Month In Review: April

Alright, another month in the books.  I’m pretty sure I failed miserably with my resolutions, but let’s get into it.

• Take better care of myself.  Yep, I completely dropped the ball on this one.  I’m still blaming that on spring break.  I did still eat pretty well, though, so I get to give myself partial credit.  But not as much partial credit as last month.  Ah well.  Onwards and upwards.
• Read every day.  Alright, no room for improvement on this one.  And I actually stuck to it, so yay!  I only read 2.5 books this month, but that’s okay.  The point is to read every day, not how many books I actually read.
• Blog every day.  I thought it was impossible to improve on this one, but I think I actually did this month.  I blogged twice in one day, which brings me to a grand total of 31 for the month.  Hooray!
• Work on my house.  Somehow I feel like I regressed even further on this one this month.  Yikes.  C’est la vie.

Okay, so good marks for two, below average marks for one, and abysmal marks for one.  Not great, but I can only improve, right?

In other April news, my (seeming) apathy semester is over now.  Thank God.  And the trek towards Philly starts tomorrow when I go to my parents’ house, so that’s freaking awesome.  And the Phillies ended the month on a kind of high note.  A win is a high note, right?  Honestly, I’m glad I stopped watching after the fourth inning.  I saved myself some stress 🙂

Until tomorrow.

This Is Why I Can’t Have Nice Things

Or: Why Won’t My Brain Just Let Me Enjoy Anything?

Almost two months ago I wrote nearly a thousand words about Mona and how much I loved their record and how scared I was that I was going to burn out on it.  Well, I haven’t burned out on it (woohoo), but this is along the same lines.

The other day I was watching their video for “Shooting the Moon,” as I am wont to do, and I was suddenly struck by the similarities between it and the video for 3 Doors Down’s “Duck and Run.”  (For the record, the similarities aren’t really as strong as I’d thought at the time.  I hadn’t watched the “Duck and Run” video for at least a decade, and the only parts I really remembered were not dissimilar to “Shooting the Moon.”  But also not dissimilar to countless other staged “live” performance music videos.)  And then I was gripped by panic that I would someday be as ashamed of liking Mona as I now am of once liking 3 Doors Down.

And it’s like, really, brain?  You have to jump to both the end and the worst case scenario?  Can’t I just enjoy this thing that I enjoy without worrying that I will cease to enjoy it at some point in the future?  And maybe it’s my fault for actively worrying about getting burned out on Mona.  Or maybe it’s my fault for being ashamed of once liking 3 Doors Down.  (Ashamed isn’t really the right word.  It’s more like, I haven’t actively chosen to listen to them in seven years.  With the exception of today when I looked for the “Duck and Run” video.)  But c’mon brain, give me a break.

Anyways, this is a thought that was bouncing around in my brain for days, but I didn’t have time to really deal with it when I had schoolwork to finish.  But now that the semester’s over I was able to get it out of my head (and hopefully I won’t have to deal with it anymore).

Until tomorrow.

“I Think I, I Could Use A Little Break/Today Was A Good Day”

Hells yeah today was a good day!

I got my paper turned in hours before the original deadline (seriously, professor, you can go screw).  Officially marking the last thing I had to do for this semester.

And I got all of that accomplished despite hitting my friend the snooze button a lot.  (Tomorrow morning I’m not even bothering with an alarm because I don’t have anything I need to wake up for!)

Plus and also, the Phillies won!  Woohoo!  And I figured out how to get the most out of MLB.tv so I was able to watch the Nats-Dodgers game (a/k/a Bryce Harper’s MLB debut).  (For the record, today marked the first time ever that I wanted to watch two games at once.  It’s not like I’d tried before and only figured it out today.)  I’m not entirely sure why I wanted to watch Harper’s debut; for the most part I’ve been pretty anti since I think he’s a ginormous douche.  A douche with prodigious talent, but a douche nonetheless.  But I watched.  And enjoyed.  Especially since the Nats lost Dodgers won.  The funny thing is, Strasburg was in the game as well, but MLB’s Twitter accounts couldn’t have cared less.  Clearly, poor Stephen is yesterday’s news.  Oh, and one other thing before I go to bed.  I know it’s been said by a million other people, but Vin Scully is really freaking awesome.  I may have to watch the Dodgers feed during the Phils-Dodgers series.

