Well this has jumped the shark.

I never really watched Dancing with the Stars in the first place, but really?! Bristol Palin? The Situation? These people aren't celebrities, they're hicks with overly televised private lives. I would also like to point out that there's a difference between a "Star" and tabloid fodder.

At this point, they should just change it to "Dancing with D-List Socialites, and the occasional singer/actor/comedian from the 1980s."

AND ONE MORE THING

Rick but not a Rickroll. And surprisingly really, really good.

Back to school~

Last post before I leave for school SUPER EARLY tomorrow. Like I think I need to wake up at 4:30 or some crazy shit like that. Kinda crazily shuffling things in my duffles to get them all under 50 lbs... I think I managed but we'll see. Also rounded up some tchotchkes to decorate the dorm with. It's looking like three garden gnomes, an Ugly Doll, and a cool thing I'll post at the end.

Got my hair dyed today, just a darker shade of brown but I like it. :) Nothing crazy - I've always wondered what I would look like as a redhead and I will have to keep wondering, because I know that in real life I would look pretty atrocious with fakey orange hair.

MY PLUSHIE FIGHTS EVIL BY MOONLIGHT. :)

You are running out of steam.

After giving it an afternoon to think it over, I think I like Funeral better than The Suburbs when it comes to Arcade Fire.

An issue I've noticed a lot of bands have is they fall into "Every track sounds the same" syndrome. It's hard to describe, but basically it's when you're listening to a CD on repeat and instead of really getting any sense of it, it just sort of devolves into noise because there's nothing really impressive about it. Occasionally one song or a line or two might stick out, but in general the whole thing is sort of... bland. I never found Funeral to have this problem, but The Suburbs definitely falls into this.

Am I the only one who thinks it's weird for a Canadian band to sing about American politics and pathos from the perspective of an American teenager, especially when the band members are in their late twenties/early thirties?

I can easily think of a bunch of bands that hit their stride and put out albums that don't all sound alike. The Killers' Sam's Town is this. Considered it was followed up with Day and Age, it wasn't a fluke. The Decemberists can oscillate wildly within one album, and I wouldn't have it any other way. It's just that after the brilliance that was Funeral, The Suburbs feels like a regression. I like it okay, but I haven't found any new favorite songs on here.

For the record, this is my favorite Arcade Fire song.

So I did a little research...

Most of the quotes and accusations in all of the articles on Caster Semenya come from two sources: Jemma Simpson, aged 26, and Diane Cummins, aged 36.

Now, really, it's easy to imagine this sort of thing evolving from locker room talk:

1. "Ugh, she's just so fast! It's not fair!"

Becomes,

2. "Too bad she's got a face like a dude. At least we're prettier than her."

Becomes,

3. "Did you hear she's really a man?"

High school bullying. Pure and simple. It would be understandable if all these girls were actually anywhere close to being in high school. However, instead what you're looking at is two grown women picking on a teenaged girl because they're pissed that she's better than them. So Caster Semenya gets put through a humiliating ordeal on the international news because she's not some blonde haired blue eyed anglo saxon and they get off scot free?

She's looking a bit girlier at the Berlin world championships this year. How much of that do you think is personal preference, and how much of that is her trying to bend to public opinion of what a female athlete should look like?

"Essentially we are running against a man."

Y'all are just a bunch of sore losers.

Keep running, Caster. Haters gonna hate, but you rock.

Back in middle school, I was on the cutting edge of music. I listened to Guster and Dashboard Confessional and Something Corporate before any of my friends did. And then at some point I stopped caring and didn't pick up Fall Out Boy or The Decemberists or Ben Folds or Lady Gaga until everyone else had been listening to them for ages.

But damn it I love Mumford and Sons.

Bromance is officially in the dictionary.

Along with these other bits of lingo: Muggle, blamestorming, Gaydar, Grrrl, Threequel, Mini-me, Screenager, Cyber-slacking (what I am doing right now - sort of), Lookism, Frankenfood, Riffage, Bouncebackability, Prebuttal, Ego-surfing, and Meatspace.

