The weather is insane today. The wind is whipping all around, raining like mad, dark as if night refuses to relax its grip on the city. You'd expect some shadowy figure with a bright red tie to leap down from a building at any moment. But I am in a fabulous mood, yes, simply fabulous. Even though the second half of my root canal is in a couple hours. Mail from Antarctica probably has something to do with it, though the sheer insanity of the weather helps, too. That's why I had to move away from Southern California. The weather there can never be described as "sheer insanity". Days like this make those bitterly cold days, where the cold never leaves your bones, worth suffering through.

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1. Put Your iTunes on Shuffle.
2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer.
3. You must write down the name of the song no matter how silly it sounds!
4. Put any comments in brackets after the song name.
5. You can do it too!

1. If someone says, �Is this okay?� You say?
I'll Do It [Annapolis Soundtrack]

2. How would you describe yourself?
Ophelia [Kashmir]

3. What do you like in a guy/girl?
The Foggy Dew [The Chieftains] really...

4. How do you feel today?
Big Star [Kenny Chesney]

5. What is your life�s purpose?
Incomplete [Sisqo] :(

6. What is your motto?
Paso Doble #5 [Various Artists]

7. What do your friends think of you?
Wishing Well [Jo Dee Messina]

8. What do you think of your parents?
The Happiest Place on Earth [Desaparecidos]

9. What do you think about very often?
I Knew I Loved You [Savage Garden]

10. What is 2 + 2?
Braveheart

11. What do you think of your best friend?
Angel Loved the Devil [Kenny Chesney]

12. What do you think of the person you like?
Le'kol Ehad [Lior Narkis & Shlomi Shabat] here are the lyrics translated from Hebrew:

Every man has a woman
who will close the circle with him.
Every woman has a man
who is destined for her.
Like cloth for the body, like air for breathing,
And among the madness they find comfort.

And you are my sweet soul,
the only one to set me on fire.
With you I am the whole world,
with you I am the universe.
Without you I am half a human being,
without you I am really nothing.

Every man has his dream,
that looks like is coming true,
Every woman has her dream,
that he will come and storm her heart.
Like water to the thirsty,
like hope for despair.
And among the coldness of the sea,
they have love.

13. What is your life story?
Across the Ocean [Azure Ray]

14. What do you want to be when you grow up?
Knuckle Hungry [Planes Mistaken for Stars]

15. What do you think of when you see the person you like?
Amselpolka! [Verschiedene]

16. What will you dance to at your wedding?
Beautiful [Christina Aguilera]

17. What will they play at your funeral?
Play [JLo]

18. What is your hobby/interest?
These White Lights Will Bend to Make Blue [Azure Ray] Aw, my hobby is optics!

19. What is your biggest fear?
If She Knew What She Wants [The Bangles]

20. What is your biggest secret?
Mellow Yellow [Donovan] Don't ask.

21. What do you think of your friends?
Irish I- Unit 2 [Pimsleur] "Do you speak Gaelic?"

22. What will you post this as?
Rodeo [Garth Brooks]

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I had a good weekend. I went to Shabbat at the Hillel, because they said that you didn't have to be Jewish. I was still the only non-Jewish person there, but it's the thought that counts. I met a lot of really nice people and learned a lot about Shabbat and whether not doing things is more passive or active than remembering things. I also went to some services-- they recommended I go to the service that was only singing. Jews are a pretty excellent bunch for singing and dancing, and everyone got into the swing with the clapping and the dancing about and the praising God in Hebrew and all that. It was transliterated in the hymnal so I could follow along. Surprisingly (though perhaps it shouldn't have been) a lot of the songs were very similar to our prayers, so I felt like I was back home in my church only singing better hymns in a key that a normal person could actually handle. It was a special Israeli Shabbat this week so we had Israeli food and challah. It was very doughy and delicious. I had an excellent time, I might go back (perhaps I will become like the boy in Life of Pi who was regularly going to three different religious services a week).

I spent the rest of the weekend going to a formal and the office Christmas party. On Sunday I spent all day playing Javanese gamelan until our concert at 5pm. We screwed up pretty badly a couple of times, but we pretended like we knew what we were doing and since people didn't know what to expect I don't think they noticed too much. A bunch of my friends came. :D I let them play the bonang after the concert and they all seemed very appreciative of the strange and wonderful Javanese sound. Afterwards I went to Zebo's orchestra concert. Tonight I went to my friend Lish's Greek chorus concert. It was in a huge church with a huge balcony but the fire marshall wouldn't let anyone sit up there, so everyone was crammed standing up in the back and the aisles. The entire program was in Latin with a little bit of Greek, including the announcements, so you never really had any idea what was going on. We sang all of our favorite Christmas carols in Latin, which really got me in the Christmas spirit. Walking through the freezing, freezing cold also made me awake enough to finally do my fluid mechanics homework (and before 3 am, too!)

Today was the last day of fluid mechanics, so it is only right and salutary for me to post a fluid mechanics-y video:



As my prof said, this video is the one that makes you realize just how little we really know about fluid mechanics. Or in my words, "wtf? That's awesome!"

