Erin on the Oscars

Well, there wasn't an Oscar blog last night, but since I knew I wouldn't be able to do one even if there had been, I did write down some of my thoughts last night as the Oscars aired. They are a little bit stream-of-consciousness-y. Here they are:

I like the nominee sequence lots. I like how they're introducing the nominees instead of the host.
Aw, yay, Ellen! I like her. "We don't have time for boring speeches." Peter O'Toole = almost dead. Steve Carell is looking for the camera to make a face at. And Ellen could not get out of the dancing. It was pretty much compulsory.

I just don't approve of Nicole Kidman's dress. It's red with a big fugly bow on the shoulder. The red carpet people implied that she could get away with it only because she's Nicole Kidman. That does not fly with me.
This just in: Nicole Kidman is telepathic. She predicted that Pan's Labyrinth would win this award on the red carpet.

Nerd Oscars! Maggie hosted the Nerd Oscars! [On a side note, my mom and I went to see Thoroughly Modern Millie at Beef and Boards on Saturday night, and there was a minor character who I could have sworn looked like SOMEBODY I knew, but I couldn't figure out who, and then last night I finally figure out that she looked exactly like Maggie Gyllenhall. Fin.]

My reaction to the first interpretive shadow-dance: What. The hell. Is this? Oh. Commercial.

Will Ferrell, Jack Black, and John C. Reilly's musical number: The gang of "You're Boring" reunited! And lo, it is awesome.

That is some amazing makeup in Pan's Labyrinth. Clean sweep for them so far, and I approve.

Regarding Ellen's comment about Dame Judi Dench getting her eyes done: Careful. Dame Judi Dench took my eye out in a bar fight.

Having Abigail Breslin and Jaden Smith present together is adorable and genius. The Animated Short lady said something about Tom Hanks and acceptance speeches. Was she making a reference to last year's Oscars? I love the idea and the winning of West Bank Story. Also, shouldn't Jaden be able to read "West Bank Story?" I'll let it slide because he was probably nervous.

I heart James McAvoy and his accent.
I heart Rachel Weisz and her accent, but in a completely different way.
Yay, Alan Arkin!
I like Melissa Etheridge.
Oh, Ben Affleck. I could make so many jokes about your writing "talents" and your "process." I liked that writer montage.

Ooooh, costumes. I heart costumes. Actually having them on the stage is a brilliant idea. [Upon Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt's "Devil Wears Prada" hijinks:] LOL at Meryl Streep! I adore Meryl Streep. [Her Satan-face was probably the hardest I laughed all night.] YAY for Marie Antoinette! They totally deserved to win this. And the lady who won is adorable.

Ah! Crazy Tom Cruise!
What gentle playoff music we have this year.

Visual Effects. Please win, POTC. YAY! In the words of Cleolinda, "Because... duh." When winning with multiple other people, always be the first to talk. Also, some winner says to his son, "the pinky promise worked." Awww.

Best Foreign Film. Cut to Sascha Baron Cohen, who looks confused: "I'm not foreign." Heeeee.
Wow. Clive Owen and Her Cateness. So much lovely. Whoa! Pan's Labyrinth didn't win? Whoa! Even Her Cateness is surprised.

Snakes on a Plane!

Yeah, everyone knew Jennifer Hudson was gonna win. And her gratitude is awesome. Awwww.
An Inconvenient Truth wins: the opposite of surprise. And now, Oscar winner Al Gore.

Oh, Clint Eastwood. You so aged. Celine Dion's singing dress is exceptionally pretty. The pity Oscar guy wrote pretty music. [He speechifies in Italian.] Clint Eastwood is uncomfortable. [Eastwood translates.] He is just making stuff up. What the guy is really saying: "You fat, ugly people. Why didn't you ever give me an Oscar? I was nominated five times! My music was really pretty! Screw you, assholes. I don't need your pity. You know where you can all shove this award."

Wow. "Volverine." That was a horrible pun. Three of the movies nominated for score have Cate Blanchett in them. Does this qualify her as a muse?

Yay, Little Miss Sunshine! lol, the guy who wrote it was Matthew Broderick's assistant? Vindicated now!

I like how they point out that what Jennifer Lopez is best at is being pretty.

Beyonce is trying to turn "Listen" into "And I Tell You I'm Not Going." She's all, "Look, I can do exactly what Jennifer Hudson did to win an Oscar!" It's pretty cool to have a Grammy-winner, an Oscar-winner, and a Tony-winnner up there all at the same time. Dreamgirls was a good movie, y'all. Despite none of its nominated songs winning (WTF!). Did I mention I really like Melissa Etheridge?

