COMDISCO, or: Whose boyfriend are you again?
—Is this a cult?
—No, we’re the International Friendship Center. :)
homesick for a place that doesn’t quite exist
okay i got accepted to grad school here—w00t—but since i’m in, the prerequisite courses i’m in now seem inconsequential and right now i have to write two clinical observation reports by noon and it’s 5am and yet here i am liveblogging my mind on teh cryptojournal and nomnomming starbursts. fucking STARBURSTS!
time for the teej to get kinda real with you guyz, k? throat cleared, knuckles cracked, eyebrows groomed with licked indexed fingers. Amanda and i have been talking about moving in this fall, talking as in idle mutual fantasizing and speccing places for funzies right now, but it looks like this will probably happen. big whoops, you dismiss, but we’ve only been dating for 2.5 months! i practically live at her place now—i have chores there!—and my apartment right now is just a hotel room where i can sleep, shower, change clothes, and charge my electronic devices, so it makes sense.
plus, manda observed that we could consolidate resources and save money—we talked about this on a pier that juts out into lake mendota which was frozen at the time, but the ice and snow were well tolerated by the ducks, especially a fate-tempting handful that stood on precariously thin ice, just tempting that glass sheet to crack in a way that made my bleeding heart skip a beat as i recalled falling through ice into the farm’s pit of liquid cow manure as a young and fearless child, but i wasn’t thinking about that horrifyingly unsanitary thought right then, because manda and i were well past the ducks; we were sitting on a bench looking at the frozen lake, talking playfully and breathlessly about neighborhoods we could live in this year and in future years, about the what it would be like to canoe across a lake to work, and it was cold but nice out so we just sat there for a while all romanticky, picturesque, cherishible, and mentally i was all like, i really really need to save money and consolidate resources with this girl
—which is important because of recent events, like how the n00b governor wants to rob us decent working-to-middle-classish ppl to make rich ppl richer, even though the rich ppl don’t deserve to steal our money or strip our services from us—and i could rant about the shitshow present tense around here, but i can’t: it’s depressing to think about the way an inverted turtle is depressing to think about and it makes me feel despondent to see 100,000 non-rich ppl show up for two weekends in a row and still be thoroughly ignored by the governor and it knots my stomach to see someone be so tone-deaf and heartless.
the fucking future, am i right? i’ve got my professional future very mapped out and i’ve met .-~*´¨¯¨`*·~My_DrEaMgUrL~*´¨¯¨`*·~-., but now the good things in my state are being cannibalized and sold for parts for the benefit of no one. *something* *something* my state plunging thru thin ice into a pool of shit, etc.
ugh i wanted to right about all the blissful domesticities i experience now and anticipate then and how she’s my alarm clock when i sleep at her place because when i don’t, i stay up all nite and procrastinate— BUT NOW I’M ALL BUMMED OUT.
in three weeks me and the ladyfriend will be here! i’m so excited! days of laziness! baking potatoes, baking in the sun! my sister lives there so it’s pretty cheap for us to travel there. (i say this just in case the tumblr’s Privilege Police, of which i am jr journeyperson lieutenant, are going to hound me about having monies for airfare.) i’m sposed to get my grad school decision around that ides-bewaring “mid-march” time. i’m hoping to see that letter the day i get back. no bad vibes!
i’m excited to future-tense march-and-beyond travel and do things with ‘manda. she’s my perfect companion for doing things. she took me iceskating—for the first time in my life!!—a week ago. i only fell twice, and once was during a game of tag i tried playing with her (in which she became the first human to ever WIN tag, i think).
we want to go snorkeling. i’ve never been. have you ever snorkeled? in an ocean? with the sharks and barracuda?
have u ever been attacked by me n my friends? im the great barracuda. observe my underbite n piranhalike teeth. a group of me n my friends is called a battery wh is wut u humans also call a series of short diagnostic tests. we will test u teej.
is snorkeling fun? is it like that pixies song? you know the one from Fight Club. oh you didn’t realize that what’s-his-face is singing about scuba-ing in that song? he is!
The song was written by frontman Black Francis while he attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, inspired by his experiences scuba diving in the Caribbean. He later said he had “this very small fish trying to chase me. I don’t know why—I don’t know too much about fish behavior.”
whoa tangenty tangent time:
With your feet in the air and your head on the ground
Try this trick and spin it, yeah
Your head will collapse
When there’s nothing in it
could this be THE BENDS? Nooooooo! you say? clinical signs of decompression sickness bubble in yr brain, BOOM:
- Altered sensation, tingling or numbness paresthesia, increased sensitivity hyperesthesia
- Confusion or memory loss (amnesia)
- Visual abnormalities
- Unexplained mood or behaviour changes
- Seizures, unconsciousness
i had dinner with amanda and her parents on friday and her mom was concerned about sharks because she saw on the news that they are really out this year. i was like, maybe it was just one attack that kicked off a media frenzy (LOL) because hey that stock footage won’t play itself. i think amanda said something very funny and aphoristic and kinda sassy like “you swim with all the sharks in the world when you swim in the ocean”. story of my life etc!
relevant: the first blockbuster film of all time Jaws is on netflix instant right now. should i watch it? do you think a battery of barracuda chasing down humans then nom-nomming them would have been more terrifying than a single dumb “great” white shark? can you see their glinting formation, lunging towards you like the spectral swords in castlevania games?
