Something To Brighten Your Monday

FML is a pretty funny website: people share their woes and misfortunes with others in a structured manner. The posts start with “Today…” and end with “FML,” which stands for “fuck my life.” They make you laugh and wince in sympathy, because pretty much any of these could happen to anyone, but they’re not exactly uplifting… and that’s where GMH comes in.

GMH stands for “Gives Me Hope,” and it was a website response to FML. The creators of the website explain, “We love FML, but FML can be a downer. And we’re completely exhausted by the negativity of the mainstream media… [GMH is] like Chicken Soup for the Soul – the 21st Century, Twitter-style version.” The website is full of short stories of inspiration events, kind actions by friends, and the little things that people do. A couple of examples follow:

I recently cut my hair and donated it to locks of love. As I approached the counter to pay for the haircut, the receptionist informed me that the gentleman who was getting his hair cut a few seats down from me had paid for my haircut. He thought it was a wonderful thing that I was doing and that I shouldn’t have to pay to help someone else. GMH. (link)

I work in a coffee shop, and every time I make a hot chocolate for someone, I like to draw a pattern in chocolate sauce on the froth relevant to what I think they’d like. Smiley faces for little boys, love hearts and butterflies for the girls and sometimes, if I’m really lucky and hear their name, the first letter. Their laughter GMH. (link)

The first night I found the website, I spent over two hours reading the blurbs, crying because people can be so nice. When Chris came over later that evening, I had to explain that everything was fine, I was just insane, and will you just read this page because ohmigod, if it doesn’t make you cry you’re quite obviously heartless. The ones about little kids and pets in particular get me.

It made me think of two instances in my life I could have written about and submitted: in once instance, two men in military uniforms were having dinner with their family at Melo’s, a local Italian restaurant. At the end of their meal when they tried to pay the bill, the waitress waved it away. “Don’t worry about it,” she explained when they inquired about the check, “a family across the restaurant paid before they left.” I’m a firm believer that even if you don’t agree with wars and the politics that drive them, everyone should stand behind our troops.

The second was the first time I took the bus up to Portland to visit a friend that went to PSU. For anyone who has taken Greyhound to or from Portland: the station isn’t in the nicest part of town, and I was clueless about the bus system up there. I ended up on the wrong bus and the driver, who was just about ready to have his break, drove me straight up to the doors of my friend’s dorm. I was so, so grateful.

So, I recommend GMH whenever you’re feeling a little down or depressed. I’m not usually one for “uplifting” or “inspirational” writing, but these stories are short and sweet, and they’re guaranteed to cheer up anyone on a Monday. As for comments, are there any moments from your life that give you hope? I’d love to hear about them!

Sunday Morning

Sunday morning rain is falling
Steal some covers, share some skin
Clouds are shrouding us in moments unforgettable
You twist to fit the mold that I am in
-”Sunday Morning” (Maroon 5)

I am in love with Sundays. Friday nights are nice because the whole weekend stretches out in front of you, and Saturdays are lovely because you know you’ve got the whole next day, too. But Sundays… Sundays were built for lazing around, spending the morning in bed with coffee and toast. (We’ll forgive the fact that I don’t drink coffee, it’s just about setting the scene.) They make the Sunday papers bigger for a reason.

Chris and I went out to a later lunch yesterday and curled up on the couch to watch the first disc of the first season of The Big Bang Theory. (I’ll save the rant on how much I absolutely love TV on DVD for another post.) He had to leave to take care of some programming, though, and I was a little bummed out – not because I didn’t have fun hanging out with him earlier in the day, but because I love the nights where I stay at his place or he crashes here. Cuddling on the couch is nice, but sleeping the whole night through is the best.

He surprised me by coming over a little after one in the morning last night, knowing I was bummed out he had to leave earlier. I had been watching Harper’s Island, this horror serial about a wedding gone horribly wrong and the murders that ensue. I was partway through the eighth episode when he came over. We finished that one, watched the ninth, and then went to bed sometime after two.

