Sometimes Truth...

Man Torches Oregon Church During Service
I won't copy the whole article but here are a few exerpts:

SALEM, Ore. - A man ranting about "the blood" burst into a church sanctuary during a service, sloshed fuel onto people and started a fire, police and church officials said Thursday.

Parishioners were able to smother the flames with their coats, said the Rev. Scott Erickson, pastor of the Peoples Church. Two older women from the congregation were burned when their clothing caught fire.

The man ran down the aisle but was caught when Laverne Marks, 65, stuck out her foot and tripped him, said Erickson, who wasn't inside the church at the time but spoke to members.

Hooray for her! It's funny how a 65-year-old woman can take down a paranoid schizophrenic - who is attempting to burn down a building - without breaking every single one of his ribs. Perhaps the Portland Police department should call her up and learn something.

A friend sent me a link today about some sort of real life zombie disease that was going around Cambodia, but it was dated April 2005, so it's not quite as interesting as I thought it was. Well hell, now that I've mentioned it, I might as well link it, right? Here ya go:There Has Been a Small Outbreak of 'Zombism'

Haha, for some reason when I read that headline I heard John Cleese, "THERE IS NO NEED TO PANIC." Afterall, it's just a small outbreak. Good lord.

Voting!

Got my ballot today, filled it out and put a stamp on it. Just gotta get in the mail! Exciting! Now I've got to wait for the rest of the country to get their votes in. Hooray for absentee ballots!

I'm excited for the (hopeful) takeover of Congress by the Democrats. Excited and nervous.... they can't fuck this up. It's such an opportunity and there are so many things that need to get done right away.

Spent Saturday in my hometown dropping flyers on doorsteps in my old neighbhorhood. Once again the development of the large chunk of land in front of my house is on the ballot. It lost 4 to 1 last year, so I'm not sure how it got approved to get on the ballot again. My flyering partner graduated high school a few years before me and it was cool to get to talk to him. It's nice to hear that so many kids from that crappy little town have turned into such intelligent adults. It was an absolutely gorgeous day; perfect for walking around the hill.

I finally made it back to the Sunday session at the pub down the street. There were only a handful of musicians there and no mandolins, but it was lovely nonetheless. I was actually able to name a few tunes! Now I just have to learn to play 'em. :-)

I'm sleeping in!

The linguistics class thing (see previous post) WILL thwart my plans to graduate next December. Dammit! Looking on the bright side though, having an extra term means that I don't need to cram in 16 credits every quarter - goodbye 8am class!!!! Phwew! I feel better already! Unfortunately, that means I only get a partial refund on it and the VA is going to want money back since they're paying me for 16 credits not 12. That should be fun. *eye roll*

Although I'm eager to get out and be an international shovelbum for awhile, I have to remind myself that these are my off years. I get paid to sit around in classrooms learning about neat things. I don't have to work, just study and live. It's like a multi-year vacation. Today we learned about dinosaurs! And birds! And to think I get *paid* for this...

Thinking Block

If anyone could come up with, and find a way to bottle, an anti-procrastination remedy, you'd be a gazillionaire. Not that I have a gazillion dollars to give you, but I'm sure the collective of proscratinators would come up with something... eventually. I've wasted the entire weekend doing absolutely nothing because I can't formulate words for these stupid papers. Still looking at a blank Word document, drooling slightly.

Oh, and I just found out that the stupid linguistics class I took last semester didn't actually count for my major, so now I have to take another. Dammit, at least it boosted my GPA (easiest class EVER). I just hope that this doesn't thwart my quest to graduate next December - that's right, if Sara can actually get these stupid term papers written she can graduate in ONE YEAR!

Update: It's 1:39am and I've got two pages to go. YEEEEHAWW!!! But damn is being long-winded redundant. I, personally, am all about the brevity. Unfortunately it seems much of academia is focused on reaching a minimum length of content, rather than a minimum amount of... ya know... relevance. I have to keep telling myself, "I'm writing to their standards, not mine." I would never write such drivel on my own... yeahhhhh.. So sleepy...

Scholarly Woes

-- Alternatively titled, "Why I Should Just Get a Job Installing Posh Lightbulbs and Chastise the Customers on their Embarassing Ethnocentrism" --

It turns out that social theory is not my favorite class. While I do find it mildy interesting that in some East Asian cultures it is not only acceptable for a woman to marry her mother's younger brother (that would be her uncle, to those of you as excited about kinship diagrams as I am), or her mother's brother's son (her cousin. see, isn't this fun?), but actually preferable, I don't really find it all that surprising. Different people do different things, that's all there is to it. It all seems so screamingly obvious to me that I don't see the need for all the monstrous anthologies and academic analysis, and I certainly don't think it's worth paying $600 to hear such revelations. But then I watch the news and hear some politician or preacher claim to have a handle on what is "natural" and what is "unnatural" about what people want to marry whom and how they organize their families, and I realize that some people just don't get it. That only angers me more, though, as I feel it should be these ignorant asshats that have to spend their Friday nights writing term papers on the complexities of sex versus gender in modern kinship theory, not me.

In the good news department I got my posh lightbulbs in the mail! I'm using the word 'posh' because my French-Canadian friend who was finishing her Master's degree at the same place I was doing my field school just wrote me an email today. She's now a real life archaeologist and gets PAID to do archaeology in Ireland! Imagine! She liked using the word 'posh' and placed it front of nearly every noun possible, and it was one of our favorite words among the field school students. Now it's in my head and I'm going to use it, dammit.

