cool thoughts on the present situation

first ! christine, brooke, and i started our history blog, cool thoughts. the name is based on a document brooke and i saw at the benjamin franklin underground museum called cool thoughts on the present situation of our public affairs (authored by one benjamin franklin, alias mrs. silence dogood), and the blog is woefully located on tumblr because the name "cool thoughts" is literally taken everywhere else, and is mostly parked domains or blogs of like, "confucious say..." shit and doors quotes. alas ! anyway, the purpose of the blog is for us to post anything we are reading about or interested in throughout history, in any format, whenever we want. if you'd like to contribute something (anything !), please send it to coolthoughts@nervous.org.



one of my main goals here is to get comfortable talking about things i know about< without the crippling fear of being wrong or considered "not smart enough"- this is a problem many people have, i'm sure, but women specifically are made to feel intellectually inferior or like they have to apologize for or soften their opinions. it may not seem like i have a big problem with this if you know me, but it's something i struggle with every day- especially in regard to my lack of formal education.

what else ! i've been taking an ill-advised break from reading for the past few days because my brain needed a break, which means i'm going to have to really and sincerely bust ass all weekend to get everything done. i have a research proposal, a few essays, and a rough draft for my genocide paper due. i'm actually waiting for my professor's feedback for the rough draft- she's really awesome but can be a little slow with stuff over e-mail, and our class meeting is canceled this week. anyway, i've been mostly farting around watching simpsons dvds, and it's been... heavenly.


i only have seasons 5-9

i also ended up breaking down and buying cataclysm, the next world of warcraft expansion. i am waffling about whether or not i want to play- like, i just don't have time for wow anymore with school, and i have mixed feelings about the new 10 man raiding structure. like, i love the dudes (and two women) i play with, but i often found myself being the 11th man when 10 mans were forming up previously. i'm not the most amazing player, but i was better than some other people who were chosen, and that was because i had a lot of personality conflicts with some shitty random norms in the guild (like a handful of idiot privilege denyin' dudes who wanted to be able to call women bitches and stuff). luckily those dudes were sort of phased out or alienated (by me !) so there's a small chance things will be different now, but who knows? yesterday was a patch day, and the world was ripped apart and orgrimmar was redesigned, and everything honestly looks pretty cool. i also saved the name astralweeks for a goblin shaman. sigh. i really like this fucking game, who am i kidding.



what else ! oh ! nick and sandi are coming today ! sandi told me not to eat anything in anticipation of a family dinner? which is exciting and also easy to do because i'm only at work for 3 hours today and i forgot to bring lunch and also i have zero groceries that aren't thanksgiving ingredients (actually i have some trader joe's burritos i guess). i'm excited to see them because it's been figuratively forever. also i get to bro down with christina, who just got back from san francisco.

my plans for the break? cooking, hanging out, thanksgiving with jeanne and mike, reading, writing, agonizing, procrastinating, simpsons, history, internet. i gotta get some work done in my last 30 minutes at work, though, so.. ttyl. happy thanksgiving !

out with the ogre

yesterday i totally did what i said i was going to do and cleaned my room. unfortunately, i didn't actually START cleaning until like, 9pm. before that i took a nap, talked to people online, and watched a few episodes of the simpsons. oh, i also complained a lot !

i didn't just want to straighten up, i wanted to CLEAN. which meant dusting all my books and getting rid of clothes and books i don't want to make room for stuff i DO want. none of the clothes were in donatable condition, so i just tossed them. the books i'm going to put on my porch to see if anyone wants them, so uh, if you want every book by yukio mishima, somerset maugham, or emily dickinson stop on by !



i also had a lot of dusting to do, which is a bummer because i'm allergic to dust. i dusted both bookshelves (only one is in the pictures) and the dust rag was like, black, and my sinuses felt like they were glued together by pain and some glue. i felt very sorry for myself !

i regret that i didn't take real pictures, but here's some before-and-after shots:


from the door before


from the door after

my bed before


my bed after


some trolls and dust before


bookshelf sans trolls

so um, those trolls. i have a weird shameful... i don't want to say 'attraction' cause that implies a sex thing but like... a weird shameful attraction to troll dolls? i love them and i can't help it. despite this, i know that is really weird and lame so i never really bought any until a couple of years ago, when i found all those trolls for $1 at the flea market by holmesburg prison.



don't let that picture of historic holmesburg prison distract you though cause i still have some trolls ! i had those trolls shamefully hidden in my closet and when my mom was visiting, she somehow found them (when she was trying not to clean my room cause i wouldn't let her, which led to her picking up everything i own and asking me what it was) and put them on display. she also was like, "LOOK AT ALL YOUR RAT FINK DOLLS" and INSISTED that trolls were called "rat fink dolls" when she was little. please note that my mom is independently and keenly aware that this is rat fink:



and wasn't confusing them or anything. this may be true, but my mom also insisted that the NEWSPAPER printed that rod stewart had to have a gallon of semen pumped out of his stomach (we were talking about who that rumor was about when we were growing up, and my mom was like, 'it was rod stewart... IT WAS IN THE NEWSPAPER !!!!').

