My Latest Amazon Haul [Part II]

Seventh Son of the Seventh Son

I know a man who is something of a friend of the family. I haven’t seen him for a while, and never knew him very well, but I’ve heard that his wife might have skin cancer. I’m really sorry to hear that.

There’s something else I’m really sorry about. Judging from what I hear -and this is all through my dad and grandmother- it seems that this guy believes he has the biblibical power of the laying on of hands. That’s right. Laying on of hands, as in, he can heal the sick.

He gets his power from his status as “the seventh son of the seventh son.” And he is going to heal his wife’s cancer. Right. Well, I for one think she’s in capable hands, don’t you?

Ah, West Virginia, wild and wonderful!

My Latest Amazon Haul

Odd Synesthetic Experience

Speaking of my aberrant psychology, this afternoon when I was petting my dog (awww…) I had an odd synesthetic experience. When I did a certain motion with my fingers I perceived a noise. I’ve never had a tactile –> sound experience like that before. I only remember having grapheme –> color and timbre –> color before this. That was an odd thing.

Pterodactyls in my Bedroom! ZOMG!

Last night I experienced some rather vivid hypnogogic imagery. As I was laying in bed to go to sleep I saw little silhouettes of pterosaurs flying above my bed, specifically, Pteranodon longiceps.

They swooped and dived and were behaving rather life-like, to be honest about it. It was unnerving to be seeing things you know aren’t real, but I really really like pterosaurs, so it was hard to get too freaked out.

Eventually a mosasaur entered the scene. Yeah, I know, aerial and aquatic animals don’t belong together, but I was hallucinating, so forgive me. It was one of the smaller Tylosaurus species. It had a paddle on the end of its tail. You should have seen this thing in motion. Stunningly fluid. Serpentine. Gorgeous.

I think I lost consciousness at about that point. Damn.

I’m Not a Girl, Retards!

Got some interesting traffic today. <_<

Seriously, wtf is up with that?

I waited 2 Hours to Attend a Canceled Class

Due to shitty weather, my Uni instituted a two hour delay today. This would have been a good thing, but I didn’t know about it. I woke up at the usual time and went to class. No one was there. I tried checking the teacher’s PC to see if school was canceled or delayed, but the stupid thing was swarming with bizarre error messages.

So I ran to a computer lab. Closed. Ran across campus to another computer lab. Also closed. And so, I went back to class and sat. And waited for two fucking hours until people started flooding in.

Then I realized that I didn’t recognize a single damn one of them. So I ask the kid in front of me what class was meeting. He says Geology. Not physics. Geology. Apparently “Two Hour Delay” means “Two Hour Cancelation” in Westvirginia-ese. I hate life.

Sorting Porno Files in Class

Note: This post was written yesterday.

Physics is a boring subject. If attendance wasn’t madatory I would skip every non-exam class period. Sadly, I must attend the lectures or fail. So, what’s a bored guy do? Search desperately for entertainment. Luckily (or so I thought) there’s a nerdy kid that sits in front of me that brings his laptop everyday.

He’s into some of the same type of stuff I am apparently, amateur game design and spriting and what-not. So I pass the time by watching this kid change Megaman’s armor from blue to black and making a crappy anime guy-that-looks-like-a-girl and then programming him/her to jump and, ZOMG point a gun. Not exactly high brow entertainment, but given the alternative (listening to detailed explanations of “If you let go of a rock it will fall instead of flying away into the negaverse”), it is sufficient.

So today, when I see him scrolling through folders of image thumbnails, it seemed like business as usual. When I saw that they were anime images, I wasn’t exactly surprised given his other “nerdy” interests. I joked to myself “lol he’s browsing his ““Hentai.” I meant that as a joke, not prophecy, but that’s about the time when I noticed that a lot of those pics looked like girls. I thought I was just letting my imagination run away with me. He may be looking at anime images, but surely not his personal fap library But some of those thumbnails looked vaguely like girls in very sexual poses… I went into denial. There’s no way in hell he’s browsing porn in class. Then I saw an image I recognized from my own harddrive saw a very explicit thumbnail.

I couldn’t deny it any more. He was sorting his apparently endless collection of anime porn in a public classroom in broad fucking daylight, with me in the background awkwardly trying to ignore it, but you can’t really ignore something like that no matter how much you want to. And it got worse. As the hour went on, he was obviously getting more brazen, since he would occasionally actually open the friggin’ images in the Windows image previewer full size before moving them to other folders.

