Ah, this week was very interesting -- suffice to say it's been quite funny motivating myself to do things with phrases such as, "you wrote 50k words in a month, you can do this stupid assignment!" This weekend I worked on the Stony Brook Press Literary Supplement. Put all of it together by hand...and by hand I mean using Quark Express and Illustrator. Quark, surprisingly, only quit on me one time. Impressive! & Illustrator...what can I say besides it's this immensely powerful program that seems relatively simple. It's deceptive! But I made some really neat linear shapes bend and sway to my will. I'll link to the thing once it's in the issue, but if you feel like waiting for an 80 MB file to download by all means let me know and I will link you to it.

I've recently been converted into a Lady Gaga fan. At first I was obscenely jealous of her because she got to go to the VMA's with Kermit as her date, but I got over it. Then Bad Romance's video came out and it was easily the most interesting music video I'd seen in years -- then I listened to the Fame Monster and I must say I was impressed by her newer songs. I think I just thought she was trashy in the very beginning - or maybe she really was, I don't remember. She's a lot more streamlined now, and "Speechless" is just a gorgeous song, although she sounds a little drunk when she sings it. Charming!

I bought LED Christmas lights and I've hooked them around my headboard. My headboard and sheets are white; the whole effect is very fairy-tale virginal, which is calming when you're there for rest and reading. I think everyone needs a corner in their living area that calms them down, at the very least. Anyway, the LED light is a white so pure and intense that the regular ceiling light in the room now looks disgustingly yellow. Woops! This is, I think, my last post before the 16th. In between I will have sososomuchtodo. I will list it, so that when I come onto livejournal to procrastinate this list can stare me in the face and hiss at me with evil eyes.

• Bio Lab (T) (the last one, aurghg!)
• Bio Lab Debate (T) (about persistent vegetative states -- do you think they'll give me a bye if I tell them I am in one?)
• Honors 401 Presentation (T)
• Honors 401 Final Paper (F)
• ITL Oral Presentation (W)
• EGL Paper (*now moved to day of final, 16th) (going to do it on Paradise Lost & Homer and talk about sex, woooo! *giggle*)
• Finish reading The Prelude (before final on 16th)
• Cancer Biology Ch 12 and 16 (before final on 15th)

Somewhere along there is Winter Beerfest (which is really just Winterfest, says the nondrinker), going out with my suitemates and telling them I'm commuting next semester, and filling out a scholarship application that will send me to Tajikistan. I am not kidding about the last bit. What I am really looking forward to after the 16th is a return to my book. I can't tell you how weird it is not to be writing about my characters every day. Yep, gon' return to my book, read books, and do some illustration. (pssst secret I've been cheating and reading bits and bobs of The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye even though I should be doing work, and practicing my Persian by reading Harry Potter in Persian, hehehe) I leave you with some bits from my horoscope, which I read and with a grain of salt:

( Cut for those who think that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side (kid) )

I heard this song at Starbucks during one of those moments where the speaker mix isn't absolute rubbish. It is wonderful in every way possible. I'm putting the embed under a cut because it's an eyesore. But listen to it. The chorus has the best melody, but the other lyrics are better. My stupid translation of the refrain follows:

Oh, mon amour...
Mon doux, mon tendre, mon merveilleux amour
De l`aube claire jusqu`à la fin du jour
Je t`aime encore tu sais je t`aime.

Love of mine,
Sweet, tender, marvelous love of mine
From clearest dawn until day's end
I love you still, you know I love you

The clip in the cut is only 30 seconds because the internet is fail, but if you click the link on it, you can listen to the full song on imeem.
( For the song, click this )

Novel's right on schedule, if I stay up late tonight. Which I probably will (though it is already late). If anyone wants to beta anything for me, hit me up.

Why, hello. Let me tell you what is up.

It's my birthday tomorrow and I have no plan besides having told my friends to meet me in Manhattan. I told twenty people altogether. I originally intended to have a picnic but now it's going to rain and I will feel terrible for making them all spend money to get there without having a place to go or a course of action. I would cancel what I said to them if I could, but I'm not going to have a chance to see anyone again until August.

