ad astra!

As another year draws to a close, it’s time to tally up the figures for the year:

Cigarettes Smoked: 3,812
Alcoholic beverages consumed: 143
Cups of Coffee: 1,464
Sodas drank: 1,095
Hits of Ectasy: 2.5
Times Smoked Marijuana: 15
Hours Worked: 1,473
Miles driven: 11,407
Miles flown: 3,708
Cell Phone Minutes: 6,204
Birthdays: 1
Places lived: 3
Roommates had: 4
Boys Kissed: 17
Girls Kissed: 3
Asses Kissed: 0
Infatuations: 3
Times fallen in love: 1
Times thrown up: 2
Times cried: 7
Books read: 25
Elevator rides: 276
Boat rides: 1
Rollercoaster rides: 13
Emotional Rollercoaster Rides: 4
Arguments with Josh: 12
Arguments with Technology: 3
Arguments with Customers: 104
Arguments with Self: 371
Laughs: too many to count
Smiles: too many to count
Warm, fuzzy feelings: several
Blog posts: 308

winter + discontent

nine inch nails :: halo two :: something i can never have

i still recall the taste of your tears
echoing your voice just like the ringing in my ears
my favorite dreams of you still wash ashore
scraping through my head till I don’t wanna sleep anymore

you make this all go away
you make this all go away
i’m down to just one thing
and i’m starting to scare myself

you make this all go away
you make this all go away
i just want something
i just want something i can never have

you always were the one to show me how
back then i couldn’t do the things that i can do now
this thing is slowly taking me apart
grey would be the color
if i had had heart

c’mon tell me

you make this all go away
you make this all go away
i’m down to just one thing
and i’m starting to scare myself

you make this all go away
you make this all go away
i just want something
i just want something i can never have

in this place it seems like such a shame
though it all looks different now I know it’s still the same
everywhere i look i’m all i see
just a fading fucking reminder of who i used to be

c’mon tell me

you make this all go away
you make this all go away
i’m down to just one thing
and i’m starting to scare myself

you make this all go away
you make it all go away
i just want something
i just want something i can never have

This is the coolest thing on the internet right now.

So. Freaking. Awesome.

“The iBeam laser pointer is an amazingly powerful red laser beam that is capable of being seen over a quarter of a mile away. Need we say how much fun this could be?”

It could be great fun if your idea of fun is, say, burning the retinas of airline pilots.

“I usually don?t watch as they stick me-this time I did though since it is all about the blood, a test to see if it has turned against you or not.“

Aedh wishes for the Cloths of Heaven (W.B. Yeats, 1899)

Had I the heavens? embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

I thought I would post this again, as I like it and it’s been in my head lately.

As the semester draws to a close, I need to take a few moments to look back on four months that has been:

1.) A crash course in time management. Getting homework done, getting enough time to myself, as well as finding time to do laundry and grocery shop have all been part of my back to school adventure. I haven’t had a lot of time to see old friends, family, even watch a lot of TV (but I did see way too much Stargate SG-1) or play video games. That being said, I did drop the ball a few times and failed to pick it up. We’ll see how I fare when grades are posted.

2.) A lesson in moving. That exodus was amazingly expensive, time-consuming, and paradigm shifting.

3.) Getting to know Joe. I knew Joe sort-of before we moved in, but the little kibbutz we’ve founded here has worked toward giving me a “home” where there wasn’t one before. But my god, do we need to clean. You’d think straight people lived here.

4.) Don’t even try to have a social life. Failure on all fronts.

5.) I remember sleeping in there somewhere. Actually I’ve slept a lot, mostly due to being depressed.

6.) All I’ve undergone I will keep on. The thought has been on my mind lately of throwing in the towel for a semester to better acclimate myself to Grand Rapids. I think now that it’s a bad idea. I’m here in GR and making the sacrifice of easy living for something that I hope will pay off in the long run. Deffered rather than instant gratification has proven to be more rewarding to me, so I need to continue on the path I set myself on in order to legitimize all of the rice Joe eats, DVDs I can’t afford, trips to Manhattan I can’t take, etc. It’s this struggle that I need to embrace, knowing that my hard work might someday pay off. This has been the hardest thing to keep ahold of all semester.

I’m trying my hardest in these last few days.

A little encouragement, guys?

Joe beat MGS3.

Starsailor :: Love is Here :: Way To Fall
Son, you’ve got a way to fall
They’ll tell you where to go
But they won’t know

Son, you’d better take it all
They’ll tell you what they know
But they won’t show

Oh, I’ve got something in my throat
I need to be alone
While I suffer

Son, you’ve got a way to kill
They’re picking on you still
But they don’t know

Son, you’d better wait to shine
They’ll tell you what is yours
But they take mine

Oh, I’ve got something in my throat
I need to be alone
While I suffer

Oh, there’s a hole inside my boat
I need stay afloat
For the summer long

Left my Sweet Soul
Beneath the bedclothes
I’m not coming down.

Walls have ears but
No one hears when
Nobody’s around.

Son, you’ve got to wait to fall
They’ll tell you where to go
But they won’t know

Link to iTunes Music Store. Link to Metal Gear Solid Website.

I got boingboinged, a great honor IMO. Or at least two minutes of me giggling to myself because I got to say “soylent green is people” on the internet. I got like 7 new inbound links. Neato. Thanks for linking and coming, folks. I’ll be reading where I was linked at as soon as finals are over.

I was talking about MSN Spaces and how they stink. Microsoft copyrights the content of everything you post! I can’t believe there hasn’t been more of a hubub about this; why you’d want to give your thoughts and dreams and fears and such to Microsoft is beyond me.

Personally, I stopped liking MSN a long time ago. I stopped liking Hotmail when I set up a new account and had spam in it within five minutes. I stopped liking Windows when I sat down and used OS X for a few hours. Oh, wait. I’ve never liked Windows.

One more thing: I had to do a presentation for my ENG 383 David Ihrman class, and I chose to talk about the ways in which Modernism (specifically John Dos Passos) reflected and borrowed from the newly developed cinema, “cinematics” as I decided to call it. Ihrman liked it so much he’s making it a final exam question (how do these other texts that we read exhibit cinematics?) and he suggested that I should present it on Student Scholarship Day. So I think I will. I think, also, that I’ll be busting up the final exam in that course.

Now I just gotta do this fricken Poland paper.

One more one more thing: Josh pointed out Choose the Blue, a site that lets you compare how companies donated to either the Democratic or Republican party. I’ve found that most of the companies that I looked up donated to both, and the question is only a matter of how much more they donated to either party. Companies that stand out are Costco (98% to Democrats), Barnes & Noble (98%), Hard Rock Cafe (100%), Adobe (97%), Ticketmaster (95%), and Sony (70%).

My life is a fresh new hell every day.