, run-of-the-mill ant: oh no. Kate had a specific ant in mind: the Argentine ant. (Yes, okay, I did have "Evita" playing in my head every time she said its name. Shut up.) That's actually a link to the exact image she got, by the way. Oh yes, accuracy in reporting, what what. The guy convinced her to just get one ant on her back so it could be all creepily detailed, and Kate decided to come back the next day to get it done. So we went to the Academy of Music and met up with Jeff and Erik to sing along to the best movie ever conceived. It was really pretty full, for having an $8 admission tag, and even included drag queen songleaders, which are necessary for pretty much every event ever, especially like, church functions. Everyone was so into it and had great energy, but really, in the face of Hedwig on the big screen, how can you not? Afterward Kate, Christine, Erik and I went to Osaka for a late dinner--mmmm shrimp tempura. Osaka apparently has the best sushi in the valley, but as I try to stay away from fish that's not so much, er, cooked as much as possible, I can't verify that. After Erik drove us back, Kate, Christine, and I went back to my mod to watch Reality Bites, this 90s film with Janeane Garofalo, Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, and Winona Ryder that I had never heard of before but was completely revelatory. After watching it, all of us were like, "Um, number one, we feel so much better about life after college, and number two, where has this movie been all of our lives?" Sunday Kate awoke me to ask if I wanted to come into Northampton and watch her get an insect permanently inked into her flesh. Of course I said yes, and we met up with Amy to go into town. It was one of the most gorgeous days...ever. It was warm, sunny, and like...amazing, especially after the Rain Plague of recent weeks. I felt all frolic-y inside, which translates to my outside as a sort of joyful hobbling. We went to Haymarket for breakfast, of sorts *milk and a slice of Boston creme pie, in my case--mmmm, nutritious* and then went down to Lucky's for Kate's fateful date...with destiny. And a needle. She went in the backroom while Amy and I looked on over this half-door thing that made it feel like Kate was a horse we were watching in a stall or something. The tattoo guy was playing Miles Davis and talked to us about squids *which sent Amy into a panic, naturally* and his love for bugs, which made me queasy. Watching someone get tattooed is kind of a weird thing, but Kate said it didn't hurt that much, though I sometimes suspect Kate is an android and it probably wouldn't hurt if you like, fed her to a bear. After that, we got lunch at Pinnochio's Pizza and I went to go see Thumbsucker while Kate and Amy headed home. Thumbsucker was good, but kind of disorienting--I'm not really sure why, though I suspect it had a lot to do with Keanu Reeves being in it. I was sitting at the bus stop when Mara came by and offered me a ride, and of course I said yes because I wanted to get back to campus and get started on my work as soon as possible *read: eat my Chef Boyardee Spaghetti and Meatballs as soon as possible.* I got to take in the loveliness of the day while walking across Merrill quad, where people were chilling out and enjoying what may well be one of the last days until March we can be outside for more than ten minutes without wanting to die. This past week, though, I have to say, really has been beautiful. I mean, short-sleeves, Frisbee-playing beautiful. Remind of that in two months when I'm setting myself on fire to stay warm.

Tuesday night I went to the DeVotchKa show at the Iron Horse, and oh my, were they the amazingness. DeVotchKa is this multi-instrumental, Eastern European-inspired rock band, and by that description alone you should be able to tell how much they rock. They're apparently good pals with Gogol Bordello, one of my other favorite gypsy rock outfits, who apparently came to Noho just before I discovered them--curse you, crafty gypsy rockers! I had never been to the Iron Horse before, but it's right in downtown Noho and is a really nice space, kind of a bar/cafe set-up with a stage. I got a seat right next to the stage, which was awesome, since I was right in front of the accordion play. Rock on. There are four people in DeVotchKa: three guys and one girl, all of whom play a weird variety of instruments, including, but not limited to, the drums, the trombone, the saxophone, the guitar, and some weird metal thing that warbles when you ding it. They were so very, very good, and their frontman is so very, very hot. I mean, guys, I may be gay, but I think I have a serious man crush with this one. He kind of looked like a cross between Simon from Firefly and Joaquin Phoenix in Walk the Line--yeah, exactly. SO. ATTRACTIVE. Also, he sings like a god. After eating at Cafe Fireside I went back to campus to watch Heavenly Creatures with Amy and Kate, which was really disconcerting. Heavenly Creatures is Kate Winslet's first film, and it's directed by Peter Jackson, which, if you've ever seen and/or heard of it, you will agree is really bizarre. It's about crazy New Zealand lesbians--just the thing for a Tuesday night.

