exercise science

wish you were here!
It is monsooning here in Southern MA which means that the basement of my parents' house is flooding. We live on top of a very large hill, which means we almost never lose power, but we are prone to flooding; I have lost power more often in college than I ever have at home. Carpeting was probably a poor choice.

FUN FACTS ABOUT SIX GALLONS OF WATER
1 gallon of water is about 8.35 lbs
6 gallons of water is about 50 lbs
It takes about 5 minutes to get 6 gallons of water into our wet/dry vac
which means that if i vacuum for 30 minutes i have effectively lifted 300 lbs of water.

Who needs weightlifting when you can wet vac!

I have blogged about cars way more than I ever anticipated

I drive a 2009 Toyota Corolla named Franz. Needless to say I have not felt very safe lately.

In case you have not been keeping up, Toyota has been going through a whole bunch of recalls on assorted parts in their 2009 and 2010 sedans, including a floor mat which was prone to getting stuck underneath the accelerator pedal, sticking accelerators, and the possibility of increased stopping distances in cold weather because the brake vacuum port could freeze. To translate: Your car could speed out of control... and then possibly not stop! And now there are reports of steering columns locking up! This is certainly safe.

I got Franz in late May. I had been driving him from my apartment to campus and back (plus around the greater Seacoast area) all summer when the floor mat recall occured. I had a new accelerator pedal by Thanksgiving. Shortly after returning to school - which I would like to note is in New Hampshire, a cold place - in January, all these other recall notifications started to come out.

I had noticed that Franz's brakes were prone to occasionally cutting out for seconds at a time. This is a scary thing, but I am also prone to stomping on my brakes (just like Dad!) and sort of assumed that this was a byproduct of stomping on my brakes... until Mom called me in a panic over the brake/accelerator recall. Explains everything! At least I didn't have accelerator problems, that would have been infinitely worse.

But today Franz is getting his brakes and second accelerator fixed. And ironically enough, 2010 Toyota Corolla and Scion xB Earn Insurance Institute for Highway Safety 'Top Safety Pick' Award. Awesome.

I unabashedly love Lady Gaga.

She's great. She's crazy - mixing Bowie and Madonna and pure pop sensibility into the catchiest, most ridiculous cultural sensation in a very long time (I would argue my lifetime, at least.) She's a smart lady. She knows precisely what she is doing. AND she can sing.

To the best of my knowledge, I have yet to meet a single person who does not respect her, at the very least for her conceptualization of fame. (Are you that person? Let's talk.)

I feel like we all got hooked on Bad Romance. I mean, Just Dance? Okay. I remember first hearing it and kind of brushing it off: it was catchy, but whatever. Poker Face? Yeah, alright. It's clever. and then -- BAD ROMANCE. Anyone with fully functional eardrums in the past few months knows this song.

So needless to say, I was more than a bit disappointed when she fell off everyone's radar for a while. The Paparazzi video was cool - Gaga rocks disabledness! - but all things considered it was kind of normal (at least for her). There was a sheer shortage of asymmetrical glittery things and certainly no comically oversized hats. I was getting worried. Nothing strange had happened in a while!

But then the Telephone video happened. And all was right with the world yet again.



Things to notice:
- "I told you she didn't have a dick!"
- Gaga's symbolic commentaries on the prison system and the hypersexualization of women (by other women too!)
- CIGARETTE GLASSES! Diet Coke Curlers! WHAT
- Is that pre-(f/F)ame Gaga in the sunglasses?!
- new crazy arm flailings!
- Beyonce! With Bangs! / Gaga & Beyonce do Tarantino
>> (see also: references to Jackie Brown and the Paparazzi video)
- Telephone Hat
- Madonna reference! -- hair, choreography...

(EDIT 3/16, Upon Further Deconstruction)
erin: i feel like nothing can be more gay than this video
heather: sleeping with women is more gay than that video.
erin: i don't know about that!


