Jesus it's been a rough three days. Thank god tomorrow is Thursday, cause I really really need it.


You can swallow, or you can spit,
You can throw it up or choke on it,
You can dream, so dreamm out loud
You know that your time is comin' round
so don't let the bastards grind you down
- "Acrobat" U2

Hear that, bastards?
Then again, life is going pretty good

Each day that passes, I think to myself: accounting is really the nadir of my life. I mean *really.*

I am so so SO tired. I am falling over myself with symptoms of old foginess (no, not fogginess). Today I was completely spent after riding 12 miles and proceeded to sleepwalk to the rest of my classes after rushing to finish the damn accounting problem set due today. As poetic justice, I stayed awake in all of my classes except accounting, where my good friends V and Karen tallyed the minutes for which I was certifiably asleep. 6:43-7:05. Not bad for an in class nap. Too bad the class decided to drag on one HIDEOUS HOUR after that. I seriously do not know what I am going to do. Accounting seems to drain the life blood out of me. It is 9:24pm and i am now yearning for bedtime. Instead, I get HumeTime.

So in my quest to dominate the part of the world that is rightfully mine (That big ugly thing in Asia-land), I am taking Chinese for white kids. Two questions often arise.

How is that part of the world rightfully yours? ah, gentle reader, you are in the (virtual) presence of ROYALTY. Apparently on both sides of my family, I am descendent of two separate dynasties (and you thought they got em all in that massacre, hrm?) I'm closest to the Song "throne" on my mother's side, I guess - my grandmother is apparently the 33rd direct descendant. Making me the 35th. We even have this crazy ancient book proving it, which is hilarious to me. My dad's side is a little farther off (more distantly related to the throne), but hell still verymuch in that tree, still descendent from the man - he's related to the Han dynasty, and my grandfather has got the dish on *those* papers. That makes MY blood bluer than 99% of the people out there, thereby meaning I am severely deoxygenated. How sweet it is.

the second question is: "Chinese for white kids? why?" Because I am white. I mean I guess it was destiny that made me not know anything to do with china-land because the legend just gets sweeter when they recount how I at the age of 20 had to learn the language of the people before moving on to overturning the commie leaders in a violent yet magnificent bloodbath remenicent of Big Man Han original. Back to my damn flashcards I go.

I would like to request armistice (actually, rather, a cease fire) from econometrics. It is being mean to me and manipulating letters (such as E,X,Y,Z,Fs, etc) in very very un-understandable ways. for example:

E(E(xIy) = E(x). Why this is true, I still don't know. There's a law that says it is though and I haven't been arrested yet and i don't want to, so I'll go along with it.

Also, if Y = a +bx +u
and (u I x) = 0

E(Y) somehow becomes a + bE(x). My head hurts.

Something tells me I should have majored in dance or something. At least there's not much to understand and just a lot to have to know how to do. I don't understand anything in economics anymore and I don't understand what to do. I feel as if the entire entabulature of the Parthenon has fallen on my poor head (I am also right now studying art hum. can you tell?). Pain. The architrave hit me twice.

Hypothesis: My pheramones are titanium.

Materials: camelbak hydration pack, Cannondale R1200 '98 model, Ugly biking clothing comprising of a yellow and purple Jersey (1), Cycling shorts with a pair of shorts on top (1 of each), and a pair of black oakley sunglasses (1)

Procedure:
Bike four loops in central park starting from the 106th entrance on a Saturday.
Count the number of times suggestive comments, aka "pick ups" are made by overweight middle aged executives, identified by their ten thousand dollar full carbon Kestrel/Colnago/Cinelli bikes and pro-cycling team clothing replicas.
Analyze the results.

Observations:
I was picked up twice using very similar, low quality attempts, herein termed "pick up lines." Both involved attempting to talk to me while riding abreast of me at a speed of approximately 30 kilometers/hour. There were various lines involved. Both attempts began with "Do you come here often at this time?" and concluded with "Do you want to ride with me?" or "Maybe we should ride together sometime." One overweight executive type (we'll call him B) slyly injected a "I hope it's less crowded on Tuesday." Both riders were politely rebuffed by a "it's my last loop for today."