Put that together with the fact that I'm already scared witless about turning twenty one and that I'll be getting on a really early train tomorrow to get tickets to Shakespeare in the Park (which will also probably get rained out), and you can perhaps understand why I could be in better spirits.

So I'm pretty much boned. I'm going to try to accept it with grace.

In other news, do you like this piece I posted? It's the first thing I've properly attempted to color in years. They're two characters from the Kushiel's Legacy books (Mavros is in black and Imriel is in blue). I love that series because everyone is described as so unutterably beautiful that no matter how hard you try to capture them you can always excuse yourself for not quite getting it right. To top it off, they're described as a pretty folk, so drawing males as bishonen would be pretty much welcome.

RIP netherworld.nu. You had a good run. Not really, but let's just pretend you did. I registered a new site, which will probably be completed sometime soon. It's aestival.net. If anybody who reads this wants hosting on there, leave a comment about it and I would be happy to discuss it with you. So far there is nothing up except for an online playlist that you can listen to by clicking here. I have bizarre tastes but maybe you will find something worthy of listening to. There is some kind of theme to that playlist, be it the cosmos, making babies, or robots, but I'm not necessarily one for laying it all out there to be understood. All I have to say is that the song selection is both thematic and incredibly indicative of albums that have come out in the last year that I have adored and listen to pretty regularly.

If you want something else to do, visit Fifty Two Stories. Free short stories are like free cupcakes, only without calories you don't need and just as sweet. For some reason I really liked this one, although I can't quite figure out why. Tiger, Tiger is also pretty good.

I changed my livejournal layout and added a new mood theme. It's going to be hilarious looking at old posts and seeing my mood described as "JARETH LOLZ" next to a picture of Audrey Tautou.

Oh, and, I suppose you have figured this out, but I returned from England and France. About a month ago, actually. I have come back from trips before and announced it on livejournal only to never post pictures or stories, but this time I am making a blog on aestival for my photos and intend on describing certain bizarre incidents in alarming detail, whether on there or in another post to come on here.

For this afternoon, I'm going to drive to Stony Brook with Sarah and see if I can do anything for the paper. MCAT studying goes okay. I'm trying to block out flagrant wank and focus on learning, but boy is it hard.

Lists (I typed "Losts" instead. Twice.) tend to help my sanity, so here goes.

1. I started a sketchblog. As God as my witness I will never go hung--er, I promise to keep it updated. I already unloaded a lot of stuff onto there. This sketchbook I'm using now is amazing - not only is it the first one in a few years (like FIVE YEARS) that I may actually end up finishing, and manages to be the perfect size to fit into my bags, but it's got a spiral binding that, by the Power of Grayskull!, hasn't fallen apart on me yet. The only caveat is that it's a b!tch and a half to lay flat in my scanner. But that's a problem with anything that's not a thin sheet of paper when put into the scanner, so whatever. I'm pretty sure this is it, but in all honesty, I obtained it in my usual sneaky-take-extra-art-supplies-from-dad manner, so I could be wrong.

2. UNASHAMED #1: I spent tonight watching episodes of Sailor Moon and reading my old Sailor Moon manga. It is in Japanese. I literally bought volumes 1-8 as a child to look at the pictures and just surmise what was happening. When I was 9, I had no idea Chibi Moon was her daughter until some woman in a comic book shop in California told me after I saw a poster of Dark Lady (Wicked Lady? whatever she became) and asked about it. I must say, watching it in Japanese made me appreciate Mercury and Jupiter a hell of a lot more. Despite this, Sailor V and Neptune are still the shizzle, yo.

3. UNASHAMED #2: I have discovered the wonderful world of Disney Songs in Other Languages. It started with "I'll Make a Man Out Of You" in Spanish, and it spiraled out of control and to depths I didn't think imaginable. They even have multi-language videos, where the song switches from Spanish to Arabic to Finnish to Portuguese and BEYOND in a matter of a verse. The transitions are flawless. Somewhere along the way, I found a hidden caché of songs in French and downloaded them all to store safely on my iTunes. It's a wonderful thing, to compare lyrics and appreciate them more. This leads me to...