Wednesday I spent dying of leg malfunction, but I managed to get up and about enough at night to go the screening of "I Exist: Queer Voices from the Middle East in the U.S.," which I really wanted to attend one, because, hey, awesome, and two, because the QCA was sponsoring it and I figured we should actually go, you know, actively sponsor it. Thursday was really nice and sunny, so after work Kate and I went out to the big tree near the Red Barn to enjoy my Atkins basket and have a reading party--I lent her my copy of Anansi Boys and I started Infinite Jest, which is proving to be an amazing book, except that it's like 3 million pages long and I only have time to read it in about two minute spurts. We stayed out there until after dark, which really doesn't mean anything because it's started to get dark at about 5:00 here now, talking about science fiction (I'm cool, guys, seriously, don't hate) and our new idea for a Div III, called "F--- you, DIORAMAS!" The concept was inspired by the Chem assignment Kate was working on, which required her to write the biography (in comic or story form) of the element of her choice. This is especially hysterical if you know how often Kate puts down the humanities for being all touchy-feely and hippie-ish, and swears that there's nothing like that in the science world. I suggested she just do a diorama, which got us thinking about how long it's been since we did a diorama and how amazing they are. I mean, really, dioramas in shoeboxes were such an inspired idea. So we decided we could do a Div. III art installation piece of all dioramas, which then evolved into a life-size diorama, and then a theater production that actually takes place inside a diorama about living in a diorama. Oh my god, dioramas. I can't even take the genius. After hanging out with Kel at the QCA, I went back to my mod to watch Aladdin with Kate, where she attempted to make microwave popcorn (MICROWAVE popcorn, people. And you think I’m incompetent) but burnt it, causing our kitchen to fill with smoke. We freaked out because we thought the smoke alarms were going to go off and everyone in Enfield was going to yell at us, but they didn’t, which was good for us at the time, but which seems really bad, now, actually. I mean, shouldn’t they have at least beeped a little? Anyway, there was so much smoke in the microwave that we actually took the entire thing outside to air it out. It was a little ridiculous, so is pretty much everything with me and Kate.

