Draconis Combine

Ansurakusu desu.

My superpower, according to Emode.com, is invisibility -- and judging from my lack of posts recently, I've been putting it to good use. But, since I am home sickly from work at the paper, and since I should be doing other, more responsible things with my time (like, say, revising my paper for English class tomorrow), I thought I'd blog instead. (For those who might be concerned about my grades, don't be. All of those papers that I have put off doing have been turned in on time, and I've gotten good marks on all those that I've gotten back.)

To coin a Monty Python phrase, "I feel crappy..." I went to N'awlins Thursday for a college newspaper conference, and the day after we got back, I came down with wretchedness. So I called in to the paper tonight, got the editor-in-chief, and said, "Kate, I'm sick." To which she replied, "You sound sick."
"Yes," I said. "What should I do?"
"You should come into work!" she said. But she sounded like she was laughing -- albeit a bit hysterically, since I'm a copy editor, and if I don't make it, she has to cover for my lame ass. (I'm really sorry, Kate. I promised you godiva's, and by god, I'm gonna deliver on that).
"But... I have a fever of nearly 100, and I feel like shit. I got sick right after we got back from New Orleans," I said.
"You probably caught something awful on Bourbon Street," said Kate, sounding what might have been the tiniest bit pleased about that. That's fair. If she has to suffer, I should be suffering too. "Like hep C," she suggested.
"I think it's anthrax," I said, hoping to cheer her up. "I was sitting next to a lady from Tampa on the shuttle to the French Market on Saturday."
"Maybe so," she said, sounding cheered. "Okay. See you later, then."
At least if I die, there's the prospect of my being newsworthy.

I know, I know, I'm sure everyone thinks it's a terrible thing to joke about, but I can't help it. I have a very gallows sense of humour, and so I have to constantly fight the urge to make cracks. Like when my Japanese teacher asked me if I was "genki" (healthy) today. In Japanese, they don't do the standard "I'm fine, how'r'you?" thing. If your sick, they damn well expect you to say so. So I said "maa, maa," which is a good non-committal noise, and she asked me if I was sick. "Byouki desuka?"
"Un. Chotto byouki desu." yeah, a little bit.
"Arerugi desuka?" Allergies? (I spend some of the fall and much of the spring in allergic misery, and bless her, Matsuda-sensei never forgets it.)
And here I fight down the wild urge to say "Ansurakusu desu," and see how fast the classroom clears out. But I don't know if she'd be amused, and we must not piss off the sensei. Right. So I just mumble something about a cold and go on. No one appreciates my jokes.

And the only other fun thing that happened to me today was after I picked up my brother to take him home after classes. (We go to the same college, yes.) It's 12:30, and I'm feeling particularly wretched, and he turns to me and says, "I want an icecol'coc'cola." (One word, there, due to the influence of Laris' brother-in-law).
"Well, I hope you have one at home," I tell him. There is a pause.
"I said I wanted an icecol'coc'cola. Not an icecol' beeeyatch."
"Why? Do you have one of those at home?" I ask, kinda puzzled.
"No, I'm sitting next to one."
I let this percolate through the misery-induced haze for a minute. "Oh."
"Don't you want an icecol'coc'cola?"
Now, it's not even 60 degrees outside today. Not exactly what I'd call "icecol'coc'cola weather," were I to be asked to describe such a phenomenon. Plus I'm sick. So I whine. "No.. I'm sick."
My brother puts a comforting hand on my shoulder, and says with great sympathy, "Awww. Puddin'. We'll get you an icecol'coc'cola and put some Robitussin in it."

penned by Alsafi  at 9:17 PM

argh. Netscape just ate my half-finished post. And threw me into my kanji kit software, for no good reason, so I just typed about two lines in Japanese before I even noticed that all the rest of it was gone! sigh. Before you ask, Ali, I put up with Netscape because IE (which I normally like better, despite it being Of The Dark Side) one, takes forever and a day to load on my pathetically slow-ass computer, and two, will let me view webpages in Japanese, but won't let me read the text part of my email in Japanese, which leads me to send stupid emails to my friend Mihoko, asking her to resend emails that I got, but that I couldn't read because of my stupidstupid browser. rrrrrrRRRRRRrrr, as Andromeda used to say.