Conclusion: My pheramones are easily detectable at speeds of 30km/h and do not degrade over distances of 2-3 meters. Hypothesis is considered true.

This sucks. apparently, I can no longer change the size of the words for my blog...I tried using the PC the other day to edit all these ugly bloated-letter mac posts but the button didn't show up again! I can only assume they snatched away the size buttons. So things will probably be looking ugly for a while to come.

I love my hockey team. We are fucking hilarious and now that we have a few fun-looking fun-loving freshman recruited (and that we get to haze them), I am excited for things. That we have a few weekend tournaments in Boston is also pretty pleasant - I'm definitely NOT complaining =D

What I AM complaining about, however, is the dearth of interesting information conveyed in my two hour accounting & finance lecture. It is so heinous boring in that class and it's at the worst possible time EVER: right before the weekend, from 6-8pm. It makes me want to die every time I sit and listen to Markus Maedler yabber on about crediting things and debiting things. DEATH. I promise, however, that I will learn something this semester. Class was so bad yesterday, I just had to have a beer afterwards. And I HATE beer.

I'm now sitting happily in my apartment drinking a Fortnum & Mason English Breakfast doing the New York Times Friday crossword. I think I am more or less as happy as I could ever possibly be. That I will have to interrupt this happiness by doing laundry in a little bit annoys me in the same way food in a wisdom tooth hole (which I am happy to report are now fully healed) annoys me. My jerk of a boyfriend only has ONE wisdom tooth. ONE. and it doesn't have to come out because it's aligned properly. Grrrrr. Oh well, I suppose that means he's not so wise...he's not really a jerk either, but I'm just saying.

Tea, crossword, laundry, maybe a bike ride. What could be better?

So once again I'm on the mac and things look funny.

I've been watching Law & Order: SVU recently (I have the DVDs courtesy of boy and I love Law & Order) and I'm still in shock every time. I know it's about sex crimes before I even pop the DVD in and I know that in order to keep its Emmy winning potential high year after year it has to come up with interesting twists to stay fresh. What still gnaws at me and makes me cringe every time though is the very basic premise of the whole SVU unit: that a sex crime has occurred.

I think the absolute worst episode is when a raped girl was given a card by one of the detectives when she was in the hospital and the day after she is released her body is found on some docks by the Hudson and the card is rammed in her mouth, crumpled. I actually threw up that episode, I don't think I ever could stand watching the entire thing.

I don't know why I watch the show; I think it's this bipolar masochistic yet driving need to watch that on some universe crimes like these actually are prosecuted successfully and that occasionally, there's a possibility just desserts will be served. On the other hand, it probably pushes me more often into those days I'm paralyzed by something, drugged by perpetual guilt and the self-loathing that on better days I try to wheedle out of myself.

Then I look at where this mess has taken me and it's somewhere along the lines of being unable to trust anybody or anything and this ugly, animal fear I get whenever I'm awake. I think someday, though, through the words of a good friend, "with reflection each day I get closer to where I want to be."

"I wake up scared, I wake up strange, I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever going to change..."
-"What a Good Boy," Barenaked Ladies

Okay so I'm typing this on the mac version of blogger so it looks funny. it's missing all these post editing buttons at the top so I'm sorry if it's ugly.

Ever wonder what it's like to fall off a bike when you're still clipped to it at about 20km/hour and have the bums in central park turn a blind eye? It's magical. I had some athsma attack of some sort today while I was riding the loop in the park and i collapsed while still on the bike (yes, riding it) and that's prettymuch all i remember of the situation. I think I must have fainted (passed out/whatever) on impact. All I remember is waking up supine in my apartment with my bike inside and me on the floor struggling for air and in lots of pain. I felt like i wanted to die so I took a shower, fell over in the shower, took a nap and now I feel less like I want to die, i guess. Everythign still hurts. I think i only managed to ride one six mile loop today, too, instead of the intended four or five. Bother. Maybe next time I'll take my puffer with me and not be such an ass. But probably not. I have these gashes on my legs and knees, probably from the fall but it could have been that squirrels or homeless people were chewing at me when I passed out. Yikes.