Friday was spent errand-doing, including a much, much needed grocery trip. I was pretty much licking my mod mates’ dirty dishes, I was so desperate for substantial nutrition. Oh, but before all the shopping goodness, Kate and I had our meeting for the Ireland trip, which I am now officially going on (thank Joss). It sounds like it’s pretty much going to be the best thing ever—plus we’re apparently staying near my distant Irish cousins, so I might do some family-type bonding (read: awkward interaction with complete strangers in the hopes that they will feed me dinner or something.) Right, so after that Kate and I got lunch at the Bridge, then met up with Kel and Amy to gallivant about town. We hit the bank (because I finally got my paycheck—ahhhh sweet), Barnes and Noble, Stop N’ Shop, then Amherst. When we got back, I went to Kate and Kel’s mod, since they had promised to make me dinner, and ate French toast and scrambled eggs while watching, for some reason, FOX News than BET. They kind of messed with my head, especially one right after the other. Afterward Kel and I watched Palindromes, this movie I’ve been waiting to see since it came out and Kel really wanted to watch. It’s a weirdly amazing concept—there’s one main character, this thirteen-year-old girl, but she’s played by a different actor in each segment. It’s one of those things that could go horribly, horribly wrong, but ended up working really well. Sean came over to distract us with the revelation that he plays Dungeons and Dragons during it, then I think I must have gotten home at some point that night and gone to sleep, but I can’t really verify that statement. Saturday I got up extra-early (read: 10:30 a.m.) to go with Erik and Skim to Vermont on a random road trip. We decided we wanted to get out of the Valley for awhile, so we drove north until we hit Ludlow and stopped for lunch in this place called Trapper’s, which was decorated as a hunting lodge, save for the giant and inexplicable posters of Maui on the walls. It was a brilliantly gorgeous day, so we walked around town, pausing to laugh hysterically and take incredibly tourist-y pictures with a painted llama statue, shop in various souvenir-type places, and take in the town biker gang (consisting of four people) and uni-cycler. We looked ridiculously out of place—not only were we dressed in Hampshire-type attire, but Erik has a BMW that he feels must perform at top speed at all times, which means he doesn’t really blend in on the back roads of Vermont. We dropped by a reservoir Alice, who in her youth had a summer cabin in the area, recommended, and then went to Chester for tea in a real-life tea house of tea-ness. It was like being in every old woman’s house ever. There were various chachkas for sale everywhere, and everything was sort of pastel-colored and comfortably old. It was all very soothing. We were the only people there, and it was only run by one woman and her dog, which hung out with us while we ate. We got tea, of course, and I got a homemade ice cream sundae, which goes way better with tea than you might think. Never doubt my ability to combine a hot fudge sundae with any meal imaginable. After tea, we drove around to take in the Vermont-ness of Vermont some more, including the apple pie stands, lack of billboards, and general quaintness of the place. We weren’t that far from the Valley, but it was like an entirely different land—probably because the Valley is an entirely different land from everywhere else. Before leaving Vermont, we had to do something syrup-related, so we stopped at a sugar shack and the woman let us sample some of her syrup (purely in a literal maple sense) and showed us the workings of her syrup-making machine, though I still don’t fully grasp the whole thing and prefer to let it remain a “good on waffles” type mystery. After returning to Massachusetts, Erik and I decided to go see—of all things—“Chicken Little.” No, I don’t know either. It was actually pretty good, though, and we managed to get away with buying child’s tickets, which I think is fair since we were seeing “Chicken Little” and all. There was a gay pig, Amy Sedaris, and this hilarious fish, so it all turned out well. Afterward Erik and I met up with Kate and Kel at Ellen’s mod, went to Prescott to party for a bit, then went back to my mod to watch Hackers. Really, guys, I somehow missed a large and crucial part of 90s cinema. Hackers, if you’re horribly culturally unlearned, like, apparently, me, is an Angelina Jolie/Matthew Lillard/Marc Antony (HA!)/other random people film about, naturally, Hackers. Only it was made in 1995, so all the super-cool technology they use is just laughably ridiculous—like, all the laptops are the size of suitcases and the computer graphics just make you want to cry. It’s amazing. It has the motto “HACK THE PLANET!” and tries to make it seem as though hackers and gamers were somehow cool in the 90s and rode motorcycles and went to gamer nightclubs instead of sitting in dark basements for hours and hours and hours on end. This past week could really be re-titled, in my the internal spreadsheet of my life, as the week of OMG 90s MOVIES. I mean, first Reality Bites, then Hackers, then, on Sunday, due to Sean’s suggestion, Singles with Kyra Sedgwick and Matt Dillon. The 90s-ness of my cinematic choices comes mostly from the fact that Sean only has VHS tapes, all of which he purchased five years or more ago, so I have access to all these films I feel I would never otherwise encounter. Sunday was eaten up by sleep, Singles, and work, then the Boondocks at 11 on Adult Swim. Adult Swim has ruled my life lately. I mean, now they have the Boondocks, which is amazing and smart and actually makes sense, unlike 12 Oz. Mouse, which I actually love, but for entirely different reasons. Has anyone else seen 12 Oz. Mouse? Because…yeah. I don’t even know, guys. It’s like Uncle Monsterface—plus 500. I don’t even…I can’t even…I mean, the fact that 12 Oz. Mouse is actually on television makes me wonder if everyone in the world is just secretly like me, and civilization is soon just going to fall apart. I could watch it for hours. Literally…seconds. Only a lot of them. So…hours. What?

Okay, it’s late now, as is clear from that last sentence. I just got back from watching House of 1000 Corpses with Kate, Harry, and Amy after a long day of doing not so much. I did meet with Joel Dansky, though, the Disabilities Service Coordinator, who was actually able to come meet with me in my mod so I didn’t have to go to Prescott at 9 am. Ooooh, maybe as a disabled student I can request that all classes be moved from wherever they are to my mod living room. Or better yet, my bedroom. And instead of “classes,” they can be changed to “hot model make-out sessions/ice cream parties.” Sweeeeet cuppin’ cakes, I think I’ve finally found a use for this handicap.

I'm so...cold...