Now, I can sort of see a use for muggle as a word, but I don't totally like the way they've chosen to describe it - having heard it used to describe "non-theater people" in the company of "theater people," I would rather see it defined as "an ordinary person, as opposed to whatever exclusive group that is describing them." Or something like that.

But really - Meatspace? Riffage? Threequel? Grrrl? Most of these words are such transient internet slang that in ten years no one will even remember what they mean! Let alone imagine using them in an actual sentence.

Metrosexual had better not be in the dictionary. Or at least, if it is, please let it be listed as a synonym for "fop."

Also, their definition of "gaydar" does not explain why it is also possessed by like 90% of straight women. (C and I have narrowed this down to a factor of natural selection - possession of gaydar assists in selecting a mate; back when our ancestors were living in caves and couldn't waste energy courting a male if he was more interested in playing Hide-the-Salami with another dude it was helpful to know in advance. I wonder how you say "homosexual" in Neanderthal?)

Clarification: I know that modern humans are not direct descendants of Neanderthals. (Most of us, anyway.)

New York Man loses pants, gets an article in the Times.

This is news? Really?! I would say it was a slow day but even that doesn't excuse human interest pieces about misplacing your dry cleaning.

Back to school in eight days (by our counting method.) Start spreading the news, I'm leaving next week! I'm going to be a part of it! New York, New York!

XKCD is so true, so often.

Sometimes I wonder why I got out of Star Wars fandom... But every time I wonder, I realize I don't have the energy to get back in. I haven't spoken to most of my friends from those days in ages.

(I kind of miss them, but when some of them IM me out of the blue and I realize how much people change in five years, I don't miss them as much.)

I had this friend. No, the better phrase would be "I had this classmate." I don't know if he was my friend or not, I'd only known him for that one year, when we landed next to each other in English and History. I hardly knew anything about this guy, just that we'd rib each other about passing papers up and ask what we'd gotten for number three.

Anyway, he died. Not recently - over two years ago now. And it was sad and it was tragic in the way that it is always sad and tragic when a young person dies. And even though I hardly knew him, the way everyone spoke about him afterwards made it clear that we'd lost someone really special. But I think I was just taking their word for it, because I hardly knew him.

This doesn't belittle the tragedy any - we lost a classmate that day, someone that some of us had lost someone really close to us, someone they'd known since elementary school and genuinely loved.

But it wasn't my tragedy to be sad over. I could be sad because it happened, but you could have substituted any number of people into the role of victim and I would have probably felt the same. And I regret this. I regret going through the motions and not really understanding them, and for not getting to know this quasi-friend better when I had the chance.

Live every day like you may never see your friends again. :)

Leez.

The latest batch of No Love letters

Dear harried soccer mom in spinning class,

Please tell your children that staring into the classroom window and signalling frantically to you that they want to leave every five minutes will not make the class end sooner, and in fact is just uncomfortable and distracting for everyone.

No love,

Me

Dear hopelessly out of touch spinning instructor,

Having two music mixes that you alternate every other week does not count as variety, it counts as "I have been coming to this damn class of yours every week for three months get some better tunes." Your "fake-out" endings of songs are not "cute" or "funny" and they only make me want to stop pedaling and get off my bike and strangle you every time you chuckle and say, "Bet you thought we were done!"

Also please do not refer to events that nebulously happened in class "last week." We were all there. It did not happen. We were there the week before last week. It did not happen then, either. You are an exercise instructor, not a stand-up comic.

No love,

Me

Today:

There were shenanigans. We wound up at [the same] Starbucks twice within an hour. The male barrista was wearing blue and gray argyle socks under his cargo shorts. I guess because he's behind the counter like 85% of the time most people never find out.

Apparently my habit of twisting thick strands of my hair into loose knots is weird?