ur so fucked. me n my friends r going 2 underbite rite into yr chest… this summer in WAVES OF MUTILATION 3D
also, you guys remember the single funniest original thought of all time circa two years ago?
whoa whoa pal, where is your miiiiiiiiiind?
i feel okay rough-draft-wise about these three paragraphs
i hate this i hate this i hate this plz kill me—last night i had a drink with A and her friends and she asked how i was doing and i answered by performing an elaborate pantomime of me tying a rope into a noose, wrapping it around my neck, pulling the rope taut and then falling and snapping my neck; this spawned a brief but morbid game of charades between me and her: she unscrewed the lid off a pretend bottle of pills and knock it back like a shot—or maybe that was me; i loaded six rounds into a revolver, whirled the chamber around, brought the gun to my head; she turned the key of car’s ignition, put her hands at 10 and 2 of the steering wheel, paused, and her head slowly wilted towards the wheel as she asphyxiated from make-believe carbon monoxide poisoning. that’s my current mood y’all. i am so fucking boring on paper
Why I would like to be speech-language pathologist boils down to two reasons: First, I am incredibly passionate about linguistics and the speech and hearing sciences, and I am a very, very gifted student in these fields. Second, I am idealistic and wish to use my specialized training to assess and treat individuals with speech, language and swallowing disorders as well as professionally advocate for individuals with communication impairments and language differences. In short, speech-language pathology is simply my calling if I want a rewarding career that engages my passions and strengths and allows me to help other people get the most out of their lives.
My undergraduate career has been a rigorous investigation of language at many different levels and across several disciplines. Early on, I discovered I had a preternatural talent for linguistics, especially in the phonetics-phonology side of the field, and I embraced linguistics with an intense and ebullient enthusiasm. I devoured my textbooks, consistently annoyed friends and family by eliciting dialect variables, and used to pass the time by making strange sounds to myself as I experimented with novel vocal tract configurations. I enrolled in any course that seemed at all relevant to a budding language scientist: phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, symbolic logic, formal languages via theory of computation, philosophy of language, descriptive courses in non-English languages, and the offerings of our communicative disorders department. Indeed, ever since my first linguistics course in 2005, I have had language on my mind, and I have been listening and analyzing language nonstop for the past five years.
My thorough yet well-rounded background in linguistics allows me to bring several unique qualities to the graduate program at [—-]. My extensive experience in phonetics gives me very intuitive understanding about the acoustic transfer functions at work in the vocal tract and the auditory system, and this experience makes me a natural speech and hearing scientist. For instance, I can read and suss out the possible clinical implications in the latest literature from phonetics and linguistic theory. Moreover, I possess a very strong understanding of sociolinguistic variability and dialect variation; I keep up with the cutting-edge of English variation and am sensitive to the subtle but deleterious effects of linguistic chauvinism. Since ASHA clinical competencies require practitioners to accurately parse out disordered language from dialectal variation, I will be a very valuable asset to my peers in the graduate program in this respect. Lastly, having studied language from many different perspectives, I can readily communicate across disciplines—an essential skill for practitioners working as part of a interdisciplinary team of specialists.
need to elaborate my ideals, explain my two bad semesters (illness), describe career objectives, end with a sense of how awesome and prepared and driven i am now—then gut out needless words and punch it up and come up with some synonyms for “i am interested in”
ughhhhh
realized there is no way i can sex it up so i’ll just fucking spell it out
Why I would like to be speech-language pathologist boils down to two reasons: (1) I am incredibly passionate about linguistics and the speech and hearing sciences, and I am a very, very gifted student in these fields. (2) I am idealistic and wish to use my specialized training to assess and treat individuals with speech, language and swallowing disorders as well as professionally advocate for individuals with communication impairments and language differences. In short, speech-language pathology is simply my calling if I want a rewarding career that engages my passions and strengths and allows me to help other people get the most out of their lives.
circle of death
On Saturday I got to meet a couple of her close friends, and we met them at The Plaza bar where we played a drinking game called Circle of Death, which was pretty fun especially the parts where we would have to go around naming members of a given category, one of which was the devious category Countries of South America, and have to keep going around until someone fucked up and therefore had to drink.
One of her friends is her bff Andrew who is a few years younger than me and well-groomed, witty and gay, and who has Amanda laughing every other minute with some inside joke. Andrew and I talk about his recipe for artichoke dip and he gives me the pro-tip that people always go ape-shit for dips in bread-bowls. Later on when the two ladies excuse themselves from the table, we small-talk briefly about something I can’t remember and after a pause he says to me, “If you hurt her, I will fucking kill you”. I laugh kinda nervously and say “okay” or “that’s fair” or maybe both, and he tells me that it’s his job as bff to say that to me. I nod and he observes that I “seem decent enough” though. Females return. Group continues drinking. I’m glad she has a friend like him.
collateral damage from a tumblr meetup. As mentioned before, I couldn’t find any legitimate attractions to show lolo in my city so her and I resolved at 2:30pm to do a “power hour” with wine and champagne and it kinda turned into a shitshow for the both of us, but mostly for her, as she lay crumpled up on the ground and I sat beside her quizzing her with flashcards from my child language disorders class—which was funny because she was drunk and goofy but still 100% on the ball and her memory very declarative, and we might have argued about where on the Glasgow Coma Scale she belonged at that particular moment—AND since we first became internet bffs bc of our mutual love of all things linguistic and we right then and there lied on the floor all stupid and silly and arguing about matters linguistic, it was kinda the perfect meetup in many respects.