WAIT LOOK AT THIS COOL THING JEANNE FOUND !!!!



can someone look at the link and tell me how much those are and if they're for presta or schrader valves??

anyyyyway, i digress. i didn't finish cleaning until 12:30am, and then i took a cold shower and went to bed, so my xbox is not getting set up until today... unless mouse wants to hang out !!!!!

p.s. christina mocked my trolls until she came and looked at them and then we had this weird maniacal troll interlude where we were basically hysterical and at the end of it she got all serious and wouldn't let me throw them out.

go ahead and ask her

hayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!! last night i worked on a work project at home, like a dork, and crocheted ! that's like, mostly it ! i had to look up like 50302943 people in our system to make mailing labels for them and i got about half of it out of the way since it's so time-consuming. the actual work isn't time-consuming but our system is so slow that it takes like 5 minutes per person to look them up which is like four hours in internet time.


i can't take credit for this clever graphic

i made it my goal to finish two more granny squares while i cleared our DVR of the simpsons and futurama, but i kept getting distracted and it took longer than i thought. i think it would take like 45 minutes or so to do a granny square if i actually focused but it took me like 900 hours because i kept putting it down. anyway, here's the two new ones:



and here's all four together in case you are too lazy to look at the last entry !



what else? i'm also re-reading the fellowship of the ring, which i haven't read since i was 10-14 (when i read it many, many, many times). i lovedddddddddd these books when i was a kid and, re-reading them, i really regret seeing the movies. i wasn't too crazy about them when they came out, but like, i had everything pictured so vividly in my mind- what everyone looked like, what every place looked like, what every race looked like, etc. and now when i'm reading i just picture this:







i'm especially heartbroken about gollum because the movie gollum is really stupid and gross and i hate him. gandalf and saruman are okay though cause... 1) christopher lee is cool and 2) what else is a wizard going to look like? anyway, it is coloring my re-reading in a way that is bumming me out, because like... i'm an adult, i shouldn't have to think about elijah wood if i don't want to, and it also sucks to lose important magical stuff from your childhood.

i unfortunately have to cut this short because i have a meeting in 20 minutes that i have to prepare for. hayyyy.

p.s. my mom gets here after work tomorrow ! which means i'd better clean my room tonight and maybe drop my laundry off to be washed?

if you liked it then you should have put a thing on it

hayyyy. yesterday was pretty cool ! i had to work a little late, but afterward mouse came over. i've been feeling kind of bummed and anxious lately and i think spending time with people is the uh, ointment i need. christina has been doing a good job of hanging out with me and listening to all my stupid jokes (and doing stuff like absentmindedly singing, "ooh vaginas are a place on girls" in the hallway to the tune of the belinda carlisle song).

we mostly ate food and watched DVR'd simpsons episodes (including one of the alltime worst episodes, the one with tony hawk where bart gets emancipated):



we got chinese food, but i just got soup because i wasn't really hungry. christina came home while we were hanging out and she did a little spinning and laughed at like, every single thing marge said or did (which is cute, because i always say marge reminds me of christina's bff jess).

we also watched part of the 11th inning of the phillies/giants game !!! it was 5-5, and i'd like to give a shoutout to my man eugenio velez for playing like a chump



and giving us two runs.

after that, i tanked an icc10 on my paladin ! we got up through the plague quarter but couldn't get putricide down- one of the healers had to split, and one of the dps kept getting disconnected. i didn't do perfectly, but i think i did okay, and i learned about some paladin shit i was too lazy to learn before ! haha. i get too embarrassed to ask questions sometimes (related to being a woman- i'm afraid people will think i'm a shitty player or dumb because i'm a woman, but it's actually cause i'm a lazy player ! and i get pre-emptively indignant), and people call paladin abilities by nicknames (plus all the abilities are some combination of holy, divine, hammer, and light), so when people ask me to use (insert nickname of spell) i never know what to do.


saltpeter on the outskirts of dalaran

what else? oh yeah, i wanted to talk about the biggest injustice in world history. mike linked me to this article about bizarre victorian taxidermied things that sold at auction when a museum of weird victorian shit closed down, and this sasquatch sold for $1000:



i could totally fucking afford that and NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT IT UNTIL AFTER THE AUCTION. why is this life !

tonight is knitting group + 25 man raid. i'm excited because christina told me that her coworker, kathleen, is coming tonight, and kathleen is cool ! plus maybe some of the actual group members will be there tonight and i'll make even more friends ! and we're finally moving on to tougher content in our 25 mans because we have new recruits, so i'm excited !

p.s. jess also linked me to this earlier. female fronted punk rock mix tape, 1977-1989. download it, get psyched, be a woman (or an ally to women).
p.p.s. last night i heard a tom waits song on tv and i thought it was everlast.