So that’s how I spent my first class period today. Trying to avert my eyes from a freaking weird little twerp sorting his anime porn collection. You can’t make this shit up. I swear, all my classes are filled with fucking nutjobs.

I Has an Occupation

I am currently employed as a Wackenhut security officer. I have been doing so for several months, but never could be bothered to let you guys know about it. Sorry ’bout that. ^_^.

Interesting trivia: Wackenhut is the security company that guards the so-called “Area 51” base. Oddly enough, I was hired mere days after having my first (and only) UFO sighting. You may begin formulating conspiracy theories right… now.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Put in a Blender

I was in English class today and the professor introduced to us students the idea of the “rhetorical triangle.” The three points of this triangle are: “Logos,” “Pathos,” and “Ethos”.

Logos refers to the author’s logical appeal.

Pathos refers to the way the author appeals to the emotions of the reader.

Ethos is how authoritative and/or ethical the author comes across as being.

These three terms originate in the ancient Greek language as guides to public speakers in such obsessively political city-states as Athens. Being as old as they are, and the influence the Greeks had on the Romans, it’s not surprising that these words left linguistic “descendants” that we still use in English today. The professor tried to incite us to name some based on similarities between these terms and words we use in everyday conversation.

“Can anyone name anything that sounds or looks like ‘Logos’?”

“Logic!”

“Great! What about Pathos?”

“Empathy!”
“Pathetic!”

“Good job. Can anyone name a word that sounds like ‘Ethos’?”

“Ethics!”

“Good. Can anyone think of anything else?”

“Pepto-Bismol!”

“…” The professor pretends to have not heard that a student had just suggested with one hundred percent sincerity that the word Pepto-Bismol was somehow related to the ancient Greek rhetorical term “Ethos.” Where did that come from? I swear, you can’t make this crap up.

50 Things That Would be More Enjoyable and/or Productive Than Doing my Crappy English Assignment

Playing crappy RPG Maker games.

Collecting my belly-button lint and sorting it by color and texture.

Posting nude photos of myself on the internet.

Being mummified. Alive.

Deleting all my spam email messages individually.

Sending spam email messages advertising products I won’t profit from to other people… also individually.

Imagining what I would look like with various facial hair configurations.

Speculating on the sound of one hand clapping.

Lighting stuff on fire.

Reliving my childhood by starting a Pokemon fanfic.

Anything which results in my death.

Anything which results in your death.

Getting arrested for threatening blog posts.

Self immolation on the White House lawn in protest over… something happening in another hemisphere.

Picking my nose.

Eating it.

Vomiting, ’cause that’s really gross. Seriously. The second one, I mean. Everybody picks their nose, right?

Learning Mandarin Chinese and then translating the complete works of Confucius into Pig Latin.

Being kidnapped by unfriendly space aliens, stripped and ejected from the craft to enjoy the warm fuzzy sensation of slowly suffocating while my blood boils in the pressureless, anoxic vacuum of space.

Paying Bloom 06 to change their name back to Eiffel 65.

Sitting in a pitch black room trying to be as still and quiet as possible.

THIS IS THE SONG THAT NEEEEEEVVVVEEEEEERRRR ENNNDDDDDSSS! IT JUST GOES ON AND ON MY FRIEEEEEEEEENNNDDDDSSS!!!

Showering and powdering myself with soot. Then attending a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan.

Compiling a genealogy and scouring it for signs of incest.

Praying that certain negative cultural stereotypes are wrong.

Cybering undercover police officers in chatrooms.

Resisting arrest.

Stealthily replacing the blanks set aside for a Civil War reenactment with real bullets.

Overthrowing the government.

Learning American Sign Language.

Utilizing Universal Sign Language by flippin’ the bird at as many people as possible.

Bench pressing without a spotter.

Siring you a baby brother.

Siring you a baby sister.

Resorting to lame yo’ mama jokes.

I’m running out of ideas.

Getting high by licking a toad.

Getting killed by licking one of those colorful jungle frogs.

Editing the List of prehistoric sponges on Wikipedia.

Feeling pathetic because I know I’d actually have fun doing that.