Okay, here's the thing: I am generally a fairly patient and optimistic person. Really. My glasses are all full *of cool, cool delicious milk...mmmm*, my clouds are all shiny, I've got a bluebird on my shoulder *actually, no, because that would be scary, but metaphorically*--all that jazz. HOWEVER, if the rain does not ceases very, very soon, my brain is actually going to explode. Everywhere. Like a mashed potato volcano. Or just...a volcano. And when it explodes, it is going to explode is such a way that each particle of my brain goo will become an unstoppable mini-killing machine, complete with tentacles and googly eyes, and no one will survive. So please, for all of our sake's, someone shut off the rain. Someone just take a gigantic wrench and turn off that tap in the sky. I'm begging you. Everything smells like wet dog because apparently wet college student and wet dog=pretty much the same thing. I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE. Hampshire Admissions, I've thought about this long and hard, and I have a proposition for you: let's just move Hampshire to the location displayed below:

Seriously, let's just pack up and go there. Someone can just figure out a way to move all the buildings to Tahiti as their Div III and we'll be golden. No one will even know the difference--we can even bring some sheep and some lesbians so people think it's still in the Valley. It's totally a fool-proof idea. There's no chance on it going utterly, utterly, horribly wrong. None.
If this rain continues until Hampshire Halloween, I am switching my costume from punk Harry Potter to slug person. I will give up on sunlight and live in the earth and avoid salty foods. TAKE THAT, RAIN MAN.

cassidy cassidy cassidy cassidy cassidy

This entry brought to you by the Little Sister's League for Blog Inclusion.


This is Cassidy, who lambasted *I. LOVE. THAT. WORD.* for not including her by name in the last entry, even though I referred to "The Family" like 689 times. Cassidy enjoys soccer, bad jokes, and reversing her eyebrow hair to freak me out. Because it's really creepy. Really, try it. When Cassidy was young, I taught her her first word ("RAT") and generally helped to shape her character. Moral of this story? Never allow me around your children.

The conclusion of this entry brought to you by Katharine's Urgent Need for Scrambled Eggs and A Shower.

sweet cuppin' cakes, i love me some mmmmuffin

Life is never more perfect than when you're eating a freshly baked chocolate chip muffin, especially if you did not have to bake/pay for said muffin yourself. One of the things I love most about my mod is that the other people in it not only cook, but actually enjoy cooking, so often when I wander out of my room at 3 in the afternoon wondering if I'm going to have to have Cheetos and ketchup for breakfast again, there will be a plate of warm pastries for the taking. It's like magic.

You know, you would think that with a 4-day weekend, you would really have time to get things done. You would think. However, I have come to the conclusion that what everyone really needs is a 6-day weekend...which makes it not so much a week "end" as a "week," but whatever. There should only be one day of work, then 6 days of rest. Just like in the Bible! Er...I think.

Basically, I have somehow ended up with more work than I can throw a stick at, if I were inclined to throw sticks. I'd say that really has to qualify as one of humanity's top ten most useless expressions, because, let's face it, you can throw a stick at pretty much anything. It might not help, but you can do it, and probably feel a little better about things. You can even throw intangible sticks at your emotions for fun--except for that bastard ennui. You can't throw a stick at ennui. It won't care. I wonder if I could hand in a stick as one of my response papers, though. I could just be like, "This is how I responded to the text," and then throw the stick at my professor. That's one case where throwing a stick at things might actually be constructive...or restraining order-inducing...

The to-do list, as it stands today: A paper on The Cheese and the Worms *a book that is not nearly as gross as it sounds* and a paper on Nazi book burnings for Dangerous Books; an essay on Maus and an essay on Poison River for my comic book class midterm; an ending for my Lost in the Story story cycle; my Division I portfolio; my Division II applications. Now, it's not like any of this involves, like, high-level neurocalculus or anything, but it's a lot of words. A LOT. And I like words, most of the time, but at some point there are just so many your brain just starts going, "Merrrrrrrrrrrrrgh," and wanting to draw pictures of bunnies for the rest of your academic career. HOWEVER, as all of my pictures of bunnies end up looking more like pictures of fuzzy scissors, I think I'll continue to slog my way through the writing, even though Kim from America's Next Top Model is apparently wandering around Northampton today. I'm giving up lesbian model stalking for my studies, okay? I think that pretty much says how incredibly scholarly I am.