You should always be listening in case of ninjas while you're peeing.
-these words of wisdom are brought to you by Laris, AKA RK, of the Patterson Posse.

Well, I am not procrastinating working on an English paper. Err... not that I know of, anyway. Instead, I am procrastinating working on the stories that are supposed to be going into tomorrow's campus newspaper.

Electric chickens!

So it occurs to me that I totally failed to mention, in my Monday night entry, how kind and good and sweet my friends Ali and Laris are to me, that they would drive all the way out to my workplace just to deliver me food. I am a loved little scorpion.

So what am I doing, you ask? I am ... (drumroll, please) ... putting off writing a paper for another one of my English classes. Yup.

I found out Tuesday that I may be eligible to go to Japan in the spring, to spend a year studying at Chukyo University in Nagoya. The catch is, I have to get all my ducks in row and get everything in by November 1. So for the past couple days I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off (these metaphors are really beginning to fowl me up. ^.^ ), trying to get professors to write me letters of academic recommendation, figuring out what classes are offered at Chukyo Gakuin and what kind of transfer credit I can ask for for taking them, filling out forms, and basically stressing out -- piling all the ISEP stuff on top of all the mad amounts of homework that I have to do. S'pretty crazy in my corner of the garden these days. @.@

Electric chickens go "bukbukbuk...buk... *zzzzt*!"

It occurs to me, after some thought and (more importantly) some sleep, that I think they do, in fact, speak French in Morrocco...

Just makin' little crackwhore noises...

And putting off revising an English paper. I bet you guys are all (hmm. Mebbe "all" is too strong a word for the maybe 2 people who actually read this...) Anyway, I bet you're thinking, "Wow. Alsafi's got a hella lot of English papers to procrastinate writing." (This, by the way, is true.) "Her English prof must be muy kibishii*!"

This is not so true. What it is, is that I'm taking a total of 3 English classes -- 9 hours of my life a week, sunk into depravity and low vice in the English department. I am a glutton for punishment, ne.

*kibishii - a Japanese word meaning "slave-driving Scylla personality that makes the witch in "Rapunzel" (the original version, with the eye-scratching-out-ness) look like a right grandmotherly old lady."

Aaaaanyway, I'm bored and stuck at work, and so I thought I'd post the Manon Lascaut story.

Manon Lascaut, hereafter referred to as ML, because I'm tired of typing the HTML tags, is Puccini's first opera. You gotta give the man credit for perserverance, 'cos if my first opera had been anything like ML, I'd have definitely stuck to sonatas and suchlike thereafter.

The music for ML is not bad, you see. But the plot...
Well, Mademoiselle Manon Lascaut -- the title character -- is a gold-digging airhead without enough sense to come in out of the rain. She's headed off to a convent (yeah right) when she runs into some nice, poor, (dumb) poety-scholar-type who whisks her off to Paris, madly in love. Keep in mind, this opera is in Italian.
Flash forward 3 months. Now Manon is the mistress of a wealthy (slimy) old guy who tried to kidnap her in the previous act. Apparently, she quickly tired of being poor, dropped the scholar like a hot rock, and went for the rich dude. Well, the scholar-dude doesn't like this, comes to woo her back after winning a bunch of money playing Go Fish, the old dude gets mad, and Manon and the scholar (whose name I cannot, for the life of me, remember. I think he was a baritone. I never can care enough to remember the baritones) wind up on a boat headed for America. See, Manon just couldn't leave without the jewellry the old dude had given her, and he had her arrested for stealing it. She wouldn'ta gotten caught, either, but she was such a ditz that she had to spend about half-an-hour agonizing AFTER they told her the cops were coming. Che. And the scholar comes to try and free her before she gets transported, can't, and so signs on the boat himself. Clearly, he spends most of this opera thinking with his little head.
Skip the boat ride. Now the unhappy couple is trudging through a desert (!) outside of New Orleans (?!). Manon whines a lot about how she's thirsty and she can't walk, and so he leaves her (at her request) to go find help. I don't remember if he finds anything, but he comes back, and she finally expires. At great length. Maybe he dies, too.