Trying to have a rational discussion with a creationist.

Reading the instructions to my microwave. In Korean.

Ordering a dozen mail-order brides and starting a low-key brothel.

Downloading a pirated copy of a Backstreet Boys album and burning it to a CD. Then breaking it in half and jamming the pieces as deep into my eye sockets as I can.

Testing by trial and error whether the laws of gravity hold true over all of the earth’s surface.

Jumping up and down on Oprah’s couch.

Sneaking into the monkey exhibit at a local zoo and timing to see how long it is before the staff to realize that one of these apes is not like the others.

Lighting even more stuff on fire.

Painting my face with honey and jamming my head into a beehive.

Compiling a list of fifty things that would be more productive than doing my homework.

Sometimes I Think the Cosmos Conspires Against Me

Sometimes I think the cosmos conspires against me. Not to hurt me, or kill me, that would be too flattering. If the Will of the Macrocosm is out to get you killed, you can at least rest assured that your life has some importance. Mine obviously doesn’t fall under that category, though. I think the universe goes out of its way just to make me look like an idiot. Example:

The other day, my dad dropped me off on campus so that I could buy my text books at the campus bookstore and pay my tuition. So when I finished doing that, I called Dad and told him to pick me up. I go to sit and wait at the usual spot that Dad picks me up at when such a thing is necessary.

I know that Dad is coming to pick me up in a slightly dirty, white Chevy Malibu and that he’s wearing a hat and has our dog with him. So when a white Malibu pulls up, driven by a guy in a hat, that appears to be leaning over and petting a dog, I go around the car and yank on the passsenger side door. Strangely it’s locked. I peek in the window and see what look like financial papers all over the seat. Like bank statements or something. WTF? I don’t remember dad saying he was going to the bank. And where’s Yorkie? I just saw Dad petting him.

Then I noticed that the guy in the driver’s seat was a black dude. Yeah… how ’bout that. And the leaning over bit? He was messing with those papers, not petting a dog. Now, I ask you: What are the chances that a slightly dirty white Chevy Malibu driven by a guy in a hat that’s acting like he’s messing with a dog would pull in the exact spot at the exact time that I expect to see dad arriving in a slightly dirty white Chevy Malibu wearing a hat and petting a dog?

And then of course, there are witnesses to whom I must explain why I just randomly went up to a car and tried to open the door. And then get laughed at. Yes, yes, I’m sure it was just hilarious. Seriously, this is all too convenient for it to be anything other than a conspiracy of cosmic proportions. Somebody up there is out to get me.

Don’t Count on Hearing From Me For A While

To make a long story short, I missed paying my tuition deadline and was administratively withdrawn from the university. Which sounds really scary. Except it’s not. All it did was make tuition payment an inconvenience, as I had to wait for Uni to process all the payments and registrations of the punctual students before I could get mine in.

I felt stupid. I had just completely forgot, until a few hours after the deadline. That’s always how my memory works. I forget until it’s too late to do anything, but I remember early enough that I have plenty of time to stress and stew over whatever it was I forgot about. I wasn’t worried this time, though. I had done the same thing last semester (that time because I was out of town) and had little trouble out of it.

I informed my dad that due to my stupidity we would not be able to pay my tuition until I was out of town. Actually, this is gonna be a long story anyway. Sorry about that. Which meant that he would have to stop by the bursar’s office to pay my bill. Not a major burden.

So imagine my surprise when yesterday my dad calls and gives me a delivery through the phone. Turns out that Dad wanted to serve me a heaping platter of Tirade liberally peppered with profanity, threats and spiced with character attacks.

He congratulates me on being kicked out of college with no hope of readmission. Although by “congratulate” I mean “scream ’til his voice was too hoarse to continue.” Eventually there was a loud crashing noise. I think he threw the phone. Then there was static. I think he broke the phone. And that was that, I guess. I bet you $100 he’s gonna blame me for “making” him break the phone, too.

I was kinda confused. I knew about my withdrawal, and so did Dad. Compounding my confusion was the fact that a couple hours beforehand I was online on my university “information liaison online,” or whatever it was called, that said my account with school was fully registered for courses, in academic good standing, not owing any fees apart from tuition and that once I paid that I was all set. Still, dad was so upset that I started worrying myself.