Where did I leave off in updating? Oh! Last last Wednesday...jeez. This is going to get sketchy, guys. Expect a lot of, "And then something else happened, but I don't remember what. THE END." So, on Wednesday, Kel and Kate dragged me out of bed (so many of my stories start out that way) and made me go to the ThirstyMind, where I ate chocolate cake and more or less studied. Then I went to Lost in the Story, which I've officially decided is my favorite class in the universe. I mean, my other classes rock, but Lost in the Story centers completely around making shit up, and if there's anything in this entire world I'm capable of doing, it's making shit up. We're currently in the middle of a story cycle, wherein six people write six separate beginnings to a story, then six people write the middle, then six people write the end...Ours is kind of weird, though, because it's not like you continue one of the stories--you just write a middle based on all six beginnings, but you don't necessarily have to include all of them. It's a little bizarre, and I'm not entirely sure what's going to come of it, but thus far it's been supremely entertaining. Our final project for the class is to write a 20-page short story, and for once I've actually started working on a final two months before it's due. Thus far my story involves giant squid sex, a legless poetess, and a guy named Edgar. I'm not really certain how it's all going to come together, but I assure you it will be fabulous. After class I went over to Kel's to cook pasta for the QCA's Sexy Spaghetti Soiree, and by "cook pasta" I mean "stand around while Kel cooked the pasta and occasionally asked me to hand her things." We made a ginormous pot of pasta, which we then lugged over to the QCA for our family-style coming out dinner--but a good family-style coming out dinner, not like the family-style coming out dinners that end up with someone getting kicked out of the house. We got about fifteen people, which was good considering the weather was still apolocalyptic, all of whom shared there coming out stories after I pointed to them and forced them to. I told mine first, and I would totally relate it here except that I feel it's completely one of those tales that has to be told in person in order to get the full effect, because it's amazingly ridiculous. So if you see me and we're not in a red state, ask me about my coming out story and I'll totally tell you--and even include sound effects and inappropriate hand motions!

Thursday has been deleted by this blog, since I can't remember anything significant happening that day. Friday, though, my parentals and sisters got into town for Friends and Family weekend and saw my amazingly clean room, which was amazingly clean for a grand total of about 2 seconds after they left. I even vacuumed--it was intense. We were hoping for that, like, picture-perfect tourist-heaven leaf-turning New England weather, but instead we got rain. SO. MUCH. RAIN. I stopped taking showers for about a week just because they reminded me entirely too much of rainfall. I HATE RAIN NOW. I used to really like it, because it only showed up occasionally, but it has overstayed its welcome. Also, can we just dwell on the general bizarre-ness of water falling from the sky every couple of days? I mean, I know it makes perfect natural sense, but it's really sort of odd. It's also odd that the days we think of as nice are created by a giant fireball. Weather is trippy, man.