We woke up around nine-thirty or ten the next morning, and made toast and peeled some fruit and curled up in bed to finish the series. In some sort of miracle, crumbs didn’t even make it into my bed. We vegged out until after twelve in the afternoon, watching people get sliced-and-diced and nibbling on orange segments.

Maroon 5 got it right: it’s all about taking your time, laying in bed long after you know you should have gotten up, fighting for covers and having a pleasant, lazy breakfast. It’s about listening to the rain outside, if it’s raining inside, and knowing that you’re warm and cozy and wrapped up in blankets with your favorite person. It’s all about Sunday mornings.

“I love the smell of commerce in the morning.”

I considered just titling this post “Some thoughts about shopping malls” but that just seemed so boring. Then I thought, I’ll use a clever quotation about shopping malls instead! Then I was like, aw, fuck it, I’ll just use a quote from Mallrats, cause I’m a total Kevin Smith fangirl, and it’s a great movie.

Technically, when I went to the mall yesterday with some friends, it was actually like five in the evening. It was also the first time I’d been inside a proper mall for an extended period of time in months. Or, you know, since post-Christmas shopping with Eric, so… whatever. Nowadays, I usually just order my clothes online and have them shipped to my door. When over 50% of your wardrobe comes from the same store and you already know what size you are in everything they make, shopping is easy. Valentine’s Day is coming up, however, and I needed to find something for the boyfriend. I also wanted to make sure that it would be here by the 14th without paying for 2-day shipping. Hence, the mall.

Back home, if I do go shopping in brick-and-mortar buildings, it tends to either be TJ Maxx and/or Ross, or Broadway Plaza in Walnut Creek. If you know anything about the Bay Area and Broadway Plaza it’s kind of ironic, because it’s basically the polar opposite of a TJ Maxx/Ross store. If you don’t, it’s one of those outdoor shopping centers spread over a couple of blocks with the sort of “upscale” locations like Banana Republic, The Gap, Nordstrom’s, and PF Chang’s.

The actual mall back home is Sunvalley, and it’s kinda… sketchy these days. Like, you feel a little like wearing solid colors might get you shot up in a turf war of some kind. Not really, I mean, I’m exaggerating, but it’s definitely not somewhere I’d want to hang out at for fun or anything. There’s two malls up here in Oregon that are within reasonable distance of the university: Valley River Center, aka the VRC, and the Gateway mall in Springfield. Here’s a friendly tip from a girl who has been here for over two years now: just avoid Gateway. It’s even more sketch-tacular than Sunvalley back home. Like, you go to a late movie at the theater there and when you walk into the parking lot, you hold your breath as you walk to your car.

So, yesterday two friends and I ventured forth to the VRC and spent three hours or so wandering around and stimulating the economy. (Hurr hurr, that would be even funnier if you knew my friend and the fact that she slipped the cashier at Abercrombie her phone number. Get it? Stimulating? Shut up, I thought it was funny.) And I realized that even though I hadn’t spent time in malls for a really long time, some things never change. And because everyone loves unsolicited advice, I have plenty of it to follow.

Like middle schools kids that think they’re awesome because they hang out at the mall. You know the kind: the group that are wearing knitted beanies and you can tell that the majority of them are in the same social class but there’s always that one guy, a little chubbier than the rest, that you can tell is the worshipful sycophant. The kind that carry around a skateboard but look like they can’t use it, and when they swear they do the furtive glance around to make sure their moms didn’t hear. Yeah, that crowd is still hanging out at malls. Kids, take it from a girl who was in that position once: it doesn’t make you cooler. It makes you lame for not having anything better to do other than hang out at a mall.

And the creepy, something-past-30 guy that was working the kiosk selling cellphone covers? Hitting on 20-year old girls is not cool. It’s creepy. Asking us if we party, then mentioning that you don’t party anymore, “just go to the strip club and drink beer” with your friends is just, ew. Don’t do it.