So, I set about trying to rectify the situation. One hour later I was reinstated as a student sans paid tuition. Problem go bye-bye. And just to let you get a better idea of how fast it was solved, I should inform you that most of that hour was spent navigating my school’s moronically designed website (which incidentally gets worse with each update), trying to get ahold of an employee at the registrar’s office (for some reason I couldn’t get anyone until I called another branch of the staff and have them transfer me to the registrar) and then calling Dad who was apparently too miffed to answer the phone.

When Dad finally decided to pick up, he apparently never bothered to check the like, 8 messages I left, so he didn’t know I solved the problem. Looks like I was getting second helpings of that Tirade. Yum.

Dad continued his tirade, anyway, despite me carefully explaining that there was no more problem, and never really . I think that bruised ego may be the cause of this. Maybe he was ticked that after all that screaming and swearing and throwing stuff
around all it took was 3 minutes on the phone with the lady to solve the problem.

To cut to the chase, he ended up blaming the incident on being “lazy,” and my being “lazy” on my seemingly excessing computer use. Dad says that from now on my computer is for school work and school work only. And, he adds that if he catches me “playing stupid games” he’ll “bust it up and throw it over the hillside.”

This’ll all blow over. Eventually. But until then, which may be a duration of time last from zero days to several months, don’t be surprised if I don’t post much, if at all.

And in Other News…

Yesterday I turned twenty years old. I really don’t feel like I should be twenty. Wow. The years just fly by. My only comfort is the ice cream cake my dad bought me. Calories heal all wounds.

*Insert that Bible verse about a person’s lifespan being like fog in the morning here*

I Just saw Some UFOs

I dunno, maybe this will ruin all vestiges of scientific credibility I’ve tried to create for myself, but I can’t help but post what just happened to me a little bit ago.

A couple of hours ago I got a call from an old high school buddy. We chatted it up for a while, and after I hung up, I stepped outside. It’s been fairly nice out, though a little windy. I start pacing around trying to rid myself of cabin fever, and reminiscing a bit about the good old days. There was a lot of cloud cover. Great sheets of cloud were being blown much faster than usual, rolling across the sky at a pretty quick pace. The moon wasn’t full, but it was on its way, and the night was well lit.

Gradually the clouds slow to a halt and there was a nearly perfectly circular gap in them that was kinda like a window looking directly at the moon. My mind was wandering, and I paced back and forth, ocasionally stopping to look at the bright moon and marvel at the Silvery Light reflecting off the clouds and the Grandness of the Scheme and The Works of His Hands and all that sappy rubbish.

After doing this for about ten minutes, I look at the moon again and just when I start to turn away, I notice not quite out of the corner of my eye a tiny pin-prick of red light sitting right below the center of the moon which as soon as I see it, zips in a perfectly straight line to the right and disappears behind the cloud cover.

Before I can get over what I just saw, which I immediately wondered if I was seeing a UFO or if my mind was playing tricks on me (though leaning towards the former). I’ve seen shooting stars, but they were always pale, ephemeral things that traveled in weak arcs. This light looked more “solid” and traveled in a perfectly straight line.

Suddenly, I see another identical tiny red light, this one at the moon’s upper left side. It also immediate zips in a straight line, although at about a 60 degree angle out to the upper left, and behind the cloud cover. Now I was really wondering what was going on. Again, I thought “UFO,” but felt stupid. Even though it didn’t look like a shooting star, I knew I was no astronomer and I could have been wrong. But I didn’t think I was.

At this point I’m really weirded out. I sort of deny what I had seen. I go back inside and ask dad to step out. When he comes I tell him to look at the moon. Together we stand there looking at the moon. He asks why I wanted him to look at the moon. I explain to him what happened. He tells me to go get some binoculars and look at the moon through those.

I run inside and come back out. I pull up a chair and sit there for about five minutes staring at the moon. I got a pretty good look at it, through the binoculars you can see the craters and everything, which surprised me. Dad gets bored and goes in. I sit there for about ten more minutes. Nothing.

I get up and start moving around. The nervous energy was driving me to pace about. About ten minutes later I look up again and I see a tiny spot of pale yellow light. “Ha!” I think, “Another UFO!” The light was really tiny and moving slowly towards my right. It pulsed regularly. I chastise myself for thinking it was a UFO.