Right. So, Friday night we went to dinner at the Teapot in Northampton, which is pretty much exactly like Taipei and Tokyo, where I usually eat Chinese and Japanese food, except that they get angrier at you if you and your friends just order tea and one plate of dumplings. After dropping by the Hampshire Mall to discover that every movie we wanted to see had started exactly, like, 15 minutes before, we went to Haymarket for smoothies. Look, if you ever go to Northampton, there is really only one thing that you are, like, required by law to do, and that is go to Haymarket and have a smoothie. Not only is it in a really cool space, but they have the best smoothies in the universe, bar none--and yes, and that includes the Smoothie Planet of Smoothiedromeda. I had the Swamp Thing, which looks sort of like tar and tastes kind of like perfection. The other thing you should probably do if you're ever in Northampton is go to Faces, the store of many wonders, where I brought the Family immediately afterward and bought the coolest tiki-man mirror you will ever see. Then the Family came over to Kate's mod to meet Kate and Amy, which was pretty much hilarious just because any meeting of people I know is generally hilarious, since everyone I know has very little sense of the concept of "tact" but is ridiculously familiar with the concept of "awkwardness." After the Family went back to their hotel, I hung out with Kate, Harry, Ben, and Amy in Kate's room, a gathering which basically consisted of fighting over Fruit Roll-ups *with tongue tattoos!* and freaking out because the tiki man-mirror is kind of terrifying. The mirror part is where the mouth would be, so when you look into it there are these giant teeth above and below your face, which is disconcerting even when you haven't eaten 15 Fruit Roll-ups. Then Kate and I went over to my mod to watch Saved! Ellen came over at some point to talk about how she and Kel have pretty much the exact same fashion sense *read: emo boi/mountain woman fashion sense* and some time after that I fell asleep. Saturday the Family came to fetch me at some ridiculously early hour like 10 for breakfast at the Route 9 diner, where I have spent many a late and insane night. After brunch we went for ice cream at Flayvors, which has incredible ice cream. Look, if you can smell the cow manure, you know the place has good ice cream. It's that fresh. On Friends and Family weekend, Hampshire always has all kinds of crazy activities at the Farm Center, so we went there to pet the donkey and goats and run away from the roosters, which are terrifying. We drank apple cider that was cidered right before our eyes, saw Jacob Wolf Lefton *BEST. NAME. EVER.* blacksmith it up, and took a wild adventure through the wilderness in search of cows but only found mud, a weird girl we think might be one of those mythical Hampshire students who went off to live in the forest, and a hay ride we had to avoid at short notice several times. We also saw Ellen D., the only other person from my high school to apply to and/or come to Hampshire. She was a year behind me at school, and told me she picked Hampshire based solely on the fact that I liked it so much and she didn't want to deal with applying anywhere else, which I found really amusing. After our wholesome family farm fun, we got in the car and prepared to drive 4 hours to the middle of nowhere, a journey that was made significantly more awesome by the fact that we listened to Mitch Hedberg for most of the trip. If you've never heard Mitch Hedberg, you are not only a loser, but you probably can't understand 23% of what I say. So go listen and enlighten yourself, because he's the best guy...ever. My entire family completely loved him, which should pretty much tell you how un-Tennessean they really are. Oh, as to why we decided to drive 4 hours in the pouring rain to destinations unknown--it was my grandmother's 80th birthday, so my uncle had booked us all rooms at this really cool inn called the Governor's House, so named because it was apparently once a Governor's House. Creative. The inn was in New Hampshire, though, and as far as I'm concerned the whole of New Hampshire can pretty much be categorized under "middle of nowhere." It's full of moose and pretty much nothing else. After driving down roads that had no landmarks except "that big tree" and "that slightly less big tree," we found the place and got prepped for our fancy dinner. And boy, was it fancy. My immediate and extended family, though, has some problems with the concept of fancy, so it pretty much ended up being "loud and inappropriate" and therefore really, really fun. They sat us in our own separate room, which was probably very good thinking on their part. I had some kind of amazing pork tenderloin and mashed potatoes and then, of course, huge amounts of the person-sized chocolate cake they brought out at the end. I had been instructed to talk as little as possible in order to avoid scandalizing my young New Hampshire cousins, but somehow we all ended up making inappropriate comments about St. Francis of Assisi and the wedding next door regardless of my direct influence. The next morning we had brunch, which means bacon and cheese crepes, which means *drooooooool*. I LOVE CREPES. Were it legal, I would completely marry a crepe and have half-crepe babies and fight for the rights of crepes everywhere and then open a crepe restaurant called "Holy Crepe" and then realize how if you type the word "crepe" enough times, it starts to not mean anything anymore. Crepe. Crepe. Crepe. Oh my god I need to stop. ANYWAY, after the eating we went to Atkins Farms, which is full of fresh, wholesome food goodness. We got chicken and cider donuts, then I went back to Hampshire and bid farewell to the family. I then had the QCA meeting, to which only one person showed up because the weather had gone from apocalyptic to suicide-inducing. Again--I HATE RAIN.