When we went and saw this opera, last fall, my dearly beloved roommate made the nice lady sitting in front of us laugh out loud by turning to me early in the second act, putting her head down on my shoulder, and saying, "I'm going to sleep. Wake me at the last act. I want to see her die."
After the opera, I posed two solutions to the problematical desert-near-New Orleans business. One -- the ship had been blown off course, and they were really lost somewhere outside of Casablanca, which they had mistaken for New Orleans (Hey! It could happen! If they were speaking Italian in France, they could very well have mistaken Morroccan for French!). Or, ML could just be updated to take advantage of new information. Manon could be eaten alive by mosquitoes, then devoured by an alligator while her boy was sucked under into the muck of the bayou and never heard from again! And then there could be a big zydeco party.

My friend the Puccini apologist says I should be nicer -- ML was his first opera, after all, and everyone's first opera would be better off buried, she says.

To which I say: Mozart, yo.

Laaaab attendant! I bliiinded myself with the mouuuuuse!

So I come into school today to find that there was a power surge at just after midnight last night, and the computers are almost all fried. Apparently Physical Plant--which generates all of our power on campus--flooded, causing a massive power spike all over campus. Most of the buildings don't even have lights. And when they turned the power back on (which is the only way we have any lights), it started a fire in the history building. The leetspeak phrase of the day is: j00 R fUk720Rd.

Now the power has just come back up in its entirety, and we see the actual extent of the damage. We were worried that we had lost 10 of the 14 new Macintosh G4s that we have just begun to get installed here in the English department--about $25,000 worth of new equipment. Now it seems that we may have only lost 3 of the flatscreen monitors--only $1500. Not bad, relatively speaking, but we are so strapped for cash at my school that I shudder to think what kind of repercussions will come from even that loss. And I haven't even asked what (if anything) has happened in the PC lab. (I'm a Macgrrl, so the loss of the shiny G4s is what reallly distresses me.)

And as soon as I am either less or more hacked off about it, I'll post the "Electric Chickens" Theory of Computer Failure.

The sad thing is, it's not that I don't have anything to write about (I have plenty, believe me. Plenty.), it's that lately I just don't have the time to think, much less blog. I have many many papers due very soon, we're approaching midterms at breakneck speed, and I've been hangin' out with the Patterson Posse whenever I do have a free moment!

Well, here I am back, after what seemed like the shortest fall break on record. Sigh. We only get a weekend + 2 days for fall break (I know, all you people with real jobs are really sympathetic, aren't you?), and it seems like all my professors think "Ah-HAH! They have 'Fall Break!' Let's give them about 60 hours worth of work to get done during their 'Fall Break!' Muahahahah." I'm sure it's something like that -- a conspiracy of professors.
... ... Actually, come to think of it, I get great amusement out of imagining my professors (or any single one of my professors, really) rubbing their hands together and going "Muahahahah." If I ever get to be a professor, that's definitely something I will have to do.

Actually, I shouldn't whine too much. If I'm swamped, it's nobody's fault but my own, because while I didn't get much relaxing done over the break, I sure as hell didn't do much in the way of schoolwork, either. I did go and see The Others, though, which is an awfully creepy movie, despite my roommate figuring out the plot twist about halfway through and explaining it to us. She still shrieked at one point, causing both me and our other friend to shriek as well. Like little girls. How shaming. I also finally got around to watching the copy of Neil Gaiman: Live At the Aladdin that I bought from the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund back at Dragon*Con (yes, I am a lame gamer freak -- leave me alone). The man should be nominated for godhood, if he hasn't been already.