Anyway, my posh lightbulbs are posh because they're the supercool spiraling energy-saving kind. I had to order them over the internet, because I can't just have normal 60w lights in the places I live. No no no, I have to have 75w dimmable, or 100w 3-way and they just don't sell those kinds of ultraposh lights in the hardware stores 'round these parts. I was a little wary of ordering them this way, as the last time I tried to I spent a great deal of money ('a great deal of money' in Sara's world is about fifty bucks) only to find out that they didn't fit in my decidely unposh, $10 Kmart lamps. Not only did I have to throw those posh bulbs away, but when I moved both of the unposh lamps broke and had to be tossed as well. But victory was mine, finally! The bulbs fit, barely, and I even washed the glass covers on the light fixtures so the new posh glow from the new posh bulbs wouldn't be marred by the presence of an alarming amount of dead bugs.

Update: During another vain attempt to read one of the articles integral to my papers, I was reminded of a story. Last year, or the year before that, there were some measures on the ballot regarding gay marriage (whether for it against it, I don't remember). As we drove past a gigantic billboard that read, "ONE MAN, ONE WOMAN. brought to you by the Church of Latter Day Saints," my dad snorted and said, "Oh like they're ones to talk!" [note: see "Mormons, polygamy."]

It's Friday the 13th...

...AND I saw a black cat! Even stopped to pet her. As I did I recalled a newspaper article I read long ago that recommended that owners of black cats keep their pets inside on Friday the 13th, as there is a huge number of such cats being killed for superstitious reasons. Isn't the mind a funny thing? Half the time I can't even remember where I parked my bike and yet I can conjure up an insignificant newspaper article that I read a number of years ago and whose validity may be questionable. Sheesh.

Three papers. Two due Monday, one on Tuesday. Also a two quizzes on Tuesday and an in-class essay on Thursday. Screw this school crap.

Look, it's me!

There's the wonderful little site where you can create your own South Park character. I took the base of that and edited it a bit in Paint to bring you... ME! I'm done with my major assignments for the week and I'm taking a little break, as next week I have THREE papers, TWO quizzes, and ONE in-class essay. The week after that I have a paper, a quiz and a midterm. So I'm relaxing while I can. Yeah, that's it...

Rain

I like the sound of rain. No matter where I've found myself in the world, the pitter-patter of rain on rooftops, sidewalks and trees has always soothed and relaxed me, reminded me of home, and helped me sleep. I feel warm and comforted, snuggled up with pillows under my blanket or sipping some hot coffee.

However, what I don't like is the sound of rainwater gurgling through the gutters and drains. That sound brings images of rotted leaves matted to the sidewalk; of the drowning darkness from November through April that leaves me struggling for a breath of sunlight; memories of mornings dim and damp that I walked to school, alternating which hand warmed in a pocket, while the other held on with cold and stiff fingers to the trumpet case that banged against my knee.

Winters in Oregon are long and dull. We don't get too many exciting storms, just slow and mind-numbing drizzle for months and months on end. I can't stand winter in any part of the world, though. If I had it my way, I'd travel back and forth between the southern hemisphere and this half of the planet, giving myself a perpetual summer.

Several times in the past few weeks I've thought, "this is it. The last nice day until June," but I've been wrong in nearly every case.

Monday, after my great-uncle's funeral, I decided to go on a drive and let my feet and hands guide the route. I found myself headed east through the Columbia River Gorge, one of the most beautiful parts of an already beautiful state. I think I was seeking the desert, but settled on an area near Hood River, which lies in the strange middle ground of not-quite-western-forest and not-quite-eastern-desert. I ended up parked at lookout that gave gorgeous views of both Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams. I wrote in my journal, reflected on life, and as I watched the sun start to slip to the other side of Hood I was certain that I had picked the last day of the year for such a view to be possible.

Saturday, an innocent bid to finally empty the recycling bin that had been full of bricks (don't ask) turned into several hours worth of yardwork, taking down old grapevines, raking, sweeping and composting. I haven't lived in a place that had a yard to work in (and no, shoveling snow and/or picking up pine needles off the sidewalk in front of the barracks does not count) in quite some time - six years to be exact - and I'd forgot how much I enjoy it. I was almost disappointed when everything was finished for the day. "Are you sure you don't have a hole to dig somewhere?" I wanted to ask.

Here's to nine months of soggy shoes!

Ugh, Tuesdays

8:ooam class is killing me. I forgot my bike lock, so I had to turn around and get it. Instead of getting to school nice and early, I only had enough time to change clothes (I sweat like an obese man eating a hotdog) and not enough to buy coffee. So I sat through a 2-hour geography lecture on stuff that I would normally find fascinating, but instead I found myself focused on keeping my eyes open and not being too obvious when checking my watch every 3-5 seconds. I need to read some more about genetics for my next class but I still can't think and the coffee is too damn hot to drink. Arrgghh.

There's a guy in both of my Tuesday/Thursday classes who I am sure is former or current military. The interesting thing about him is that he wears these shirts with designs that look like bad English wallpaper (I know, I know, as opposed to good English wallpaper). It really seems like someone ripped off a parlor wall and turned it into a collared shirt - dark green or yellow with swirls of dark-colored flowers. They're hideous, but also rather amusing for my sleepy, bored self sitting behind him. Today, however, he's wearing a boring orange t-shirt that says something about Homeland Security. Boo.