To the guy at the body jewelry shop, you were friendly and chatty with the customers, offering advice and joking about your tattoos. This is a good thing! Because I liked you, here’s a little bit of free advice: talking in a really loud voice with your friends about the fact that you owe your last apartment complex “like, five thousand dollars” in back rent and that you can’t even have your name on your current lease and that insuring your “current pee-oh-ess car” will cost you $160 a month isn’t a brilliant idea. Even if you are cute, and even if you make friendly conversation, it will make a girl think twice before giving you her number. She will, however, give it to the cute guy at the cashier that didn’t talk about how broke he was.

To workers at posh, upper-end clothing stores like Banana Republic: just because we are college students doesn’t necessarily mean that we don’t have the money to spend on your clothes. Treating us like we don’t have the money to spend on your clothes ensures that even if we do, we won’t. Don’t be rude.

And finally, to the skinny blonde getting a Diet Coke at Panda Express while staring longingly across the food court at the Cinnabon storefront: do it. Doooooo it. You only live once (and you look like you’re just going to throw it up ten minutes later, anyways). Honey, they did studies: boys like girls with a little meat on their bones. They feel like they won’t break them when they look at them.

Thursday 13 – 13 Little Pleasures In Life

1. Perfectly toasted toast. Not burned in any places, not undercooked so it’s like vaguely stale bread. Golden brown with that perfect little crunch when you bite in. My ideal: sourdough with butter or cream cheese.
2. Never-before worn socks. (Contributed by my brother on the FB post some weeks ago that inspired this list. Hi, Jason!)
3. The first sip of soda from a can or a bottle, when it is perfectly fizzy and hasn’t started to go flat yet.
4. Snuggling in bed (preferably with a significant other) close enough to a window to hear the rain drip down outside. Extra bonus points for metal things outside that the rain can ping off (like metal birdbaths or cars).
5. Waking up to sunshine and blue skies in February in Oregon (even if a mere four hours later it’s grey and rainy again).
6. Watching your favorite movie while curled up under a blanket on the FABULOUS leather couch back home you really, really miss because it’s so damn comfortable (because the love seat you stole for your apartment just isn’t long enough to stretch out on).
7. Starting a new-new book. New-to-you books (i.e., from used bookstores) are nice, too, but there’s something about being the first to crack open a book and make your mark on the spine and smell the new paper. Yeah, I’m a total geek.
8. Movie theater popcorn. The stuff you make at home never tastes the same, probably from the lack of butter-flavored topping they use or whatever. But seriously, movie theater popcorn is amazing.
9. Not having class until noon but waking up at 7/8 in the morning. I think a lot of people would argue with me on this one – yeah, I love my sleep, too, but there’s just something so nice about waking up and having a good 4 hours or so to just start your day lazily. I love Tuesdays and Thursdays because of this. I get to finish homework, clean up around the house, play videogames, or just lay around in bed with a book. It’s nice not to feel rushed in the morning.
10. The smell of freshly baked bread. Preferably in your home/apartment, where you can attack the fresh loaf with a nice, sharp bread knife and…
11. some butter at room temperature. Seriously, invest in a butter dish with a lid for your place, because there is nothing worse than making toast and going for the butter and groaning because it’s in the fridge and totally solid. Spreadable butter (real butter, not that fake margarine-yogurt-hydrogenated-oils stuff) with that perfect consistency is amazing.
12. Finding out that coat/pair of shoes/electronic equipment/imported sea salt you were lusting after a few weeks back has been marked down in price recently enough that they still have your size/color preference/whatever.
13. Coming home from the beach and realizing that your clothes/hair/blankets still smell like the ocean/sea salt/bonfire smoke.

Movie Review: Knowing

Oh, Nicholas Cage. You’ve made some great movies and some not-great-but-still-perfectly-enjoyable-to-watch movies (Con Air, National Treasure), and you’ve made some rather terrible movies that I’ll watch out of hope that they’ll end up being in the second category.