What an odd montage to America. [At this point, I was getting lazy. My next three comments are] Yay, Kate! Aw, Scorsese! I am so sleepy.
Bring out yer dead!
heh: "sexiest man to portray Truman Capote."

And here is Helen Mirren's Oscar. One-earringed Helen Mirren. Kate Winslet is tearing up. Luff. Somewhere, Queen Elizabeth is all, "Well, now I can't hate you. Dammit!" [I just have to say, this whole night made me love Helen Mirren.]

Ugh. I forgot about Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon. Poor Peter O'Toole. But yay Forest Whittaker! Very, very moving speech.

[Best director. Spielberg, Copolla, and Lucas were very funny.] Hi, George. I love you, George. *hug*
YES! SCORSESE! Everybody's standing and I'm clapping and YES! Even the announcer sounds triumphant.

NOT BABEL WINS! WOOHOOOO!
See, that's what "The Departed" has up on "Babel": a plot.

Wow, Carrie Fisher helped write this?

And those were my thoughts on this year's Oscars.

FINE.

Because it’s ridiculous. Because it’s absurd. Because they’re wearing pants!

I need a new title scheme. Suggestions?

So a lot has happened and I haven't posted much. I apologize. But today I want to post about two tiny unimportant things that happened and could end up leading to something awesome. But first a disclaimer: exploring these things has led me to some unsettling and vaguely creepy things on the internet. I am not buying into anything, just intrigued and ready to come to my own conclusions.
So several weeks ago, maybe even months, I had my first experience with what's called lucid dreaming. Basically, it means becoming aware, in the course of a dream, that you're dreaming. I was asleep on the couch downstairs, and I woke up once and then went back to sleep. Then I woke up about five more times, but not really. They were fake. I could tell because the house was full of stuff and the wrong people, and everyone was acting weird and trying to stop me from getting to class. Anyway, the dream kept ending with me realizing I was still asleep and waking up again, in the next dream. And eventually, through the repetition, I became fully aware that I was dreaming. And furthermore I was aware of being aware that I was dreaming. I could feel the couch under me at the same time as I could feel the air all around me and the standing up that I was doing in the dream - so weird. And I had a hard time waking up for real, but eventually I managed it.
And then, a few days later, after waking up from a creepy dream on Alexa's couch, I had my first experience with sleep paralysis. This was actually really terrifying. For a few seconds after waking up, I COULD NOT MOVE. I couldn't even tell Alexa I couldn't move. I actually thought someone was cursing me. She saw me try to talk, too, so I didn't dream it.
Anyway, it turns out it's a well-documented scientific phenomenon as, I just recently learned, is lucid dreaming. So I started doing research on the internet and it looks like the lucid dreaming thing is a whole institution - apparently one can learn to do it and so doing control all of one's dreams. This could be a lot of internet insanity, but my recent experiences make me inclined to think otherwise, and I'm suddenly very interested in trying one of these methods, to induce a lucid dream. I feel like I've always had this intense desire to live in a world other than this one, one with more excitement and more resemblance to fiction, and maybe this is the way to go about it. I guess I'm hoping you'll all tell me this isn't super-weird or crazy.

So when you hook the hose up to your tailpipe, don't expect to wake up and get toast for breakfast. The toast is you.

Happy Belated Birthday...to me!

So my birthday was last Friday and I am now officially 19. Woo. Hoo. I hope you all noted the sarcasm in that. Birthdays aren't the same as they were when we were younger. When I turned 5, it was SO EXCITING! I was one year closer to being a big girl! But now that I am a big girl, one year passing isn't as exciting. It's depressing. I mean, there were so many things I wanted to do this year...so many things I wanted to experience while I was 18. And I failed. Don't get me wrong, my 18th year was a good one. Lots of fun/exciting things happened. But all the excitement's gone now.

I apologize for the depressing tone of that paragraph. I could try to lighten the mood, but I'm not in the mood (ba-boom-chick). This is a really crap post after all the snow excitement. And my writing style is so different from all of yours. I don't know...I think Sophia has a case of the grumpies.

So when you hook the hose up to your tailpipe, don't expect to wake up and get toast for breakfast. The toast is you.

What transpired the day before Valentines day, and other things which may be of interest to the reader.

So, aside from Marten's comic, there has been no comment on the subject of Tuesday night. It's a little hard to explain, so bear with me. One of the landmarks at Wooster is this huge castle-like building called Kauke Arch. It looks like this:

Okay. So we have this tradition, going back about 75 years. My Dad and my uncle did this when they went here. Rumor has it if the arch can be completely filled with snow, classes will be cancelled the next day. So Tuesday night, we went out, as Wooster students have done for three quarters of a century, to try and fill the arch. There were about 400 of us out there. It was great fun. Until the cops showed up and told everyone to leave.