The subject for today’s post comes from one of my very favorite Something Corporate songs, “Watch the Sky.”

Until tomorrow.

Pffttt

This is both an accurate description of my feelings after watching tonight’s Phillies game (the second game in a row in which Doc gets handed the loss because the offense can’t get its collective head out of its collective ass – good job, guys) and my brain after writing 3,000 words for my last assignment.

Yeah, I wrote a 12-page paper today.  And I’m pretty proud of that 🙂  It’s not quite finished yet, but I got enough done for the day.  And besides, it’s not due ’til 11:59 PM tomorrow.

Scratch that.  It’s now due by 11:59 PM 5/3/12.  I may be the first and only person to get pissed off when a professor extends the deadline for an assignment, but pissed I am.

I checked the BlackBoard site about an hour ago just to verify that the assignment was, in fact, due tomorrow and not tonight.  And what do I see when I check?  An announcement from earlier today that he extended the deadline by five days.  Five fucking days!  I wouldn’t be mad except for the fact that he announced it today.  Today!  Don’t fucking tell me that my deadline has been pushed back the day before the original deadline.  That doesn’t do me any good.  I spent the past several days working my ass off to get the damn thing done by the original deadline.  And believe you me, I will turn it in before the original deadline.  Not least because at 11:59 PM 5/3/12 I will be in Philly (well, Cherry Hill) – home, home, home!!

The funny thing is that every time I think I can’t dislike this professor more, he sinks to a new low.  I’m so, so glad that I waited to complete my course evaluations.  Again, I may be the only student to bitch about the new, later deadline, but I don’t care.  I also get mad when other drivers don’t follow the rules of the road in order to be nice to me (this mostly happens when they stop without a stop sign to let me turn from my stop sign).  So fuck you very much, Dr. Asshat.  Enjoy your shitty evaluation.

I’m so mad that I’m swearing on my blog, which I mostly try to avoid doing.  This is a sign to stop.

Until tomorrow.

Economizing

Economizing really is a watchword for my life right now.  This is most obvious when it comes to money (duh), but right now I’m interested in economizing something else: words.  I need to economize my words.

I think I’m finished doing the research/reading for my last assignment of the semester.  Now I just have to write it.  And it is much too late to start the writing tonight, but I’m hopeful I’ll have a complete draft done by this time tomorrow.

But you can see why I need to save my words for that.

Until tomorrow.

There’s Light At The End Of This Tunnel

I only have to do one thing before the semester ends.  Woohoo!  Of course, it’s write a 10-12 page, single-spaced(!) paper for the class I completely loathe.  But whatever, it’s the only thing left to do.  I’m pretty excited about that.

In other news, I made my first ever Spotify playlist yesterday.

042412 playlist

It’s at about this time every year that I decide to make a playlist of the songs I am currently all about.  Of course, I normally do it in iTunes.  And that requires buying all of the songs I want.  But this year I went the Spotify route which is much cheaper 🙂  I was actually inspired to try making a Spotify playlist because of the news that WordPress now supports embedding stuff from Spotify.  And decided to do it yesterday to give myself a little respite from schoolwork.

The order of the tracks was kind of determined by Spotify’s Related Artists feature.  For some reason most of the artists I wanted to include were “related” to each other.  I don’t know that I necessarily buy that, but it made my life slightly easier, so that was cool.

Oh, one other thing to mention.  The Eve 6 song I included is actually called “Victoria,” but Spotify says it’s called “Curtain.”  I’ve run across albums that have incorrect track listings on Spotify before (Straylight Run’s Prepare to Be Wrong EP springs to mind), but it’s much funnier this time since it’s apparently some Spotify exclusive version of the new Eve 6 record.  You’d think they’d get the track listing correct on that, right?

What new song can you not stop listening to?

Until tomorrow.