Other than that, I went to the Crafts Fair and bought Chanukah/Solstice/Yuletide/Christmas presents (have I got everyone? Oh, and Oseibo, Kwanzaa, Ramadan and Chinese New Year. My group of friends is pretty diverse, and I like to keep all my bases covered. ^.^ ). Oh, yeah, and the opera last night -- one of my friends was singing with the chorus, in Turandot. Whee, Puccini, the guy who brought us "the desert just outside of New Orleans" in Manon Lascaut. Actually, Turandot is pretty good, especially music-wise. I'm not the biggest Puccini fan in the world, but this was pretty. The story -- well, Puccini was none too particular about getting his exotic locales very accurate, his heroines are -- to a woman -- flatter than stick-on window decals, and his heroes all seem to have taken their brains out and played with them at some point prior to the start of the opera -- maybe while the orchestra was warming up. I'll tell the Manon Lascaut story at some point, and you'll see what I mean. But, the music was lovely (of course, my friend gave a stunning performance as Peasant/Court Lady #3), the costumes were really cool, and the sets were... stunning. Really. We kept bursting into spontaneous applause when the curtain came up between acts, because the sets were that beautiful.

Testin', testin', one two three.

Procrastinating studying for an Art History quiz at the moment, and talking gaming with the Patterson Posse.
I found my brother yesterday, and have yet to do anything evil to him. He got out of his (richly deserved) punishment in the usual manner -- by making my laugh so hard I nearly peed like a little frog. I never can remember what it is he says that kills me, but whatever it is, he invariably says it. Of course, my brother and the guy who does the "Alan Greenspan: H4x0r Economist" comics ( http://www.rdwarf.com/~kioh/ ) are the only ones who can make "long term depreciation" sound funny.
Anyway, I found him at the JET Programme seminar that we got out of Japanese class early to go to. (This has happened TWICE in the last semester. Not the seminar -- the getting out of Japanese class early. I think the world is coming to an end. I can count on the fingers of one elbow the number of times I've gotten out of Japanese class early for any reason other than that I finished my exam ahead of time!) I felt all fly at the seminar, since I was one of three third-year students there (everyone else was a first- or second-year). I got to be all "shitsurei shimasu" and shit -- to this very serious looking vice-consul-type-lady. I'm so going to Japan after I graduate.

god I'm tired. I don't know why -- I actually got to bed at something approximating a decent hour last night, but I'm still just utterly wiped out. z.z This morning, I kept waking up 3 minutes before my watch alarm (I'm still living out of a box, and while I have *found* my clock radio, I have no place to hook it up yet. So I set my handy-dandy watch alarm, stick it REAL close to my ear, and hope it's enough to wake me up. No Bob Edwards at violence-inducing volume for me, at least not yet.) and setting it forward another fifteen minutes. Sort of like hitting the snooze button, only requiring a hell of a lot more dexterity, meaning that I have to be more awake to do it, meaning that it takes longer for me to get back to sleep again, so I have less unconciousness-time before I have to do it again (or before the horrible "beep-beep, beep-beep" of the Damned goes off in my ear). Which is how I managed to get up 30 minutes later than usual, and still only have a net gain of about 3 minutes of sleep. As soon as I wake up enough, I think I'll be crabby.

And on top of it all, I could have just slept a whole extra hour, blissfully, and still made it to class on time, if my brother had just called and told me that he was spending the night in a friend's dorm room, so I didn't have to go pick him up. But no. This I do not find out until I have gone to get him, and my hour of sleep potential has fled. -.- I must think of something particularly dark and twisted to avenge myself on him. ^.^

It doesn't love me.

grr. I'm trying to change what this sucker looks like, and I'm getting -nowhere-. Fast.

This is what I get for procrastinating on my English paper, isn't it?

Okay, after much headache and anger, this is sorta kinda working. It's not where I want it, it's not doing quite what I want it to, but it's up. -.-

Testing, 1..2..