Obviously, everyone refused to leave. There was yelling. Snowballs were thrown. Tasers were pointed. Arrests were made. Apparently some one went streaking. Then bagpipes showed up. Eventually Dean Holmes showed up and convinced the cops that the arch filling was a harmless tradition, and the arch was filled. The three kids were released shortly thereafter. You can get more of the story on the internet - just google Kauke arch or Wooster snow filling or whatever.

I got back to the Annex around 11:45 because my roommate had made this plan. Cause at midnight it would be Valentines day, he was gonna sing this song for this girl he's liked forever then finally reveal his feelings for her, so I came back with him for moral support. He chickened out about the feelings revealing, though, so I wasn't needed. Anyhow, we stayed up and drank cocoa and played mario and finally got to sleep around 2:30.

The next day we awoke to find that classes had actually been cancelled. As had everything else. So I spent Valentines day with my girlfriend. And everything was happy for a while.

Then of course, classes started again. Then play rehearsal started again, and I discovered the price of happiness - in order to make up for the rehearsals we got off because of snow, we're rehearsing all day Saturday and Sunday. This wouldn't be so bad, except that my family is going to be here this weekend, and I'm barely going to see them. But what can you do?

I don't know why blogger is putting a space in every time I start a new paragraph. It's making this post unnecessarily long. I have to go to bed now, because I'm exhausted. I'll return to the real world when tech week is over.

By the way, my new title scheme is going to be "titles reminscent of Don Quixote."

So when you hook the hose up to your tailpipe, don't expect to wake up and get toast for breakfast. The toast is you.

I cut myself shaving. with a katana

Alright, so I really don't have that much to blog about, but I couldn't help myself, the quote was too good to pass up using as a title. I mean, it's relevant in so many ways: I shaved today(though I didn't cut myself), I've been learning how to use a katana, and in the context of the comic, it's used as a lame explaination! I've been getting great webcomic quotes and it's been killing me to have too boring a life to use them as titles to whatever I happen to feel like sharing with you all. Though, with the blog silence lately, I wonder if you all are still there sometimes. Heck, has Paul even switched to the new blogger yet? meh.

There's some kind of Gala thing going on tonight, and I am decidedly not going, not even for the cheesecake. Why? I'm not sure. Maybe I'm lazy. Maybe I'm frightened of being dragged on to the dance floor to make a fool of myself. Maybe I'm frightened of saying things and making a fool of myself. I'm going to go with it's too cold outside to go anywhere. In the mean time, I've got a nasty headache and lots of webcomic archive to read on this new sam and fuzzy thing. I didn't like it at first, it was sort of a Jonny the Homicidal Maniac wannabe, but no more than Skewed to the Left is a xkcd wannabe, and it's definitely taken off in it's own unique direction. I've grown to like it in the time I've spent with nothing to do but read webcomics. Speaking of Skewed to the Left, it's been updated a couple times. You should read it and give me feed back. It's a lot easier to give feedback on stick figure webcomics than Nathan or Jonah's story posts, all you really have to do is say "huh?" or "lol" and I'm good. I just want to know if anyone is actually looking at it, or if these are better off staying in my notebooks.

Meanwhile, things seem to be going well for me; I'm living at common grounds next year because Jake dropped out of it, I'm in Merry Kuween of Scots because one of their tenors dropped out of that, and I'm working at an Arby's here. Not exactly something to be proud of, but it's closer than walking to the student employment office every day until they finally give me a job and I'm pretty much guaranteed work and better pay than anyone who works on campus. Student-wise, anyway. Any of these three things may lead to interesting plot development, but my 3o-minute slot remains obscured by more interesting programming on other channels.

So when you hook the hose up to your tailpipe, don't expect to wake up and get toast for breakfast. The toast is you.

Wait. First, lets try taking out the heart, blowing in the ventricals, and putting it back in.

...it's a nintendo joke. see, when a game wouldn't work, you'd take it out, blow in it, and put it back in. after doing this a few (or a million) times, the game would work again.

I realized something while I was watching Northern Exposure last night: my life for the past year and a half has been something like a tv show. That's why I haven't really been watching any tv, because I've been getting my fill of silliness, dramatics, cheesy romantics, and warm fuzzy moments from the real world. I think over break, though, my writers ran out of ideas and I'm now on hiatus. That's why I spent a Saturday night a couple weeks ago catching up on the third season of the office. Really, I watched like 8 episodes on the internet in one night. That's why I'm watching Northern Exposure. It charms me, and my life is on hiatus. I'll probably ask Alexa if she'll watch Firefly with me, and I'll probably drop in on Amanda and Scott to watch Star Trek as often as they'll let me. I'm not depressed or anything and I don't think of this as permanent; I just don't feel like anything interesting can happen for a while. Maybe not until spring break. In the mean time, I'll be getting classwork done productively, staying in shape and getting mad karate and katana skillz, and watching a lot of television.

