New pictures from the Hubble telescope, which they just put a reeeeeeeeeally expensive new camera on. These are worth it and then some.

Just make sure to turn off the new agey music the Washington Post‘s Camera Works guys put on there for no apparent reason. You just click on the little thing next to the word audio and it’ll turn off.

You know the signs. You’ve had a nice, big meal, a lot of tasty drinks, and you’re sitting around doing something. You could be driving, you could be watching television, you could be doing your homework, you could be staring at the wall, but you’re more than likely talking on the phone. And then it hits you.

Oh shit, I have to pee right now.

“Sudden realization” is a term my friend Joanna and I came up with in high school for this phenomenon: When you get terribly distracted by something, only to realize shortly before your bladder is about to explode that you may need to use the bathroom sometime soon. In our cases, the distraction was having animated phone conversations, most of the time about about who we’d fuck (and how much we’d pay or have to be paid to do so) at my high school.

I find it kind of sad that my sudden realizations are now precipitated by getting heavily involved in work, especially web design. When I was redesigning my main site, this would happen at least once or twice a night. While that’s not technically work, since I actually like my site, the same thing happens when I get heavily involved in my News and New Media Classwork, which, because I’m being graded on it, is officially work.

I’ve (luckily) never had one hit me on stage. I generally manage to be too nervous about fucking up the lyrics to one of my songs to even bother paying attention to that. Though I have had a couple of moments when I’m talking to someone after the show and the little alarm bells start to go off in the back of my mind.

So if you’re talking to me after a show, and I get an odd look on my face and then excuse myself and sprint in the general direction of the bathroom, believe me when I say:

It’s not you, it’s me.

I went to Iowa for about six hours yesterday. It took longer to drive there and back than I actually spent in the damn state.

I went because I promised Mark I’d take him to Independence, Iowa. He’s working on this project for a Writing Nonfiction Books class about concepts of patriotism and how they’ve changed in small towns named after American values.

Or something like that.

So we left at 6am after getting about three nanoseconds of sleep apiece (him due to late-night Twister, me due to the fact that I couldn’t sleep because my feet were blocks of ice), and drove to Iowa. We passed such fantastic towns as Rockford, IL, home of the Peaches of A League Of Their Own fame; Dubuque, IA, of…no fame whatsoever; and Dyersville, IA, where the Field Of Dreams is located.

We finally got to Independence at about 11 in the morning, where we proceeded to a bake sale that the First United Methodist Church had posted about on its website. We had been intending to stay the night so he could talk to people for his project, but we ran into several problems.

1. It was Saturday, so large numbers of people were not around.

2. People in small towns don’t like to talk to people from big towns.

3. It was raining and disgusting, and the place just became that much more depressing.

4. It’s spring quarter of his senior year, and I’m graduating one quarter later, so we were both suffering from bad cases of senioritis, and hence didn’t feel like dealing with it all.

You could really tell how bad the kids working as soda jerks at the local A&W wanted to get out of town. It basically was how much I wanted out of DC times how much Mark wanted out of Salt Lake. Or at least to get rid of the politicians and Mormons, respectively.

To sum up: Our motto at 6am was “Iowa or Bust!” Our motto by 3pm was “Fuck Iowa, Let’s Get The Hell Out Of Here.”

From my Gender and Society reading:

“…Probably a whole continuum of sexual desire exists, with some people no more able to sexualize same-sex people than they can a bowling ball and some people no more able to sexualize other-sex people than they can a basketball. Still others can be turned on to either–and even to bowling balls and basketballs, depending on the circumstances.”

Oh baby, let’s play some basketball…

I need to get new earplugs.

I initially got them because the Smashing Pumpkins nearly deafened me on the Adore tour. I had great seats, but it was at Constitution Hall in DC, which has the most atrocious acoustics I’ve heard, ever.

They had the subwoofers (low frequency, like the bass) jacked way up, and I was apparently right fucking next to them, because every time D’Arcy hit a certain note, my whole head would rattle and my right ear would hurt like a motherfucker. My head hurt like hell after the show, and I had a really, really bad ringing in my right ear for about five days after the show.

So I got these really nice custom fitted earplugs at an unrelated visit to an ear nose and throat guy when I almost broke my nose by diving the wrong way onto a bed and smacking my face into a big cabinet behind the bed.

TANGENT WARNING: I also discovered on this visit that I’ve had a deviated septum (the little thing in the middle of your nose that seperates it into, you know, nostrils), and have apparently had it for years. I had just kind of been under the impression that usually only being able to breathe through one nostril was normal, or that this was a product of my allergies. The doctor told me this was likely the result of a very old break and that the only way to fix it was to re-break my nose so it could could be re-set. I was like, no thanks, I’ll just sniff halfheartedly.