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The Graduate Student Council (GSC) has been discussing ideas on how to spend its surplus. One idea that was proposed was to use it to provide conference funding for people who were not eligible for conference funding from the graduate school. This would include first year students, sixth year students, people wanting to attend more than one conference in a year, people wanting to attend a conference where they were not presenting, etc. Naturally the sciences are rather unsympathetic, since we are usually independently funded and we don't depend on the graduate school.

My friend Rhodes made the impassioned argument that providing conference funding from the GSC treasury was fundamentally wrong. The GSC budget is composed of "activity fees" paid by the graduate student body each semester. When organizations ask for money from the GSC, our main requirement when deciding whether to fund them is whether or not the activity that they are proposing will be open to the whole graduate student body, so that contributing members can get value back from their activity fee. Giving conference funding, she argued, would be giving money given by all and meant for all for the private use of a few.
She went on to suggest that if we were raking in a huge surplus, we might consider reducing the activity fee.

And she calls herself a democrat.

A change to the bylaws to provide conference funding was narrowly defeated.

They also suggested a change to the bylaws which would create a system of good and poor standing for departments. If your representatives (2 from each department) didn't come to 3 of 4 of the last GSC meetings, you would be in poor standing, and you would forfeit the partial refund of your activity fee that is currently available with a majority of student signatures. If your department is in good standing, your department would automatically get the refund (without signatures). Naturally, the departments that never come to the meeting are also departments that do not attend many GSC functions (most of which comprise standing in a crowded room and drinking as much alcohol as possible until it runs out around 11 pm). Therefore it is a tyranny that their contribution to the GSC should be seized. This policy also pins the responsibility for the money of the entire department on the actions of their representatives (who are usually forced into the job for lack of volunteers). The officers suggested that these departments should just assign different representatives. I suggested that the GSC should not have use blackmail to perpetuate its own existence, and that rather than the money belonging to the GSC and the GSC benevolently offering to refund some of it to its constituency, it should be recognized that the money belongs to the constituency, and it is given in trust to the GSC for the purpose of funding activities. If departments choose to fund their own activities, it should be returned to them whether or not 2/40 of them come to your sanctimonious meeting. I didn't say it quite like that.

It passed anyway. Everyone who was there to vote is obviously not from one of these absent departments, and the board will never deny a policy aimed at shoring up their own influence, by whatever means necessary.

We spent the rest of the meeting electing officers dedicated to getting us more money and debating how we should spend our surplus. Someone suggested a scotch tasting. Rhodes and I will continue to fight to return the money to its rightful owners...

POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

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An ROV from Shell's deep drilling program comes face to face with an ALIEN. It is probably from the parallel ocean beneath our fragile ocean floor, and it will probably be followed by the fearsome MEGALODON.

ps- it's real!

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Going to sleep late and waking up early sucks, because internet has barely changed in the time that you were away. How am I supposed to amuse myself? I even have the last shout in the shout box. I think it is the job of the people who live in Asia to make interesting entries, like jolenesiah did last night, so that when I wake up I will have something to read. I beg of you.

Luckily all wasn't for naught, as the world changed last night and today there is a beautiful blanket of Colorado snow over everything.

Well, I'm going away for the weekend, and when I come back, internet, you BETTER HAVE CHANGED!

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Shall we dance?
On a bright cloud of music shall we fly?
Shall we dance?
Shall we then say "goodnight" and mean "goodbye"?
Or perchance,
When the last little star has left the sky,
Shall we still be together
With our arms around each other
And shall you be my new romance?
On the clear understanding
That this kind of thing can happen,
Shall we dance?
Shall we dance?
Shall we Dance?

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This is probably the 80 billionth blog entry about Twilight on Nutang. I just started reading it, to prepare myself to go to the movie later on in the week. I have been out of the Twilight loop because of my ridiculous work schedule. I hadn't even watched TV since.... ... ..... the debates?

So far I like it. This girl reminds me of myself in high school, only she is clearly way more mature than I was and a better cook, and I was less of a spazz in gym class. I don't know what about her reminds me of myself... maybe it's how she schedules time for herself to feel depressed.

Lord knows there has been more than one boy who has driven me into the absolutely ridiculous state of distraction that Edward seems to induce in Bella.
I was just lucky that these neither of those boys were vampires.

OR WERE THEY?!?!!!?

The other book I just read (on the plane) was "The Incredible Shrinking Man" which was written by the same guy who wrote "I am Legend". This book was about none other than a shrinking man, who woke up every morning 1/7" shorter than the day before. The best part is that you can totally imagine the author sitting around in his cellar thinking about you would see every object differently depending on how progressively small you were. A spider would start as an annoyance and then escalate into a lethal threat as each day passed. A lawn chair would be a nice place to sit, and then a convenient ladder, until it was an impossibly irregular cliff face. Each day you would curse yourself for not thinking ahead and taking measures to help the smaller version of yourself who would come along later.
I would recommend this book to middaymoon except for it has several scandalous parts in it and whenever I recommend books to people and then remember that they have scandalous parts in them I get very worried that they'll think, "And just why did she think I would want to read this FILTH!?"

I swear it's just because of the mind-bendiness of it all.

...back to Twilight.


::EDIT:: One of them was definitely a vampire.
::EDIT2:: Having reached the end of the book, I see that there are very important ways in which I am not like Bella at all.

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