I completely forgot that I put Knowing on my Netflix list, so imagine my surprise when I opened that cheery red envelope to find that instead of 500 Days of Summer, which is what I thought was at the top of the list. Thankfully Chris is the kind of guy that will watch pretty much anything! We settled down with Ben and Jerry after dinner a couple weeks ago and watched the movie on my laptop.

I thought that the premise had promise, but I’m a sucker for movies regarding an apocalyptic situation and the earth, basically. Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, all that kind of stuff. I’m kind of upset that I didn’t get to see 2012 in theaters, and even though I have an intense hatred of having to read anything that Cormac McCarthy wrote (which, to be fair, has more to do with the formatting of his novels than anything else), I really do want to see The Road. Because Viggo Mortensen is ruggedly hot.

But I digress. I hope that none of you were planning to see this movie, because I am going to lay out the plot below. In other words: BEWARE SPOILERS.

A long, long time ago there was this creepy little girl that never smiled, ever. Her school decided to do something special and build a time capsule, to be opened in fifty years by little kids in the future! Everyone was supposed to draw what they thought the future would look like: spaceships, drive-through Starbucks, you know, whatever. Creepy Little Girl, however, just wrote down a bunch of numbers, filling up both sides of the paper. She is chastised for this by her teacher, who takes away her paper because she is taking too long but puts it in with the other’s drawings anyways. During the ceremony burying the time capsule later, CLG disappears. They find her some hours later, huddled in the basement below the gym, her hands bloody. Everyone is naturally freaked out, and even more so when they realize that her hands are bloody because she used them to carve the final numbers she couldn’t fit on her paper into the back of the door. Creep-tastic.

Flash forward to the future. Nicholas Cage and his son live alone in this weird house in the woods with no apparent neighbors. Through some vague dialogue it appears that NC’s wife has passed away, and he and his son are in some disagreement about the existence of heaven. We also find out that NC is a professor at MIT! Woo! Go smart guys! His son happens to go to the same school that CLG used to go to, and, naturally, gets here envelope when the great unveiling of the time capsule occurs. Even though he’s not supposed to he brings the letter home, thinking that there might be some meaning to all the nonsense. We find out NC has a drinking problem – but that’s okay, because in his state of alcohol-induced brilliance, he realizes that all those numbers? They’re dates of disasters where people died, and the number of people that died in said disasters. (Sorry for the awkward sentence.) However, some random numbers exist between these that he still can’t figure out.

On his way to pick up his son from school one day he is stuck in a traffic jam. Bored and troubled because one of the disasters predicted happened to be scheduled to take place that day, he glances at the GPS screen his fancy schmancy truck comes equipped with and comes to a sudden shocking realization: all those other numbers smooshed between the dates and deaths are locations in longitude and latitude! That was one smart Creepy Little Girl. He whips out the paper and realizes that he is IN the location the disaster is predicted to occur! Suddenly, a plane rockets into the scene and crashes in the road/field, leaving a long streak of flaming cars and debris.

To make a long story short: CLG, between bouts of being creepy and predicting future disasters, managed to get married and produce offspring. Said offspring has a daughter near NC’s kid’s age, and happens to live in town. They meet and at first she is naturally off-put by Nick’s unsettling interest in her dead mother, but eventually comes around. They realize that the last prediction, slated only a short time in the future, is a prediction that EVERYONE else is going to die after a convoluted process where “33″ is recognized to be “EE” backwards, because little kids apparently do that sometimes, and “EE” stands for “everyone else.” They visit the hella creepy trailor where CLG lived as an adult and about the same time, strange flat black rocks start showing up in odd places and the kids begin to see creepy men that look a lot like Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Apparently, the world is slated to end due to a massive solar flare or some such that will basically fry each and every living thing on earth. CLG’s kid gets killed in a car crash and the kids are spirited away by the creepy men (who I think they call Whisper Men in the movie) to the trailer where CLG used to live. Nicholas Cage races after them, convinced the men are going to murder the kids or something, and comes to the frightening realization that behind CLG’s trailer is a whole field of the smooth, flat black rocks that have been turning up in the oddest places. He sees the kids with the men and threatens them only to be soothed by the kids: it’s okay, because the creepy men are really aliens/angels/??? sent from above/a higher power/??? to spirit away children and animals to another planet to repopulate. And NC is told he can’t go with his son, so he’s left on earth to be incinerated with everyone else.