So anyway, I got these really nice earplugs, and I caried them around with me for about three and a half years. And then they began to disintegrate, and they finally bit the dust about six months ago. This wasn’t a problem, since until last week, I hadn’t been to a concert since October.

At the Patty Griffin show, this wasn’t really a problem, since her band was not terribly loud. But I was at a show tonight at Nevin’s because Ellen Rosner, who I’ve been bugging to let me know when she had an 18+ show, was among the people there.

When I left, I came back and I could tell my hearing was not what it ought to be, though it wasn’t too bad, since Nevin’s isn’t that fucking big. But I was still shouting when I came in to talk to my roommates.

So the ear nose and throat people will be getting a call from me soon. Probably a very loud one.

these wouldn’t post last night because the server was being a pain. enjoy!

So I mopped the kitchen and the bathroom in my apartment today. The entire apartment smelled like Jewel-brand Pine Cleaner for several hours after I finished.

To an alien arriving on the planet Earth, this would seem like an odd phenomenon: “So let me get this straight. You’re going to take your living space, which you created prescisely to seperate yourself from the outdoors, and try to make it smell…like the outdoors? Why?”

And when I respond that it seems cleaner when it smells like pine, he will respond, “But pine trees have all that sap, you know, the kind that makes the pine needles stick to your shoes if you’re hiking, or your pants if you’re stupid enough to sit down in a pine forest.”

Becuase this is an unusually knowledgable little alien.

Eventually I will make him understand that artificial pine scent is a much more pleasurable smell than eau de burnt hamburger, which has permeated this apartment for a couple of days after I tried to cook a mega burger (the kind of burger you get when you accidentally get too high a proportion of the ground beef you get from the store into one patty) at too high a temperature and ended up just burning the damn thing.

And the alien will smile, and dance. Because that’s what aliens do. I think.

The one thing that really drives me absolutely bananas about web design is that I can only seem to do it between the hours of one and six in the morning, and I always end up with a massive headache from staring at a computer and not blinking for several hours.

I think I need to invest in some Vizene. Either that or start taking breaks.

I have come to the conclusion that the ideal career for me is Idle Rich. And I don’t mean Powerball rich, I mean Bill Gates rich, but without that whole antitrust thing. I could sit around and just buy crap online and play the guitar all day, and not have to worry about money. Because I wouldn’t need a college diploma for that, so I could quit school like, now.

I have spent the last hour or so reading the world’s most pointless articles for a class called “News Media and American Society,” which consists entirely of things you learn simply by living in D.C., which I did for eighteen goddamn yeras. This, by the way, is the same class and the same articles I bitched about having to spend three hours printing. It would have been nice had all that money and time I spent actually produced something worth reading.

But no, as is the case with many of my classes, these articles produced nothing worthwile, or even amusing. At least my film history class had a wonderful quote from a West German director named Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who was reviewing six films by Douglas Sirk, and specifically talking about All That Heaven Allows:

“Later on, Jane goes back to Rock because she has headaches, which is what happens to us all if we don’t fuck once in a while.”

So true.

But nothing like this has hit me today, so I’m convinced I need to be idle rich, so I don’t have to read articles like “News Icons and the Mainstreaming of Social Change” for one goddamn second longer.

I was feeling rather confident and nerd-like yesterday, marvelling over the immense amount of knowledge I have somehow come to possess about computers. It doesn’t mean a damn thing when it comes to getting them to behave, but nevertheless, I seem to have soaked up an unusually large amount of knowledge about computers.

And then, the VCR struck.

I have been fighting with this thing ever since my roommate Jamie and I lost the original remote freshman year. I’ve been trying to get a universal remote that works for it and have gone through half a dozen that wouldn’t even respond. I finally found an RCA brand one (it’s an RCA VCR) that can turn it on, play, rewind, etc., so I was like great, now I can finally program it.

Except the VCR doesn’t recognize the menu button.

The menu button, it turns out, is a crucial part of controlling my VCR. I can’t program channels (which means I can’t tape anything higher than channel 13), I can’t program the clock, I can’t set it to tape at a certain time. This defeats much of the purpose of a good VCR.

I think I’m going to call RCA and see what the possibility is of trying to find a remote that will actually make the goddamn thing work. I may just crack and get a new VCR and sell this one to someone who doesn’t care about taping shows off TV. If you are that person, email me and make me an offer. The picture quality is still really good, this thing is just making me insane.

And I feel bad that I constantly have to ask people to tape The Real World for me, though I usually try to get people who are watching it anyway. At least I’m home for ER and don’t have to subject anyone else to the festival of bad writing that show has become this season.