Gorrammit

I nearly went to bed without blogging. Had that happened I would’ve used actual swear words instead of fake, Firefly swear words. So thank God for small favors, right?

I even had a potential blog topic bouncing around in my head, but it will have to wait for another day. I got distracted by the late-night Phillies game (extra base hits! runs! a win!). And then just as the game ended I remembered that the POTUS was gonna be slow jamming the news on Jimmy Fallon, so I had to watch that.

And now it is quarter of two in the morning and it is way past my bedtime (or it really should be, if I were a smart person with good sleep habits).

Until tomorrow.

What To Do?

So a couple of weeks ago my personal cheerleader gave me a “just because” Amazon gift card. (Have I mentioned that she’s awesome?) I used most of it on baseball books (yay!), but the remaining balance is burning a metaphorical hole in my virtual wallet.

But here’s my problem: I can’t decide what to buy. Should I get Brand New’s Daisy on vinyl or the Fifty Shades of Grey series? I am aware that these things have nothing in common except for my crazy head. But, y’know, they’re things that I want. I know that the gift card was intended for books, but the beauty of a gift card is that I can get whatever I want.

Why am I even thinking about this right now? Because I want to buy myself a “congratulations on surviving the semester” present. I deserve a damn present. But what to buy?

Oh good, I’ve now officially talked in circles. Time to go back to work on my take home final exam (blah).

Unrelated: I hate the Chevy Cruze Eco commercial where the guy is picking his parents up at the airport. Every time the dad says “that’s hippie talk!” I want to punch him in the face. It probably doesn’t help that I only seem to see it during Phillies losses, but damn that old guy is super annoying.

Until tomorrow.

What Is There To Say

I’ve been working, working, working (when I haven’t been feeling like crap) today.  Blah.  But I did get to use the word “obfuscate” in my paper (love that word!), so that didn’t suck.  And the Phillies had to go and lose a game that the Padres kept trying to hand them on a silver platter.  But at least the Flyers beat up on the Pens to advance to the next round in the playoffs.  And the Sixers’ magic number is down to one.  (I’d be more excited about these things if I cared about hockey and basketball, but whatever.)

In other news, it’s Daniel Johns’ (singer in Silverchair, ex-husband of Natalie Imbruglia) birthday today.  To celebrate, here are some Silverchair videos.  (It’s also my aunt’s birthday, but she doesn’t have awesome music videos on YouTube, so I’m feeling okay about my decision to focus on Daniel Johns instead.)

First up is “Israel’s Son.”  If there was one song I was bummed Silverchair didn’t play when I saw them at the TLA, it was this one.  Even more so than “Tomorrow.”  The intro to this song will always be one of my favorite things.

And on the other end of the Silverchair spectrum is “Miss You Love.”  Featuring lots of close-ups of Daniel Johns’ awesome glitter eyeshadow.

I hadn’t watched “Miss You Love” since I was in college (and I’d never seen “Israel’s Son” before), so this was an excellent plan.  But it’s back to the salt mines for me.

Until tomorrow.

Time Is Not On My Side

I’ve got two papers and a final exam (wait, what?) due in the next seven days. Blogging will probably be low on the priority list this week. On the plus side, I’ve made pretty good progress on one of the papers (the easy one).

At least the Phillies game was early by West Coast standards. But a 5:35 local time start is pretty weird. It was another loss but hey, at least it wasn’t a shutout. Thanks Ty Wigginton (did I really just type that?).

Oh and hey, congrats to Phil Humber on throwing the 21st perfect game in MLB history. And a huge “go screw yourselves” to MLB and FOX for their asinine blackout rules that meant almost nobody in the country got to watch it. Good job, guys. I want you to think long and hard about what you’ve done and how you can keep this from happening in the future. (Actually, I have the answer to that: drop the blackout rules.) I didn’t spend more money than I really should have for a Premium MLB.tv subscription to not be able to watch historic games in progress. Or, for that matter, to ever be forced to listen to Joe Buck and Tim McCarver call a game.

Whoops, this is longer than I thought it would be. I get verbose when I get rant-y.

Until tomorrow.