Yeah. That’s where I wish I was kidding. It is left purposely ambiguous exactly WHAT the men are (angels or aliens or what have you), but they scoop up the kids (and some rabbits) and whisk them away in a massive spaceship off the planet. You are treated to a view of lots of other spaceships lifting off the planet and also flying away to space, where they gently deposit the children (and rabbits) in an idyllic grassy field. I think the angels idea is pushed a bit, because there’s a giant tree that could definitely be meant to symbolize the Tree of Knowledge from the Garden of Eden. But that’s how the movie ends.

So, 1137 or so words later, I leave you with this simple conclusion: Knowing is not worth the 1.5 hours of your life it would take to watch it. The end.

A Public Service Announcement From Your Local Healer

(If I had a “Rant” subcatergory, this would apply.)

Fact: I will not heal you if you persist in standing in an AOE effect, such as the disease/poison/whatever cloud from Hadronox in Azjol-Nerub. I’m not a total bitch, you get a free 5-10 seconds in case you don’t realize what you’re doing, but after that I just assume that you’re a retard because the first rule of WoW is DO NOT STAND IN GROUND EFFECTS. (Unless it is Tranquility.)

Fact: Do not whisper me saying, “Don’t wast your mana on [insert player here.]” It is my job to heal them. It is your job to tank or dps, not waste your time telling me how to do my job. Along the same lines, if you are taking damage, please don’t whisper/yell/type in party chat, “OHMYGOD HEAL ME!” I’m a healer. I see that you’re taking damage. A lot of other people are, too, probably. I have enough decency not to yell at you, “OHMYGOD, TANK THAT MOB!” or “DPS! DPS!”, please do the same for me.

That has been a public service announcement from your local healer. Thank you, and good night.