Oh, and starting tomorrow, I'll be updating a webcomic on blogger. It's going to be a Monday, Wednesday, Friday thing. Since both Nathan and Jonah started updating their story blogs on a weekly basis, this will be a way for me to feel as creatively productive without working too much. Most of them will be amusing things I come up with during classes and stick figure comics making fun of myself. Sometimes, I'll probably get lazy and pull out an old doodle. Pardon the bad picture quality, I'm using a school scanner and editing them with MS Paint. Click this tomorrow: Skewed to the Left!

So when you hook the hose up to your tailpipe, don't expect to wake up and get toast for breakfast. The toast is you.

I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen.

I know I haven't posted in a while. So, for those of you who have wanted me to do so, here is a post. It's not going to be a typical happy-Erin post, though.

I've been melancholy for a week or so, I guess, and not for any one real reason. Just a bunch of little reasons. Just a bunch of things that I should just forget about that I can't, that I'm letting get to me even though I know I shouldn't.

I got cast in a play, "Two Rooms," which is a really good thing. It's a very challenging role, and the director has complimented me on how I'm handling it. He called me an intelligent and articulate actress. I was flattered, but at the same time rehearsing this thing has been so emotionally draining. One night after rehearsal I got done with my last scene and I just wanted to cry. Just because.

People think I'm a cold person. I have this on very good authority. I mean, I happened to discover two really good friends discussing how most people see me as a cold person because I am so reserved and shy, but that they don't see me that way. Which is good. And, I mean, I guess I knew this. I did know it. It's just not a nice thing to hear, particularly when I thought I was doing better in that area in college. So now I overanalyze every conversation I have, and spend a lot of time wondering who these people are. Is it everyone I know? Only a few people? Did I do something to make them think this after they have known me for two or three years now?

I'm in a class called Women in Fiction where we're reading two of my all-time favorite books, Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre. We started the P&P discussion today, which I really had to psych myself up for because I feel duty- and honor-bound to defend it to the death. To protect it, sort of. That went okay. But then at the end of class we got back our first assignment, which I got a B- on, which wouldn't be so terribly bad except that the professor told us straight up that nobody got below a B, so... And this is a professor I really, really want to like me and a class I really love. I can't bear the thought of her thinking I suck. Especially now when I've gotten up the courage to step up and try to be impressive.

And it's also really sad that I define so much of myself based on my academic accomplishments. I should try to be more social, I know, but at the same time I'm thinking, well, everybody thinks I'm a cold person, almost nobody likes me anyway, so why shouldn't I just stay in my room all weekend and finish all my homework for the week? I know, it's pouting. I shouldn't stay in my room feeling sorry for myself. But I can't help it. So I stayed in my room pretty much all last weekend, except for watching Rent with Bethany and Whitney and Jane Eyre with Whitney, Bethany, Jenaba, and Other Erin. And I got through all of the homework for this week that I knew about. I didn't post on any blogs, which I should have done.

There are a lot of things I'm supposed to get done right now. My job is picking up pace and I'm struggling to keep up with it all of a sudden, despite the fact that I'm working on it almost every day. All of a sudden I have to decide about internships and grad school and my senior Independent Study Project, and I feel like I don't even have time to stop and think about a single one of these things. I feel like I'm drowning, and my only response is to do constant homework until I'm insanely ahead, as a sort of way of treading water.

So you see, it's not anything that's a big deal. Just a bunch of little things. And I'm not trying to fish for praise here and OH MY GOD I HATE IT WHEN MY ROOMMATES MAKE SPECIAL REQUESTS FOR THE PRINTING OF THINGS ON MY PRINTER! Sorry. That was a kneejerk reaction to "Hey, when you go to bed-- I don't know when you're going to bed, but whenever you do, could you leave your computer on [I turn it off every night. It's a ritual; I hate having my rituals interrupted, and the roommates always mess with my computer anyway and leave stuff running and I'm very territorial and it pisses me off!] so I can print out a paper?"

Ahem. I'm not fishing for praise. I know when I get angsty you guys don't really know what to do besides assure me that I'm awesome, which is nice and which I really appreciate. I'm just not sure it would be helpful in this case, because what I have to deal with are absolutely valid faults I have, and it would just be lying for you to try to say they're not there. You know they are. I just thought I'd post so you know whats going on with me. Bet you're sorry you asked now, huh?

So when you hook the hose up to your tailpipe, don't expect to wake up and get toast for breakfast. The toast is you.