WELCOME BACK LADY GAGA
i have missed you

intra-research: some thoughts & questions

1. This is the one-year anniversary of my prefix research, sort of; to be honest I don't really remember when the due date for my research proposal was last year, but I recall it being in early March before spring break. (I want to say it was March 5th, but I'm alright with finding something in the middle of the month. I know that my proposal was accepted in early April.) Happy one year, prefixes! It's been fun.

2. speaking of which: HOW IS SPRING BREAK STARTING TOMORROW i'm so confused. I feel like I just careened directly into spring break. After spring break is April, and after April is May. And then my thesis is due, and then I graduate. When did time get faster?

3. Originally my spring break plans involved a presentation of my prefix research at the McGill International Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, but they decided they weren't interested in my cutting-edge research. Their loss... what I'm doing is exciting. So I guess I'm going home for a week. (The downside of living in a dorm is that I occasionally get kicked out of my living space for brief periods of time. It doesn't happen a lot, which is nice; though I really would prefer to stay here so I can keep working - I have a system, and it's been fairly effective. )

4. Who invented peach soda? and why does it not actually taste like peaches?

I tell people that I don't have a cell phone sometimes.

This is a lie - I do have a cell phone. (Sorry, friends.) It's mostly because I don't want to have to use it. I really hate the idea of being consistently contactable; I leave my room/house so I can interact face-to-face with other people. I have a landline; it's not like I can't EVER be called or call other people.

Cell phones just sort of annoy me, and though I realize I am probably infinitely more difficult to contact than I think I am, I really like living in the 90s. That, and these sort of people really scare me:


from http://cellphones.org/

do doot DODOO DOOT DOO (a short story)

Apparently nobody reviews demographics OR contemporality when it came to picking performers for UNH; I would like to review that this is, in fact, New Hampshire. As a result, we have had concerts by Third Eye Blind, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, Lupe Fiasco featuring Sean Kingston, Akon, Guster, Brand New, and Dropkick Murphys (among others) while I've been here.

Now, to be fair, I've gone to a few of these. I am not hating entirely on SCOPE, who is responsible for bringing these major concerts (though their comedians are questionable: Jimmy Fallon? Demetri Martin? Bo Burnham?? really guys?). Third Eye Blind was fun if not nostalgic for sure. And if Guster hadn't been full of drunk biddies it would have been a lot more fun. And, admittedly, I am a little bit disappointed in myself retroactively for not seeing Ludacris when he was here. BUT... That's a lot of hip-hop. And not all of campus listens to this kind of music - I know that I wouldn't pay even $5 to see Snoop Dogg or Akon; so overall I've been a bit disappointed in the acts brought to campus.

Though SCOPE promised "not another rap act!" I think we all had our apprehensions. We all waited nervously. Last year I found out that the decision process was between Death Cab for Cutie, Wilco and Guster, and they chose Guster - who had been to UNH several times in the past - yet again. Maybe this was a scheduling thing, a cost thing, an any thing. I don't know. I'm not in SCOPE. Or MUSO for that matter - who brought Girl Talk my sophomore year and are bringing the Mountain Goats tomorrow - so I suppose I'm not really allowed to criticize. But, I think the campus collective was all sort of nervous that Taylor Swift or Toby Keith was coming for our spring show.

BUT NO, thank god, they actually brought something likely to pique the interest of the part of campus who probably wouldn't go to see Snoop Dogg and Akon. They're bringing MGMT - refreshing! Exciting! And just announced on Monday! So I jumped at the chance to get tickets, knowing that they're going to go fast...and I don't have class on Wednesday mornings. That helped too. So I dragged my ass out of bed at 7:30 am, chugged a few cups of coffee and walked over to the MUB for 8:30, thinking this would be a reasonable time to start waiting for tickets which went on sale at 9:45. We couldn't leave the line unless you had someone to swap out for you, lest you lose your spot. So I was stuck there. Not too bad, this should be quick, right?

FOUR HOURS LATER

I had tickets to MGMT. And I had also listened to approximately a thousand people over the course of the past four hours say the initialism "M-G-M-T" (their name is pronounced "management", everyone, pay attention). I spent my morning standing and occasionally shuffling along between a biddy collective and two pretentious and otherwise apparently dumb English majors who spent the entire time alternatively talking about how great Chuck Palahniuk's books are and how much one of them looooves Alice in Wonderland and every concert that has happened in Boston in the past six months (and of course they had been to all of them).

