Sunday, March 22, 2009

You are the King of the Divan

Good news, everyone! I actually went out and did stuff this week! Then again, at one point I also said, “Oh man, we played Dungeons & Dragons for so long that I missed 'Lost!'” Which is about the geekiest thing a person can say outside of discussing string theory. Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s top moments:

* Went to see an awesome local band called The Paper and the Plane. I actually found out about them through one of the music magazines Mom sent me in a care package. I told this to the band and we all agreed the irony of discovering a Brisbane band through a publication written in Ohio is much appreciated.

*I sat in the wrong class for an hour and was completely terrified the entire time because it was a complicated web design course and everyone was writing advanced HTML codes. All I know how to do in HTML is italicize and bold fonts. Sometimes I can add a photo or link. Why didn’t I just leave, you ask? Well, when I peeked in, I asked the professor, “Is this Digital Imaging?” because it was in the room we’re normally in, but a different teacher. He said it was and after ten minutes I figured this was the wrong class and he probably thought I asked him something else (for having a not overly difficult to understand accent, you’d be shocked how many times people have no idea what I’m saying). And you can’t just get up to leave in the middle of a lecture or they yell at you. It was horrible. Plus, I never found out where the class I was meant to be in moved to. :[

*None of you probably care about this, but The Horrors released a new single that’s completely different from their old style, yet still fantastic. It’s over eight minutes long and never lags once, that’s how good it is. I almost cried with joy when I heard it the first time (music geek alert!) and have probably listened to it twenty times since.

*In small groups for my Human Biology class, we had to do an exercise where we were given a list of symptoms and had to diagnose the 'patient.' The rest of my group, who are Forensic Science and Pre-Med students were convinced the ‘patient’ was just drunk. I knew right away he had a diabetic shock. Guess who was the correct one? I then convinced my group that I knew this because I’m an Anesthesiology major with a specialty in small mammals. Yes, I have outsmarted the future doctors and scientists of Australia. Twice! Bwahahaha. I really only knew it because I have a diabetic friend and watch 'House' religiously.

*My flatmate Madeline is obsessed with the comedian Tim Minchin and has tickets to see him every single night he’s here, so I went with her on Thursday. It was the first time I’d ever been to a comedy show and I loved it. Then again, it was a bit concert-like because Tim Minchin does mostly comedic songs, kind of like Flight of the Conchords, but one Australian guy with a piano instead of two Kiwis with guitars. Turns out, the friend Madeline was supposed to take Friday night canceled, so I went a second time. The other great part about this show was the venue, a reconverted powerhouse. Much silliness was had pre-show taking pictures with all the graffiti left over from when it was abandoned. After the shows, we got to meet Mr. Minchin and he’s lovely. He has a huge bit in his show about Americans and when I said hello to him he was all worried he’d offended me. I just laughed and said, “Well, I’m from Philadelphia, so I’m pretty much in agreement with you.” (His jokes were mainly about the Bible Belt and Manhattan)

*On the way to the second Tim Minchin show, we saw The Kiss Army! Well, it was only two guys dressed up as Kiss, so it was more like a Kiss Small Battlement. Still, it was pretty darn cool, they went all out with the costumes. People over here really like to dress up, it seems.

*This weekend I attended a small party for a friend’s birthday, which was actually on St Patrick's Day, but we couldn’t celebrate it then. So we wore green and pretended to be Irish a week after the fact, haha. It was good fun and like all the best parties, ended with us driving around wearing cardboard crowns from Hungry Jacks, blasting ‘Ca Plane Pour Moi’ while receiving many stares from passing cars. Yes, we started out Irish and ended with a Belgian punk/disco song. Yes, there is such a thing as punk/disco.

*If you haven’t seen it already, I posted my Ace Enders interview over at Popserious. Woo.

Also, thanks again for the happy stories, everyone. They were very effective. With the exception of the wrong class incident and a particularly gruesome lecture on skin diseases, I had a significantly more uplifting week. :]

Saturday, March 14, 2009

Hello Today

Poor Australia, we’ve been taking quite a beating over here. First the fires, then floods, an earthquake, and just recently there was an oil spill right off the coast of where I live. I wanted to help clean it up, but they weren’t letting any untrained volunteers in. They keep showing footage of dead turtles covered in slick washed up on the beach. The news over here has been depressing the past few weeks, so if any of you have any cute stories or a happy article about a puppy becoming friends with a duck or something like that, please leave them in the comments.

Despite not being able to watch TV without seeing bad news, I’ve had a great time so far this semester. I get along with everyone in my flat (the jerky note-leaver has gone, hooray!) and have especially become close friends with the other girls in only a short period of time. This year is looking considerably better than the last, everything’s looking up Milhouse! Like always, I have a very strange bunch of classes to further my already schizophrenic transcript:

*Romantic and Victorian Literature- We read awesome novels written by long dead authors.
*Ghosts and the Gothic- We read awesome novels written by long dead opium addicts.
*Human Biology- We study biology way more in-depth than high school. The teacher shows pictures of unspeakable things that make all the medical students around me go ‘oooh’ while I try not to throw up.
*Digital Imaging- We Photoshop. From 6-8 pm on freaking Macs in a freezing cold room. I try not to smash the computer.

Fridays are my free days, so I spend a few hours volunteering in the food co-op. Which is nice because I get paid in store credit so it’s the closest I have to a job for now. Will work for soy milk. While sitting behind the ancient cash register that mocks my basic math skills, I realized that yesterday was the two year anniversary of the infamous Spring Break ‘bar fight’ incident with The Horrors. This trip down memory lane was then burst when a Hare Krishna customer asked me to help him pull a splinter out of his thumb.