Got home, wrote my bio for YPI. They only give us about 75 words, which means they have to be pretty straightforward. You have enough room to list your accomplishments and hope they sound impressive, and include a tiny bit of wit before you're out of space. With longer bios I can hide behind cute and self-depreciating humor to downplay myself, but this is more like, "Just spit it out and be done!"

Then I tried to write a bit of "Lifetime Achievement" but it's slow going. I am so unproductive when I have no deadlines...

Runaways and Vagabonds 2

Apparently, according to my mother, she doesn't even remember the occasion listed in my last post - it doesn't hold a candle to the time when I was seven or eight and went on an adventure with the pool cleaner's kids from next door.

I remember this much about that:

• It was a Friday afternoon. I was in my friday clothes from Jewish day school.
• I was wearing these horrible too-big-for-me blue suede Sketchers

And that's about all I remember. I recall sneaking out the back gate and going down the vacant lot to the river. I remember sneaking around the back fence and across the open back part of the yard that faced the river to meet up with these kids. I remember we trooped across at least five or six yards before we got caught.

I do not remember the aftermath, which my mother describes as this:

"I chewed you out so hard! I told you were never allowed to leave the backyard again! But then that night when I was tucking you in you said it was the most fun you'd ever had in your life and I felt bad, that my daughter was so sheltered that the most fun she'd ever had was going five houses down and I wouldn't even let her leave the back yard, so after that I stopped trying to pen me in."

So apparently no one cares about me running away on my bike. (Mom says it doesn't even count as running away, because I didn't pack a bag and didn't get very far.)

Not as adventurous as she thinks she is,

Leez.

Vagabonds and runaways

When I was nine, I tried to run away from home on my bike.

I got as far as the neighboring subdivision, and then spent the next hour and a half riding around and hiding from my friends' moms who I was sure were looking for me and out to report me to my mom. I went home when it started getting dark and I got hungry, and hoped that they'd felt sorry that I'd been gone. No one really cared. I didn't even get in trouble.

Today I wondered why my mom was always so antsy about me crossing that intersection. It's a three-way stop on a T shaped corner on a two lane road.

Earworms

Does anyone know how to get a Scissor Sisters song out of your head? It's been playing on repeat for the last two days.

No?

Well, have a youtube video so you can hear the kind of hell I've been in. Catchy, catchy hell. Not to mention possibly the strangest music video I've ever seen... well, maybe not. Maybe Mika and Lady Gaga are weirder.

But that was pretty strange. No, really, I have no idea what I just watched - do you? The song is still stuck in my head, though.

Today I read the entire archives of the webcomic Girls With Slingshots. Definitely worth a read, good stuff.

Three weeks until I move back into university housing! Four until classes start! HOORAY!

War of Attrition

Loading dishwashers in my house is as follows:

• Someone runs the dishwasher and doesn't unload it, because they walk away while it does its thing.
• People pile dishes on the counter, either because the dishwasher is full, the dishwasher is running, or the dishwasher is clean.
• NO ONE LIKES TO PUT DISHES AWAY.
• The clean dishes sit there for a day and a half.
• It becomes a war of staying power: Who will buckle first and change loads?

My dad plays dirty. He eats the smelliest leftovers in the fridge and leaves the dishes on the counter when he goes to work, effectively forcing my hand. If I want a kitchen that doesn't smell like old fish and stale milk, I have to unload this dishwasher in order to get the dirties off the counter.

When I go to school I am going to wash stuff by hand when I am finished using it so I will not have to deal with this.

The 'Tane diaries: conclusion

Dear Accutane:

It's been a great five months but I think we're done here. It's been great.

Leez.

(Took my last pill this morning, yay!)

Also, I really hope this is just a cosmic viral ad for next season.

Running themes:

Conversations about coffee, absent fathers, conversations between no more than two people at a time, the supernatural, growing up, not wanting to deal with adulthood, dead homosexuals, conversations about the artistic process, and pretentious references to outside sources.

Someday I will write a play that avoids these.