Let Me Pencil That In

Dearest Journalman of My Soul,

In keeping with the trend of confessing my darkest secrets to you, I have another one: Google is taking over my life. It has everything I could ever need to organize my otherwise whirlwind of a life. In fact, the How-To of the Day today on my Google homepage is How To Balance School and Word as an Adult, something that I personally find useful, seeing as I do just that. And it gave me some useful tips, such as opening an online calendar to keep track of tests and work things and to schedule study time. I think this is fantastic, so I went ahead and added my whole life to my calendar. Now, if only I had a blackberry and could check my Google Calendar from anywhere.

(Side note: The best part of my job-- getting called sweetie by giant African men. I don't know if this is just because they want to suck up and think that's the best way into my heart, or whether it's because I'm such a flaming queen that they assume I'm a woman, but...I hope not the latter.)

Well, last night I decided to delve once more into the wonderful world of making Chili. Jenna has this amazing(ly easy) recipe, involving beef/turkey, bell peppers, onions and a crapton of canned beans, tomatoes, tomato sauce and refried beans. It fills a giant soup pot to the rim, which is totally awesome, but since my kitchen stuff is totally disorganized, it led to a lack of tupperware to contain my concoction. I ended up bringing about a gallon of it to work today in the hopes that someone will help me to eat it all. I'm slowly building up a repertoire of foodstuffs that I can cook. This is going against years of being kept out of the kitchen when my mom cooked dinner and only being allowed to assist during cake- or cookie-making. I still have a phobia of baking pies because she couldn't do it. You'd think this would cause me to be more motivated to bake a freaking pie, just to prove that I'm a better baker, but it just makes me nervous. But I'm very much into cooking my own meals right now. I've been spending entirely too much money on eating out and ordering in (not to mention booze and video games...or crack). Last night's bean and beef extravaganza cost me a total of 27 dollars and probably yielded something around 15 servings. Pretty good, I'd say.

In other news, I have some sort of uncontrollable urge to own every edition of every Final Fantasy game, even when one version is fully sufficient. Take Final Fantasy IV. I played it on Super Nintendo, I've played the original SNES version on an emulator, I've played the harder JP version of the SNES game on an emulator, I bought FF IV Advance for the Game Boy Advance, despite having already played and beaten the one Chris owned. Now, to taunt me, they are developing a DS version of Final Fantasy IV, which I imagine will include some touch screen capabilities like the DS version of Final Fantasy III (which I found insanely dull after a while). I am hoping (obviously) that this version of Final Fantasy IV will have some more enhanced touch screen stuff, but it's unlikely, because honestly what would you add to a Final Fantasy game that would require a touch screen. Maybe at least they'll do something with the two screens. FFIII DS just put a stupid world map on the top screen, which made it silly that there was a button to pull up the world map, because it just copied what was on the top screen onto the bottom screen and what's the point of that!? REALLY NOW! At least I completed the GBA version of FFIV before this one is created. It would be sad if they released a DS version of FFVI, because I'd buy it and I haven't even done the extra content on FFVI Advance yet.

Ok, I'm geeked out. I may have just lost some of the few friends I have left.

Love,
Me

My Slow Descent Into Alcoholism Eye Jelly

Yesterday, following a rousing day of surfing the web, emailing and reading up on the life of the recently departed Anna Nicole Smith, I shlepped myself over to school. Thursdays for some are Grey's "I'll become as bad as ER soon, give me a chance!" Anatomy night, but for me, they are Anatomy and Physiology night. Oh, the irony. I had great plans for the evening after class, so I wasn't overly anxious during class. I arrived early and began to read Wizard's First Rule, a trite-fest of a fantasy novel that uses caricatures of people to make the reader understand who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. For example, bad guys are pedophiles, murderers and rapists. Good guys save babies, promote equality and cry a lot. Anyhoo, for some reason, I can't put the damn book down (even though I've read it already), so chances are, I'll finish it (all 900 pages) before Erika and John Barleycorn finish our book club book.

Regardless, lab turned out to be a dissection of cow eyes. Come on, how awesome. I got to say, "Out, vile jelly!" while I poured the vitreous body out of the eyeball. Even better, our lens was still attached to the vitreous body, so I plopped it around on my hand and thought fondly of Dragon Warrior. Everyone should dissect an eye at some point, because they are wicked cool inside. Lining the back is this iridescent membrane thing that is greenish-blue and shines. It's hot. Hot like your face.

After class, I meandered my way over to Somerville and watched the tail end of a rousingly dramatic Grey's episode and then settled down with a dinner of popcorn and tea (mm) to watch The Descent with Devrie. As gory as the first time I saw it. Still scared me shit-less.

That is pretty much it for my day yesterday. Thrilling, I know. Today, I'm going to avoid working and try and find some food here shortly. We shall see. I miss Finale's chili, but I am unsure I want that sitting in my stomach all day. Someone amuse me, please.