Thursday 13 – 13 Things I Love About California

1. The weather. Yes, it rains. In a number of locations, it also snows. But the weather is still blissfully mild compared to a lot of other places. Winter days are usually in the 50’s range, and while we do tend to get streaks of hot weather in the summer that can top 100 degrees, it usually hangs out in the 90’s. Also, that’s just a hot heat, it’s not humid or anything.
2. San Francisco. From where I live, it’s just a quick BART trip away. There’s always something to do, whether you have money or not: just wandering around the city, or having dim sum in Chinatown, or window shopping at the Westfield, or catching an IMAX movie at the Metreon. The people watching is amazing, and the food from the ferry building is basically to die for.
3. Lake Tahoe. It’s both a summer and winter place, but I think of it more as summer. Beaches, beautiful water, forests… it’s gorgeous. (And yes, technically we share this with Nevada.)
4. The Monterey Bay Aquarium. After having been here, all other aquariums just seem to pale in comparison. Cannery Row, nearby, is also nice (and sells saltwater taffy!).
5. The San Francisco Zoo + Ocean Beach. Technically these are two different things, but because of their proximity, we usually hit them up together. Who doesn’t love big cats and monkeys and the carousel at the SF Zoo? And Ocean Beach is just… Ocean Beach. Big and open and cold and beautiful.
6. Stinson and Muir Beaches. Muir is a little more out there and empty than Stinson. You don’t really want to go into the water at either location (cold, riptides, sharks, take your pick), but the beaches are gorgeous. There’s tons of fog and mountains and trees and someday I fully intend to live in Marin County.
7. Los Angeles. I know, I used to hate it, too. The NorCal/SoCal divide is still alive and kicking. But I appreciate it a LOT more after going to school for over 2 years in Oregon. When I visited in November, the weather was amazing. There’s Santa Monica, and the Third Street Promenade, and… well, I’m applying to do post-undergrad stuff in SoCal, so yeah.
8. Berkeley, particularly Telegraph and Shattuck. It’s quirky, full of unique little stores and shops, and oh, the food. The taco truck that used to sit at the top of Telegraph (it still might, I haven’t been there in awhile), if you went at the end of the day you could get like 5 chicken tacos for 5 bucks. I dream about those tacos, I just want you to know that. Warm corn tortillas and shredded chicken and onions and cilantro, and they were amazing.
9. Old Town Sacramento. Sacramento never made much sense to me as our state’s capital (I feel like it should be San Francisco, but I might be biased), but visiting Old Town for the day is pretty fun. There’s and Old Fashioned Candy Shoppe, and some cool buildings, a little Irish-style pub, the riverfront… and a bunch of antique stores. It’s nice, just not when it’s over 100 degrees! When my mom and I went some years back, I thought we were going to faint in the streets. All the brick buildings help throw the heat back at you.
10. Hangman’s Hill. It’s actually officially called Taylor’s Reservoir or some such, but everyone I know just calls it Hangman’s, for a tree that used to stand up there before I was born/can remember. We watch fireworks on the 4th of July from up there, and Nathan and I used to make 7-11 runs in the summer for ranch sunflower seeds and Slurpees and candy and then bring up portable speakers and an iPod and just lounge around in the sun, listening to music and eating junk food.
11. Paso Nogal. It’s this park a couple blocks away from my house, and it’s full of paths that go every which way. There’s some basketball courts, a dog park, and benches scattered everywhere, and if you go up to the top there’s a really nice view of the whole town. If you bring binoculars and it’s a non-hazy day, you can see airplanes take off and land from Buchanan Airfield in Concord.
12. The propensity for good Mexican food. Obviously down south, because of the nearness to Mexico, but even in the Bay Area. Up in Oregon, we have Taco Bell and Burrito Boy… and Burrito Boy makes good chicken nachos, but there’s really no comparison.
13. My house. For real. My room, in particular – with the new carpeting, it feels absolutely lush. It’s a corner room with two windows, so (if I ever opened the blinds) it has the opportunity for tons of light. The backyard, because: hello pool. Also, it’s just home, you know?

A Beginner’s Guide to World of Warcraft: Introduction

I was just thinking back to how overwhelmed I was when I started playing WoW. You get a little handbook that goes with the game – actually, considering the normal size of the pamphlets that come with video games, the WoW manual is pretty large – and Blizzard has supplementary information on their website. But still, stepping into a huge world populated with millions of players, all of whom seem to know more than you do and all of whom tell you that you’re doing things wrong can be really overwhelming. So I decided I wanted to write one, for people that are just starting playing, or for girls who are dating geeks and want to know enough about the game to follow the conversations their SO is having very enthusiastically with his best friend with so many words you’ve never heard of that it seems like they’re speaking a foreign language. Ladies: I HAVE BEEN THERE. I UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH.

I’ve always been into videogames, but I was always a console/handheld girl before WoW. I think the only other things I played on the computer were educational games, like Treasure Math Storm and The Oregon Trail, and Myst. (Which is an awesome game and you should go get it, right now, if you’ve never played before. Seriously.) But I’d spent a large chunk of my lunchtime during junior year of high school listening to Chris and Tom (sometimes we affectionately refer to them as Geek 1 and Geek 2) blather on and on about “dps” this and “ohmigod boss loot” that, and I was utterly confused. They discussed the intricacies of PVP talent builds and we discussed the intricacies of how neither of them were ever going to get laid.