After seeing the weird red lights by the moon, my imagination is running away from me and now every little plane or star is going to look like a UFO. I felt stupid. Then again, this light was kind of…odd. Something about it just seemed “un-airplane-like,” although at this point I couldn’t put my finger on just what it was.

I live not to far from an airport, so we get a lot of planes in and out of the area, but planes usually have red or green lights or something besides the blinking white strobe. This had no trace of any color besides pale yellow. And, the way this object “flashed,” I dunno it was just a bit different than the way I remembered planes flashing. It was almost like the timing was a bit less regular it just seemed more… organic. Later I decided that “pulsing” was a term more suited to the way the light changed brightness.

Still, it was silly to act like this was anything other than a normal everyday plane at high altitude. I thought my imagination was running away with me. I know I’ve said this before, but everytime I started to think I was seeing a UFO, I felt really stupid and embarrassed. After all it was moving at the right speed, certainly not making right angle turns or any of that UFO type stuff. I get a little bored with this airplane and as I turn away, just out of the corner of my eye, I notice it speeding up.

In just about a second, it ends up at about one and a half times to twice the speed that it was before. The object begins changing the “behavior” of its light. It now looked smaller, but no less bright. It’s color changes almost imperceptively towards the redder end of the spectrum. Previously it had been slowly pulsing, but this quickly became a rapid “flickering.”

Then, if all this wasn’t weird enough, it does something that really stuns me. It makes a sudden “U-turn,” and is now flying back up and over the path it had been going before. Once it gets about two thirds of the way back to where it was when I first noticed it, it stops. It paused briefly, and then stunned me even further by shooting off to the right and disappearing in a nearly straight but slightly parabolic path. The light left an extremely long, faint motion blur behind it.

Even though I had briefly considered that it may be a UFO, I didn’t expect it to really be one. I felt weird after seeing that, like sort of dazed. I then began searching for conventional explanations. It flew horizontally at a nearly straight line at high speed, so it had to be a satellite, right? I stood rooted at that one spot.

I still felt dazed, and tried to review the events in my mind. The rapid U-turn the light performed killed the satellite explanation. At this point I realized that I had literally gone into denial about what I had seen. Whatever this was, it wasn’t an airplane, satellite or shooting star. This dazed period lasted only a few seconds, but it seemed much longer.

Now the clouds were starting to roll in again and the object vanished. I went over to the right following the direction the light traveled, estimating where I would be able to see it again if the clouds cleared up. Then I waited. Suddenly it appeared again, when the clouds started thinning out. It made weird random motions like whirligig beetles on a pond. It was flying faster than I had ever seen an airplane of similar altitude fly, but not extremely fast like a meteor. It made swooping turns. Everytime it did this, just like before, it pulsed faster and looked a bit more reddish.

It vanished again as the clouds started rolling overhead again. Then appeared briefly. More clouds rolled in. I don’t know how many times I saw the object again, but it was a couple. Maybe four at the most. The clouds started rolling in even faster, until the entire sky was covered and the light was hidden from view.

I waited and the object didn’t appear. After I became confident I wouldn’t miss seeing the object again in the process, I went in to get my dad again, hoping it would appear for him and my story could be corroberated. We waited about 10 minutes. The clouds covered the sky completely and showed no signs of clearing up. Dad went back inside. I waited outside staying vigilant, watching the sky. About 45 minutes or so, later I gave up and went inside again.

I don’t know how long this experience lasted. The last time I had check a clock, it was not quite 9:30. It was 11:08 when I came in. The first thing I did after the incident was begin typing this. It took me about an hour, I think, before I actually posted it.

Update #1: I’ve added more detail to the description of my sighting of the red lights and why I felt they were not shooting stars.

Update #2: I’m removing foolish, inaccurate speculations about the yellow object’s elevation. The original text can be found below.

I live not to far from an airport, so we get a lot of planes in and out of the area, but they’re almost always recently taken off or soon to be landing which means that they’re almost always at low altitude. This sure wasn’t. If it was the size of a plane, then it had to be at a height that I don’t recall ever seeing any airplane at. And planes usually have red or green lights or something besides the blinking white one. This had no trace of any color besides light yellow. And, the way this object flashed, I dunno it was just a bit different than the way I remembered planes flashing. It was almost like the timing was a bit less regular it just seemed more… organic.