I had contemplated about six ways to either kill myself or these girls, but all of them required that I drink more coffee. My well-documented hatred of mornings comes with my consumption of enough coffee to kill a small rodent. This is one of those conundrums in that I can't do anything productive until I have my coffee, but I can't have more coffee if I can't leave. (Luckily Oliver, Former Coffee Shop Employee, walked by and was willing to go on a coffee journey for me while I was getting slightly closer to the ticket office. He understands).

But - the long and short of all of this is that finally a big concert is happening at UNH that I am legitimately excited about and demographically more reasonable than something like 70% of the past concerts in the past four years. And while the biddies and yah-dudes will probably still be belligerently stupid at this, too, it will hopefully be a good time.

Springtime is a dangerous time

Because all I want to do is be outside, absorbing the sunshine and warm weather, thinking about flowers and going on drives to the beach but overall most definitely not doing work.

This semester will get interesting right quick if the weather stays like it has been.

Craigslist sketches me out a lot.

It's fine for buying a couch for $35 or getting a job through their help wanted ads, but anything larger than that immediately falls under the category of "Questionable".

So when Nicole asked me yesterday if I wanted to check out a car she found on craigslist, I had my apprehensions. Understandably, I think. But, I have a car, and she needed a ride over to where this car was. That and I had absolutely zero plans that afternoon, so I may as well make my life interesting. Though Lynette the GPS overshot the house a little bit, it wasn't too hard to get there; Nicole recognized the car from the ad anyway.

She was checking out a 1997 Ford Thunderbird. Now- Nicole and I know almost nothing about cars. She knows they have belts and cylinders and I know they have wheels and brakes. We are by no means the best candidates to drive ourselves to some guy's house and attempt to buy a car without a lot more prior knowledge.

It has just been inspected and was inspected until July; the guy who owned the car had just installed new rear brakes, and he had a garage full of other vehicles - it was clear he was a mechanic of some sort. We couldn't think of anything else useful to ask besides winter driving, gas mileage, and we stared blankly under the hood. The car also didn't have plates or a passenger's side door handle. The guy took us on a ride down the street and back.

We went to Franz (my car) to mull it over. There was someone coming at 4:00 who was also thinking about buying it.

Heather: I don't think you should buy this car.
Nicole: I think I'm going to buy this car.
Heather: Okay.
And with that we drove to a bank.

It was nerve-wracking. I was nervous about the whole craigslist factor; Nicole was nervous because this would be her first car ever! Finally we got ahold of someone who knows more than we do about cars (though, to be fair, that doesn't take much) and they agreed this was a good idea - a good deal too - and we felt better about it. So she bought a (hot!) '97 Thunderbird which we named Bruno. It was $900.

one fish two fish red fish blue fish

WHAT. UNH. WHAT IS THIS.

"the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house" - audre lorde

i love social justice!

Sort of. Social justice is something that is very important to me (see also: my academics, and sometimes my own life) but it is so, so complex and you can never truly get to the bottom of it. So to very few people's surprise (presumably? it doesn't surprise me that I attended this) I attended UNH's MLK Leadership Summit over this past weekend. You may remember me talking about the application earlier...

The MLK summit is all about social justice and the intersections of multiple identities and the roles of power & privilege. It was amazing, challenging, frustrating, fascinating and full of feelings (Oh God, so many FEELINGS...As we all know, I am bad at Feelings let alone FEELINGS. this was a lot to handle. Yes, there is a difference). It had some great moments and some not-so-great moments. But, it was an overwhelmingly positive experience.

Sometimes I feel like a Social Justice robot - Social Justice Bot 3000! - saying and thinking the same things over and over. I've been trying to figure out how to describe this whole experience and its impact on me but mostly I can say that I learned so much about myself and how I fit into a world of power and privilege. And that is a supreme understatement - I don't think I've ever learned so much in such a short period of time.