I got tired of being left out of the conversation, so one day during senior year I dragged my dad down to the Apple store in Walnut Creek and bought the games. Obviously it had to be popular if it had millions of players, one of which was my boyfriend and who actually went down to Best Buy the day the expansion pack Burning Crusade was released to pick it up before classes. It happened to be the day of STAR testing at school, which meant that we didn’t have to be at school until after lunch, and we all went out to breakfast to celebrate finally being seniors and getting to skip the standardized tests from hell. When we pointed out that he wasn’t going to have time to install and play it before classes started he just insisted that was okay and went to go pick it up anyways.

We all exchanged pitying glances around the table and took bets on whether or not he’d come to class that day.

Still, some months later, annoyed at still not understanding what they were talking about, I found myself sitting on the couch with the two game boxes next to me, surrounded by CDs. For real. Installing the game was a huge pain in the ass: not because the process was complicated or anything, but because the first box came with 5 or 6 discs and the expansion pack had another 4 or so. I restrained the urge to scream and set about installing the game.

Oh, little did I know the fun that came with patching the game after the discs themselves had been installed. For those of you who don’t play computer games with regular updates: rewrites and additions and deletions to the game come in the form of patches, which need to be downloaded before you can play. In this way, Blizzard can add new instances, modify talents/spells/abilities/items that are too powerful/not powerful enough/unbalance the game in some form. After installing the discs proper I probably spent another thirty minutes to an hour patching the game.

I created my account and then scanned the realm list, searching for the one my friends played on. Fun fact: So many people play World of Warcraft, it would be impossible for them to all play in the same “world.” As a result, there are a lot of different realms: exact copies of Azeroth/Outlands/Northrend, across which people are divided. There’s a limited amount of cross-realm interaction, in PVP battlegroups (we’ll get to more about this later) and in using the newly implemented Dungeon Finder tool, but for the most part you are limited to interacting with the other players on your realm. So there’s a handy hint: if you are going to be playing with already established friends, make sure that you play on their realm! Characters can be transferred, but it’s a pricy process.

…And I was going to get into Horde vs. Alliance and a breakdown of the races, but then this post would go on and on forever, so we’ll save that for next time!

Some Notes on Food

Fact: I like food. I like to cook it, I like to eat it, I like to read about it, watch TV shows on it, and daydream about it. It truly is a miracle that I’m not 400 lbs. And there were a few things I wanted to say about recent meals/snacks/what-have-you that I’ve had.

• Chris and I ate at Bay 839 when we went to Newport. We had their quinoa and cheese stuffed peppers (so excellent, especially the bottoms that get pan-fried and a little crispy/browned) to start, he had a steak and I had the pulled pork. While the pulled pork itself was good, there was nothing particularly special about it – but the coleslaw that topped it, oh my god, it was amazing. I think they added shredded apples to it, which added just a hint of sweetness and played really well with the pork.
• Brie. I mean, that’s pretty much it. I fucking love that cheese. I like it on bread, I like it on crackers with ham, and, not gonna lie, I will actually just slice of wedges of it and eat it plain. Also melty with roasted garlic. Uh-mazing.
• Ben and Jerry’s Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough. I, like many people, specifically hunt out the chunks of cookie dough, but the vanilla ice cream base is so good in this that I don’t really mind eating it, either.
• That three-ingredient tomato sauce I mentioned the other day? It’s good. Really good. You should go and make some tonight, good. It’s super simple, it’s really true that the butter adds an interesting flavor (reminiscent of vodka sauce, in my opinion!) that olive oil does not, and the halved onion stewed with the ingredients is the icing in the cake. I wish I’d had an immersion blender, I would have chopped the onion and added it back into the sauce. Really delicious and pretty simple, although it took longer than 40 minutes for mine to thicken up properly on the stove.
• Sourdough toast. I bought a loaf of sourdough bread at the store, the pre-sliced stuff, thinking I would make cheesy bread to go with the pasta last night. (And I did, and it was tasty.) However, I’d forgotten exactly how much I love sourdough toast with cream cheese in the mornings. Oh my god, I had four slices yesterday. That’s disgusting. (But it tasted SO good.)
• Street food. It’s probably a little extra-prevalant in Eugene, being a college town, but the three places right around campus that I hit up are the hot dog stand, the new BBQ pork/beef stand, and the falafel stand. I had a falafel yesterday, and holy shit was it good. If I thought I could live off falafels, I would entertain the notion of becoming vegetarian… until I craved a bacon cheeseburger. (Sad note, though: while eating my tasty falafel, I dripped sauce all over my black leggings. Che triste.)