But Monday! Sweet, sweet Monday! On Monday the clouds parted and the sunshine reigned! I called my mom just to be like, "See, I swear it's pretty here most of the time! You guys just have awful timing!" Monday morning I was so inspired by the sunlight I cooked a turkey. Yes--a turkey. An entire...turkey. This mystified my modmates and pretty much everyone I know, all of whom were like, "Honey...you don't even have the patience for Eggo waffles. Why are you cooking a turkey?" The answer is simple and stupid. Upon my last grocery trip, I realized you could get way more lunch meat from a whole turkey than those, like, deli meat things. Somehow, I failed to realize that to get that meat, though, I would at some point actually have to cook said turkey. When my mom came up, she gave me instructions, and so I just decided, "Well, it's either cook it or use it for arts and crafts, and the latter just seems wrong somehow, so let's cook it!" So I did, and it worked, which is the really remarkable thing. Now, though, I have like 8 pounds of turkey sitting in a plastic pitcher in the fridge since we didn't have a Tupperware container big enough to hold it. I'm kind of like Martha Stewart. Tuesday I went to work, had class, and probably did something amazing I don't remember. Wednesday I had class and then America's Next Top Model, which a bunch of first-years always get all glammed up and come over to my mod for. It's kind of bizarre, as is Shawn in drag, which he always dresses up in for the duration of the show. Wednesday is my total TV night--there's ANTM, LOST, and Drawn Together, which is the most TV I ever watch in one night ever anymore. Thursday I worked, hung out with Kate and Kel, and went to the Yurt meeting--the Yurt is our on-campus media center, built in the style of a Mongolian yurt because hey, you can do that here. I went to the meeting to get a radio show, and lo and behold! I have one. They're actually allowing me airtime, which is hilarious. My friends were so excited and also like, "How do you even find out about this stuff? You lead like seven different mysterious lives." It's on Internet radio, meaning no FCC standards *YES* and right now it's on-campus only, so if you want to hear it you'll have to come to Hampshire. Wouldn't that be awesome if I got some prospective student to come to Hampshire purely because they wanted to hear my radio show? I think I would get a trophy from Admissions or something. After watching Alias and bugging Kate at Pub Safety, I went with Amy to K2, where most of the people who lived with us on E2 last year live. They were all having some insane hall drama that was threatening to escalate into a gang war, but for all the tension it was a pretty fun night. There's just something about living on a hall that makes people extra-angsty. In the mods, I guess, you have more space, so you want to kill each other less, but on living on a hall is like being trapped in tube where you can only run from one end to the other. Not that I know what that's like or need years of therapy from when my parents made me play "The Tube Game" or anything. After hanging with them we went back to my mod to watch Jerry Maguire and eat sourdough bread with olive oil and pepper, which is an excellent snack that makes you feel like you're being healthy even though you're probably completely not.

Friday I...oh right! Was dragged out of bed by Kate and Kel. Right, of course. We went errand-running all day and ate at Cafe Fireside, where someone had decided the special of the day needed to be "combine three of Katharine's favorite foods into a pasta dish" so they had chicken, shrimp, and broccoli alfredo. OMG SO GOOD. That+dark chocolate mousse=the perfect meal. Then we came back to my mod to watch Space Cases, which I loved as a child and just found for download *Firefly fans--it has Jewel Staite as the ship's engineering genius--she's been playing the same character for, like, 10 years.* We also watched Amy's home movies, where she mostly yells about food and falls down a lot, so it's pretty much the same as her life today. Kate and Kel then went off to study, while Amy and I watched Inspiration Today for like 2 hours. It was terrifying yet addictive. We watched some guy named Alvin Slaughter *just pause to take in that name* lead praise worship and then some creepy bishop guy tell us to give him all our money because Jesus said we should. It totally reminded me of my Genesis Weekend experience, which I told Amy about, where one of my friends from school invited me to a "sleepover with her friends" that turned out to be a "Genesis Weekend sleepover" which means "the sleepover in which we try to save your soul." We weren't allowed to listen to anything but Christian music or talk about anything un-Christian, which meant it was not only really boring, but I had nothing to listen to/talk about. There was also this creepy group leader woman who wanted me to fill out a survey with my name, address, and a list of people I hung out with who I thought were going to hell, to which I responded, "OH GOD OH GOD," and locked myself in another room. I stayed in there listening to my Gorillaz CD until this girl came in and told me she didn't think that was Christian music, but I told her "Clint Eastwood" was actually one of Jesus' nicknames, so it counted. The next morning they took me to their mega-church, where me and all the other heathen kids tricked into coming basically tried to act invisible while the preacher guy denounced everything from women to Democrats to people who drive Volkswagens. It was really, really funny/frightening. If you're ever wondering why I'm not so much a fan of Tennessee, a lot of it can probably be traced back to that story. That and NASCAR.

This morning I cooked scrambled eggs and have since spent the rest of the day listening to Miles Davis, Cowboy Bebop, and the Triplets of Belleville soundtrack, because they are somehow the most conducive to studying. And, speaking of studying, mayhaps I should wrap up this entry and do a little of that. After all, contrary to popular belief, I am actually a student here and not just some wandering homeless person who hangs out in people's mods and eats their muffins. I swear...