4. UNASHAMED #3: In one of the perhaps three instances I left my house this past month for something other than library visits, doctor or dentist appointments, I went out with friends to a karaoke place in Flushing (aka K-town aka Korea-on-Long Island). There, I slapped that microphone a new one and garnered a score of 100 (!) on the Christina Aguigghelareaea (can you tell I don't know how to spell it? can you?) version of "Reflection". Hear me roar, internets! ROARAGE. For future reference, "Let's Dance" is probably the most unwise choice of Bowie songs imaginable for a karaoke selection. "Under Pressure" was, however, oodles of awesome. Oh, and I will never, ever let Tomasz sing, hum, or utter the lyrics of Nirvana's "Rape Me" again, for fear that he will scare and or alarm normal members of society.

5. Andrew Bird's new album, "Noble Beast" is absolutely stunning. It's my favorite album of his I've heard, and I pretty much eat up anything I hear of his. It really feels like a complete album rather than an amalgam of songs (which his early work tended to give me the impression of doing); compared to the album before this it flows better from start to finish - almost as if what he was attempting to do in Armchair Apocrypha, in terms of finding the perfect balance between lyricism and melody, he did in this album to a more sophisticated degree. It's almost breathtaking in its beauty because it's music that only he can write, only he can deliver. It's just damn near impossible to cover a song of his, or write with his degree of whimsy and cleverness, much less recite it with his cadence.

Uh, it's 3 am. I think that's it.

Today was highly boring.

http://hellyes.muxtape.com
I uploaded a new playlist to my muxtape. You better go listen. It's dedicated to alyza.
The theme this time is succeeding in times of immense stress. Or going insane. Take thy pick.



ps. my lj icons feel dated :(

Want to listen to a playlist I made? Then please do! http://hellyes.muxtape.com !
I don't know how long it's going remain as such. Savor the moment. I intend to change it periodically. Muxtape is a wonderful place, except for that chance that the tapes will change. I found these awesome covers of Losing My Religion and Too Little Too Late, but they were gone the next time I checked! Maybe I will be reunited with them again.

I might go to the Daily Show tomorrow. I keep checking to see who the guest will be, but it says "TBA". Total Bad Ass? Watch it be someone lame if I go, and someone excellent if I choose not to.

This has become the day of Awful Small Injuries. First, my biology textbook gave me a papercut that seemed to cut across the web of my hand in slow motion, dragging out the agony for all that it was worth. Second, due to the fact that I sleep with my mouth gaping open (like I can't believe what I'm seeing in my dreams), I seem to have bitten my tongue in my sleep. Third, & I don't know how this came about, I have an awkward cut on the inner left side of my upper lip. It makes it very hard to smile. Or move my lips.

I'm trying to formulate how I'd like to say this next statement, but the only thing that feels right is this: I've got to write a bloody essay for my Famous American Murders class.
Wish I knew what to write about.

“Time passes and the pain begins to roll in and out as though it’s a woman standing at an ironing board, passing the iron back and forth, back and forth across a white tablecloth.” - The Time Traveler's Wife

Last night I began a short comic. It's going to be a fairy tale, or fable, or something old-ish-sounding. I'm not sure if I'd like the main character to meet a sticky end or not. We shall see. I suppose that the week before finals is not the best time to draw a comic, but finals be damned, I will complete something that I start.

I made a muxtape for my friend. Here is the URL: http://finagled.muxtape.com/ It's funny because his last name is Nagler. Originally this list was supposed to celebrate some of the more positive facets of love, but at some point it began to feel like the songs were putting themselves together. Perhaps I just wanted an excuse to put "Waterloo Sunset" into a playlist. The world may never know.


When asked if I was going to the Desi formal, I didn't know how exactly to reply. In a manner of speaking, I am, since the place I'm going is a house owned by a person named Desi. Yet I've a feeling it's going to be the farthest thing from formal, ever.