Thursday 13: 13 Things I Did/Thought About While Not Sleeping

Edit: Oops, it appears that the mobile app I wrote this on cut it off after 6. How strange. The rest of the text has been added in and updated. Sorry ’bout that! (8:31 am)

My sleep schedule has been incredibly weird in the last couple weeks, for a variety of reasons. Probably the biggest one is the fact that I went from nearly a month of vacation to 9/10 am classes. Regardless, today I was so tired I took a nap and slept from 6 pm to 9:30 pm. Hooray for feeling refreshed, but boo for being wide awake at 1:23 am with a class in 7:37 and counting.

Therefore, I present to you: things I did and/or thought about while not sleeping.

1. I finally finished unpacking from winter break. (Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, minus one box.) My clothes had been out of my duffel bags forever, but they were all in a giant heap on top of my dresser, or a second giant heap on my desk. They are now all folded and put away.

2. While sorting my clothes, I rearranged my closet back into being sorted by article type and then color, according to the rainbow. Yes, it’s totally OCD, but I can basically find any item I want in a split second.

3. Picked out my outfit for tomorrow.

4. Took care of the disaster zone that was my end table, yeesh. I wouldn’t really call myself a sloppy person, but I am lazy and I tend to let things go until they drive me so nuts I have to clean up. The end table reached that point. Now the only things on it are my alarm clock, lamp, and water bottle.

5. Cleaned the bathroom. I have long hair and I’m perpetually shedding it everywhere. I finally took care of the near carpet of it on the bathroom floor, then wiped down the counter and sink for good measure.

6. Washed, dried, AND put away the dishes. Here’s a friendly tip: the smell of hot water hitting the dried honey mustard-apricot spread I used for my panini is totally gag-worthy. I resolve to rinse out that dish straightaway next time instead of waiting a night.

7. Considered vacuuming the floor, but realized it was after 1 in the morning and decided to spare the neighbors.

8. Finally removed the nail polish from my pedicure from Thanksgiving (!) break and my manicure from post-Christmas. Decided to go au natural for a little bit, since they’ve basically been coated with polish for months.

9. Pondered what magical nail polish remover or techniques salons have/use. Seriously, the stuff on my fingernails came off pretty easily, but the stuff on my toes I had to scrub at. At the salon, it’s like two swipes and they’re done! What’s up with that?

10. I cleaned off my desk. The aforementioned big pile of clothing and a jumble of other stuff was on it. What really freaks me out was the weird stuff I scrubbed off the top after I removed the clothes from it. I haven’t used my desk properly in months; I usually just use the laptop from the bed/couch. Some article I read, though, said that for better sleeping habits, you should really only use the bed for sleeping and sex and not let it become your de facto desk. So I finally cleaned mine off.

11. Considered the dinner I was going to be cooking the next night. I’m really excited about trying out this recipe (three ingredients! no garlic! butter instead of olive oil!), mostly because of its simplicity, but it’s also gotten rave reviews. I’m intrigued.

12. Not going to lie, I played a little bit of World of Warcraft, too. Don’t judge!

13. Blogged. =) Look at me, so productive, my blog entry for the day is up and it’s not even two hours into the new day.

So, while I most certainly do not advocate a messed up sleep schedule (it is no fun, and it’s partially my own damn fault for taking that three-hour nap), you can most certainly be productive with the time you’re not sleeping.