Someone gives Bush a hammer--hilarity ensues

I'm no expert in building--unless, of course, it involves LEGOs or popsicle sticks, of which I am the undisputed master--but doesn't the way he's holding that hammer seem like he's unsure what it's for? Or where he is? Or what the hell he's doing? These photo ops are really getting out of hand--a tool belt and hardhat, people? I mean, really--as if Bush has every built anything but an evil empire in his life. I've been put in prison for some of things I've accidentally done with power tools and I think even I'm more competent with a hammer than that guy. Apparently he just spent most of the time chatting, signing autographs, and posing for pictures in the style of, "I have an IQ of 35 and there's a rabid wildebeest running toward me from just off-camera"--or at least that's what I'm gathering from his expression in the above pic. He also made sure to tell everybody that even though it's really, really hard, being the President, he's holding up okay and damn it, he's a survivor. If he can get through Hurricane Katrina, then by the stars and stripes, everyone can. The best part is this picture is from FOX news, who posted it because apparently it's supposed to be inspiring and spirit-lifting, as opposed to irrefutable proof that Bush has the mental facilities of a mentally sub par prairie dog.

I also like the strategy for glossing over the whole horribly, horribly slow response to Katrina: *actual quote* "If I didn't respond well enough, I'm going to learn the lessons." See, we know your city's destroyed, we know thousands of people are dead, we know that some strengthening of the levees probably could have prevented a good deal of this, but the important thing is that Bush learned a lesson, and now he knows not to do it again. Don't you care about the president's education? Stop being selfish and let him hold the hammer, New Orleans. Jeez. You know, guys, just like he keeps telling us, Bush's job is really hard. I mean, he has to keep playing dress-up and getting his picture taken all day. It's just like my job--when I was five. Those were some trying times, my friends--I sympathize with the guy, I really do.

On to my day, which also, incidentally, involved a toolbelt and a hard hat, though in an entirely different context--unless Habitat for Humanity has added free construction worker-themed strippers to their services, in which case it's exactly the same context. I got up at 8:15 *ewwwww* to go eat breakfast at the Bridge and poster for the Sexy Spaghetti Soiree with Kel. She then walked me over to Eric Carle, where I worked until I had to go over to UMass for Noam Chomsky. Now, Noam Chomsky is awesome--like, linguistic superhero awesome--but he's not exactly what you would call a dynamic speaker. It was basically like being in one of those lecture classes where you're not entirely sure the professor actually knows anyone's there and might just be reading out loud to himself, which I haven't actually had to suffer through since high school. He also managed to ruin my childhood--a couple of years ago we found this tape of me telling this story of this boy who turns into a magic pebble and thought it was the best story ever and that I was some amazing child prodigy, but Noam Chomsky revealed that there was a story exactly like it, about Sylvester the donkey, already in print, and that my entire life has been a lie. Don't ask me why Noam Chomsky was talking about Sylvester the donkey--I have no idea--but it was a horrible moment. Though, I have to say, a story about a guy turning into a rock sounds way smarter coming from a five-year-old than an actual adult author. I kind of can't believe anyone wrote that book. I wanted to see Chomsky's other talk, the one actually at Hampshire, which was supposed to be more politically oriented, but I had comic book class and even Noam Chomsky can't keep me from the best class in the entire universe. I got dinner at Fatzo's and also bought a white chocolate mocha at Starbucks for the sole purpose of staying awake during comic book class, what with the having gotten up at 8:15 and not usually being conscious for more than about 8 hours at a time. I'm glad I planned ahead, because the class was awesome--we had a guest speaker named Michael Kasper who does artists books and revealed that apparently Amherst College, despite being Current Preppy, Elitist Headquarters of the Universe, is actually in possession of one of the biggest collections of alternative media ever because of this special fund they got from one of their dead hippie ex-students. So that was weird. He passed out and talked about a bunch of artists books, which he described as the "kissing cousins" of comic books. Really, though, couldn't he have just said that they were cousins? Why do they have to be kissing cousins? When did it become necessary for two things to start making out in order to be related? After comic book class, Sarah and I discussed the accessories necessary for being the coolest person in the world, which include: snowshoes; an umbrella/cane with a pocketknife/pen in it; gloves that exude fingerpaint; goggles that actually attach to your eyeballs and let you switch between infrared, x-ray, and night vision just by blinking; a helmet that beams TV to said goggles; and finally, a full-body camoflague suit. Admit it, if you had all that, there's no way you could not be the coolest person in the world. Wow, that sentence was awkward. For some reason, outlining those requirements seemed really important at the time, but now I have no idea why. Now, though, what will make me the coolest person in the world is to stop smelling vaguely like kitty litter, so I'm going to go take a shower.