Humans are a wonderful lot, a paradoxically wonderful one. Scanning the headlines of CNN today, there are reports of the stampeding in Baghdad, the difficulty New Orleans is having evacuating the city, and the death penalty one drunk driver in Thailand is receiving for having killed four people.

So in Baghdad, a thousand people (or so) were killed because rumors of an insurgent suicide bomber ripped through a pilgrimage site, the people ran out and on top of each other onto a bridge where the bridge siding collapsed and more people were thrown into the water, some of which I'm sure died by drowning. I'd always assumed stampeding had to do with larger things crushing smaller things, not equal things stepping on equal things and killing them. Intuitively, that makes sense. How one person can muster the gumption to actually step on another repeatedly (I'm assuming each person probably had to step on more than just ONE person to have a thousand people die) is really beyond me. Sure, you can say it's in an effort to save your own skin, and that just illustrates my point: people tend to shed the bonds of law, order and dignity as soon as is convenient, when an excuse (yes, I'll call it an excuse, not necessarily implying a bad thing, just an explanatory "reason") allows.

Moving on now, to how the mayor is having trouble evacuating New Orleans and how some 50 or 60 thousand people still have to be moved out. Interestingly enough, the evacuation process is being slowed because of looting. Looting must come off as the most primeval example of illustrating that one is above the law when certain conditions arise making it impossible for the law to be enforced. You loot because you want. You loot because you can't get caught. You loot because the infinite hunger of personal wants arises at the time most opportune for it to be fulfilled at the least personal cost. I loved reading about this. I'm not going to sit on a moral high horse about looting and all the things that aren't "good" about it, I'm just going to say that I agree with Thomas Hobbes, that law is the only mechanism keeping the beastly human nature in check. To what lengths we go to correct our own defect is interesting too...

In Thailand a 23 year old drunk driver who killed four people on a drunken spree is being sentenced to death. I am one for the death penalty. I don't believe keeping scum on the earth alive and paying for its subsistence when it has committed a heinous atrocity against its own is an effective form of "rehabilitation." To an extent, I don't consider rehabilitation for large crimes possible, large being defined as crimes like murder, rape, slavery, torture, etc. A Thai anti-drunk driving association is claiming, however, that the death penalty is appropriate as a punishment for drunk driving and that this should set a rather juicy legal precedent for other judges to draw upon when sentencing. I completely agree that in this case, the driver should get the death penalty. You did a stupid stupid thing, friend, and people were killed. I am all about avenging blood with blood and I don't think society should pay for his subsistence after killing one person and then three others while trying to evade detection. I don't think, however, this case should be setting too much legal precedent. I think it was my philosophy class which declared that humans definitely place a premium (of punishment) on a successful crime and a much lesser one on an unsuccessful crime. The sentencing difference between murder and attempted murder is significant, though the mens rea involved in the two instances could be identical. I would also argue the guilty *act* is no different either. Then why the difference in sentencing? Who knows, but in terms of legal consistency, IF Thailand differentiates between successful and non-successful acts, it must acknowledge this to be an 'exceptional' circumstance of drunk driving. If this 23 year old Thai man had just cajoled drunkenly down the street in his car harmlessly whizzing down empty streets clearly drunk, would he have received the same sentence? Should he? Likely not. What Thailand's penalty for drunk driving (without vehicular homicide) is, I don't know, but considering that it has the highest rate of vehicle death in the world, I'd guess it isn't nearly a large enough deterrent.

Buried in all this is the fact that no matter what humans attempt to do to "right the wrongs" through law, the wrongs are still there, waiting for their chances. Delicious. Loot on, New Orleans, loot on.